“Alas, Monsieur,” said the detective, “that I cannot do. I have called on him this morning and his wife tells me that he left for the North yesterday afternoon. But it is José Puégas that did it. I know his ways.”“Tiens!” said the Mayor, reflectively. “I know him also, an evil fellow.”“But why are you not looking for him?” exclaimed Aristide.“Arrangements have been made,” replied the detective coldly.Aristide suddenly bethought him of the furtive masquer of the night before.“I can put you on his track,” said he, and related what he knew.The Mayor looked dubious. “It wasn’t he,” he remarked.“José Puégas, Monsieur, would not commit a burglary in a pig’s head,” said the policeman, with the cutting contempt of the expert.“It was a vow, I suppose,” said Aristide, stung to irony. “I’ve always heard he was a religious man.”The detective did not condescend to reply.“Monsieur le Maire,” said he, “I should like to examine the premises, and beg that you will have the kindness to accompany me.”“With the permission of Monsieur le Maire,” said Aristide. “I too will come.”“Certainly,” said the Mayor. “The more intelligences concentrated on the affair the better.”“I am not of that opinion,” said the detective.“It is the opinion of Monsieur le Maire,” said Aristide rebukingly, “and that is enough.”When they reached the house—distances are short in Perpignan—they found policemen busily engaged with tape measures around the premises. Old Madame Coquereau in a clean white linen dressing jacket, bare-headed, defying the keen air, stood grim and eager in the midst of them.“Good morning, Monsieur Pujol, what do you think of this?”“A veritable catastrophe,” said Aristide.She shrugged her iron shoulders. “I tell him it serves him right,” she said, cuttingly. “A sensible person keeps his money under his mattress and not in a tin machine by a window which anyone can get at. I wonder we’ve not been murdered in our beds before.”“Ah, Maman!” expostulated the Mayor of Perpignan.But she turned her back on him and worried the policemen. They, having probed, and measured, and consulted with the detective, came to an exact conclusion. The thief had climbed over the back wall—there were his footsteps. He had entered by the kitchen door—there were the marks of infraction. He had broken open the safe—there was the helpless condition of the lock. No one in Perpignan, but José Puégas, with his bad, socialistic, Barcelona blood, could have done it. These brilliant results were arrived at after much clamour and argument and imposingprocès verbal. Aristidefelt strangely depressed. He had narrated his story of the pig-headed masquer to unresponsive ears. Here was a melodramatic scene in which he not only was not playing a leading part, but did not even carry a banner. To be less than a super in life’s pageant was abhorrent to the nature of Aristide Pujol.Moodily he wandered away from the little crowd. He hated the police and their airs of gods for whom exists no mystery. He did not believe in the kitchen-door theory. Why should not the thief have simply entered by the window of the study, which like the kitchen, was on the ground floor? He went round the house and examined the window by himself. No; there were no traces of burglary. The fastenings of the outside shutters and the high window were intact. The police were right.Suddenly his quick eye lit on something in the gravel path and his heart gave a great leap. It was a little round pink disc of confetti.Aristide picked it up and began to dance and shake his fist at the invisible police.“Aha!” he cried, “now we shall see who is right and who is wrong!”He began to search and soon found another bit of confetti. A little further along he discovered a third and a fourth. By using his walking stick he discovered that they formed a trail to a point inthe wall. He examined the wall. There, if his eyes did not deceive him, were evidences of mortar dislodged by nefarious toes. And there,mirabile visu!at the very bottom of the wall lay a little woollen pompon or tassel, just the kind of pompon that gives a finish to a pierrot’s shoes. Evidently the scoundrel had scraped it off against the bricks while clambering over.The pig-headed masquer stood confessed.A less imaginative man than Aristide would have immediately acquainted the police with his discovery. But Aristide had been insulted. A dull, mechanical bureaucrat who tried to discover crime with a tape-measure had dared to talk contemptuously of his intelligence! On his wooden head should be poured the vials of his contempt.“Tron de l’air!” cried Aristide—a Provençal oath which he only used on sublime occasions—“It is I who will discover the thief and make the whole lot of you the laughing-stock of Perpignan.”So did my versatile friend, joyously confident in his powers, start on his glorious career as a private detective.“Madame Coquereau,” said he, that evening, while she was dealing a hand at piquet, “what would you say if I solved this mystery and brought the scoundrel to justice?”“To say that you would have more sense thanthe police, would be a poor compliment,” said the old lady.Stéphanie raised cloistral eyes from her embroidery frame. She sat in a distant corner of the formal room discreetly lit by a shaded lamp.“You have a clue, Monsieur?” she asked with adorable timidity.Aristide tapped his forehead with his forefinger. “All is there, Mademoiselle.”They exchanged a glance—the first they had exchanged—while Madame Coquereau was frowning at her cards; and Aristide interpreted the glance as the promise of supreme reward for great deeds accomplished.The mayor returned early from the café, a dejected man. The loss of his hundred and twenty pounds weighed heavily on his mind. He kissed his mother sorrowfully on the cheek, his niece on the brow, held out a drooping hand to Aristide, and, subsiding into a stiff imitation Louis XVI chair, rested his elbows on its unconsoling arms and hid his face in his hands.“My poor uncle! You suffer so much?” breathed Stéphanie, in divine compassion.“Little Saint!” murmured Aristide devoutly, as he declared four aces and three queens.The Mayor moved his head sympathetically. He was suffering from the sharpest pain in his pockethe had felt for many a day. Madame Coquereau’s attention wandered from the cards.“Dis donc, Fernand,” she said sharply. “Why are you not wearing your ring?”The Mayor looked up.“Maman,” said he, “it is stolen.”“Your beautiful ring?” cried Aristide.The Mayor’s ring, which he usually wore, was a remarkable personal adornment. It consisted in a couple of snakes in old gold clenching an enormous topaz between their heads. Only a Mayor could have worn it with decency.“You did not tell me, Fernand,” rasped the old lady. “You did not mention it to me as being one of the stolen objects.”The Mayor rose wearily. “It was to avoid giving you pain,maman. I know what a value you set upon the ring of my good Aunt Philomène.”“And now it is lost,” said Madame Coquereau, throwing down her cards. “A ring that belonged to a saint. Yes, Monsieur Pujol, a saint, though she was my sister. A ring that had been blessed by His Holiness the Pope——”“But,maman,” expostulated the Mayor, “that was an imagination of Aunt Philomène. Just because she went to Rome and had an audience like anyone else——”“Silence, impious atheist that you are!” cried the old lady. “I tell you it was blessed by HisHoliness—and when I tell you a thing it is true. That is the son of to-day. He will call his mother a liar as soon as look at her. It was a ring beyond price. A ring such as there are few in the world. And instead of taking care of this precious heirloom, he goes and locks it away in a safe. Ah! you fill me with shame. Monsieur Pujol, I am sorry I can play no more, I must retire. Stéphanie, will you accompany me?”And gathering up Stéphanie like a bunch of snowdrops, the yellow, galvanized iron old lady swept out of the room.The Mayor looked at Aristide and moved his arms dejectedly.“Such are women,” said he.“My own mother nearly broke her heart because I would not become a priest,” said Aristide.“I wish I were a Turk,” said the Mayor.“I, too,” said Aristide.He took pouch and papers and rolled a cigarette.“If there is a man living who can say he has not felt like that at least once in his life he ought to be exhibited at a fair.”“How well you understand me, my good Pujol,” said Monsieur Coquereau.The next few days passed busily for Aristide. He devoted every spare hour to his new task. He scrutinized every inch of ground between the studywindow and the wall; he drew radiating lines from the point of the wall whence the miscreant had started homeward and succeeded in finding more confetti. He cross-examined every purveyor of pierrot shoes and pig’s heads in Perpignan. His researches soon came to the ears of the police, still tracing the mysterious José Puégas. A certain good-humoured brigadier whose Catalan French Aristide found difficult to understand, but with whom he had formed a derisory kind of friendship, urged him to desist from the hopeless task.“Jamais de la vie!” he cried—“The honour of Aristide Pujol is at stake.”The thing became an obsession. Not only his honour but his future was at stake. If he discovered the thief, he would be the most talked of person in Perpignan. He would know how to improve his position. He would rise to dizzy heights. Perpignan-Ville de Plaisir would acclaim him as its saviour. The Government would decorate him. And finally, both the Mayor and Madame Coquereau would place the blushing and adorable Mademoiselle Stéphanie in his arms and her two hundred and fifty thousand francs dowry in his pocket. Never before had so dazzling a prize shimmered before him in the near distance.On the last Saturday night of the Carnival, there was a specialcorsofor the populace in the Avenue des Plantanes, the long splendid Avenue of planetrees just outside the Porte Notre Dame, which is the special glory of Perpignan. The masquers danced to three or four bands. They threw confetti andserpentins. They rode hobby-horses and beat each other with bladders. They joined in bands of youths and maidens and whirled down the Avenue in Bacchic madness. It was acorso blanc, and everyone wore white—chiefly modifications of Pierrot costume—and everyone was masked. Chinese lanterns hung from the trees and in festoons around the bandstands and darted about in the hands of the revellers. Above, great standard electric lamps shed their white glare upon the eddying throng casting a myriad of grotesque shadows. Shouts and laughter and music filled the air.Aristide in a hideous red mask and with a bag of confetti under his arm, plunged with enthusiasm into the revelry. To enjoy yourself you only had to throw your arm round a girl’s waist and swing her off wildly to the beat of the music. If you wanted to let her go you did so; if not, you talked in the squeaky voice that is the recognized etiquette of the carnival. On the other hand any girl could catch you in her grip and sweep you along with her. Your mad career generally ended in a crowd and a free fight of confetti. There was one fair masquer, however, to whom Aristide became peculiarly attracted. Her movements werefree, her figure dainty and her repartee, below her mask, more than usually piquant.“This hurly-burly,” said he, drawing her into a quiet eddy of the stream, “is no place for the communion of two twin souls.”“Beau masque,” said she, “I perceive that you are a man of much sensibility.”“Shall we find a spot where we can mingle the overflow of our exquisite natures?”“As you like.”“Allons! Hop!” cried he, and seizing her round the waist danced through the masquers to the very far end of the Avenue.“There is a sequestered spot round here,” he said.They turned. The sequestered spot, a seat beneath a plane tree, with a lonesome arc-lamp shining full upon it, was occupied.“It’s a pity!” said the fair unknown.But Aristide said nothing. He stared. On the seat reposed an amorous couple. The lady wore a white domino and a black mask. The cavalier, whose arm was around the lady’s waist, wore a pig’s head, and a clown or Pierrot’s dress.Aristide’s eyes fell upon the shoes. On one of them the pompon was missing.The lady’s left hand tenderly patted the cardboard snout of her lover. The fierce light of the arc lamp caught the hand and revealed, on thefourth finger, a topaz ring, the topaz held in its place by two snakes’ heads.Aristide stared for two seconds; it seemed to him two centuries. Then he turned simply, caught his partner again, and with a “Allons, Hop!” raced back to the middle of the throng. There, in the crush, he unceremoniously lost her, and sped like a maniac to the entrance gates. His friend the brigadier happened to be on duty. He unmasked himself, dragged the police agent aside, and breathless, half-hysterical, acquainted him with the astounding discovery.“I was right,mon vieux!There at the end of the Avenue you will find them. The pig-headed prowler I saw, withmypompon missing from his shoe, and hisbonne amiewearing the stolen ring. Ah! you police people with your tape-measures and your José Puégas! It is I, Aristide Pujol, who have to come to Perpignan to teach you your business!”“What do you want me to do?” asked the brigadier stolidly.“Do?” cried Aristide. “Do you think I want you to kiss them and cover them with roses? What do you generally do with thieves in Perpignan?”“Arrest them,” said the brigadier.“Eh bien!” said Aristide. Then he paused—possibly the drama of the situation striking him. “No, wait. Go and find them. Don’t take youreyes off them. I will run and fetch Monsieur le Maire and he will identify his property—et puis nous aurons la scène à faire.”The stout brigadier grunted an assent and rolled monumentally down the Avenue. Aristide, his pulses throbbing, his heart exulting, ran to the Mayor’s house. He was rather a panting triumph than a man. He had beaten the police of Perpignan. He had discovered the thief. He was the hero of the town. Soon would the wedding bells be playing.... He envied the marble of the future statue. He would like to be on the pedestal himself.He dashed past the maid-servant who opened the door and burst into the prim salon. Madame Coquereau was alone, just preparing to retire for the night. Mademoiselle Stéphanie had already gone to bed.“Mon Dieu, what is all this?” she cried.“Madame,” shouted he, “glorious news. I have found the thief!”He told his tale. Where was Monsieur le Maire?“He has not yet come back from the café.”“I’ll go and find him,” said Aristide.“And waste time? Bah!” said the iron-faced old lady, catching up a black silk shawl. “I will come with you and identify the ring of my sainted sister Philomène. Who should know it better than I?”“As you like, Madame,” said Aristide.Two minutes found them on their journey. Madame Coquereau, in spite of her sixty-five years trudged along with springing step.“They don’t make metal like me, nowadays,” she said scornfully.When they arrived at the gate of the Avenue, the police on guard saluted. The mother of Monsieur le Maire was a power in Perpignan.“Monsieur,” said Aristide, in lordly fashion, to a policeman, “will you have the goodness to make a passage through the crowd for Madame Coquereau, and then help the Brigadier Pésac to arrest the burglar who broke into the house of Monsieur le Maire?”The man obeyed, went ahead clearing the path with the unceremoniousness of the law, and Aristide giving his arm to Madame Coquereau followed gloriously. As the impressive progress continued the revellers ceased their revels and followed in the wake of Aristide. At the end of the Avenue Brigadier Pésac was on guard. He approached.“They are still there,” he said.“Good,” said Aristide.The two police-officers, Aristide and Madame Coquereau turned the corner. At the sight of the police the guilty couple started to their feet. MadameCoquereau pounced like a hawk on the masked lady’s hand.“I identify it,” she cried. “Brigadier, give these people in charge for theft.”The white masked crowd surged around the group, in the midst of which stood Aristide transfigured. It was his supreme moment. He flourished in one hand his red mask and in the other a pompon which he had extracted from his pocket.“This I found,” said he, “beneath the wall of Monsieur le Maire’s garden. Behold the shoe of the accused.”The crowd murmured their applause and admiration. Neither of the prisoners stirred. The pig’s head grinned at the world with its inane, painted leer. A rumbling voice beneath it said:“We will go quietly.”“Attention s’il vous plaît,” said the policemen, and each holding a prisoner by the arm they made a way through the crowd. Madame Coquereau and Aristide followed close behind.“What did I tell you?” cried Aristide to the brigadier.“It’s Puégas, all the same,” said the brigadier, over his shoulder.“I bet you it’s not,” said Aristide, and striding swiftly to the back of the male prisoner whipped off the pig’s head, and revealed to the petrifiedthrong the familiar features of the Mayor of Perpignan.Aristide regarded him for two or three seconds open-mouthed, and then fell back into the arms of the Brigadier Pésac screaming with convulsive laughter. The crowd caught the infection of merriment. Shrieks filled the air. The vast mass of masqueraders held their sides, swayed helplessly, rolled in heaps, men and women, tearing each other’s garments as they fell.Aristide, deposited on the ground by the Brigadier Pésac laughed and laughed. When he recovered some consciousness of surroundings, he found the Mayor bending over him and using language that would have made Tophet put its fingers in its ears. He rose. Madame Coquereau shook her thin fists in his face.“Imbecile! Triple fool!” she cried.Aristide turned tail and fled. There was nothing else to do.And that was the end of his career at Perpignan. Vanished were the dreams of civic eminence; melted into thin air the statue on the Quai Sadi-Carnot; faded, too, the vision of the modest Stéphanie crowned with orange-blossom; gone forever the two hundred and fifty thousand francs. Never since Alnaschar kicked over his basket of crockery was there such a hideous welter of shattered hopes.If the Mayor had been allowed to go disguisedto the Police Station, he could have disclosed his identity and that of the lady in private to awe-stricken functionaries. He might have forgiven Aristide. But Aristide had exposed him to the derision of the whole of Roussillon and the never ending wrath of Madame Coquereau. Ruefully Aristide asked himself the question: why had the Mayor not taken him into the confidence of his masquerading escapade? Why had he not told him of the pretty widow, whom, unknown to his mother, he was courting? Why had he permitted her to wear the ring which he had given her so as to spite his sainted Aunt Philomène? And why had he gone on wearing the pig’s head after Aristide had told him of his suspicions? Ruefully Aristide found no answers save in the general chuckle-headedness of mankind.“If it hadn’t been such a good farce I should have wept like a cow,” said Aristide, after relating this story. “But every time I wanted to cry, I laughed.Nom de Dieu!You should have seen his face! And the face of Madame Coquereau! She opened her mouth wide showing ten yellow teeth and squealed like a rabbit! Oh, it was a good farce! He was very cross with me,” he added after a smiling pause, “and when I got back to Paris I tried to pacify him.”“What did you do?” I asked.“I sent him my photograph,” said Aristide.VITHE ADVENTURE OF FLEURETTEOne day, when Aristide was discoursing on the inexhaustible subject of woman, I pulled him up.“My good friend,” said I, “you seem to have fallen in love with every woman you have ever met. But for how many of them have you really cared?”“Mon Dieu!For all of them!” he cried, springing from his chair and making a wind-mill of himself.“Come, come,” said I; “all that amorousness is just Gallic exuberance. Have you ever been really in love in your life?”“How should I know?” said he. But he lit a cigarette, turned away, and looked out of window.There was a short silence. He shrugged his shoulders, apparently in response to his own thoughts. Then he turned again suddenly, threw his cigarette into the fire, and thrust his hands into his pockets. He sighed.“Perhaps there was Fleurette,” said he, not looking at me. “Est-ce qu’on sait jamais?That wasn’ther real name—it was Marie-Joséphine; but people called her Fleurette. She looked like a flower, you know.”I nodded in order to signify my elementary acquaintance with the French tongue.“The most delicate little flower you can conceive,” he continued. “Tiens, she was a slender lily—so white, and her hair the flash of gold on it—and she had eyes—des yeux de pervenche, as we say in French. What ispervenchein English—that little pale-blue flower?”“Periwinkle,” said I.“Periwinkle eyes! My God, what a language! Ah, no! She haddes yeux de pervenche.... She wasdiaphane, diaphanous ... impalpable as cigarette-smoke ... a little nose like nothing at all, with nostrils like infinitesimal sea-shells. Anyone could have made a mouthful of her.... Ah!Cré nom d’un chien!Life is droll. It has no common sense. It is the game of a mountebank.... I’ve never told you about Fleurette. It was this way.”And the story he narrated I will do my best to set down.The good M. Bocardon, of the Hôtel de la Curatterie at Nîmes, whose grateful devotion to Aristide has already been recorded, had a brother in Paris who managed the Hôtel duSoleil et de l’Ecosse (strange conjuncture), a flourishing third-rate hostelry in the neighbourhood of the Halles Centrales. Thither flocked sturdy Britons in knickerbockers, stockings, and cloth caps, Teutons with tin botanizing boxes (for lunch transportation), and American school-marms realizing at last the dream of their modest and laborious lives. Accommodation was cheap, manners were easy, and knowledge of the gay city less than rudimentary.To M. Bocardon of Paris Aristide, one August morning, brought glowing letters of introduction from M. and Mme. Bocardon of Nîmes. M. Bocardon of Paris welcomed Aristide as a Provençal and a brother. He brought out from a cupboard in his private bureau an hospitable bottle of old Armagnac, and discoursed with Aristide on the seductions of the South. It was there that he longed to retire—to a dainty little hotel of his own with a smart clientèle. The clientèle of the Hôtel du Soleil et de l’Ecosse was not to his taste. He spoke slightingly of his guests.“There are people who know how to travel,” said he, “and people who don’t. These lost muttons here don’t, and they make hotel-keeping a nightmare instead of a joy. A hundred times a day have I to tell them the way to Notre Dame.Pouah!” said he, gulping down his disgust and the rest of his Armagnac, “it is back-breaking.”“Tu sais, mon vieux,” cried Aristide—he had the most lightning way of establishing an intimacy—“I have an idea. These lost sheep need a shepherd.”“Eh bien?” said M. Bocardon.“Eh bien,” said Aristide. “Why should not I be the shepherd, the official shepherd attached to the Hôtel du Soleil et de l’Ecosse?”“Explain yourself,” said M. Bocardon.Aristide, letting loose his swift imagination, explained copiously, and hypnotized M. Bocardon with his glittering eye, until he had assured to himself a means of livelihood. From that moment he became the familiar genius of the hotel. Scorning the title of “guide,” lest he should be associated in the minds of the guests with the squalid scoundrels who infest the Boulevard, he constituted himself “Directeur de l’Agence Pujol.” An obfuscated Bocardon formed the rest of the agency and pocketed a percentage of Aristide’s earnings, and Aristide, addressed as “Director” by the Anglo-Saxons, “M. le Directeur” by the Latins, and “Herr Direktor” by the Teutons, walked about like a peacock in a barn-yard.he must have dealt out paralyzing informationAt that period, and until he had learned up Baedeker by heart, a process which nearly gave him brain-fever, and still, he declares, brings terror into his slumbers, he knew little more of the history, topography, and art-treasures of Paris thanthe flock he shepherded. He must have dealt out paralyzing information. The Britons and the Germans seemed not to heed; but now and then the American school-marms unmasked the charlatan. On such occasions his unfaltering impudence reached heights truly sublime. The sharp-witted ladies looked in his eyes, forgot their wrongs, and, if he had told them that the Eiffel Tower had been erected by the Pilgrim Fathers, would have accepted the statement meekly.“My friend,” said Aristide, with Provençal flourish and braggadocio, “I never met a woman that would not sooner be misled by me than be taught by the whole Faculty of the Sorbonne.”He had been practising this honourable profession for about a month, lodging with the good Mme. Bidoux at 213 bis, Rue Saint-Honoré, when, one morning, in the vestibule of the hotel, he ran into his old friend Batterby, whom he had known during the days of his professorship of French at the Academy for Young Ladies in Manchester. The pair had been fellow-lodgers in the same house in the Rusholme Road; but, whereas Aristide lived in one sunless bed-sitting-room looking on a forest of chimney-pots, Batterby, man of luxury and ease, had a suite of apartments on the first floor and kept an inexhaustible supply of whisky, cigars, and such-like etceteras of the opulent, and the very ugliest prize bull-pup you can imagine. Batterby, in gaudyraiment, went to an office in Manchester; in gaudier raiment he often attended race meetings. He had rings and scarf-pins and rattled gold in his trousers pockets. He might have been an insufferable young man for a poverty-stricken teacher of French to have as a fellow-lodger; but he was not. Like all those born to high estate, he made no vulgar parade of his wealth, and to Aristide he showed the most affable hospitality. A friendship had arisen between them, which the years had idealized rather than impaired. So when they met that morning in the vestibule of the Hôtel du Soleil et de l’Ecosse their greetings were fervent and prolonged.In person Batterby tended towards burliness. He had a red, jolly face, divided unequally by a great black moustache, and his manner was hearty. He slapped Aristide on the back many times and shook him by the shoulders.“We must have a drink on this straight away, old man,” said he.“You’re so strange, you English,” said Aristide. “The moment you have an emotion you must celebrate it by a drink. ‘My dear fellow, I’ve just come into a fortune; let us have a drink.’ Or, ‘My friend, my poor old father has just been run over by an omnibus; let us have a drink.’ My good Reginald, look at the clock. It is only nine in the morning.”“Rot!” said Reginald. “Drink is good at any time.”They went into the dark and deserted smoking-room, where Batterby ordered Scotch and soda and Aristide, an abstemious man, a plain vermouth.“What’s that muck?” asked Batterby, when the waiter brought the drinks. Aristide explained. “Whisky’s good enough for me,” laughed the other. Aristide laughed too, out of politeness and out of joy at meeting his old friend.“With you playing at guide here,” said Batterby, when he had learned Aristide’s position in the hotel, “it seems I have come to the right shop. There are no flies on me, you know, but when a man comes to Paris for the first time he likes to be put up to the ropes.”“Your first visit to Paris?” cried Aristide. “Mon vieux, what wonders are going to ravish your eyes! What a time you are going to have!”Batterby bit off the end of a great black cigar.“If the missus will let me,” said he.“Missus? Your wife? You are married, my dear Reginald?” Aristide leaped, in his unexpected fashion, from his chair and almost embraced him. “Ah, but you are happy, you are lucky. It was always like that. You open your mouth and the larks fall ready roasted into it! My congratulations. And she is here, in this hotel, your wife? Tell me about her.”Batterby lit his cigar. “She’s nothing to write home about,” he said, modestly. “She’s French.”“French? No—you don’t say so!” exclaimed Aristide, in ecstasy.“Well, she was brought up in France from her childhood, but her parents were Finns. Funny place for people to come from—Finland—isn’t it? You could never expect it—might just as well think of ’em coming from Lapland. She’s an orphan. I met her in London.”“But that’s romantic! And she is young, pretty?”“Oh, yes; in a way,” said the proprietary Briton.“And her name?”“Oh, she has a fool name—Fleurette. I wanted to call her Flossie, but she didn’t like it.”“I should think not,” said Aristide. “Fleurette is an adorable name.”“I suppose it’s right enough,” said Batterby. “But if I want to call her good old Flossie, why should she object? You married, old man? No? Well, wait till you are. You think women are angels all wrapped up in feathers and wings beneath their toggery, don’t you? Well, they’re just blooming porcupines, all bristling with objections.”“Mais, allons, donc!” cried Aristide. “You love her, your beautiful Finnish orphan brought up in France and romantically met in London, with the adorable name?”“Oh, that’s all right,” said the easy Batterby, lifting his half-emptied glass. “Here’s luck!”“Ah—no!” said Aristide, leaning forward and clinking his wineglass against the other’s tumbler. “Here is to madame.”When they returned to the vestibule they found Mrs. Batterby patiently awaiting her lord. She rose from her seat at the approach of the two men, a fragile flower of a girl, about three-and-twenty, pale as a lily, with exquisite though rather large features, and with eyes of the blue of thepervenche(in deference to Aristide I use the French name), which seemed to smile trustfully through perpetual tears. She was dressed in pale, shadowy blue—graceful, impalpable, like the smoke, said Aristide, curling upwards from a cigarette.“Reggie has spoken of you many times, monsieur,” said Fleurette, after the introduction had been effected.Aristide was touched. “Fancy him remembering me!Ce bon vieux Reginald.Madame,” said he, “your husband is the best fellow in the world.”“Feed him with sugar and he won’t bite,” said Batterby; whereat they all laughed, as if it had been a very good joke.“Well, what about this Paris of yours?” he asked, after a while. “The missus knows as little of it as I do.”“Really?” asked Aristide.“I lived all my life in Brest before I went to England,” she said, modestly.“She wants to see all the sights, the Louvre, the Morgue, the Cathedral of What’s-its-name that you’ve got here. I’ve got to go round, too. Pleases her and don’t hurt me. You must tote us about. We’ll have a cab, old girl, as you can’t do much walking, and good old Pujol will come with us.”“But that is ideal!” cried Aristide, flying to the door to order the cab; but before he could reach it he was stopped by three or four waiting tourists, who pointed, some to the clock, some to the wagonette standing outside, and asked the director when the personally-conducted party was to start. Aristide, who had totally forgotten the responsibilities attached to the directorship of the Agence Pujol and, but for this reminder, would have blissfully left his sheep to err and stray over Paris by themselves, returned crestfallen to his friends and explained the situation.“But we’ll join the party,” said the cheery Batterby. “The more the merrier—good old bean-feast! Will there be room?”“Plenty,” replied Aristide, brightening. “But would it meet the wishes of madame?” Her pale face flushed ever so slightly and the soft eyes fluttered at him a half-astonished, half-grateful glance.“With my husband and you, monsieur, I should love it,” she said.So Mr. and Mrs. Batterby joined the personally-conducted party, as they did the next morning, and the next, and several mornings after, and received esoteric information concerning the monuments of Paris that is hidden even from the erudite. The evenings, however, Aristide, being off duty, devoted to their especial entertainment. He took them to riotous and perspiring restaurants where they dined gorgeously for three francs fifty, wine included; to open-aircafés-concertsin the Champs Elysées, which Fleurette found infinitely diverting, but which bored Batterby, who knew not French, to stertorous slumber; to crowded brasseries on the Boulevard, where Batterby awakened, under a steady flow of whisky, to appreciative contemplation of Paris life. As in the old days of the Rusholme Road, Batterby flung his money about with unostentatious generosity. He was out for a beano, he declared, and hang the expense! Aristide, whose purse, scantily filled (truth to say) by the profits of the Agence Pujol, could contribute but modestly to this reckless expenditure, found himself forced to accept his friend’s lavish hospitality. Once or twice, delicately, he suggested withdrawal from the evening’s dissipation.“But, my good M. Pujol,” said Fleurette, with childish tragicality in herpervencheeyes, “without you we shall be lost. We shall not enjoy ourselves at all, at all.”So Aristide, out of love for his friend, and out of he knew not what for his friend’s wife, continued to show them the sights of Paris. They went to the cabarets of Montmartre—theCiel, where one is served by angels; theEnfer, where one is served by red devils in a Tartarean lighting; theNéant, where one has coffins for tables—than all of which vulgarity has imagined no more joy-killing dreariness, but which caused Fleurette to grip Aristide’s hand tight in scared wonderment and Batterby to chuckle exceedingly. They went to the Bal Bullier and to various other balls undreamed of by the tourist, where Fleurette danced with Aristide, as light as an autumn leaf tossed by the wind, and Batterby absorbed a startling assortment of alcohols. In a word, Aristide procured for his friends prodigious diversion.“How do you like this, old girl?” Batterby asked one night, at the Moulin de la Galette, a dizzying, not very decorous, and to the unsophisticated visitor a dangerous place of entertainment. “Better than Great Coram Street, isn’t it?”She smiled and laid her hand on his. She was a woman of few words but of many caressing actions.“I ought to let you into a secret,” said he. “This is our honeymoon.”“Who would have thought it?”fleurette danced with aristide, as light as an autumn leaf tossed by the wind“A fortnight ago she was being killed in aBloomsbury boarding-house. There were two of ’em—she and a girl called Carrie. I used to call ’em Fetch and Carrie. This one was Fetch. Well, she fetched me, didn’t you, old girl? And now you’re Mrs. Reginald Batterby, living at your ease, eh?”“Madame would grace any sphere,” said Aristide.“I wish I had more education,” said Fleurette, humbly. “M. Pujol and yourself are so clever that you must laugh at me.”“We do sometimes, but you mustn’t mind us. Remember—at the what-you-call-it—the little shanty at Versailles——?”“The Grand Trianon,” replied Aristide.“That’s it. When you were showing us the rooms. ‘What is the Empress Josephine doing now?’” He mimicked her accent. “Ha! ha! And the poor soul gone to glory a couple of hundred years ago.”The little mouth puckered at the corners and moisture gathered in the blue eyes.“Mais, mon Dieu, it was natural, the mistake,” cried Aristide, gallantly. “The Empress Eugénie, the wife of another Napoleon, is still living.”“Bien sûr,” said Fleurette. “How was I to know?”“Never mind, old girl,” said Batterby. “You’re living all right, and out of that beastlyboarding-house, and that’s the chief thing. Another month of it would have killed her. She had a cough that shook her to bits. She’s looking better already, isn’t she, Pujol?”After this Aristide learned much of her simple history, which she, at first, had been too shy to reveal. The child of Finnish sea-folk who had drifted to Brest and died there, she had been adopted by an old Breton sea-dog and his wife. On their death she had entered, as maid, the service of an English lady residing in the town, who afterwards had taken her to England. After a while reverses of fortune had compelled the lady to dismiss her, and she had taken the situation in the boarding-house, where she had ruined her health and met the opulent and conquering Batterby. She had not much chance, poor child, of acquiring a profound knowledge of the history of the First Empire; but her manners were refined and her ways gentle and her voice was soft; and Aristide, citizen of the world, for whom caste distinctions existed not, thought her the most exquisite flower grown in earth’s garden. He told her so, much to her blushing satisfaction.One night, about three weeks after the Batterbys’ arrival in Paris, Batterby sent his wife to bed and invited Aristide to accompany him for half an hour to a neighbouring café. He looked grave and troubled.“I’ve been upset by a telegram,” said he, when drinks had been ordered. “I’m called away to New York on business. I must catch the boat from Cherbourg to-morrow evening. Now, I can’t take Fleurette with me. Women and business don’t mix. She has jolly well got to stay here. I sha’n’t be away more than a month. I’ll leave her plenty of money to go on with. But what’s worrying me is—how is she going to stick it? So look here, old man, you’re my pal, aren’t you?”He stretched out his hand. Aristide grasped it impulsively.“Why, of course,mon vieux!”“If I felt that I could leave her in your charge, all on the square, as a real straight pal—I should go away happy.”“She shall be my sister,” cried Aristide, “and I shall give her all the devotion of a brother.... I swear it—tiens—what can I swear it on?” He flung out his arms and looked round the café as if in search of an object. “I swear it on the head of my mother. Have no fear. I, Aristide Pujol, have never betrayed the sacred obligations of friendship. I accept her as a consecrated trust.”“You only need to have said ‘Right-o,’ and I would have believed you,” said Batterby. “I haven’t told her yet. There’ll be blubbering all night. Let us have another drink.”When Aristide arrived at the Hôtel du Soleilet de l’Ecosse at nine o’clock the next morning he found that Batterby had left Paris by an early train. Fleurette he did not meet until he brought back the sight-seers to the fold in the evening. She had wept much during the day; but she smiled bravely on Aristide. A woman could not stand in the way of her husband’s business.“By the way, what is Reginald’s business?” Aristide asked.She did not know. Reginald never spoke to her of such things; perhaps she was too ignorant to understand.“But he will make a lot of money by going to America,” she said. Then she was silent for a few moments. “Mon Dieu!” she sighed, at last. “How long the day has been!”It was the beginning of many long days for Fleurette. Reginald did not write from Cherbourg or cable from New York, as he had promised, and the return American mail brought no letter. The days passed drearily. Sometimes, for the sake of human society, she accompanied the tourist parties of the Agence Pujol; but the thrill had passed from the Morgue and the glory had departed from Versailles. Sometimes she wandered out by herself into the streets and public gardens; but, pretty, unprotected, and fragile, she attracted the attention of evil or careless men, which struck cold terror into her heart. Mostoften she sat alone and listless in the hotel, reading the feuilleton of thePetit Journal, and waiting for the post to bring her news.“Mon Dieu, M. Pujol, what can have happened?”“Nothing at all,chère petite madame”—question and answer came many times a day. “Only some foolish mischance which will soon be explained. The good Reginald has written and his letter has been lost in the post. He has been obliged to go on business to San Francisco or Buenos Ayres—et, que voulez-vous?one cannot have letters from those places in twenty-four hours.”“If only he had taken me with him!”“But, dear Mme. Fleurette, he could not expose you to the hardships of travel. You, who are as fragile as a cobweb, how could you go to Patagonia or Senegal or Baltimore, those wild places where there are no comforts for women? You must be reasonable. I am sure you will get a letter soon—or else in a day or two he will come, with his good, honest face as if nothing had occurred—these English are like that—and call for whisky and soda. Be comforted,chère petite madame.”Aristide did his best to comfort her, threw her in the companionship of decent women staying at the hotel, and devoted his evenings to her entertainment. But the days passed, and Reginald Batterby, with the good, honest face, neither wrotenor ordered whisky and soda. Fleurette began to pine and fade.One day she came to Aristide.“M. Pujol, I have no more money left.”“Bigre!” said Pujol. “The good Bocardon will have to give you credit. I’ll arrange it.”“But I already owe for three weeks,” said Fleurette.Aristide sought Bocardon. One week more was all the latter dared allow.“But her husband will return and pay you. He is my old and intimate friend. I make myself hoarse in telling it to you, wooden-head that you are!”But Bocardon, who had to account to higher powers, the proprietors of the hotel, was helpless. At the end of the week Fleurette was called upon to give up her room. She wept with despair; Aristide wept with fury; Bocardon wept out of sympathy. Already, said Bocardon, the proprietors would blame him for not using the legal right to detain madame’s luggage.“Mon Dieu! mon Dieu!what is to become of me?” wailed Fleurette.“You forget, madame,” said Aristide, with one of his fine flourishes, “that you are the sacred trust of Aristide Pujol.”“But I can’t accept your money,” objected Fleurette.“Tron de l’air!” he cried. “Did your husband put you in my charge or did he not? Am I your legal guardian, or am I not? If I am your legal guardian, what right have you to question the arrangements made by your husband? Answer me that.”Fleurette, too gentle and too miserable for intricate argument, sighed.“But it is your money, all the same.”Aristide turned to Bocardon. “Try,” said he, “to convince a woman! Do you want proofs? Wait there a minute while I get them from the safe of the Agence Pujol.”He disappeared into the bureau, where, secure from observation, he tore an oblong strip from a sheet of stiff paper, and, using an indelible pencil, wrote out something fantastic halfway between a cheque and a bill of exchange, forged as well as he could from memory the signature of Reginald Batterby—the imitation of handwriting was one of Aristide’s many odd accomplishments—and made the document look legal by means of a receipt stamp, which he took from Bocardon’s drawer. He returned to the vestibule with the strip folded and somewhat crumpled in his hand. “Voilà,” said he, handing it boldly to Fleurette. “Here is your husband’s guarantee to me, your guardian, for four thousand francs.”Fleurette examined the forgery. The stampimpressed her. For the simple souls of France there is magic inpapier timbré.“It was my husband who wrote this?” she asked, curiously.“Mais, oui,” said Aristide, with an offended air of challenge.Fleurette’s eyes filled again with tears.“I only inquired,” she said, “because this is the first time I have seen his handwriting.”“Ma pauvre petite,” said Aristide.“I will do whatever you tell me, M. Pujol,” said Fleurette, humbly.“Good! That is talking likeune bonne petite dame raisonnable. Now, I know a woman made up of holy bread whom St. Paul and St. Peter are fighting to have next them when she goes to Paradise. Her name is Mme. Bidoux, and she sells cabbages and asparagus and charcoal at No. 213 bis, Rue Saint-Honoré. She will arrange our little affair. Bocardon, will you have madame’s trunks sent to that address?”He gave his arm to Fleurette, and walked out of the hotel, with serene confidence in the powers of the sainted Mme. Bidoux. Fleurette accompanied him unquestioningly. Of course she might have said: “If you hold negotiable security from my husband to the amount of four thousand francs, why should I exchange the comforts of the hotel for the doubtful accommodation of the saintedMme. Bidoux who sells cabbages?” But I repeat that Fleurette was a simple soul who took for granted the wisdom of so flamboyant and virile a creature as Aristide Pujol.Away up at the top of No. 213 bis, Rue Saint-Honoré, was a little furnished room to let, and there Aristide installed his sacred charge. Mme. Bidoux, who, as she herself maintained, would have cut herself into four pieces for Aristide—did he not save her dog’s life? Did he not marry her daughter to the brigadier of gendarmes (sale voyou!), who would otherwise have left her lamenting? Was he not the most wonderful of God’s creatures?—Mme. Bidoux, although not quite appreciating Aristide’s quixotic delicacy, took the forlorn and fragile wisp of misery to her capacious bosom. She made her free of the cabbages and charcoal. She provided her, at a risible charge, with succulent meals. She told her tales of her father and mother, of her neighbours, of the domestic differences between the concierge and his wife (soothing idyll for an Ariadne!), of the dirty thief of a brigadier of gendarmes, of her bodily ailments—her body was so large that they were many; of the picturesque death, through apoplexy, of the late M. Bidoux; the brave woman, in short, gave her of her heart’s best. As far as human hearts could provide a bed for Fleurette, that bed was of roses. As a matter of brutal fact, it wasnarrow and nubbly, and the little uncarpeted room was ten feet by seven; but to provide it Aristide went to his own bed hungry. And if the bed of a man’s hunger is not to be accounted as one of roses, there ought to be a vote for the reduction of the Recording Angel’s salary.It must not be imagined that Fleurette thought the bed hard. Her bed of life from childhood had been nubbly. She never dreamed of complaining of her little room under the stars, and she sat among the cabbages like a tired lily, quite contented with her material lot. But she drooped and drooped, and the cough returned and shook her; and Aristide, realizing the sacredness of his charge, became a prey to anxious terrors.“Mère Bidoux,” said he, “she must have lots of good, nourishing, tender, underdone beef, good fillets, andentrecôtes saignantes.”Mme. Bidoux sighed. She had a heart, but she also had a pocket which, like Aristide’s, was not over-filled. “That costs dear, my poor friend,” she said.“What does it matter what it costs? It is I who provide,” said Aristide, grandly.And Aristide gave up tobacco and coffee and the mild refreshment at cafés essential to the existence of every Frenchman, and degraded his soul by taking half-franc tips from tourists—a source of income which, as Director, M. le Directeur,Herr Direktor of the Agence Pujol, he had hitherto scorned haughtily—in order to provide Fleurette with underdone beefsteaks.All his leisure he devoted to her. She represented something that hitherto had not come into his life—something delicate, tender, ethereal, something of woman that was exquisitely adorable, apart from the flesh. Once, as he was sitting in the little shop, she touched his temple lightly with her fingers.“Ah, you are good to me, Aristide.”He felt a thrill such as no woman’s touch had ever caused to pass through him—far, far sweeter, cleaner, purer. If thebon Dieucould have given her to him then and there to be his wife, what bond could have been holier? But he had bound himself by a sacred obligation. His friend on his return should find him loyal.“Who could help being good to you, little Fleurette?” said he. “Even an Apache would not tread on a lily of the valley!”“But you put me in water and tend me so carefully.”“So that you can be fresh whenever the dear Reginald comes back.”She sighed. “Tell me what I can do for you, my good Aristide.”“Keep well and happy and be a valiant little woman,” said he.Fleurette tried hard to be valiant; but the effort exhausted her strength. As the days went on, even Aristide’s inexhaustible conversation failed to distract her from brooding. She lost the trick of laughter. In the evenings, when he was most with her, she would sit, either in the shop or in the little room at the back, her blue childish eyes fixed on him wistfully. At first he tried to lure her into the gay street; but walking tired her. He encouraged her to sit outside on the pavement of the Rue Saint-Honoré and join with Mme. Bidoux in the gossip of neighbours; but she listened to them with uncomprehending ears. In despair Aristide, to coax a smile from her lips, practised his many queer accomplishments. He conjured with cards; he juggled with oranges; he had a mountebank’s trick of putting one leg round his neck; he imitated the voices of cats and pigs and ducks, till Mme. Bidoux held her sides with mirth. He spent time and thought in elaborating what he calledbonnes farces, such as dressing himself up in Mme. Bidoux’s raiment and personifying a crabbed customer.Fleurette smiled but listlessly at all these comicalities.One day she was taken ill. A doctor, summoned, said many learned words which Aristide and Mme. Bidoux tried hard to understand.“But, after all, what is the matter with her?”
“Alas, Monsieur,” said the detective, “that I cannot do. I have called on him this morning and his wife tells me that he left for the North yesterday afternoon. But it is José Puégas that did it. I know his ways.”
“Tiens!” said the Mayor, reflectively. “I know him also, an evil fellow.”
“But why are you not looking for him?” exclaimed Aristide.
“Arrangements have been made,” replied the detective coldly.
Aristide suddenly bethought him of the furtive masquer of the night before.
“I can put you on his track,” said he, and related what he knew.
The Mayor looked dubious. “It wasn’t he,” he remarked.
“José Puégas, Monsieur, would not commit a burglary in a pig’s head,” said the policeman, with the cutting contempt of the expert.
“It was a vow, I suppose,” said Aristide, stung to irony. “I’ve always heard he was a religious man.”
The detective did not condescend to reply.
“Monsieur le Maire,” said he, “I should like to examine the premises, and beg that you will have the kindness to accompany me.”
“With the permission of Monsieur le Maire,” said Aristide. “I too will come.”
“Certainly,” said the Mayor. “The more intelligences concentrated on the affair the better.”
“I am not of that opinion,” said the detective.
“It is the opinion of Monsieur le Maire,” said Aristide rebukingly, “and that is enough.”
When they reached the house—distances are short in Perpignan—they found policemen busily engaged with tape measures around the premises. Old Madame Coquereau in a clean white linen dressing jacket, bare-headed, defying the keen air, stood grim and eager in the midst of them.
“Good morning, Monsieur Pujol, what do you think of this?”
“A veritable catastrophe,” said Aristide.
She shrugged her iron shoulders. “I tell him it serves him right,” she said, cuttingly. “A sensible person keeps his money under his mattress and not in a tin machine by a window which anyone can get at. I wonder we’ve not been murdered in our beds before.”
“Ah, Maman!” expostulated the Mayor of Perpignan.
But she turned her back on him and worried the policemen. They, having probed, and measured, and consulted with the detective, came to an exact conclusion. The thief had climbed over the back wall—there were his footsteps. He had entered by the kitchen door—there were the marks of infraction. He had broken open the safe—there was the helpless condition of the lock. No one in Perpignan, but José Puégas, with his bad, socialistic, Barcelona blood, could have done it. These brilliant results were arrived at after much clamour and argument and imposingprocès verbal. Aristidefelt strangely depressed. He had narrated his story of the pig-headed masquer to unresponsive ears. Here was a melodramatic scene in which he not only was not playing a leading part, but did not even carry a banner. To be less than a super in life’s pageant was abhorrent to the nature of Aristide Pujol.
Moodily he wandered away from the little crowd. He hated the police and their airs of gods for whom exists no mystery. He did not believe in the kitchen-door theory. Why should not the thief have simply entered by the window of the study, which like the kitchen, was on the ground floor? He went round the house and examined the window by himself. No; there were no traces of burglary. The fastenings of the outside shutters and the high window were intact. The police were right.
Suddenly his quick eye lit on something in the gravel path and his heart gave a great leap. It was a little round pink disc of confetti.
Aristide picked it up and began to dance and shake his fist at the invisible police.
“Aha!” he cried, “now we shall see who is right and who is wrong!”
He began to search and soon found another bit of confetti. A little further along he discovered a third and a fourth. By using his walking stick he discovered that they formed a trail to a point inthe wall. He examined the wall. There, if his eyes did not deceive him, were evidences of mortar dislodged by nefarious toes. And there,mirabile visu!at the very bottom of the wall lay a little woollen pompon or tassel, just the kind of pompon that gives a finish to a pierrot’s shoes. Evidently the scoundrel had scraped it off against the bricks while clambering over.
The pig-headed masquer stood confessed.
A less imaginative man than Aristide would have immediately acquainted the police with his discovery. But Aristide had been insulted. A dull, mechanical bureaucrat who tried to discover crime with a tape-measure had dared to talk contemptuously of his intelligence! On his wooden head should be poured the vials of his contempt.
“Tron de l’air!” cried Aristide—a Provençal oath which he only used on sublime occasions—“It is I who will discover the thief and make the whole lot of you the laughing-stock of Perpignan.”
So did my versatile friend, joyously confident in his powers, start on his glorious career as a private detective.
“Madame Coquereau,” said he, that evening, while she was dealing a hand at piquet, “what would you say if I solved this mystery and brought the scoundrel to justice?”
“To say that you would have more sense thanthe police, would be a poor compliment,” said the old lady.
Stéphanie raised cloistral eyes from her embroidery frame. She sat in a distant corner of the formal room discreetly lit by a shaded lamp.
“You have a clue, Monsieur?” she asked with adorable timidity.
Aristide tapped his forehead with his forefinger. “All is there, Mademoiselle.”
They exchanged a glance—the first they had exchanged—while Madame Coquereau was frowning at her cards; and Aristide interpreted the glance as the promise of supreme reward for great deeds accomplished.
The mayor returned early from the café, a dejected man. The loss of his hundred and twenty pounds weighed heavily on his mind. He kissed his mother sorrowfully on the cheek, his niece on the brow, held out a drooping hand to Aristide, and, subsiding into a stiff imitation Louis XVI chair, rested his elbows on its unconsoling arms and hid his face in his hands.
“My poor uncle! You suffer so much?” breathed Stéphanie, in divine compassion.
“Little Saint!” murmured Aristide devoutly, as he declared four aces and three queens.
The Mayor moved his head sympathetically. He was suffering from the sharpest pain in his pockethe had felt for many a day. Madame Coquereau’s attention wandered from the cards.
“Dis donc, Fernand,” she said sharply. “Why are you not wearing your ring?”
The Mayor looked up.
“Maman,” said he, “it is stolen.”
“Your beautiful ring?” cried Aristide.
The Mayor’s ring, which he usually wore, was a remarkable personal adornment. It consisted in a couple of snakes in old gold clenching an enormous topaz between their heads. Only a Mayor could have worn it with decency.
“You did not tell me, Fernand,” rasped the old lady. “You did not mention it to me as being one of the stolen objects.”
The Mayor rose wearily. “It was to avoid giving you pain,maman. I know what a value you set upon the ring of my good Aunt Philomène.”
“And now it is lost,” said Madame Coquereau, throwing down her cards. “A ring that belonged to a saint. Yes, Monsieur Pujol, a saint, though she was my sister. A ring that had been blessed by His Holiness the Pope——”
“But,maman,” expostulated the Mayor, “that was an imagination of Aunt Philomène. Just because she went to Rome and had an audience like anyone else——”
“Silence, impious atheist that you are!” cried the old lady. “I tell you it was blessed by HisHoliness—and when I tell you a thing it is true. That is the son of to-day. He will call his mother a liar as soon as look at her. It was a ring beyond price. A ring such as there are few in the world. And instead of taking care of this precious heirloom, he goes and locks it away in a safe. Ah! you fill me with shame. Monsieur Pujol, I am sorry I can play no more, I must retire. Stéphanie, will you accompany me?”
And gathering up Stéphanie like a bunch of snowdrops, the yellow, galvanized iron old lady swept out of the room.
The Mayor looked at Aristide and moved his arms dejectedly.
“Such are women,” said he.
“My own mother nearly broke her heart because I would not become a priest,” said Aristide.
“I wish I were a Turk,” said the Mayor.
“I, too,” said Aristide.
He took pouch and papers and rolled a cigarette.
“If there is a man living who can say he has not felt like that at least once in his life he ought to be exhibited at a fair.”
“How well you understand me, my good Pujol,” said Monsieur Coquereau.
The next few days passed busily for Aristide. He devoted every spare hour to his new task. He scrutinized every inch of ground between the studywindow and the wall; he drew radiating lines from the point of the wall whence the miscreant had started homeward and succeeded in finding more confetti. He cross-examined every purveyor of pierrot shoes and pig’s heads in Perpignan. His researches soon came to the ears of the police, still tracing the mysterious José Puégas. A certain good-humoured brigadier whose Catalan French Aristide found difficult to understand, but with whom he had formed a derisory kind of friendship, urged him to desist from the hopeless task.
“Jamais de la vie!” he cried—“The honour of Aristide Pujol is at stake.”
The thing became an obsession. Not only his honour but his future was at stake. If he discovered the thief, he would be the most talked of person in Perpignan. He would know how to improve his position. He would rise to dizzy heights. Perpignan-Ville de Plaisir would acclaim him as its saviour. The Government would decorate him. And finally, both the Mayor and Madame Coquereau would place the blushing and adorable Mademoiselle Stéphanie in his arms and her two hundred and fifty thousand francs dowry in his pocket. Never before had so dazzling a prize shimmered before him in the near distance.
On the last Saturday night of the Carnival, there was a specialcorsofor the populace in the Avenue des Plantanes, the long splendid Avenue of planetrees just outside the Porte Notre Dame, which is the special glory of Perpignan. The masquers danced to three or four bands. They threw confetti andserpentins. They rode hobby-horses and beat each other with bladders. They joined in bands of youths and maidens and whirled down the Avenue in Bacchic madness. It was acorso blanc, and everyone wore white—chiefly modifications of Pierrot costume—and everyone was masked. Chinese lanterns hung from the trees and in festoons around the bandstands and darted about in the hands of the revellers. Above, great standard electric lamps shed their white glare upon the eddying throng casting a myriad of grotesque shadows. Shouts and laughter and music filled the air.
Aristide in a hideous red mask and with a bag of confetti under his arm, plunged with enthusiasm into the revelry. To enjoy yourself you only had to throw your arm round a girl’s waist and swing her off wildly to the beat of the music. If you wanted to let her go you did so; if not, you talked in the squeaky voice that is the recognized etiquette of the carnival. On the other hand any girl could catch you in her grip and sweep you along with her. Your mad career generally ended in a crowd and a free fight of confetti. There was one fair masquer, however, to whom Aristide became peculiarly attracted. Her movements werefree, her figure dainty and her repartee, below her mask, more than usually piquant.
“This hurly-burly,” said he, drawing her into a quiet eddy of the stream, “is no place for the communion of two twin souls.”
“Beau masque,” said she, “I perceive that you are a man of much sensibility.”
“Shall we find a spot where we can mingle the overflow of our exquisite natures?”
“As you like.”
“Allons! Hop!” cried he, and seizing her round the waist danced through the masquers to the very far end of the Avenue.
“There is a sequestered spot round here,” he said.
They turned. The sequestered spot, a seat beneath a plane tree, with a lonesome arc-lamp shining full upon it, was occupied.
“It’s a pity!” said the fair unknown.
But Aristide said nothing. He stared. On the seat reposed an amorous couple. The lady wore a white domino and a black mask. The cavalier, whose arm was around the lady’s waist, wore a pig’s head, and a clown or Pierrot’s dress.
Aristide’s eyes fell upon the shoes. On one of them the pompon was missing.
The lady’s left hand tenderly patted the cardboard snout of her lover. The fierce light of the arc lamp caught the hand and revealed, on thefourth finger, a topaz ring, the topaz held in its place by two snakes’ heads.
Aristide stared for two seconds; it seemed to him two centuries. Then he turned simply, caught his partner again, and with a “Allons, Hop!” raced back to the middle of the throng. There, in the crush, he unceremoniously lost her, and sped like a maniac to the entrance gates. His friend the brigadier happened to be on duty. He unmasked himself, dragged the police agent aside, and breathless, half-hysterical, acquainted him with the astounding discovery.
“I was right,mon vieux!There at the end of the Avenue you will find them. The pig-headed prowler I saw, withmypompon missing from his shoe, and hisbonne amiewearing the stolen ring. Ah! you police people with your tape-measures and your José Puégas! It is I, Aristide Pujol, who have to come to Perpignan to teach you your business!”
“What do you want me to do?” asked the brigadier stolidly.
“Do?” cried Aristide. “Do you think I want you to kiss them and cover them with roses? What do you generally do with thieves in Perpignan?”
“Arrest them,” said the brigadier.
“Eh bien!” said Aristide. Then he paused—possibly the drama of the situation striking him. “No, wait. Go and find them. Don’t take youreyes off them. I will run and fetch Monsieur le Maire and he will identify his property—et puis nous aurons la scène à faire.”
The stout brigadier grunted an assent and rolled monumentally down the Avenue. Aristide, his pulses throbbing, his heart exulting, ran to the Mayor’s house. He was rather a panting triumph than a man. He had beaten the police of Perpignan. He had discovered the thief. He was the hero of the town. Soon would the wedding bells be playing.... He envied the marble of the future statue. He would like to be on the pedestal himself.
He dashed past the maid-servant who opened the door and burst into the prim salon. Madame Coquereau was alone, just preparing to retire for the night. Mademoiselle Stéphanie had already gone to bed.
“Mon Dieu, what is all this?” she cried.
“Madame,” shouted he, “glorious news. I have found the thief!”
He told his tale. Where was Monsieur le Maire?
“He has not yet come back from the café.”
“I’ll go and find him,” said Aristide.
“And waste time? Bah!” said the iron-faced old lady, catching up a black silk shawl. “I will come with you and identify the ring of my sainted sister Philomène. Who should know it better than I?”
“As you like, Madame,” said Aristide.
Two minutes found them on their journey. Madame Coquereau, in spite of her sixty-five years trudged along with springing step.
“They don’t make metal like me, nowadays,” she said scornfully.
When they arrived at the gate of the Avenue, the police on guard saluted. The mother of Monsieur le Maire was a power in Perpignan.
“Monsieur,” said Aristide, in lordly fashion, to a policeman, “will you have the goodness to make a passage through the crowd for Madame Coquereau, and then help the Brigadier Pésac to arrest the burglar who broke into the house of Monsieur le Maire?”
The man obeyed, went ahead clearing the path with the unceremoniousness of the law, and Aristide giving his arm to Madame Coquereau followed gloriously. As the impressive progress continued the revellers ceased their revels and followed in the wake of Aristide. At the end of the Avenue Brigadier Pésac was on guard. He approached.
“They are still there,” he said.
“Good,” said Aristide.
The two police-officers, Aristide and Madame Coquereau turned the corner. At the sight of the police the guilty couple started to their feet. MadameCoquereau pounced like a hawk on the masked lady’s hand.
“I identify it,” she cried. “Brigadier, give these people in charge for theft.”
The white masked crowd surged around the group, in the midst of which stood Aristide transfigured. It was his supreme moment. He flourished in one hand his red mask and in the other a pompon which he had extracted from his pocket.
“This I found,” said he, “beneath the wall of Monsieur le Maire’s garden. Behold the shoe of the accused.”
The crowd murmured their applause and admiration. Neither of the prisoners stirred. The pig’s head grinned at the world with its inane, painted leer. A rumbling voice beneath it said:
“We will go quietly.”
“Attention s’il vous plaît,” said the policemen, and each holding a prisoner by the arm they made a way through the crowd. Madame Coquereau and Aristide followed close behind.
“What did I tell you?” cried Aristide to the brigadier.
“It’s Puégas, all the same,” said the brigadier, over his shoulder.
“I bet you it’s not,” said Aristide, and striding swiftly to the back of the male prisoner whipped off the pig’s head, and revealed to the petrifiedthrong the familiar features of the Mayor of Perpignan.
Aristide regarded him for two or three seconds open-mouthed, and then fell back into the arms of the Brigadier Pésac screaming with convulsive laughter. The crowd caught the infection of merriment. Shrieks filled the air. The vast mass of masqueraders held their sides, swayed helplessly, rolled in heaps, men and women, tearing each other’s garments as they fell.
Aristide, deposited on the ground by the Brigadier Pésac laughed and laughed. When he recovered some consciousness of surroundings, he found the Mayor bending over him and using language that would have made Tophet put its fingers in its ears. He rose. Madame Coquereau shook her thin fists in his face.
“Imbecile! Triple fool!” she cried.
Aristide turned tail and fled. There was nothing else to do.
And that was the end of his career at Perpignan. Vanished were the dreams of civic eminence; melted into thin air the statue on the Quai Sadi-Carnot; faded, too, the vision of the modest Stéphanie crowned with orange-blossom; gone forever the two hundred and fifty thousand francs. Never since Alnaschar kicked over his basket of crockery was there such a hideous welter of shattered hopes.
If the Mayor had been allowed to go disguisedto the Police Station, he could have disclosed his identity and that of the lady in private to awe-stricken functionaries. He might have forgiven Aristide. But Aristide had exposed him to the derision of the whole of Roussillon and the never ending wrath of Madame Coquereau. Ruefully Aristide asked himself the question: why had the Mayor not taken him into the confidence of his masquerading escapade? Why had he not told him of the pretty widow, whom, unknown to his mother, he was courting? Why had he permitted her to wear the ring which he had given her so as to spite his sainted Aunt Philomène? And why had he gone on wearing the pig’s head after Aristide had told him of his suspicions? Ruefully Aristide found no answers save in the general chuckle-headedness of mankind.
“If it hadn’t been such a good farce I should have wept like a cow,” said Aristide, after relating this story. “But every time I wanted to cry, I laughed.Nom de Dieu!You should have seen his face! And the face of Madame Coquereau! She opened her mouth wide showing ten yellow teeth and squealed like a rabbit! Oh, it was a good farce! He was very cross with me,” he added after a smiling pause, “and when I got back to Paris I tried to pacify him.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I sent him my photograph,” said Aristide.
THE ADVENTURE OF FLEURETTE
One day, when Aristide was discoursing on the inexhaustible subject of woman, I pulled him up.
“My good friend,” said I, “you seem to have fallen in love with every woman you have ever met. But for how many of them have you really cared?”
“Mon Dieu!For all of them!” he cried, springing from his chair and making a wind-mill of himself.
“Come, come,” said I; “all that amorousness is just Gallic exuberance. Have you ever been really in love in your life?”
“How should I know?” said he. But he lit a cigarette, turned away, and looked out of window.
There was a short silence. He shrugged his shoulders, apparently in response to his own thoughts. Then he turned again suddenly, threw his cigarette into the fire, and thrust his hands into his pockets. He sighed.
“Perhaps there was Fleurette,” said he, not looking at me. “Est-ce qu’on sait jamais?That wasn’ther real name—it was Marie-Joséphine; but people called her Fleurette. She looked like a flower, you know.”
I nodded in order to signify my elementary acquaintance with the French tongue.
“The most delicate little flower you can conceive,” he continued. “Tiens, she was a slender lily—so white, and her hair the flash of gold on it—and she had eyes—des yeux de pervenche, as we say in French. What ispervenchein English—that little pale-blue flower?”
“Periwinkle,” said I.
“Periwinkle eyes! My God, what a language! Ah, no! She haddes yeux de pervenche.... She wasdiaphane, diaphanous ... impalpable as cigarette-smoke ... a little nose like nothing at all, with nostrils like infinitesimal sea-shells. Anyone could have made a mouthful of her.... Ah!Cré nom d’un chien!Life is droll. It has no common sense. It is the game of a mountebank.... I’ve never told you about Fleurette. It was this way.”
And the story he narrated I will do my best to set down.
The good M. Bocardon, of the Hôtel de la Curatterie at Nîmes, whose grateful devotion to Aristide has already been recorded, had a brother in Paris who managed the Hôtel duSoleil et de l’Ecosse (strange conjuncture), a flourishing third-rate hostelry in the neighbourhood of the Halles Centrales. Thither flocked sturdy Britons in knickerbockers, stockings, and cloth caps, Teutons with tin botanizing boxes (for lunch transportation), and American school-marms realizing at last the dream of their modest and laborious lives. Accommodation was cheap, manners were easy, and knowledge of the gay city less than rudimentary.
To M. Bocardon of Paris Aristide, one August morning, brought glowing letters of introduction from M. and Mme. Bocardon of Nîmes. M. Bocardon of Paris welcomed Aristide as a Provençal and a brother. He brought out from a cupboard in his private bureau an hospitable bottle of old Armagnac, and discoursed with Aristide on the seductions of the South. It was there that he longed to retire—to a dainty little hotel of his own with a smart clientèle. The clientèle of the Hôtel du Soleil et de l’Ecosse was not to his taste. He spoke slightingly of his guests.
“There are people who know how to travel,” said he, “and people who don’t. These lost muttons here don’t, and they make hotel-keeping a nightmare instead of a joy. A hundred times a day have I to tell them the way to Notre Dame.Pouah!” said he, gulping down his disgust and the rest of his Armagnac, “it is back-breaking.”
“Tu sais, mon vieux,” cried Aristide—he had the most lightning way of establishing an intimacy—“I have an idea. These lost sheep need a shepherd.”
“Eh bien?” said M. Bocardon.
“Eh bien,” said Aristide. “Why should not I be the shepherd, the official shepherd attached to the Hôtel du Soleil et de l’Ecosse?”
“Explain yourself,” said M. Bocardon.
Aristide, letting loose his swift imagination, explained copiously, and hypnotized M. Bocardon with his glittering eye, until he had assured to himself a means of livelihood. From that moment he became the familiar genius of the hotel. Scorning the title of “guide,” lest he should be associated in the minds of the guests with the squalid scoundrels who infest the Boulevard, he constituted himself “Directeur de l’Agence Pujol.” An obfuscated Bocardon formed the rest of the agency and pocketed a percentage of Aristide’s earnings, and Aristide, addressed as “Director” by the Anglo-Saxons, “M. le Directeur” by the Latins, and “Herr Direktor” by the Teutons, walked about like a peacock in a barn-yard.
he must have dealt out paralyzing information
At that period, and until he had learned up Baedeker by heart, a process which nearly gave him brain-fever, and still, he declares, brings terror into his slumbers, he knew little more of the history, topography, and art-treasures of Paris thanthe flock he shepherded. He must have dealt out paralyzing information. The Britons and the Germans seemed not to heed; but now and then the American school-marms unmasked the charlatan. On such occasions his unfaltering impudence reached heights truly sublime. The sharp-witted ladies looked in his eyes, forgot their wrongs, and, if he had told them that the Eiffel Tower had been erected by the Pilgrim Fathers, would have accepted the statement meekly.
“My friend,” said Aristide, with Provençal flourish and braggadocio, “I never met a woman that would not sooner be misled by me than be taught by the whole Faculty of the Sorbonne.”
He had been practising this honourable profession for about a month, lodging with the good Mme. Bidoux at 213 bis, Rue Saint-Honoré, when, one morning, in the vestibule of the hotel, he ran into his old friend Batterby, whom he had known during the days of his professorship of French at the Academy for Young Ladies in Manchester. The pair had been fellow-lodgers in the same house in the Rusholme Road; but, whereas Aristide lived in one sunless bed-sitting-room looking on a forest of chimney-pots, Batterby, man of luxury and ease, had a suite of apartments on the first floor and kept an inexhaustible supply of whisky, cigars, and such-like etceteras of the opulent, and the very ugliest prize bull-pup you can imagine. Batterby, in gaudyraiment, went to an office in Manchester; in gaudier raiment he often attended race meetings. He had rings and scarf-pins and rattled gold in his trousers pockets. He might have been an insufferable young man for a poverty-stricken teacher of French to have as a fellow-lodger; but he was not. Like all those born to high estate, he made no vulgar parade of his wealth, and to Aristide he showed the most affable hospitality. A friendship had arisen between them, which the years had idealized rather than impaired. So when they met that morning in the vestibule of the Hôtel du Soleil et de l’Ecosse their greetings were fervent and prolonged.
In person Batterby tended towards burliness. He had a red, jolly face, divided unequally by a great black moustache, and his manner was hearty. He slapped Aristide on the back many times and shook him by the shoulders.
“We must have a drink on this straight away, old man,” said he.
“You’re so strange, you English,” said Aristide. “The moment you have an emotion you must celebrate it by a drink. ‘My dear fellow, I’ve just come into a fortune; let us have a drink.’ Or, ‘My friend, my poor old father has just been run over by an omnibus; let us have a drink.’ My good Reginald, look at the clock. It is only nine in the morning.”
“Rot!” said Reginald. “Drink is good at any time.”
They went into the dark and deserted smoking-room, where Batterby ordered Scotch and soda and Aristide, an abstemious man, a plain vermouth.
“What’s that muck?” asked Batterby, when the waiter brought the drinks. Aristide explained. “Whisky’s good enough for me,” laughed the other. Aristide laughed too, out of politeness and out of joy at meeting his old friend.
“With you playing at guide here,” said Batterby, when he had learned Aristide’s position in the hotel, “it seems I have come to the right shop. There are no flies on me, you know, but when a man comes to Paris for the first time he likes to be put up to the ropes.”
“Your first visit to Paris?” cried Aristide. “Mon vieux, what wonders are going to ravish your eyes! What a time you are going to have!”
Batterby bit off the end of a great black cigar.
“If the missus will let me,” said he.
“Missus? Your wife? You are married, my dear Reginald?” Aristide leaped, in his unexpected fashion, from his chair and almost embraced him. “Ah, but you are happy, you are lucky. It was always like that. You open your mouth and the larks fall ready roasted into it! My congratulations. And she is here, in this hotel, your wife? Tell me about her.”
Batterby lit his cigar. “She’s nothing to write home about,” he said, modestly. “She’s French.”
“French? No—you don’t say so!” exclaimed Aristide, in ecstasy.
“Well, she was brought up in France from her childhood, but her parents were Finns. Funny place for people to come from—Finland—isn’t it? You could never expect it—might just as well think of ’em coming from Lapland. She’s an orphan. I met her in London.”
“But that’s romantic! And she is young, pretty?”
“Oh, yes; in a way,” said the proprietary Briton.
“And her name?”
“Oh, she has a fool name—Fleurette. I wanted to call her Flossie, but she didn’t like it.”
“I should think not,” said Aristide. “Fleurette is an adorable name.”
“I suppose it’s right enough,” said Batterby. “But if I want to call her good old Flossie, why should she object? You married, old man? No? Well, wait till you are. You think women are angels all wrapped up in feathers and wings beneath their toggery, don’t you? Well, they’re just blooming porcupines, all bristling with objections.”
“Mais, allons, donc!” cried Aristide. “You love her, your beautiful Finnish orphan brought up in France and romantically met in London, with the adorable name?”
“Oh, that’s all right,” said the easy Batterby, lifting his half-emptied glass. “Here’s luck!”
“Ah—no!” said Aristide, leaning forward and clinking his wineglass against the other’s tumbler. “Here is to madame.”
When they returned to the vestibule they found Mrs. Batterby patiently awaiting her lord. She rose from her seat at the approach of the two men, a fragile flower of a girl, about three-and-twenty, pale as a lily, with exquisite though rather large features, and with eyes of the blue of thepervenche(in deference to Aristide I use the French name), which seemed to smile trustfully through perpetual tears. She was dressed in pale, shadowy blue—graceful, impalpable, like the smoke, said Aristide, curling upwards from a cigarette.
“Reggie has spoken of you many times, monsieur,” said Fleurette, after the introduction had been effected.
Aristide was touched. “Fancy him remembering me!Ce bon vieux Reginald.Madame,” said he, “your husband is the best fellow in the world.”
“Feed him with sugar and he won’t bite,” said Batterby; whereat they all laughed, as if it had been a very good joke.
“Well, what about this Paris of yours?” he asked, after a while. “The missus knows as little of it as I do.”
“Really?” asked Aristide.
“I lived all my life in Brest before I went to England,” she said, modestly.
“She wants to see all the sights, the Louvre, the Morgue, the Cathedral of What’s-its-name that you’ve got here. I’ve got to go round, too. Pleases her and don’t hurt me. You must tote us about. We’ll have a cab, old girl, as you can’t do much walking, and good old Pujol will come with us.”
“But that is ideal!” cried Aristide, flying to the door to order the cab; but before he could reach it he was stopped by three or four waiting tourists, who pointed, some to the clock, some to the wagonette standing outside, and asked the director when the personally-conducted party was to start. Aristide, who had totally forgotten the responsibilities attached to the directorship of the Agence Pujol and, but for this reminder, would have blissfully left his sheep to err and stray over Paris by themselves, returned crestfallen to his friends and explained the situation.
“But we’ll join the party,” said the cheery Batterby. “The more the merrier—good old bean-feast! Will there be room?”
“Plenty,” replied Aristide, brightening. “But would it meet the wishes of madame?” Her pale face flushed ever so slightly and the soft eyes fluttered at him a half-astonished, half-grateful glance.
“With my husband and you, monsieur, I should love it,” she said.
So Mr. and Mrs. Batterby joined the personally-conducted party, as they did the next morning, and the next, and several mornings after, and received esoteric information concerning the monuments of Paris that is hidden even from the erudite. The evenings, however, Aristide, being off duty, devoted to their especial entertainment. He took them to riotous and perspiring restaurants where they dined gorgeously for three francs fifty, wine included; to open-aircafés-concertsin the Champs Elysées, which Fleurette found infinitely diverting, but which bored Batterby, who knew not French, to stertorous slumber; to crowded brasseries on the Boulevard, where Batterby awakened, under a steady flow of whisky, to appreciative contemplation of Paris life. As in the old days of the Rusholme Road, Batterby flung his money about with unostentatious generosity. He was out for a beano, he declared, and hang the expense! Aristide, whose purse, scantily filled (truth to say) by the profits of the Agence Pujol, could contribute but modestly to this reckless expenditure, found himself forced to accept his friend’s lavish hospitality. Once or twice, delicately, he suggested withdrawal from the evening’s dissipation.
“But, my good M. Pujol,” said Fleurette, with childish tragicality in herpervencheeyes, “without you we shall be lost. We shall not enjoy ourselves at all, at all.”
So Aristide, out of love for his friend, and out of he knew not what for his friend’s wife, continued to show them the sights of Paris. They went to the cabarets of Montmartre—theCiel, where one is served by angels; theEnfer, where one is served by red devils in a Tartarean lighting; theNéant, where one has coffins for tables—than all of which vulgarity has imagined no more joy-killing dreariness, but which caused Fleurette to grip Aristide’s hand tight in scared wonderment and Batterby to chuckle exceedingly. They went to the Bal Bullier and to various other balls undreamed of by the tourist, where Fleurette danced with Aristide, as light as an autumn leaf tossed by the wind, and Batterby absorbed a startling assortment of alcohols. In a word, Aristide procured for his friends prodigious diversion.
“How do you like this, old girl?” Batterby asked one night, at the Moulin de la Galette, a dizzying, not very decorous, and to the unsophisticated visitor a dangerous place of entertainment. “Better than Great Coram Street, isn’t it?”
She smiled and laid her hand on his. She was a woman of few words but of many caressing actions.
“I ought to let you into a secret,” said he. “This is our honeymoon.”
“Who would have thought it?”
fleurette danced with aristide, as light as an autumn leaf tossed by the wind
“A fortnight ago she was being killed in aBloomsbury boarding-house. There were two of ’em—she and a girl called Carrie. I used to call ’em Fetch and Carrie. This one was Fetch. Well, she fetched me, didn’t you, old girl? And now you’re Mrs. Reginald Batterby, living at your ease, eh?”
“Madame would grace any sphere,” said Aristide.
“I wish I had more education,” said Fleurette, humbly. “M. Pujol and yourself are so clever that you must laugh at me.”
“We do sometimes, but you mustn’t mind us. Remember—at the what-you-call-it—the little shanty at Versailles——?”
“The Grand Trianon,” replied Aristide.
“That’s it. When you were showing us the rooms. ‘What is the Empress Josephine doing now?’” He mimicked her accent. “Ha! ha! And the poor soul gone to glory a couple of hundred years ago.”
The little mouth puckered at the corners and moisture gathered in the blue eyes.
“Mais, mon Dieu, it was natural, the mistake,” cried Aristide, gallantly. “The Empress Eugénie, the wife of another Napoleon, is still living.”
“Bien sûr,” said Fleurette. “How was I to know?”
“Never mind, old girl,” said Batterby. “You’re living all right, and out of that beastlyboarding-house, and that’s the chief thing. Another month of it would have killed her. She had a cough that shook her to bits. She’s looking better already, isn’t she, Pujol?”
After this Aristide learned much of her simple history, which she, at first, had been too shy to reveal. The child of Finnish sea-folk who had drifted to Brest and died there, she had been adopted by an old Breton sea-dog and his wife. On their death she had entered, as maid, the service of an English lady residing in the town, who afterwards had taken her to England. After a while reverses of fortune had compelled the lady to dismiss her, and she had taken the situation in the boarding-house, where she had ruined her health and met the opulent and conquering Batterby. She had not much chance, poor child, of acquiring a profound knowledge of the history of the First Empire; but her manners were refined and her ways gentle and her voice was soft; and Aristide, citizen of the world, for whom caste distinctions existed not, thought her the most exquisite flower grown in earth’s garden. He told her so, much to her blushing satisfaction.
One night, about three weeks after the Batterbys’ arrival in Paris, Batterby sent his wife to bed and invited Aristide to accompany him for half an hour to a neighbouring café. He looked grave and troubled.
“I’ve been upset by a telegram,” said he, when drinks had been ordered. “I’m called away to New York on business. I must catch the boat from Cherbourg to-morrow evening. Now, I can’t take Fleurette with me. Women and business don’t mix. She has jolly well got to stay here. I sha’n’t be away more than a month. I’ll leave her plenty of money to go on with. But what’s worrying me is—how is she going to stick it? So look here, old man, you’re my pal, aren’t you?”
He stretched out his hand. Aristide grasped it impulsively.
“Why, of course,mon vieux!”
“If I felt that I could leave her in your charge, all on the square, as a real straight pal—I should go away happy.”
“She shall be my sister,” cried Aristide, “and I shall give her all the devotion of a brother.... I swear it—tiens—what can I swear it on?” He flung out his arms and looked round the café as if in search of an object. “I swear it on the head of my mother. Have no fear. I, Aristide Pujol, have never betrayed the sacred obligations of friendship. I accept her as a consecrated trust.”
“You only need to have said ‘Right-o,’ and I would have believed you,” said Batterby. “I haven’t told her yet. There’ll be blubbering all night. Let us have another drink.”
When Aristide arrived at the Hôtel du Soleilet de l’Ecosse at nine o’clock the next morning he found that Batterby had left Paris by an early train. Fleurette he did not meet until he brought back the sight-seers to the fold in the evening. She had wept much during the day; but she smiled bravely on Aristide. A woman could not stand in the way of her husband’s business.
“By the way, what is Reginald’s business?” Aristide asked.
She did not know. Reginald never spoke to her of such things; perhaps she was too ignorant to understand.
“But he will make a lot of money by going to America,” she said. Then she was silent for a few moments. “Mon Dieu!” she sighed, at last. “How long the day has been!”
It was the beginning of many long days for Fleurette. Reginald did not write from Cherbourg or cable from New York, as he had promised, and the return American mail brought no letter. The days passed drearily. Sometimes, for the sake of human society, she accompanied the tourist parties of the Agence Pujol; but the thrill had passed from the Morgue and the glory had departed from Versailles. Sometimes she wandered out by herself into the streets and public gardens; but, pretty, unprotected, and fragile, she attracted the attention of evil or careless men, which struck cold terror into her heart. Mostoften she sat alone and listless in the hotel, reading the feuilleton of thePetit Journal, and waiting for the post to bring her news.
“Mon Dieu, M. Pujol, what can have happened?”
“Nothing at all,chère petite madame”—question and answer came many times a day. “Only some foolish mischance which will soon be explained. The good Reginald has written and his letter has been lost in the post. He has been obliged to go on business to San Francisco or Buenos Ayres—et, que voulez-vous?one cannot have letters from those places in twenty-four hours.”
“If only he had taken me with him!”
“But, dear Mme. Fleurette, he could not expose you to the hardships of travel. You, who are as fragile as a cobweb, how could you go to Patagonia or Senegal or Baltimore, those wild places where there are no comforts for women? You must be reasonable. I am sure you will get a letter soon—or else in a day or two he will come, with his good, honest face as if nothing had occurred—these English are like that—and call for whisky and soda. Be comforted,chère petite madame.”
Aristide did his best to comfort her, threw her in the companionship of decent women staying at the hotel, and devoted his evenings to her entertainment. But the days passed, and Reginald Batterby, with the good, honest face, neither wrotenor ordered whisky and soda. Fleurette began to pine and fade.
One day she came to Aristide.
“M. Pujol, I have no more money left.”
“Bigre!” said Pujol. “The good Bocardon will have to give you credit. I’ll arrange it.”
“But I already owe for three weeks,” said Fleurette.
Aristide sought Bocardon. One week more was all the latter dared allow.
“But her husband will return and pay you. He is my old and intimate friend. I make myself hoarse in telling it to you, wooden-head that you are!”
But Bocardon, who had to account to higher powers, the proprietors of the hotel, was helpless. At the end of the week Fleurette was called upon to give up her room. She wept with despair; Aristide wept with fury; Bocardon wept out of sympathy. Already, said Bocardon, the proprietors would blame him for not using the legal right to detain madame’s luggage.
“Mon Dieu! mon Dieu!what is to become of me?” wailed Fleurette.
“You forget, madame,” said Aristide, with one of his fine flourishes, “that you are the sacred trust of Aristide Pujol.”
“But I can’t accept your money,” objected Fleurette.
“Tron de l’air!” he cried. “Did your husband put you in my charge or did he not? Am I your legal guardian, or am I not? If I am your legal guardian, what right have you to question the arrangements made by your husband? Answer me that.”
Fleurette, too gentle and too miserable for intricate argument, sighed.
“But it is your money, all the same.”
Aristide turned to Bocardon. “Try,” said he, “to convince a woman! Do you want proofs? Wait there a minute while I get them from the safe of the Agence Pujol.”
He disappeared into the bureau, where, secure from observation, he tore an oblong strip from a sheet of stiff paper, and, using an indelible pencil, wrote out something fantastic halfway between a cheque and a bill of exchange, forged as well as he could from memory the signature of Reginald Batterby—the imitation of handwriting was one of Aristide’s many odd accomplishments—and made the document look legal by means of a receipt stamp, which he took from Bocardon’s drawer. He returned to the vestibule with the strip folded and somewhat crumpled in his hand. “Voilà,” said he, handing it boldly to Fleurette. “Here is your husband’s guarantee to me, your guardian, for four thousand francs.”
Fleurette examined the forgery. The stampimpressed her. For the simple souls of France there is magic inpapier timbré.
“It was my husband who wrote this?” she asked, curiously.
“Mais, oui,” said Aristide, with an offended air of challenge.
Fleurette’s eyes filled again with tears.
“I only inquired,” she said, “because this is the first time I have seen his handwriting.”
“Ma pauvre petite,” said Aristide.
“I will do whatever you tell me, M. Pujol,” said Fleurette, humbly.
“Good! That is talking likeune bonne petite dame raisonnable. Now, I know a woman made up of holy bread whom St. Paul and St. Peter are fighting to have next them when she goes to Paradise. Her name is Mme. Bidoux, and she sells cabbages and asparagus and charcoal at No. 213 bis, Rue Saint-Honoré. She will arrange our little affair. Bocardon, will you have madame’s trunks sent to that address?”
He gave his arm to Fleurette, and walked out of the hotel, with serene confidence in the powers of the sainted Mme. Bidoux. Fleurette accompanied him unquestioningly. Of course she might have said: “If you hold negotiable security from my husband to the amount of four thousand francs, why should I exchange the comforts of the hotel for the doubtful accommodation of the saintedMme. Bidoux who sells cabbages?” But I repeat that Fleurette was a simple soul who took for granted the wisdom of so flamboyant and virile a creature as Aristide Pujol.
Away up at the top of No. 213 bis, Rue Saint-Honoré, was a little furnished room to let, and there Aristide installed his sacred charge. Mme. Bidoux, who, as she herself maintained, would have cut herself into four pieces for Aristide—did he not save her dog’s life? Did he not marry her daughter to the brigadier of gendarmes (sale voyou!), who would otherwise have left her lamenting? Was he not the most wonderful of God’s creatures?—Mme. Bidoux, although not quite appreciating Aristide’s quixotic delicacy, took the forlorn and fragile wisp of misery to her capacious bosom. She made her free of the cabbages and charcoal. She provided her, at a risible charge, with succulent meals. She told her tales of her father and mother, of her neighbours, of the domestic differences between the concierge and his wife (soothing idyll for an Ariadne!), of the dirty thief of a brigadier of gendarmes, of her bodily ailments—her body was so large that they were many; of the picturesque death, through apoplexy, of the late M. Bidoux; the brave woman, in short, gave her of her heart’s best. As far as human hearts could provide a bed for Fleurette, that bed was of roses. As a matter of brutal fact, it wasnarrow and nubbly, and the little uncarpeted room was ten feet by seven; but to provide it Aristide went to his own bed hungry. And if the bed of a man’s hunger is not to be accounted as one of roses, there ought to be a vote for the reduction of the Recording Angel’s salary.
It must not be imagined that Fleurette thought the bed hard. Her bed of life from childhood had been nubbly. She never dreamed of complaining of her little room under the stars, and she sat among the cabbages like a tired lily, quite contented with her material lot. But she drooped and drooped, and the cough returned and shook her; and Aristide, realizing the sacredness of his charge, became a prey to anxious terrors.
“Mère Bidoux,” said he, “she must have lots of good, nourishing, tender, underdone beef, good fillets, andentrecôtes saignantes.”
Mme. Bidoux sighed. She had a heart, but she also had a pocket which, like Aristide’s, was not over-filled. “That costs dear, my poor friend,” she said.
“What does it matter what it costs? It is I who provide,” said Aristide, grandly.
And Aristide gave up tobacco and coffee and the mild refreshment at cafés essential to the existence of every Frenchman, and degraded his soul by taking half-franc tips from tourists—a source of income which, as Director, M. le Directeur,Herr Direktor of the Agence Pujol, he had hitherto scorned haughtily—in order to provide Fleurette with underdone beefsteaks.
All his leisure he devoted to her. She represented something that hitherto had not come into his life—something delicate, tender, ethereal, something of woman that was exquisitely adorable, apart from the flesh. Once, as he was sitting in the little shop, she touched his temple lightly with her fingers.
“Ah, you are good to me, Aristide.”
He felt a thrill such as no woman’s touch had ever caused to pass through him—far, far sweeter, cleaner, purer. If thebon Dieucould have given her to him then and there to be his wife, what bond could have been holier? But he had bound himself by a sacred obligation. His friend on his return should find him loyal.
“Who could help being good to you, little Fleurette?” said he. “Even an Apache would not tread on a lily of the valley!”
“But you put me in water and tend me so carefully.”
“So that you can be fresh whenever the dear Reginald comes back.”
She sighed. “Tell me what I can do for you, my good Aristide.”
“Keep well and happy and be a valiant little woman,” said he.
Fleurette tried hard to be valiant; but the effort exhausted her strength. As the days went on, even Aristide’s inexhaustible conversation failed to distract her from brooding. She lost the trick of laughter. In the evenings, when he was most with her, she would sit, either in the shop or in the little room at the back, her blue childish eyes fixed on him wistfully. At first he tried to lure her into the gay street; but walking tired her. He encouraged her to sit outside on the pavement of the Rue Saint-Honoré and join with Mme. Bidoux in the gossip of neighbours; but she listened to them with uncomprehending ears. In despair Aristide, to coax a smile from her lips, practised his many queer accomplishments. He conjured with cards; he juggled with oranges; he had a mountebank’s trick of putting one leg round his neck; he imitated the voices of cats and pigs and ducks, till Mme. Bidoux held her sides with mirth. He spent time and thought in elaborating what he calledbonnes farces, such as dressing himself up in Mme. Bidoux’s raiment and personifying a crabbed customer.
Fleurette smiled but listlessly at all these comicalities.
One day she was taken ill. A doctor, summoned, said many learned words which Aristide and Mme. Bidoux tried hard to understand.
“But, after all, what is the matter with her?”