The Sentimental Adventures of Jimmy Bulstrode Part 14

"Stop!" Bulstrode put out his hand. "Simone!"

The little thing dragged herself to him with a new timidity, as though she believed him in league with the world against her.

"Come," he encouraged, "come out here on the terrace, where you have so often played with your doll, and don't be frightened, _mon enfant_; everything will be all right."

When he had so settled her in the smallest of chairs he went back to the other bit of Paris street-life which had seethed in to him.

Madame Branchard, whom his manner had reduced to, for her, marvellous quiet and ease, approached impressively and lowered her voice as deeply as it would fall.

"Mademoiselle Lascaze, whom monsieur knows has been my tenant for months past, is dead--dead, monsieur!"

Bulstrode echoed, "Dead?" and his first thought was: "It was not she, then, whom I saw striving for entrance this morning. Ah, poor creature! Drowned?"

"Monsieur then knows?"

Knows--how should he know? He had thought of the aquarium and her often repeated feat.

"Monsieur is right, she is drowned; but it is not the aquarium--it is the Seine. It appears," the wine-merchant's wife went on, "that last night she made _la fete_ in the streets. We over here lock up, well, at a decent hour, as monsieur will understand. Those who are in stay, those who are out--well, monsieur will understand----"

Yes, he understood. Would she go on?

"Mademoiselle Lascaze had evidently lost her key of entry--so it appears. We have this story from her comrades, a bad lot, like herself. She tried to get in about five o'clock--they left her knocking at the door. She must then have wandered the streets for an hour, for it was six when they met her again by chance quite by the Pont des Arts. They all had something to drink and started across the river, when the poor thing offered to give an exhibition of her circus feat and, before anyone could stop her, had dived off the bridge into the Seine."

He had, then, seen her knocking there in the dawn, and if he had hastened a little--not held conventionally back----

"It is all _en regle_," a.s.sured Madame Branchard. "As my husband will tell monsieur, he has been to the morgue to identify her."

The wine-merchant now at his cue, nodded impressively. "Mais oui, I a.s.sure monsieur she was quite natural--and she was une belle femme tout le meme----"

His wife glanced at him scornfully. "She was a bad mother, and all the house will tell you so. Many times, monsieur, I have gone in with my pa.s.s-key and taken the poor little thing downstairs in my arms to give her all the supper she would have had, and many a time, on cold nights, when there was not a stick of fire in their room, and the woman abroad--many a time I have had her sleep in our bed with us--my husband will tell monsieur."

The wine-merchant nodded a.s.sent. "She speaks the truth, monsieur."

Bulstrode found presence of mind to wonder. "I suppose Mademoiselle Lascaze left debts?"

The husband and wife exchanged glances.

"_En verite_, monsieur," confessed Madame Branchard, "she has left a few, but they are small and not significant; a hundred francs will cover them. It is not for our pockets we are come to monsieur."

Here the sentimentality having been disposed of by the woman, the husband broke in:

"It is like this, Monsieur Balstro" (Bulstrode saw how intimately the _hotel meuble_ knew him): "In a few moments even the authorities will be here to take charge of the woman's effects and Simone will become the property of the State. She has no relatives, as Monsieur will understand. Thinking, therefore, that monsieur, _who is so good_, might for some reason care to take an interest in the child's future----"

Branchard coughed and paused. Having given Mr. Bulstrode ample time to speak, to show some signs of life and of his usual quick benevolence, and being greeted with nothing other than quiet, meditative silence, the merchant shrugged and comprehensively relinquished suppositions and hopes in one large gesture.

"In which case" (evidently that of taking for granted that Bulstrode was less good than they had supposed), "in that case we shall put in a plea ourselves for Simone and adopt her."

Madame's voice, now in full and customary volume, expressed frankly _her_ goodness. "We have five children and our means are modest, but"--and she put it sublimely--"_one is not a mother for nothing_."

Her tirade, however, was quite lost on Bulstrode, who was occupied with his own projects of benevolence. Turning to this contingent of the _hotel meuble_ a back scarcely more imperturbable than his face had been, he went out of the room to the terrace, where Simone sat just as he had left her. She was, on her low chair, so tiny that in order more nearly than ever before to approach her little point of view, to come into her little sphere, Bulstrode knelt down on one knee.

"Don't look so frightened, my child. Nothing will harm you--I a.s.sure you of that; don't you"--he called her loyally to answer--"don't you believe me, Simone?"

The little thing drew in a struggling breath and whispered: "Oui, m'sieu."

"Good!" He was smiling at her and had taken her ice-cold, dirty, little hands. "You are fond of me, Simone--you like a little M'sieu Balstro'?"

"Oh," she caught at her frightened voice and more clearly whispered, "oh, oui, m'sieu!"

"Bien encore!"

He wanted tactfully to break the ice which shock and terror had formed around the poor little heart, and yet not to prolong the moment.

"_Voyons_," he said to her lightly, as if he were only to bid her come and play in his garden, and not ask her to decide her destiny.

"_Voyons_, how would you like to come and live with me? to have toys and pretty clothes and good things to eat--to be"--the bachelor put it bravely--"to be _my_ little girl. How, Simone, would you like it?"

If further startled she was humanized by his warmth, which was melting her; her breast heaved, her lips trembled, and she asked: "Et puis--maman?"

Here Madame Branchard, in whom all feelings were subordinate to curiosity and motherhood, had approached until she stood directly behind the two on the terrace. Tears had sprung to her eyes and she sniffled and wiped them frankly away with her hand.

Bulstrode, singularly relieved by her appearance, turned and asked her, "What does she then know?"

"Nothing, m'sieur, nothing at all."

Simone got up on her feet and her big doll fell with a crash on the marble of the terrace and broke in a dozen pieces, but the catastrophe did not touch her.

"And maman?" she repeated. "Where is she? She did not come home last night?"

Bulstrode had descended to one knee in order to approach her, but Madame Branchard got down on both knees and tenderly put her arms around the child.

"Look, ma pet.i.te--your mother has gone away forever to a beautiful country, and she has left you here to be a good girl and do whatever this kind gentleman says. Will you go to be his little girl? He will give you everything in the world." She closed with this magnificent promise, whose breadth and wealth no child-mind could grasp. In order to give her more complete liberty in which to make her decision the wine-merchant's wife, after kissing her, set her free.

Simone made no audible reflection of wonder at her seeming desertion, no exhibition of distress, no melodramatic outburst of grief or surprise. She stood silent, absorbed, desolate, and ashamed, twisting in and out between her frail little fingers the fringe of Madame Branchard's black shawl.

"Or," brightly continued the good woman, "you can come home with me and play with Marie and Jeannette and have what we have. You can be my little girl, as you will--it is for you to decide--chez moi, or with this bon monsieur."

Was it fair of them--thus to lay on her six years the burden of her own destiny?

Simone raised her head; her cheeks had reddened a little at Madame Branchard's last words. She was unable to grasp the benefits that Bulstrode's magnificence offered, but she knew Marie and Jeannette--she knew the hands of Madame Branchard could tuck one in at night, and how warm and soft was the bosom on which she had already wept her little griefs. There were many beautiful things in the world, but Simone just then only wanted one. Madame Branchard was not _her_ mother--but she was still _a_ mother! Simone whispered so low that only the woman heard:

"I will go with you."

Prosper having embarked on a sea of indiscretion, went through the day consistently. With a love of the melodramatic in his Latin temperament he had admitted the _hotel meuble sans ceremonie_: and late that afternoon he gave entrance to another group of quite a different order, and without formality ushered the lady and her friends to the terrace, where the solitary inhabitant of another man's house was taking a farewell beverage before leaving Paris.

"We have caught you in time, Jimmy!" Mrs. Falconer made a virtue of it.

"If you are absconding with the Montensier treasures, then let me show Molly and the Marquis at least what has been left behind."

His bags and boxes in the hall, his automobile at the door, and Bulstrode himself in travelling trim, it looked very much like a flight, indeed. Miss Molly and the Marquis, it transpired, were able to explore for themselves and to find in the gallery and salons pictures and objects of interest to excuse a prolonged absence.