The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol Part 37

"And little Jean--a beautiful child about four years old?"

"That I don't know, sir. I live at Wilmer's End, a good half mile from here."

Aristide made for the third house past the poplar. First there was a plank bridge across a gra.s.s-grown ditch; then a tiny patch of garden; then a humble whitewashed cottage with a small leaded cas.e.m.e.nt window on each side of the front door. Unlike Hope Cottage, it did not look at all the residence of Miss Janet and Miss Anne. Its appearance, indeed, was woe-begone. Aristide, however, went up to the door; as there was neither knocker nor bell, he rapped with his knuckles. The door opened, and there, poorly dressed in blouse and skirt, stood Miss Anne.

She regarded him for a moment in a bewildered way, then, recognizing him, drew back into the stone flagged pa.s.sage with a sharp cry.

"You? You--Mr. Pujol?"

"_Oui, Mademoiselle, c'est moi._ It is I, Aristide Pujol."

She put her hands on her bosom. "It is rather a shock seeing you--so unexpectedly. Will you come in?"

She led the way into a tiny parlour, very clean, very simple with its furniture of old oak and bra.s.s, and bade him sit. She looked a little older than when he had seen her at Aix-en-Provence. A few lines had marred the comely face and there was here and there a touch of grey in the reddish hair, and, though still buxom, she had grown thinner. Care had set its stamp upon her.

"Miss Honeywood," said Aristide. "It is on account of little Jean that I have come----"

She turned on him swiftly. "Not to take him away!"

"Then he is here!" He jumped to his feet and wrung both her hands and kissed them to her great embarra.s.sment. "Ah, mademoiselle, I knew it. I felt it. When such an inspiration comes to a man, it is the _bon Dieu_ who sends it. He is here, actually here, in this house?"

"Yes," said Miss Anne.

Aristide threw out his arms. "Let me see him. _Ah, le cher pet.i.t!_ I have been yearning after him for three years. It was my heart that I ripped out of my body that night and laid at your threshold."

"Hus.h.!.+" said Miss Anne, with an interrupting gesture. "You must not talk so loud. He is asleep in the next room. You mustn't wake him. He is very ill."

"Ill? Dangerously ill?"

"I'm afraid so."

"_Mon Dieu_," said he, sitting down again in the oak settle. To Aristide the emotion of the moment was absorbing, overwhelming. His att.i.tude betokened deepest misery and dejection.

"And I expected to see him full of joy and health!"

"It is not my fault, Mr. Pujol," said Miss Anne.

He started. "But no. How could it be? You loved him when you first set eyes on him at Aix-en-Provence."

Miss Anne began to cry. "G.o.d knows," said she, "what I should do without him. The dear mite is all that is left to me."

"All? But there is your sister, the dear Miss Janet."

Miss Anne's eyes were hidden in her handkerchief. "My poor sister died last year, Mr. Pujol."

"I am very sorry. I did not know," said Aristide gently.

There was a short silence. "It was a great sorrow to you," he said.

"It was G.o.d's will," said Anne. Then, after another pause, during which she dried her eyes, she strove to smile. "Tell me about yourself. How do you come to be here?"

Aristide replied in a hesitating way. He was in the presence of grief and sickness and trouble; the Provencal braggadocio dropped from him and he became the simple and childish creature that he was. He accounted very truthfully, very convincingly, for his queer life; for his abandonment of little Jean, for his silence, for his sudden and unexpected appearance. During the ingenuous _apologia pro vita sua_ Miss Anne regarded him with her honest candour.

"Janet and I both understood," she said. "Janet was gifted with a divine comprehension and pity. The landlady at the hotel, I remember, said some unkind things about you; but we didn't believe them. We felt that you were a good man--no one but a good man could have written that letter--we cried over it--and when she tried to poison our minds we said to each other: 'What does it matter? Here G.o.d in his mercy has given us a child.' But, Mr. Pujol, why didn't you take us into your confidence?"

"My dear Miss Anne," said Aristide, "we of the South do things impulsively, by lightning flashes. An idea comes suddenly. _Vlan!_ we carry it out in two seconds. We are not less human than the Northerner, who reflects two months."

"That is almost what dear, wise Janet told me," said Miss Anne.

"Then you know in your heart," said Aristide, after a while, "that if I had not been only a football at the feet of fortune, I should never have deserted little Jean?"

"I do, Mr. Pujol. My sister and I have been footb.a.l.l.s, too." She added with a change of tone: "You tell me you saw our dear home at Chislehurst?"

"Yes," said Aristide.

"And you see this. There is a difference."

"What has happened?" asked Aristide.

She told him the commonplace pathetic story. Their father had left them shares in the company of which he had been managing director. For many years they had enjoyed a comfortable income. Then the company had become bankrupt and only a miserable ninety pounds a year had been saved from the wreckage. The cottage at Beverly Stoke belonging to them--it had been their mother's--they had migrated thither with their fallen fortunes and little Jean. And then Janet had died. She was delicate and unaccustomed to privation and discomfort--and the cottage had its disadvantages. She, Anne herself, was as strong as a horse and had never been ill in her life, but others were not quite so hardy. "However"--she smiled--"one has to make the best of things."

"_Parbleu_," said Aristide.

Miss Anne went on to talk of Jean, a miraculous infant of infinite graces and accomplishments. Up to now he had been the st.u.r.diest and merriest fellow.

"At nine months old he saw that life was a big joke," said Aristide.

"How he used to laugh."

"There's not much laugh left in him, poor darling," she sighed. And she told how he had caught a chill which had gone to his lungs and how the night before last she thought she had lost him.

She sat up and listened. "Will you excuse me for a moment?"

She went out and presently returned, standing at the doorway. "He is still asleep. Would you like to see him? Only"--she put her fingers on her lips--"you must be very, very quiet."

He followed her into the next room and looked about him shyly, recognizing that it was Miss Anne's own bedroom; and there, lying in a little cot beside the big bed, he saw the sleeping child, his brown face flushed with fever. He had a curly shock of black hair and well formed features. An old woolly lamb nose to nose with him shared his pillow.

Aristide drew from his pocket a Teddy bear, and, having asked Miss Anne's permission with a glance, laid it down gently on the coverlid.

His eyes were wet when they returned to the parlour. So were Miss Anne's. The Teddy bear was proof of the simplicity of his faith in her.

After a while, conscious of hunger, he rose to take leave. He must be getting back to St. Albans. But might he be permitted to come back later in the afternoon? Miss Anne reddened. It outraged her sense of hospitality to send a guest away from her house on a three-mile walk for food. And yet----

"Mr. Pujol," she said bravely, "I would ask you to stay to luncheon if I had anything to offer you. But I am single handed, and, with Jean's illness, I haven't given much thought to housekeeping. The woman who does some of the rough work won't be back till six. I hate to let you go all those miles--I am so distressed----"

"But, mademoiselle," said Aristide. "You have some bread. You have water. It has been a banquet many a day to me, and this time it would be the most precious banquet of all."

"I can do a little better than that," faltered Miss Anne. "I have plenty of eggs and there is bacon."

"Eggs--bacon!" cried Aristide, his bright eyes twinkling and his hands going up in the familiar gesture. "That is superb. _Tiens!_ you shall not do the cooking. You shall rest. I will make you an _omelette au lard_--_ah!_"--he kissed the tips of his fingers--"such an omelette as you have not eaten since you were in France--and even there I doubt whether you have ever eaten an omelette like mine." His soul simmering with omelette, he darted towards the door. "The kitchen--it is this way?"