Part 51

It may be remembered that Aristide Pujol had aged parents, browned and wrinkled children of the soil, who had passed all their days in the desolation of Aigues-Mortes, the little fortified, derelict city in the salt marshes of Provence. Although they regarded him with the same unimaginative wonder as a pair of alligators might regard an Argus butterfly, their undoubted but freakish progeny, and although Aristide soared high above their heads in all phases of thought and emotion, the mutual ties remained strong and perdurable. Scarcely a year passed without Aristide struggling somehow south to visit ses vieux, as he affectionately called them, and whenever Fortune shed a few smiles on him, one or two at least were sure to find their way to Aigues-Mortes in the shape of, say, a silver-mounted umbrella for his father or a deuce of a Paris hat for the old lady's Sunday wear. Monsieur and Madame Pujol had a sacred museum of these unused objects--the pride of their lives. Aristide was entirely incomprehensible, but he was a good son. A bad son in France is rare.

But once Aristide nearly killed his old people outright. An envelope from him contained two large caressive slips of bluish paper, which when scrutinized with starting eyes turned out to be two one-thousand-franc notes. Mon Dieu! What had happened? Had Aristide been robbing the Bank of France? They stood paralyzed and only recovered motive force when a neighbour suggested their reading the accompanying letter. It did not explain things very clearly. He was in Aix-les-Bains, a place which they had never heard of, making his fortune. He was staying at the Hôtel de l'Europe, where Queen Victoria (they had heard of Queen Victoria) had been contented to reside, he was a glittering figure in a splendid beau-monde, and if ses vieux would buy a few cakes and a bottle of vin cacheté with the enclosed trifle, to celebrate his prosperity, he would deem it the privilege of a devoted son. But Pujol senior, though wondering where the devil he had fished all that money from, did not waste it in profligate revelry. He took the eighty pounds to the bank and exchanged the perishable paper for one hundred solid golden louis which he carried home in a bag curiously bulging beneath his woollen jersey and secreted it with the savings of his long life in the mattress of the conjugal bed.

"If only he hasn't stolen it," sighed the mother.

"What does it matter, since it is sewn up there all secure?" said the old man. "No one can find it."

The Provençal peasant is as hard-headed and practical as a Scottish miner, and if left alone by the fairies would produce no imaginative effect whatever upon his generation; but in his progeniture he is more preposterously afflicted with changelings than any of his fellows the world over, which, though ethnologically an entirely new proposition, accounts for a singular number of things and inter alia for my dragon-fly friend, Aristide Pujol.

Now, Aristide, be it said at the outset, had not stolen the money. It (and a vast amount more) had been honestly come by. He did not lie when he said that he was staying at the Hôtel de l'Europe, Aix-les-Bains, honoured by the late Queen Victoria (pedantic accuracy requires the correction that the august lady rented the annexe, the Villa Victoria, on the other side of the shady way--but no matter--an hotel and its annexe are the same thing) nor did he lie in boasting of his prodigious prosperity. Aristide was in clover. For the first, and up to now as I write, the only, time in his life he realized the gorgeous visions of pallid years. He was leading the existence of the amazing rich. He could drink champagne--not your miserable tisane at five francs a quart--but real champagne, with year of vintage and gôut américan or gôut anglais marked on label, fabulously priced; he could dine lavishly at the Casino restaurants or at Nikola's, prince of restaurateurs, among the opulent and the fair; he could clothe himself in attractive raiment; he could step into a fiacre and bid the man drive and not care whither he went or what he paid; he could also distribute five-franc pieces to lame beggars. He scattered his money abroad with both hands, according to his expansive temperament; and why not, when he was drawing wealth out of an inexhaustible fount? The process was so simple, so sure. All you had to do was to believe in the cards on which you staked your money. If you knew you were going to win, you won. Nothing could be easier.

He had drifted into Aix-les-Bains from Geneva on the lamentable determination of a commission agency in the matter of some patent fuel, with a couple of louis in his pocket forlornly jingling the tale of his entire fortune. As this was before the days when you had to exhibit certificates of baptism, marriage, sanity and bank-balance before being allowed to enter the baccarat rooms, Aristide paid his two francs and made a bee line for the tables. I am afraid Aristide was a gambler. He was never so happy as when taking chances; his whole life was a gamble, with Providence holding the bank. Before the night was over he had converted his two louis into fifty. The next day they became five hundred. By the end of a week his garments were wadded with bank notes whose value amounted to a sum so stupendous as to be beyond need of computation. He was a celebrity in the place and people nudged each other as he passed by. And Aristide passed by with a swagger, his head high and the end of his pointed beard sticking joyously up in the air.

We see him one August morning, in the plentitude of his success, lounging in a wicker chair on the shady lawn of the Hôtel de l'Europe. He wore white buckskin shoes--I begin with these as they were the first point of his person to attract the notice of the onlooker--lilac silk socks, a white flannel suit with a zig-zag black stripe, a violet tie secured by a sapphire and diamond pin, and a rakish panama hat. On his knees lay the Matin; the fingers of his left hand held a fragrant corona; his right hand was uplifted in a gesture, for he was talking. He was talking to a couple of ladies who sat near by, one a mild-looking Englishwoman of fifty, dressed in black, the other, her daughter, a beautiful girl of twenty-four. That Aristide should fly to feminine charms, like moth to candle, was a law of his being; that he should lie, with shriveled wings, at Miss Errington's feet was the obvious result. Her charms were of the winsome kind to which he was most susceptible. She had an oval face, a little mouth like crumpled rose petals (so Aristide himself described it), a complexion the mingling of ivory and peach blossom (Aristide again), a straight little nose, appealing eyes of the deepest blue veiled by sweeping lashes and fascinating fluffiness of dark hair over a pure brow. She had a graceful figure, and the slender foot below her white piqué skirt was at once the envy and admiration of Aix-les-Bains.

Aristide talked. The ladies listened, with obvious amusement. In the easy hotel way he had fallen into their acquaintance. As the man of wealth, the careless player who took five-hundred-louis banks at the table with the five-louis minimum, and cleared out the punt, he felt it necessary to explain himself. I am afraid he deviated from the narrow path of truth.

"What perfect English you speak," Miss Errington remarked, when he had finished his harangue and had put the corona between his lips. Her voice was a soft contralto.

"I have mixed much in English society, since I was a child," replied Aristide, in his grandest manner. "Fortune has made me know many of your county families and members of Parliament."

Miss Errington laughed. "Our M. P.'s are rather a mixed lot, Monsieur Pujol."

"To me an English Member of Parliament is a high-bred conservative. I do not recognize the others," said Aristide.

"Unfortunately we have to recognize them," said the elder lady with a smile.

"Not socially, madame. They exist as mechanical factors of the legislative machine; but that is all." He swelled as if the blood of the Montmorencys and the Colignys boiled in his veins. "We do not ask them into our drawing rooms. We do not allow them to marry our daughters. We only salute them with cold politeness when we pass them in the street."

"It's astonishing," said Miss Errington, "how strongly the aristocratic principle exists in republican France. Now, there's our friend, the Comte de Lussigny, for instance----"

A frown momentarily darkened the cloudless brow of Aristide Pujol. He did not like the Comte de Lussigny----

"With Monsieur de Lussigny," he interposed, "it is a matter of prejudice, not of principle."

"And with you?"

"The reasoned philosophy of a lifetime, mademoiselle," answered Aristide. He turned to Mrs. Errington.

"How long have you known Monsieur de Lussigny, madame?"

She looked at her daughter. "It was in Monte Carlo the winter before last, wasn't it, Betty? Since then we have met him frequently in England and Paris. We came across him, just lately, at Trouville. I think he's charming, don't you?"

"He's a great gambler," said Aristide.

Betty Errington laughed again. "But so are you. So is mamma. So am I, in my poor little way."

"We gamble for amusement," said Aristide loftily.

"I'm sure I don't," cried Miss Betty, with merry eyes--and she looked adorable--"When I put my despised five-franc piece down on the table I want desperately to win, and when the horrid croupier rakes it up I want to hit him--Oh! I want to hit him hard."

"And when you win?"

"I'm afraid I don't think of the croupier at all," said Miss Betty.