Part 59

"See here. Can you understand this?"

He thrust into his hand a pink strip of paper. It was a cheque for a hundred pounds, made payable to Eugene Miller, Esquire, signed by Mary Errington, and marked "Not known. No account."

"Tonnerre de Dieu!" cried Aristide. "How did you get this?"

"How did I get it? I cashed it for her--the day she went away. She said urgent affairs summoned her from Aix--no time to wire for funds--wanted to pay her hotel bill--and she gave me the address of her old English home in Somerset and invited me to come there in September. Fifteenth of September. Said that you were coming. And now I've got a bum cheque. I guess I can't wander about this country alone. I need blinkers and harness and a man with a whip."

He went on indignantly. Aristide composed his face into an expression of parental interest; but within him there was shivering and sickening upheaval. He saw it all, the whole mocking drama....

He, Aristide Pujol, was the most sweetly, the most completely swindled man in France.

The Comte de Lussigny, the mild Mrs. Errington and the beautiful Betty were in league together and had exquisitely plotted. They had conspired, as soon as he had accused the Count of cheating. The rascal must have gone straight to them from Miller's room. No wonder that Lussigny, when insulted at the tables, had sat like a tame rabbit and had sought him in the garden. No wonder he had accepted the accusation of adventurer. No wonder he had refused to play for the cheque which he knew to be valueless. But why, thought Aristide, did he not at once consent to sell the papers on the stipulation that he should be paid in notes? Aristide found an answer. He wanted to get everything for nothing, afraid of the use that Aristide might make of a damning confession, and also relying for success on his manipulation of the cards. Finally he had desired to get hold of a dangerous cheque. In that he had been foiled. But the trio has got away with his thousand pounds, his wonderful thousand pounds. He reflected, still keeping an attentive eye on young Eugene Miller and interjecting a sympathetic word, that after he had paid his hotel bill, he would be as poor on quitting Aix-les-Bains as he was when he had entered it. Sic transit.... As it was in the beginning with Aristide Pujol, is now and ever shall be....

"But I have my clothes--such clothes as I've never had in my life," thought Aristide. "And a diamond and sapphire tie-pin and a gold watch, and all sorts of other things. Tron de l'air, I'm still rich."

"Who would have thought she was like that?" said he. "And a hundred pounds, too. A lot of money."

For nothing in the world would he have confessed himself a fellow-victim.

"I don't care a cent for the hundred pounds," cried the young man. "Our factory turns out seven hundred and sixty-seven million pairs of boots per annum." (Aristide, not I, is responsible for the statistics.) "But I have a feeling that in this hoary country I'm just a little toddling child. And I hate it. I do, sir. I want a nurse to take me round."

Aristide flashed the lightning of his wit upon the young man from Atlanta, Georgia.

"You do, my dear young friend. I'll be your nurse, at a weekly salary--say a hundred francs--it doesn't matter. We will not quarrel." Eugene Miller was startled. "Yes," said Aristide, with a convincing flourish. "I'll clear robbers and sirens and harpies from your path. I'll show you things in Europe--from Tromsö to Cap Spartivento that you never dreamed of. I'll lead you to every stained glass window in the world. I know them all."

"I particularly want to see those in the church of St. Sebald in Nuremberg."

"I know them like my pocket," said Aristide. "I will take you there. We start to-day."

"But, Mr. Pujol," said the somewhat bewildered Georgian. "I thought you were a man of fortune."

"I am more than a man. I am a soldier. I am a soldier of Fortune. The fickle goddess has for the moment deserted me. But I am loyal. I have for all worldly goods, two hundred and fifty dollars, with which I shall honorably pay my hotel bill. I say I am a soldier of Fortune. But," he slapped his chest, "I am the only honorable one on the Continent of Europe."

The young man fixed upon him the hard blue eyes, not of the enthusiast for stained glass windows, but of the senior partner in the boot factory of Atlanta, Georgia.

"I believe you," said he. "It's a deal. Shake."

"And now," said Aristide, after having shaken hands, "come and lunch with me at Nikola's for the last time."

He rose, stretched out both arms in a wide gesture and smiled with his irresistible Ancient Mariner's eyes at the young man.

"We lunch. We eat ambrosia. Then we go out together and see the wonderful world through the glass-blood of saints and martyrs and apostles and the good Father Abraham and Louis Quatorze. Viens, mon cher ami. It is the dream of my life."

Practically penniless and absolutely disillusioned, the amazing man was radiantly happy.

THE ADVENTURE OF A SAINT MARTIN'S SUMMER

My good friend Blessington, who is a mighty man in the Bordeaux wine-trade, happening one day to lament the irreparable loss of a deceased employé, an Admirable Crichton of a myriad accomplishments and linguistic attainments whose functions it had been, apparently, to travel about between London, Bordeaux, Marseilles and Algiers, I immediately thought of a certain living and presumably unemployed paragon of my acquaintance.

"I know the very man you're looking for," said I.

"Who is he?"

"He's a kind of human firework," said I, "and his name is Aristide Pujol."