Part 67

"Ah!" cried Aristide, "is it I, then, that give you a headache?"

"It's not your fault," she said gently. "You have been everything that a loyal gentleman could be--and it's because you're a loyal gentleman that you must go."

"I don't understand," said he, puzzled. "I must go away because I give you a headache, although it is not my fault."

"It's nothing to do with headaches," she explained. "Don't you see? People around here are talking."

"About you and me?"

"Yes," said Miss Anne, faintly.

"Saprelotte!" cried Aristide, with a fine flourish, "let them talk!"

"Against Jean and myself?"

The reproach brought him to his feet. "No," said he. "No. Sooner than they should talk, I would go out and strangle every one of them. But it is infamous. What do they say?"

"How can I tell you? What would they say in your own country?"

"France is France and England is England."

"And a little cackling village is the same all the world over. No, my dear friend--for you are my dear friend--you must go back to London, for the sake of my good name and Jean's."

"But let us leave the cackling village."

"There are geese on every common," said Anne.

"Nom de Dieu!" muttered Aristide, walking about the tiny parlour. "Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!" He stood in front of her and flung out his arms wide. "But without Jean and you life will have no meaning for me. I shall die. I shall fade away. I shall perish. Tell me, dear Miss Anne, what they are saying, the miserable peasants with souls of mud."

But Anne could tell him no more. It had been hateful and degrading to tell him so much. She shivered through all her purity. After a barren discussion she held out her hand, large and generous like herself.

"Good-bye"--she hesitated for the fraction of a second--"Good-bye, Aristide. I promise you shall provide for Jean's future. I will bring him up to London now and then to see you. We will find some way out of the difficulty. But you see, don't you, that you must leave Beverly Stoke?"

Aristide went back to his comfortless lodgings aflame with bewilderment, indignation and despair. He fell upon Mrs. Buttershaw, a slatternly and sour-visaged woman, and hurled at her a tornado of questions. She responded with the glee of a hag, and Aristide learned the amazing fact that in the matter of sheer uncharitableness, unkindness and foulness of thought Beverly Stoke, with its population of three hundred hinds, could have brought down upon it the righteous indignation of Sodom, Gomorrah, Babylon, Paris, and London. For a fortnight or so Anne Honeywood's life in the village had been that of a pariah dog.

"And now you've spoke of it yourself," said Mrs. Buttershaw, her hands on her hips, "I'm glad. I'm a respectable woman, I am, and go to church regularly, and I don't want to be mixed up in such goings on. And I never have held with foreigners, anyway. And the sooner you find other lodgings, the better."

For the first and only time in his life words failed Aristide Pujol. He stood in front of the virtuous harridan, his lips working, his fingers convulsively clutching the air.

"You--you--you--you naughty woman!" he gasped, and, sweeping her away from the doorway of his box of a sitting-room, he rushed up to his tinier bedroom and in furious haste packed his portmanteau.

"I would rather die than sleep another night beneath your slanderous roof," he cried at the foot of the stairs. "Here is more than your week's money." He flung a couple of gold coins on the floor and dashed out into the darkness and the rain.

He hammered at Anne Honeywood's door. She opened it in some alarm.

"You?--but----" she stammered.

"I have come," said he, dumping his portmanteau in the passage, "to take you and Jean away from this abomination of a place. It is a Tophet reserved for those who are not good enough for hell. In hell there is dignity, que diable! Here there is none. I know what you have suffered. I know how they insult you. I know what they say. You cannot stay one more night here. Pack up all your things. Pack up all Jean's things. I have my valise here. I walk to St. Albans and I come back for you in an automobile. You lock up the door. I tell the policeman to guard the cottage. You come with me. We take a train to London. You and Jean will stay at a hotel. I will go to my good friend who saved me from Madam Gougasse. After that we will think."

"That's just like you," she said, smiling in spite of her trouble, "you act first and think afterwards. Unfortunately I'm in the habit of doing the reverse."

"But it's I who am doing all the thinking for you. I have thought till my brain is red hot." He laughed in his luminous and excited way, and, seizing both her hands, kissed them one after the other. "There!" said he, "be ready by the time I return. Do not hesitate. Do not look back. Remember Lot's wife!" He flourished his hat and was gone like a flash into the heavy rain and darkness of the December evening. Anne cried after him, but he too remembering Lot's wife would not turn. He marched on buoyantly, heedless of the wet and the squirting mud from unseen puddles. It was an adventure such as he loved. It was a knightly errand, parbleu! Was he not delivering a beautiful lady from the dragon of calumny? And in an automobile, too! His imagination fondled the idea.

At a garage in St. Albans he readily found a car for hire. He was all for driving it himself--that is how he had pictured the rescue--but the proprietor, dull and unimaginative tradesman, declined firmly. It was a hireling who drove the car to Beverly Stoke. Anne, unhatted and uncloaked, admitted him.