Part 68

"You are not ready?"

"My dear friend, how can I----?"

"You are not coming?" His hands dropped to his sides and his face was the incarnation of disappointment.

"Let us talk things over reasonably," she urged, opening the parlour door.

"But I have brought the automobile."

"He can wait for five minutes, can't he?"

"He can wait till Doomsday," said Aristide.

"Take off your dripping coat. You must be wet through. Oh, how impulsive you are!"

He took off his overcoat dejectedly and followed her into the parlour, where she tried to point out the impossibility of his scheme. How could she abandon her home at a moment's notice? Failing to convince him, she said at last in some embarrassment, but with gentle dignity: "Suppose we did run away together in your romantic fashion, would it not confirm the scandal in the eyes of this wretched village?"

"You are right," said Aristide. "I had not thought of it."

He knew himself to be a madman. It was not thus that ladies were rescued from calumny. But to leave her alone to face it for time indefinite was unthinkable. And, meanwhile, what would become of him severed from her and little Jean? He sighed and looked around the little room where he had been so happy, and at the sweet-faced woman whose companionship had been so dear to him. And then the true meaning of all the precious things that had been his life for the past two months appeared before him like a smiling valley hitherto hidden and now revealed by dissolving mist. A great gladness gathered round his heart. He leaned across the table by which he was sitting and looked at her and for the first time noticed that her eyes were red.

"You have been crying, dear Anne," said he, using her name boldly. "Why?"

A man ought not to put a question like that at a woman's head and bid her stand and deliver. How is she to answer? Anne felt Aristide's bright eyes upon her and the colour mounted and mounted and deepened on her cheeks and brow.

"I don't like changes," she said in a low voice.

Aristide slipped noiselessly to the side of her chair and knelt on one knee and took her hand.

"Anne--my beloved Anne!" said he.

And Anne neither moved nor protested, but looked away from him into the fire.

* * * * *

And that is all that Aristide told me. There are sacred and beautiful things in life that one man does not tell to another. He did, however, mention that they forgot all about the unfortunate chauffeur sitting in the rain till about three hours afterwards, when Aristide sped away to a St. Albans hotel in joyous solitude.

The very next day he burst in upon me in a state of bliss bordering on mania.

"But there is a tragic side to it," he said when the story was over. "For half the year I shall be exiled to Bordeaux, Marseilles and Algiers as the representative of Dulau et Compagnie."

"The very best thing that could happen for your domestic happiness," said I.

"What? With my heart"--he thumped his heart--"with my heart hurting like the devil all the time?"

"So long as your heart hurts," said I, "you know it isn't dead."

A short while afterwards they were married in London. I was best man and Jean, specklessly attired, was page of honour, and the vicar of her own church at Chislehurst performed the ceremony. The most myopic of creatures could have seen that Anne was foolishly in love with her rascal husband. How could she help it?

As soon as the newly wedded pair had received the exhortation, Aristide, darting to the altar-rail, caught Jean up in his arms, and, to the consternation of the officiating clergy, the verger, and Anne's conventional friends, cried out exultingly:

"Ah, mon petit. It was a lucky day for both of us when I picked you up on the road between Salon and Arles. Put your hands together as you do when you're saying your prayers, mon brave, and say, 'God bless father and mother.'"

Jean obediently adopted the attitude of the infant Samuel in the pictures.