"Keep well and happy and be a valiant little woman," said he.
Fleurette tried hard to be valiant; but the effort exhausted her
strength. As the days went on, even Aristide's inexhaustible
conversation failed to distract her from brooding. She lost the trick of
laughter. In the evenings, when he was most with her, she would sit,
either in the shop or in the little room at the back, her blue childish
eyes fixed on him wistfully. At first he tried to lure her into the gay
street; but walking tired her. He encouraged her to sit outside on the
pavement of the Rue Saint-Honore and join with Mme. Bidoux in the gossip
of neighbours; but she listened to them with uncomprehending ears. In
despair Aristide, to coax a smile from her lips, practised his many
queer accomplishments. He conjured with cards; he juggled with oranges;
he had a mountebank's trick of putting one leg round his neck; he
imitated the voices of cats and pigs and ducks, till Mme. Bidoux held
her sides with mirth. He spent time and thought in elaborating what he
called _bonnes farces_, such as dressing himself up in Mme. Bidoux's
raiment and personifying a crabbed customer.
Fleurette smiled but listlessly at all these comicalities.
One day she was taken ill. A doctor, summoned, said many learned words
which Aristide and Mme. Bidoux tried hard to understand.
"But, after all, what is the matter with her?"
[Illustration: ARISTIDE PRACTISED HIS MANY QUEER ACCOMPLISHMENTS]
"She has no strength to struggle. She wants happiness."
"Can you tell me the druggist's where that can be procured?" asked
Aristide.
The doctor shrugged his shoulders. "I tell you the truth. It is one of
those pulmonary cases. Happy, she will live; unhappy, she will die."
"My poor Mme. Bidoux, what is to be done?" asked Aristide, after the
doctor had gone off with his modest fee. "How are we to make her happy?"
"If only she could have news of her husband!" replied Mme. Bidoux.
Aristide's anxieties grew heavier. It was November, when knickerbockered
and culture-seeking tourists no longer fill the cheap hotels of Paris.
The profits of the Agence Pujol dwindled. Aristide lived on bread and
cheese, and foresaw the time when cheese would be a sinful luxury.
Meanwhile Fleurette had her nourishing food, and grew more like the
ghost of a lily every day. But her eyes followed Aristide, wherever he
went in her presence, as if he were the god of her salvation.
One day Aristide, with an unexpected franc or two in his pocket,
stopped in front of a _bureau de tabac_. A brown packet of caporal and
a book of cigarette-papers--a cigarette rolled--how good it would be!
He hesitated, and his glance fell on a collection of foreign stamps
exposed in the window. Among them were twelve Honduras stamps all
postmarked. He stared at them, fascinated.
"_Mon brave Aristide!_" he cried. "If the _bon Dieu_ does not send you
these vibrating inspirations, it is because you yourself have already
conceived them!"
He entered the shop and emerged, not with caporal and cigarette-papers,
but with the twelve Honduras stamps.
That night he sat up in his little bedroom at No. 213 bis, Rue
Saint-Honore, until his candle failed, inditing a letter in English to
Fleurette. At the head of his paper he wrote "Hotel Rosario, Honduras."
And at the end of the letter he signed the name of Reginald Batterby.
Where Honduras was, he had but a vague idea. For Fleurette, at any rate,
it would be somewhere at the other end of the world, and she would not
question any want of accuracy in local detail. Just before the light
went out he read the letter through with great pride. Batterby alluded
to the many letters he had posted from remote parts of the globe, gave
glowing forecasts of the fortune that Honduras had in store for him,
reminded her that he had placed sufficient funds for her maintenance in
the hands of Aristide Pujol, and assured her that the time was not far
off when she would be summoned to join her devoted husband.
"Mme. Bidoux was right," said he, before going to sleep. "This is the
only way to make her happy."
The next day Fleurette received the letter. The envelope bore the
postmarked Honduras stamp. It had been rubbed on the dusty pavement to
take off the newness. It was in her husband's handwriting. There was no
mistake about it--it was a letter from Honduras.
"Are you happier now, little doubting female St. Thomas that you are?"
cried Aristide when she had told him the news.
She smiled at him out of grateful eyes, and touched his hand.
"Much happier, _mon bon ami_," she said, gently.
Later in the day she handed him a letter addressed to Batterby. It had
no stamp.
"Will you post this for me, Aristide?"
Aristide put the letter in his pocket and turned sharply away, lest she
should see a sudden rush of tears. He had not counted on this innocent
trustfulness. He went to his room. The poor little letter! He had not
the heart to destroy it. No; he would keep it till Batterby came; it was
not his to destroy. So he threw it into a drawer.
Having once begun the deception, however, he thought it necessary to
continue. Every week, therefore, he invented a letter from Batterby. To
interest her he drew upon his Provencal imagination. He described
combats with crocodiles, lion-hunts, feasts with terrific savages from
the interior, who brought their lady wives chastely clad in petticoats
made out of human teeth; he drew pictures of the town, a kind of
palm-shaded Paris by the sea, where one ate ortolans and oysters as big
as soup-plates, and where Chinamen with pigtails rode about the streets
on camels. It was not a correct description of Honduras, but, all the
same, an exotic atmosphere stimulating and captivating rose from the
pages. With this it was necessary to combine expressions of affection.
At first it was difficult. Essential delicacy restrained him. He had
also to keep in mind Batterby's vernacular. To address Fleurette,
impalpable creation of fairyland, as "old girl" was particularly
distasteful. By degrees, however, the artist prevailed. And then at last
the man himself took to forgetting the imaginary writer and poured out
words of love, warm, true, and passionate.
And every week Fleurette would smile and tell him the wondrous news, and
would put into his hands an unstamped letter to post, which he, with a
wrench of the heart, would add to the collection in the drawer.
Once she said, diffidently, with an unwonted blush and her pale blue
eyes swimming: "I write English so badly. Won't you read the letter and
correct my mistakes?"
But Aristide laughed and licked the flap of the envelope and closed it.
"What has love to do with spelling and grammar? The good Reginald would
prefer your bad English to all the turned phrases of the Academie
Francaise."
"It is as you like, Aristide," said Fleurette, with wistful eyes.
Yet, in spite of the weekly letters, Fleurette continued to droop. The
winter came, and Fleurette was no longer able to stay among the cabbages
of Mme. Bidoux. She lay on her bed in the little room, ten feet by
seven, away, away at the top of the house in the Rue Saint Honore. The
doctor, informed of her comparative happiness, again shrugged his
shoulders. There was nothing more to be done.
"She is dying, monsieur, for want of strength to live."
Then Aristide went about with a great heartache. Fleurette would die;
she would never see the man she loved again. What would he say when he
returned and learned the tragic story? He would not even know that
Aristide, loving her, had been loyal to him. When the Director of the
Agence Pujol personally conducted the clients of the Hotel du Soleil et
de l'Ecosse to the Grand Trianon and pointed out the bed of the Empress
Josephine he nearly broke down.
"What is the Empress doing now?"
What was Fleurette doing now? Going to join the Empress in the world of
shadows.
The tourists talked after the manner of their kind.
"She must have found the bed very hard, poor dear."
"Give me an iron bedstead and a good old spring mattress."
"Ah, but, my dear sir, you forget. The Empress's bed was slung on the
back of tame panthers which Napoleon brought from Egypt."
It was hard to jest convincingly to the knickerbockered with death in
one's soul.
"Most beloved little Flower," ran the last letter that Fleurette
received, "I have just had a cable from Aristide saying that you are
very ill. I will come to you as soon as I can. _Ces petits yeux de
pervenche_--I am learning your language here, you see--haunt me day and
night ..." etcetera, etcetera.
Aristide went up to her room with a great bunch of chrysanthemums. The
letter peeped from under the pillow. Fleurette was very weak. Mme.
Bidoux, who, during Fleurette's illness, had allowed her green grocery
business to be personally conducted to the deuce by a youth of sixteen
very much in love with the lady who sold sausages and other
_charcuterie_ next door, had spread out the fortune-telling cards on
the bed and was prophesying mendaciously. Fleurette took the flowers
and clasped them to her bosom.
"No letter for _ce cher Reginald_?"
She shook her head. "I can write no more," she whispered.