He looked at her over his glasses and shook his head.
"What is the good of looking at moonshine? The moon itself I have
already seen."
So Aristide and Mrs. Ducksmith sat by themselves outside the hotel, and
he expounded to her the beauty of moonlight and its intoxicating effect
on folks in love.
"Wouldn't you like," said he, "to be lying on that white burnished cloud
with your beloved kissing your feet?"
"What odd things you think of."
"But wouldn't you?" he insinuated.
Her bosom heaved and swelled on a sigh. She watched the strip of silver
for a while and then murmured a wistful "Yes."
"I can tell you of many odd things," said Aristide. "I can tell you how
flowers sing and what colour there is in the notes of birds. And how a
cornfield laughs, and how the face of a woman who loves can outdazzle
the sun. _Chere madame_," he went on, after a pause, touching her little
plump hand, "you have been hungering for beauty and thirsting for
sympathy all your life. Isn't that so?"
She nodded.
"You have always been misunderstood."
A tear fell. Our rascal saw the glistening drop with peculiar
satisfaction. Poor Mrs. Ducksmith! It was a child's game. _Enfin_,
what woman could resist him? He had, however, one transitory qualm of
conscience, for, with all his vagaries, Aristide was a kindly and
honest man. Was it right to disturb those placid depths? Was it right
to fill this woman with romantic aspirations that could never be
gratified? He himself had not the slightest intention of playing
Lothario and of wrecking the peace of the Ducksmith household. The
realization of the saint-like purity of his aims reassured him. When
he wanted to make love to a woman, _pour tout de bon_, it would not be
to Mrs. Ducksmith.
"Bah!" said he to himself. "I am doing a noble and disinterested act. I
am restoring sight to the blind. I am giving life to one in a state of
suspended animation. _Tron de l'Air!_ I am playing the part of a
soul-reviver! And, _parbleu!_ it isn't Jean or Jacques that can do that.
It takes an Aristide Pujol!"
So, having persuaded himself, in his Southern way, that he was executing
an almost divine mission, he continued, with a zest now sharpened by an
approving conscience, to revive Mrs. Ducksmith's soul.
The poor lady, who had suffered the blighting influence of Mr. Ducksmith
for twenty years with never a ray of counteracting warmth from the
outside, expanded like a flower to the sun under the soul-reviving
process. Day by day she exhibited some fresh timid coquetry in dress and
manner. Gradually she began to respond to Aristide's suggestions of
beauty in natural scenery and exquisite building. On the ramparts of
Angouleme, daintiest of towns in France, she gazed at the smiling
valleys of the Charente and the Son stretching away below, and of her
own accord touched his arm lightly and said: "How beautiful!" She
appealed to her husband.
"Umph!" said he.
Once more (it had become a habit) she exchanged glances with Aristide.
He drew her a little farther along, under pretext of pointing out the
dreamy sweep of the Charente.
"If he appreciates nothing at all, why on earth does he travel?"
Her eyelids fluttered upwards for a fraction of a second.
"It's his mania," she said. "He can never rest at home. He must always
be going on--on."
"How can you endure it?" he asked.
She sighed. "It is better now that you can teach me how to look at
things."
"Good!" thought Aristide. "When I leave them she can teach him to look
at things and revive his soul. Truly I deserve a halo."
As Mr. Ducksmith appeared to be entirely unperceptive of his wife's
spiritual expansion, Aristide grew bolder in his apostolate. He
complimented Mrs. Ducksmith to his face. He presented her daily with
flowers. He scarcely waited for the heavy man's back to be turned to
make love to her. If she did not believe that she was the most
beautiful, the most ravishing, the most delicate-souled woman in the
world, it was through no fault of Aristide. Mr. Ducksmith went his
pompous, unseeing way. At every stopping-place stacks of English
daily papers awaited him. Sometimes, while Aristide was showing them
the sights of a town--to which, by the way, he insisted on being
conducted--he would extract a newspaper from his pocket and read with
dull and dogged stupidity. Once Aristide caught him reading the
advertisements for cooks and housemaids. In these circumstances Mrs.
Ducksmith spiritually expanded at an alarming rate; and,
correspondingly, dwindled the progress of Mr. Ducksmith's sock.
They arrived at Perigueux, in Perigord, land of truffles, one morning,
in time for lunch. Towards the end of the meal the _maitre d'hotel_
helped them to great slabs of _pate de foie gras_, made in the
house--most of the hotel-keepers in Perigord make _pate de foie gras_,
both for home consumption and for exportation--and waited expectant of
their appreciation. He was not disappointed. Mr. Ducksmith, after a
hesitating glance at the first mouthful, swallowed it, greedily devoured
his slab, and, after pointing to his empty plate, said, solemnly:--
"_Plou._"
Like Oliver, he asked for more.
"_Tiens!_" thought Aristide, astounded. "Is he, too, developing a soul?"
But, alas! there were no signs of it when they went their dreary round
of the town in the usual ramshackle open cab. The cathedral of
Saint-Front, extolled by Aristide and restored by Abadie--a terrible
fellow who has capped with tops of pepper-castors every pre-Gothic
building in France--gave him no thrill; nor did the picturesque,
tumble-down ancient buildings on the banks of the Dordogne, nor the
delicate Renaissance facades in the cool, narrow Rue du Lys.
"We will now go back to the hotel," said Mr. Ducksmith.
"But have we seen it all?" asked his wife.
"By no means," said Aristide.
"We will go back to the hotel," repeated her husband, in his
expressionless tones. "I have seen enough of Perigueux."
This was final. They drove back to the hotel. Mr. Ducksmith, without a
word, went straight into the salon, leaving Aristide and his wife
standing in the vestibule.
"And you, madame," said Aristide; "are you going to sacrifice the glory
of God's sunshine to the manufacture of woollen socks?"
She smiled--she had caught the trick at last--and said, in happy
submission: "What would you have me do?"
With one hand he clasped her arm; with the other, in a superb gesture,
he indicated the sunlit world outside.
"Let us drain together," cried he, "the loveliness of Perigueux to its
dregs!"
Greatly daring, she followed him. It was a rapturous escapade--the
first adventure of her life. She turned her comely face to him and he
saw smiles round her lips and laughter in her eyes. Aristide, worker
of miracles, strutted by her side choke-full of vanity. They wandered
through the picturesque streets of the old town with the gaiety of
truant children, peeping through iron gateways into old courtyards,
venturing their heads into the murk of black stairways, talking (on
the part of Aristide) with mothers who nursed chuckling babes on their
doorsteps, crossing the thresholds, hitherto taboo, of churches, and
meeting the mystery of coloured glass and shadows and the heavy smell
of incense.
Her hand was on his arm when they entered the flagged courtyard of an
ancient palace, a stately medley of the centuries, with wrought
ironwork in the balconies, tourelles, oriels, exquisite Renaissance
ornaments on architraves, and a great central Gothic doorway, with
great window-openings above, through which was visible the stone
staircase of honour leading to the upper floors. In a corner stood a
mediaeval well, the sides curiously carved. One side of the courtyard
blazed in sunshine, the other lay cool and grey in shadow. Not a human
form or voice troubled the serenity of the spot. On a stone bench
against the shady wall Aristide and Mrs. Ducksmith sat down to rest.
"_Voila!_" said Aristide. "Here one can suck in all the past like an
omelette. They had the feeling for beauty, those old fellows."
"I have wasted twenty years of my life," said Mrs. Ducksmith, with a
sigh. "Why didn't I meet someone like you when I was young? Ah, you
don't know what my life has been, Mr. Pujol."
"Why not Aristide when we are alone? Why not, Henriette?"
He too had the sense of adventure, and his eyes were more than usually
compelling and his voice more seductive. For some reason or other,
undivined by Aristide--over-excitement of nerves, perhaps--she burst
into tears.
"_Henriette! Henriette, ne pleurez pas._"
His arm crept round her--he knew not how; her head sank on his shoulder,
she knew not why--faithlessness to her lord was as far from her thoughts
as murder or arson; but for one poor little moment in a lifetime it is
good to weep on someone's shoulder and to have someone's sympathetic arm
around one's waist.
"_Pauvre petite femme!_ And is it love she is pining for?"
She sobbed; he lifted her chin with his free hand--and what less could
mortal apostle do?--he kissed her on her wet cheek.
A bellow like that of an angry bull caused them to start asunder. They
looked up, and there was Mr. Ducksmith within a few yards of them, his
face aflame, his rabbit's eyes on fire with rage. He advanced, shook his
fists in their faces.
"I've caught you! At last, after twenty years, I've caught you!"
"Monsieur," cried Aristide, starting up, "allow me to explain."
He swept Aristide aside like an intercepting willow-branch, and poured
forth a torrent of furious speech upon his wife.
"I have hated you for twenty years. Day by day I have hated you more.
I've watched you, watched you, watched you! But, you sly jade, you've
been too clever for me till now. Yes; I followed you from the hotel. I
dogged you. I foresaw what would happen. Now the end has come. I've
hated you for twenty years--ever since you first betrayed me----"
Mrs. Ducksmith, who had sat with overwhelmed head in her hands, started
bolt upright, and looked at him like one thunderstruck.
"I betrayed you?" she gasped, in bewilderment. "My God! When? How? What
do you mean?"
He laughed--for the first time since Aristide had known him--but it was
a ghastly laugh, that made the jowls of his cheeks spread horribly to
his ears; and again he flooded the calm, stately courtyard with the
raging violence of words. The veneer of easy life fell from him. He
became the low-born, petty tradesman, using the language of the hands
of his jam factory. No, he had never told her. He had awaited his
chance. Now he had found it. He called her names....
[Illustration: "I'VE CAUGHT YOU! AT LAST, AFTER TWENTY YEARS, I'VE
CAUGHT YOU!"]
Aristide interposed, his Southern being athrob with the insults heaped
upon the woman.
"Say that again, monsieur," he shouted, "and I will take you up in my
arms like a sheep and throw you down that well."
The two men glared at one another, Aristide standing bent, with crooked
fingers, ready to spring at the other's throat. The woman threw herself
between them.
"For Heaven's sake," she cried, "listen to me! I have done no wrong. I
have done no wrong now--I never did you wrong, so help me God!"
Mr. Ducksmith laughed again, and his laugh re-echoed round the quiet
walls and up the vast staircase of honour.
"You'd be a fool not to say it. But now I've done with you. Here, you,
sir. Take her away--do what you like with her; I'll divorce her. I'll
give you a thousand pounds never to see her again."
"_Goujat! Triple goujat!_" cried Aristide, more incensed than ever at
this final insult.
Mrs. Ducksmith, deadly white, swayed sideways, and Aristide caught her
in his arms and dragged her to the stone bench. The fat, heavy man
looked at them for a second, laughed again, and sped through the
_porte-cochere_. Mrs. Ducksmith quickly recovered from her fainting
attack, and gently pushed the solicitous Aristide away.
"Merciful Heaven!" she murmured. "What is to become of me?"
The last person to answer the question was Aristide. For once in his
adventurous life resource failed him. He stared at the woman for whom he
cared not the snap of a finger, and who, he knew, cared not the snap of
a finger for him, aghast at the havoc he had wrought. If he had set out
to arouse emotion in these two sluggish breasts he had done so with a
vengeance. He had thought he was amusing himself with a toy cannon, and
he had fired a charge of dynamite.
He questioned her almost stupidly--for a man in the comic mask does not
readily attune himself to tragedy. She answered with the desolate
frankness of a lost soul. And then the whole meaning--or the lack of
meaning--of their inanimate lives was revealed to him. Absolute
estrangement had followed the birth of their child nearly twenty years
ago. The child had died after a few weeks. Since then he saw--and the
generous blood of his heart froze as the vision came to him--that the
vulgar, half-sentient, rabbit-eyed bloodhound of a man had nursed an
unexpressed, dull, implacable resentment against the woman. It did not
matter that the man's suspicion was vain. To Aristide the woman's blank
amazement at the preposterous charge was proof enough; to the man the
thing was real. For nearly twenty years the man had suffered the cancer
to eat away his vitals, and he had watched and watched his blameless
wife, until now, at last, he had caught her in this folly. No wonder he
could not rest at home; no wonder he was driven, Io-wise, on and on,
although he hated travel and all its discomforts, knew no word of a
foreign language, knew no scrap of history, had no sense of beauty, was
utterly ignorant, as every single one of our expensively State-educated
English lower classes is, of everything that matters on God's earth; no
wonder that, in the unfamiliarity of foreign lands, feeling as helpless
as a ballet-dancer in a cavalry charge, he looked to Cook, or Lunn, or
the Agence Pujol to carry him through his uninspired pilgrimage. For
twenty years he had shown no sign of joy or sorrow or anger, scarcely
even of pleasure or annoyance. A tortoise could not have been more
unemotional. The unsuspected volcano had slumbered. To-day came
disastrous eruption. And what was a mere laughing, crying child of
a man like Aristide Pujol in front of a Ducksmith volcano?
"What is to become of me?" wailed Mrs. Ducksmith again.
"_Ma foi!_" said Aristide, with a shrug of his shoulders. "What's going
to become of anyone? Who can foretell what will happen in a minute's
time? _Tiens!_" he added, kindly laying his hand on the sobbing woman's
shoulder. "Be comforted, my poor Henriette. Just as nothing in this
world is as good as we hope, so nothing is as bad as we fear. _Voyons!_
All is not lost yet. We must return to the hotel."
She weepingly acquiesced. They walked through the quiet streets like
children whose truancy had been discovered and who were creeping back to
condign punishment at school. When they reached the hotel, Mrs.
Ducksmith went straight up to the woman's haven, her bedroom.
Aristide tugged at his Vandyke beard in dire perplexity. The situation
was too pregnant with tragedy for him to run away and leave the pair
to deal with it as best they could. But what was he to do? He sat down
in the vestibule and tried to think. The landlord, an unstoppable
gramophone of garrulity, entering by the street-door and bearing down
upon him, put him to flight. He, too, sought his bedroom, a cool
apartment with a balcony outside the French window. On this balcony,
which stretched along the whole range of first-floor bedrooms, he
stood for a while, pondering deeply. Then, in an absent way, he
overstepped the limit of his own room-frontage. A queer sound startled
him. He paused, glanced through the open window, and there he saw a
sight which for the moment paralyzed him.
[Illustration: THERE HE SAW A SIGHT WHICH FOR THE MOMENT PARALYZED HIM]
Recovering command of his muscles, he tiptoed his way back. He
remembered now that the three rooms adjoined. Next to his was Mr.
Ducksmith's, and then came Mrs. Ducksmith's. It was Mr. Ducksmith whom
he had seen. Suddenly his dark face became luminous with laughter, his
eyes glowed, he threw his hat in the air and danced with glee about the
room. Having thus worked off the first intoxication of his idea, he
flung his few articles of attire and toilet necessaries into his bag,
strapped it, and darted, in his dragon-fly way, into the corridor and
tapped softly at Mrs. Ducksmith's door. She opened it. He put his finger
to his lips.
"Madame," he whispered, bringing to bear on her all the mocking
magnetism of his eyes, "if you value your happiness you will do exactly
what I tell you. You will obey me implicitly. You must not ask
questions. Pack your trunks at once. In ten minutes' time the porter
will come for them."