It may be remembered that Aristide Pujol had aged parents, browned and
wrinkled children of the soil, who had passed all their days in the
desolation of Aigues-Mortes, the little fortified, derelict city in the
salt marshes of Provence. Although they regarded him with the same
unimaginative wonder as a pair of alligators might regard an Argus
butterfly, their undoubted but freakish progeny, and although Aristide
soared high above their heads in all phases of thought and emotion, the
mutual ties remained strong and perdurable. Scarcely a year passed
without Aristide struggling somehow south to visit _ses vieux_, as he
affectionately called them, and whenever Fortune shed a few smiles on
him, one or two at least were sure to find their way to Aigues-Mortes in
the shape of, say, a silver-mounted umbrella for his father or a deuce
of a Paris hat for the old lady's Sunday wear. Monsieur and Madame Pujol
had a sacred museum of these unused objects--the pride of their lives.
Aristide was entirely incomprehensible, but he was a good son. A bad son
in France is rare.
But once Aristide nearly killed his old people outright. An envelope
from him contained two large caressive slips of bluish paper, which when
scrutinized with starting eyes turned out to be two one-thousand-franc
notes. Mon Dieu! What had happened? Had Aristide been robbing the Bank
of France? They stood paralyzed and only recovered motive force when a
neighbour suggested their reading the accompanying letter. It did not
explain things very clearly. He was in Aix-les-Bains, a place which they
had never heard of, making his fortune. He was staying at the Hotel de
l'Europe, where Queen Victoria (they had heard of Queen Victoria) had
been contented to reside, he was a glittering figure in a splendid
beau-monde, and if _ses vieux_ would buy a few cakes and a bottle of vin
cachete with the enclosed trifle, to celebrate his prosperity, he would
deem it the privilege of a devoted son. But Pujol senior, though
wondering where the devil he had fished all that money from, did not
waste it in profligate revelry. He took the eighty pounds to the bank
and exchanged the perishable paper for one hundred solid golden louis
which he carried home in a bag curiously bulging beneath his woollen
jersey and secreted it with the savings of his long life in the mattress
of the conjugal bed.
"If only he hasn't stolen it," sighed the mother.
"What does it matter, since it is sewn up there all secure?" said the
old man. "No one can find it."
The Provencal peasant is as hard-headed and practical as a Scottish
miner, and if left alone by the fairies would produce no imaginative
effect whatever upon his generation; but in his progeniture he is more
preposterously afflicted with changelings than any of his fellows the
world over, which, though ethnologically an entirely new proposition,
accounts for a singular number of things and _inter alia_ for my
dragon-fly friend, Aristide Pujol.
Now, Aristide, be it said at the outset, had not stolen the money. It
(and a vast amount more) had been honestly come by. He did not lie when
he said that he was staying at the Hotel de l'Europe, Aix-les-Bains,
honoured by the late Queen Victoria (pedantic accuracy requires the
correction that the august lady rented the annexe, the Villa Victoria,
on the other side of the shady way--but no matter--an hotel and its
annexe are the same thing) nor did he lie in boasting of his prodigious
prosperity. Aristide was in clover. For the first, and up to now as I
write, the only, time in his life he realized the gorgeous visions of
pallid years. He was leading the existence of the amazing rich. He could
drink champagne--not your miserable _tisane_ at five francs a quart--but
real champagne, with year of vintage and _gout american_ or _gout
anglais_ marked on label, fabulously priced; he could dine lavishly at
the Casino restaurants or at Nikola's, prince of restaurateurs, among
the opulent and the fair; he could clothe himself in attractive raiment;
he could step into a fiacre and bid the man drive and not care whither
he went or what he paid; he could also distribute five-franc pieces to
lame beggars. He scattered his money abroad with both hands, according
to his expansive temperament; and why not, when he was drawing wealth
out of an inexhaustible fount? The process was so simple, so sure. All
you had to do was to believe in the cards on which you staked your
money. If you knew you were going to win, you won. Nothing could be
easier.
He had drifted into Aix-les-Bains from Geneva on the lamentable
determination of a commission agency in the matter of some patent fuel,
with a couple of louis in his pocket forlornly jingling the tale of his
entire fortune. As this was before the days when you had to exhibit
certificates of baptism, marriage, sanity and bank-balance before being
allowed to enter the baccarat rooms, Aristide paid his two francs and
made a bee line for the tables. I am afraid Aristide was a gambler. He
was never so happy as when taking chances; his whole life was a gamble,
with Providence holding the bank. Before the night was over he had
converted his two louis into fifty. The next day they became five
hundred. By the end of a week his garments were wadded with bank notes
whose value amounted to a sum so stupendous as to be beyond need of
computation. He was a celebrity in the place and people nudged each
other as he passed by. And Aristide passed by with a swagger, his head
high and the end of his pointed beard sticking joyously up in the air.
We see him one August morning, in the plentitude of his success,
lounging in a wicker chair on the shady lawn of the Hotel de l'Europe.
He wore white buckskin shoes--I begin with these as they were the first
point of his person to attract the notice of the onlooker--lilac silk
socks, a white flannel suit with a zig-zag black stripe, a violet tie
secured by a sapphire and diamond pin, and a rakish panama hat. On his
knees lay the _Matin_; the fingers of his left hand held a fragrant
corona; his right hand was uplifted in a gesture, for he was talking. He
was talking to a couple of ladies who sat near by, one a mild-looking
Englishwoman of fifty, dressed in black, the other, her daughter, a
beautiful girl of twenty-four. That Aristide should fly to feminine
charms, like moth to candle, was a law of his being; that he should lie,
with shriveled wings, at Miss Errington's feet was the obvious result.
Her charms were of the winsome kind to which he was most susceptible.
She had an oval face, a little mouth like crumpled rose petals (so
Aristide himself described it), a complexion the mingling of ivory and
peach blossom (Aristide again), a straight little nose, appealing eyes
of the deepest blue veiled by sweeping lashes and fascinating fluffiness
of dark hair over a pure brow. She had a graceful figure, and the
slender foot below her white pique skirt was at once the envy and
admiration of Aix-les-Bains.
Aristide talked. The ladies listened, with obvious amusement. In the
easy hotel way he had fallen into their acquaintance. As the man of
wealth, the careless player who took five-hundred-louis banks at the
table with the five-louis minimum, and cleared out the punt, he felt it
necessary to explain himself. I am afraid he deviated from the narrow
path of truth.
"What perfect English you speak," Miss Errington remarked, when he had
finished his harangue and had put the corona between his lips. Her voice
was a soft contralto.
"I have mixed much in English society, since I was a child," replied
Aristide, in his grandest manner. "Fortune has made me know many of your
county families and members of Parliament."
Miss Errington laughed. "Our M. P.'s are rather a mixed lot, Monsieur
Pujol."
"To me an English Member of Parliament is a high-bred conservative. I
do not recognize the others," said Aristide.
"Unfortunately we have to recognize them," said the elder lady with a
smile.
"Not socially, madame. They exist as mechanical factors of the
legislative machine; but that is all." He swelled as if the blood of the
Montmorencys and the Colignys boiled in his veins. "We do not ask them
into our drawing rooms. We do not allow them to marry our daughters. We
only salute them with cold politeness when we pass them in the street."
"It's astonishing," said Miss Errington, "how strongly the aristocratic
principle exists in republican France. Now, there's our friend, the
Comte de Lussigny, for instance----"
A frown momentarily darkened the cloudless brow of Aristide Pujol. He
did not like the Comte de Lussigny----
"With Monsieur de Lussigny," he interposed, "it is a matter of
prejudice, not of principle."
"And with you?"
"The reasoned philosophy of a lifetime, mademoiselle," answered
Aristide. He turned to Mrs. Errington.
"How long have you known Monsieur de Lussigny, madame?"
She looked at her daughter. "It was in Monte Carlo the winter before
last, wasn't it, Betty? Since then we have met him frequently in
England and Paris. We came across him, just lately, at Trouville. I
think he's charming, don't you?"
"He's a great gambler," said Aristide.
Betty Errington laughed again. "But so are you. So is mamma. So am I, in
my poor little way."
"We gamble for amusement," said Aristide loftily.
"I'm sure I don't," cried Miss Betty, with merry eyes--and she looked
adorable--"When I put my despised five-franc piece down on the table I
want desperately to win, and when the horrid croupier rakes it up I want
to hit him--Oh! I want to hit him hard."
"And when you win?"
"I'm afraid I don't think of the croupier at all," said Miss Betty.
Her mother smiled indulgently and exchanged a glance with Aristide.
This pleased him; there was an agreeable little touch of intimacy in
it. It confirmed friendly relations with the mother. What were his
designs as regards the daughter he did not know. They were not evil,
certainly. For all his southern blood, Latin traditions and
devil-may-care upbringing, Aristide, though perhaps not reaching our
divinely set and therefore unique English standard of morality, was a
decent soul; further, partly through his pedagogic sojourn among them,
and partly through his childish adoration of the frank, fair-cheeked,
northern goddesses talking the quick, clear speech, who passed him by
when he was a hunted little devil of a _chasseur_ in the Marseilles
cafe, he had acquired a peculiarly imaginative reverence for English
girls. The reverence, indeed, extended to English ladies generally.
Owing to the queer circumstances of his life they were the only women
of a class above his own, with whom he had associated on terms of
equality. He had, then, no dishonorable designs as regards Miss Betty
Errington. On the other hand, the thoughts of marriage had as yet not
entered his head. You see, a Frenchman and an Englishman or an
American, view marriage from entirely different angles. The
Anglo-Saxon of honest instincts, attracted towards a pretty girl at
once thinks of the possibilities of marriage; if he finds them
infinitely remote, he makes romantic love to her in the solitude of
his walks abroad or of his sleepless nights, and, in her presence, is
as dumb and dismal as a freshly hooked trout. The equally honest Gaul
does nothing of the kind. The attraction in itself is a stimulus to
adventure. He makes love to her, just because it is the nature of a
lusty son of Adam to make love to a pretty daughter of Eve. He lives
in the present. The rest doesn't matter. He leaves it to chance. I am
speaking, be it understood, not of deep passions--that is a different
matter altogether--but of the more superficial sexual attractions
which we, as a race, take so seriously and puritanically, often to our
most disastrous undoing, and which the Latin light-heartedly regards
as essential, but transient phenomena of human existence. Aristide
made the most respectful love in the world to Betty Errington, because
he could not help himself. "_Tonnerre de Dieu!_" he cried when from my
Britannic point of view, I talked to him on the subject. "You English
whom I try to understand and can never understand are so funny! It
would have been insulting to Miss Betty Errington--_tiens!_--a purple
hyacinth of spring--that was what she was--not to have made love to
her. Love to a pretty woman is like a shower of rain to hyacinths. It
passes, it goes. Another one comes. _Qu'importe?_ But the shower is
necessary--Ah! _sacre gredin_, when will you comprehend?"
All this to make as clear as an Englishman, in the confidence of a
changeling child of Provence can hope to do, the attitude of Aristide
Pujol towards the sweet and innocent Betty Errington with her mouth like
crumpled rose-petals, her ivory and peach-blossom complexion, her soft
contralto voice, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, as per foregoing bald
description, and as per what can, by imaginative effort, be pictured
from the Pujolic hyperbole, by which I, the unimportant narrator of
these chronicles, was dazzled and overwhelmed.
"I'm afraid I don't think of the croupier at all," said Betty.
"Do you think of no one who brings you good fortune?" asked Aristide. He
threw the _Matin_ on the grass, and, doubling himself up in his chair
regarded her earnestly. "Last night you put five louis into my bank----"
"And I won forty. I could have hugged you."
"Why didn't you? Ah!" His arms spread wide and high. "What I have lost!"
"Betty!" cried Mrs. Errington.
"Alas, Madame," said Aristide, "that is the despair of our artificial
civilization. It prohibits so much spontaneous expression of emotion."
"You'll forgive me, Monsieur Pujol," said Mrs. Errington dryly, "but I
think our artificial civilization has its advantages."
"If you will forgive me, in your turn," said Aristide, "I see a doubtful
one advancing."
A man approached the group and with profuse gestures took off a straw
hat which he thrust under his right arm, exposing an amazingly flat head
on which the closely cropped hair stood brush-fashion upright. He had an
insignificant pale face to which a specious individuality was given by a
moustache with ends waxed up to the eyes and by a monocle with a
tortoise shell rim. He was dressed (his valet had misjudged things--and
valets like the rest of us are fallible) in what was yesterday a fairly
white flannel suit.
"Madame--Mademoiselle." He shook hands with charming grace. "Monsieur."
He bowed stiffly. Aristide doffed his Panama hat with adequate ceremony.
"May I be permitted to join you?"
"With pleasure, Monsieur de Lussigny," said Mrs. Errington.
Monsieur de Lussigny brought up a chair and sat down.
"What time did you get to bed, last night?" asked Betty Errington. She
spoke excellently pure French, and so did her mother.
"Soon after we parted, mademoiselle, quite early for me but late for
you. And you look this morning as if you had gone to bed at sundown and
got up at dawn."
Miss Betty's glance responsive to the compliment filled Aristide with
wrath. What right had the Comte de Lussigny, a fellow who consorted with
Brazilian Rastaquoueres and perfumed Levantine nondescripts, to win such
a glance from Betty Errington?
"If Mademoiselle can look so fresh," said he, "in the artificial
atmosphere of Aix, what is there of adorable that she must not resemble
in the innocence of her Somersetshire home?"
"You cannot imagine it, Monsieur," said the Count; "but I have had the
privilege to see it."
"I hope Monsieur Pujol will visit us also in our country home, when we
get back," said Mrs. Errington with intent to pacificate. "It is modest,
but it is old-world and has been in our family for hundreds of years."
"Ah, these old English homes!" said Aristide.
"Would you care to hear about it?"
"I should," said he.
He drew his chair courteously a foot or so nearer that of the mild lady;
Monsieur de Lussigny took instant advantage of the move to establish
himself close to Miss Betty. Aristide turned one ear politely to Mrs.
Errington's discourse, the other ragingly and impotently to the
whispered conversation between the detached pair.
Presently a novel fell from the lady's lap. Aristide sprang to his feet
and restored it. He remained standing. Mrs. Errington consulted a watch.
It was nearing lunch time. She rose, too. Aristide took her a pace or
two aside.
"My dear Mrs. Errington," said he, in English. "I do not wish to be
indiscreet--but you come from your quiet home in Somerset and your
beautiful daughter is so young and inexperienced, and I am a man of the
world who has mingled in all the society of Europe--may I warn you
against admitting the Comte de Lussigny too far into your intimacy."
She turned an anxious face. "Monsieur Pujol, is there anything against
the Count?"
Aristide executed the large and expressive shrug of the Southerner.
"I play high at the tables for my amusement--I know the principal
players, people of high standing. Among them Monsieur de Lussigny's
reputation is not spotless."
"You alarm me very much," said Mrs. Errington, troubled.
"I only put you on your guard," said he.
The others who had risen and followed, caught them up. At the entrance
to the hotel the ladies left the men elaborately saluting. The latter,
alone, looked at each other.
"Monsieur."
"Monsieur."
Each man raised his hat, turned on his heel and went his way. Aristide
betook himself to the cafe on the Place Carnot on the side of the square
facing the white Etablissement des Bains, with a stern sense of having
done his duty. It was monstrous that this English damask rose should
fall a prey to so detestable a person as the Comte de Lussigny. He
suspected him of disgraceful things. If only he had proof. Fortune, ever
favoring him, stood at his elbow. She guided him straight to a table in
the front row of the terrace where sat a black-haired, hard-featured
though comely youth deep in thought, in front of an untouched glass of
beer. At Aristide's approach he raised his head, smiled, nodded and
said: "Good morning, sir. Will you join me?"
Aristide graciously accepted the invitation and sat down. The young
man was another hotel acquaintance, one Eugene Miller of Atlanta,
Georgia, a curious compound of shrewdness and simplicity, to whom
Aristide had taken a fancy. He was twenty-eight and ran a colossal
boot-factory in partnership with another youth and had a consuming
passion for stained-glass windows. From books he knew every square
foot of old stained-glass in Europe. But he had crossed the Atlantic
for the first time only six weeks before, and having indulged his
craving immoderately, had rested for a span at Aix-les-Bains to
recover from aesthetic indigestion. He had found these amenities
agreeable to his ingenuous age. He had also, quite recently, come
across the Comte de Lussigny. Hence the depth of thought in which
Aristide discovered him. Now, the fact that North is North and South
is South and that never these twain shall meet is a proposition all
too little considered. One of these days when I can retire from the
dull but exacting avocation of tea-broking in the City, I think I
shall write a newspaper article on the subject. Anyhow, I hold
the theory that the Northerners of all nations have a common
characteristic and the Southerners of all nations have a common
characteristic, and that it is this common characteristic in each
case that makes North seek and understand North and South seek and
understand South. I will not go further into the general proposition;
but as a particular instance I will state that the American of the
South and the Frenchman of the South found themselves in essential
sympathy. Eugene Miller had the unfearing frankness of Aristide Pujol.
"I used rather to look down upon Europe as a place where people knew
nothing at all," said he. "We're sort of trained to think it's an
extinct volcano, but it isn't. It's alive. My God! It's alive. It's Hell
in the shape of a Limburger cheese. I wish the whole population of
Atlanta, Georgia, would come over and just see. There's a lot to be
learned. I thought I knew how to take care of myself, but this
tortoise-shell-eyed Count taught me last night that I couldn't. He
cleaned me out of twenty-five hundred dollars----"
"How?" asked Aristide, sharply.
"Ecarte."
Aristide brought his hand down with a bang on the table and uttered
anathemas in French and Provencal entirely unintelligible to Eugene
Miller; but the youth knew by instinct that they were useful,
soul-destroying curses and he felt comforted.
"Ecarte! You played ecarte with Lussigny? But my dear young friend, do
you know anything of ecarte?"
"Of course," said Miller. "I used to play it as a child with my
sisters."
"Do you know the _jeux de regle_?"
"The what?"
"The formal laws of the game--the rules of discards----"
"Never heard of them," said Eugene Miller.
"But they are as absolute as the Code Napoleon," cried Aristide. "You
can't play without knowing them. You might as well play chess without
knowing the moves."
"Can't help it," said the young man.
"Well, don't play ecarte any more."
"I must," said Miller.
"_Comment?_"
"I must. I've fixed it up to get my revenge this afternoon--in my
sitting room at the hotel."
"But it's imbecile!"
The sweep of Aristide's arm produced prismatic chaos among a tray-full
of drinks which the waiter was bringing to the family party at the next
table. "It's imbecile," he cried, as soon as order was apologetically
and pecuniarily restored. "You are a little mutton going to have its
wool taken off."
"I've fixed it up," said Miller. "I've never gone back on an engagement
yet in my own country and I'm not going to begin this side."
Aristide argued. He argued during the mechanical absorption of four
glasses of _vermouth-cassis_--after which prodigious quantity of black
currant syrup he rose and took the Gadarene youth to Nikola's where he
continued the argument during dejeuner. Eugene Miller's sole concession
was that Aristide should be present at the encounter and, backing his
hand, should have the power (given by the rules of the French game) to
guide his play. Aristide agreed and crammed his young friend with the
_jeux de regle_ and _pate de foie gras_.
The Count looked rather black when he found Aristide Pujol in Miller's
sitting room. He could not, however, refuse him admittance to the game.
The three sat down, Aristide by Miller's side, so that he could overlook
the hand and, by pointing, indicate the cards that it was advisable to
play. The game began. Fortune favored Mr. Eugene Miller. The Count's
brow grew blacker.
"You are bringing your own luck to our friend, Monsieur Pujol," said he,
dealing the cards.
"He needs it," said Aristide.
"_Le roi_," said the Count, turning up the king.
The Count won the vole, or all five tricks, and swept the stakes towards
him. Then, fortune quickly and firmly deserted Mr. Miller. The Count
besides being an amazingly fine player, held amazingly fine hands. The
pile of folded notes in front of him rose higher and higher. Aristide
tugged at his beard in agitation. Suddenly, as the Count dealt a king as
trump card, he sprang to his feet knocking over the chair behind him.
"You cheat, monsieur. You cheat!"
"Monsieur!" cried the outraged dealer.
"What has he done?"
"He has been palming kings and neutralizing the cut. I've been watching.
Now I catch him," cried Aristide in great excitement. "_Ah, sale voleur!
Maintenant je vous tiens!_"
"Monsieur," said the Comte de Lussigny with dignity, stuffing his
winnings into his jacket pocket. "You insult me. It is an infamy. Two of
my friends will call upon you."
"And Monsieur Miller and I will kick them over Mont Revard."
"You cannot treat _gens d'honneur_ in such a way, monsieur." He turned
to Miller, and said haughtily in his imperfect English, "Did you see the
cheat, you?"
"I can't say that I did," replied the young man. "On the other hand that
torch-light procession of kings doesn't seem exactly natural."
"But you did not see anything! _Bon!_"
"But I saw. Isn't that enough, _hein_?" shouted Aristide brandishing his
fingers in the Count's face. "You come here and think there's nothing
easier than to cheat young foreigners who don't know the rules of
ecarte. You come here and think you can carry off rich young English
misses. Ah, _sale escroc!_ You never thought you would have to reckon
with Aristide Pujol. You call yourself the Comte de Lussigny. Bah! I
know you----" he didn't, but that doesn't matter--"your _dossier_ is in
the hands of the prefect of Police. I am going to get that _dossier_.
Monsieur Lepine is my intimate friend. Every autumn we shoot together.
Aha! You send me your two galley-birds and see what I do to them."
The Comte de Lussigny twirled the tips of his moustache almost to his
forehead and caught up his hat.
"My friends shall be officers in the uniform of the French Army," he
said, by the door.
"And mine shall be two gendarmes," retorted Aristide. "_Nom de Dieu!_"
he cried, after the other had left the room. "We let him take the
money!"
"That's of no consequence. He didn't get away with much anyway," said
young Miller. "But he would have if you hadn't been here. If ever I can
do you a return service, just ask."
Aristide went out to look for the Erringtons. But they were not to be
found. It was only late in the afternoon that he met Mrs. Errington in
the hall of the hotel. He dragged her into a corner and in his
impulsive fashion told her everything. She listened white faced, in
great distress.
"My daughter's engaged to him. I've only just learned," she faltered.
"Engaged? _Sacrebleu!_ Ah, _le goujat!_"--for the second he was
desperately, furiously, jealously in love with Betty Errington. "_Ah, le
sale type! Voyons!_ This engagement must be broken off. At once! You are
her mother."
"She will hear of nothing against him."
"You will tell her this. It will be a blow; but----"
Mrs. Errington twisted a handkerchief between helpless fingers. "Betty
is infatuated. She won't believe it." She regarded him piteously. "Oh,
Monsieur Pujol, what can I do? You see she has an independent fortune
and is over twenty-one. I am powerless."
"I will meet his two friends," exclaimed Aristide magnificently--"and I
will kill him. _Voila!_"
"Oh, a duel? No! How awful!" cried the mild lady horror-stricken.
He thrust his cane dramatically through a sheet of a newspaper, which he
had caught up from a table. "I will run him through the body like
that"--Aristide had never handled a foil in his life--"and when he is
dead, your beautiful daughter will thank me for having saved her from
such an execrable fellow."
"But you mustn't fight. It would be too dreadful. Is there no other
way?"
"You must consult first with your daughter," said Aristide.
He dined in the hotel with Eugene Miller. Neither the Erringtons nor the
Comte de Lussigny were anywhere to be seen. After dinner, however, he
found the elder lady waiting for him in the hall. They walked out into
the quiet of the garden. She had been too upset to dine, she explained,
having had a terrible scene with Betty. Nothing but absolute proofs of
her lover's iniquity would satisfy her. The world was full of slanderous
tongues; the noblest and purest did not escape. For herself, she had
never been comfortable with the Comte de Lussigny. She had noticed too
that he had always avoided the best French people in hotels. She would
give anything to save her daughter. She wept.
"And the unhappy girl has written him compromising letters," she
lamented.
"They must be got back."
"But how? Oh, Monsieur Pujol, do you think he would take money for
them?"
"A scoundrel like that would take money for his dead mother's shroud,"
said Aristide.
"A thousand pounds?"
She looked very haggard and helpless beneath the blue arc-lights.
Aristide's heart went out to her. He knew her type--the sweet
gentlewoman of rural England who comes abroad to give her pretty
daughter a sight of life, ingenuously confident that foreign
watering-places are as innocent as her own sequestered village.
"That is much money, _chere madame_," said Aristide.
"I am fairly well off," said Mrs. Errington.
Aristide reflected. At the offer of a smaller sum the Count would
possibly bluff. But to a Knight of Industry, as he knew the Count to be,
a certain thousand pounds would be a great temptation. And after all to
a wealthy Englishwoman what was a thousand pounds?
"Madame," said he, "if you offer him a thousand pounds for the letters,
and a written confession that he is not the Comte de Lussigny, but a
common adventurer, I stake my reputation that he will accept."
They walked along for a few moments in silence; the opera had begun at
the adjoining Villa des Fleurs and the strains floated through the still
August air. After a while she halted and laid her hand on his sleeve.
"Monsieur Pujol, I have never been faced with such a thing, before. Will
you undertake for me this delicate and difficult business?"
"Madame," said he, "my life is at the service of yourself and your most
exquisite daughter." She pressed his hand. "Thank God, I've got a friend
in this dreadful place," she said brokenly. "Let me go in." And when
they reached the lounge, she said, "Wait for me here."
She entered the lift. Aristide waited. Presently the lift descended and
she emerged with a slip of paper in her hand.
"Here is a bearer cheque, Monsieur Pujol, for a thousand pounds. Get the
letters and the confession if you can, and a mother's blessing will go
with you."
She left him and went upstairs again in the lift. Aristide athirst with
love, living drama and unholy hatred of the Comte de Lussigny, cocked
his black, soft-felt evening hat at an engaging angle on his head and
swaggered into the Villa des Fleurs. As he passed the plebeian crowd
round the petits-chevaux table--these were the days of little horses and
not the modern equivalent of _la boule_--he threw a louis on the square
marked 5, waited for the croupier to push him his winnings, seven louis
and his stake on the little white horse, and walked into the baccarat
room. A bank was being called for thirty louis at the end table.
"_Quarante_," said Aristide.
"_Ajuge a quarante louis_," cried the croupier, no one bidding higher.
Aristide took the banker's seat and put down his forty louis. Looking
round the long table he saw the Comte de Lussigny sitting in the punt.
The two men glared at each other defiantly. Someone went "banco."
Aristide won. The fact of his holding the bank attracted a crowd round
the table. The regular game began. Aristide won, lost, won again. Now it
must be explained, without going into the details of the game, that the
hand against the bank is played by the members of the punt in turn.