"Then he is here!" He jumped to his feet and wrung both her hands and
kissed them to her great embarrassment. "Ah, mademoiselle, I knew it. I
felt it. When such an inspiration comes to a man, it is the _bon Dieu_
who sends it. He is here, actually here, in this house?"
"Yes," said Miss Anne.
Aristide threw out his arms. "Let me see him. _Ah, le cher petit!_ I
have been yearning after him for three years. It was my heart that I
ripped out of my body that night and laid at your threshold."
"Hush!" said Miss Anne, with an interrupting gesture. "You must not talk
so loud. He is asleep in the next room. You mustn't wake him. He is very
ill."
"Ill? Dangerously ill?"
"I'm afraid so."
"_Mon Dieu_," said he, sitting down again in the oak settle. To Aristide
the emotion of the moment was absorbing, overwhelming. His attitude
betokened deepest misery and dejection.
"And I expected to see him full of joy and health!"
"It is not my fault, Mr. Pujol," said Miss Anne.
He started. "But no. How could it be? You loved him when you first set
eyes on him at Aix-en-Provence."
Miss Anne began to cry. "God knows," said she, "what I should do without
him. The dear mite is all that is left to me."
"All? But there is your sister, the dear Miss Janet."
Miss Anne's eyes were hidden in her handkerchief. "My poor sister died
last year, Mr. Pujol."
"I am very sorry. I did not know," said Aristide gently.
There was a short silence. "It was a great sorrow to you," he said.
"It was God's will," said Anne. Then, after another pause, during which
she dried her eyes, she strove to smile. "Tell me about yourself. How do
you come to be here?"
Aristide replied in a hesitating way. He was in the presence of grief
and sickness and trouble; the Provencal braggadocio dropped from him and
he became the simple and childish creature that he was. He accounted
very truthfully, very convincingly, for his queer life; for his
abandonment of little Jean, for his silence, for his sudden and
unexpected appearance. During the ingenuous _apologia pro vita sua_ Miss
Anne regarded him with her honest candour.
"Janet and I both understood," she said. "Janet was gifted with a divine
comprehension and pity. The landlady at the hotel, I remember, said some
unkind things about you; but we didn't believe them. We felt that you
were a good man--no one but a good man could have written that
letter--we cried over it--and when she tried to poison our minds we said
to each other: 'What does it matter? Here God in his mercy has given us
a child.' But, Mr. Pujol, why didn't you take us into your confidence?"
"My dear Miss Anne," said Aristide, "we of the South do things
impulsively, by lightning flashes. An idea comes suddenly. _Vlan!_ we
carry it out in two seconds. We are not less human than the Northerner,
who reflects two months."
"That is almost what dear, wise Janet told me," said Miss Anne.
"Then you know in your heart," said Aristide, after a while, "that if I
had not been only a football at the feet of fortune, I should never have
deserted little Jean?"
"I do, Mr. Pujol. My sister and I have been footballs, too." She added
with a change of tone: "You tell me you saw our dear home at
Chislehurst?"
"Yes," said Aristide.
"And you see this. There is a difference."
"What has happened?" asked Aristide.
She told him the commonplace pathetic story. Their father had left them
shares in the company of which he had been managing director. For many
years they had enjoyed a comfortable income. Then the company had become
bankrupt and only a miserable ninety pounds a year had been saved from
the wreckage. The cottage at Beverly Stoke belonging to them--it had
been their mother's--they had migrated thither with their fallen
fortunes and little Jean. And then Janet had died. She was delicate and
unaccustomed to privation and discomfort--and the cottage had its
disadvantages. She, Anne herself, was as strong as a horse and had never
been ill in her life, but others were not quite so hardy. "However"--she
smiled--"one has to make the best of things."
"_Parbleu_," said Aristide.
Miss Anne went on to talk of Jean, a miraculous infant of infinite
graces and accomplishments. Up to now he had been the sturdiest and
merriest fellow.
"At nine months old he saw that life was a big joke," said Aristide.
"How he used to laugh."
"There's not much laugh left in him, poor darling," she sighed. And she
told how he had caught a chill which had gone to his lungs and how the
night before last she thought she had lost him.