The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol

“It is a truly historical château,” said he.

“I should love to see it,” said the girl.

Aristide threw out his arms across the table. “It is yours, mademoiselle, for your honeymoon,” said he.

Dinner came to an end. Miss Christabel left the gentlemen to their wine, an excellent port whose English qualities were vaunted by the host. Aristide, full of food and drink and the mellow glories of the castle in Languedoc, and smoking an enormous cigar, felt at ease with all the world. He knew he should like the kind Mr. Smith, hospitable though somewhat insular man. He could stay with him for a week – or a month – why not a year?

After coffee and liqueurs had been served Mr. Smith rose and switched on a powerful electric light at the end of the large room, showing a picture on an easel covered by a curtain. He beckoned to Aristide to join him and, drawing the curtain, disclosed the picture.

“There!” said he. “Isn’t it a stunner?”

It was a picture all grey skies and grey water and grey feathery trees, and a little man in the foreground wore a red cap.

“It is beautiful, but indeed it is magnificent!” cried Aristide, always impressionable to things of beauty.

“Genuine Corot, isn’t it?”

“Without doubt,” said Aristide.

His host poked him in the ribs. “I thought I’d astonish you. You wouldn’t believe Gottschalk could have done it. There it is – as large as life and twice as natural. If you or anyone else can tell it from a genuine Corot I’ll eat my hat. And all for eight pounds.”

Aristide looked at the beefy face and caught a look of cunning in the little pig’s eyes.

“Now are you satisfied?” asked Mr. Smith.

“More than satisfied,” said Aristide, though what he was to be satisfied about passed, for the moment, his comprehension.

“If it was a copy of an existing picture, you know – one might have understood it – that, of course, would be dangerous – but for a man to go and get bits out of various Corots and stick them together like this is miraculous. If it hadn’t been for a matter of business principle I’d have given the fellow eight guineas instead of pounds – hanged if I wouldn’t! He deserves it.”

“He does indeed,” said Aristide Pujol.

“And now that you’ve seen it with your own eyes, what do you think you might ask me for it? I suggested something between two and three thousand – shall we say three? You’re the owner, you know.” Again the process of rib-digging. “Came out of that historic château of yours. My eye! you’re a holy terror when you begin to talk. You almost persuaded me it was real.”

“Tiens!” said Aristide to himself. “I don’t seem to have a château after all.”

“Certainly three thousand,” said he, with a grave face.

“That young man thinks he knows a lot, but he doesn’t,” said Mr. Smith.

“Ah!” said Aristide, with singular laconicism.

“Not a blooming thing,” continued his host. “But he’ll pay three thousand, which is the principal, isn’t it? He’s partner in the show, you know, Ralston, Wiggins, and Wix’s Brewery” – Aristide pricked up his ears – “and when his doddering old father dies he’ll be Lord Ranelagh and come into a million of money.”

“Has he seen the picture?” asked Aristide.

“Oh, yes. Regards it as a masterpiece. Didn’t Brauneberger tell you of the Lancret we planted on the American?” Mr. Smith rubbed hearty hands at the memory of the iniquity. “Same old game. Always easy. I have nothing to do with the bargaining or the sale. Just an old friend of the ruined French nobleman with the historic château and family treasures. He comes along and fixes the price. I told our friend Harry – ”

“Good,” thought Aristide. “This is the same Honourable Harry, M.P., who is engaged to the ravishing Miss Christabel.”

“I told him,” said Mr. Smith, “that it might come to three or four thousand. He jibbed a bit – so when I wrote to you I said two or three. But you might try him with three to begin with.”

Aristide went back to the table and poured himself out a fresh glass of his kind host’s 1865 brandy and drank it off.

“Exquisite, my dear fellow,” said he. “I’ve none finer in my historic château.”

“Don’t suppose you have,” grinned the host, joining him. He slapped him on the back. “Well,” said he, with a shifty look in his little pig’s eyes, “let us talk business. What do you think would be your fair commission? You see, all the trouble and invention have been mine. What do you say to four hundred pounds?”

“Five,” said Aristide, promptly.

A sudden gleam came into the little pig’s eyes.

“Done!” said Mr. Smith, who had imagined that the other would demand a thousand and was prepared to pay eight hundred. “Done!” said he again.

They shook hands to seal the bargain and drank another glass of old brandy. At that moment, a servant, entering, took the host aside.

“Please excuse me a moment,” said he, and went with the servant out of the room.

Aristide, left alone, lighted another of his kind host’s fat cigars and threw himself into a great leathern arm-chair by the fire, and surrendered himself deliciously to the soothing charm of the moment. Now and then he laughed, finding a certain comicality in his position. And what a charming father-in-law, this kind Mr. Smith!

His cheerful reflections were soon disturbed by the sudden irruption of his host and a grizzled, elderly, foxy-faced gentleman with a white moustache, wearing the ribbon of the Legion of Honour in the buttonhole of his overcoat.

“Here, you!” cried the kind Mr. Smith, striding up to Aristide, with a very red face. “Will you have the kindness to tell me who the devil you are?”

Aristide rose, and, putting his hands behind the tails of his frock-coat, stood smiling radiantly on the hearthrug. A wit much less alert than my irresponsible friend’s would have instantly appreciated the fact that the real Simon Pure had arrived on the scene.

“I, my dear friend,” said he, “am the Baron de Je ne Sais Plus.”

“You’re a confounded impostor,” spluttered Mr. Smith.

“And this gentleman here to whom I have not had the pleasure of being introduced?” asked Aristide, blandly.

“I am M. Poiron, monsieur, the agent of Messrs. Brauneberger and Compagnie, art dealers, of the Rue Notre Dame des Petits Champs of Paris,” said the new-comer, with an air of defiance.

“Ah, I thought you were the Baron,” said Aristide.

“There’s no blooming Baron at all about it!” screamed Mr. Smith. “Are you Poiron, or is he?”

“I would not have a name like Poiron for anything in the world,” said Aristide. “My name is Aristide Pujol, soldier of fortune, at your service.”

“How the blazes did you get here?”

“Your servant asked me if I was a French gentleman from Manchester. I was. He said that Mr. Smith had sent his carriage for me. I thought it hospitable of the kind Mr. Smith. I entered the carriage —et voilà!”

“Then clear out of here this very minute,” said Mr. Smith, reaching forward his hand to the bell-push.

Aristide checked his impulsive action.

“Pardon me, dear host,” said he. “It is raining dogs and cats outside. I am very comfortable in your luxurious home. I am here, and here I stay.”

“I’m shot if you do,” said the kind Mr. Smith, his face growing redder and uglier. “Now, will you go out, or will you be thrown out?”

Aristide, who had no desire whatever to be ejected from this snug nest into the welter of the wet and friendless world, puffed at his cigar, and looked at his host with the irresistible drollery of his eyes.

“You forget, mon cher ami,” said he, “that neither the beautiful Miss Christabel nor her affianced, the Honourable Harry, M.P., would care to know that the talented Gottschalk got only eight pounds, not even guineas, for painting that three-thousand-pound picture.”

“So it’s blackmail, eh?”

“Precisely,” said Aristide, “and I don’t blush at it.”

“You infernal little blackguard!”

“I seem to be in congenial company,” said Aristide. “I don’t think our friend M. Poiron has more scruples than he has right to the ribbon of the Legion of Honour which he is wearing.”

“How much will you take to go out? I have a cheque-book handy.”

Mr. Smith moved a few steps from the hearthrug. Aristide sat down in the arm-chair. An engaging, fantastic impudence was one of the charms of Aristide Pujol.

“I’ll take five hundred pounds,” said he, “to stay in.”

“Stay in?” Mr. Smith grew apoplectic.

“Yes,” said Aristide. “You can’t do without me. Your daughter and your servants know me as M. le Baron – by the way, what is my name? And where is my historic château in Languedoc?”

“Mireilles,” said M. Poiron, who was sitting grim and taciturn on one of the dining-room chairs. “And the place is the same, near Montpellier.”

“I like to meet an intelligent man,” said Aristide.

“I should like to wring your infernal neck,” said the kind Mr. Smith. “But, by George, if we do let you in you’ll have to sign me a receipt implicating yourself up to the hilt. I’m not going to be put into the cart by you, you can bet your life.”

“Anything you like,” said Aristide, “so long as we all swing together.”

Now, when Aristide Pujol arrived at this point in his narrative I, his chronicler, who am nothing if not an eminently respectable, law-abiding Briton, took him warmly to task for his sheer absence of moral sense. His eyes, as they sometimes did, assumed a luminous pathos.

“My dear friend,” said he, “have you ever faced the world in a foreign country in December with no character and fifteen pounds five and three-pence in your pocket? Five hundred pounds was a fortune. It is one now. And to be gained just by lending oneself to a good farce, which didn’t hurt anybody. You and your British morals! Bah!” said he, with a fine flourish.

Aristide, after much parleying, was finally admitted into the nefarious brotherhood. He was to retain his rank as the Baron de Mireilles, and play the part of the pecuniarily inconvenienced nobleman forced to sell some of his rare collection. Mr. Smith had heard of the Corot through their dear old common friend, Jules Dancourt of Rheims, had mentioned it alluringly to the Honourable Harry, had arranged for the Baron, who was visiting England, to bring it over and dispatch it to Mr. Smith’s house, and on his return from Manchester to pay a visit to Mr. Smith, so that he could meet the Honourable Harry in person. In whatever transaction ensued Mr. Smith, so far as his prospective son-in-law was concerned, was to be the purely disinterested friend. It was Aristide’s wit which invented a part for the supplanted M. Poiron. He should be the eminent Parisian expert who, chancing to be in London, had been telephoned for by the kind Mr. Smith.

“It would not be wise for M. Poiron,” said Aristide, chuckling inwardly with puckish glee, “to stay here for the night – or for two or three days – or a week – like myself. He must go back to his hotel when the business is concluded.”

“Mais, pardon!” cried M. Poiron, who had been formally invited, and had arrived late solely because he had missed his train at Manchester, and come on by the next one. “I cannot go out into the wet, and I have no hotel to go to.”

Aristide appealed to his host. “But he is unreasonable, cher ami. He must play his rôle. M. Poiron has been telephoned for. He can’t possibly stay here. Surely five hundred pounds is worth one little night of discomfort? And there are a legion of hotels in London.”

“Five hundred pounds!” exclaimed M. Poiron. “Qu’est-ce que vous chantez là? I want more than five hundred pounds.”

“Then you’re jolly well not going to get it,” cried Mr. Smith, in a rage. “And as for you” – he turned on Aristide – “I’ll wring your infernal neck yet.”

“Calm yourself, calm yourself!” smiled Aristide, who was enjoying himself hugely.

At this moment the door opened and Miss Christabel appeared. On seeing the decorated stranger she started with a little “Oh!” of surprise.

“I beg your pardon.”

Mr. Smith’s angry face wreathed itself in smiles.

“This, my darling, is M. Poiron, the eminent Paris expert, who has been good enough to come and give us his opinion on the picture.”

M. Poiron bowed. Aristide advanced.

“Mademoiselle, your appearance is like a mirage in a desert.”

She smiled indulgently and turned to her father. “I’ve been wondering what had become of you. Harry has been here for the last half-hour.”

“Bring him in, dear child, bring him in!” said Mr. Smith, with all the heartiness of the fine old English gentleman. “Our good friends are dying to meet him.”

The girl flickered out of the room like a sunbeam (the phrase is Aristide’s), and the three precious rascals put their heads together in a hurried and earnest colloquy. Presently Miss Christabel returned, and with her came the Honourable Harry Ralston, a tall, soldierly fellow, with close-cropped fair curly hair and a fair moustache, and frank blue eyes that, even in Parliament, had seen no harm in his fellow-creatures. Aristide’s magical vision caught him wincing ever so little at Mr. Smith’s effusive greeting and overdone introductions. He shook Aristide warmly by the hand.

“You have a beauty there, Baron, a perfect beauty,” said he, with the insane ingenuousness of youth. “I wonder how you can manage to part with it.”

“Ma foi,” said Aristide, with his back against the end of the dining-table and gazing at the masterpiece. “I have so many at the Château de Mireilles. When one begins to collect, you know – and when one’s grandfather and father have had also the divine mania – ”

“You were saying, M. le Baron,” said M. Poiron of Paris, “that your respected grandfather bought this direct from Corot himself.”

“A commission,” said Aristide. “My grandfather was a patron of Corot.”

“Do you like it, dear?” asked the Honourable Harry.

“Oh, yes!” replied the girl, fervently. “It is beautiful. I feel like Harry about it.” She turned to Aristide. “How can you part with it? Were you really in earnest when you said you would like me to come and see your collection?”

“For me,” said Aristide, “it would be a visit of enchantment.”

“You must take me, then,” she whispered to Harry. “The Baron has been telling us about his lovely old château.”

“Will you come, monsieur?” asked Aristide.

“Since I’m going to rob you of your picture,” said the young man, with smiling courtesy, “the least I can do is to pay you a visit of apology. Lovely!” said he, going up to the Corot.

Aristide took Miss Christabel, now more bewitching than ever with the glow of young love in her eyes and a flush on her cheek, a step or two aside and whispered: —

“But he is charming, your fiancé! He almost deserves his good fortune.”

“Why almost?” she laughed, shyly.

“It is not a man, but a demi-god, that would deserve you, mademoiselle.”

M. Poiron’s harsh voice broke out.

“You see, it is painted in the beginning of Corot’s later manner – it is 1864. There is the mystery which, when he was quite an old man, became a trick. If you were to put it up to auction at Christie’s it would fetch, I am sure, five thousand pounds.”

“That’s more than I can afford to give,” said the young man, with a laugh. “Mr. Smith mentioned something between three and four thousand pounds. I don’t think I can go above three.”

“I have nothing to do with it, my dear boy, nothing whatever,” said Mr. Smith, rubbing his hands. “You wanted a Corot. I said I thought I could put you on to one. It’s for the Baron here to mention his price. I retire now and for ever.”

“Well, Baron?” said the young man, cheerfully. “What’s your idea?”

Aristide came forward and resumed his place at the end of the table. The picture was in front of him beneath the strong electric light; on his left stood Mr. Smith and Poiron, on his right Miss Christabel and the Honourable Harry.

“I’ll not take three thousand pounds for it,” said Aristide. “A picture like that! Never!”

“I assure you it would be a fair price,” said Poiron.

“You mentioned that figure yourself only just now,” said Mr. Smith, with an ugly glitter in his little pig’s eyes.

“I presume, gentlemen,” said Aristide, “that this picture is my own property.” He turned engagingly to his host. “Is it not, cher ami?”

“Of course it is. Who said it wasn’t?”

“And you, M. Poiron, acknowledge formally that it is mine,” he asked, in French.

“Sans aucun doute.”

“Eh bien,” said Aristide, throwing open his arms and gazing round sweetly. “I have changed my mind. I do not sell the picture at all.”

“Not sell it? What the – what do you mean?” asked Mr. Smith, striving to mellow the gathering thunder on his brow.

“I do not sell,” said Aristide. “Listen, my dear friends!” He was in the seventh heaven of happiness – the principal man, the star, taking the centre of the stage. “I have an announcement to make to you. I have fallen desperately in love with mademoiselle.”

There was a general gasp. Mr. Smith looked at him, red-faced and open-mouthed. Miss Christabel blushed furiously and emitted a sound half between a laugh and a scream. Harry Ralston’s eyes flashed.

“My dear sir – ” he began.

“Pardon,” said Aristide, disarming him with the merry splendour of his glance. “I do not wish to take mademoiselle from you. My love is hopeless! I know it. But it will feed me to my dying day. In return for the joy of this hopeless passion I will not sell you the picture – I give it to you as a wedding present.”

He stood, with the air of a hero, both arms extended towards the amazed pair of lovers.

“I give it to you,” said he. “It is mine. I have no wish but for your happiness. In my Château de Mireilles there are a hundred others.”

“This is madness!” said Mr. Smith, bursting with suppressed indignation, so that his bald head grew scarlet.

“My dear fellow!” said Mr. Harry Ralston. “It is unheard-of generosity on your part. But we can’t accept it.”

“Then,” said Aristide, advancing dramatically to the picture, “I take it under my arm, I put it in a hansom cab, and I go with it back to Languedoc.”

Mr. Smith caught him by the wrist and dragged him out of the room.

“You little brute! Do you want your neck broken?”

“Do you want the marriage of your daughter with the rich and Honourable Harry broken?” asked Aristide.

“Oh, damn! Oh, damn! Oh, damn!” cried Mr. Smith, stamping about helplessly and half weeping.

Aristide entered the dining-room and beamed on the company.

“The kind Mr. Smith has consented. Mr. Honourable Harry and Miss Christabel, there is your Corot. And now, may I be permitted?” He rang the bell. A servant appeared.

“Some champagne to drink to the health of the fiancés,” he cried. “Lots of champagne.”

Mr. Smith looked at him almost admiringly.

“By Jove!” he muttered. “You have got a nerve.”

“Voilà!” said Aristide, when he had finished the story.

“And did they accept the Corot?” I asked.

“Of course. It is hanging now in the big house in Hampshire. I stayed with the kind Mr. Smith for six weeks,” he added, doubling himself up in his chair and hugging himself with mirth, “and we became very good friends. And I was at the wedding.”

“And what about their honeymoon visit to Languedoc?”

“Alas!” said Aristide. “The morning before the wedding I had a telegram – it was from my old father at Aigues-Mortes – to tell me that the historic Château de Mireilles, with my priceless collection of pictures, had been burned to the ground.”

IV

THE ADVENTURE OF THE FOUNDLING

There was a time when Aristide Pujol, in sole charge of an automobile, went gaily scuttering over the roads of France. I use the word advisedly. If you had heard the awful thing as it passed by you would agree that it is the only word adequate to express its hideous mode of progression. It was a two-seated, scratched, battered, ramshackle tin concern of hoary antiquity, belonging to the childhood of the race. Not only horses, but other automobiles shied at it. It was a vehicle of derision. Yet Aristide regarded it with glowing pride and drove it with such daredevilry that the parts must have held together only through sheer breathless wonder. Had it not been for the car, he told me, he would not have undertaken the undignified employment in which he was then engaged – the mountebank selling of a corn-cure in the public places of small towns and villages. It was not a fitting pursuit for a late managing director of a public company and an ex-Professor of French in an English Academy for Young Ladies. He wanted to rise, ma foi, not descend in the social scale. But when hunger drives —que voulez-vous? Besides, there was the automobile. It is true he had bound himself by his contract to exhibit a board at the back bearing a flaming picture of the success of the cure and a legend: “Guérissez vos cors,” and to display a banner with the same device, when weather permitted. But, still, there was the automobile.

It had been lying for many motor-ages in the shed of the proprietors of the cure, the Maison Hiéropath of Marseilles, neglected, forlorn, eaten by rust and worm, when suddenly an idea occurred to their business imagination. Why should they not use the automobile to advertise and sell the cure about the country? The apostle in charge would pay for his own petrol, take a large percentage on sales, and the usual traveller’s commission on orders that he might place. But where to find an apostle? Brave and desperate men came in high hopes, looked at the car, and, shaking their heads sorrowfully, went away. At last, at the loosest of ends, came Aristide. The splendour of the idea – a poet, in his way, was Aristide, and the Idea was the thing that always held him captive – the splendour of the idea of dashing up to hotels in his own automobile dazed him. He beheld himself doing his hundred kilometres an hour and trailing clouds of glory whithersoever he went. To a child a moth-eaten rocking-horse is a fiery Arab of the plains; to Aristide Pujol this cheat of the scrap-heap was a sixty-horse-power thunderer and devourer of space.

How they managed to botch up her interior so that she moved unpushed is a mystery which Aristide, not divining, could not reveal; and when and where he himself learned to drive a motor-car is also vague. I believe the knowledge came by nature. He was a fellow of many weird accomplishments. He could conjure; he could model birds and beasts out of breadcrumb; he could play the drum – so well that he had a kettle-drum hanging round his neck during most of his military service; he could make omelettes and rabbit-hutches; he could imitate any animal that ever emitted sound – a gift that endeared him to children; he could do almost anything you please – save stay in one place and acquire material possessions. The fact that he had never done a thing before was to him no proof of his inability to do it. In his superb self-confidence he would have undertaken to conduct the orchestra at Covent Garden or navigate a liner across the Atlantic. Knowing this, I cease to bother my head about so small a matter as the way in which he learned to drive a motor-car.

Behold him, then, one raw March morning, scuttering along the road that leads from Arles to Salon, in Provence. He wore a goat-skin coat and a goat-skin cap drawn down well over his ears. His handsome bearded face, with its lustrous, laughing eyes, peeped out curiously human amid the circumambient shagginess. There was not a turn visible in the long, straight road that lost itself in the far distant mist; not a speck on it signifying cart or creature. Aristide Pujol gave himself up to the delirium of speed and urged the half-bursting engine to twenty miles an hour. In spite of the racing-track surface, the crazy car bumped and jolted; the sides of the rickety bonnet clashed like cymbals; every valve wheezed and squealed; every nut seemed to have got loose and terrifically clattered; rattling noises, grunting noises, screeching noises escaped from every part; it creaked and clanked like an over-insured tramp-steamer in a typhoon; it lurched as though afflicted with loco-motor ataxy; and noisome vapours belched forth from the open exhaust-pipe as though the car were a Tophet on wheels. But all was music in the ears of Aristide. The car was going (it did not always go), the road scudded under him, and the morning air dashed stingingly into his face. For the moment he desired nothing more of life.