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 amus.e.m.e.nt. 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 pa.s.s 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 amus.e.m.e.nt," 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 G.o.ddesses talking the quick, clear speech, who pa.s.sed him by when he was a hunted little devil of a _cha.s.seur_ in the Ma.r.s.eilles cafe, he had acquired a peculiarly imaginative reverence for English girls. The reverence, indeed, extended to English ladies generally.
Owing to the queer circ.u.mstances of his life they were the only women of a cla.s.s above his own, with whom he had a.s.sociated 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 l.u.s.ty 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 pa.s.sions--that is a different matter altogether--but of the more superficial s.e.xual 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 pa.s.ses, 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 att.i.tude 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 gra.s.s, 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 sh.e.l.l 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."