"That"s true--my luggage."
"Send it on by train, _chere amie_."
"When will it arrive at Carca.s.sonne?"
"Not to-morrow," said Pujol, "but perhaps next week or the week after.
Perhaps it may never come at all. One is never certain with these railway companies. But what does that matter?"
"What do you say?" cried the lady, sharply.
"It may arrive or it may not arrive; but you are rich enough, _chere amie_, not to think of a few camisoles and bits of jewellery."
"And my lace and my silk dress that I have brought to show your parents.
_Merci!_" she retorted, with a dangerous spark in her little eyes. "You think one is made of money, eh? You will soon find yourself mistaken, my friend. I would give you to understand----". She checked herself suddenly. "Monseigneur"--she turned to me with a resumption of the gracious manner of her bottle-decked counter at the Cafe de l"Univers--"you are too amiable. I appreciate your offer infinitely; but I am not going to entrust my luggage to the kind care of the railway company. _Merci, non._ They are robbers and thieves. Even if it did arrive, half the things would be stolen. Oh, I know them."
She shook the head of an experienced and self-reliant woman. No doubt, distrustful of banks as of railway companies, she kept her money hidden in her bedroom. I pitied my poor young friend; he would need all his gaiety to enliven the domestic side of the Cafe de l"Univers.
The lady having declined my invitation, I expressed my regrets; and Aristide, more emotional, voiced his sense of heart-rent desolation, and in a resigned tone informed me that it was time to start. I left the lovers and went to the hotel, where I paid the bill, summoned McKeogh, and lit a companionable pipe.
The car backed down the narrow street into the square and took up its position. We entered. McKeogh took charge of Aristide"s valise, tucked us up in the rug, and settled himself in his seat. The car started and we drove off, Aristide gallantly brandishing his hat and Mme. Gouga.s.se waving her lily hand, which happened to be hidden in an ill-fitting black glove.
"To Montpellier, as fast as you can!" he shouted at the top of his lungs to McKeogh. Then he sighed as he threw himself luxuriously back. "Ah, this is better than a train. Amelie doesn"t know what a mistake she has made!"
The elderly victim of my furious entry was lounging, in spite of the mistral, by the grim machicolated gateway. Instead of scowling at me he raised his hat respectfully as we pa.s.sed. I touched my cap, but Aristide returned the salute with the grave politeness of royalty.
"This is a place," said he, "which I would like never to behold again."
In a few moments we were whirling along the straight, white road between the interminable black vineyards, and past the dilapidated homesteads of the vine-folk and wayside cafes that are scattered about this unjoyous corner of France.
"Well," said he, suddenly, "what do you think of my _fiancee_?"
Politeness and good taste forbade expression of my real opinion. I murmured plat.i.tudes to the effect that she seemed to be a most sensible woman, with a head for business.
"She"s not what we in French call _jolie, jolie_; but what of that?
What"s the good of marrying a pretty face for other men to make love to?
And, as you English say, there"s none of your confounded sentiment about her. But she has the most flourishing cafe in Carca.s.sonne; and, when the ceiling is newly decorated, provided she doesn"t insist on too much gold leaf and too many naked babies on clouds--it"s astonishing how women love naked babies on clouds--it will be the snuggest place in the world.
May I ask for one of your excellent cigarettes?"
I handed him the case from the pocket of the car.
"It was there that I made her acquaintance," he resumed, after having lit the cigarette from my pipe. "We met, we talked, we fixed it up. She is not the woman to go by four roads to a thing. She did me the honour of going straight for me. Ah, but what a wonderful woman! She rules that cafe like a kingdom; a Semiramis, a Queen Elizabeth, a Catherine de"
Medici. She sits enthroned behind the counter all day long and takes the money and counts the saucers and smiles on rich clients, and if a waiter in a far corner gives a bit of sugar to a dog she spots it, and the waiter has a deuce of a time. That woman is worth her weight in thousand-franc notes. She goes to bed every night at one, and gets up in the morning at five. And virtuous! Didn"t Solomon say that a virtuous woman was more precious than rubies? That"s the kind of wife the wise man chooses when he gives up the giddy ways of youth. Ah, my dear sir, over and over again these last two or three days my dear old parents--I have been on a visit to them in Aigues-Mortes--have commended my wisdom.
Amelie, who is devoted to me, left her cafe in Carca.s.sonne to make their acquaintance and receive their blessing before our marriage, also to show them the lace on her _dessous_ and her new silk dress. They are too old to take the long journey to Carca.s.sonne. "My son," they said, "you are making a marriage after our own hearts. We are proud of you. Now we can die perfectly content." I was wrong, perhaps, in saying that Amelie has no sentiment," he continued, after a short pause. "She adores me. It is evident. She will not allow me out of her sight. Ah, my dear friend, you don"t know what a happy man I am."
For a brilliant young man of five-and-thirty, who was about to marry a horrible Megaera ten or twelve years his senior, he looked unhealthily happy. There was no doubt that his handsome roguery had caught the woman"s fancy. She was at the dangerous age, when even the most ferro-concrete-natured of women are apt to run riot. She was comprehensible, and pardonable. But the man baffled me. He was obviously marrying her for her money; but how in the name of Diogenes and all the cynics could he manage to look so confoundedly joyful about it?
The mistral blew bitterly. I snuggled beneath the rug and hunched up my shoulders so as to get my ears protected by my coat-collar. Aristide, sufficiently protected by his goat"s hide, talked like a shepherd on a May morning. Why he took for granted my interest in his unromantic, not to say sordid, courtship I knew not; but he gave me the whole history of it from its modest beginnings to its now penultimate stage. From what I could make out--for the mistral whirled many of his words away over unheeding Provence--he had entered the Cafe de l"Univers one evening, a human derelict battered by buffeting waves of Fortune, and, finding a seat immediately beneath Mme. Gouga.s.se"s _comptoir_, had straightway poured his grievances into a feminine ear and, figuratively speaking, rested his weary heart upon a feminine bosom. And his buffetings and grievances and wearinesses? Whence came they? I asked the question point-blank.
[Ill.u.s.tration: HAD STRAIGHTWAY POURED HIS GRIEVANCES INTO A FEMININE EAR]
"Ah, my dear friend," he answered, kissing his gloved finger-tips, "she was adorable!"
"Who?" I asked, taken aback. "Mme. Gouga.s.se?"
"_Mon Dieu_, no!" he replied. "Not Mme. Gouga.s.se. Amelie is solid, she is virtuous, she is jealous, she is capacious; but I should not call her adorable. No; the adorable one was twenty--delicious and English; a peach-blossom, a zephyr, a summer night"s dream, and the most provoking little witch you ever saw in your life. Her father and herself and six of her compatriots were touring through France. They had circular tickets. So had I. In fact, I was a miniature Thomas Cook and Son to the party. I provided them with the discomforts of travel and supplied erroneous information. _Que voulez-vous?_ If people ask you for the history of a pair of Louis XV. corsets, in a museum gla.s.s case, it"s much better to stimulate their imagination by saying that they were worn by Joan of Arc at the Battle of Agincourt than to dull their minds by your ignorance. _Eh bien_, we go through the chateaux of the Loire, through Poitiers and Angouleme, and we come to Carca.s.sonne. You know Carca.s.sonne? The great grim _cite_, with its battlements and bastions and barbicans and fifty towers on the hill looking over the rubbishy modern town? We were there. The rest of the party were buying picture postcards of the _gardien_ at the foot of the Tour de l"Inquisition. The man who invented picture postcards ought to have his statue on the top of the Eiffel Tower. The millions of headaches he has saved! People go to places now not to exhaust themselves by seeing them, but to buy picture postcards of them. The rest of the party, as I said, were deep in picture postcards. Mademoiselle and I promenaded outside. We often promenaded outside when the others were buying picture postcards," he remarked, with an extra twinkle in his bright eyes. "And the result? Was it my fault? We leaned over the parapet. The wind blew a confounded _meche_--what do you call it----?"
"Strand?"
"Yes--strand of her hair across her face. She let it blow and laughed and did not move. Didn"t I say she was a little witch? If there"s a Provencal ever born who would not have kissed a girl under such provocation I should like to have his mummy. I kissed her. She kept on laughing. I kissed her again. I kissed her four times. At the beginning of the fourth kiss out came her father from the postcard shop. He waited till the end of it and then announced himself. He announced himself in such ungentlemanly terms that I was forced to let the whole party, including the adorable little witch, go on to Pau by themselves, while I betook my broken heart to the Cafe de l"Univers."
"And there you found consolation?"
"I told my sad tale. Amelie listened and called the manager to take charge of the _comptoir_, and poured herself out a gla.s.s of Frontignan.
Amelie always drinks Frontignan when her heart is touched. I came the next day and the next. It was pouring with rain day and night--and Carca.s.sonne in rain is like Hades with its furnaces put out by human tears--and the Cafe de l"Univers like a little warm corner of Paradise stuck in the midst of it."
"And so that"s how it happened?"
"That"s how it happened. _Ma foi!_ When a lady asks a _galant homme_ to marry her, what is he to do? Besides, did I not say that the Cafe de l"Univers was the most prosperous one in Carca.s.sonne? I"m afraid you English, my dear friend, have such sentimental ideas about marriage.
Now, we in France----_Attendez, attendez!_" He suddenly broke off his story, lurched forward, and gripped the back of the front seat.
"To the right, man, to the right!" he cried excitedly to McKeogh.
We had reached the point where the straight road from Aigues-Mortes branches into a fork, one road going to Montpellier, the other to Nimes.
Montpellier being to the west, McKeogh had naturally taken the left fork.
"To the right!" shouted Aristide.
McKeogh pulled up and turned his head with a look of protesting inquiry.
I intervened with a laugh.
"You"re wrong in your geography, M. Pujol. Besides, there is the signpost staring you in the face. This is the way to Montpellier."
"But, my dear, heaven-sent friend, I no more want to go to Montpellier than you do!" he cried. "Montpellier is the last place on earth I desire to visit. You want to go to Nimes, and so do I. To the right, chauffeur."
"What shall I do, sir?" asked McKeogh.
I was utterly bewildered. I turned to the goat-skin-clad, pointed-bearded, bright-eyed Aristide, who, sitting bolt upright in the car, with his hands stretched out, looked like a parody of the G.o.d Pan in a hard felt hat.
"You don"t want to go to Montpellier?" I asked, stupidly.
"No--ten thousand times no; not for a king"s ransom."
"But your four thousand francs--your meeting Mme. Gouga.s.se"s train--your getting on to Carca.s.sonne?"
"If I could put twenty million continents between myself and Carca.s.sonne I"d do it," he explained, with frantic gestures. "Don"t you understand?
The good Lord who is always on my side sent you especially to deliver me out of the hands of that unspeakable Xantippe. There are no four thousand francs. I"m not going to meet her train at Montpellier, and if she marries anyone to-morrow at Carca.s.sonne it will not be Aristide Pujol."
I shrugged my shoulders.