"Can you tell me the druggist"s where that can be procured?" asked Aristide.
The doctor shrugged his shoulders. "I tell you the truth. It is one of those pulmonary cases. Happy, she will live; unhappy, she will die."
"My poor Mme. Bidoux, what is to be done?" asked Aristide, after the doctor had gone off with his modest fee. "How are we to make her happy?"
"If only she could have news of her husband!" replied Mme. Bidoux.
Aristide"s anxieties grew heavier. It was November, when knickerbockered and culture-seeking tourists no longer fill the cheap hotels of Paris.
The profits of the Agence Pujol dwindled. Aristide lived on bread and cheese, and foresaw the time when cheese would be a sinful luxury.
Meanwhile Fleurette had her nourishing food, and grew more like the ghost of a lily every day. But her eyes followed Aristide, wherever he went in her presence, as if he were the G.o.d of her salvation.
One day Aristide, with an unexpected franc or two in his pocket, stopped in front of a _bureau de tabac_. A brown packet of caporal and a book of cigarette-papers--a cigarette rolled--how good it would be!
He hesitated, and his glance fell on a collection of foreign stamps exposed in the window. Among them were twelve Honduras stamps all postmarked. He stared at them, fascinated.
"_Mon brave Aristide!_" he cried. "If the _bon Dieu_ does not send you these vibrating inspirations, it is because you yourself have already conceived them!"
He entered the shop and emerged, not with caporal and cigarette-papers, but with the twelve Honduras stamps.
That night he sat up in his little bedroom at No. 213 bis, Rue Saint-Honore, until his candle failed, inditing a letter in English to Fleurette. At the head of his paper he wrote "Hotel Rosario, Honduras."
And at the end of the letter he signed the name of Reginald Batterby.
Where Honduras was, he had but a vague idea. For Fleurette, at any rate, it would be somewhere at the other end of the world, and she would not question any want of accuracy in local detail. Just before the light went out he read the letter through with great pride. Batterby alluded to the many letters he had posted from remote parts of the globe, gave glowing forecasts of the fortune that Honduras had in store for him, reminded her that he had placed sufficient funds for her maintenance in the hands of Aristide Pujol, and a.s.sured her that the time was not far off when she would be summoned to join her devoted husband.
"Mme. Bidoux was right," said he, before going to sleep. "This is the only way to make her happy."
The next day Fleurette received the letter. The envelope bore the postmarked Honduras stamp. It had been rubbed on the dusty pavement to take off the newness. It was in her husband"s handwriting. There was no mistake about it--it was a letter from Honduras.
"Are you happier now, little doubting female St. Thomas that you are?"
cried Aristide when she had told him the news.
She smiled at him out of grateful eyes, and touched his hand.
"Much happier, _mon bon ami_," she said, gently.
Later in the day she handed him a letter addressed to Batterby. It had no stamp.
"Will you post this for me, Aristide?"
Aristide put the letter in his pocket and turned sharply away, lest she should see a sudden rush of tears. He had not counted on this innocent trustfulness. He went to his room. The poor little letter! He had not the heart to destroy it. No; he would keep it till Batterby came; it was not his to destroy. So he threw it into a drawer.
Having once begun the deception, however, he thought it necessary to continue. Every week, therefore, he invented a letter from Batterby. To interest her he drew upon his Provencal imagination. He described combats with crocodiles, lion-hunts, feasts with terrific savages from the interior, who brought their lady wives chastely clad in petticoats made out of human teeth; he drew pictures of the town, a kind of palm-shaded Paris by the sea, where one ate ortolans and oysters as big as soup-plates, and where Chinamen with pigtails rode about the streets on camels. It was not a correct description of Honduras, but, all the same, an exotic atmosphere stimulating and captivating rose from the pages. With this it was necessary to combine expressions of affection.
At first it was difficult. Essential delicacy restrained him. He had also to keep in mind Batterby"s vernacular. To address Fleurette, impalpable creation of fairyland, as "old girl" was particularly distasteful. By degrees, however, the artist prevailed. And then at last the man himself took to forgetting the imaginary writer and poured out words of love, warm, true, and pa.s.sionate.
And every week Fleurette would smile and tell him the wondrous news, and would put into his hands an unstamped letter to post, which he, with a wrench of the heart, would add to the collection in the drawer.
Once she said, diffidently, with an unwonted blush and her pale blue eyes swimming: "I write English so badly. Won"t you read the letter and correct my mistakes?"
But Aristide laughed and licked the flap of the envelope and closed it.
"What has love to do with spelling and grammar? The good Reginald would prefer your bad English to all the turned phrases of the Academie Francaise."
"It is as you like, Aristide," said Fleurette, with wistful eyes.
Yet, in spite of the weekly letters, Fleurette continued to droop. The winter came, and Fleurette was no longer able to stay among the cabbages of Mme. Bidoux. She lay on her bed in the little room, ten feet by seven, away, away at the top of the house in the Rue Saint Honore. The doctor, informed of her comparative happiness, again shrugged his shoulders. There was nothing more to be done.
"She is dying, monsieur, for want of strength to live."
Then Aristide went about with a great heartache. Fleurette would die; she would never see the man she loved again. What would he say when he returned and learned the tragic story? He would not even know that Aristide, loving her, had been loyal to him. When the Director of the Agence Pujol personally conducted the clients of the Hotel du Soleil et de l"Ecosse to the Grand Trianon and pointed out the bed of the Empress Josephine he nearly broke down.
"What is the Empress doing now?"
What was Fleurette doing now? Going to join the Empress in the world of shadows.
The tourists talked after the manner of their kind.
"She must have found the bed very hard, poor dear."
"Give me an iron bedstead and a good old spring mattress."
"Ah, but, my dear sir, you forget. The Empress"s bed was slung on the back of tame panthers which Napoleon brought from Egypt."
It was hard to jest convincingly to the knickerbockered with death in one"s soul.
"Most beloved little Flower," ran the last letter that Fleurette received, "I have just had a cable from Aristide saying that you are very ill. I will come to you as soon as I can. _Ces pet.i.ts yeux de pervenche_--I am learning your language here, you see--haunt me day and night ..." etcetera, etcetera.
Aristide went up to her room with a great bunch of chrysanthemums. The letter peeped from under the pillow. Fleurette was very weak. Mme.
Bidoux, who, during Fleurette"s illness, had allowed her green grocery business to be personally conducted to the deuce by a youth of sixteen very much in love with the lady who sold sausages and other _charcuterie_ next door, had spread out the fortune-telling cards on the bed and was prophesying mendaciously. Fleurette took the flowers and clasped them to her bosom.
"No letter for _ce cher Reginald_?"
She shook her head. "I can write no more," she whispered.
She closed her eyes. Presently she said, in a low voice:--
"Aristide--if you kiss me, I think I can go to sleep."
He bent down to kiss her forehead. A fragile arm twined itself about his neck and he kissed her on the lips.
"She is sleeping," said Mme. Bidoux, after a while.
Aristide tiptoed out of the room.
And so died Fleurette. Aristide borrowed money from the kind-hearted Bocardon for a beautiful funeral, and Mme. Bidoux and Bocardon and a few neighbours and himself saw her laid to rest. When they got back to the Rue Saint Honore he told Mme. Bidoux about the letters. She wept and clasped him, weeping too, in her kind, fat old arms.
The next evening Aristide, coming back from his day"s work at the Hotel du Soleil et de l"Ecosse, was confronted in the shop by Mme. Bidoux, hands on broad hips.
"_Tiens, mon pet.i.t_," she said, without preliminary greeting. "You are an angel. I knew it. But that a man"s an angel is no reason for his being an imbecile. Read this."
She plucked a paper from her ap.r.o.n pocket and thrust it into his hand.
He read it, and blinked in amazement.