“Evidently,” said Aristide, impressed by these preparations, “it is expected that I wash myself now and change my clothes, and that I sleep here for the night. And for all that the ravishing Miss Christabel is engaged to her honourable Harry, this is none the less a corner of Paradise.”
So Aristide attired himself in his best, which included a white tie and a pair of nearly new brown boots – a long task, as he found that his valise had been spirited away and its contents, including the white tie of ceremony (he had but one), hidden in unexpected drawers and wardrobes – and eventually went downstairs into the drawing-room. There he found Miss Christabel and, warming himself on the hearthrug, a bald-headed, beefy-faced Briton, with little pig’s eyes and a hearty manner, attired in a dinner-suit.
“My dear fellow,” said this personage, with outstretched hand, “I’m delighted to have you here. I’ve heard so much about you; and my little girl has been singing your praises.”
“Mademoiselle is too kind,” said Aristide.
“You must take us as you find us,” said Mr. Smith. “We’re just ordinary folk, but I can give you a good bottle of wine and a good cigar – it’s only in England, you know, that you can get champagne fit to drink and cigars fit to smoke – and I can give you a glimpse of a modest English home. I believe you haven’t a word for it in French.”
“Ma foi, no,” said Aristide, who had once or twice before heard this lunatic charge brought against his country. “In France the men all live in cafés, the children are all put out to nurse, and the women, saving the respect of mademoiselle – well, the less said about them the better.”
“England is the only place, isn’t it?” Mr. Smith declared, heartily. “I don’t say that Paris hasn’t its points. But after all – the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergères and that sort of thing soon pall, you know – soon pall.”
“Yet Paris has its serious side,” argued Aristide. “There is always the tomb of Napoleon.”
“Papa will never take me to Paris,” sighed the girl.
“You shall go there on your honeymoon,” said Mr. Smith.
Dinner was announced. Aristide gave his arm to Miss Christabel, and proud not only of his partner, but also of his frock-coat, white tie, and shiny brown boots, strutted into the dining-room. The host sat at the end of the beautifully set table, his daughter on his right, Aristide on his left. The meal began gaily. The kind Mr. Smith was in the best of humours.
“And how is our dear old friend, Jules Dancourt?” he asked.
“Tiens!” said Aristide, to himself, “we have a dear friend Jules Dancourt. Wonderfully well,” he replied at a venture, “but he suffers terribly at times from the gout.”
“So do I, confound it!” said Mr. Smith, drinking sherry.
“You and the good Jules were always sympathetic,” said Aristide. “Ah! he has spoken to me so often about you, the tears in his eyes.”
“Men cry, my dear, in France,” Mr. Smith explained. “They also kiss each other.”
“Ah, mais c’est un beau pays, mademoiselle!” cried Aristide, and he began to talk of France and to draw pictures of his country which set the girl’s eyes dancing. After that he told some of the funny little stories which had brought him disaster at the academy. Mr. Smith, with jovial magnanimity, declared that he was the first Frenchman he had ever met with a sense of humour.
“But I thought, Baron,” said he, “that you lived all your life shut up in that old château of yours?”
“Tiens!” thought Aristide. “I am still a Baron, and I have an old château.”
“Tell us about the château. Has it a fosse and a drawbridge and a Gothic chapel?” asked Miss Christabel.
“Which one do you mean?” inquired Aristide, airily. “For I have two.”
When relating to me this Arabian Nights’ adventure, he drew my special attention to his astuteness.
His host’s eye quivered in a wink. “The one in Languedoc,” said he.
Languedoc! Almost Pujol’s own country! With entire lack of morality, but with picturesque imagination, Aristide plunged into a description of that non-existent baronial hall. Fosse, drawbridge, Gothic chapel were but insignificant features. It had tourelles, emblazoned gateways, bastions, donjons, barbicans; it had innumerable rooms; in the salle des chevaliers two hundred men-at-arms had his ancestors fed at a sitting. There was the room in which François Premier had slept, and one in which Joan of Arc had almost been assassinated. What the name of himself or of his ancestors was supposed to be Aristide had no ghost of an idea. But as he proceeded with the erection of his airy palace he gradually began to believe in it. He invested the place with a living atmosphere; conjured up a staff of family retainers, notably one Marie-Joseph Loufoque, the wizened old major-domo, with his long white whiskers and blue and silver livery. There were also Madeline Mioulles, the cook, and Bernadet the groom, and La Petite Fripette the goose girl. Ah! they should see La Petite Fripette! And he kept dogs and horses and cows and ducks and hens – and there was a great pond whence frogs were drawn to be fed for the consumption of the household.
Miss Christabel shivered. “I should not like to eat frogs.”
“They also eat snails,” said her father.
“I have a snail farm,” said Aristide. “You never saw such interesting little animals. They are so intelligent. If you’re kind to them they come and eat out of your hand.”
“You’ve forgotten the pictures,” said Mr. Smith.
“Ah! the pictures,” cried Aristide, with a wide sweep of his arms. “Galleries full of them. Raphael, Michael Angelo, Wiertz, Reynolds – ”
He paused, not in order to produce the effect of a dramatic aposiopesis, but because he could not for the moment remember other names of painters.
“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.”