must go now, monsieur. He must not find me here with you. I am suffering enough already from his reproaches. Ah! it is unjust – unjust!” she cried, clenching her hands, while the tears again started into her eyes, and the corners of her pretty lips twitched with pain. “Indeed,” she added, “I know it has been wrong of me to talk to you like this. But que voulez-vous? It was not my fault. Adieu, monsieur.”
At the sight of her standing before him in her woeful beauty, Aristide’s pulses throbbed.
“It is not adieu – it is au revoir, Mme. Zette,” he cried.
She protested tearfully. It was farewell. Aristide darted to his rejected hat and clapped it on the back of his head. He joined her and swore that he would see her again. It was not Aristide Pujol who would allow her to be rent in pieces by the jaws of that crocodile, M. Bocardon. Faith, he would defend her to the last drop of his blood. He would do all manner of gasconading things.
“But what can you do, my poor M. Pujol?” she asked.
“You will see,” he replied.
They parted. He watched her until she became a speck and, having joined the other speck, her husband, passed out of sight. Then he set out through the burning gardens towards the Hôtel du Luxembourg, at the other end of the town.
Aristide had fallen in love. He had fallen in love with Provençal fury. He had done the same thing a hundred times before; but this, he told himself, was the coup de foudre– the thunderbolt. The beautiful Arlésienne filled his brain and his senses. Nothing else in the wide world mattered. Nothing else in the wide world occupied his mind. He sped through the hot streets like a meteor in human form. A stout man, sipping syrup and water in the cool beneath the awning of the Café de la Bourse, rose, looked wonderingly after him, and resumed his seat, wiping a perspiring brow.
A short while afterwards Aristide, valise in hand, presented himself at the bureau of the Hôtel de la Curatterie. It was a shabby little hotel, with a shabby little oval sign outside, and was situated in the narrow street of the same name. Within, it was clean and well kept. On the right of the little dark entrance-hall was the salle à manger, on the left the bureau and an unenticing hole labelled salon de correspondance. A very narrow passage led to the kitchen, and the rest of the hall was blocked by the staircase. An enormous man with a simple, woe-begone fat face and a head of hair like a circular machine-brush was sitting by the bureau window in his shirt-sleeves. Aristide addressed him.
“M. Bocardon?”
“At your service, monsieur.”
“Can I have a bedroom?”
“Certainly.” He waved a hand towards a set of black sample boxes studded with brass nails and bound with straps that lay in the hall. “The omnibus has brought your boxes. You are M. Lambert?”
“M. Bocardon,” said Aristide, in a lordly way, “I am M. Aristide Pujol, and not a commercial traveller. I have come to see the beauties of Nîmes, and have chosen this hotel because I have the honour to be a distant relation of your wife, Mme. Zette Bocardon, whom I have not seen for many years. How is she?”
“Her health is very good,” replied M. Bocardon, shortly. He rang a bell.
A dilapidated man in a green baize apron emerged from the dining-room and took Aristide’s valise.
“No. 24,” said M. Bocardon. Then, swinging his massive form halfway through the narrow bureau door, he called down the passage, “Euphémie!”
A woman’s voice responded, and in a moment the woman herself appeared, a pallid, haggard, though more youthful, replica of Zette, with the dark rings of sleeplessness or illness beneath her eyes which looked furtively at the world.
“Tell your sister,” said M. Bocardon, “that a relation of yours has come to stay in the hotel.”
He swung himself back into the bureau and took no further notice of the guest.
“A relation?” echoed Euphémie, staring at the smiling, lustrous-eyed Aristide, whose busy brain was wondering how he could mystify this unwelcome and unexpected sister.
“Why, yes. Aristide, cousin to your good Aunt Léonie at Raphèle. Ah – but you are too young to remember me.”
“I will tell Zette,” she said, disappearing down the narrow passage.
Aristide went to the doorway, and stood there looking out into the not too savoury street. On the opposite side, which was in the shade, the tenants of the modest little shops sat by their doors or on chairs on the pavement. There was considerable whispering among them and various glances were cast at him. Presently footsteps behind caused him to turn. There was Zette. She had evidently been weeping since they had parted, for her eyelids were red. She started on beholding him.
“You?”
He laughed and shook her hesitating hands.
“It is I, Aristide. But you have grown! Pécaïre! How you have grown!” He swung her hands apart and laughed merrily in her bewildered eyes. “To think that the little Zette in pigtails and short check skirt should have grown into this beautiful woman! I compliment you on your wife, M. Bocardon.”
M. Bocardon did not reply, but Aristide’s swift glance noticed a spasm of pain shoot across his broad face.
“And the good Aunt Léonie? Is she well? And does she still make her matelotes of eels? Ah, they were good, those matelotes.”
“Aunt Léonie died two years ago,” said Zette.
“The poor woman! And I who never knew. Tell me about her.”
The salle à manger door stood open. He drew her thither by his curious fascination. They entered, and he shut the door behind them.
“Voilà!” said he. “Didn’t I tell you I should see you again?”
“Vous avez un fameux toupet, vous!” said Zette, half angrily.
He laughed, having been accused of confounded impudence many times before in the course of his adventurous life.
“If I told my husband he would kill you.”
“Precisely. So you’re not going to tell him. I adore you. I have come to protect you. Foi de Provençal.”
“The only way to protect me is to prove my innocence.”
“And then?”
She drew herself up and looked him straight between the eyes.
“I’ll recognize that you have a loyal heart, and will be your very good friend.”
“Mme. Zette,” cried Aristide, “I will devote my life to your service. Tell me the particulars of the affair.”
“Ask M. Bocardon.” She left him, and sailed out of the room and past the bureau with her proud head in the air.
If Aristide Pujol had the rapturous idea of proving the innocence of Mme. Zette, triumphing over the fat pig of a husband, and eventually, in a fantastic fashion, carrying off the insulted and spotless lady to some bower of delight (the castle in Perpignan – why not?), you must blame, not him, but Provence, whose sons,
