The Sentimental Adventures of Jimmy Bulstrode

by Marie Van Vorst

Of which celestial knowledge Bulstrode had his doubts. It was close to twelve, and dismissing Prosper for the night, he took his cigar out on the terrace and to what solitude his garden might extend. Before long the noise of the music subsided, the people, tired out with hours of festivity, dispersed, and the alley settled into quiet. From the distance now and then came the soft, dull explosion of fireworks, the rumble and roar of Paris was a little accelerated; otherwise the silence about Bulstrode's garden grew and deepened as the night advanced.

It was rare for him to allow himself to be the object of his own personal consideration, or that indeed he at all thought of himself, and when he did the man he had long ignored had his revenge and made him pay up old scores.

On the late afternoon of this very day he was to have walked for miles through the Fontainebleau woods with Mrs. Falconer, and instead he had fled. Pleading a sudden summons to Paris, he left Fontainebleau.

It was well past four o'clock when he at last threw his cigar away and rose. He had been musing all night in his chair.

A sudden gust of noise blew down the quiet little street, the sound of loud singing and the shrill staccato of a woman's laugh. By the time the revellers had passed his house and the hubbub had died away, Bulstrode, with an idea at length of going up to his room, walked across the salon and prepared to extinguish the electricity, but the sound of some one tapping without caught his ear, and going over to the window that gave on the street, he looked out. From end to end the alley was deserted except for the figure of a woman. As he saw in the ruddy light of early morning she huddled against the threshold of the hôtel meublé—knocking persistently at the door. The tattered gauze of her dress, whose bold decolletée left her neck and shoulders bare, a garland of roses on the bandeaux of her black hair, she epitomized the carnival just come to its end—its exhaustion, its excess, spent at length, surfeited, knocking for entrance at last to rest. Bulstrode, as he remarked the sinuous figure that swayed as the woman stood, exclaimed to himself with illumination: "Why, she's the fish, of course! Simone's mother! And this is the state in which she goes to the miserable child!"

As, knocking at intervals, the object leaned there a few moments longer, evidently scarcely able to stand, his pity wakened and he slowly left the window, shut in its blinds, and crossed his ante-chamber, where the artificial light of electricity was met by the full sunshine of the breaking day streaming in through the open window of his terrace. Not entirely sure of his motive or to what excess of folly it might lead him, he nevertheless opened wide his front door, only to see that the woman on the opposite street had gone. She had been let in. With a glance of relief up and down the street where the confetti in disks of lilac and yellow and red lay in dirty piles or swam on the flushing gutters that sparkled in the light, Bulstrode shot to his door on the Parisian world and after a nuit blanche went upstairs to his rooms.

And there had intensely come to him during the period of his dressing the next morning after a tardy wakening the idea of taking the child, of—he was certain it could be done—buying the mother off. He would, in short, if he could, legally adopt the Parisian gamine for his own. It would give him a distinct interest, and life was empty for want of one; this, in a manner, however short of perfect, would supply the need of a loving living creature in his environment and would—his thrill at the idea proved to him how lonely he had been—give him companionship and a responsibility of a tender, personal sort. He could make a home at last for a child. Men are more paternal than they are credited with being, and Bulstrode directly foresaw delightful causeries in the future with—(he knew many women)—with one woman whose pretty taste, whose wit and humor, should counsel him in his new rôle. Mrs. Falconer would dress Simone—her hand should be wonderfully in it all. Bulstrode had let his fancy linger over the scheme. Certainly, during the hour in which he spun his fanciful plan, there was not one bar to its execution. Nor did there come to him any hint of its intrinsic sterility, or the idea that it was possibly an excuse for the interweaving of another interest more closely with his life—no idea that he was simply strengthening an old bond, or by means of this little tug pushing a mighty vessel nearer port.

He almost happily mused until a nursery grew out of thin air, a child's little garments lay on a chair, and festivities, whose charm is of the most mysterious, illuminated his reverie. Bulstrode, even without the shudder of the climatician, contemplated the rigors of his own country, for a rosy room grew out of his dream, fire-lit and fragrant with fir and holly, and in the centre shone The Tree, whose shiny globes and marvels were reflected till they danced in a child's eyes.

There had been an hour earlier the quick, brusque dash of a French thunder-storm, and the cooled air came refreshingly from the garden as Bulstrode stood out on the terrace before going into the noonday breakfast. Prosper, fetching his master's coffee at nine o'clock, had been informed that they were leaving Paris that day and received instructions as to the setting in order of the hôtel before returning it to its proprietor. Where his wanderings were to take him Bulstrode had not as yet made up his mind. It, after all, mattered so very little what a bachelor did with his leisure! It was the height of the season along the seacoast and a dozen places brilliantly beckoned; there were tri-weekly boats to the country, where he should most properly be.

"There is," he with recurrent leeway to his inclinations reflected, "always plenty of time to decide what one does not want to do!"