“We gamble for amusement,” said Aristide loftily.
“I’m sure I don’t,” cried Miss Betty, with merry eyes—and she looked adorable—“When I put my despised five-franc piece down on the table I want desperately to win, and when the horrid croupier rakes it up I want to hit him—Oh! I want to hit him hard.”
“And when you win?”
“I’m afraid I don’t think of the croupier at all,” said Miss Betty.
Her mother smiled indulgently and exchanged a glance with Aristide. This pleased him; there was an agreeable little touch of intimacy in it. It confirmed friendly relations with the mother. What were his designs as regards the daughter he did not know. They were not evil, certainly. For all his southern blood, Latin traditions and devil-may-care upbringing, Aristide, though perhaps not reaching our divinely set and therefore unique English standard of morality, was a decent soul; further, partly through his pedagogic sojourn among them, and partly through his childish adoration of the frank, fair-cheeked, northern goddesses talking the quick, clear speech, who passed him by when he was a hunted little devil of a chasseur in the Marseilles café, he had acquired a peculiarly imaginative reverence for English girls. The reverence, indeed, extended to English ladies generally. Owing to the queer circumstances of his life they were the only women of a class above his own, with whom he had associated on terms of equality. He had, then, no dishonorable designs as regards Miss Betty Errington. On the other hand, the thoughts of marriage had as yet not entered his head. You see, a Frenchman and an Englishman or an American, view marriage from entirely different angles. The Anglo-Saxon of honest instincts, attracted towards a pretty girl at once thinks of the possibilities of marriage; if he finds them infinitely remote, he makes romantic love to her in the solitude of his walks abroad or of his sleepless nights, and, in her presence, is as dumb and dismal as a freshly hooked trout. The equally honest Gaul does nothing of the kind. The attraction in itself is a stimulus to adventure. He makes love to her, just because it is the nature of a lusty son of Adam to make love to a pretty daughter of Eve. He lives in the present. The rest doesn’t matter. He leaves it to chance. I am speaking, be it understood, not of deep passions—that is a different matter altogether—but of the more superficial sexual attractions which we, as a race, take so seriously and puritanically, often to our most disastrous undoing, and which the Latin light-heartedly regards as essential, but transient phenomena of human existence. Aristide made the most respectful love in the world to Betty Errington, because he could not help himself. “Tonnerre de Dieu!” he cried when from my Britannic point of view, I talked to him on the subject. “You English whom I try to understand and can never understand are so funny! It would have been insulting to Miss Betty Errington—tiens!—a purple hyacinth of spring—that was what she was—not to have made love to her. Love to a pretty woman is like a shower of rain to hyacinths. It passes, it goes. Another one comes. Qu’importe? But the shower is necessary—Ah! sacré gredin, when will you comprehend?”
All this to make as clear as an Englishman, in the confidence of a changeling child of Provence can hope to do, the attitude of Aristide Pujol towards the sweet and innocent Betty Errington with her mouth like crumpled rose-petals, her ivory and peach-blossom complexion, her soft contralto voice, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, as per foregoing bald description, and as per what can, by imaginative effort, be pictured from the Pujolic hyperbole, by which I, the unimportant narrator of these chronicles, was dazzled and overwhelmed.
“I’m afraid I don’t think of the croupier at all,” said Betty.
“Do you think of no one who brings you good fortune?” asked Aristide. He threw the Matin on the grass, and, doubling himself up in his chair regarded her earnestly. “Last night you put five louis into my bank——”
“And I won forty. I could have hugged you.”
“Why didn’t you? Ah!” His arms spread wide and high. “What I have lost!”