A week after he had taken up his work in the City, under my friend Blessington, I saw the delighted and prosperous man again. It was a Saturday and he came to lunch at my house.
“Tiens!” said he, when he had recounted his success in the office, “it is four years since I was in England?”
“Yes,” said I, with a jerk of memory. “Time passes quickly.”
“It is three years since I lost little Jean.”
“Who is little Jean?” I asked.
“Did I not tell you when I saw you last in Paris?”
“No.”
“It is strange. I have been thinking about him and my heart has been aching for him all the time. You must hear. It is most important.” He lit a cigar and began.
It was then that he told me the story of which I have already related in these chronicles:[A] how he was scouring France in a ramshackle automobile as the peripatetic vendor of a patent corn cure and found a babe of nine months lying abandoned in the middle of that silent road through the wilderness between Salon and Arles; how instead of delivering it over to the authorities, he adopted it and carried it about with him from town to town, a motor accessory sometimes embarrassing, but always divinely precious; how an evil day came upon him at Aix-en-Provence when, the wheezing automobile having uttered its last gasp, he found his occupation gone; how, no longer being able to care for le petit Jean, he left him with a letter and half his fortune outside the door of a couple of English maiden ladies who, staying in the same hotel, had manifested great interest in the baby and himself; and how, in the dead of the night, he had tramped away from Aix-en-Provence in the rain, his pockets light and his heart as heavy as lead.
“And I have never heard of my little Jean again,” said Aristide.