“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.”
IV
THE ADVENTURE OF THE FOUNDLING
There was a time when Aristide Pujol, in sole charge of an automobile, went gaily scuttering over the roads of France. I use the word advisedly. If you had heard the awful thing as it passed by you would agree that it is the only word adequate to express its hideous mode of progression. It was a two-seated, scratched, battered, ramshackle tin concern of hoary antiquity, belonging to the childhood of the race. Not only horses, but other automobiles shied at it. It was a vehicle of derision. Yet Aristide regarded it with glowing pride and drove it with such daredevilry that the parts must have held together only through sheer breathless wonder. Had it not been for the car, he told me, he would not have undertaken the undignified employment in which he was then engaged—the mountebank selling of a corn-cure in the public places of small towns and villages. It was not a fitting pursuit for a late managing director of a public company and an ex-Professor of French in an English Academy for Young Ladies. He wanted to rise, ma foi, not descend in the social scale. But when hunger drives—que voulez-vous? Besides, there was the automobile. It is true he had bound himself by his contract to exhibit a board at the back bearing a flaming picture of the success of the cure and a legend: “Guérissez vos cors,” and to display a banner with the same device, when weather permitted. But, still, there was the automobile.