When Raikes had parted from the Sepoy, a degree of his customary
hardness and assurance was evident in his manner.
He had been able to comment sagaciously upon the extraordinary
narrative, and had appropriated as much of the sapphire as his greedy
glance and covetous memory could bear away; but now that he pursued his
way along the dimly lighted hallway which led to his apartment, a
singularly thoughtful mood oppressed him.
This phenomenon, due, in part, to the cessation of the drowsy cadences
of the Sepoy and the absence of the fascination and gleam of the
sapphire, was relegated by Raikes to the overtures of approaching
drowsiness.
And yet the startling episode which confronted Prince Otondo in the
evening's instalment of this Oriental complication recurred to his mind
again and again.
Strangely, too, Raikes did not comment upon the singular fact of the
narrative itself.
Why should the Sepoy take the trouble to relate it to him, and why
should he, of all unconcerned and self-centered men, manifest such an
unusual interest in a recital which lacked every practical feature and
had nothing but the weird to commend it?
If he asked himself these questions, it was with the impersonality of
lethargy, for they were dismissed as readily as they presented
themselves.
With such sedative queries, which were gradually diminishing from fabric
to ravel, Raikes finally reached his room and, securely bolting the
door, began to prepare to retire.
This was not an elaborate proceeding.
His outer garments removed, he had only to seek the seclusion of the
bedclothes, clad in the remainder of his attire.
In this manner he economized on the cost of a night-robe and the time it
would consume to don and doff such a superfluity.
At all events, if such was not his sordid reasoning, the promptness with
which he fell asleep indicated that he did not propose to squander
useless time in wakeful speculation upon the intangible nothings to
which his recollection of the narrative began to fade.
However, if Raikes had succeeded in passing the boundaries of slumber,
he had admitted, at the same time, extravagances of which he would never
have been guilty in his wakeful hours, for he found himself so engaged
in all sorts of uneasy shiftlessness and inconsiderate expenditure that
when morning came and he awoke, as usual, with the sunrise, he resumed
his customary identity, peevish and unrefreshed.
For a moment he sat with his knees huddled to his chin, over which his
eyes peered like vermin in the wainscoting, and then, urged by an
impulse whose source he could not determine, he leaped with surprising
agility to the floor and proceeded to the false radiator.
For a short space of inexplicable indecision he stood with his hands
resting upon the button which released the fastenings in the rear, an
uneasy thoughtfulness converging the ugly wrinkles downward to the root
of his nose and contracting his eyebrows with senile apprehension.
Suddenly his wonted decision asserted itself. He pressed the button and
the radiator swung toward him; a few moments later the inner
compartments responded to his manipulation, and the last door opened.
Apparently everything was as he had left it.
To his rapid enumeration the quantity of the small bags, containing his
beloved coin, remained undisturbed. But, upon nearer regard, one of
them--that within easiest reach--seemed to betray, through its canvas
sides, a variety of unusually sharp angles and definite lines.
With a suffocating sensation of impending disaster, Raikes grasped the
bag.
It pended from his tense grip with a frightful lightness. He caught up
its neighbor for further confirmation. It responded with reassuring bulk
and weight. But this one from which all specific gravity seemed to have
departed--what did it contain?
With trembling hands the terrified man unfastened the cord which bound
it and inverted the bag over the table.
Instead of the sharp, musical collision and clink of metal, a sodden
succession of thuds smote his ears.
With a shriek of utter wonderment and alarm, Raikes stood erect and
petrified.
His hands fell, with inert palsies, to his sides. His eyes seemed about
to start from his head, for, looming dully to his aching gaze, in place
of the coin he had so confidently hidden away, was a rayless, squalid
heap of small, black coals.
A moment he stood lean and limp; every particle of the fever which
consumed him concentrated in his starting eyes, which turned, with
savage inquiry, toward the fastenings of the door.
The next instant, with a leap like that of a wild beast, he reached the
threshold, examined the bolt with vivid glance and searching fingers,
then raised his hand to his forehead with a gesture of utter
distraction.
Nothing had been disturbed.
Even the check-pin which he had inserted over the bar for additional
security was in place.
The only other possible means of entrance was by a window at the other
extreme of the room.
But this was not to be considered, for it opened, with sheer
precipitation, upon the unrelieved front of the house.
The windows adjacent were removed at a distance which could afford no
possible basis from which to reach the one from which Raikes glared so
grimly.
Moreover, the shutters had been clasped and the inner sash secured.
The conclusion was inevitable.
No one had entered the room during the night. It was impossible for a
stranger to have access to the apartment during the day unobserved, and
the recess behind the radiator was known to himself alone.
Nevertheless there was the absurd substitution.
It was incredible!
The secret repository was of his own construction.
The room was secure against intrusion.
And opposed to all this the incontrovertible proof of his loss, a
catastrophe all the more agonizing since the logic of the situation
obliged him to eliminate any one from suspicion.
Raikes had always considered a loss of this character the climax of
malignant fate. He had never been able to contemplate it without the
mortal shudder which usually communicates its chill to a loving parent
confronted with the prospect of the departure of a dear one.
The recess in the wall contained all that Raikes held dear in the world;
every spasm of fear, each contraction of the heart, always began and
concluded with the button which moved its protecting bolts.
But now a new element added its ugly emphasis; there was something
supernatural about the episode.
Convinced of the impossibility of thievery in any of its ordinary forms,
he was bewildered as to the inexplicable means of his present
predicament.
His sense of security was shaken.
He promised himself to stand guard over his belongings jealously that
day, and to make assurance doubly sure at night.
In the meantime Raikes decided to confide his misfortune to no one.
There was a meager possibility that the guilty one might be misled by
his silence; he had heard of such cases; he had known of the culprit
offering condolences to the silent victim on the assumption that the
latter had discussed his mishap with others.
He would wait, and with Raikes to determine was to do.
With his obnoxious individuality rendered several degrees more
unendurable by his catastrophe, if that was possible, Raikes, having
assumed that portion of his attire in which he had not slept,
double-locked the door of his room from the outside with a brace of keys
that, in all likelihood, had not their duplicates in existence, and
proceeded to the dining-room, whither he had been preceded by his
parchment of a sister.
At once he began to rustle his exhausted sensibilities with an added
menace, awakened by a manifest desire on the part of the famished woman
to satisfy the cravings of an ungratified hunger with an extra help of
bread and butter.
As he looked upon the attenuated creature, with a morose reflection of
his loss, the latter, with a rebellion which she could not control,
selected with trembling fortitude a thick slice of bread, which she
buttered liberally and began to devour with pathetic haste, despite the
rebuking gleam of the rat eyes opposite, an episode which, added to his
already perturbed mind, exasperated his brutal temper to the point of
snarling remonstrance, which was fortunately denied its utterance by the
opportune arrival of the Sepoy, who smiled blandly upon the chill
acknowledgment of the shriveled Raikes.
The Sepoy, at the conclusion of a hearty repast, which the spinster
witnessed with famished envy and Raikes considered with ascetic
disapproval, looked, with a scarcely concealed disdain, into the
furtive, troubled eyes of the miser and said: "I will see you to-night?"
"Yes," replied Raikes promptly. "I will be there."
"Very well; I will not return until the time appointed," said the Sepoy.
"I expect to show you a rarity."
"Another brilliant aggravation?" asked Raikes.
"Ah!" laughed the Sepoy, "is that your estimation of the sapphire?"
"Yes," returned Raikes with acid frankness. "To be permitted to
appropriate the gleam and the radiance; to comprehend the cunning of the
facets; to appraise its magnificent bulk intelligently, and witness the
careless possession by another of all these beatitudes, I think that
constitutes an aggravation."
"It has been known to degenerate into a temptation," continued the
Sepoy, reflecting the cynical humor of the other.
"Aye!" admitted Raikes, "and has concluded in surrender."
With this the strangely assorted trio left the table directly, the Sepoy
to his problematical business, the spinster to escape the reprimand
foreshadowed in the eyes of her brother, and Raikes to keep his
treasures under malicious surveillance.
All that day his diseased mind tortured itself with impossible theories
and absurd speculations, until his attempts to explain the curious
substitution degenerated into a perfect chaos of despair and
bewilderment.
With an impatience he could not explain, Raikes at last presented
himself at the apartment of the Sepoy as the hour of ten was striking.
He was greeted by the curious individual within with a demeanor which
somehow offended Raikes with the impression that his prompt eagerness
was the subject of amused calculation.
His irritation, however, was not permitted to develop, for no sooner had
he seated himself in the chair indicated by his host than the latter
placed upon the table, within easy reach of his harassed visitor, a
small box of leather and directed him to press the spring.
Anticipating something of the nature of the contents of the case from
the material of which it was made, Raikes, forgetting for the moment the
futility of the day's researches, pressed his bony thumb upon the
spring, and at once the lid flew back like a protest, disclosing the
most superb diamond it had ever been his misfortune to see and not
possess.
"Ah!" he cried in an ecstasy of tantalized contemplation, "the glass,
the glass! Anything so precious must have had commensurate treatment.
What color, what clarity, what bulk!" and as the unhappy creature
yielded to that species of intoxication which even the grace of God
seems unable to ameliorate, the Sepoy, with the easy poise and balance
of intonation and phrase which had served as such facile vehicles for
the previous instalments, began:
"When the bewildered prince realized the meaning of the worthless heap
in the recess, and calculated, with familiar appraisement, the immense
loss represented by the senseless substitution, he stood for a moment
destitute of all dignity and as impotent as the meanest of his
household.
"His thin, fine lips, which usually held such firm partnership and
divided his words with such cynical scission, relaxed separately into
the inane lines of superstitious fear, and the luster of his restless
eyes seemed to have degenerated into that surrounding dullness of sickly
white which would have provided the impressionable Lal Lu with an easy
fortitude to deny the approaches of this semi-potentate.
"The next instant, like the doubled blade of Toledo steel, the prince
recoiled to his lithe stature, and the customary brightness of his eyes
returned shadowed with a degree of crafty reflection.
"One by one, lest a stray gem might be collected with the worthless
debris, like the crew of Ulysses clinging to the sheep of the Cyclops,
Prince Otondo removed the pebbles which intruded their sordid presence
in this scintillant treasure-trove like a motley of base subjects in an
assemblage of the nobility.
"When the last of these worthless objects had been cleared from the
recess, the prince closed the panel, and seating himself before the
rayless heap, surrendered himself to moody reflection, like a disabled
enthusiast confronted by his disillusions.
"How did these pebbles reach this hiding place?
"In asking himself the question, the prince had absolute assurance that
it was impossible for any one to enter his sleeping-apartment without
his knowledge.
"The puzzled man also recollected, with a shudder, which he alone could
explain, that he had taken radical means of making it impossible for the
artisan who had contrived the hidden treasury to reveal its existence.
"He was positive, too, when he had retired the night before, that his
jewels were undisturbed.
"Why just this exchange of a handful?
"For what reason had not double the quantity been removed? Nay, why not
all, since it was possible to abstract a portion?
"At this question the eerie iteration of the merchant returned to his
mind:
"'Pebbles for diamonds!'
"At once the distasteful alternative upon which it was based recurred to
him.
"A quick radiation illumined his mind, and subsided to darkness as
promptly.
"Ram Lal!
"It was he who had indicated the substitution. But the merchant could no
more enter the room in which the prince was seated at this moment than
the most abject menial in the palace.
"Still, the merchant had been able to predict the disaster.
"Some sort of association existed, but what it was, considered with the
impracticability of unobserved entrance and exit, was beyond his
comprehension.
"The incredible condition existed.
"In the light of its outrageous improbability, and the insuperable
obstacles in the way of its accomplishment, the prince found himself
compelled to dismiss every hypothesis.
"Still, he could subject Ram Lal to an investigation that would, at
least, extort a confession as to his ability to allude to the episode in
advance.
"In the meantime, with true Oriental craft, the prince determined to say
nothing of his loss, and present an impassive demeanor to those by whom
he was surrounded.
"With this purpose the prince proceeded to the apartment beyond, and was
about to strike the gong to summon the servant charged with the
preparation of his morning repast, when his attention was attracted to a
slip of folded paper fluttering from the edge of the table-top and held
in place by a diminutive bronze Buddha.
"With the weird certainty that this beckoning paper was another
unaccountable feature of the savage perplexity he was compelled to
endure, the prince, approaching, grasped the folded sheet with eager,
trembling hands and exposed its inner surface to his vivid glance.
"'Ah!' With a burning sensation about his eyes, a fever of harassed
impatience in his brain, and a sense of suffocation and impotent rage,
he read:
* * * * *
"'MOST ILLUSTRIOUS!
"'Unless Lal Lu is returned to her father by nightfall, another handful
of precious stones will be replaced by as many pebbles.
"'And this to warn thee:
"'The native troops at Meerut are in revolt.
"'They have shot the regimental officers, and have put to death every
European they could find.
"'They are now on their way to Delhi to proclaim Dahbur Dhu, thy
grandfather, sovereign of Hindustan.
"'The Moghul is old.
"'Thou art next in succession.'
* * * * *
"There was no signature.
"None was needed; the prince had preserved several specimens of that
chirography at the bottom of various interesting bills of sale.
"As this bizarre scion of an incredibly ancient regime read this
extraordinary missive, with its exasperating reference to the
restitution of Lal Lu, and considered the prompt realization of the
threatened reprisal which had followed his first failure to comply with
the request of Ram Lal, a sense of fear and futility possessed him.
"With curious apathy, an unaccountable suggestion of impersonality,
almost, he did not pause to consider the absence of the intolerant
passion which his loss should have occasioned, or to wonder at his
bewildered reception of this implication of further dispossession.
"The prince appeared to be moving as in a spell; but as he concluded the
remainder of the missive and remembered, at its inspiration, that he
was, indeed, the grandson of the Moghul and the heir-apparent of this
pageant throne of Delhi, a sensible degree of his customary cynical
assurance returned.
"Hastening to the ante-room, the prince, with alert reanimation,
questioned the stalwart official who stood without.
"He indicated to his master that the missive had been left upon the
outer sill of the threshold leading from the ante-room to the corridor
which opened upon the courtyard.
"Beyond this nothing could be learned; but other and more absorbing
information was conveyed to the prince.
"He learned that several bodies of Sepoys had already passed the palace,
on the highway, in the direction of Delhi.
"Startled at this rapid confirmation of the statement conveyed in the
strange communication which he had just read, the prince rapidly
reviewed the singular cause of the mutiny.
"Great Britain had just supplied the native soldiery with the Enfield
rifle.
"This weapon was rendered formidable by a new cartridge, which, in order
that it might not bind in the barrel bore, was greased in England with
the fat of beef or pork.
"With incredible indifference to the prejudices of the Sepoys, the
military authorities at Calcutta ordered the low-caste Lascars to
prepare the cartridges in a similar manner.
"To this direct invitation disaster was not slow to respond.
"The fat of pigs was sufficient to make a degenerate of a Mohammedan;
and to devour the flesh of cows converted a Hindoo into a Mussulman.
"In this manner had Tippu Sultan enforced the faith of Islam on hordes
of Brahmins, and with the abomination of pork had the Afghans prevailed
upon the Hindoo Sepoys, captured in the Kabul war, to become
Mohammedans.
"Exasperated by the unconcealed contempt of the Brahmins, the Lascars,
with an easily understood rancor, managed to convey the startling
information to their detested superiors that the cartridges they bit in
loading the new rifles were greased with the fat of cows, and that they
were, in consequence, defiled, and their boasted caste supremacy was
destroyed.
"This revelation, so momentous to the Hindoo, found its way first to
Barrackpore by reason of its nearness to Calcutta.
"At once an indescribable panic ensued, and in a marvelously short time
every native regiment in Bengal was confronted with the possibility of
lost caste, and terrified at the consequent belief that the British
Government was making an attempt to Anglicize them with beef as they
had already attempted to do with beer.
"The account of the greased cartridges, embellished as it speeded,
traveled, with the rapidity which usually expedites evil rumor, along
the Ganges and Jumna to Benares, Allahabad, Agra, Delhi and Meerut, and
the British authorities were confronted with a revolt which was to cost
thousands of men and countless treasure.
"As the prince reflected upon the fever of events, and calculated their
possible consequence to himself, the ambition--often napping, seldom in
slumber--which he secretly cherished, awoke to disturbing vividness.
"His allowance was ample; his retinue, all things considered,
impressive; and the Kutub, although in a state of disrepair in certain
portions, was still unmistakably a royal residence. But he was
thoroughly weary of the massive pile, and increasingly exasperated at
the interdict of Delhi.
"Certain salacious possibilities within its walls still made their
insidious appeals to him, and he had not forgotten the ceremonious
deference accorded him in the household of the Moghul.
"At the Kutub he had to contrive his own dissipations and excesses.
"There was no need to be clandestine.
"The very frankness of his privileges discouraged his imagination. There
was no spice of jeopardy in them; no preludes of intrigue.
"To relieve this surfeit, which is the worst of monotonies, eagerly
would the prince have joined the revolting troops, detachments of which
he could perceive from the walls of the Kutub hastening along the
sun-scorched highway to Delhi.
"But his semi-majesty was cautious.
"It was characteristic of him that his mature reflections should
frequently place his impulse under obligations; a condition that had
resulted in many a salutary compromise with some proposed moral abandon.
"Should he show the slightest countenance to the native troops in the
present emergency, the record of such an attitude would constitute
anything but a passport to the continued consideration of the British
Government, upon whose sufferance he not only enjoyed his present
magnificent residence, but the acknowledgment of his right of succession
as well.
"The prince was not yet inclined to believe that the Sepoys could make
headway against his detested patrons.
"However, with his mind stimulated by the hazard of the prospect, this
picturesque heir-apparent, who had assured himself, since his perusal of
the unaccountably delivered missive, that Ram Lal had no intention of
making his appearance that day, at least, returned to the apartment
where his morning repast awaited him, which he dispatched with the
preoccupied impersonality of a savant who consults his timepiece in
order to determine the temperature.
"Advised of the fact that he had finished by a disposition to ignore his
remaining privileges, the prince, as if to pursue the direction of the
unseeing gaze which he projected into space, rose slowly, and with that
moody deliberation which is so often the outward manifestation of an
ignoble as well as an elevated determination, proceeded to the silken
arras and disappeared from view between the folds.
"Quickly he traversed the passageway leading to the apartments of Lal
Lu; and in response to a light touch upon the gong the same servile
apparition emerged and vanished, with cringing obedience, down the
passage.
"With a gleam in his eyes, which might have caused a magistrate to
reflect or a moralist to anticipate, that was both sinister and
engaging, eager and speculative, the prince, with a gesture that was not
without its impatient majesty and lithe impressiveness, swept aside the
curtains which guarded the entrance to the small ante-room and stepped
within."
* * * * *
As the Sepoy reached this point of the narrative, arranged, perhaps,
with shrewd malice to tantalize his eager listener, an expression of
libidinous expectation and depraved absorption deepened upon the
countenance of the latter, who, like an animal deprived of its prey,
looked up suddenly as the narrator paused, with an exasperation which he
made little attempt to conceal.
"Hell!" he muttered, "why do you pause? It is not late. This is an
irritating trick of yours to leave off at the crucial juncture."
"Ha, ha!" laughed the Sepoy mirthlessly. "You have attended me, then?
Well, I can't admit you with the prince until to-morrow evening. I have
much to do ere I retire."
"This is my dismissal, I presume," responded Raikes sourly as he
replaced the gem, from which he seemed unable to remove his thieving
eyes.
"Here, take this damned thing; it has demoralized me," and placing the
shagreen case, with its priceless contents, in the hands of the
evilly-smiling Sepoy, he disappeared through the doorway.
Arrived at the door which opened upon his room, Raikes was assured, by
the familiar response of the locks to the pressure of his extraordinary
keys, that his precautions of a few hours before had been undisturbed.
Moreover, his sister, seated in her room in a chair so placed as to
command a view of the doorway opposite, and looking more effaced than
ever from the weary vigil which her heartless brother had imposed upon
her during his absence, advised him of the customary isolation and
depression which distinguished this barren household.
Within, Raikes began to make himself secure for the night.
He double-locked the door, placed the heavy bar in the iron shoulders,
over which he inserted a stout iron pin.
A brief investigation convinced him that it was out of the question to
open the shutters from without.
Satisfied upon these points, Raikes proceeded to the radiator, which for
a trembling space of apprehension he forbore to open.
However, since it was certainty he wanted, the valves shortly swung
toward him, the inner door responded to the sesame of his touch, and the
recess containing the tenets of his religion was exposed to view.
With trembling hands, which indicated the latent fear which unnerved
him, and eyes aching with anxiety, the wretched man examined bag after
bag of his precious coin with the solicitude one sees manifested by
parents whose children are rendered doubly dear by the taking away of
one of their number.
"Ah!" With a sigh, the relief of which almost concluded in physical
collapse, Raikes was able to assure himself that his rapid inventory
revealed no further loss.
Replacing his treasure with the indisposition he usually manifested to
leave the vicinity of his hoard, the miser closed the various
compartments with more than his accustomed certitude and began to
prepare to respond to the lassitude of sleep which, for some
unaccountable reason, was unusually insistent.
With the easy partition of attire already noted, Raikes presently found
himself ready to tuck himself away for the night, which he did after
rolling his bedstead directly in front of the false radiator.
This unusual measure of precaution consummated, Raikes, with the first
sense of security he had felt for the last twenty-four hours, presently
succumbed to a sleep remarkable for its quick approach and its
subsequent soundness.
Until early dawn, with the relaxation which is commonly the reward of
innocence, Raikes slept away in unconscious travesty.
And when at last he opened his eyes he was as alertly awake as he had
been profoundly asleep.
With a promptness due to his retiring forebodings, his habitual unrest
and suspicion returned to him.
He was as vitally alive to the disturbing conditions of the day before
as if they had been the subjects of an all-night meditation.
But the confidence of his bolts and bars, the recollection of his
unusual measures of safety, reassured him somewhat.
It was, therefore, with a degree of composure he approached the door and
satisfied himself that the bar and the locks had been undisturbed.
With equal assurance he rolled the bedstead from the radiator and
pressed the button which operated the concealed spring, with a
deliberation in which no suggestion of uneasiness appeared.
A quick revolution or so and the inner recess was revealed.
To his rapid accounting the quantity of bags was the same, and their
relative positions, which he had so carefully arranged the night before,
were undisturbed--but this one, that within easiest reach! What was it
caused those sharp suggestions in its accustomed rotundity--those
angular points?
In a quiver the man was transformed.
With a cry such as must have been forced from the Jew of old, compelled
by the rough levies of his time to part at once with his teeth and his
treasure, Raikes grasped the bag, which came away in his clutch with the
agonizing lightness that had preceded his first loss.
Quickly he unfastened the mouth of the fateful packet and inverted it
over the table.
The next instant there rattled to view a soulless, sodden shower of
lack-luster, heart-breaking coals.
(To be continued on Dickey No. 2, Series B.)
* * * * *
"Ah, ha!" exclaimed Dennis, "an' it's there ye are again," as the
familiar phrase at the bottom of bosom No. 1 met his glance.
But it did not exasperate him on this occasion, for the young man, true
to his determination to be liberal with himself, had still bosoms No. 2
and No. 3 at his disposal.
As he was about to separate No. 2 from its duplicate, his eyes, glancing
aimlessly about for the moment, caught sight of a trim female figure
sitting not far away on a bench diagonally opposite.
Hovering near her, a man, of a species Dennis had not seen before on the
street corners of New York, seemed determined to intrude upon her
attention.
Convinced of his purpose, the lady, for such she unmistakably appeared,
rose from the seat as the fellow was about to raise his hat as a
preliminary to further overtures, and sought another bench directly
opposite the one from which Dennis had been a witness to her apparent
persecution.
The intruder, however, refusing evidently to believe that the action of
the lady had a personal application, deliberately walked past this new
resting place and surveyed its occupant with insolent estimation.
A short distance away his pace slackened; he was about to return.
With genuine Irish impulse, Dennis, rising hurriedly, proceeded to the
bench occupied by the disturbed lady, and, with a bow that was not
deficient in grace and evident good intention, said:
"Excuse me, but say the wurrd, madam, and I'll see that you are troubled
no more with that loafer."
For an instant, with an expression of countenance that suggested a fear
that the flight from one intrusion was but the introduction to another,
the lady looked upon Dennis with an astonishment that was partly the
result of his picturesque contrasts of voice and visage.
Then, with fine intuition realizing, in the ingenuous face of the young
Irishman, the unmistakable evidence of kindly impulse, she said, with a
modulation in which Dennis was able to detect the accent of good
breeding:
"I thank you, sir; I am tired; that man annoys me; but I would rather
move on than be the cause of a disturbance."
"If you will permit me," responded Dennis promptly, "I will sit beside
you long enough to indicate that you have met a friend; then I think
that he will move off."
The lady looked at Dennis with an uncertain smile, in which there was
just enough restraint to urge the young man to add hastily: "An' when he
is gone for good, I will go too."
"Oh, I was not thinking of that, I assure you!" the lady hastened to
say. "That would be rather ungrateful on my part. I accept your
suggestion. May I ask you to be seated?" and Dennis promptly complied.
As he had predicted, the fellow, who had witnessed the conversation, was
compelled to accept its ostensible suggestion, and departed finally with
a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders and a Tammany tilt of his hat over
his eyebrows.
In yielding to his gallant impulse, Dennis was unaware of the fact that
he held, with not exactly picturesque abandon, bosom No. 1 in his right
hand and the other two in his left, which gave him the appearance of
having disposed, in some violent way, of the remainder of several
shirts.
Awakened by the puzzled amusement depicted in the curious gaze with
which the lady surveyed the various bosoms which he held, and encouraged
by the impromptu nature of the entire episode, Dennis, as he realized
the spectacle which he presented, indulged himself in a frank laugh, in
which his companion seemed inclined to join.
The next moment he apologized, and, yielding to the obligation enforced
by the situation, explained his possession of the dickey bosoms and the
curious story which had gone before.
As he proceeded with the candor of genuine enthusiasm, and related the
incredible narrative in his rich, Irish brogue, which affected his
hearer, as it did every one else, with such singular sentiments in
contrast with his remarkable countenance, all traces of punctilious
restraint and artificial reticence vanished, and with the mien of one
who proposes to extract all the entertainment possible from an
undreamed-of experience, the lady urged Dennis to continue.
"I can't do that unless I read the balance from the dickey," said
Dennis. "Would you mind?"
"I should like it very much," replied the lady with gratifying
readiness.
"Well, then," said Dennis, "here goes," and with his musical voice,
which was one of his most inviting characteristics, the young man, on
the basis of all that had preceded the bosom from which he was about to
read, and which he had narrated to his auditor with refreshing _verve_
and an ingenuousness whose vitalizing effect upon her sensibilities he
was far from suspecting, began.