CHAPTER I.

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BOHEMIAN DAYS

*Three American Tales*

BY

GEO. ALFRED TOWNSEND

_"GATH"_

"And David arose and fled to Gath. And he changed his behavior. And

every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and

every one that was discontented gathered themselves unto him. And

the time that David dwelt in the country of the Philistines was a

full year and four months."

H. CAMPBELL & CO., Publishers,

NO. 21 PARK ROW,

NEW YORK

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1880,

By GEO. ALFRED TOWNSEND,

in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.

THE BURR PRINTING HOUSE

AND STEAM TYPE-SETTING OFFICE,

Cor. Frankfort and Jacob Sts.,

NEW YORK.

TO TEN FRIENDS AT DINNER,

GILSEY HOUSE, NEW YORK,

APRIL 21, 1879;

WHO MADE THIS PUBLICATION

_A PROMISE AND AN OBLIGATION_.

PREFACE.

So far from the first tale in this book being of political motive, it

was written among the subjects of it, and read to several of them in

1864. Perhaps the only _souvenir_ of refugee and "skedaddler" life

abroad during the war ever published, its preservation may one day be

useful in the socialistic archives of the South, to whose posterity

slavery will seem almost a mythical thing. With as little bias in the

second tale, I have etched the young Northern truant abroad during the

secession. The closing tale, more recently written, in the midst of

constant toil and travel, is an attempt to recall an old suburb, now

nearly erased and illegible by the extension of a great city, and may be

considered a home American picture about contemporary with the European

tales.

CONTENTS.

SHORT NOVELS.

THE REBEL COLONY IN PARIS 13

MARRIED ABROAD 99

THE DEAF MAN OF KENSINGTON 155

CHORDS.

BOHEMIA 9

LITTLE GRISETTE 93

THE PIGEON GIRL 149

THE DEAD BOHEMIAN 279

BOHEMIA.

The farther I do grow from _La Bohème_,

The more I do regret that foolish shame

Which made me hold it something to conceal,

And so I did myself expatriate;

For in my pulses and my feet I feel

That wayward realm was still my own estate;

Wise wagged our tongues when the dear nights grew late,

And quainter, clearer, rose our quick conceits,

And pure and mutual were our social sweets.

Oh! ever thus convivial round the gate

Of Letters have the masters and the young

Loitered away their enterprises great,

Since Spenser revelled in the halls of state,

And at his tavern rarest Jonson sung.

THE REBEL COLONY IN PARIS.

* * * * *

I.

THE EXILES.

In the latter part of October, 1863, seven very anxious and dilapidated

personages were assembled under the roof of an old, eight-storied

tenement, near the church of St. Sulpice, in the city of Paris.

The seven under consideration had reached the catastrophe of their

decline--and rise. They had met in solemn deliberation to pass

resolutions to that effect, and take the only congenial means for

replenishment and reform. This means lay in miniature before a caged

window, revealed by a superfluity of light--a roulette-table, whereon

the ball was spinning industriously from the practised fingers of Mr.

Auburn Risque, of Mississippi.

Mr. Auburn Risque had a spotted eye and a bluishly cold face; his

fingers were the only movable part of him, for he performed respiration

and articulation with the same organ--his nose; and the sole words

vouchsafed by this at present were:

"Black--black--black--white--black--white--white--black"--etc.

The five surrounding parties were carefully noting upon fragments of

paper the results of the experiment, and likewise Master Lees, the

lessee of the chamber--a pale, emaciated youth, sitting up in bed, and

ciphering tremulously, with bony fingers; even he, upon whom disease had

made auguries of death, looked forward to gold, as the remedy which

science had not brought, for a wasted youth of dissipation and

incontinence.

They were all representatives of the recently instituted Confederacy.

Most of them had dwelt in Paris anterior to the war, and, habituated to

its luxuries, scarcely recognized themselves, now that they were forlorn

and needy. Note Mr. Pisgah, for example--a Georgian, tall, shapely and

handsome, with the gray hairs of his thirtieth year shading his working

temples; he had been the most envied man in Paris; no woman could resist

the magnetism of his eye; he was almost a match for the great Berger at

billiards; he rode like a centaur on the Boulevards, and counterfeited

Apollo at the opera and the masque. His credit was good for fifty

thousand francs any day in the year. He had travelled in far and

contiguous regions, conducted intrigues at Athens and Damascus, and

smoked his pipe upon the Nile and among the ruins of Sebastopol. Without

principle, he was yet amiable, and with his dashing style and address,

one forgot his worthlessness.

How keenly he is reminded of it now! He cannot work, he has no craft nor

profession; he knew enough to pass for an educated gentleman; not enough

to earn a franc a day. He is the _protégé_ at present of his

washerwoman, and can say, with some governments, that his debts are

impartially distributed. He has only two fears--those of starvation in

France, and a soldier's death in America.

The prospect of a debtor's prison at Clichy has long since ceased to be

a terror. There, he would be secure of sustenance and shelter, and of

these, at liberty, he is doubtful every day.

Still, with his threadbare coat, he haunts the Casino and the Valentino

of evenings; for some mistresses of a former day send him billets.

He lies in bed till long after noon, that he may not have pangs of

hunger; and has yet credit for a dinner at an obscure _cremery_. When

this last confidence shall have been forfeited, what must result to

Pisgah?

He is striving to anticipate the answer with this experiment at

roulette; for he has a "system" whereby it is possible to break any

gambling bank--Spa, Baden, Wisbaden or Homburg. The others have systems

also, from Auburn Risque to Simp, the only son of the richest widow in

Louisiana, who disbursed of old in Paris ten thousand dollars annually.

His house at Passy was a palace in miniature, and his favorite a tragedy

queen. She played at the Folies Dramatiques, and drove three horses of

afternoons upon the Champs Elysées. She had other engagements, of

course, when Mr. Lincoln's "paper blockade" stopped Master Simp's

remittances, and he passed her yesterday upon the Rue Rivoli, with the

Russian ambassador's footman at her back, but she only touched him with

her silks.

Simp studied a profession, and was a volunteer counsel in the memorable

case of Jeems Pinckney against Jeems Rutledge. His speech, on that

occasion, occupied in delivery just three minutes, and set the

court-room in a roar. He paid the village editor ten dollars to compose

it, and the same sum to publish it.

"If you could learn it for me," said Simp, anxiously, "I would give you

twenty dollars."

This, his first and last public appearance, was conditional to the

receipt from his mother, of six thousand acres of land and eighty

negroes. It might have been a close calculation for a mathematician to

know how many black sweat-drops, how many strokes of the rawhide, went

into the celebrated dinner at the Maison Dorée, wherein Master Simp and

only his lady had thirty-four courses, and eleven qualities of wine, and

a bill of eight hundred francs.

In that prosperous era, his inalienable comrade had been Mr. Andy Plade,

who now stood beside him, intensely absorbed.

Of late Mr. Plade's affection had been transferred to Hugenot, the only

possessor of an entire franc in the chamber. Hugenot was a short-set

individual, in pumps and an eye-glass, who had been but a few days in

the city. He was decidedly a man of sentiment. He called the Confederacy

"ow-ah cause," and claimed to have signed the call for the first

secession meeting in the South.

He asserted frankly that he was of French extraction, but only hinted

that he was of noble blood. He had been a hatter, but carefully ignored

the fact; and, having run the blockade with profitable cargoes fourteen

times, had settled down to be a respectable trader between Havre and

Nassau. Mr. Plade shared much of the sentiment and some of the money of

this illustrious personage.

There were rumors abroad that Plade himself had great, but embarrassed,

fortunes.

He was one of the hundred thousand chevaliers who hail the advent of war

as something which will hide their nothingness.

"I knew it," said Auburn Risque, at length, pinching the ball between

his hard palms as if it were the creature of his will. "My system is

good; yours do not validate themselves. You are novices at gambling; I

am an old blackleg." It was as he had said; the method of betting which

he proposed had seemed to be successful. He staked upon colors; never

upon numbers; and alternated from white to black after a fixed,

undeviating routine.

Less by experiment than by faith, the others gave up their own theories

to adopt his own. They resolved to collect every available sou, and,

confiding it to the keeping of Mr. Risque, send him to Germany, that he

might beggar the bankers, and so restore the Southern Colony to its

wonted prosperity.

Hugenot delivered a short address, wishing "the cause" good luck, but

declining to subscribe anything. He did not doubt the safety of "the

system" of course, but had an hereditary antipathy to gaming. The

precepts of all his ancestry were against it.

Poor Lees followed in a broken way, indicating sundry books, a guitar,

two pairs of old boots, and a canary bird, as the relics of his fortune.

These, Andy Plade, who possessed nothing, but thought he might borrow a

trifle, volunteered to dispose of, and Freckle, a Missourian, who was

tolerated in the colony only because he could be plucked, asserted

enthusiastically, and amid great sensation, that he yet had three

hundred francs at the banker's, his entire capital, all of which he

meant to devote to the most reliable project in the world.

At this episode, Pisgah, whose misfortunes had quite shattered his

nerves, proposed to drink at Freckle's expense to the success of the

system, and Hugenot was prevailed upon to advance twenty-one sous, while

Simp took the order to the adjacent _marchand du vin_.

When they had all filled, Hugenot, looking upon himself in the light of

a benefactor, considered it necessary to do something.

"Boys," he said, wiping his eves with the lining of a kid glove, "will

you esteem it unnatural, that a Suth Kurlinian, who sat--at an early

age, it is true--at the feet of the great Kulhoon, should lift up his

voice and weep in this day of ou-ah calamity?"

(Sensation, aggrieved by the sobs of Freckle, who, unused to spirits and

greatly affected--chokes.)

"When I cast my eye about this lofty chambah" (here Lees, who hasn't

been out of it for a year, hides himself beneath the bed-clothes); "when

I see these noble spih-its dwelling obscu' and penniless; when I

remembah that two short years ago, they waih of independent

fohtunes--one with his sugah, anotha with his cotton, a third with his

tobacco, in short, all the blessings of heaven bestowed upon a free

people--niggars, plantations, pleasures!--I can but lay my pooah hand

upon the manes of my ancestry, and ask in the name of ou-ah cause, is

there justice above or retribution upon the earth!"

A profound silence ensued, broken only by Mr. Plade, who called Hugenot

a man of sentiment, and slapped his back; while Freckle fell upon

Pisgah's bosom, and wished that his stomach was as full as his heart.

Mr. Simp, who had been endeavoring to recollect some passages of his

address, in the case of the Jeemses, for that address had an universal

application, and might mean as much now as on the original occasion,

brought down one of those decayed boots which the _marchand des habits_

had thrice refused to buy, and said, stoutly:

"'By Gad! think of it, hyuh am I, a beggah, by Gad, without shoes to my

feet, suh! The wuth of one nigga would keep me now for a yeah. At home,

by Gad, I could afford to spend the wuth of a staving field hand every

twenty-fouah houahs. I'll sweah!" cried Simp in conclusion, "I call this

hard."

"I suppose the Yankees have confiscated my stocks in the Havre

steamers," muttered Andy Plade. "I consider they have done me out of

twenty thousand dollars."

"Brotha writes to me, last lettah," continued Freckle, who had

recovered, "every tree cut off the plantation--every nigga run off, down

to old Sim, a hundred years old--every panel of fence toted away--no

bacon in smoke-house--not an old rip in stable--no corn, coon, possum,

rabbit, fox, dog or hog within ten miles of the place--house stands in a

mire--mire stands in desert--Yankee general going to conscrip brotha. I

save myself, sp'ose, for stahvation."

"Wait till you come down to my condition," faltered the proprietor,

making emphasis with his meagre finger--"I have been my own enemy; the

Yankees will but finish what is almost consummated now. I tell you,

boys, I expect to die in this room; I shall never quit this bed. I am

offensive, wasted, withered, and would look gladly upon Père la

Chaise,[A] if with my bodily maladies my mind was not also diseased. I

have no fortitude; I am afraid of death!"

[Footnote A: The great Cemetery of Paris.]

The room seemed to grow suddenly cold, and the faces of all the inmates

became pale; they looked more squalid than ever--the threadbare

curtains, the rheumatic chairs, the soiled floor, sashes and wallpaper.

Mr. Hugenot fumbled his shirt-bosom nervously, and his diamond pin,

glaring like a lamp upon the worn garbs and faces of his compatriots,

showed them still wanner and meaner by contrast.

"Put the blues under your feet!" cried Auburn Risque, in his hard,

practical way; "my system will resurrect the dead. You shall have

clothes upon your backs, shoes upon your feet, specie in your pockets,

blood in your veins. Let us sell, borrow and pawn; we can raise a

thousand francs together. I will return in a fortnight with fifty

thousand!"

II.

RAISING THE WIND.

The million five hundred thousand folks in Paris, who went about their

pleasures that October night, knew little of the sorrows of the Southern

Colony.

Pisgah dropped in at the Chateau des Fleurs to beg a paltry loan from

some ancient favorite. The time had been, when, after a nightly debauch,

he had placed two hundred francs in her morning's coffee-cup. It was

mournful now to mark his premature gray hairs, as, resting his soiled,

faded coat-sleeve upon her _manteau de velour_, he saw the scorn of his

poverty in the bright eyes which had smiled upon him, and made his

request so humbly and so feverishly.

"Give me back, Feefine," he faltered, "only that fifty francs I once

tied in a gold band about your spaniel's neck. I am poor, my dear--that

will not move you, I know, but I am going to Germany to play at the

banks; if I win, I swear to pay you back ten francs for one!"

There was never a _lorette_ who did not love to gamble. She stopped a

passing gentleman and borrowed the money; the other saw it transferred

to Pisgah, with an expression of contempt, and, turning to a friend,

called him aloud a withering name.

Poor Pisgah! he would have drawn his bowie-knife once, and defied even

the emperor to stand between the man and himself after such an

appellation. He would have esteemed it a favor now to be what he was

named, and only lifted his creased beaver gratefully, and hobbled

nervously away, and stopping near by at a café drank a great glass of

absinthe, with almost a prayerful heart.

At Mr. Simp's hotel in the Rue Monsieur Le Prince much business was

transacted after dark. Monsieurs Freckle and Plade were engaged in

smuggling away certain relics of furniture and wearing apparel.

Mr. Simp already owed his landlord fifteen months' rent, for which the

only security was his diminishing effects.

If the mole-eyed concierge should suspect foul play with these, Simp

would be turned out of doors immediately and the property confiscated.

Singly and in packages the collateral made its exit. A half-dozen regal

chemises made to order at fifty francs apiece; a musical clock picked up

at Genoa for twelve louis; a patent boot-jack and an ebony billiard cue;

a Paduan violin; two statuettes of more fidelity than modesty, to be

sold pound for pound at the current value of bronze; divers

pipes--articles of which Mr. Simp had earned the title of connoisseur,

by investing several hundred dollars annually--a gutta-percha

self-adjusting dog-muzzle, the dog attached to which had been seized by

H. M. Napoleon III. in lieu of taxes, etc., etc.

Everything passed out successfully except one pair of pantaloons which

protruded from Freckle's vest, and that unfortunate person at once fell

under suspicion of theft. All went in the manner stated to Mr. Lees'

chamber, he being the only colonist who did not hazard the loss of his

room, chiefly because nobody else would rent it, and in part because his

landlady, having swindled him for six or eight years, had compunctions

as to ejecting him.

Thence in the morning, true to his aristocratic instincts, Mr. Simp

departed in a _voiture_ for the central bureau of the Mont de Piete,[B]

in the Rue Blanc Manteau. His face had become familiar there of late. He

carried his articles up from the curb, while the _cocher_ grinned and

winked behind, and taking his turn in the throng of widows, orphans,

ouvriers, and profligates and unfortunates of all loose conditions, Simp

was a subject of much unenviable remark. He came away with quite an

armful of large yellow certificates, and the articles were registered to

Monsieur Simp, a French subject; for with such passports went all his

compatriots.

[Footnote B: The government pawnbroking shop.]

Andy Plade spent twenty-four hours, meanwhile, at the Grand Hotel,

enacting the time-honored part of all things to all men.

He differed from the other colonists, in that they were weak--he was

bad. He spoke several languages intelligibly, and knew much of many

things--art, finances, geography--just those matters on which newly

arrived Americans desire information. His address was even fascinating.

One suspected him to be a leech, but pardoned the motive for the manner.

He called himself a broken man. The war had blighted his fair fortunes.

For a time he had held on hopefully, but now meant to breast the current

no longer. His time was at the service of anybody. Would monsieur like

to see the city? He knew its every cleft and den. So he had lived in

Paris five years--in the same manner, elsewhere, all his life.

A few men heard his story and helped him--one Northern man had given him

employment; his gratitude was defalcation.

To day he has sounded Hugenot; but that man of sentiment alluded to the

business habits of his ancestry, and intimated that he did not lend.

"Ou-ah cause, Andy," he says, with a flourish, "is now negotiating a

loan. When ou-ah beloved country is reduced to such straits, that she

must borow from strangers, I cannot think of relieving private

indigence."

Later in the day, however, Mr. Plade made the acquaintance of an

ingenuous youth from Pennsylvania, and obtaining a hundred francs, for

one day only, sent it straightway to Mr. Auburn Risque.

A second meeting was held at Lees' the third day noon, when the

originator of the "system" sat icily grim behind a table whereon eleven

hundred francs reposed; and the whole colony, crowding breathlessly

around, was amazed to note how little the space taken up by so great a

sum.

They opened a crevice that Lees might be gladdened with the sight of the

gold; for to-day that invalid was unusually dispirited, and could not

quit his bed.

"We are down very low, old Simp," said Pisgah, smilingly, "when either

the possession or the loss of that amount can be an event in our lives."

"You will laugh that it was so, a week hence," answered Auburn

Risque--"when you lunch at Peters' while awaiting my third check for a

thousand dollars apiece."

"I don't believe in the system," growled Lees, opening a cold draft from

his melancholy eyes: "I don't feel that I shall ever spend a sou of the

winnings. No more will any of you. There will be no winnings to spend.

Auburn Risque will lose. He always does."

"If you were standing by at the play I should," cried Risque, while the

pock-marks in his face were like the thawings of ice. "You would croak

like an old raven, and I should forget my reckoning."

"Come now, Lees," cried all the others; "you must not see bad omen for

the Colony;" and they said, in undertone, that Lees had come to be quite

a bore.

They were all doubtful, nevertheless. Their crisis could not be

exaggerated. Their interest was almost devout. Three thousand miles from

relief; two seas between, one of water and one of fire; at home,

conscription, captivity, death: the calamity of Southerners abroad would

merit all sympathy, if it had not been induced by waste, and unredeemed

by either fortitude or regret.

The unhappy Freckle, whose luckless admiration of the rest had been his

ruin, felt that a sonorous prayer, such as his old father used to make

in the Methodist meeting-house, would be a good thing wherewith to

freight Auburn Risque for his voyage. When men stake everything on a

chance, it is natural to look up to somebody who governs chances; but

Andy Plade, in his loud, bad way, proposed a huge toast, which they took

with a cheer, and quite confused Hugenot, who had a sentiment _apropos_.

Then they escorted Auburn Risque to the Chemin de fer du Nord,[C] and

packed him away in a third-class carriage, wringing his hand as if he

were their only hope and friend in the world.

[Footnote C: Northern Railway Station.]

III.

DEATH IN EXPATRIATION.

It was a weary day for the Southern Colony. They strolled about town--to

the Masque, the Jardin des Plantes, the Champ des Mars, the Marché aux

Chevaux, and finally to Freckle's place, and essayed a lugubrious hour

at whist.

"It is poor fun, Pisgah," said Mr. Simp, at last, "if we remember that

afternoon at poker when you won eight thousand francs and I lost six

thousand."

The conversation forever returned to Spa and Baden-Baden, and many

wagers were made upon the amount of money which Risque would gain--first

day--second day--first week, and so forth.

At last they resolved to send to Lees' chamber for the roulette-board,

and pass the evening in experiment. They drew Jacks for the party who

should fetch it, and Freckle, always unfortunate, was pronounced the

man. He went cheerfully, thinking it quite an honor to serve the Colony

in any capacity--for Freckle, representing a disaffected State, had

fallen under suspicion of lukewarm loyalty, and was most anxious to

clear up any such imputation.

His head was full of odd remembrances as he crossed the Place St.

Sulpice: his plain old father at the old border home, close and

hard-handed, who went afield with his own negroes, and made his sons

take the plough-handles, and marched them all before him every Sunday to

the plank church, and led the singing himself with an ancient

tuning-fork, and took up the collection in a black velvet bag fastened

to a pole.

He had foreseen the war, and sent his son abroad to avoid it. He had

given Freckle sufficient money to travel for five years, and told him in

the same sentence to guard his farthings and say his prayers. Freckle

could see the old man now, with a tear poised on his tangled eyelashes,

asking a farewell benediction from the front portico, upon himself

departing, while every woolly-head was uncovered, and the whole

assembled "property" had groaned "Amen" together.

That was patriarchal life; what was this? Freckle thought this much

finer and higher. He had not asked himself if it was better. He was

rather ashamed of his father now, and anxious to be a dashing gentleman,

like Plade or Pisgah.

Why did he play whist so badly? How chanced it that, having dwelt

eighteen months in Paris, he could speak no French? His only _grisette_

had both robbed him and been false to him. He knew that the Colony

tolerated him, merely. Was he indeed verdant, as they had said--obtuse,

stupid, lacking wit?

After all, he repeated to himself, what had the Colony done for him? He

had not now twenty francs to his name, and was a thousand francs in

debt; he had essayed to study medicine, but balked at the first lesson.

Yet, though these suggestions, rather than convictions, occurred to him,

they stirred no latent ambition. If he had ever known one high

resolution, the Southern Colony had pulled it up, and sown the place

with salt.

So he reached Master Lees' tenement; it was a long ascent, and toward

the last stages perilous; the stairs had a fashion of curving round

unexpectedly and bending against jambs and blank walls. He was quite out

of breath when he staggered against Lees' door and burst it open.

The light fell almost glaringly upon the bare, contracted chamber; for

this was next to the sky and close up to the clouds, and the window

looked toward the west, where the sun, sinking majestically, was

throwing its brightest smiles upon Paris, as it bade adieu.

And there, upon his tossed, neglected bed, in the full blaze of the

sunset, his sharp, sallow jaws dropped upon his neck, his cheeks

colorless and concave, his great eyes open wide and his hair unsmoothed,

Master Lees lay dead, with the roulette table upon his breast!

* * * * *

When Freckle had raised himself from the platform at the base of the

first flight of stairs, down which he had fallen in his fright, he

hastened to his own chamber and gave the Colony notice of the depletion

of its number.

A deep gloom, as may be surmised, fell upon all. Lees had been no great

favorite of late, and it had been the trite remark for a year that he

was looking like death; but at this juncture the tidings came ominously

enough. One member, at least, of the Southern Colony would never share

the winnings of Auburn Risque, and now that they referred to his

forebodings of the morning, it was recalled that with his own demise, he

had prophesied the failure of "the system."

His end seemed to each young exile a personal admonition; they had known

him strong and spirited, and with them he had grown poor and unhappy.

Poverty is a warning that talks like the wind, and we do not heed it;

but death raps at our door with bony knuckles, so that we grow pale and

think.

They shuddered, though they were hardened young men, so unfeeling, even

after this reprimand, that they would have left the corpse of their

companion to go unhonored to its grave; separately they wished to do

so--in community they were ashamed; and Pisgah had half a hope that

somebody would demur when he said, awkwardly:

"The Colony must attend the funeral, I suppose. God knows which of us

will take the next turn."

Freckle cried out, however, that he should go, if he were to be buried

alive in the same tomb, and on this occasion only he appeared in the

light of an influential spirit.

IV.

THE DESPERATE CHANCE.

During all this time Mr. Auburn Risque, packed away in the omnibus

train, with a cheap cigar between his lips, and a face like a

refrigerator, was scudding over the rolling provinces of France,

thinking as little of the sunshine, and the harvesters of flax, and the

turning leaves of the woods, and the chateaux overawing the thatched

little villages, as if the train were his mail-coach, and France were

Arkansas, and he were lashing the rump of the "off" horse, as he had

done for the better part of his life.

Risque's uncle had been a great Mississippi jobber; he took U. S. postal

contracts for all the unknown world; route of the first class, six

horses and daily; route of the second class, semi-weekly and four

horses; third class, two horses and weekly; fourth class, one horse, one

saddle, and one small boy.

The young Auburn had been born in the stable, and had taken at once to

the road. His uncle found it convenient to put him to work. He can never

be faithfully said to have learned to _walk_; and recalls, as the first

incident of his life, a man who carried a baby and two bowie knives,

teaching him to play old sledge on the cushions of a Washita stage.

Thenceforward he was a man of one idea. He held it to be one of the

decrees, that he was to grow rich by gaming. As he went, by day or

night, in rain or fog or burning sun, by the margins of turgid

south-western rivers, where his "leaders" shied at the alligators asleep

in the stage-road; through dreary pine woods, where the owls hooted at

silence; over red, reedy, slimy causeways; in cane-breaks and bayous;

past villages where civilization looked westward with a dirk between its

teeth, and cracked its horsewhip; past rich plantations where the

negroes sang afield, and the planter in the house-porch took off his hat

to bow--here, there, always, everywhere, with his cold, hard,

pock-marked face, thin lips and spotted eye, Auburn Risque sat brooding

behind the reins, computing, calculating, overreaching, waiting for his

destiny to wrestle with Chance and bind it down while its pockets were

picked.

His whole life might have been called a game of cards. He carried a

deck forever next his heart. Sometimes he gambled with other

vehicles--stocks, shares, currency--but the cards were still his

mainstay, and he was well acquainted with every known or obsolete game.

There was no trick, nor fraud, nor waggery which he had not at his

fingers-ends.

It was his favorite theory that there was method in what seemed chance;

principles underlying luck; measures for infinity; clues to all

combinations.

Given one pack of cards, one man to shuffle, one to cut, one to deal,

and fair play, and it was yet possible to know just how many times in a

given number of games each card would fall to each man.

Given a roulette circle of one hundred numbered spaces and a blindfolded

man to spin the ball; it could be counted just how many times in one

thousand said ball would come to rest upon any one number.

No searcher for perpetual motion, no blind believer in alchemy, clung to

his one idea closer than Auburn Risque. He had shut all themes,

affections, interests, from his mind. He neither loved nor hated any

living being. He was penurious in his expenditures--never in his wagers.

He would stake upon anything in nature--a trot, an election, a battle, a

murder.

"Will you play picquet for one sou the game, one hundred and fifty

points?" says a soldier near by.

He accepts at once; the afternoon passes to night, and the lamps in the

roof are lighted. The cards flicker upon the seat; the boors gather

round to watch; they pass the French frontier, and see from their

windows the forges of Belgium, throwing fire upon the river Meuse.

Still, hour after hour, though their eyes are weary, and all the folks

are gone or sleeping, the cards fall, fall, fall, till there comes a jar

and a stop, and the guard cries, "Cologne!"

"You have won," says the soldier, laying down his money. "Good-night."

The Rhine is a fine stream, though our German friends will build

mock-castles upon it, and insist that it is the only real river in the

world.

Auburn Risque pays no more regard to it than though he were treading the

cedars and sands of New Jersey or North Carolina. He speaks with a

Franco-Russian, who has lost in play ten thousand francs a month for

three successive years, and while they discuss chances, expedients and

experiences, the Siebern-gebierge drifts by, they pass St. Goar and

Bingen, and the wonderful Rhine has been only a time, nothing of a

scene, as they stop abreast Biberich, and, rowed ashore in a flagboat,

make at once for the railway.

At noon, on the third day, Mr. Risque having engaged a frugal bed at a

little distance from Wisbaden, enters the grand saloon of the Kursaal,

and turning to the right, sees before him a perspective, to which not

all the marvels of art or nature afford comparison: a snug little room,

with a table of green baize in the centre of the floor, and about the

table sundry folks of various ages and degrees, before each a heap of

glittering coins, and in the midst of all a something which moves

forever, with a hurtle and a hum--the roulette.

Mark them! the weak, the profligate, the daring. There is old age,

watching the play, with its voice like a baby's cry; and the paper

whereon it keeps tremulous tally swimming upon eyes of perpetual

twilight.

The boy ventures his first gold piece with the resolve that, win or

lose, he will stake no more. He wins, and lies. At his side stands

beautiful Sin, forgetting its guilt and coquetry for its avarice. The

pale defaulter from over the sea hazards like one whose treasure is a

burden upon his neck, and the _roué_--blank, emotionless,

remorseless--doubling at every loss, walks penniless away to dinner with

a better appetite than he who saves a nation or dies for a truth.

The daintily dressed _coupeurs_ are in their chairs, eyeless, but

omniscient; the ball goes heedlessly, slaying or anointing where it

stays, and the gold as it is raked up clinks and glistens, as if it

struck men's hearts and found them as hard and sounding.

Mr. Risque advanced to the end of the table, and stood motionless a

little while, drinking it all into his passionless eyes, which, like

sponges, absorbed whatever they saw, but nothing revealed. At last his

right hand dropped softly to his vest pocket, as though it had some

interest in deceiving his left hand.

Apparently unconscious of the act, the right hand next slid over the

table edge, and silently deposited a five-franc piece upon the black

compartment.

"Whiz-z-z-z" started the ball from the fingers of the coupeurs--"click"

dropped the ball into a black department of the board; "clink! tingle!"

cried the money, changing hands; but not a word said Auburn Risque,

standing like a stalagmite with his eyes upon ten francs.

"Whiz-z-z!"--"click!" "click!" "tingle!"

Did he see the fifteen francs at all, half trance-like, half

corpse-like, as he stood, waiting for the third revolution, and waiting

again, and again, and again?

His five francs have grown to be a hundred; his cold hand falls

freezingly upon them; five francs replace the hundred he took

away--"Whizz!" goes the ball; "click!" stops the ball; the coupeur

seizes Mr. Risque's five francs, and Mr. Risque walks away like a

somnambulist.

V.

BURIED IN THE COMMON DITCH.

It would have been a strange scene for an American public, the street

corridor of the lofty house near the church of Saint Sulpice, on the

funeral afternoon.

The coffin lay upon a draped table, and festoons of crape threw phantom

shadows upon the soiled velvet covering. Each passing pedestrian and

cabman took off his hat a moment. The Southern Colony were in the

landlady's bureau enjoying a lunch and liquor, and precisely at three

o'clock they came down stairs, not more dilapidated than usual, while at

the same moment the municipal hearse drove up, attended by one _cocher_

and two _croquemorts_.[D]

[Footnote D: Literally, "parasites of death."]

The hearse was a cheap charity affair, furnished by the _Maire_ of the

_arrondissement_, though it was sprucely painted and decked with funeral

cloth. The driver wore a huge black chapeau, a white cotton cravat, and

thigh-boots, which, standing up stiffly as he sat, seemed to engulf him

to the ears.

When the _croquemorts_, in a business way, lifted the velvet from the

coffin, it was seen to be constructed of strips of deal merely,

unpainted, and not thicker than a Malaga raisin box.

There was some fear that it would fall apart of its own fragility, but

the chief _croquemort_ explained politely that such accidents never

happened.

"We have entombed four of them to-day," he said; "see how nicely we

shall lift the fifth one."

There was, indeed, a certain sleight whereby he slung it across his

shoulder, but no reason in the world for tossing it upon the hearse with

a slam. They covered its nakedness with velvet, and the _cocher_, having

taken a cigar from his pocket, and looking much as if he would like to

smoke, put it back again sadly, cracked his whip, and the cortege went

on. The _croquemorts_ kept a little way ahead, sauntering upon the

sidewalk, and their cloaks and oil-cloth hats protected them from a

drizzling rain, which now came down, to the grief of the mourners,

walking in the middle of the street behind the body. They were seven in

number, Messrs. Plade, Pisgah and Simp, going together, and apparently a

trifle the worse for the lunch; Freckle followed singly, having been

told to keep at a distance to render the display more imposing; the

landlady and her niece went arm in arm after, and behind them trode a

little old hunchback gentleman, neatly clothed, and bearing in his hand

a black, wooden cross, considerably higher than himself, on which was

painted, in white letters, this inscription:

CHRISTOPHER LEES,

CAROLINA DU NORD,

ÉTATS CONFÉDÉRE

AMERIQUE.

AGE VINGT-QUATRE.

A wreath of yellow immortelles, tied to the crosspiece, was interwoven

with these spangled letters:

"R-E-G-R-E-T-S;"

and the solemn air of the old man seemed to evidence that they were not

meaningless.

The hunchback was Lees' principal creditor. He kept a small restaurant,

where the deceased had been supplied for two years, and his books showed

indebtedness of twenty-eight hundred francs, not a sou of which he

should ever receive. He could ill afford to lose the money, and had

known, indeed, that he should never be paid, a year previous to the

demise. But the friendlessness of the stranger had touched his heart.

Twice every day he sent up a basket of food, which was always returned

empty, and every Sunday climbed the long stairway with a bottle of the

best wine--but never once said, "Pay my bill."

Here he was at the last chapter of exile, still bearing his creditor's

cross.

"Give the young man's friends a lunch," he had said to the landlady: "I

will make it right;"--and in the cortege he was probably the only honest

mourner.

Not we, who know Frenchmen by caricature merely, as volatile, fickle,

deceitful, full of artifice, should sit in judgment upon them. He has

the least heart of all who thinks that there is not some heart

everywhere! The charity which tarrieth long and suffereth much wrong,

has been that of the Parisians of the Latin Quarter, during the American

war.

Along all the route the folks lifted their hats as the hearse passed by,

and so, through slush and mist and rain, the little company kept

straight toward the barriers, and turned at last into the great gate of

the cemetery of Mt. Parnasse.

They do not deck the cities of the dead abroad as our great sepulchres

are adorned.

Père la Chaise is famed rather for its inmates than its tombs, and Mont

Parnasse and Monte Martre, the remaining places of interment, are even

forbidding to the mind and the eye.

A gate-keeper, in semi-military dress, sounded a loud bell as the hearse

rolled over the curb, and when they had taken an aisle to the left, with

maple trees on either side, and vistas of mean-looking vaults, a

corpulent priest, wearing a cape and a white apron, and attended by a

civil assistant of most villainous physiognomy, met the cortege and

escorted it to its destination.

This was the _fosse commune_--in plain English, the _common trench_--an

open lot adjacent to the cemetery, appropriated to bodies interred at

public expense, and presenting to the eye a spectacle which, considered

either with regard to its quaintness or its dreariness, stood alone and

unrivalled.

Nearest the street the ground had long been occupied, trench parallel

with trench, filled to the surface level, sodded green, and each grave

marked by a wooden cross. There was a double layer of bodies beneath,

lying side by side; no margin could of course be given at the surface;

the thickly planted crosses, therefore, looked, at a little distance,

like a great waste of heath or bramble, broken now and then by a dwarf

cedar, and hung to the full with flowers and tokens. The width of the

trenches was that of the added height of two full-grown men, and the

length a half mile perhaps; a narrow passage-way separated them, so

that, however undistinguishable they appeared, each grave could be

indentified and visited.

Close observation might have found much to cheer this waste of flesh,

this economy of space; but to this little approaching company the scene

was of a kind to make death more terrible by association.

A rough wall enclosed the flat expanse of charnel, over which the

scattered houses of the barriers looked widowed through their mournful

windows; and now and then a crippled crone, or a bereaved old pauper,

hobbled to the roadway and shook her white hairs to the rain.

It seemed a long way over the boggy soil to the newly opened trench,

where the hearse stopped with its wheels half-sunken, and the chief

_croquemort_, without any ado, threw the coffin over his shoulder and

walked to the place of sepulture. Five _fossoyeurs_, at the remote end

of the trench, were digging and covering, as if their number rather than

their work needed increase, and a soldier in blue overcoat, whose hands

were full of papers, came up at a commercial pace, and cried:

"_Corps trente-deux!_"

Which corresponded to the figures on the box, and to the number of

interments for the day.

The delvers made no pause while the priest read the service, and the

clods fell faster than the rain. The box was nicely mortised against

another previously deposited, and as there remained an interstice

between it and that at its feet, an infant's coffin made the space

complete.

The Latin service was of all recitations the most slovenly and

contemptuous; the priest might have been either smiling or sleeping; for

his very red face appeared to have nothing in common with his scarcely

moving lips; and the assistant looked straight at the trench, half

covetously, half vindictively, as if he meant to turn the body out of

the box directly, and run away with the grave-clothes. It took but two

minutes to run through the text; the holy water was dashed from the

hyssop; and the priest, with a small shovel, threw a quantity of clods

after it. "_Requiescat in pace!_" he cried, like one just awakened, and

now for the first time the grave-diggers ceased; they wanted the

customary fee, _pour boire_.

The exiles never felt so destitute before; not a sou could be found in

the Colony. But the little hunchback stepped up with the cross, and gave

it to the chief _fossoyeur_, dropping a franc into his hand; each of the

women added some sous, and the younger one quietly tied a small round

token of brass to the wood, which she kissed thrice; it bore these

words:

"_A mon ami._"

"A little more than kin and less than kind!" whispered Andy Plade, who

knew what such souvenirs meant, in Paris.

The Colony went away disconsolate; but the little hunchback stopped on

the margin, and looked once more into the pit where the box was fast

disappearing.

"Pardon our debts, _bon Dieu!_" he said, "as we pardon our debtors."

Shall we who have followed this funeral be kind to the stranger that is

within our gates? The quiet old gentleman standing so gravely over the

_fosse commune_ might have attracted more regard from the angels than

that Iron Duke who once looked down upon the sarcophagus of his enemy in

the Hotel des Invalides.

And so Lees was at rest--the master's only son, the heir to lands and

houses, and servants, and hopes. He had escaped the bullet, but also

that honor which a soldier's death conferred--and thus, abroad and

neglected, had existed awhile upon the charity of strangers, to expire

of his own wickedness, and accept, as a boon, this place among the bones

of the wretched.

How beat the hearts which wait for the strife to be done and for him to

return! The field-hands sleep more honored in their separate mounds

beneath the pine trees. The landlady's daughter may come sometimes to

fasten a flower upon his cross; but, like that cross, her sorrow will

decay, and Master Lees will mingle with common dust, passing out of the

memory of Europe--ay! even of the Southern Colony.

How bowed and wounded they threaded the way homeward, those young men,

whom the world, in its bated breath, had called rich and fortunate! Now

that they thought it over, how absurd had been this gambling venture!

They should lose every sou. They had, for a blind chance, exhausted the

patience of their creditors, and made away with their last

collateral--their last crust, and bed, and drink.

"I wish," said Simp, bitterly, "that I had been born one of my mother's

niggers. Bigad! a cabin, a wood fire, corn meal and a pound of pork per

diem, would keep me like a duke next winter."

Here they stopped at Simp's hotel, and, as he was afraid to enter alone,

the loss of his baggage being detected, the Colony consented to ascend

to his chamber.

"Monsieur Simp," said the fierce concierge, "here is a letter, the last

which I shall ever receive for you! You will please pay my bill

to-night, or I shall go to the office of the _prud'homme_; you are of

the _canaille_, sir! Where are your effects?"

"Whoop!" yelled Mr. Simp, in the landlady's face. "Yah-ah-ah! hoora

ah-ah! three cheers! we have news of our venture! This is a telegram!"

"WISBADEN, Oct. 30.

"The system wins! To-day and yesterday I took seven thousand one

hundred francs. I have selected the 4th of November to break the

bank.

"AUBURN RISQUE."

VI.

THE OLD REVELRY REVIVED.

The Colony would have shouted over Master Lees' coffin at the receipt of

such intelligence. They gave a genuine American cheer, nine times

repeated, with the celebrated "tiger" of the Texan Rangers, as it had

been reported to them. Mr. Simp read the dispatch to the concierge, who

brightened up, begged his pardon, and hoped that he would forget words

said in anger.

"Madam," said Mr. Simp, with some dignity, "I have suffered and

forgotten much in this establishment; we have an aphorism, relative to

the last feather, in the English tongue. But lend me one hundred francs

till my instalment arrives from Germany, and I will forgive even the

present insult."

"Boys!" cried Andy Plade, "let us have a supper! We--that is, you--can

take the telegram to our several creditors, and raise enough upon it to

pass a regal night at the _Trois Frères_."

This proposition was received with great favor; the concierge gave Simp

a hundred francs; he ordered cigars and a gallon of punch, and they

repaired to his room to arrange the details of the celebration.

Freckle gave great offence by wishing that "Poor Lees" were alive to

enjoy himself; and Simp said, "Bigad, sir! Freckle, living, is more of a

bore than Lees, dead."

They resolved to attend supper in their dilapidated clothes, so that

what they had been might be pleasantly rebuked by what they were. "And

but for this feature," said Andy Plade, "it would have been well to

invite Ambassador Slidell." But Pisgah and Simp, who had applied to

Slidell several times by letter for temporary loans, were averse, just

now, to the presence of one who had forgotten "the first requisite of a

Southern Gentleman--generosity."

So it was settled that only the Colony and Hugenot were to come, each

man to bring one lady. Simp, Pisgah, and Freckle thought Hugenot a

villain. He had not even attended the obsequies of the lamented Lees.

But Andy Plade forcibly urged that Hugenot was a good speaker, and would

be needed for a sentiment.

In the evening a lunch was served by Mr. Simp, of which some young

ladies of the Paris _demi-monde_ partook; the "Bonnie Blue Flag" was

sung with great spirit, and Freckle became so intoxicated at two in the

morning that one of the young ladies was prevailed upon to see him to

his hotel.

There was great joy in the Latin Quarter when it was known that the

Southern Colony had won at Wisbaden, and meant to pay its debts. The

tailors, shoemakers, tobacconists, publicans, grocers and hosiers met in

squads upon corners to talk it over; all the gentlemen obtained loans,

and, as evidence of how liberal they meant to be, commenced by giving

away whatever old effects they had.

A _cabinet_ or small saloon of the most expensive restaurant in Paris

was pleasantly adorned for the first reunion of the Confederate exiles.

The ancient seven-starred flag, entwined with the new battle-flag, hung

in festoons at the head of the room, and directly beneath was the

portrait of President Davis. A crayon drawing of the C. S. N. V.

Florida, from the portfolio of the amateur Mr. Simp, was arched by two

crossed cutlasses, hired for the occasion; and upon an enormous iced

cake, in the centre of the table, stood a barefooted soldier, with his

back against a pine tree, defying both a Yankee and a negro.

At eleven o'clock P.M. the scrupulously dressed attendants heard a buzz

and a hurried tramp upon the stairs. They repaired at once to their

respective places, and after a pause the Southern Colony and convoy made

their appearance upon the threshold. With the exception of Pisgah and

Hugenot, all were clothed in the relics of their poverty, but their

hairs were curled, and they wore some recovered articles of jewelry.

They had thus the guise of a colony of barbers coming up from the gold

diggings, full of nuggets and old clothes.

By previous arrangement, the chair was taken by Andy Plade, supported by

two young ladies, and, after saying a welcome to the guests in elegant

French, he made a significant gesture to the chief waiter. The most

luscious Ostend oysters were at once introduced; they lifted them with

bright silver _fourchettes_ from plates of Sevres porcelain, and each

guest touched his lips afterward with a glass of refined _vermeuth_.

Three descriptions of soup came successively, an amber _Julien_, in

which the microscope would have been baffled to detect one vegetable

fibre, yet it bore all the flavors of the garden; a tureen of _potage à

la Bisque_, in which the rarest and tiniest shell-fish had dissolved

themselves; and at the last a _tortue_, small in quantity, but so

delicious that murmurs of "_encore_" were made.

Morsels of _viande_, so alternated that the appetite was prolonged--each

dish seeming a better variation of the preceding--were helped toward

digestion by the finest vintages of Burgundy; and the luscious _patés de

foie gras_--for which the plumpest geese in Bretagne had been invalids

all their days, and, if gossip be true, submitted in the end to a slow

roasting alive--introduced the fish, which, by the then reformed

Parisian mode, must appear after, not before, the _entrée_.

A _sole au vin blanc_ gave way to a regal _mackerel au sauce

champignon_, and after this dish came confections and fruits _ad

libitum_, ending with the removal of the cloth, the introduction of

cigars, and a _marquise_ or punch of pure champagne.

It was a pleasant evening within and without; the windows were raised,

and they could see the people in the gardens strolling beneath the lime

trees; the starlight falling on the plashing fountain and the gray,

motionless statues; the pearly light of the lines of lamps, shining down

the long arcades; the glitter of jewelry and precious merchandise in the

marvellous _boutiques_; the groups which sat around the café beneath

with _sorbets_ and _glacés_, and sparkling wines; the old women in

Normandie caps and green aprons, who flitted here and there to take the

hire of chairs, and break the hum of couples, talking profane and sacred

love; around and above all, the Cardinal's grand palace lifting its

multitudinous pilasters, and seeming to prop up the sky.

It was Mr. Simp and his lady who saw these more particularly, as they

had withdrawn from the table, to exchange a memory and a sentiment, and

Hugenot had joined them with his most recent mistress; for the latter

was particularly unfortunate in love, being cozened out of much money,

and yet libelled for his closeness.

All the rest sat at the table, talking over the splendor of the supper,

and proposing to hold a second one at the famous Philippe's, in the Rue

Montorgueil. But Mr. Freckle, being again emboldened by wine, and

affronted at the subordinate position assigned him, repeatedly cried

that, for his part, he preferred the "old Latin Quarter," and challenged

the chairman to produce a finer repast than Magny's in the Rue

Counterscarp.

Pisgah, newly clothed _cap-à-pie_, was drinking absinthe, and with his

absent eyes, worn face and changing hairs, looked like the spectre of

his former self. Now and then he raised his head to give unconscious

assent to something, but immediately relapsed to the worship of his

nepenthe; and, as the long potations sent strong fumes to his temples,

he chuckled audibly, and gathered his jaws to his eyes in a vacant grin.

The gross, coarse woman at his side, from whom the other females shrank

with frequent demonstrations of contempt, was Pisgah's _blanchisseuse_.

He was in her debt, and paid her with compliments; she is old and

uninviting, and he owes her eight hundred francs. Hers are the new

garments which he wears to-night. Few knew how many weary hours she

labored for them in the floating houses upon the Seine. But she is in

love with Pisgah, and is quite oblivious of the general regard; for,

strange to such grand occasions, she has both eaten and imbibed

enormously, and it may be even doubted at present whether she sees

anything at all.

She strokes his cloth coat with her red, swollen hands, and proposes now

and then that he shall visit the wardrobe to look after his new hat; but

Pisgah only passes his arm about her, and drains his absinthe, and

sometimes, as if to reassure the company, shouts wildly at the wrong

places: "'At's so, boys!" "Hoorah for you!" "Ay! capital, gen'l'men,

capital!" And his partner, conscious that something has happened, laughs

to her waist, and leans forward, quite overcome, as if she beheld

something mirthful over her washboard.

The place was now quite dreamy with tobacco-smoke; Freckle was riotously

sick at the window, and Andy Plade, who had been borrowing small sums

from everybody who would lend, struck the table with a corkscrew, and

called for order.

"Drire rup!" cried Mr. Freckle, looking very attentively, but seeing

nothing.

"I have the honor to state, gentlemen of the Colony, that we have with

us to-night an eloquent representative of our country--one whose

business energy and enterprise have been useful both to his own fortunes

and to the South--one who is a friend of yours, and more than a dear

friend to me. We came from the same old Palmetto State, the first and

the last ditch of our revolution. I give you a toast, gentlemen, to

which Mr. Hugenot will respond:

"'The Mother Country and the Colony--good luck to both!'"

"Hoorah for you!" cried Pisgah, looking the wrong way.

The glasses rattled an instant, amid iterations of "Hear! hear!" and Mr.

Hugenot, rising, as it appeared from a bandbox, carefully surveyed

himself in a mirror opposite, and touched his nose with a small nosegay.

"I feel, my friends, rather as your host than your guest to-night--"

("It isn't yesternight"--from Freckle--"it's to-morroer night.")

"For I, gentlemen, stand upon my hereditary, if not my native heath; and

you are, at most, Frenchmen by adoption. That ancestry whose deeds will

live when the present poor representative of its name is departed drew

from this martial land its blood and genius."

(Loud cries of "Gammon" from Freckle, and disapprobation from Simp.)

"From the past to the present, my friends, is a short transition. I

found you in Paris a month ago, poor and dejected. You are here

to-night, with that luxury which was your heritage. And how has it been

restored?"

("'At's so!" earnestly, from Pisgah.)

"By hard, grovelling work? Never! No contact with vulgar clay has soiled

these aristocratic hands. The cavalier cannot be a mudsill! You are not

like the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin. You

have not toiled, gentlemen, but you have spun!"

(Great awakening, doubt, and bewilderment.)

"You have spun the roulette ball, and you have won!"

(Ferocious and unparalleled cheering.)

"And it has occurred to me, my friends, that ou-ah cause, in the present

tremendous struggle, has been well symbolized by these, its foreign

representatives. Calamity came upon the South, as upon you. It had

indebtedness, as you have had. Shall I say that you, like the South,

repudiated? No! that is a slander of our adversaries. But the parallel

holds good in that we found ourselves abandoned by the world. Nations

abroad gave us no sympathy; our neighbors at home laughed at our

affliction. They would wrest from us that bulwark of our liberties, the

African."

"Capital, gentlemen, capital!" from Pisgah.

"They demanded that we should toil for ourselves. Did we do so? Never!

We appealed to the chances, as you have done; we would fight the Yankee,

but we would not work. You would fight the bank, but you would not

slave; and as you have won at Wisbaden, so have we, in a thousand

glorious contests. Fill, then, gentlemen, to the toast which your

chairman has announced:

"'The Mother Country and the Colony--good luck to both!'"

The applause which ensued was of such a nature that the proprietors

below endeavored to hasten the conclusion of the dinner by sending up

the bill. Pisgah and the _blanchisseuse_ were embracing in a spirited

way, and Simp was holding back Freckle, who--persuaded that Hugenot's

remarks were in some way derogatory to himself--wished to toss down his

gauntlet.

"The next toast, gentlemen of the Colony," said Andy Plade, "is to be

dispatched immediately by the waiter, whom you see upon my right hand,

to the office of the telegraph; thence to Mr. Risque at Wisbaden:

"'The Southern exiles; doubtless the most immethodical men alive; but

the results prove they have the best system: no _Risque_, no winnings.'

"You will see, gentlemen," continued Mr. Plade, when the enthusiasm had

subsided, "that I place the toast in this envelope. It will go in two

minutes to Mr. Auburn Risque!"

The waiter started for the door; it was dashed open in his face, and

splattered, dirty, and travel-worn, Auburn Risque himself stood like an

apparition on the threshold.

"Perdition!" thundered Plade, staggered and pale-faced; "you were not to

break the bank till to-morrow."

The Colony, sober or inebriate, clustered about the door, and held to

each other that they might hear the explanation aright.

Auburn Risque straightened himself and glared upon all the besiegers,

till his pock-marked face grew white as leprosy, and every spot in his

secretive eye faded out in the glitter of his defiance.

"To-morrow?" he said, in a voice hard, passionless, inflectionless; "how

could one break the bank to-morrow, when all his money was gone

yesterday?"

"Gone!" repeated the Colony, in a breath rather than a voice, and

reeling as if a galvanic current had passed through the circle--"Gone!"

"Every sou," said Risque, sinking into a chair. "The bank gave me one

hundred francs to return to Paris; I risked twenty-five of it, hopeful

of better luck, and lost again. Then I had not enough money to get home,

and for forty kilometres of the way I have driven a _charette_. See!" he

cried, throwing open his coat; "I sold my vest at Compiègne last night,

for a morsel of supper."

"But you had won seven thousand one hundred francs!"

"I won more--more than eighteen thousand francs; but, enlarging my

stakes with my capital, one hour brought me down to a sou."

"The 'system' was a swindle," hissed Mr. Simp, looking up through red

eyes which throbbed like pulses. "What right had you to plunder us upon

your speculation?"

"The 'system' could not fail," answered the gamester, at bay; "it must

have been my manner of play. I think that, upon one run of luck, I gave

up my method."

"We do not know," cried Simp, tossing his hands wildly; "we may not

accuse, we may not be enraged--we are nothing now but profligates

without means, and beggars without hope!"

They sobbed together, bitterly and brokenly, till Freckle, not entirely

sober, shouted, "Good God, is it that gammon-head, Hugenot, who has

ruined us? Fetch him out from his ancestry; let me see him, I say! Where

is the man who took my three hundred francs!"

"I wish," said Simp, in a suicidal way, "that I were lying by Lees in

the _fosse commune_. But I will not slave; the world owes every man a

living!"

"Ay!" echoed the rest, as desperately, but less resolutely.

"This noise," said one of the waiters politely, "cannot be continued. It

is at any rate time for the _salon_ to be closed. We will thank you to

pay your bill, and settle your quarrels in the garden."

"Here is the account," interpolated Andy Plade, "dinner for thirteen

persons, nineteen hundred and fifty francs.

"Manes of my ancestry!" shrieked Hugenot, overturning the

_blanchisseuse_ in his way, and rushing from the house.

"We have not the money!" cried the whole Colony in chorus; and, as if by

concert, the company in mass, male and female, cleared the threshold and

disappeared, headed by Andy Plade, who kept all the subscriptions in his

pockets, and terminated by Freckle, who was caught at the base of the

stairs and held for security.

VII.

THE COLONY DISBANDED.

The Colony, as a body, will appear no more in this transcript. The

greatness of their misfortune kept them asunder. They closed their

chamber-doors, and waited in hunger and sorrow for the moment when the

sky should be their shelter and beggary their craft.

It was in this hour of ruin that the genius of Mr. Auburn Risque was

manifest. The horse is always sure of a proprietor, and with horses Mr.

Risque was more at home than with men.

"Man is ungrateful," soliloquized Risque, keeping along the Rue

Mouffetard in the Chiffoniers' Quarter; "a horse is invariably faithful,

unless he happens to be a mule. Confound men! the only excellence they

have is not a virtue--they can play cards!"

Here he turned to the left, followed some narrow thoroughfares, and

stopped at the great horse market, a scene familiarized to Americans, in

its general features, by Rosa Bonheur's "La Foire du Chevaux."

Double rows of stalls enclosed a trotting course, roughly paved, and

there was an artificial hill on one side, where draught-horses were

tested. The animals were gayly caparisoned, whisks of straw affixed to

the tails indicating those for sale; their manes and forelocks were

plaited, ribbons streamed over their frontlets, they were muzzled and

wore wooden bits.

We have no kindred exhibition in the States, so picturesque and so

animated. Boors in blouses were galloping the great-hoofed beasts down

the course by fours and sixes; the ribbons and manes fluttered; the

whips cracked, and the owners hallooed in _patois_.

Four fifths of French horses are gray; here, there was scarcely one

exception; and the rule extended to the asses which moved amid hundreds

of braying mulets, while at the farther end of the ground the teams were

parked, and, near by, seller and buyer, book in hand, were chaffering

and smoking in shrewd good-humor.

One man was collecting animals for a celebrated stage-route, and the

gamester saw that he was a novice.

"Do you choose that for a good horse?" spoke up Risque, in his practical

way, when the man had set aside a fine, sinewy draught stallion.

"I do!" said the man, shortly.

"Then you have no eye. He has a bad strain. I can lift all his feet but

this one. See! he kicks if I touch it. Walk him now, and you will remark

that it tells on his pace."

The man was convinced and pleased. "You are a judge," he said, glancing

down Risque's dilapidated dress; "I will make it worth something to you

to remain here during the day and assist me."

The imperturbable gamester became a feature of the sale. He was the

best rider on the ground. He put his hard, freckled hand into the jaws

of stallions, and cowed the wickedest mule with his spotted eye. He knew

prices as well as values, and had, withal, a dashing way of bargaining,

which baffled the traders and amused his patron.

"You have saved me much money and many mistakes," said the latter, at

nightfall. "Who are you?"

"I am the man," answered Risque, straightforwardly, "to work on your

stage-line, and I am dead broke."

The man invited Risque to dinner; they rode together on the Champs

Elysées; and next morning at daylight the gamester left Paris without a

thought or a farewell for the Colony.

It was in the Grand Hotel that Messrs. Hugenot and Plade met by chance

the evening succeeding the dinner.

"I shall leave Paris, Andy," said Hugenot, regarding his pumps through

his eye-glass. "My ancestry would blush in their coffins if they knew

ou-ah cause to be represented by such individuals as those of last

evening."

"Let us go together," replied Plade, in his plausible way; "you cannot

speak a word of any continental language. Take me along as courier and

companion; pay my travelling expenses, and I will pay my own board."

"Can I trust you, Suth Kurlinian?" said Hugenot, irresolutely; "you had

no money yesterday."

"But I have a plan of raising a thousand francs to-day. What say you?"

"My family have been wont to see the evidence prior to committing

themselves. First show me the specie."

"_Voila!_" cried Plade, counting out forty louis; "the day after

to-morrow I guarantee to own eighteen hundred francs."

It did not occur to Mr. Hugenot to inquire how his friend came to

possess so much money; for Hugenot was not a clever man, and somewhat in

dread of Andy Plade, who, as his school-mate, had thrashed him

repeatedly, and even now that one had grown rich and the other was a

vagabond, the latter's strong will and keen, bad intelligence made him

the master man.

Hugenot's good fortune was accidental; his cargoes had passed the

blockade and given handsome returns; but he shared none of the dangers,

and the traffic required no particular skill. Hugenot was, briefly, a

favorite of circumstances. The war-wind, which had toppled down many a

long, thoughtful head, carried this inflated person to greatness.

They are well contrasted, now that they speak. The merchant, elaborately

dressed, varnished pumps upon his effeminate feet, every hair taught its

curve and direction, the lunette perched upon no nose to speak of, and

the wavering, vacillating eye, which has no higher regard than his own

miniature figure. Above rises the vagabond, straight, athletic and

courageous, though a knave.

He is so much of a man physically and intellectually, that we do not see

his faded coat-collar, frayed cuffs, worn buttons, and untidy boots. He

is so little of a man morally, that, to any observer who looks twice,

the plausibility of the face will fail to deceive. The eye is deep and

direct, but the high, jutting forehead above is like a table of stone,

bearing the ten broken commandments. He keeps the lips ajar in a smile,

or shut in a resolve, to hide their sensuality, and the fine black beard

conceals the massive contour of jaws which are cruel as hunger.

It was strange that Plade, with his clear conception, should do less

than despise his acquaintance. On the contrary, he was partial to

Hugenot's society. The world asked, wonderingly, what capacities had the

latter? Was he not obtuse, sounding, shallow? Mr. Plade alone, of all

the Americans in Paris, asserted from the first that Hugenot was

far-sighted, close, capable. Indeed, he was so earnest in this

enunciation that few thought him disinterested.

* * * * *

It was Master Simp who heard a bold step on the stairs that night, and a

resolute knock upon his own door.

"Arrest for debt!" cried Mr. Simp, falling tearfully upon his bed; "I

have expected the summons all day."

"The next man may come upon that errand," answered the ringing voice of

Andy Plade. "Freckle sleeps in Clichy to-night; Risque cannot be found;

the rest are as badly off; I have news for you."

"I am the man to be mocked," pleaded Simp; "but you must laugh at your

own joke; I am too wretched to help you."

"The Yankees have opened the Mississippi River; Louisiana is subjugated,

and communication re-established with your neighborhood; you can go

home."

"What fraction of the way will this carry me?" said the other, holding

up a five-franc piece. "My home is farther than the stars from me."

"It is a little sum," urged Mr. Plade; "one hundred dollars should pay

the whole passage."

Mr. Simp, in response, mimicked a man shovelling gold pieces, but was

too weak to prolong the pleasantry, and sat down on his empty trunk and

wept, as Plade thought, like a calf.

"Your case seems indeed hopeless," said the elder. "Suppose I should

borrow five hundred dollars on your credit, would you give me two

hundred for my trouble?"

Mr. Simp said, bitterly, that he would give four hundred and ninety-five

dollars for five; but Plade pressed for a direct answer to his original

proffer, and Simp cried "Yes," with an oath.

"Then listen to me! there is no reason to doubt that your neighbors have

made full crops for two years--cotton, sugar, tobacco. All this remains

at home unsold and unshipped--yours with the rest. Take the oath of

allegiance to the Yankee Government before its _chargé des affaires_ in

Paris. That will save your crops from confiscation, and be your passport

to return. Then write to your former banker here, promising to consign

your cotton to him, if he will advance five hundred dollars to take you

to Louisiana. He knows you received of old ten thousand dollars per

annum. He will risk so small a sum for a thing so plausible and

profitable."

"I don't know what you have been saying," muttered Simp. "I cannot

comprehend a scheme so intricate; you bewilder me! What is a

consignment? How am I, bigad! to make that clear in a letter? Perhaps my

speech in the case of Rutledge _vs._ Pinckney might come in well at this

juncture."

"Write!" cried Plade, contemptuously; "write at my dictation."

That night the letter was mailed; Mr. Simp was summoned to his banker's

the following noon, and at dusk he met Andy Plade in the Place Vendôme,

and paid over a thousand francs with a sigh.

On the third night succeeding, Messrs. Plade and Hugenot were smoking

their cigars at Nice, and Mr. Simp, without the least idea of what he

meant to do, was drinking cocktails on the Atlantic Ocean.

* * * * *

"Francine," said Pisgah, with a woful glance at the dregs of absinthe in

the tumbler, "give me a half franc, my dear; I am poorly to-day."

"Monsieur Pisgah," answered Madame Francine, "give me nine hundred and

sixty-five francs, seventy-five centimes--that is your bill with me--and

I am poorly also."

"My love," said Pisgah, rubbing his grizzled beard against the madame's

fat cheek, "you are not hard-hearted. You will pity the poor old exile.

I love you very much, Francine."

"Stand off!" cried the madame; "_vous m'embate!_ You say you love me;

then marry me!"

"Nonsense, my angel!"

"I say marry me!" repeated the madame, stamping her foot. "You are rich

in America. You have slaves and land and houses and fine relatives. You

will get all these when the war closes; but if you die of starvation in

Paris, they amount to nothing. Marry me! I will keep you alive here; you

will give me half of your possessions there! I shall be a grand lady,

ride in my carriage, and have a nasty black woman to wash my fine

clothes."

"That is impossible, Francine," answered Pisgah, not so utterly degraded

but he felt the stigma of such a proposition from his

_blanchisseuse_--and as he leaned his faded hairs upon his unnerved and

quivering hands, the old pride fluttered in his heart a moment and

painted rage upon his neck and temples.

"You are insulted, my lord count!" cried Madame Francine; "an alliance

with a poor washerwoman would shame your great kin. Pay me my money, you

beggar! or I shall put the fine gentleman in prison for debt."

"That would be a kindness to me, madame," said Pisgah, very humbly and

piteously.

"You are right," she made answer, with a mocking laugh; "I will not save

your life: you shall starve, sir! you shall starve!"

In truth, this consummation seemed very close, for as Pisgah entered his

creamery soon afterward, the proprietor met him at the threshold.

"Monsieur Pisgah," he said, "you can have nothing to eat here, until you

pay a part of your bill with me; I am a poor man, sir, and have

children."

Pisgah kept up the street with heavy forebodings, and turned into the

place of a clothes-merchant, to whom his face had long been familiar.

When he emerged, his handsome habits, the gift of Madame Francine, hung

in the clothes-dealer's window, and Mr. Pisgah, wearing a common blouse,

a cap, and coarse hide shoes, repaired to the nearest wine-shop, and

drank a dead man's portion of absinthe at the zinc counter. Then he

returned to his own hotel, but as he reached to the rack for his key,

the landlady laid her hand upon it and shook her head.

"You are properly dressed, Monsieur Pisgah," she said; "those who have

no money should work; you cannot sleep in twenty-six to night, sir; I

have shut up the chamber, and seized the little rubbish which you left."

Pisgah was homeless--a vagabond, an outcast. He walked unsteadily along

the street in the pleasant evening, and the film of tears that shut the

world from his eyes was peopled with far-off and familiar scenes.

He saw his father's wide acres, with the sunset gilding the fleeces of

his sheep and crowning with fire the stacks of grain and the vanes upon

his granges. Then the twilight fell, and the slaves went homeward

singing, while the logs on the brass andirons lit up the windows of the

mansion, and every negro cabin was luminous, so that in the night the

homestead looked like a village. Then the moon rose above the woods,

making the lawn frosty, and shining upon the long porch, where his

mother came out to welcome him, attended by the two house-dogs, which

barked so loudly in their glee that all the hen-coops were alarmed, and

the peacocks in the trees held their tails to the stars and trilled.

"Come in, my son," said the mother, looking proudly upon the tall,

straight shape and glossy locks; "the supper is smoking upon the table;

here is your familiar julep, without which you have no appetite; the

Maryland biscuit are unusually good this evening, and there is the

yellow pone in the corner, with Sukey, your old nurse, behind it. Do you

like much cream in your coffee, as you used to? Bless me! the partridge

is plump as a duck; but here is your napkin, embroidered with your name;

let us ask a blessing before we eat!"

While all this is going on, the cat, which has been purring by the fire,

takes a wicked notion to frighten the canary bird, but the high old

clock in the corner, imported from England before the celebrated

Revolutionary war, impresses the cat as a very formidable object with

its stately stride-stride-stride--so that the cat regarding it a moment,

forgets the canary bird, and mews for a small portion of cream in a

saucer.

"Halloo! halloo!" says the parrot, awakened by a leap of the fire; for,

the back-log has broken in half, and Pisgah sees, by the increased

light, the very hair-powder gleam on the portrait of General Washington.

But now the cloth is removed, and the old-fashioned table folds up its

leaves; they sip some remarkable sherry, which grandfather regards with

a wheezy sort of laugh, and after they have played one game of draughts,

Mr. Pisgah looks at his gold chronometer, and asks if he has still the

great room above the porch and plenty of bedclothes.

This is what Mr. Pisgah sees upon the film of his tears--wealth,

happiness, manliness! When he dashes the tears themselves to the

pavement with an oath, what rises upon his eye and his heart?

Paris--grand, luxurious, pitiless, and he, at twilight, flung upon the

world, with neither kindred nor country--a thing unwilling to live,

unfit to die!

He strolled along the quay to the Morgue; the beautiful water of St.

Michel fell sibilantly cold from the fountain, and Apollyon above, at

the feet of the avenging angel, seemed a sermon and an allegory of his

own prostration. How all the folks upon the bridge were stony faced! It

had never before occurred to him that men were cold-blooded creatures.

He wondered if the Seine, dashing against the quays and piers beneath,

were not their proper element? Ay! for here were three drowned people on

the icy slabs of the Morgue, with half a hundred gazing wistfully at

them, and their fixed eyes glaring fishily at the skylight, as if it

were the surface of the river and they were at rest below.

So seemed all the landscape as he kept down the quay--the lines of high

houses were ridges only in the sea, and Notre Dame, lifting its towers

and sculptured façade before, was merely a high-decked ship, with

sailors crowding astern. The holy apostles above the portal were more

like human men than ever, with their silicious eyes and pulseless

bosoms; while the hideous gargoyles at the base of each crocheted

pinnacle, seemed swimming in the dusky evening.

It may have been that this aqueous phenomenon was natural to one

"half-seas over;" but not till he stood on the place of the Hôtel de la

Ville, did Pisgah have any consciousness whatever that he walked upon

the solid world.

At this moment he was reminded, also, that he held a letter in his hand,

his landlady's gift at parting; it was dated, "Clichy dungeon," and

signed by Mr. Freckle.

"Dear Pisgah," read the text, "I am here at claim of restaurateur;

shall die to-morrow at or before twelve o'clock, if Andy Plade

don't fork over my subscription of two hundred francs. Andy Plade

damned knave--no mistake! No living soul been to see me, except

letter from Hon. Mr. Slidell. He has got sixteen thousand dollars

in specie for Simp. Where's Simp, dogorn him! Hon. S. sent to

Simp's house; understood he'd sailed for America. Requested Hon. S.

to give me small part of money as Simp's next friend. Hon. S.

declined. Population of prison very great. Damned scrub stock!

Don't object to imprisonment as much as the fleas. Fleas bent on

aiding my escape. If they crawl with me to-morrow night as far

again as last night I'll be clear--no mistake! Live on soup,

chiefly. Abhor soup. Had forty francs here first day, but debtor

with one boot and spectacles won it at _picquet_. Restaurateur says

bound to keep me here a thousand years if I don't sock--shall

die--no mistake! Come see me, _toute suite_. Fetch pocket-comb,

soap, and English Bible.

"Yours, in deep waters, FRECKLE."

"The whole world is in deep waters," said Pisgah, dismally. "So much the

better for them; here goes for something stronger!"

He repaired to the nearest drinking-saloon, and demanded a glass brimful

of absinthe, at which all the garçons and patrons held up their hands

while he drank it to the dregs.

"Sacristie!" cried a man with mouth wide open, "that gentleman can drink

clear laudanum."

"I wish," thought Pisgah, with a pale face, "that it had been laudanum;

I should have been dead by this time and all over. Why don't I get the

_delirium tremens_? I should like to be crazy. Oh, ho, ho, ho!" he

continued, laughing wildly, "to be in a hospital--nurses, soft bed, good

food, pity--oh, ho! that would be a fate fit for an emperor."

Here his eye caught something across the way which riveted it, and he

took half a step forward, exultingly. A great _caserne_, or barrack,

adjoined the Hôtel de Ville, and twice every day, after breakfast and

dinner, the soldiers within distributed the surplus of their rations to

mendicants without. The latter were already assembling--laborers in

neat, common clothing, with idlers and profligates not more forbidding,

while a soldier on guard directed them where to rest and in what order

or number to enter the building. Pisgah halted a moment with his heart

in his throat. But he was very hungry, and his silver was half gone

already; if he purchased a dinner, he might not be left with sufficient

to obtain a bed for the night.

"Great God!" he said aloud, lifting his clenched hands and swollen eyes

to the stars, "am I, then, among the very dogs, that I should beg the

crumbs of a common soldier?"

He took his place in the line, and when at length his turn was

announced, followed the rabble shamefacedly. The _chasseurs_ in the

mess-room were making merry after dinner with pipes and cards, and one

of these, giving Pisgah a piece of bread and a tin basin of strong

soup, slapped him smartly upon the shoulder, and cried:

"My fine fellow! you have the stuff in you for a soldier."

"I am just getting a soldier's stuff into me," responded Pisgah,

antithetically.

"Why do you go abroad, hungry, ill-dressed, and houseless, when you can

wear the livery of France?"

Pisgah thought the soldier a very presuming person.

"I am a foreigner," he said, "a--a--a French Canadian (we speak

_patois_ there). My troubles are temporary merely. A day or two may make

me rich."

"Yet for that day or two," continued the _chasseur_, "you will have the

humiliation of begging your bread. What signifies seven years of

honorable service to three days of mendicancy and distress? We are well

cared for by the nation; we are respected over the world. It is a mean

thing to be a soldier in other lands; here we are the gentlemen of

France."

Pisgah had never looked upon it in that light, and said so.

"Your poverty may have unmanned you," repeated the other; "to recover

your own esteem do a manly act! We have all feared death as citizens;

but take cold steel in your hand, and you can look into your grave

without a qualm. I say to you," spoke the _chasseur_, clearly and

eloquently, "be one of us. Decide now, before a doubt mars your better

resolve! You are a young man, though the soulless career of a citizen

has anticipated the whitening of your hairs. Plant your foot; throw back

your shoulders; say 'yes!'"

"I do!" cried Pisgah, with something of the other's enthusiasm; "I was

born a gentleman, I will die a gentleman, or a soldier."

They put Mr. Pisgah among the conscripts recently levied, and he went

about town with a fictitious number in his hat, joining in their

bacchanal choruses. The next day he appeared in white duck jacket and

pantaloons, looking like an overgrown baker's boy, with a chapeau like a

flat, burnt loaf. He was then put through the manual, which seemed to

indicate all possible motions save that of liquoring up, and when he was

so fatigued that he had not the energy even to fall down, he was clasped

in the arms of Madame Francine, who had traced him to the barracks, but

was too late to avert his destiny.

"Oh! _mon amant!_" she cried, falling upon his neck. "Why did you go and

do it? You knew that I did not mean to see you starve."

"You have consigned me to a soldier's grave, woman!" answered Pisgah, in

the deepest tragedy tone.

"Do not say so, my _bonbon_!" pleaded the good lady, covering him with

kisses. "I would have worn my hands to the bone to save you from this

dreadful life. Suppose you should be sent to Algiers or Mexico, or some

other heathen country, and die there."

It was Pisgah's turn to be touched.

"My blood is upon your head, Francine! Have you any money?"

"Yes, yes! a gentleman, a _noir_, a _naigre_, for whom I have washed,

paid me fifty francs this evening. It is all here; take it, my love!"

"I do not know, creature! that your conduct permits me to do so," said

Pisgah, drawing back.

"You will drive me mad if you refuse," shrieked the blanchisseuse. "Oh!

oh! how wicked and wretched am I!"

"Enough, madame! step over the way for my habitual glass of absinthe. Be

particular about the change. We military men must be careful of our

incomes. Stay! you may embrace me if you like."

The poor woman came every day to the barracks, bringing some trifle of

food or clothing. She washed his regimentals, burnished his buckles and

boots, paid his losses at cards, and bought him books and tobacco. She

could never persuade herself that Pisgah was not her victim, and he

found it useful to humor the notion.

Down in the swift Seine, at her booth in the great lavatory, where the

ice rushed by and the rain beat in, she thought of Pisgah as she toiled;

and though her back ached and her hands were flayed, she never wondered

if her lot were not the most pitiable, and his in part deserved.

How often should we hard, selfish men, thank God for the weaknesses of

women!

VIII.

THE MURDER ON THE ALPS.

And so, with Mr. Pisgah on the road to glory, Mr. Simp on the smooth

sea, Mr. Freckle in the debtor's jail, Mr. Risque behind his

four-in-hand, and Mr. Lees in the charity grave, let us sit with the two

remaining colonists in the cabriolet at Bellinzona; for it is the month

of April, and they are to cross the great St. Gothard _en route_ for

Paris. Here is the scene: a gloomy stone building for the diligence

company; two great yellow diligences, empty and unharnessed in the area

before; one other diligence, packed full, with the horses' heads turned

northward, and the blue-nosed Swiss clerk calling out the names of

passengers; a half-dozen cabriolets looking at each other irresolutely

and facing all possible ways; two score of unwashed loungers, in red

neck-kerchiefs and velvet jackets, smoking rank, rakish, black cigars;

several streets of equal crookedness and filthiness abutting against a

grimy church, whence beggars, old women, and priests emerge continually;

and far above all, as if suspended in the air, a grim, battlemented

castle, a defence, as it seems, against the snowy mountains which march

upon Bellinzona from every side to crush its orchards and vineyards and

drown it in the marshes of Lago Maggiore.

"_Diligenza compito!_" cries the clerk, moving toward the waiting

cabriolet--"Signore Hugenoto."

"Here!" replies a small, consequential-looking person, reconnoitring the

interior of the vehicle.

"Le Signore Plaèdo!"

"Ci," responds a dark, erect gentleman, striding forward and saying, in

clear Italian, "Are there no other passengers?"

"None," answered the clerk; "you will have a good time together; please

remember the guard!"

The guard, however, was in advance, a tall person, wrapped to the eyes

in fur, wearing a silver bugle in front of his cap, and covered with

buff breeches.

He flourished his whip like a fencing-master, moved in a cloud of

cigar-smoke, and, as he placed his bare hand upon the manes of his

horses, they reined back, as if it burned or frosted them.

"My ancestry," says the small gentleman, "encourage no imposition. Shall

we give the fellow a franc?"

The other had already given double the sum, and it was odd, now that one

looked at him, how pale and hard had grown his features.

"God bless me, Andy!" cries the little person, stopping short; "you have

not had your breakfast to-day; apply my smelling-bottle to your nose;

you are sick, man!"

"Thank you," says the other, "I prefer brandy; I am only glad that we

are quite alone."

The paleness faded out of his cheeks as he drank deeply of the spirits,

but the jaws were set hard, and the eyes looked stony and pitiless. The

man was ailing beyond all doubt.

The whip cracked in front; the great diligence started with a groan and

a crackling of joints; the little postilion set the cabriolet going with

a chirp and a whistle; the priests and idlers looked up excitedly; the

women rushed to the windows to flutter their handkerchiefs, and all the

beggars gave sturdy chase, dropping benedictions and damnations as they

went.

The small person placed his boots upon the empty cushion before and

regarded them with some benevolence; then he touched his mustache with a

comb, which he took from the head of his cane.

"It is surprising, Andy," he said, "how the growth of one's feet bears

no proportion to that of his head. Observe those pedals. One of my

ancestors must have found a wife in China. They have gained no increase

after all these pilgrimages--and I flatter myself that they are in some

sort graceful--ay? Now remark my head. What does Hamlet, or somebody,

say about the front of Jove? This trip to Italy has actually enlarged

the diameter of my head thirteen barleycorns! Thirteen, by measurement!"

The tall gentleman said not a word, but compressed his tall shoulders

into the corner of the coach, and muffled his face with his coat-collar

and breathed like one sleeping uneasily.

"It has been a cheap trip!" exclaimed the diminutive person, changing

the theme; "you have been an invaluable courier, Andy. The most ardent

patriot cannot call us extravagant."

"How much money have you left?" echoed the other in a suppressed tone.

"Count it. I will then tell you to a sou what will carry us to Paris."

The little person drew a wallet from his side-pocket and enumerated

carefully certain circular notes. "Eleven times twenty is two hundred

and twenty; twenty-five times two hundred and twenty, five thousand five

hundred, plus nine gold louis--total, five thousand seven hundred and

twenty-five francs."

One eye only of the large gentleman was visible through the folds of his

collar. It rested like a charmed thing upon the roll of gold and paper.

It was only an eye, but it seemed to be a whole face, an entire man. It

was full of thoughts, of hopes, of acts! Had the little person marked

it, thus sinister, and glittering and intense, he would have shrunk as

from a burning-glass.

He folded up the wallet, however, and slipped it into his inside-pocket,

while the other pushed forward his hat, so that it concealed even the

eye, and sat rigid and still in his corner.

"You have not named the fare to Paris."

The tall man only breathed short and hard.

"Don't you recollect?"

"No!"

"I have a 'Galignani' here; perhaps it is advertised. But hallo, Andy!"

The exclamation was loud and abrupt, but the silent person did not move.

"_The Confederate Privateer Planter will sail from Dieppe on

Tuesday_--(that is, to-morrow evening)--_she will cruise in the Indian

Ocean, if report be true._"

The tall man started suddenly and uncovered his face with a quick

gesture. It was flushed and earnest now, and he clutched the journal

almost nervously, though his voice was yet calm and suppressed.

"To-morrow night, did you say? A cruise on the broad sea--glory without

peril, gold without work; I would to God that I were on the Planter's

deck, Hugenot!"

"Why not do something for ou-ah cause, Andy?"

"I am to return to Paris for what? To be dunned by creditors, to be

marked for a parasite at the hotels, to be despised by men whom I serve,

and pitied by men whom I hate. This pirate career suits me. What is

society to me, whom it has ostracised? I was a gentleman once--quick at

books, pleasing in company, shrewd in business. They say that I have

power still, but lack integrity. Be it so! Better a freebooter at sea

than upon the land. I have half made up my mind to evil. Hugenot, listen

to me! I believe that were I to do one bad, dark deed, it would restore

me courage, resolution, energy."

The little gentleman examined the other with some alarm; but just now

the teams commenced the ascent of a steep hill, and as he beheld the

guard a little way in advance, he forgot the other's earnestness, and

raised his lunette.

"Andy," he said, "by my great ancestry! I have seen that man before.

Look! the height, the style, the carriage, are familiar. Who is he?"

His co-voyageur was without curiosity; the former pallidness and

silentness resumed their dominion over him, and the lesser gentleman

settled moodily back to his newspaper.

No word was interchanged for several hours. They passed through shaggy

glens, under toppled towers and battlements, by squalid villages, and

within the sound of dashing streams. If they descended ever, it was to

gain breath for a longer ascent; for now the mountain snows were above

them on either side, and the Alps rose sublimely impassable in front.

The hawks careened beneath them; the chamois above dared not look down

for dizziness, and Hugenot said, at Ariola, that they were taking lunch

in a balloon. The manner of Mr. Plade now altered marvellously. It might

have been his breakfast that gave him spirit and speech; he sang a

merry, bad song, which the rocks echoed back, and all the goitred women

at the roadside stopped with their pack burdens to listen. He told a

thousand anecdotes. He knew all the story of the pass; how the Swiss,

filing through it, had scattered the Milanese; how Suwarrow and Massena

had made its sterility fertile with blood.

Hugenot's admiration amounted to envy. He had never known his associate

so brilliant, so pleasing; the exaltation was too great, indeed, to

arise from any ordinary cause; but Hugenot was not shrewd enough to

inquire into the affair. He wearied at length of the talk and of the

scene, and when at last they reached the region of perpetual ice, he

closed the cabriolet windows, and watched the filtering flakes, and

heard the snow crush under the wheels, and dropped into a deep sleep

which the other seemed to share.

The clouds around them made the mountains dusky, and the interior of the

carriage was quite gloomy. At length the large gentleman turned his

head, so that his ear could catch every breath, and he regarded the dim

outlines of the lesser with motionless interest. Then he took a straw

from the litter at his feet, and, bending forward, touched his comrade's

throat. The other snored measuredly for a while, but the titillation

startled him at length, and he beat the air in his slumber. When the

irritation ceased he breathed tranquilly again, and then the first-named

placed his hand softly into the sleeper's pocket. He drew forth the

wallet with steady fingers, and as coolly emptied it of its contents.

These he concealed in the leg of his boot, but replaced the book where

he had found it. For a little space he remained at rest, leaning against

the back of the carriage, with his head bent upon his breast and his

hands clenched like one at bay and in doubt.

The slow advance of the teams and the frequent changes of

direction--sometimes so abrupt as almost to reverse the

cabriolet--advised him that they were climbing the mountain by zigzags

or terraces. He knew that they were in the _Val Tremola_, or Trembling

Way, and he shook his comrade almost fiercely, as if relieved by some

idea which the place suggested.

"Hugenot," he said, "rouse up! The grandeur of the Alps is round about

us; you must not miss this scene. Come with me! Quit the vehicle! I know

the place, and will exhibit it."

The other, accustomed to obey, leaped to the ground immediately, and

followed through the snow, ankle deep, till they passed the diligence,

which kept in advance. The guard could not be seen--he might have

resorted to the interior; and the two pedestrians at once left the

roadway, climbing its elbows by a path more or less distinctly marked,

so that after a half hour they were perhaps a mile ahead. The agility of

Mr. Plade during this episode was the marvel of his companion. He scaled

the rocks like a goatherd, and his foot-tracks in the snow were long,

like the route of a giant. The ice could not betray the sureness of his

stride; the rare, thin atmosphere was no match for his broad, deep

chest. He shouted as he went, and tossed great boulders down the

mountain, and urged on his flagging comrade by cheer and taunt and

invective. No madman set loose from captivity could be guilty of so

extravagant, exaggerated elation.

At last they stood upon a little bridge spanning a chasm like a cobweb.

A low parapet divided it from the awful gulf. On the other side the

mountain lifted its jagged face, clammy with icicles, and far over all

towered the sterile peaks, above the reach of clouds or lightnings,

forever in the sunshine--forever desolate.

"Stand fast!" said the leader, suddenly cold and calm. "Uncover, that

the snow-flakes may give us the baptism of nature! There is no human God

at this vast height; they worship _Him_ in the flat world below. Give me

your hand and look down! You are not dizzy? One should be free from the

baseness of fear, standing here upon St. Gothard."

"If I had no qualm before," said Hugenot, "your words would make me

shudder."

"You have heard of the 'valley of the shadow'? Was your ideal like this?

I told you in Florence of the great poet Dante. You have here at a

glance more beauty and dread conjoined than even his mad fancy could

conjure up. That is the Tessino, braining itself in cataracts. Yonder,

where the clouds make a golden lake, laving forests of firs, lies Italy

as the Goths first beheld it, with their spears quivering. See how the

eagles beat the mist beneath!--that was a symbol that the Roman

standards should be rent."

The other, half in charm, half in awe, listened like one spell-bound,

with his fingers tingling and his eyeballs throbbing.

"This silence," said the elder, "is more freezing to me than the

bitterness of the cold. The very snow-flakes are dumb; nothing makes

discord but the avalanche; it is always twilight; men lie down in the

snows to die, but they are numb and cannot cry."

"Be still," replied the other, "your talk is strangely out of place. I

feel as if my ancestors in their shrouds were beside me."

"You are not wrong," cried the greater, raising his voice till it became

shrill and terrible; "your last moments are passing; that yawning ravine

is your grave. I told you an hour ago how one bad, dark deed would

redeem me. It is done! I have robbed you, and your death is essential to

my safety."

Hugenot sank upon the snow of the parapet, speechless and almost

lifeless. He clasped his hands, but could not raise his head; the whole

scene faded from his eye. If he had been weak before, he was impotent

now.

The strong man held him aloft by the shoulders with an iron grasp, and

his cold eye gave evidence to the horrible validity of his words.

"I do not lie or play, Hugenot," he said, in the same clear voice; "I

have premeditated this deed for many weeks. You are doomed! Only a

miracle can help you. The dangers of the pass will be my exculpation; it

will be surmised that you fell into the ravine. There will be no marks

of violence upon you but those of the sharp stones. We have been close

comrades. Only Omniscience can have seen premeditation. I have brought

you into this wilderness to slay you!"

The victim had recovered sufficiently to catch a part of this

confession. His lips framed only one reply--the dying man's last straw:

"After death!" he said; "have you thought of that?"

"Ay," answered the other, "long and thoroughly. Phantoms, remorses and

hells--they have all had their argument. I take the chances."

It was only a moment's struggle that ensued. The wretch clung to the

parapet, and called on God and mercy. He was lifted on high in the

strong arms, and whirled across the barrier. The other looked grimly at

the falling burden. He wondered if a dog or a goat would have been so

long falling. The distance was profound indeed; but to the murderer's

sanguine thought the body hung suspended in the air. It would not sink.

The clouds seemed to bear it up for testimony; the cold cliffs held

aloft their heads for justice; the snow-flakes fell like the ballots of

jurymen, voting for revenge--all nature seemed roused to animation by

this one act. An icicle dropped with a keen ring like a knife, and the

stream below pealed a shrill alarum.

He had done the bad, dark deed. Was he more resolute or courageous now

that he had taken blood upon his hands and shadow upon his soul?

The body disappeared at length, carried downward by the torrent; but a

wild bird darted after it, as if to reveal the secret of its

concealment, and then a noise like a human footfall crackled in the

snow.

"I like a man who takes the chances," said a cold, hard voice; "but

Chance, Andy Plade, decides against you to-day."

IX.

THE ONE GOOD DEED OF A PRIVATEERSMAN.

The murderer turned from his reverie with hands extended and trembling;

the snow was not more bleached than his bloodless face, and his feet

grew slippery and infirm. An alcove, which he had not marked, was hewn

in the brow of the precipice. It had been intended to shelter pilgrims

from the wind and the snow; and there, wrapped in his buff garments,

whose hue, assimilating to that of the rock, absorbed him from

detection, stood a witness to the deed--the guard to the diligence--none

other than Auburn Risque.

For an instant only the accused shrank back. Then his body grew short

and compact; he was gathering himself up for a life-struggle.

"Hold off!" said Risque, in his old, hard, measured way; "we guards go

armed; if you move, I shall scatter your brains in the snow; if I miss

you, a note of this whistle will summon my postilions."

The cold face was never more emotionless; he held a revolver in his

hand, and kept the other in his blank, spotted eye, as if locating the

vital parts with the end to bring him down at a shot.

"You do not play well," said Risque at length, when the other, ghastly

white, sat speechless upon the parapet; "if you were the student of

chance, that I have been, you would know that at murder the odds are

always against you!"

"You will not betray me?" pleaded Plade; "so inveterate a gamester can

have no conventional ideas of life or crime. I am ready to pay for your

discretion with half my winnings."

"I am a gambler," said Risque, curtly; "not an assassin! I always give

my opponents fair show. But I will not touch blood-money."

"What fair show do you give me?"

"Two hours' start. I am responsible for my passengers. Go on, unharmed,

if you will. But at Hospice I shall proclaim you. Every moment that you

falter spins the rope for your gallows!"

Plade did not dally, but took to flight at once. He climbed by the

angles of the terraces, and saw the diligence far below tugging up the

circuitous road. He ran at full speed; no human being was abroad

besides, but yet there were other footfalls in the snow, other sounds,

as of a man breathing hard and pursued upon the lonely mountain. The

fugitive turned--once, twice, thrice; he laughed aloud, and shook his

clenched hand at the sky. Still the flat, dead tramp followed close

behind, and the pace seemed not unfamiliar. It could not be--his blood

ceased to circulate, and stood freezing at the thought--was it the

march, the tread of Hugenot?

He dropped a loud curse, like a howl, and kept upon his way. The

footfalls were as swift; he saw their impressions at his heels--prints

of a small, lithe, human foot, made by no living man. He shut his eyes

and his ears, but the consciousness remained, the inexplicable

phenomenon of some invisible but familiar thing which would not leave

him; which made its register as it passed; which no speed could

outstrip, no argument exorcise.

Was it a sick fancy, a probed heart, or did the phantom of the dead man

indeed give chase?

Ah! there is but one class of folks whose faith in spirits nothing can

shake--the guilty, the bloody-handed.

He came to a perturbed rest at the huge, half-hospitable Hospice, to the

enthusiasm of the postilions.

"Will the gentleman have a saddle-horse?"

"A chariot?"

"A cabriolet?"

"Ten francs to Andermatt!"

"Thirty francs to Fluelen!"

"One hundred francs," cried Plade, "for the fleetest pony to Andermatt.

Ten francs to the postilion who can saddle him in two minutes. My mother

is dying in Lyons."

He climbed one of the dark flights of stairs, and an old, uncleanly monk

gave him a glass of Kerschwasser. He descended to the stables, and

cursed the Swiss lackeys into speed. He gave such liberal largess that

there was an involuntary cheer, and as he galloped away the great

diligence appeared in sight to rouse his haste to frenzy.

The telegraph kept above him--a single line; he knew the tardiness of

foot when pursued by the lightning. In one place, the conductor,

wrenched from the insulators, dropped almost to the ground. There was a

strap upon his saddle; he reined his nag to the side of the road, and,

making a knot about the wire, dashed off at a bound; the iron snapped

behind; his triumphant laugh pealed yet on the twilight, when the cries

of his pursuers rang over the fields of snow. They were aroused; he was

fleetly mounted, but they came behind in sledges.

The night closed over the road as he caught the wizard bells. The

moonlight turned the peaks to fire. The dark firs shook down their

burdens of snow. There were cries of wild beasts from the ravines below.

The post-houses were red with firelight. The steed floundered through

the snow-drifts driven by blow and halloo. It was a fearful ride upon

the high Alps; the sublimity of nature bowed down to the mystery of

crime!

Bright noon, on the third day succeeding, saw the fugitive emerge from

the railway station at Dieppe. He had escaped the Swiss frontier with

his life, but had failed to make sure that escape by reaching the harbor

at the appointed time. Broken in spirit, grown old already, he faltered

toward the town, and, stopping on the fosse-bridge, looked sorrowfully

across the shipping in the dock. Something caught his regard amid the

cloud of tri-color; he looked again, shading his eye with a tremulous

palm. There could not be a doubt--it was the Confederate standard--the

Stars and Bars.

The Planter had been delayed; she waited with steam up and an expectant

crew; her slender masts leaned against the sky; her anchor was lifted; a

knot of idlers watched her from the quay.

In a moment Mr. Plade was on board. He asked for the commander, and a

short, gristly, sunburnt personage being indicated, he introduced

himself with that plausible speech which had wooed so many to their

fall.

"I am a Charlestonian," said Plade; "a Yankee insulted me at the Grand

Hotel; we met in the Bois de Boulogne, and I ran him through the body.

His friends in Paris conspire against my life. I ask to save it now,

only to die on your deck, that it may be worth something to my country."

They went below, and the privateer put the applicant through a rigid

examination.

"This vessel must get to sea to night," he said. "I will not hazard

trouble with the French authorities by keeping you here. Spend the

afternoon ashore; we sail at eleven o'clock precisely; if at that time

you come aboard, I will take you."

Plade protested his gratitude, but the skipper motioned him to peace.

"You seem to be a gentleman," he added; "if I find you so, you shall be

my purser. But, hark!" he looked keenly at the other, and laid his hand

upon his throat--"I am under the espionage of the Yankee ambassador.

There are spies who seek to join my crew for treasonable ends; if I find

you one of these, you shall hang to my yard-arm!"

The felon walked into the dim old city, and seated himself in a

wine-shop. Some market folks were chanting in _patois_, and their

light-heartedness enraged him. He turned up a crooked street, and

stopped before an ancient church, grotesque with broken buttresses,

pinnacles, and gargoyles. The portal was wide open, and, as he entered,

some scores of school-children burst suddenly into song. It seemed to

him an accusation, shouted by a choir of angels.

At the end of the city, facing the sea, rose a massive castle. He scaled

its stairs, and passed through the courtyard, and, crossing the farther

moat, stood upon a grassy hill--once an outwork--whence the blue channel

was visible half way to England.

A knot of soldiers came out to regard him, and his fears magnified their

curiosity; he ran down the parapet, to their surprise, and re-entered

the town by a roundabout way. "I will take a chamber," he said, "and

shun observation."

An old woman, in a starched cap, who talked incessantly, showed him a

number of rooms in a great stone building. He chose a garret among the

chimney-stacks, and lit a fire, and ordered a newspaper and a bottle of

brandy. He sat down to read in loneliness. As he surmised, the murder

was printed among the "_Faits Divers_;" it gave his name and the story

of the tragedy. His chair rattled upon the tiles as he read, and the

tongs, wherewith he touched the fire, clattered in his nervous fingers.

The place was not more composed than himself; the flame was the noisiest

in the world; it crackled and crashed and made horrible shadows on the

walls. There were rats under the floor whose gnawings were like human

speech, and the old house appeared to settle now and then with a groan

as if unwilling to shelter guilt. As he looked down upon the clustering

roofs of the town they seemed wonderfully like a crowd of people gazing

up at his retreat. All the dormer-windows were so many pitiless eyes,

and the chimney-pots were guns and cannon to batter down his eyrie.

When night fell upon the city and sea, his fancies were not less

alarming. He could not rid himself of the idea that the dead man was at

his side. In vain he called upon his victim to appear, and laughed till

the windows shook. It was there, _there_, always THERE! He did not see

it--but it was _there_! He felt its breath, its eye, its influence. It

leaned across his shoulder; it gossiped with the shadows; it laid its

hand heavily upon his pocket where lay the unholy gold. Some prints of

saints and the Virgin upon the wall troubled him; their faces followed

him wherever he turned; he tore them down at length, and tossed them in

the fire, but they blazed with so great flame that he cried out for

fear.

The town-bells struck the hours; how far apart were the strokes! They

tolled rather than pealed, as if for an execution, and the lamps of some

passing carriages made a journey as of torches upon the ceiling.

After nine o'clock there was a heavy tread upon the stairs. It kept him

company, and he was glad of its coming; but it drew so close, at length,

that he stood upright, with the cold sweat upon his forehead.

The steps halted at his threshold; the door swung open; a corporal and a

soldier stood without, and the former saluted formally:

"Monsieur the stranger, will remain in his chamber under guard. I grieve

to say that he is an object of grave suspicion. _Au revoir!_"

The corporal retired without waiting for a reply; the soldier entered,

and, leaning his musket against the wall, drew a chair before the door

and sat down. The firelight fell upon his face after a moment, and

revealed to Mr. Plade his old associate, Pisgah!

The former uttered a cry of hope and surprise; the soldier waved him

back with a menace.

"I know you," he said; "but I am here upon duty; besides, I have no

friendship with a murderer."

"We are both victims of a mistake! This accusation is not true. Will you

take my hand?"

"I am forbidden to speak upon guard," answered Pisgah, sullenly. "Resume

your chair."

"At least join me in a glass."

"There is blood in it," said Pisgah.

"I swear to you, no! Let me ring for your old beverage, absinthe."

The soldier halted, irresolutely; the liquor came before he could

refuse. When once his lips touched the vessel, Mr. Plade knew that there

was still a chance for life.

In an hour Mr. Pisgah was impotent from intoxication; his musket was

flung down the stairway, the door was bolted upon him, and the prisoner

was gone.

He gained the Planter's deck as the screw made its first revolution;

they turned the channel-piles with a good-by gun; the motley crew

cheered heartily as they cleared the mole.

The pirate was at sea on her mission of plunder--the murderer was free!

The engines stopped abreast the city; the steamer lay almost motionless,

for there were lights upon the beach; a shrill "Ahoy!" broke over the

intervening waters, and the dip of oars indicated some pursuit. The

crew, half drunken, rallied to the edge of the vessel; knives glittered

amid the confusion of oaths and the click of pistols, while Mr. Plade

hastened to the skipper's side, and urged him for pity and mercy to

hasten seaward.

The other motioned him back, coldly, and the boatswain piped all hands

upon deck. Lafitte nor Kidd never looked down such desperate faces as

this gristly privateer, when his buccaneers were around him.

"Seamen," he spoke aloud, "you are afloat! Gold and glory await you; you

shall glut yourselves by the ruin of your enemy, and count your plunder

by the light of his burning merchantmen."

The knives flickered in the torchlight, and a cheer, like the howl of

the damned, went up.

"On the brink of such fortune, you find yourselves imperilled; treason

is with you; this pursuit, which we attend, is a part of its programme!

There is, within the sound of my voice, a spy!--a Yankee!"

The weapons rang again; the desperadoes pressed forward, demanding with

shrieks and imprecations that the man should be named.

"He is here," answered the captain, turning full upon the astonished

fugitive. "He came to me with a story of distress. I pitied him, and

gave him shelter; but I telegraphed to Paris to test his veracity, and I

find that he lied. No man has been slain in a duel as he states. I

believe him to be a Federal emissary, and he is in our power."

A dozen rough hands struck Plade to the deck; he staggered up, with

blood upon his face, and called Heaven to witness that he was no

traitor.

"Did you speak the truth to me to-day?" cried the accuser.

"I did not; had I done so, you would have refused me relief."

"What are you then? Speak!"

The murderer cowered, with a face so blanched that the blood ceased to

flow at its gashes.

"I cannot, I dare not tell!" he muttered.

The skipper made a sign to an attendant. A rope from the yard-arm was

flung about the felon's neck, and made fast in a twinkling. He struggled

desperately, but the fierce buccaneers held him down; his clothing was

rent, and his hairs dishevelled; he made three frantic struggles for

speech; but the loud cheers mocked his words as they brandished their

cutlasses in his eyes.

Then began that strange lifetime of reminiscence; that trooping of sins

and cruelties, in sure, unbroken continuity, through the reeling brain;

that moment of years; that great day of judgment, in a thought; that

last winkful of light, which flashes back upon time, and makes its

frailties luminous. And, higher than all offences, rose that of the fair

young wife deserted abroad, left to the alternatives of shame or

starvation. Her wail came even now, from the bed of the crowded

hospital, to follow him into the world of shadows.

"Monsieur the Commander," hailed the spokesman in the launch, "the

government of his Imperial Majesty does not wish to interpose any

obstacle to the departure of the Confederate cruiser. It is known,

however, that a person guilty of an atrocious crime is concealed on

board. In this paper, Monsieur the Capitaine will find all the

specifications. The name of the person, Plade. The crime of the person,

murder, with premeditation. The giving up of said person is essential to

the departure of the cruiser from his Imperial Majesty's waters."

There was blank silence on the deck of the privateer; the torches in the

launch threw a glare upon the water and sky. They lit up something

struggling between both at the tip of the rocking yard-arm. It was the

effigy of a man, bound and suspended, around which swept timidly the

bats and gulls, and the sea wind beat it with a shrill, jubilant cry.

"I have done justice unconsciously," said the privateer; "may it be

remembered for me when I shall do injustice consciously!"

X.

THE SURVIVING COLONISTS.

The catastrophe of the Colony and the episode having been attained, we

have only to leave Mr. Pisgah in Algiers, whither court-martial

consigned him, with the penalty of hard labor, and Mr. Risque on the

stage route he was so eminently fitted to adorn. The unhappy Freckle

continued in the prison of Clichy, and, having nothing else to do,

commenced the novel process of thinking. The prison stood high up on

Clichy Hill, walled and barred and guarded, like other jails, but within

it a fair margin of liberty was allowed the bankrupts, just sufficient

to make their fate terrible by temptation. Some good soul had endowed it

with a library; newspapers came every day; a café was attached to it,

where spirituous liquors were prohibited, to the wrath of the dry

throats and raging thirsts of the captives; there was a garden behind

it, and a billiard saloon, but these luxuries were not gratuitous; poor

Freckle could not even pay his one sou per diem to cook his rations, so

that the Prisoners' Relief Association had to make him a present of it.

He spent his time between his bare, cheerless bedroom and the public

hall. There were many Americans in the place; but none of them were

friendly with him when he was found to have no cash. Yet he heard them

speak together of their countrymen who had lain in the same jail years

before. Yonder was the room of Horace Greeley, incarcerated for a debt

which was not his own; here the blood-stains of the Pennsylvania youth

who looked out of the window, heedless of warning, and was shot dead by

the guard; there the ancient chair, in which Hallidore, the Creole, sat

so often, possessor of a million francs, but too obstinate to pay his

tailor's bill and go free. While Freckle thought of these, it was

suggested to him that he was a very wicked man. The tuitions of his

patriarchal father came to mind; he was seen on his knees, to the

infinite amusement of the other debtors, who were, however, quite too

polite to laugh in his face, and he no longer staked his ration of wine

at cards, whereby he had commonly lost it, but held long conversations

with an ardent old priest who visited the jail. The priest gave Freckle

_breviaries_ and catechisms, and told him that there was no peace of

mind outside of the apostolic fold.

So Freckle diligently embraced the ancient Romish faith, renounced the

tenets of his plain old sire as false and heretical, and earnestly

prepared himself to enter the priesthood.

In this frame of mind he was found by Mr. Simp, who had unexpectedly

returned to Paris, and, finding himself again prosperous, came to

release Freckle from the toils of Clichy.

The latter waved him away. "I wish to know none of you," he said. "I

shall serve out this term, and never again speak to an American abroad."

He was firm, and achieved his purpose. Enthusiasm often answers for

brains, and Freckle's religious zeal made him a changed man. He entered

a Jesuits' school after his discharge, and in another fashion became as

stern, severe, and self-denying as had been his father. He sometimes saw

his old comrade, Simp, driving down the Champs Elysées as Freckle came

from church in Paris, but the gallant did not recognize the young priest

in his dark gown and hose, and wide-rimmed hat.

They followed their several directions, and in the end, with the

lessening fortunes of the Confederacy, grew more moody, and yet more

ruined by the consciousness that after once suffering the agony of

expatriation, they had not improved the added chance to make of

themselves men, not Colonists.

It is not the pleasantest phase of our human nature to depict, but since

we have essayed it, let it close with its own surrounding shadow.

If we have given no light touch of womanhood to relieve its sombre

career, we have failed to be artistic in order to be true.

But that which made the Colonists weak has passed away. There are no

longer slaves at home--may there be no exiles abroad!

LITTLE GRISETTE.

Little Grisette, you haunt me yet;

My passion for you was long ago,

Before my head was heavy with snow,

Or mine eye had lost its lustre of jet.

In the dim old Quartier Latin we met;

We made our vows one night in June,

And all our life was honeymoon;

We did not ask if it were sin,

We did not go to kirk to know,

We only loved and let the world

Hum on its pelfish way below;

Marked from our castle in the air,

How pigmy its triumphal cars:

Eight stories from the entry stair,

But near the stars!

Little Grisette, rich or in debt,

We were too fond to chide or sigh--

Never so poor that I could not buy

A sweet, sweet kiss from my little Grisette.

If I could nothing gain or get,

By hook, or crook, or song, or story,

Along the starving road to glory,

I marvelled how your nimble thimble,

As to a tune, danced fast and fleeting,

And stopped my pen to catch the music,

But only heard my heart a-beating;

The quaint old roofs and gables airy

Flung down the light for you to wear it,

And made my love a queen in faery,

To haunt my garret.

Little Grisette, the meals you set

Were sweeter to me than banquet feast;

Your face was a blessing fit for a priest,

At your smile the candle went out in a pet;

The wonderful chops I shall never forget!

If the wine was a trifle too sharp or rank,

We kissed each time before we drank.

The old gilt clock, aye wrong, was swinging

The waxen floor your feet reflected;

And dear Béranger's _chansons_ singing,

You tricked at _picquet_ till detected.

You fill my pipe;--is it your eyes

Whereat I light your cigarette?

On all but me the darkness lies

And my Grisette!

Little Grisette, the soft sunset

Lingered a long while, that we might stay

To mark the Seine from the breezy quay

Around the bridges foam and fret;

How came it that your eyes were wet

When I ambitiously would be

A man renowned across the sea?

I told you I should come again--

It was but half way round the globe--

To bring you diamonds for your faith,

And for your gray a silken robe:

You were more wise than lovers are;

I meant, sweetheart, to tell you true,

I said a tearful "_Au revoir_;"

You said, "_Adieu!_"

Little Grisette, we both regret,

For I am wedded more than wived;

Those careless days in thought revived

But teach me I cannot forget.

Perhaps old age must pay the debt

Young sin contracted long ago--

I only know, I only know,

That phantoms haunt me everywhere

By busy day, in peopled gloam--

They rise between me and my prayer,

They mar the holiness of home!

My wife is proud, my boy is cold,

I dare not speak of what I fret:

'Tis my fond youth with thee I fold,

Little Grisette!

MARRIED ABROAD.

AN AMERICAN ROMANCE OF THE QUARTIER LATIN.

PART I.

TEMPTATION.

To say that Ralph Flare was "lonesome" would convey a feeble idea of his

condition. Four months in England had gone by wearily enough; but in

this great city of Paris, where he might as well have had no tongue at

all, for the uses he could put it to, he pined and chafed--and finally

swore.

An oath, if not relief in itself, conduces to that effect, and it

happened in this case that a stranger heard it.

"You are English," said the stranger, turning shortly upon Ralph Flare.

"I am not," replied that youth, "I am an American."

"Then we are countrymen," cried the other. "Have you dwelt long in the

Hôtel du Hibou?"

Ralph Flare stated that he hadn't and that he had, and that he was bored

and sick of it, and had resolved to go back to the Republic, and fling

away his life in its armies.

"Pooh! pooh!" shouted the other, "I see your trouble--you have no

acquaintances. It is six o'clock; come with me to dinner, and you shall

know half of Paris, men and women."

They filed down the tortuous Rue Jacob, now thrice gloomy by the closing

shadows of evening, and turning into the Rue de Seine, stopped before

the doorway of a little painted _boutique_, whereon was written

"_Cremery du Quartier Latin_."

A tall, sallow, bright-eyed Frenchman was seated at a fragment of

counter within the smallest apartment in the world, and addressing this

man as "Père George" the stranger passed through a second sash doorway

and introduced Ralph Flare to the most miscellaneous and democratic

assemblage that he had ever beheld in his life.

Two long yellow tables reached lengthwise down a long, narrow _salon_,

the floor whereof was made of tiles, and the light whereof fizzed and

flamed from two unruly burners. A door at the farther end opened upon a

cook-room, and the cook, a scorched and meagre woman, was standing now

in the firelight, talking in a high key, as only a Frenchwoman can talk.

Then there was Madame George, fat and handsome, and gossipy likewise,

with a baby, a boy, and a daughter; and the patrons of the place, twenty

or more in number, were eating and laughing and all speaking at the same

time, so that Ralph Flare was at first stunned and afterward astonished.

His new acquaintance, Terrapin, went gravely around the table, shaking

hands with every guest, and Ralph was wedged into the remotest corner,

with Terrapin upon his right, and upon his left a creature so naïve and

petite that he thought her a girl at first, but immediately corrected

himself and called her a child.

Terrapin addressed her as Suzette, and stated that his friend Ralph was

a stranger and quite solitary; whereat Suzette turned upon him a pair of

soft, twinkling eyes, and laughed very much as a peach might do, if it

were possible for a peach to laugh. He could only say a horrible _bon

jour_, and make the superfluous intimation that he could not speak

French; and when Madame George gave him his choice of a dozen

unpronounceable dishes, he looked so utterly blank and baffled that

Suzette took the liberty of ordering dinner for him.

"You won't get the run of the language, Flare," said Terrapin,

carelessly, "until you find a wife. A woman is the best dictionary."

"You mean, I suppose," said Flare, "a wife for a time."

Little Suzette was looking oddly at him as he faced her, and when Ralph

blushed she turned quietly to her _potage_ and gave him a chance to

remark her.

She had dark, smooth hair, closing over a full, pale forehead, and her

shapely head was balanced upon a fair, round neck. There was an

alertness in her erect ear, and open nostril, and pointed brows which

indicated keen perception and comprehension; yet even more than this

generic quickness, without which she could not have been French, the

gentleness of Suzette was manifest.

Ralph thought to himself that she must be good. It was the face of a

sweet sister or a bright daughter, or one of those school-children with

whom he had played long ago. And withal she was very neat. If any

commandment was issued especially to the French, it enjoined tidiness;

but this child was so quietly attired that her cleanliness seemed a

matter of nature, not of command. Her cheap coral ear-drops and the thin

band of gold upon her white finger could not have been so fitting had

they been of diamonds; and her tresses, inclosed in a fillet of beads,

were tied in a breadth of blue ribbon which made a cunning lover's-knot

above. A plain collar and wristbands, a bright cotton dress and dark

apron, and a delicate slipper below--these were the components of a

picture which Ralph thought the loveliest and pleasantest and best that

he had ever known.

In his own sober city of the Middle States he would have been ashamed to

connect with these innocent features a doubt, a light thought, a desire.

Yet here in France, where climate, or custom, or man had changed the

relations though not the nature of woman, he did but as the world, in

blending with Suzette's tranquil face a series of ideas which he dared

not associate with what he had called pure, beautiful, or happy.

Now and then they spoke together, unintelligibly of course, but very

merrily, and Ralph's appetite was that of the great carnivora; potage,

beef, mutton, pullet, vanished like waifs, and then came the salad,

which he could not make, so that Suzette helped him again with her

sprightly white fingers, contriving so marvellous a dish that Ralph

thought her a little magician, and wanted to eat salad till daybreak.

"Now for the cards!" cried Terrapin, when they had finished the _café_

and the _eau-de-vie_; and as the parties ranged themselves about the

greater table, Terrapin, who knew everybody, gave their names and

avocations.

"That is Boetia, a journalist on the _Siècle_; you will observe that he

smokes his cigars quite down to the stump. The little man beside him,

with a blouse, is Haynau, fellow of the College of Beaux

Arts--dead-broke, as usual; and his friend, the sallow chap, is Moise,

whose father died last week, leaving him ten thousand francs. Moise, you

will see, has a wife, Feefine, though I suspect him of bigamy; and the

tall girl, with hair like midnight and a hard voice, is at present

unmarried. Those four fellows and their dames are students of medicine.

They have one hundred francs a month apiece, and keep house upon it."

"And Suzette," said Ralph Flare, impatiently.

"Oh, she is a _couturière_, a dressmaker, but just now a clerk at a

glover's. She has dwelt sagely, generally speaking. She breakfasts upon

five sous; a roll, café, and a bunch of grapes--her dinner costs eighty

centimes, and she makes a franc and a half a day, leaving enough to pay

her room-rent."

"It is a little sum--seven dollars and a half a month--how is the girl

to dress?"

Terrapin shrugged his shoulders, but said nothing.

They played "ramps," an uproarious game; and Suzette was impetuous and

noisy as the rest, with brightened cheeks and eyes and a clear, silvery

voice. The stake was a bottle of Bordeaux. Few women play cards

honestly, and Suzette was the first to go out; but seeing that Ralph

floundered and lost continually, she gave him her attention, looking

over his hand, and talking for him, and counting with so dexterous

deceit that he escaped also, while Terrapin paid for the wine.

It was not the most reputable amusement in the world; but the hours were

winged, and midnight came untimely. Suzette tied on a saucy brown flat

streaming with ribbons, and bade them good-night, ending with Ralph, in

whose palm her little fingers lay pulsing an instant, bringing the blood

to his hand.

How mean the _cremery_ and its patrons seemed now that she was gone! The

great clamp at the portal of his hotel sounded very ghostly as he

knocked; the concierge was a hideous old man in gown and nightcap.

"_Toujours seul, monsieur_," he said, with an ugly grin.

"What does that mean, Terrapin?" said Ralph.

"He says that you always come home alone."

"How else should I come?" said Ralph, dubiously.

"How, indeed?" answered Terrapin.

It was without doubt a dim old pile--the Hôtel du Hibou. What murderers,

and thieves, and Jacobins might not have ascended the tiles of the grand

stairway? There was a cumbrous mantel in his chamber, funereal with

griffins, and there were portraits with horribly profound eyes. The sofa

and the chairs were huge; the deep window-hangings were talking together

in a rustling, mocking way; while the bed in its black recess seemed so

very long and broad and high for one person, that Ralph sat down at the

stone table, too lonely or too haunted to sleep.

Would not even this old grave be made merry with sunlight, if little

Suzette were here?

He opened the book of familiar French phrases, and began to copy some of

them. He worked feverishly, determinedly, for quite a time. Then he read

the list he had made, half aloud. It was this:

"Good-morning, my pretty one!"

"Will you walk with me?"

"May I have your company to dinner?"

"What is your name?"

"I dare say you laugh at my pronunciation."

"I am lonely in Paris."

"Are you?"

"You ought to see my chambers."

"Let me buy you a bracelet!"

"I love you!"

Ralph's voice stopped suddenly. There were deep echoes in the great

room, which made him thrill and shudder. How still and terrible were the

silence and loneliness!

A pang, half of guilt, half of fear, went keenly to his heart. It seemed

to him that his mother was standing by his shoulder, pointing with her

thin, tremulous fingers to the writing beneath him, and saying:

"My boy, what does this mean?"

He held it in the candle-flame, and thought he felt better when it was

burned; but he could not burn all those thoughts of which the paper was

only a copy.

PART II.

POSSESSION.

If the _cremery_ had seemed lonely by gaslight, what must Ralph Flare

have said of it next morning, as he sat in his old place and watched the

_ouvriers_ at breakfast? They came in, one by one, with their baton of

brown bread, and called for two sous' worth of coffee and milk. The men

wore blouses of blue and white, and jested after the Gallic code with

the sewing-girls. This bread and coffee, and a pear which they should

eat at noon, would give them strength to labor till nightfall brought

its frugal repast. Yet they were happy as crickets, and a great deal

more noisy.

Here is little Suzette, smiling and skipping, and driving her glances

straight into Ralph Flare's heart.

"Good-day, sir," she cries, and takes a chair close by him, after the

manner of a sparrow alighting. She smooths back her pure wristbands,

disclosing the grace of the arm, and as she laughs in Ralph's face he

knows what she is saying to herself; it is more doubtful that he loves

her than that she knows it.

"_Peut-être, monsieur, vous-avez besoin des gants?_"

She gave him the card of her _boutique_, and laughed like a sunbeam

playing on a rivulet, and went out singing like the witch that she was.

"I don't want gloves," said Ralph Flare; "I won't go to her shop."

But he asked Père George the direction, notwithstanding; and though his

conscience seemed to be blocking up the way--a tangible, visible,

provoking conscience--he put his feet upon it and shut his lips, and

found the place.

Ralph Flare has often remarked since--for he is quite an artist

now--that of all scenes in art or nature that _boutique_ was to him the

rarest. He has tried to put it into color--the miniature counter, the

show-case, the background of boxes, each with a button looking

mischievously at him, or a glove shaking its forefinger, or a shapely

pair of hose making him blush, and the daintiest child in the world,

flushing and flirting and gossiping before him; but the sketch recalls

matters which he would forget, his hands lose command, something makes

his eye very dim, and he lays aside his implements, and takes a long

walk, and wears a sober face all that day.

We may all follow up the sequence of a young man's thoughts in doing a

strange wrong for the first time. If Ralph's passions of themselves

could not mislead him, there were not lacking arguments and advisers to

teach him that this was no offence, or that the usage warranted the sin.

He became acquainted, through Terrapin, with dozens of his countrymen;

the youngest and the oldest and the most estimable had their open

attachments. So far as he could remark, the married and the unmarried

tradesmen's wives in Paris were nearly equal in consideration. How could

he become perfect in the language without some such incentive and

associate?

His income was not considerable, but they told him that to double his

expenses was certain economy. He was very lonely, and he loved company.

His age was that at which the affections and the instincts alike impel

the man to know more of woman--the processes of her mind, her

capacities, her emotions, the idiosyncrasies which divided her from his

own sex.

Hitherto he had been chaste, though once when he had confessed it to

Terrapin, that incredulous person said something about the marines, and

repeated it as a good joke; he felt, indeed, that he was not entirely

manly. He had half a doubt that he was worthy to walk with men, else why

had not his desires, like theirs, been stronger than his virtue; and had

not the very feebleness of desire proved also a feebleness of power?

But, more than all, he had a weakness for Suzette.

There was old Terrapin, with bonnets and dresses in his wardrobe, and a

sewing-basket on his mantel, and with his own huge boots outside the

door a pair of tapering gaiters, and in his easy-chair a little being to

sing and chatter and mix his punch and make his cigarettes. Ah! how much

more entrancing would be Ralph's chamber with Suzette to garnish it! He

would make a thousand studies of her face; she should be his model, his

professor, his divinity! What was gross in her he would refine; what

dark he would make known. They would walk together by the river side,

into the parks, into the open country. He would know no regrets for the

friends across the sea. Europe would become beautiful to him, and his

art would find inspiration from so much loveliness. No indissoluble tie

would bind them, to make kindness a duty and love necessity. No social

tyranny should prescribe where he should visit, and where she should

not. The hues of the picture deepened and brightened as he imagined it.

He was resolved to do this thing, though a phantom should come to his

bedside every night, and every shadow be his accusation.

He committed to memory some phrases of French; Terrapin was his

interpreter, and they went together--those three and a sober

_cocher_--to the Bois de Boulogne. Terrapin stated to Suzette in a

shockingly informal way that Ralph loved her and would give her a

beautiful chamber and relieve her from the drudgery of the glove-shop.

They were passing down the broad, gravelled drive, with the foliage

above them edged with moonlight, the mock cataract singing musically

below, and the _cocher_, half asleep, nodding and slashing his horses.

And while Terrapin turned his head and made himself invisible in

cigar-smoke, Ralph folded Suzette to his breast, and kissed her once so

demonstratively that the _cocher_ awoke with a spring and nearly fell

off the box, but was quite too much of a _cocher_ to turn and

investigate the matter.

That was the ceremony, and that night the nuptials. Few young couples

make a better commencement. She gave him a list of her debts, and he

paid them. They removed from Ralph's dim quarters to a cheap and

cheerful chamber upon the new Boulevard. It was on the fifth floor; the

room was just adapted for so little a couple. Superficially observed,

the furniture resolved itself into an enormous clock and a monstrously

fine mirror; but after a while you might remark four small chairs and a

great one, a bureau and a wardrobe, a sofa and a canopied bed; and just

without the two gorgeously curtained windows lay a cunning balcony,

where they could sit of evenings, with the old ruin of the Hôtel Cluny

beneath them, the towers of Notre Dame in the middle ground, and at the

horizon the beautifully wooded hill of Père la Chaise.

Suzette had tristful eyes when they rested upon this cemetery. Her baby

lay there, without a stone--not without a flower.

"_Pauvre petite Jules!_" she used to say, nestling close to Ralph, and

for a little while they would not speak nor move, but the smoke of his

cigar made a charmed circle around them, and the stars came out above,

and the panorama of the great Boulevard moved on at their feet.

Their first difficulties were financial, of course. Suzette would have

liked a silken robe, a new bonnet, a paletot, gloves and concomitants

unlimited. She delighted to walk upon the Boulevard, the Rue Rivoli, and

into the Palais Royal, looking into the shop-windows and selecting what

she would buy when Ralph's remittances came. Her hospitality when his

friends visited him did less honor to her purse than to her heart. She

certainly made excellent punches; Terrapin thought her cigarettes

unrivalled; she was fond of cutting a fruit-pie, and was quite a

_connoisseur_ with wines. Ralph did not wonder at her tidiness when the

laundry bills were presented, but doubted that the _coiffeur_ beautified

her hair; and one day, when a cool gentleman in civil uniform knocked at

the door, and insisted upon the immediate payment of a bill for fifty

francs, he lost his temper and said bad words. What could be done?

Suzette was sobbing; Ralph detested "scenes;" he threatened to leave

the hotel and Paris, and frightened her very much--and paid the money.

"You said, Suzette, that you had rendered a full account of all your

indebtedness. You told me a lie!"

"Poor boy," she replied, "this debt was so old that I never expected to

hear of it."

"Have you any more--old or otherwise?"

Suzette said demurely that she did not owe a sou in the world, but was

able to recall thirty francs in the course of the afternoon, and assured

him, truly, that this was the last.

Still, she lacked economy. They went to the same _cremery_, but her

meals cost one half more than his. She never objected to a ride in a

_voiture_; she liked to go to the balls, but walked very soberly upon

his arm, recognizing nobody, and exacting the same behavior from Ralph.

Let him look at an unusually pretty girl, through a shop-window, upon

his peril! If a letter came for him signed Lizzie, or Annie, or Mary,

she took the dictionary and tried to interpret it, and in the end called

him a _vilain_ and wept.

Toward the letters signed "Lizzie" she conceived a deep antipathy. With

a woman's instinct she discerned that "Lizzie" was more to Ralph than

any other correspondent. A single letter satisfied her of this; and when

he was reading it, for the second time, she snatched it from his hand

and flung it fiercely upon the floor. Ralph's eyes blazed menace and her

own cowered.

"Take up that letter, Suzette!"

"I won't!"

"Take it up, I say! I command! instantly!" He had risen to his feet,

and was the master now. She stooped, with pale jealousy lying whitely in

her temples, and gave it to him meekly, and sat down very stricken and

desolate. There was one whom he loved better than her--she felt it

bitterly--a love more respectful, more profound--a woman, perhaps, whom

he meant to make his wife some day, when SHE should be only a shameful

memory!

It may have been the reproach of this infidelity, or the thought of his

home, or the infatuation of his present guileful attachment, which kept

Ralph Flare from labor.

There was the great Louvre, filled with the riches of the old masters,

and the galleries of the Luxembourg with the gems of the French school,

so marvellous in color and so superb in composition, and the mighty

museum of Versailles, with its miles of battle pictures--yet the third

month of his tenure in Paris was hastening by, and he had not made one

copy.

Suzette was a bad model. She _posed_ twice, but changed her position,

and yawned, and said it was ridiculous. He had never made more than a

crayon portrait of her. He found, too, that five hundred francs a month

barely sufficed to keep them, and once, in the interval of a remittance,

they were in danger of hunger. Yet Suzette plied her needle bravely, and

was never so proud as when she had spread the dinner she had earned. In

acknowledgment of this fidelity Ralph took her to a grand _magasin_,

where they examined the goods gravely, as married folks do, consulting

each other, and trying to seem very sage and anxious.

There probably was never such a bonnet as Suzette's in the world. It was

black, and full of white roses, and floating a defiant ostrich-plume,

and tied with broad red ribbons, whereby she could be recognized from

one end of the Luxembourg gardens to the other.

The paletot was clever in like manner; she made the dress herself, and

its fit was perfection, showing her plump little figure all the plumper,

while its black color set off the whiteness of her simple collar, and

with those magic gaiters, Ralph's gift also, he used to sit in the big

chair, peering at her, and in a quandary as to whether he had ever been

so happy before, or ever so disquieted.

"Now, my little woman," said Ralph, "I have redeemed my promises; you

have a chamber, and garments, and subsistence--more than any of your

friends--and I am with you always; few wives live so pleasantly; but

there is one thing which you must do."

Suzette, sitting upon his knee, protested that he could not command any

impossible thing which she would not undertake.

"You must work a little; we are both idle, and if we continue so, may

have _ennui_ and may quarrel. After three days I will not pay for your

breakfasts, and every day in which you do not breakfast with me, paying

for yourself, I will give you no dinner. Remember it, Suzette, for I am

in earnest."

Her color fell a little at this, for she had no love for the needle. It

was merrier in the _boutique_ to chat with customers, yet she started

fairly, and for a week earned a franc a day. The eighth day came; she

had no money. Ralph put on his hat and went down the _Rue L'École de

Médecin_ without her; but his breakfast was unpalatable, indigestible.

Five o'clock came round; she was sitting at the window, perturbedly

waiting to see how he would act.

It wrung his heart to think that she was hungry, but he tried to be very

firm.

"I am going to dinner, Suzette! I keep my word, you see."

"It is well, Ralph."

That night they said little to each other. The dovecote was quite cold,

for the autumn days were running out, and they lighted a hearth fire.

Suzette made pretence of reading. She had an impenitent look; for she

conceived that she had been cruelly treated, and would not be soothed

nor kissed. Ralph smoked, and said over some old rhymes, and, finally

rising, put on his cloak.

"I am going out, Suzette; you don't make my room cheerful."

"_Bien!_"

He walked very slowly and heavily down the stairs, to convince her that

he was really going or hoping to be recalled, but she did not speak. He

saw the light burning from his windows as he looked up from below. He

was regretful and angry. At Terrapin's room he drank much raw brandy and

sang a song. He even called the astute Terrapin a humbug, and toward

midnight grew quarrelsome. They escorted him to his hotel door; the

light was still burning in his room. He was sober and repentant when he

had ascended the long stairs, though he counterfeited profound

drunkenness when he stood before her.

She had been weeping, and in her white night-habit, with her dark hair

falling loosely upon her shoulders, she was very lovely. The clock

struck one as they looked at each other. She fell upon his neck and

removed his garments, and wrapped him away between the coverlets; and he

watched her for a long time in the flickering light till a deep sleep

fell upon him, so that he could not feel how closely he was clasped in

her arms.

PART III.

CONSCIENCE.

Lest it has not been made clear in these paragraphs whether Suzette was

a good or a wicked being, we may give the matured and recent judgment of

Ralph Flare himself. Put to the test of religion, or even of

respectability, this intimacy was baneful. A wild young man had broken

his honor for the companionship of a poor, errant girl. She was poor,

but she hated to work; she had no regard for his money; she did not

share his ambition. Making against her a case thus clear and certain,

Ralph Flare entered for Suzette the plea of _not_ wicked, and this was

his defence!

_She was educated in France._ Particular sins lose their shame in some

countries. Woman in France had not the high mission and respect which

she fulfilled in his own land. Suzette was one of many children. Her

father was the cultivator of a few acres in Normandy. Her mother died as

the infant was ushered into the world. To her father and brothers she

was of an unprofitable sex, and her sisters disliked her because she

was handsomer than they. Her childhood was cheerless enough, for she had

quick instincts, and her education availed only to teach her how grand

was the world, and how confined her life. She left her home by stealth,

in the night, and alone. In the city of Cherbourg she found occupation.

She dwelt with strangers; she was lonely; her poverty and her beauty

were her sorrows. She was a girl only till her fifteenth year.

The young mother has but one city of refuge--Paris. Without friends she

passed the bitterness of reminiscence. Through the poverty of skill or

sustenance she lost her boy, and the great city lay all before her where

to choose. Luckily, in France every avenue to struggle was not closed to

her sisterhood; with us such gather only the wages of sin. It was not

there an irreparable disgrace to have fallen. For a full year she lived

purely, industriously, lonely; what adventures ensued Ralph knew

imperfectly. She met, he believed that she loved him. It was not

probable, of course, that she came out of the wrestle unscathed. She

deceived in little things, but he knew when to trust her. She was

quick-tempered and impatient of control, but he understood her, and

their quarrels were harbingers of their most happy seasons. She was

generous, affectionate, artless. He did not know among the similar

attachments of his friends any creature so pliable, so true, so

beautiful.

It was upon her acquaintances that Ralph placed the blame when she

erred. Fanchette was one of these--the dame of a student from Bretagne,

a worldly, plotting, masculine woman--the only one whom he permitted to

visit her. It was Fanchette who loaned her money when she was indolent,

and who prompted her to ask favors beyond his means.

Toward the end of every month Ralph's money ran out, and then he was

petulant and often upbraided her. Those were the only times when he

essayed to study, and he would not walk with her of evenings, so

destitute. Then Fanchette amused her: "Sew in my room," she would say;

"Ralph will come for you at eight o'clock." But Ralph never went, and

Fanchette poisoned his little girl's mind.

"When will you leave Paris, baby?" said Suzette one evening, as she

returned from her friend's and found him sitting moodily by the fire.

"Very soon," he replied crisply; "that is, if ever I have money or

resolution enough to start."

"Won't you take me with you, little one?"

"No!"

"You don't love me any more!"

"Pish!"

"Kiss me, my boy!"

"Oh, go away, you bother me--you always bother me when my money is low.

Haven't I told you about it before?"

But the next morning as Suzette made her toilet, older and more

silently, he felt repentant, and called her to him, and they talked a

long while of nothingnesses. He had a cruel way of playing with her

feelings.

"Suzette," he would say, "would you like me to take you to my country

and live with you forever?"

"Very much, my child!"

"My father has a beautiful farm, which he means to give to me. There is

a grand old house upon it, and from the high porch you can see the blue

bay speckled with sails. The orchards are filled with apples and pears.

You must walk an hour to get around the corn-fields, and there is a

picnic ground in the beech-woods, where we might entertain our friends.

I have many friends. How jolly you would look in my big rocking-chair,

before the fireplace blazing with logs, and with your lap full of

chestnuts, telling me of Paris life!"

She was drinking it all in, and the blood was ripe in her cheeks.

"Think, little one," he said, "of passing our days there, you and I! I

have made you my wife, for example; I paint great pictures; you are

proud of me; everybody respects you; you have your saddle-horse and your

tea-parties; you learn to be ashamed of what you were; you are anxious

to be better--not in people's eyes only, but in mine, in your own. To do

good deeds; to sit in the church hearing good counsel; to be patted upon

the forehead by my father--his daughter!--and to call my brother your

brother also. Thus honored, contented, good, your hairs turn gray with

mine. We walk along hand in hand so evenly that we do not perceive how

old we are growing. We may forget everything but our love; that remains

when we are gone--a part of our children's inheritance."

He spoke excellent French now; to her it was eloquence. Her arms were

around his neck. He could feel her heart, beating. He had expressed what

she scarcely dared to conceive--all her holiest, profoundest hopes, her

longing for what she had never been, for what she believed she would try

to be worthy of.

"Oh, my baby," she cried, half in tears, "you make me think! I have

never thought much or often; I wish I was a scholar, as you are, to tell

you how, since we have dwelt together, something like that has come to

me in a dream. Perhaps it is because you talk to me so that I love you

so greatly. Nobody ever spoke to me so before. That is why I am angry

when your proud friend Lizzie writes to you. All that good fortune is

for her; you are to quit Paris and me. My name will be unworthy to be

mentioned to her. How shall I be in this bad city, growing old; yet I

would try so earnestly to improve and be grateful!"

"Would you, truly, sweetheart?"

She only sobbed and waited; he coughed in a dry way and unclasped her

hands.

"I pity you, poor Suzette," he said, "but it is quite impossible for us

to be more to each other. My people would never speak to me if I behaved

so absurdly. Go to bed now, and stop crying; good-night."

She staggered up, so crushed and bowed and haggard that his conscience

smote him. He could not have done a greater cruelty to one like

her--teaching her to hope, then to despair. The next day, and the next,

she worked at Fanchette's. His remittance did not come; he was out of

temper, and said in jest that he would set out for Italy within a week.

There was a pale decision in her countenance the fourth morning. She put

on her gray robe and a little cap which she had made. He did not offer

to kiss her, and she did not beseech it. He saw her no more until nine

o'clock, when she came in with Fanchette, and her cheeks were flushed

as with wine. This made him more angry. He said nothing to either of

them and went to sleep silently.

The fifth day she returned as before. He was sitting up by the

fireplace; his rent was due; he was quite cast down, and said:

"Dear, when my purse was full you never went away two whole days,

leaving me alone."

"You are to leave me, Ralph, forever!" But she was touched, and in the

morning said that she would come back at midday. Still no remittance. He

felt like a bear. Twelve o'clock came--Suzette did not appear. It

drifted on to one; he listened vainly for her feet upon the stairs. At

two he sat at the window watching; she entered at three, half mild, half

timorous, and gave him a paper of sugar plums.

"Where did those come from?" he asked, with a scowl.

"Fanchette gave them to me."

"I don't believe it; there is _kirsch wasser_ on your lips; you have

been drinking."

She drew her handkerchief from her pocket; a little box, gilt-edged,

came out with it, and rolled into the middle of the floor. Suzette

leaped for it with a quick pallor; he wrenched it from her hands after a

fierce struggle, and delving into the soft cotton with which it was

packed, brought out sleeve-buttons of gold and a pearl breastpin. They

were new and glittering, and they flashed a burning suspicion into his

heart. He forced her unresisting into a chair, and flung them far out of

the window, over the house-roofs. Then he sat down a moment to gain

breath, and marked her with eyes in which she saw that she was already

tried and sentenced.

"Who gave you those things, Suzette?" he asked in a forced, strange

monotone.

"My ancient _patronne_."

"What's her name?"

"I don't know."

"Where does she live?"

"I shan't tell you."

He held her wrist tightly and pressed her back till her eyes were

compelled to mark his white, pinched lips and altogether bloodless

temples. His hand tightened upon her; his full, boyish figure

straightened and heightened beyond nature; his regard was terrible. A

terrible fear and silence fell around about them.

"These are the gifts of a man," he whispered; "you do not know it better

than I. I shall walk out for one hour; at the end of that time there

must not be even a ribbon of yours in this chamber."

PART IV.

REMORSE.

He gave the same order to the proprietor as he passed down-stairs, and

hurried at a crazy pace across the Pont des Arts to the rooms of

Terrapin. That philosopher was playing whist with his friends, and gave

as his opinion that Ralph was "spooney."

Ralph drank much, talked much, chafed more. Somebody advised him to

travel, but he felt that Europe had nothing to show him like that which

he had lost. He told Madame George the story at the _cremery_.

"Ah, monsieur," she said, "that is the way with all love in Paris."

He played "ramps" with the French, but the game impressed him as stupid,

and he tried to quarrel with Boetia, who was too polite to be vexed. He

drank pure cognac, to the astonishment of the Gauls, but it had no

visible effect upon him, and Père George held up his hands as he went

away, saying: "Behold these Americans! they do everything with a fever;

brandy affects them no more than water."

The room in the fifth story was very cold now. He tried to read in bed,

but the novel had no meaning in it. He walked up and down the balcony in

the November night, where he had often explained the motions of the

stars to her. They seemed to miss her now, and peeped inquisitively. He

looked into the bureau and wardrobe, half ashamed of the hope that she

had left some _souvenir_. There was not even a letter. She had torn a

leaf, on which she had written her name, out of his diary. The sketches

he had made of her were gone; if she had only taken her remembrance out

of his heart, it would have been well. Then he reasoned, with himself,

sensibly and consistently. It was a bad passion at first. How would it

have shamed his father and mother had they heard of it! Its continuance

was even more pernicious, making him profligate and idle; introducing

him to light pleasures and companies; enfeebling him, morally and

physically; diverting him from the beautiful arts; weakening his

parental love; divorcing him from grand themes and thoughts. He could

never marry this woman. Their heart-strings must have been wrung by some

final parting; and now that she had been proved untrue, was it not most

unmanly that he should permit her to stand even in the threshold of his

mind? It was a good riddance, he said, pacing the floor in the

firelight; but just then he glanced into the great mirror, and stood

fixed to mark the pallor of his face. Say what he might, laugh as he

did, with a hollow sound, that absent girl had stirred the very

fountains of his feelings. Not learned, not beautiful, not anything to

anybody but him--there was yet the difference between her love and her

deceit, which made him content or wretched.

He felt this so keenly that he lifted his voice and cursed--himself,

her, society, mankind. Then he cried like a child, and called himself a

calf, and laughed bitterly, and cried again.

There was no sleep for him that night. He drank brandy again in the

morning, and walked to the banker's. His remittance awaited him, and he

came out of the Rue de la Paix with thirty gold napoleons in his pocket.

He met all the Americans at breakfast at Trappe's in the Palais Royal,

and strolling to the morgue with a part of them, kept on to Vincennes,

and spent a wretched day in the forest. At the Place de la Bastille,

returning, he got into a cabriolet alone and searched ineffectually

along the Rue Rivoli for a companion who would ride with him. "Go

through the Rue de Beaux Arts!" he said, as they crossed Pont Neuf. This

is a quiet street in the Latin Quarter filled with cheap _pensions_, in

one of which dwelt Fanchette. His heart was wedged in his throat as he

saw at the window little Suzette sewing. She wore one of the dresses he

had given her. Her face was old and piteous; she was red-eyed and worked

wearily, looking into the street like one on a rainy day.

When she saw him, he thought, by her start and flush, that she was going

to fall from the chair; but then she looked with a dim, absent manner

into his face, like one who essays to remember something that was very

dear but is now quite strange. He was pleased to think that she was

miserable, and would have given much to have found her begging bread, as

she did that night of him.

He had ridden by on purpose to show that he had money, and she sent him

by Terrapin's word a petition for a few francs to buy her a chamber.

Fanchette's friend had come home from the country, and it would not do

for her to occupy their single bedroom; but Ralph made reply by deputy,

to the effect that the donor of the jewelry would, he supposed, give her

a room. It was a weary week ensuing; he drank spirits all the time, and

made love to an English governess in the Tuileries garden, and when

Sunday came, with a rainy, windy, dismal evening, he went with Terrapin

and Co. to the Closerie des Lilas.

This is the great ball of the Latin Quarter. It stands near the barriers

upon the Boulevard, and is haunted with students and grisettes. Commonly

it was thronged with waltzers, and the scene on gala nights, when all

the lamps were aflame, and the music drowned out by the thunder of the

dance, was a compromise between Paradise and Pandemonium. To-night there

was a beggarly array of folk; the multitude of _garçons_ contemplated

each other's white aprons, and old Bullier, the proprietor, staggering

under his huge hat, exhibited a desire to be taken out and interred. The

wild-eyed young man with flying, carroty locks, who stood in the set

directly under the orchestra, at that part of the floor called "the

kitchen," was flinging up his legs without any perceptible enjoyment,

and the policemen in helmets, and cuirassiers, who had hard work to keep

order in general, looked like lay figures now, and strolled off into the

embowered and sloppy gardens. There were not two hundred folk under the

roofs. Ralph had come here with the unacknowledged thought of meeting

Suzette, and he walked around with his cigar, leaning upon Terrapin's

arm and making himself disagreeable.

Suddenly he came before her. She seemed to have arisen from the earth.

She looked so weak and haggard that he was impelled to speak to her; but

he was obdurate and hard-hearted. He could have filled her cup of

bitterness and watched her drink it to the dregs, and would have been

relentless if she was kneeling at his feet.

"Flare, what makes you tremble so?" said Terrapin; "are you cold?

Confound it, man, you are sick! Sit here in the draft and take some

cognac."

"No," answered Ralph, "I am all right again. You see my girl there?

(Don't look at her!) You know some of these girls, old fellow? I mean to

treat two of them to a bottle of champagne. She will see it. I mean for

her to do so. Who are these passing? Come with me."

He walked by Suzette and her friend as if they had been invisible, and

addressed those whom he pursued with such energy that they shrank back.

He made one of them take his arm, and hurried here and there, saying

honeyed words all the time, by which she was affrighted; but every

smile, false as it was, fell into Suzette's heart.

Weary, wan, wretched, she kept them ever in view, crossing his path now

and then, in the vain thought that she might have one word from him,

though it were a curse. He took his new friends into an alcove. She saw

the wine burst from the bottle, and heard the clink of the glasses as

they drank good health. She did not know that all his laughter was

feigned, that his happiness was delirium, that his vows were lies. She

did not believe Ralph Flare so base as to put his foot upon her, whom he

had already stricken down.

And he--he was all self, all stone!--he laid no offence at his own door.

He did not ask if her infidelity was real or if it had no warrant in his

own slight and goading. The poor, pale face went after him

reproachfully. Every painful footfall that she made was the patter of a

blood-drop. Such unnatural excitement must have some termination. He

quarrelled with a waiter. Old Bullier ordered a cuirassier to take him

to the door; he would have resisted, but Terrapin whispered: "Don't be

foolish, Flare; if you are put out it will be a triumph for the girl;"

and only this conviction kept him calm. The cyprians whom he wooed

followed him out; he turned upon them bitterly when he had crossed the

threshold, and leaping into a carriage was driven to his hotel, where

he slept unquietly till daybreak.

See him, at dawn, in deep slumber! his face is sallow, his lips are dry,

his chest heaves nervously as he breathes hard. It is a bad sleep; it is

the sleep of bad children, to whom the fiend comes, knowing that the

older they grow the more surely are they his own.

This is not, surely, the bashful young man who started at the phantom of

his mother, and sinned reluctantly. Aye! but those who do wrong after

much admonishment are wickeder than those who obey the first bad

impulse. He is ten times more cast away who thinks and sins than he who

only sins and does not think.

Ralph Flare was one of your reasoning villains. His conscience was not a

better nature rising up in the man, and saying "this is wrong." It was

not conscience at all; it was only a fear. Far down as Suzette might be,

she never could have been unfeeling, unmerciful as he. It is a bad

character to set in black and white, yet you might ask old Terrapin or

any shrewd observer what manner of man was Ralph, and they would say,

"So-so-ish, a little sentimental, spooney likewise; but a good fellow, a

good fellow!" And more curious than all, Suzette said so too.

He rose at daylight, and dressed and looked at himself in the glass. He

felt that this would not do. His revenge had turned upon himself. He had

half a mind to send for Suzette, and forgive her, and plead with her to

come back again. The door opened: she of whom he thought stood before

him, more marked and meagre than he; and the old tyranny mounted to his

eyes as he looked upon her. He knew that she had come to be pardoned, to

explain, and he determined that she should suffer to the quick.

PART V.

TYRANNY.

If this history of Ralph Flare that we are writing was not a fiction, we

might make Suzette give way at once under the burden of her grief, and

rest upon a chair, and weep. On the contrary, she did just the opposite.

She laughed.

Human nature is consistent only in its inconsistencies. She meant to

break down in the end, but wished to intimidate him by a show of

carelessness, so she first said quietly: "Monsieur Ralph, I have come to

see to my washing; it went out with yours; will you tell the proprietor

to send it to me?"

"Yes, madame."

"May I sit down, sir? It is a good way up-stairs, and I want to breathe

a minute."

"As you like, madame."

He was resting on the sofa; she took a chair just opposite. There was a

table between them, and for a little while she looked with a ghastly

playfulness into his eyes, he regarding her coldly and darkly; and then,

she laughed. It was a terrible laugh to come from a child's lips. It was

a woman's pride, drowning at the bottom of her heart, and in its last

struggle for preservation sending up these bubbles of sound.

We talk of tragic scenes in common life; this was one of them. The

little room with its waxed, inlaid floor, the light falling bloodily in

at the crimson curtains and throwing unreal shadows upon the spent fire,

the disordered furniture, the unmade bed; and there were the two actors,

suffering in their little sphere what only _seems_ more suffering in

prisons and upon scaffolds, and playing with each other's agonies as not

more refined cruelty plays with racks and tortures.

"You are pleased, madame," said Ralph.

"No, I am wondering what has changed you. There are black circles around

your eyes; you have not shaved; the bones of your cheeks are sharp like

your chin, and you are yellow and bent like a dry leaf."

"I have had an excess of money lately. Being free to do as I like, I

have done so."

She looked furtively around the room. "Somebody has gone away from here

this morning--is it true?"

He laughed suggestively.

"I saw you with two girls last night; the company did you honor; it was

one of them, perhaps."

"You guess shrewdly," he replied.

"This is her room now; it may be she will object to see me here."

"You are right," said Ralph Flare, with mock courtesy, rising up. "When

you lived with me I permitted no one to visit me in your absence. My

late friends will be vexed. You have finished the business which brought

you here, and I must go to breakfast now."

Ralph was a good actor. Had he thought Suzette really meant to go, he

would have fallen on his knees.

"Stop, Ralph, my boy," she cried. "I know that you do not love me; I

can't see why I ever believed that you did. But let me sit with you a

little while. You drove me from you once. I know that you have found

one to fill my place; but, _enfant_, I love you. I want to take your

head in my arms as I have done a hundred times, and hear you say one

kind word before we part forever."

"There was a time," he said slowly, "when you did not need my embraces.

I was eager to give them. I did not give you kindness only; I gave you

nourishment, shelter, clothing, money. You were unworthy and ungrateful.

You are nothing to me now. Do not think to wheedle me back to be your

fool again."

"Oh! for charity, my child, not for love--I am too wretched to hope

that--for pity, let me sit by your side five minutes. I cannot put it

into words why I beg it, but it is a little thing to grant. If one

starved you, or had stolen from you, and asked it so earnestly, you

would consent. I only want you to think less bitterly of me. You must

needs have some hard thoughts. I have done wrong, my boy, but you do not

know all the cause, and as what I mean to say cannot make place in your

breast for me now, you will know that it is true, because it has no

design. Oh! _Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!_ It is so hard to have but one deep

love, and yet find that love the greatest sorrow of one's life. It is so

hard to have loved my boy so well, and to know that to the end of his

days he hated me."

She said this with all the impetuosity of her race; with utter

abandonment of plan or effort, yet with a wild power of love and gesture

which we know only upon the stage, but which in France is life, feeling,

reality.

She sat down and sobbed, raising her voice till it rolled with a shrill

music which made him quiver, through the parted curtain and into the

turbulent street. There were troops passing beneath the balcony, and the

clangor of drums and bugles climbed between the stone walls, as if to

pour all its mockery into the little room.

Ralph Flare hated to see a woman cry; it pained him more than her; so he

lifted her in his arms and carried her to the sofa and placed her head

upon his breast. For a long while she sat in that strange luxury of

grief, and she was fearful that he would send her away before her

agitation could pass, and she might speak. His face wore an incredulous

sneer as she spoke, though he knew it was absolute truth. She told him

how wretched she had been, so wretched that even temptation respected

her; how she had never known the intensity of her passion for him till

they were asunder; how all previous attachments were as ice to fire

compared to this; and how the consciousness of its termination should

make her desolate forever.

"I looked upon you," she said, "as one whom I had trained up. Since I

have lost my little Jules I have needed something to care for. I taught

you to speak my language as if you were a baby. You learned the coinage

of the land, and how to walk through the city, and all customs and

places, precisely as a child learns them from his mother. Alas! you were

wiser than I, and it made me sad to feel it. It was like the mother's

regret that her boy is getting above her, in mind, in stature, so that

he shall be able to do without her. Yet with that fear there is a pride

like mine, when I felt that you were clever. Ah! Ralph, you loved to

make me feel how weak and mean I was. You played with my poor heart,

sick enough before, and little by little I felt your love gliding away

from me, till at last you told me that it was gone. You said you should

leave France, never to return--God forgive you if it was not true!--and

when you treated me worst, I was tempted to hear kind words from

another. Fanchette's friend has a rich cousin who admires me. He is to

live in Paris many years. I never loved him, but I am poor, and many

women marry only for a home. He offered that and more to me. I would not

hear it. Oh! if you had only said one tender word to me in those days of

temptation. I begged you for it. When I was humblest at your feet you

put your heel upon me most.

"One night when I had the greatest trouble of all he sat beside me and

plied his suit, and was pleasanter, my boy, than you have ever been; and

then, rising, he placed that box of jewelry in my lap and ran away. I

left it upon Fanchette's mantel that night. She filled my head with

false thoughts next day. I never meant while you were in Paris to do you

any wrong; but I put those jewels in my pocket, meaning to give them up

again; you found them, and I was made wretched."

Ralph made that dry, biting cough which he used to express unbelief. She

only bent her head and wept silently.

"When all was gone, poor me! I have found much sorrow in my little life,

but we are light-hearted in France, and we live and laugh again. Perhaps

you have made me more like one of your countrywomen. I do not

know--only that I can never be happy any more.

"Since we have dwelt apart my tempter has been to see me every day. He

has grand chambers which he will give me, and rich wardrobes, and a

watch, and a voiture. It is a dazzling picture for one who toils, going

all her days on foot, and lovely only to be deceived. But I hate that

man now, because he has come between you and me, and I have slept upon

my tears alone."

She melted again into a long, loud wail, and he proposed nervously that

they should walk into the gardens near by. He said little, and that

contemptuously, tossing his cane at the birds, much interested in a

statue, delighted with the visitors beneath the maroon trees; and she

followed him here and there, very weak, for she had eaten no breakfast,

and not so deceived but she knew that he labored to wound her. He asked

her into a café, cavalierly, and was very careful to make display of his

napoleons as he paid. He did not invite her, but she followed him to his

hotel again, and here, as if with terrible _ennui_, he threw himself

upon his bed and feigned to sleep, while she crouched at his table and

wrote him a contrite letter. It was sweetly and simply worded, and asked

that he should let her return to him for his few remaining days in

Paris. If he could not grant so much, might she speak to him in the

street; come to see him sometimes, if only to be reviled; love him,

though she could not hope to be loved? She gave him this note with her

face turned away, and faltered the request that he would think ere he

replied, and hurried to the balcony without, that she might not trouble

him with the presence of her sorrow.

How the street beneath her, into which she looked, had changed since the

nights when they talked together upon this balcony! There was bright

sunshine, but it fell leeringly, not laughingly, upon the columns of the

Odean Theatre, upon the crowds on the Boulevard, upon the decrepit baths

of Julian, upon the far heights of Belleville, upon her more cheerlessly

than upon all.

She listened timorously for his word of recall. She wondered if he were

not writing a reply. Yes, that was his manner; he was cold and sharp of

speech, but he was an artist with his pen. She thought that her long

patience had moved him. Perhaps she should be all forgiven. Aye! they

should dwell together a few days longer. It was a dismal thought that it

must be for a few days, yet that would be some respite, and then they

could part friends; though her heart so clung to his that a parting

should rend it from her, she wanted to live over their brief happiness

again.

"Oh!" said Suzette, in the end, laying her cheek upon the cold iron of

the balcony, "I wish I had died at my father's home of pining for

something to love rather than to have loved thus truly, and have it

accounted my shame. If I were married to this man I could not be his

fonder wife; but because I am not he despises me. All day I have crawled

in the dust; I have made myself cheap in his eyes. If I were prouder he

might not love me more, but his respect would be something."

She rallied and took heart. Pride is the immortal part of woman. With a

brighter eye she entered the room. Her letter, blotted with tears, lay

crumpled and torn upon the floor at his bedside, and he, with his face

to the wall, was snoring sonorously.

"Ralph Flare," cried Suzette, "arise! that letter is the last olive

branch you shall ever see in my hand; _adieu_!"

He opened his eyes yawningly. Suzette, with trembling lips and nostrils,

clasped the door-knob. It shut behind her with a shock. Her feet were

quick upon the stairs; he pursued her like one suddenly gone mad, and

called her back with something between a moan and a howl.

"Do not go away, Suzette," he cried; "I only jested. I meant this

morning to search you out and beg you to come back. I would not lose you

for France--for the world. Be not rash or retaliatory! become not the

companion of this Frenchman who has divided us. We will commence again.

I have tested your fidelity. You shall have all the liberty that you

need, everything that I have; say to me, sweetheart, that you will

stay!"

For a moment her bright eyes were scintillant with wrath and

indignation. He who had racked her all day for his pleasure was bound

and prostrate now. Should she not do as much for her revenge?

"I have no other friend now," he pleaded; "my nights have been

sleepless, solitary. In the days I have drunk deeply, squandered my

money, tried all dissipations, and proved them disappointments. If you

leave me I swear that I will plague myself and you."

"Oh! Ralph," said Suzette, "I do not wonder at the artfulness of women

after this day's lesson. Something impels me to return your cruelty; it

is a bad impulse, and I shall disobey it. I thank God, my baby, that I

cannot do as you have done to me."

She wept again for the last time, but he kissed her tears away, and

wondered where the great shame lay, upon that child or upon him?

PART VI.

DESERTION.

When the last fresh passion was over, Suzette, whose face had grown

purer and sadder, roused Ralph Flare to his more legitimate ambition.

"My child," she said, "if you will work in the gallery every day I will

sew in one of the great _magasans_."

To see that he commenced fairly, she went with him into the Louvre, and

he selected a fine Rembrandt--an old man, bearded and scarred, massively

characterized, and clothed in magic light and shadow.

As Ralph stood at his easel, meditating the master, Suzette now

fluttered around him, now ran off to the far end of the long hall, where

he could see her in miniature, the sweetest portrait in France. At last

he was really absorbed, and she went into the city to fulfil her

promise. She was nimble of finger, and though the work distressed her at

first, she thought of his applause, and persevered.

Their method was the marvel of the unimaginative Terrapin, who made some

philosophic comments upon the "spooney" socially considered, and cut

their acquaintance.

They breakfasted at the _cremery_ at seven o'clock with the _ouvriers_,

and dined at one of Duvall's bouillon establishments. Suzette found the

work easier as she progressed. She was finally promoted to the place of

_coupeur_, or cutter, and had the superintendence of a work-room, where

she made four francs a day, and so paid all her expenses. At the end of

the second month he took the money which he otherwise would have

required for board, and bought her a watch and chain at the _Palais

Royale_. At the same time he put the finishing touch to his picture, and

when hung upon his wall, between their photographs, Suzette danced

before it, and took half the credit upon herself.

Foolish Suzette! she did not know how that old man was her most

dangerous rival. He had done what no beautiful woman in France could

do--weakened her grasp upon Ralph Flare's heart. For now Ralph's old

enthusiasm for his profession reasserted itself. It was his first and

deepest love after all.

"My baby," he said one night, "there was a great artist named

Raphael--and he had a little mistress, whom I don't think a whit

prettier than mine. She was called the _Fornarina_, just as you may be

called the _Coutouriere_, and he painted her portrait in the characters

of saints and of the Virgin. She will be remembered a thousand years,

because Raphael so loved and painted her. But he was not a great artist

only because he loved the _Fornarina_. He had something that he loved

better, and so have I."

"One more beloved than Suzette?" she cried.

"Yes! it is art. I loved you more than my art before; but I am going

back to my first love."

Suzette tossed her head and said that she could never be jealous of a

picture, and went her way with a simple faith and toiled; and as she

toiled the more, so grew her love the purer and her content the more

equal. She was not the aerial thing she had been. Retaining her

elasticity of spirit, she was less volatile, more silent, more careful,

more anxious.

It is wiser, not happier, to reach that estate called thought; for now

she asked herself very often how long this chapter of her life would

last. Must the time come when he must leave her forever? She thought it

the bitterest of all to part as they had done before, with anger; but

any parting must be agony where she had loved so well. As he lay

sleeping, he never knew what tears of midnight were plashing upon his

face. He could not see how her little heart was bleeding as it throbbed.

Yet she went right on, though sometimes the tears blinded her, till she

could not see her needle; but the consciousness that this love and labor

had made her life more sanctified was, in some sort, compensation.

One Sunday she rose before Ralph, and thinking that she was unobserved,

stole out of the hotel and up the Boulevard. He followed her,

suspiciously. She crossed the Place de la Sorbonne, turned the transept

of the Pantheon, and entered the old church of St. Etienne du Mont.

It was early mass. The tapers which have been burning five hundred years

glistened upon the tomb of the holy St. Genevieve. Here and there old

women and girls were kneeling in the chapels, whispering their sins into

the ears of invisible priests. And beneath the delicate tracery of

screen and staircase, and the gloriously-painted windows, and the image

of Jesus crucified looking down upon all, some groups of poor people

were murmuring their prayers and making the sign of the cross.

Ralph entered by a door in the choir. He saw Suzette stand pallidly

beside the holy water, and when she had touched it with the tips of her

fingers, and made the usual rites, she staggered, as if in shame, to a

remote chair, and kneeling down covered her face with her missal. Now

and then the organ boomed out. The censers were swung aloft, dispensing

their perfumes, and all the people made obeisance. Ralph did not know

what it all meant. He only saw his little girl penitent and in prayer,

and he knew that she was carrying her sin and his to the feet of the

Eternal Mercy.

He feigned sleep in the same way each Sunday succeeding, and she

disappeared as before. After a while she spoke of her family, and

wondered if her father would forgive her. She would not have forgiven

him three months ago, but was quite humble now.

She sent her photograph to the old man, and a letter came back, the

first she had received for two years.

She felt unwilling, also, to receive further gifts or support from

Ralph. If I were his wife, she said, it might be well, but since it is

not so, I must not be dependent.

Foolish Suzette again! She did not know that men love best where they

most protect. The wife who comes with a dower may climb as high as her

husband's pocket, but seldom lies snugly at his heart. Her changed

conduct did not draw him closer to her. He felt uneasy and unworthy. He

missed the artfulness which had been so winning. He had jealousies no

longer to keep his passion quick, for he could not doubt her devotion.

There was nothing to lack in Suzette, and that was a fault. She had

become modest, docile, truthful, grave. A noble man might have

appreciated her the better. Ralph Flare was a representative man, and he

did not.

His friends in America thought his copy from Rembrandt wonderful. Their

flattery made his ambition glow and flame. His mother, whose woman's

instinct divined the cause of his delay in Paris, sent him a pleading

letter to go southward; and thus reprimanded, praised, rewarded, what

was he to do?

He resolved to leave France--and without Suzette!

He had not courage to tell her that the separation was final. He spoke

of an excursion merely, and took but a handful of baggage. She had

doubts that were like deaths to her; but she believed him, and after a

feverish night went with him in the morning to the train. He was to

write every day.

Would she take money?

"No."

But she might have unexpected wants--sickness, accident, charity?

"If so," she said trustfully, "would not her boy come back?"

He had just time to buy his ticket and gain the platform. He folded her

in his arms, and exchanged one long, sobbing kiss. It seemed to Ralph

Flare that the sound of that kiss was like a spell--the breaking of the

pleasantest link in his life--the passing from sinfulness to a baser

selfishness--the stamp and seal upon his bargain with ambition, whereby

for the long future he was sold to the sorrow of avarice and the

deceitfulness of fame.

There was a sharp whistle from the locomotive--who invented that whistle

to pierce so many bosoms at parting?--the cars moved one by one till the

last, in which he was seated, sprang forward with a jerk; and though she

was quite blind, he saw her handkerchief waving till all had vanished,

and he would have given the world to have shed one tear.

He has gone on into the free country, and to-night he will sleep under

the shadow of the mountains.

She has turned back into the dark city, and she will not sleep at all in

her far-up chamber.

It is only one heart crushed, and thousands that deserve more sympathy

beat out every day. We only notice this one because it shall lie

bleeding, and get no sympathy at all.

PART VII.

DISSOLVING VIEW.

That he might not meet with his own countrymen, Ralph halted at Milan,

and in the great deserted gallery of the Brera went steadily to work.

If, as it often happened, Suzette's pale face got between him and the

canvas, he mentioned his own name and said "renown," and took a turn in

the remote corridor where young Raphael's _Sposializo_ hung opposite

that marvel of Guercino's--poor Hagar and her boy Ishmael driven

abroad. These adjuncts and the fiercer passion of self had their effect.

He never wrote to Suzette, but sent secretly for his baggage, and was

well pleased with the consciousness that he could forget her. After

three months he set out for Florence and studied the masterpieces of

Andrea del Sarto, and tried his hand at the _Flora_ of Titian.

He went into society somewhat, and was very much afraid his unworthy

conduct in Paris might be bruited abroad. Indeed, he could hardly

forgive himself the fondness he had known, and came to regard Suzette as

a tolerably bad person, who had bewitched him. He burned all her

letters, and a little lock of hair he had clipped while she was asleep

once, and blotted the whole experience out of his diary. The next Sunday

he went to hear the Rev. Mr. Hall preach, and felt quite consoled.

The summer fell upon Val d'Arno like the upsetting of a Tuscan

_Scaldino_, and Ralph Flare regretfully took his departure northward.

All the world was going to Paris--why not he? Was he afraid? Certainly

not; it had been a great victory over temptation to stay away so long.

He would carry out the triumph by braving a return.

In accordance with his principles of economy, he took a third-class

ticket at Basle. He could so make better studies of passengers; for,

somehow, your first-class people have not character faces. The only

character you get out of them is the character of wine they consume.

He left the Alps behind him, and rolled all day through the prosaic

plains of France; startling the pale little towns, down whose treeless

streets the sun shone, oh! so drearily, and taking up boors and

market-folks at every monastic station. There was a pretty young girl

sitting beside Ralph in the afternoon, but he refused to talk to her,

for he was schooling himself, and preferred to scan the features of an

odd old couple who got in at Troyes.

They were two old people of the country, and they sat together in the

descending shadows of the day, quite like in garb and feature, their

chins a little peakish, and the hairs of both turning gray. The man was

commonplace, as he leaned upon a staff, and between their feet were

paniers of purchases they had been making, which the woman regarded

indifferently, as if her heart reached farther than her eyes, and met

some soft departed scene which she would have none other see.

"She has a good face," said Flare. "I wish she would keep there a moment

more. By George, she looks like somebody I have known."

The old man nodded on his staff. The rumble of the carriages subdued to

a lull all lesser talk or murmurs, and the sky afar off brought into

sharp relief the two Gallic profiles, close together, as if they were

used to reposing so; yet in the language of their deepening lines lay

the stories of lives very, very wide apart.

"The old girl's face is soft," said Ralph Flare. "She has brightened

many a bit of Belgian pike road, and the brown turban on her head is in

clever contrast to the silver shimmer of her hairs. How anomalous are

life and art! How unconscious is this old lady of the narrow escape she

is making from perpetuation! Doubtless she works afield beside that old

Jacques Bonhomme, and drinks sour wine or Normandy cider on Sundays.

That may be the best fate of Suzette, but it must be an amply dry

reformation for any little grisette to contemplate. For such prodigals

going home there is no fatted calf slain. No fathers see them afar off

and run to place the ring upon their fingers. They renounce precarious

gayety for persistent slavery. The keen wit of the student is exchanged

for the pipe and mug and dull oath of the boor. I wish every such girl

back again to so sallow a fate, and pity her when she gets there."

And so, with much unconscious sentimentality, and the two old market

people silent before him, Ralph Flare's eyes half closed also, and the

lull of the wheels, the long lake streaks of the sedative skies, the

coming of great shadows like compulsions to slumber, made his forehead

fall and the world go up and down and darken.

It was the old woman who shook him from that repose; she only touched

him, but her touch was like a lost sense restored. He thrilled and sat

stock still, with her withered blue hand on his arm, and heard the

pinched lips say, unclosing with a sort of quiver:

"Baby!"

He looked again, and seemed to himself to grow quite old as he looked,

and he said,

"_Enfant perdu!_"

The turban kept its place, the peaked chin kept as peaked; there seemed

even more silver in the smooth hair, and the old serge gown drooped as

brownly; but the sweet old face grew soft as a widow's looking at the

only portrait she guards, and a tear, like a drop of water exhumed, ran

to the tip of her nostril.

"Suzette!" he said, "my early sin; do you come back as well with the

turning of my hairs? Has the first passion a shadow long as forever? Why

have we met?"

"Not of my seeking was this meeting, Ralph. Speak softly, for my husband

sleeps, and he is old like thee and me. If my face is an accusation, let

my lips be forgiveness. The love of you made my life dutiful; the loss

of you saddened my days, but it was the sadness of religion! I sinned no

more, and sought my father's fields, and delayed, with my hand purified

by his blessing, the residue of his sands of life. I made my years good

to my neighbors, the sick, the bereaved. I met the temptations of the

young with a truer story than pleasure tells, and when I married it was

with the prelude of my lost years related and forgiven. With children's

faces the earnestness and beauty of life returned; for this, for more,

for all, may your reward be bountiful!"

There is no curse like the dream of old age. Ralph Flare felt, with the

sudden whitening of each separate hair, the sudden remembrance of each

separate folly; and the moments of grief he had wrung from the little

girl of the Quartier Latin revived like one's mean acts seen through

others' eyes.

"Pardon you, child, Suzette?" he said; "to me you were more than I

hoped, more than I wished. I asked your face only, and you gave me your

heart. For the unfaithfulness, for the wrath, for the unmanliness, for

the tyranny with which I treated you, my soul upbraids me."

"How thankful am I," she answered; "the terror to me was that you had

learned in the Quartier lessons to make your after-life monotonous. I am

happy."

Their hands met; to his gray beard fell the smile upon her mouth; they

forget the Quartier Latin; they felt no love but forgiveness, which is

the tenderest of emotions. The whistle blew shrilly; the train stopped;

Ralph Flare awoke from sleep; but the old couple were gone.

He went to Paris, and, contrary to his purpose, inquired for her. She

had been seen by none since his departure. He wrote to the Maire of her

commune, and this was the reply:

"_Ralph, Merci! Pardonne!_

"SUZETTE."

He felt no loss. He felt softened toward her only; and he turned his

back on the Quartier Latin with a man's easy satisfaction that he could

forget.

THE PIGEON GIRL.

On the sloping market-place,

In the village of Compeigne,

Every Saturday her face,

Like a Sunday, comes again;

Daylight finds her in her seat,

With her panier at her feet,

Where her pigeons lie in pairs;

Like their plumage gray her gown,

To her sabots drooping down;

And a kerchief, brightly brown,

Binds her smooth, dark hairs.

All the buyers knew her well,

And, perforce, her face must see,

As a holy Raphael

Lures us in a gallery;

Round about the rustics gape,

Drinking in her comely shape,

And the housewives gently speak,

When into her eyes they look,

As within some holy book,

And the gables, high and crook,

Fling their sunshine on her cheek.

In her hands two milk-white doves,

Happy in her lap to lie,

Softly murmur of their loves,

Envied by the passers-by;

One by one their flight they take,

Bought and cherished for her sake,

Leaving so reluctantly;

Till the shadows close approach,

Fades the pageant, foot and coach,

And the giants in the cloche

Ring the noon for Picardie.

Round the village see her glide,

With a slender sunbeam's pace!

Mirrored in the Oise's tide,

The gold-fish float upon her face;

All the soldiers touch their caps;

In the cafés quit their naps

Garçon, guest, to wish her back;

And the fat old beadles smile

As she kneels along the aisle,

Like Pucelle in other while,

In the dim church of Saint Jacques.

Now she mounts her dappled ass--

He well-pleased such friend to know--

And right merrily they pass

The armorial château;

Down the long, straight paths they tread

Till the forest, overhead,

Whispers low its leafy love;

In the archways' green caress

Rides the wondrous dryadess--

Thrills the grass beneath her press,

And the blue-eyed sky above.

I have met her, o'er and o'er,

As I strolled alone apart,

By a lonely carrefour

In the forest's tangled heart,

Safe as any stag that bore

Imprint of the Emperor;

In the copse that round her grew

Tiptoe the straight saplings stood,

Peeped the wild boar's satyr brood,

Like an arrow clove the wood

The glad note of the cuckoo.

How I wished myself her friend!

(So she wished that I were more)

Jogging toward her journey's end

At Saint Jean au Bois before,

Where her father's acres fall

Just without the abbey wall;

By the cool well loiteringly

The shaggy Norman horses stray,

In the thatch the pigeons play,

And the forest round alway

Folds the hamlet, like a sea.

Far forgotten all the feud

In my New World's childhood haunts,

If my childhood she renewed

In this pleasant nook of France;

Might she make the blouse I wear,

Welcome then her homely fare

And her sensuous religion!

To the market we should ride,

In the Mass kneel side by side,

Might I warm, each eventide,

In my nest, my pretty pigeon.

THE DEAF MAN OF KENSINGTON.

A TALE OF AN OLD SUBURB.

* * * * *

CHAPTER I.

THE MURDER.

Between the Delaware River and Girard Avenue, which is the market street

of the future, and east of Frankfort Road, lies Kensington, a

respectable old district of the Quaker City, and occupying the same

relation to it that Kensington in England does to London. Beyond both

Kensingtons is a Richmond, but the English Richmond is a beauteous hill,

with poetical recollections of Pope and Thomson, while our Richmond is

the coal district of Philadelphia, flat to the foot and dingy to the

eye.

Kensington, however, was once no faint miniature of the staid British

suburb. The river bending to the eastward there conducts certain of the

streets crookedly away from the rectangular Quaker demon who is ever

seeking to square them. Along the water side, or near it, passes a sort

of Quay Street, between ship-yards and fish-houses on the one side, and

shops or small tenements on the other, and this street scarcely

discloses the small monument on the site of the Treaty Tree, where

William Penn in person satisfied the momentary expectations of his

Indian subjects.

Nearly parallel to the water side street is another, wider and more

aristocratic, and lined with many handsome dwellings of brick, or even

brown-stone, where the successful shipbuilders, fishtakers, coal men,

and professional classes have established themselves or their posterity.

This street was once called Queen, afterward Richmond Street, and it is

crossed by others, as Hanover, Marlborough, and Shackamaxon, which

attest in their names the duration of royal and Indian traditions

hereabout. Pleasant maple, sometimes sycamore and willow trees shade

these old streets, and they are kept as clean as any in this ever-mopped

and rinsed metropolis, while the society, though disengaged from the

great city, had its better and worser class, and was fastidious about

morals and behavior, and not disinclined to express its opinion.

One winter day in a certain year Kensington had a real sensation. The

Delaware was frozen from shore to shore, and one could walk on the ice

from Smith's to Treaty Island, and from Cooper's Point to the mouth of

the Cohocksink. On the second afternoon of the great freeze fires were

built on the river, and crowds assembled at certain smooth places to see

great skaters like Colonel Page cut flourishes and show sly gallantry to

the buxom housewives and grass widows of Kensington and the Jerseys. A

few horses were driven on the ice, and hundreds of boys ran merrily with

real sleighs crowded down with their friends. A fight or two was

improvised, and unlicensed vendors set forth the bottle that inebriates.

In the midst of the afternoon gayety a small boy, kneeling down to

buckle up to a farther hole the straps on his guttered skates, saw just

at his toe something like human hair. The small boy rose to his feet and

stamped with all his might around that object, not in any apprehension

but because small boys like to know; and when the ice had been well

broken, kneeling down and pulling it out in pieces with his mitten, the

small boy felt something cold and smooth, and then he poked his finger

into a human eye. It was a dead man. No sooner had the urchin found this

out than he bellowed out at the top of his voice, running and falling as

he yelled: "Murder! Murder! Murder!"

From all parts of the ice, like flies chasing over a silver salver

toward some sweet point of corruption, the hundreds and thousands

swarmed at the news that a dead body had been found. When they arrived

on the spot, spades, picks, and ice-hooks had been procured by those

nearest shore, and the whole mystery brought from the depths of the

river to the surface.

There lay together on the ice two men, apparently several days in the

water, and with the usual look of drowned people of good

condition--glassy and of fixed expression, as if in the moment of death

a consenting grimness had stolen into their countenances, neither

composed nor terrified.

The bodies had been already recognized when the main part of the crowd

arrived. Kensington people, generally, knew them both.

"It's William Zane and his business partner, Sayler Rainey! They own one

of the marine railways at Kensington. Come to think of it, I haven't

seen them around for nearly a week, neighbor!" exclaimed an old man.

"It's a case of drowning, no doubt," spoke up a little fellow who did a

river business in old chains and junk. "You see they had another

ship-mending place on the island opposite Kinsington, and rowin'

theirselves over was upset and never missed!"

"Quare enough too!" added a third party, "for yisterday I had a talk

with young Andrew Zane, this one's son (touching the body with his

foot), and Andrew said--a little pale I thought he was--says he, 'Pop's

_about_.'"

Here a little buzz of mystery--so grateful to crowds which have come far

over slippery surface and expect much--undulated to the outward

boundaries. As the people moved the ice cracked like a cannon shot, and

they dispersed like blackbirds, to rally soon again.

"Here's a doctor! Now we'll know about it! _He's_ here!" was exclaimed

by several, as an important little man was pushed along, and the

thickest crowd gave him passage. The little man borrowed a boy's cap to

kneel on, adjusted a sort of microscopic glass to his nose, as if plain

eyes had no adequate use to this scientific necessity, and he called up

two volunteers to turn the corpses over, keep back the throng, give him

light, and add imposition to apprehension. Finally he stopped at a place

in the garments of the principal of the twain. "Here is a hole," he

exclaimed, "with burned woollen fibre about it, as if a pistol had been

fired at close quarters. Draw back this woollen under-jacket! There--as

I expected, gentlemen, is a pistol shot in the breast! What is the name

of the person? Ah! thank you! Well, William Zane, gentlemen, was shot

before he was drowned?"

The great crowd swayed and rushed forward again, and again the ice

cracked like artillery. Before the multitude could swarm to the honey of

a crime a second time, the news was dispersed that both of the drowned

men had bullet wounds in their bodies, and both had been undoubtedly

murdered. Some supposed it was the work of river pirates; others a

private revenge, perpetrated by some following boat's party in the

darkness of night. But more than one person piped shrilly ere the people

wearily scattered in the dusk for their homes on the two shores of the

river: "How did it happen that young Zane, the old un's son, said

yisterday that his daddy was about, when he's been frozen in at least

three days?"