[D]Literally, "parasites of death."
[D]Literally, "parasites of death."
The hearse was a cheap charity affair, furnished by theMaireof thearrondissement, 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 thecroquemorts, 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 chiefcroquemortexplained 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 thecocher, 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. Thecroquemortskept 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 CONFÉDÉREAMERIQUE.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 allwho 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 thefosse commune—in plain English, thecommon 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 bodiesbeneath, 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 chiefcroquemort, without any ado, threw the coffin over his shoulder and walked to the place of sepulture. Fivefossoyeurs, 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 chieffossoyeur, 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 littlehunchback 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 thefosse communemight 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 theircreditors, 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 theprud'homme; you are of thecanaille, 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."
"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."
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 dispatchto 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 theTrois 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 Parisdemi-mondepartook; 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.
Acabinetor 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'clockP.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 silverfourchettesfrom plates of Sevres porcelain, and each guest touched his lips afterward with a glass of refinedvermeuth. Three descriptions of soup came successively, an amberJulien, in which the microscope would have been baffled to detect one vegetable fibre, yet it bore all the flavors of the garden; a tureen ofpotage à la Bisque, in which the rarest and tiniest shell-fish had dissolved themselves; and at the last atortue, small in quantity, but so delicious that murmurs of "encore" were made.
Morsels ofviande, 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 lusciouspatés 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, theentrée.
Asole au vin blancgave way to a regalmackerel au sauce champignon, and after this dish came confections and fruitsad libitum, ending with the removal of the cloth, the introduction of cigars, and amarquiseor 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 marvellousboutiques; the groups which sat around the café beneath withsorbetsandglacés, 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 clothedcap-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'sblanchisseuse.
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 ofour 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 theblanchisseusewere 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: noRisque, no winnings.'
"You will see, gentlemen," continued Mr. Plade, when the enthusiasm had subsided, "that I place thetoast 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 acharette. 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 thefosse 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 thesalonto 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 theblanchisseusein 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.
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 inpatois.
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 thesale. 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 itschargé des affairesin 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 Rutledgevs.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 getall 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 hisblanchisseuse—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, hungin 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 yourfamiliar 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 theworld, 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; itwas dated, "Clichy dungeon," and signed by Mr. Freckle.