That Boy Of Norcott's

“No, Mademoiselle, not even to that. It is a purely personal question. I have got a letter, with a Fiume postmark on it, but without the writer’s name; and I am curious to know if you could aid me to discover him. Would you look at the hand and see if it be known to you?”

“Pray excuse me, M. Owen. I am the stupidest of all people in reading riddles or solving difficulties. All the help I can give you is to say how I treat anonymous letters myself. If they be simply insults, I burn them. If they relate what appear to be matters of fact, I wait and watch for them.”

Offended by the whole tone of her manner, I bowed, and moved towards the door.

“Have you seen M. Marsac? I hear he has arrived.”

“No, Mademoiselle; not yet.”

“When you have conferred and consulted with him, your instructions are all prepared; and I suppose you are ready to start?”

“I shall be, Mademoiselle, when called upon.”

“I will say good-bye, then,” said she, advancing one step towards me, evidently intending to offer me her hand; but I replied by a low, very low bow, and retired.

I thought I should choke as I went down the stairs. My throat seemed to swell, and then to close up; and when I gained the shelter of the thick trees, I threw myself down on my face in the grass, and sobbed as if my heart was breaking. How I vowed and swore that I would tear every recollection of her from my mind, and never think more of her, and how her image ever came back clearer and brighter and more beautiful before me after each oath!

CHAPTER XXIII. THE MAN WHO TRAVELLED FOR OUR HOUSE

As I sat brooding over my fire that same evening, my door was suddenly opened, and a large burly man, looming even larger from an immense fur pelisse that he wore, entered. His first care was to divest himself of a tall Astracan cap, from which he flung off some snow-flakes, and then to throw off his pelisse, stamping the snow from his great boots, which reached half-way up the thigh.

“You see,” cried he, at last, with a jovial air, – “you see I come, like a good comrade, and make myself at home at once.”

“I certainly see so much,” said I, dryly; “but whom have I the honor to receive?”

“You have the honor to receive Gustave Maurice de Marsac, young man, a gentleman of Dauphiné, who now masquerades in the character of first traveller for the respectable house of Hodnig and Oppovich.”

“I am proud to make your acquaintance, M. de Marsac,” said I, offering my band.

“What age are you?” cried he, staring fixedly at me. “You can’t be twenty?”

“No, I am not twenty.”

“And they purpose to send you down to replace me!” cried he; and he threw himself back in his chair, and shook with laughter.

“I see all the presumption; but I can only say it was none of my doing.”

“No, no; don’t say presumption,” said he, in a half-coaxing tone. “But I may say it, without vanity, it is not every man’s gift to be able to succeed Gustave de Marsac. May I ask for a cigar? Thanks. A real Cuban, I verily believe. I finished my tobacco two posts from this, and have been smoking all the samples – pepper and hemp-seed amongst them – since then.”

“May I offer you something to eat?”

“You may, if you accompany it with something to drink. Would you believe it, Oppovich and his daughter were at supper when I arrived to report myself; and neither of them as much as said, Chevalier – I mean Mon. de Marsac – won’t you do us the honor to join us? No. Old Ignaz went on with his meal, – cold veal and a potato salad, I think it was; and the fair Sara examined my posting-book to see I had made no delay on the road; but neither offered me even the courtesy of a glass of wine.”

“I don’t suspect it was from any want of hospitality,” I began.

“An utter want of everything, mon cher. Want of decency; want of delicacy; want of due deference to a man of birth and blood. I see you are sending your servant out. Now, I beg, don’t make a stranger – don’t make what we call a ‘Prince Russe’ of me. A little quiet supper, and something to wash it down; good fellowship will do the rest. May I give your man the orders?”

“You will confer a great favor on me,” said I.

He took my servant apart, and whispered a few minutes with him at the window. “Try Kleptomitz first,” said he aloud, as the man was leaving; “and mind you say M. Marsac sent you. Smart ‘bursche’ you’ve got there. If you don’t take him with you, hand him over to me.”

“I will do so,” said I; “and am happy to have secured him a good master.”

“You’ll not know him when you pass through Fiume again. I believe there’s not my equal in Europe to drill a servant. Give me a Chinese, an Esquimau; give me a Hottentot, and in six months you shall see him announce a visitor, deliver a letter, wait at table, or serve coffee, with the quiet dignity and the impassive steadiness of the most accomplished lackey. The three servants of Fiume were made by me, and their fortunes also. One has now the chief restaurant at Rome, in the Piazza di Spagna; the other is manager of the ‘Iron Crown Hotel,’ at Zurich; he wished to have it called the ‘Arms of Marsac,’ but I forbade him. I said, ‘No, Pierre, no. The De Marsacs are now travelling incog.’ Like the Tavannes and the Rohans, we have to wait and bide our time. Louis Napoleon is not immortal. Do you think he is?”

“I have no reason to think so.”

“Well, well, you are too young to take interest in politics; not but that I did at fourteen: I conspired at fourteen! I will show you a stiletto Mazzini gave me on my birthday; and the motto on the blade was, ‘Au service du. Roi.’ Ah! you are surprised at what I tell you. I hear you say to yourself, ‘How the devil did he come to this place? what led him to Fiume?’ A long story that; a story poor old Dumas would give one of his eyes for. There’s more adventure, more scrapes by villany, dangers and deathblows generally, in the last twenty-two years of my life – I am now thirty-six – than in all the Monte Cristos that ever were written. I will take the liberty to put another log on your fire. What do you say if we lay the cloth? It will expedite matters a little.”

“With all my heart. Here are all my household goods,” said I, opening a little press in the wall.

“And not to be despised, by any means. Show me what a man drinks out of, and I’ll tell you what he drinks. When a man has got thin glasses like these, —à la Mousseline, as we say, – his tipple is Bordeaux.”

“I confess the weakness,” said I, laughing.

“It is my own infirmity too,” said he, sighing. “My theory is, plurality of wines is as much a mistake as plurality of wives. Coquette, if you will, with fifty, but give your affections to one. If I am anything, I am moral. What can keep your fellow so long? I gave him but two commissions.”

“Perhaps the shops were closed at this hour.”

“If they were, sir,” said he, pompously, “at the word ‘Marsac’ they would open. Ha! what do I see here? – a piano? Am I at liberty to open it?” And without waiting for a reply, he sat down, and ran his hands over the keys with a masterly facility. As he flew over the octaves, and struck chords of splendid harmony, I could not help feeling an amount of credit in all his boastful declarations just from this one trait of real power about him.

“I see you are a rare musician,” said I.

“And it is what I know least,” said he; “though Flotow said one day, ‘If that rascal De Marsac takes to writing operas, I ‘ll never compose another. ‘But here comes the supper;” and as he spoke my servant entered with a small basket with six bottles in it; two waiters following him, bearing a good-sized tin box, with a charcoal fire beneath.

“Well and perfectly done,” exclaimed my guest, as he aided them to place the soup on the table, and to dispose some hors d’oeuvre of anchovies, caviare, ham, and fresh butter on the board. “I am sorry we have no flowers. I love a bouquet A few camellias for color, and some violets for odor. They relieve the grossness of the material enjoyments; they poetize the meal; and if you have no women at table, mon cher, be sure to have flowers: not that I object to both together. There, now, is our little bill of fare, – a white soup, a devilled mackerel, some truffles, with butter, and a capon with stewed mushrooms. Oysters there are none, not even those native shrimps they call scampi; but the wine will compensate for much: the wine is Roediger; champagne, with a faint suspicion of dryness. And as he has brought ice, we ‘ll attack that Bordeaux you spoke of till the other be cool enough for drinking.”

As he rattled on thus, it was not very easy for me to assure myself whether I was host or guest; but as I saw that this consideration did not distress him, I resolved it should not weigh heavily on me.

“I ordered a compote of peaches with maraschino. Go after them and say it has been forgotten.” And now, as he dismissed my servant on this errand, he sat down and served the soup, doing the honors of the board in all form. “You are called – ”

“Digby is my Christian name,” interrupted I, “and you can call me by it.”

“Digby, I drink to your health; and if the wine had been only a little warmer, I ‘d say I could not wish to do so in a more generous fluid. No fellow of your age knows how to air his Bordeaux; hot flannels to the caraffe before decanting are all that is necessary, and let your glasses also be slightly warmed. To sip such claret as this, and then turn one’s eyes to that champagne yonder in the ice-pail, is like the sensation of a man who in his honeymoon fancies how happy he will be one of these days, en secondes noces. Don’t you feel a sense of triumphant enjoyment at this moment? Is there not something at your heart that says, ‘Hodnig and Oppovich, I despise you! To the regions I soar in you cannot come! To the blue ether I have risen, your very vision cannot reach!’ Eh, boy! tell me this.”

“No; I don’t think you have rightly measured my feelings. On the whole, I rather suspect I bear a very good will to these same people who have enabled me to have these comforts.”

“You pretend, then, to what they call gratitude?”

“I have that weakness.”

“I could as soon believe in the heathen mythology! I like the man who is kind to me while he is doing the kindness, and I could, if occasion served, be kind to him in turn; but to say that I could retain such a memory of the service after years that it would renew in me the first pleasant sensations it created, and with these sensations the goodwill to requite them, is downright rubbish. You might as well tell me that I could get drank simply by remembering the orgie I assisted at ten years ago.”

“I protest against your sentiment and your logic too.”

“Then we won’t dispute the matter. We’ll talk of something we can agree upon. Let us abuse Sara.”

“If you do, you’ll choose some other place to do it.”