Chapter II: Preface (2)

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.