DOCTOR KEENE RECOVERS HIS BULLET
It early attracted the apothecary's notice, in observing the civilization around him, that it kept the flimsy false bottoms in its social errors only by incessant reiteration. As he re-entered the shop, dissatisfied with himself for accepting M. Grandissime's invitation to ride, he knew by the fervent words which he overheard from the lips of his employee that the f.m.c. had been making one of his reconnoisances, and possibly had ventured in to inquire for his tenant.
"I t'ink, me, dat hanny w'ite man is a gen'leman; but I don't care if a man are good like a h-angel, if 'e har not pu'e w'ite 'ow can 'e be a gen'leman?"
Raoul's words were addressed to a man who, as he rose up and handed Frowenfeld a note, ratified the Creole's sentiment by a spurt of tobacco juice and an affirmative "Hm-m."
The note was a lead-pencil scrawl, without date.
DEAR JOE: Come and see me some time this evening.
I am on my back in bed. Want your help in a little
matter. Yours, Keene.
I have found out who ---- ----"
Frowenfeld pondered: "I have found out who ---- ----" Ah! Doctor Keene had found out who stabbed Agricola.
Some delays occurred in the afternoon, but toward sunset the apothecary dressed and went out. From the doctor's bedside in the rue St. Louis, if not delayed beyond all expectation, he would proceed to visit the ladies at Number 19 rue Bienville. The air was growing cold and threatening bad weather.
He found the Doctor prostrate, wasted, hoarse, cross and almost too weak for speech. He could only whisper, as his friend approached his pillow:
"These vile lungs!"
"Hemorrhage?"
The invalid held up three small, freckled fingers.
Joseph dared not show pity in his gaze, but it seemed savage not to express some feeling, so after standing a moment he began to say:
"I am very sorry--"
"You needn't bother yourself!" whispered the doctor, who lay frowning upward. By and by he whispered again.
Frowenfeld bent his ear, and the little man, so merry when well, repeated, in a savage hiss:
"Sit down!"
It was some time before he again broke the silence.
"Tell you what I want--you to do--for me."
"Well, sir--"
"Hold on!" gasped the invalid, shutting his eyes with impatience,--"till I get through."
He lay a little while motionless, and then drew from under his pillow a wallet, and from the wallet a pistol-ball.
"Took that out--a badly neglected wound--last day I saw you." Here a pause, an appalling cough, and by and by a whisper: "Knew the bullet in an instant." He smiled wearily. "Peculiar size." He made a feeble motion. Frowenfeld guessed the meaning of it and handed him a pistol from a small table. The ball slipped softly home. "Refused two hundred dollars--those pistols"--with a sigh and closed eyes. By and by again--"Patient had smart fever--but it will be gone--time you get--there. Want you to--take care--t' I get up."
"But, Doctor--"
The sick man turned away his face with a petulant frown; but presently, with an effort at self-control, brought it back and whispered:
"You mean you--not physician?"
"Yes."
"No. No more are half--doc's. You can do it. Simple gun-shot wound in the shoulder." A rest. "Pretty wound; ranges"--he gave up the effort to describe it. "You'll see it." Another rest. "You see--this matter has been kept quiet so far. I don't want any one--else to know--anything about it." He sighed audibly and looked as though he had gone to sleep, but whispered again, with his eyes closed--"'specially on culprit's own account."
Frowenfeld was silent: but the invalid was waiting for an answer, and, not getting it, stirred peevishly.
"Do you wish me to go to-night?" asked the apothecary.
"To-morrow morning. Will you--?"
"Certainly, Doctor."
The invalid lay quite still for several minutes, looking steadily at his friend, and finally let a faint smile play about his mouth,--a wan reminder of his habitual roguery.
"Good boy," he whispered.
Frowenfeld rose and straightened the bedclothes, took a few steps about the room, and finally returned. The Doctor's restless eye had followed him at every movement.
"You'll go?"
"Yes," replied the apothecary, hat in hand; "where is it?"
"Corner Bienville and Bourbon,--upper river corner,--yellow one-story house, doorsteps on street. You know the house?"
"I think I do."
"Good-night. Here!--I wish you would send that black girl in here--as you go out--make me better fire--Joe!" the call was a ghostly whisper.
Frowenfeld paused in the door.
"You don't mind my--bad manners, Joe?"
The apothecary gave one of his infrequent smiles.
"No, Doctor."
He started toward Number 19 rue Bienville, but a light, cold sprinkle set in, and he turned back toward his shop. No sooner had the rain got him there than it stopped, as rain sometimes will do.
WARS WITHIN THE BREAST
The next morning came in frigid and gray. The unseasonable numerals which the meteorologist recorded in his tables might have provoked a superstitious lover of better weather to suppose that Monsieur Danny, the head imp of discord, had been among the aërial currents. The passionate southern sky, looking down and seeing some six thousand to seventy-five hundred of her favorite children disconcerted and shivering, tried in vain, for two hours, to smile upon them with a little frozen sunshine, and finally burst into tears.
In thus giving way to despondency, it is sad to say, the sky was closely imitating the simultaneous behavior of Aurora Nancanou. Never was pretty lady in cheerier mood than that in which she had come home from Honoré's counting-room. Hard would it be to find the material with which to build again the castles-in-air that she founded upon two or three little discoveries there made. Should she tell them to Clotilde? Ah! and for what? No, Clotilde was a dear daughter--ha! few women were capable of having such a daughter as Clotilde; but there were things about which she was entirely too scrupulous. So, when she came in from that errand profoundly satisfied that she would in future hear no more about the rent than she might choose to hear, she had been too shrewd to expose herself to her daughter's catechising. She would save her little revelations for disclosure when they might be used to advantage. As she threw her bonnet upon the bed, she exclaimed, in a tone of gentle and wearied reproach:
"Why did you not remind me that M. Honoré Grandissime, that precious somebody-great, has the honor to rejoice in a quadroon half-brother of the same illustrious name? Why did you not remind me, eh?"
"Ah! and you know it as well as A, B, C," playfully retorted Clotilde.
"Well, guess which one is our landlord?"
"Which one?"
"Ma foi! how do I know? I had to wait a shameful long time to see Monsieur le prince,--just because I am a De Grapion, I know. When at last I saw him, he says, 'Madame, this is the other Honoré Grandissime.' There, you see we are the victims of a conspiracy; if I go to the other, he will send me back to the first. But, Clotilde, my darling," cried the beautiful speaker, beamingly, "dismiss all fear and care; we shall have no more trouble about it."
"And how, indeed, do you know that?"
"Something tells it to me in my ear. I feel it! Trust in Providence, my child. Look at me, how happy I am; but you--you never trust in Providence. That is why we have so much trouble,--because you don't trust in Providence. Oh! I am so hungry, let us have dinner."
"What sort of a person is M. Grandissime in his appearance?" asked Clotilde, over their feeble excuse for a dinner.
"What sort? Do you imagine I had nothing better to do than notice whether a Grandissime is good-looking or not? For all I know to the contrary, he is--some more rice, please, my dear."
But this light-heartedness did not last long. It was based on an unutterable secret, all her own, about which she still had trembling doubts; this, too, notwithstanding her consultation of the dark oracles. She was going to stop that. In the long run, these charms and spells themselves bring bad luck. Moreover, the practice, indulged in to excess, was wicked, and she had promised Clotilde,--that droll little saint,--to resort to them no more. Hereafter, she should do nothing of the sort, except, to be sure, to take such ordinary precautions against misfortune as casting upon the floor a little of whatever she might be eating or drinking to propitiate M. Assonquer. She would have liked, could she have done it without fear of detection, to pour upon the front door-sill an oblation of beer sweetened with black molasses to Papa Lébat (who keeps the invisible keys of all the doors that admit suitors), but she dared not; and then, the hound would surely have licked it up. Ah me! was she forgetting that she was a widow?
She was in poor plight to meet the all but icy gray morning; and, to make her misery still greater, she found, on dressing, that an accident had overtaken her, which she knew to be a trustworthy sign of love grown cold. She had lost--alas! how can we communicate it in English!--a small piece of lute-string ribbon, about so long, which she used for--not a necktie exactly, but--
And she hunted and hunted, and couldn't bear to give up the search, and sat down to breakfast and ate nothing, and rose up and searched again (not that she cared for the omen), and struck the hound with the broom, and broke the broom, and hunted again, and looked out the front window, and saw the rain beginning to fall, and dropped into a chair--crying, "Oh! Clotilde, my child, my child! the rent collector will be here Saturday and turn us into the street!" and so fell a-weeping.
A little tear-letting lightened her unrevealable burden, and she rose, rejoicing that Clotilde had happened to be out of eye-and-ear-shot. The scanty fire in the fireplace was ample to warm the room; the fire within her made it too insufferably hot! Rain or no rain, she parted the window-curtains and lifted the sash. What a mark for Love's arrow she was, as, at the window, she stretched her two arms upward! And, "right so," who should chance to come cantering by, the big drops of rain pattering after him, but the knightliest man in that old town, and the fittest to perfect the fine old-fashioned poetry of the scene!
"Clotilde," said Aurora, turning from her mirror, whither she had hastened to see if her face showed signs of tears (Clotilde was entering the room), "we shall never be turned out of this house by Honoré Grandissime!"
"Why?" asked Clotilde, stopping short in the floor, forgetting Aurora's trust in Providence, and expecting to hear that M. Grandissime had been found dead in his bed.
"Because I saw him just now; he rode by on horseback. A man with that noble face could never do such a thing!"
The astonished Clotilde looked at her mother searchingly. This sort of speech about a Grandissime? But Aurora was the picture of innocence.
Clotilde uttered a derisive laugh.
"Impertinente!" exclaimed the other, laboring not to join in it.
"Ah-h-h!" cried Clotilde, in the same mood, "and what face had he when he wrote that letter?"
"What face?"
"Yes, what face?"
"I do not know what face you mean," said Aurora.
"What face," repeated Clotilde, "had Monsieur Honoré de Grandissime on the day that he wrote--"
"Ah, f-fah!" cried Aurora, and turned away, "you don't know what you are talking about! You make me wish sometimes that I were dead!"
Clotilde had gone and shut down the sash, as it began to rain hard and blow. As she was turning away, her eye was attracted by an object at a distance.
"What is it?" asked Aurora, from a seat before the fire.
"Nothing," said Clotilde, weary of the sensational,--"a man in the rain."
It was the apothecary of the rue Royale, turning from that street toward the rue Bourbon, and bowing his head against the swirling norther.