Kitabı oku: «The Hero of the People: A Historical Romance of Love, Liberty and Loyalty», sayfa 12
CHAPTER XXIV
HAPPY FAMILY
ON the evening of this same day, about five, a scene passed in the third and top flat of a dirty old tumbledown house in Juiverie Street which we would like our readers to behold.
The interior of the sitting-room denoted poverty, and it was inhabited by three persons, a man, a woman, and a boy.
The man looked to be over fifty; he was wearing an old uniform of a French Guards sergeant, a habit venerated since these troops sided with the people in the riots and exchanged shots with the German dragoons.
He was dealing out playing cards and trying to find an infallible means of winning; a card by his side, pricked full of pinholes, showed that he was keeping tally of the runs.
The woman was four-and-thirty and appeared forty; she wore an old silk dress; her poverty was the more dreadful as she exhibited tokens of splendor; her hair was built up in a knot over a brass comb once gilded: and her hands were scrupulously cared for with the nails properly trimmed in an aristocratic style. The slippers on her feet, over openwork stockings, had been worked with gold and silver.
Her face might pass in candlelight for about thirty; but, without paint and powder it looked five years older than reality.
Its resemblance to Queen Marie Antoinette’s was still so marked that one tried to recall it in the dusty clouds thrown up by royal horses around the window of a royal coach.
The boy was five years of age; his hair curled like a cherub’s; his cheeks were round as an apple; he had his mother’s diabolical eyes, and the sensual mouth of his father – in short, the idleness and whims of the pair.
He wore a faded pearl velvet suit and while munching a hunk of cake sandwiched with preserves, he frayed out the ends of an old tricolored scarf inside a pearl gray felt hat.
The family was illuminated by a candle with a large “thief in the gutter,” stuck in a bottle for holder, which light fell on the man and left most of the room in darkness.
“Mamma,” the child broke the silence by saying, as he threw the end of the cake on the mattress which served as bed, “I am tired of that kind of cake – faugh! I want a stick of red barley sugar candy.”
“Dear little Toussaint,” said the woman. “Do you hear that, Beausire?”
As the gamester was absorbed in his calculations, she lifted her foot within snatch of her hand and taking off the slipper, cast it to his nose.
“What is the matter?” he demanded, with plain ill-humor.
“Toussaint wants some candy, being tired of cheap cake.”
“He shall have it to-morrow.”
“I want it to-day – this evening – right now!” yelled the innocent in a tearful voice which threatened stormy weather.
“Toussaint, my boy, I advise you to give us quiet or papa will take you in hand,” said the parent.
The boy yelled again but more from deviltry than from fear.
“You drunken sot, you just touch my darling, and I will attend to you,” said the mother, stretching out the white hand towards the bully which her care of the nails made to become a claw at need.
“Who the deuse wants to touch the imp? you know it is only my style of speaking, my dear Oliva, and that though I may dust your skirt now and then I have always respected the kid’s jacket. Tut, tut, come and embrace your poor Beausire who will be rich as a King in a week; come, my little Nicole.”
“When you are rich as a king, it will be another matter: but up to that time no fooling.”
“But I tell you that it is as safe as if I had a million. You might be kind for a little while. Go and get credit of the baker.”
“A man rolling in millions wants a baker to let him have a loaf on trust, ha, ha!”
“I want some red barely sugar,” howled the child.
“Come, you king with the millions, give some sugar sticks to your prince.”
Beausire started to put his hand to his fob but stopped half way.
“You know I gave you my last piece yesterday.”
“Then, if you have the money,” said the child to the woman whom Beausire called indifferently Nicole or Oliva, “give me a penny to buy candy.”
“There are two cents, you naughty boy, and mind you do not fall in sliding down the bannisters.”
“Thank you, dear mother,” said the boy, capering for joy and holding out his hand.
“Come here till I set your hat on and adjust your sash: it must not be said that Captain Beausire let his son race about the streets in disorder – though it is all the same to him, the heartless fellow! I should die of shame!”
At the risk of whatever the neighbors might say against the heir to the Beausire name, the boy would have dispensed with the hat and band, of which he recognized the use before the other urchins did the freshness and beauty. But as the arrangement of his dress was a condition of the gift, the young Hector had to yield to it.
He consoled himself by taunting his father with the coin by thrusting it up under his nose; absorbed in his figuring the parent merely smiled at the pretty freak.
Soon they heard his timid step, though quickened by gluttony, descending the stairs.
“Now then, Captain Beausire,” snapped the woman after a pause, “your wits must lift us out of this miserable position, or else I must have recourse to mine.”
She spoke with a toss of the head as much as to say: “A lady of my lovely face never dies of starvation, never fear!”
“Just what I am busy about, my little Nicole,” responded Beausire.
“By shuffling the cards?”
“Did I not tell you that I have found the infallible coup?”
“At it again, eh? Captain Beausire, I warn you that I am going to hunt up my old acquaintances and see if one of them cannot have you shut up in the madhouse. Dear, dear, if Lord Richelieu were not dead, if Cardinal Rohan were not ruined, if Lady Lamotte Valois were not in London dodging the sheriff’s officers – “
“What are you talking about?”
“I should find means and not be obliged to share the misery of an old swashbuckler like this one.”
With a queenly flirt of the hand Oliva alias Nicole Legay, disdainfully indicated the gambler.
“But I keep telling you that I shall be rich to-morrow,” he repeated, himself at any rate convinced.
“Show me the first gold piece of your million and I shall believe the rest.”
“You will see ten gold pieces this evening – the very sum promised me. You can have five to buy a silk dress and a velvet suit for the youngster: with the balance I will bring you the million I promised.”
“You unhappy fellow, you mean to gamble again?”
“But I tell you again that I have lit on an infallible sequence.”
“Own brother to the one with which you threw away the sixty thousand livres from the amount you stole at the Portuguese Ambassador’s?”
“Money got over the devil’s back goes under his belly,” replied Beausire sententiously. “I always did think that the way I got that cash brought bad luck.”
“Is this fresh lot coming from an inheritance? have you an uncle who has died in the Indies or America and left you the ten louis?”
“Nicole Legay,” rejoined Beausire with a lofty air, “these ten will be earned not only honestly but honorably, for a cause which interests me as well as the rest of the nobility of France.”
“So you are a nobleman, Friend Beausire?” jeered the lady.
“You may say so: we have it stated so in the birth entry on the register of St. Paul’s, and signed by your servitor, Jean Baptiste Toussaint de Beausire, on the day when I gave my name to our boy – “
“A handsome present that was,” gibed Nicole.
“And my estate,” added the so-called captain emphatically.
“If kind heaven does not send him something more solid,” interposed Nicole, shaking her head, “the poor little dear is sure to live on air and die in the poorhouse.”
“Really, Nicole, this is too much to endure – you are never contented.”
“Endure? good gracious, who wants you to endure?” exclaimed the reduced gentlewoman, breaking down the dam to her long-restrained ire: “Thank God, I am not worried about myself or my little pet, and this very night I shall go forth and seek my fortune.”
She rose and took three steps towards the door, but he strode in between them and opened his arms to bar the way.
“You naughty creature, did I not tell you that my fortune – “
“Go on,” said Nicole.
“Is coming home to-night: though the coup were a mistake – which is impossible, it would only be five louis lost.”
“There are times when a few pieces of money are a fortune, sir. But you would not know that, who have squandered a pile of gold as high as this house.”
“That proves my merit: I made it at the cards, and if I made some once I shall make more another time: besides, there is a special providence for – smart rogues.”
“That is a fine thing to rely on!”
“Do you not believe in Providence? are you an atheist, Nicole? of the school of Voltaire who denies all that sort of thing?”
“Beausire, no matter what I am, you are a fool.”
“Springing from the lower class, as you do, it is not surprising that you nourish such notions. I warn you that they do not appertain to my caste and political opinions.”
“You are a saucebox,” returned the beauty of the past.
“But I have faith. If anyone were to say, ‘Beausire, your son who has gone out to buy a sugar stick, will return with a lump of gold,’ I should answer: ‘Very likely, if it be the will of Allah!’ as a Turkish gentleman of my acquaintance says.”
“Beausire, you are an idiot,” said Nicole, but she had hardly spoken the words before young Toussaint’s voice was heard on the stairs calling:
“Oh, papa – mamma!”
“What is the matter?” cried Nicole, opening the door with true maternal solicitude. “Come, my darling, come.”
The voice drew near like the ventriloquist doing the trick of the man in the cellar.
“I should not be astonished if he had lit on the streak of good luck I feel promised,” said the gambler.
The boy rushed into the room, holding a sugarstick in his mouth, hugging under his left arm a bag of sugarplums, and showing in his right hand a gold coin which shone in the candle glimmer like the North Star.
“Goodness of heaven, what has occurred?” cried Nicole, slamming the door to.
She covered his gluey face with kisses – mothers never being disgusted, from their caresses seeming to purify everything.
“The matter is a genuine louis of gold, worth full value of twenty-four livres,” said Beausire, skillfully obtaining the piece.
“Where did you pick that up that I may go for the others, my duck?” he inquired.
“I never found it, papa: it was give to me,” replied the boy. “A kind gentleman give it me.”
Ready as Beausire to ask who this donor was, Nicole was prudent from experience on account of Captain Beausire’s jealousy. She confined herself to repeating:
“A gentleman?”
“Yes, mamma dear,” rejoined the child, crunching the barley-sugar between his teeth: “a gentleman who came into the grocer’s store where I was, and he says: ‘God bless me, but, master, do I not behold a young gentleman whose name is De Beausire, whom you have the honor of attending to at the present time?'”
Beausire perked up and Nicole shrugged her shoulders.
“What did the grocer say to that, eh?” demanded the card-sharper.
“Master Grocer says: ‘I don’t know whether he is a gentleman or not, but his name is Beausire,’ ‘Does he live by here?’ went on the gentleman. ‘Top-floor, next house on the left.’ ‘Give anything the young master wants to him – I will foot the bill,’ said the gentleman. Then he gave me the money saying: ‘There a louis for you, young sir: when you have eaten your candy, that will buy you more. He put the money in my hand; the grocer stuck this bag under my arm and I came away awfully glad. Oh, where is my money-piece?”
Not having seen Beausire’s disappearing trick, he began to look all round for the louis.
“You clumsy little blockhead, you have lost it,” said the captain.
“No, I never!” yelled the child.
The dispute would have become warm but for the interruption which came to put an end to it.
The door opened slowly and a bland voice made these words audible:
“How do you do, Mistress Nicole? good evening, Captain Beausire! How are you, little Toussaint?”
All turned: on the threshold was an elegantly attired man, smiling on the family group.
“Oh, here’s the gentleman who gave me the candy,” cried young Toussaint.
“Count Cagliostro,” exclaimed Beausire and the lady at the same time.
“That is a winning little boy, and I think you ought to be happy at being a parent, Captain Beausire,” said the intruder.
He advanced and with one scrutinizing glance saw that the couple were reduced to the last penny.
The child was the first to break the silence because he had nothing on his conscience.
“Oh, kind sir, I have lost the shining piece,” said he.
Nicole opened her mouth to state the case but she reflected that silence might lead to a repetition of the godsend and she would inherit it; her expectation was not erroneous.
“Lost your louis, have you, my poor boy?” said Cagliostro, “well, here are two; try not to lose them.”
Pulling out a purse of which the plumpness kindled Beausire’s greedy glances, he dropped two coins into Toussaint’s little sticky paw.
“Look, mamma,” said he, running to Nicole; “here’s one for you and one for me.”
While the child shared his windfall with his mother, the new-comer remarked the tenacity with which the former-soldier watched his purse and tried to estimate the contents before it was pocketted again. On seeing it disappear, he sighed.
“Still glum, captain?” said the visitor.
“And you, count, always rich?”
“Pooh! you are one of the finest philosophers I have ever known, as well at the present as in antiquity, and you are bound to know the axiom to which man does honor in all ages. ‘Riches are not contentment.’ I have known you to be rich, relatively.”
“That’s so: I have owned as much as a hundred thousand francs.”
“It is possible; only when I met you again, you had spent nearly forty thousand of it so as to have but sixty, but that is a round sum for a corporal in the army.”
“What is that to the sums you dispose of?” he sighed.
“I am only the banker, the trustee, Captain Beausire, and if I were obliged to settle up I daresay you could play St. Martin and I the beggar who would be glad to have half your cloak. But, my dear Beausire, do you not remember the circumstances of our last meeting? As I said, just now, you had sixty thousand left of the hundred thousand: were you happier than now?”
The ex-corporal heaved a retrospective sigh which might pass for a moan.
“Would you exchange your present position though you possessed nothing but one poor louis you ‘nicked’ from young Toussaint?”
“My lord!”
“Do not let us get warm, sir: we quarrelled once and you were obliged to go out and pick up your sword which I threw out of the window. You will remember?” went on the count, seeing that the man made no reply: “it is a good thing to have a memory. I ask you again would you change your actual position, though down to the solitary louis you ‘extracted’ from young Toussaint” – this time the allegation passed without protest – “for the precarious scrape from which I relieved you?”
“No, my lord, you are right – I should not change. At that epoch, alas! I was parted from my darling Nicole.”
“To say nothing of being hunted by the police, on account of your robbing the Portuguese Embassy. What the mischief has become of that case, a villainous one, as I remember it, Captain B.?”
“It has been dropped, my lord,” was the reply.
“So much the better: though I would not reckon on its not being picked up again. The police are awful for raking up past grievances, and the ruling powers might want to be on good terms with Portugal. However, that apart, in spite of the hard lines to which you are reduced, you are happy. If you had a thousand louis, your felicity would be complete, eh?”
Nicole’s eyes glittered and her partner’s flashed flames.
“Lord be good to us,” cried the latter: “with half I would buy a lot in the country and live a rural life on the rest like a country squire!”
“Like Cincinnatus!”
“While Nicole would educate the boy.”
“Like Cornelia! Death of my life, Captain Beausire! not only would this be exemplary but touching: do you hope to earn as much as that in the piece of business you have in hand?”
“What business?” queried the other, starting.
“That you are carrying on as sergeant of the Guards; for which you are to meet a man, this evening, under the Palais Royal arcades.”
“Oh, my lord,” moaned Beausire, turning pale as a corpse and wringing his hands. “Do not destroy me!”
“Why, you are going distracted now? Am I the Chief of Police to ruin you?”
“There, I told you, you are getting into a pretty pickle,” exclaimed Nicole. “I know nothing about it, my lord, but whenever he hides any game from me, I know it is a bad one.”
“But you are wrong, my dear lady, for this is an excellent speculation.”
“Is it not?” cried the gambler. “The count, as a nobleman, understands that all the nobility are in this scheme – “
“For it to succeed. It must be allowed though, that the people are interested in its failure. If you will believe me, captain – you understand that a friend is giving advice – you will take no part in it for the peers or the people. Better act for yourself.”
“Certainly, for yourself,” said Nicole. “Blest if you have not toiled long enough for others: so that it is high time you looked after Number One.”
“You hear the lady, who speaks like a born orator. Bear this in mind, Friend Beausire, all spec’s have a good and a bad side, one for the winners, one for the losers: no affair however good, can benefit everybody; the whole trouble is to hit on the right side.”
“And you do not think I am there, eh?”
“Not at all; I would even add, if you are willful – for you know I dabble in telling fortunes – that you will not only risk your honor, and the fortune you seek – but your life. You will most likely be hanged!”
“They do not hang noblemen,” objected Beausire, wiping the perspiration streaming from his brow.
“That is so: but to avoid the gallows-tree and have your head cut off, you would have to prove your family-tree; it would take so long that the court would lose patience, and string you up for the time being – leaving your widow to demand compensation if you turned out to have deserved decapitation. Still you may say that it does not matter, as it is the crime that casts shame and not the scaffold, to quote a poet. Still again, I dare say you are not so attached to your opinions that you would lay down your life for them; I understand this. Deuse take us, but we have only one life, as another poet says, not so great as the other, but as truthful.”
“My lord,” faltered the ex-guardsman, “I have remarked in my too brief acquaintance with your lordship, that you have a way of speaking of some things which would make the hair of a more timid man than me bristle on his head.”
“Hang me if that is my intention,” responded Cagliostro; “Besides you are not a timid man.”
“No: yet there are circumstances,” began Beausire.
“I understand; such as when one has the jail for theft behind one and the gallows for high treason before one – for I suppose they give that name to the crime of kidnapping the King.”
“My lord,” cried Beausire, terrified.
“Wretch, is it on kidnapping that you build your fortune?” demanded Oliva.
“Oh, he was not wrong to dwell in golden dreams, my dear lady; only, as I have already said, each affair has a dark side and a bright one and Beausire has the misfortune to take the dark one; all he has to do is to shift.”
“If there is time, what must I do?” asked the bully.
“Suppose one thing,” said the gentleman; “that your conspiracy fails. Suppose that the accomplices of the masked man and the one in the brown cloak are arrested; we may suppose anything in these times – suppose they are doomed to death! Suppose – for Augeard and Bezenval have been acquitted, so that anything unlikely may come round nowadays – suppose that you are one of these accomplices; you have the halter round your neck, when – say what they like – a man always shows a little of the white feather about then – “
“Do have done, my lord! I entreat you, for I seem to feel the rope throttling me!”
“That is not astonishing as I am supposing it is round your neck! Suppose, then, that they say to you: ‘Poor old Beausire, this is your own fault. Not only might you have dodged this Old Bony who clutches you in his claws, but gain a thousand louis to buy the pretty cottage under the green trees where you long to live with ever-lovely Oliva and merry little Toussaint, with the balance of what was partly spent for the purchase of your homestead. You might live, as you said, like a squire, in high boots in the winter and easy shoes the rest of the year; while, instead of this delicious lookout, you have the Execution-place, planted with two or three one or two-armed trees, of which the highest holds out its ugly branch unto you. Faugh! my poor Captain Beausire, what a hideous prospect!'”
“But how am I to elude it – how make the thousand to ensure my peace and that of dear Nicole and little Toussaint?”
“Your good angel would say: ‘Why not apply to the Count of Cagliostro, a rich nobleman who is in town for his pleasure and who is weary of nothing to do. Go to him and tell him – “
“But I do not know where he lives! I did not even know he is in town; I did not know he was still alive!” protested Beausire.
“He lives ever. It is because you would not know these facts that he comes to you, my dear Beausire, so that you will have no excuse. You have merely to say to him: ‘Count, I know how fond you are of hearing the news. I have some fresh for you. The King’s brother is conspiring with Marquis Favras. I speak from full knowledge as I am the right-hand man of the marquis. The aim of the plot is to take the King away to Peronne. If your lordship likes to be amused, I will tell him step by step how the moves are played.’ Thereupon the count, who is a generous lord, would reply: ‘If you will really do this, Captain Beausire, as all laborers are worthy of their hire, I put aside twenty-four thousand livres for a charitable act; but I will balk myself in this whim, and you shall have them on the day when you come and tell me either that the King shall be taken off or Marquis Favras captured – in the same way as you are given these ten louis – not as hand-money or as an advance, or a loan, but as a pure gift.”
Like an actor rehearsing with the “properties,” Cagliostro pulled out the weighty purse, stuck in finger and thumb and with a dexterity bearing witness to his experience in such actions, whipped out just ten pieces, neither more nor less, which Beausire – we must do him justice – thrust out his hand with alacrity to receive.
“Excuse me, captain,” said the other, gently fencing off the hand, “we are only playing at Supposes.”
“Yes, but through suppositions one arrives at the fact,” responded the cardplayer, whose eyes glowed like burning coals.
“Have we reached this point?”
Beausire hesitated; let us hasten to say that it was not honor, fidelity to plighted word, or a pricked conscience which caused the wavering. Did our readers know Beausire, they would not want this denial. It was the simple fear that the count would not keep his word.
“I see what you are passing through,” said the tempter.
“Ay, my lord, I shrink from betraying the trust a gentleman puts in me,” replied the adventurer. “It is very hard,” he seemed to say as he raised his eyes heavenward.
“Nay, it is not that, and this is another proof of the old saw that ‘No man knows himself',” said the count. “You are afraid that I will not pay you the sum stated. The objection is quite natural; but I shall give security.”
“My lord certainly need not.”
“Personal security, Madam Legay.”
“Oh, if the count promises, it is as good as done,” said the lady.
“You see, sir, what one gains by scrupulously keeping one’s promises. One day when the lady was in the same quandary as yourself, I mean the police were hunting after her, I offered her an asylum in my residence. The lady hesitated, fearing that I was no Joseph – unless so christened. I gave her my word to respect her, and this is true, eh?”
“I swear it, on my little Toussaint,” said Oliva-Nicole.
“So you believe that I will pay the sum mentioned on the day when the King shall have been abducted or Marquis Favras arrested, to say nothing of my serving the running knot strangling him a while ago. For this affair, at all events, there shall be no halter or gibbet, for I cannot bind myself any farther. You understand: The man who is born to be – ahem!”
“My lord, it is as if the courts had awarded us the money,” said the woman.
“Well, my beauty,” said Cagliostro, putting the ten gold pieces on the table in a row, “just imbue the captain with this belief of yours.”
He waved his hand for the gambler to confer with his partner. Their parley lasted only five minutes, but it was most lively. Meanwhile Cagliostro looked at the cards and the one by which tally was kept.
“I know the run,” he observed, “it is that invented by John Law who floated the Mississippi Bubble. I lost a million on it.”
This remark seemed to give fresh activity to the dialogue of Beausire and his light-o-love. At last Beausire was decided; he came forward to offer his hand to Cagliostro like a horse-dealer about to strike a bargain. But the other frowned.
“Captain, between gentlemen the parole suffices. Give me yours.”
“On the faith of Beausire, it shall be done.”
“That is enough for me,” said the other, drawing out a diamond-studded watch on which was a portrait of Frederick the Great. “It is now a quarter to nine. At nine precisely you are expected under the Royale Place arcades, near Sully House. Take these ten pieces, pocket them, put on your coat and buckle on your sword – and do not keep them waiting.”
“Where am I to see your lordship next?” inquired Beausire, obeying the instructions, without asking reiteration.
“In St. Jean’s Cemetery, if you please. When we have such deadly matters to discuss the company of the dead is better than the living. Come when you are free; the first to arrive waits for the other. I have now to chat with the lady.”
The captain stood on one foot.
“Be easy; I did not make bold when she was a single woman; I have the more reason to respect her since she is a mother of a family. Be off, captain.”
Beausire threw a glance at his wife, by courtesy, at all events, tenderly hugged little Toussaint, saluted the patron with respect mixed with disquiet, and left the house just as Notre Dame clock bell was striking the three-quarters after eight.
