Kitabı oku: «The Shoes of Fortune», sayfa 10
When it was over I was to be fated for the pleasantest of surprises!
There came to me a sous-officer of the grenadiers.
In French he asked if I was Monsieur Greig. I said as best I could in the same tongue that I was that unhappy person at his service. Then, said he, “Come with me.” He led me into a hall about a hundred feet long that had beds or mattresses for about three hundred people. The room was empty, as those who occupied it were, he said, at Mass. Its open windows in front looked into another courtyard from that in which we had been exercising, while the windows at the rear looked into a garden where already lilac was in bloom and daffodillies endowed the soil of a few mounds with the colour of the gold. On the other side of the court first named there was a huge building. “Galbanon,” said my guide, pointing to it, and then made me understand that the same was worse by far than the Bastille, and at the moment full of Marquises, Counts, Jesuits, and other clergymen, many of them in irons for abusing or writing against the Marchioness de Pompadour.
I listened respectfully and waited Monsieur’s explanation. It was manifest I had not been brought into this hall for the good of my education, and naturally I concluded the name of Galbanon, that I had heard already from Buhot, with its villainous reputation, was meant to terrify me into a submission to what had been proposed. The moment after a hearty meal – even of soup maigre– was not, however, the happiest of times to work upon a Greig’s feelings of fear or apprehension, and so I waited, very dour within upon my resolution though outwardly in the most complacent spirit.
The hall was empty when we entered as I have said, but we had not been many minutes in it when the tramp of men returning to it might be heard, and this hurried my friend the officer to his real business.
He whipped a letter from his pocket and put it in my hand with a sign to compel secrecy on my part. It may be readily believed I was quick enough to conceal the missive. He had no cause to complain of the face I turned upon another officer who came up to us, for ‘twas a visage of clownish vacuity.
The duty of the second officer, it appeared, was to take me to a new cell that had been in preparation for me, and when I got there it was with satisfaction I discovered it more than tolerable, with a sufficiency of air and space, a good light from the quadrangle, a few books, paper, and a writing standish.
When the door had been shut upon me, I turned to open my letter and found there was in fact a couple of them – a few lines from her ladyship in Dunkerque expressing her continued interest in my welfare and adventures, and another from the Swiss through whom the first had come. He was still – said the honest Bernard – at my service, having eluded the vigilance of Buhot, who doubtless thought a lackey scarce worth his hunting, and he was still in a position to post my letters, thanks to the goodwill of the sous-officer who was a relative. Furthermore, he was in hopes that Miss Walkinshaw, who was on terms of intimacy with the great world and something of an intriguante, would speedily take steps to secure my freedom. “Be tranquil, dear Monsieur!” concluded the brave fellow, and I was so exceedingly comforted and inspired by these matters that I straightway sat down to the continuation of my journal for Miss Walkinshaw’s behoof. I had scarce dipped the pen, when my cell door opened and gave entrance to the man who was the cause of my incarceration.
The door shut and locked behind him; it was Father Hamilton!
It was indeed Father Hamilton, by all appearance none the worse in body for his violent escapade, so weighty with the most fatal possibilities for himself, for he advanced to me almost gaily, his hand extended and his face red and smiling.
“Scotland! to my heart!” cries he in the French, and throws his arms about me before I could resist, and kisses me on the cheeks after the amusing fashion of his nation. “La! la! la! Paul,” he cried, “I’d have wanted three breakfasts sooner than miss this meeting with my good secretary lad that is the lovablest rogue never dipped a pen in his master’s service. Might have been dead for all I knew, and run through by a brutal rapier, victim of mine own innocence. But here’s my Paul, pardieu! I would as soon have my croque-mort now as that jolly dog his uncle, that never waked till midnight or slept till the dull, uninteresting noon in the years when we went roving. What! Paul! Paul Greig! my croque-mort! my Don Dolorous! – oh, Lord, my child, I am the most miserable of wretches!”
And there he let me go, and threw himself upon a chair, and gave his vast body to a convulsion of arid sobs. The man was in hysterics, compounding smiles and sobs a score to the minute, but at the end ‘twas the natural man won the bout, else he had taken a stroke. I stood by him in perplexity of opinions whether to laugh or storm, whether to give myself to the righteous horror a good man ought to feel in the presence of a murtherer, or shrug my shoulders tolerantly at the imbecile.
“There!” said he, recovering his natural manner, “I have made a mortal enemy of Andrew Greig’s nephew. Yes, yes, master, glower at Misery, fat Misery – and the devil take it! – old Misery, without a penny in ‘ts pocket, and its next trip upon wheels a trip to the block to nuzzle at the dirty end in damp sawdust a nose that has appreciated the bouquet of the rarest wines. Paul, my boy, has’t a pinch of snuff? A brutal bird out there sings a stave of the Chanson de la Veuve so like the confounded thing that I heard my own foolish old head drop into the basket, and there! I swear to you the smell of the sawdust is in my nostrils now.”
I handed him my box; ‘twas a mull my Uncle Andy gave me before he died, made of the horn of a young bullock, with a blazon of the house on the silver lid. He took it eagerly and drenched himself with the contents.
“Oh, la! la!” he cried; “I give thanks. My head was like yeast. I wish it were Christmas last, and a man called Hamilton was back in Dixmunde parish. But there! that is enough, I have made my bed and I must lie on’t, with a blight on all militant jesuitry! When last I had this box in my fingers they were as steady as Mont St. Michel, now look – they are trembling like aspen, n’est-ce pas? And all that’s different is that I have eaten one or two better dinners and cracked a few pipkins of better wine, and – and – well-nigh killed a police officer. Did’st ever hear of one Hamilton, M. Greig? ‘Twas a cheery old fellow in Dixmunde whose name was the same as mine, and had a garden and bee-hives, and I am on the rack for my sins.”
He might be on the rack – and, indeed, I daresay the man was in a passion of feelings so that he knew not what he was havering about, but what impressed me most of all about him was that he seemed to have some momentary gleams of satisfaction in his situation.
“I have every ground of complaint against you, sir,” I said.
“What!” he interrupted. “Would’st plague an old man with complaints when M. de Paris is tapping him on the shoulder to come away and smell the sawdust of his own coffin? Oh, ‘tis not in this wise thy uncle had done, but no matter!”
“I have no wish, Father Hamilton, to revile you for what you have brought me,” I hastened to tell him. “That is far from my thoughts, though now that you put me in mind of it, there is some ground for my blaming you if blaming was in my intention. But I shall blame you for this, that you are a priest of the Church and a Frenchman, and yet did draw a murderous hand upon a prince of your own country.”
This took him somewhat aback. He helped himself to another voluminous pinch of my snuff to give him time for a rejoinder and then – “Regicide, M. Greig, is sometimes to be defended when – ”
“Regicide!” I cried, losing all patience, “give us the plain English of it, Father Hamilton, and call it murder. To call it by a Latin name makes it none the more respectable a crime against the courts of heaven where the curse of Babel has an end. But for an accident, or the cunning of others, you had a corpse upon your conscience this day, and your name had been abhorred throughout the whole of Europe.”
He put his shoulders up till his dew-laps fell in massive folds.
“‘Fore God!” said he, “here’s a treatise in black letter from Andrew Greig’s nephew. It comes indifferently well, I assure thee, from Andrew’s nephew. Those who live in glass houses, cher ami, – those who live in glass houses – ”
He tapped me upon the breast with his fat finger and paused, with a significant look upon his countenance.
“Oh, ye can out with it, Father Hamilton!” I cried, certain I knew his meaning.
“Those who live in glass houses,” said he, “should have some pity for a poor old devil out in the weather without a shelter of any sort.”
“You were about to taunt me with my own unhappy affair,” I said, little relishing his consideration.
“Was I, M. Greig?” he said softly. “Faith! a glass residence seems to breed an ungenerous disposition! If thou can’st credit me I know nothing of thine affair beyond what I may have suspected from a Greig travelling hurriedly and in red shoes. I make you my compliments, Monsieur, of your morality that must be horror-struck at my foolish play with a pistol, yet thinks me capable of a retort so vile as that you indicate. My dear lad, I but spoke of what we have spoken of together before in our happy chariot in the woods of Somme – thine uncle’s fate, and all I expected was, that remembering the same, thou his nephew would’st have enough tolerance for an old fool to leave his punishment in the hands of the constitute authority. Voilà! I wish to heaven they had given me another cell, after all, that I might have imagined thy pity for one that did thee no harm, or at least meant to do none, which is the main thing with all our acts else Purgatory’s more crowded than I fancy.”
He went wearily over to the fire and spread his trembling hands to the blaze; I looked after him perplexed in my mind, but not without an overpowering pity.
“I have come, like thyself, doubtless,” he said after a little, “over vile roads in a common cart, and lay awake last night in a dungeon – a pretty conclusion to my excursion! And yet I am vastly more happy to-day than I was this time yesterday morning.”
“But then you were free,” I said, “you had all you need wish for – money, a conveyance, servants, leisure – ”
“And M’ Croque-mort’s company,” he added with a poor smile. “True, true! But the thing was then to do,” and he shuddered. “Now my part is done, ‘twas by God’s grace a failure, and I could sing for content like one of the little birds we heard the other day in Somme.”
He could not but see my bewilderment in my face.
“You wonder at that,” said he, relinquishing the Roman manner as he always did when most in earnest. “Does Monsieur fancy a poor old priest can take to the ancient art of assassination with an easy mind? Nom de nom! I could skip to the block like a ballet-dancer if ‘twere either that or live the past two days over again and fifty years after. I have none of the right stomach for murder; that’s flat! ‘tis a business that keeps you awake too much at night, and disturbs the gastric essence; calls, too, for a confounded agility that must be lacking in a person of my handsome and plenteous bulk. I had rather go fishing any day in the week than imbrue. When Buhot entered the room where I waited for a less worthy man and I fired honestly for my money and missed, I could have died of sheer rapture. Instead I threw myself upon his breast and embraced him.”
“He said none of that to me.”
“Like enough not, but ‘tis true none the less, though he may keep so favourable a fact out of his records. A good soul enough, Buhot! We knew him, your uncle and I, in the old days when I was thinner and played a good game of chess at three in the morning. Fancy Ned Hamilton cutting short the glorious career of old Buhot! I’d sooner pick a pocket.”
“Or kill a prince!”
“Felicitations on your wit, M. Greig! Heaven help the elderly when the new wit is toward! N’importe! Perhaps ‘twere better to kill some princes than to pick a pocket. Is it not better, or less wicked, let us say, to take the life of a man villainously abusing it than the purse of a poor wretch making the most of his scanty livres?”
And then the priest set out upon his defence. It is too long here to reproduce in his own words, even if I recalled them, and too specious in its terms for the patience of the honest world of our time. With his hands behind his back he marched up and down the room for the space of a half-hour at the least, recounting all that led to his crime. The tale was like a wild romance, but yet, as we know now, true in every particular. He was of the Society of Jesus, had lived a stormy youth, and fallen in later years into a disrepute in his own parish, and there the heads of his Society discovered him a very likely tool for their purposes. They had only half convinced him that the death of Charles Edward was for the glory of God and the good of the Church when they sent him marching with a pistol and £500 in bills of exchange and letters of credit upon a chase that covered a great part of three or four countries, and ended at Lisbon, when a German Jesuit in the secret gave him ten crusadoes to bring him home with his task unaccomplished.
“I have what amounts almost to a genius for losing the opportunities of which I do not desire to avail myself,” said Father Hamilton with a whimsical smile.
And then he had lain in disgrace with the Jesuits for a number of years until it became manifest (as he confessed with shame) that his experience of leisure, wealth, and travel had enough corrupted him to make the prospect of a second adventure of a similar kind pleasing. At that time Charles, lost to the sight of Europe, and only discovered at brief and tantalising intervals by the Jesuit agents, scarce slept two nights in the same town, but went from country to country incognito, so that ‘twas no trivial task Father Hamilton undertook to run him to earth.
“The difficulty of it – indeed the small likelihood there was of my ever seeing him,” he said, “was what mainly induced me to accept the office, though in truth it was compelled. I was doing very well at Dunkerque,” he went on, “and very happy if I had never heard more of prince or priesthood, when Father Fleuriau sent me a hurried intimation that my victim was due at Versailles on Easter and ordered my instant departure there.”
The name of Fleuriau recalled me to my senses. “Stop, stop, Father Hamilton!” I cried, “I must hear no more.”
“What!” said he, bitterly, “is’t too good a young gentleman to listen to the confession of a happy murderer that has failed at his trade?”
“I have no feeling left but pity,” said I, almost like to weep at this, “but you have been put into this cell along with me for a purpose.”
“And what might that be, M. Greig?” he asked, looking round about him, and seeing for the first time, I swear, the sort of place he was in. “Faith! it is comfort, at any rate; I scarce noticed that, in my pleasure at seeing Paul Greig again.”
“You must not tell me any more of your Jesuit plot, nor name any of those involved in the same, for Buhot has been at me to cock an ear to everything you may say in that direction, and betray you and your friends. It is for that he has put us together into this cell.”
“Pardieu! am not I betrayed enough already?” cried the priest, throwing up his hands. “I’ll never deny my guilt.”
“Yes,” I said, “but they want the names of your fellow conspirators, and Buhot says they never expect them directly from you.”
“He does, does he?” said the priest, smiling. “Faith, M. Buhot has a good memory for his friend’s characteristics. No, M. Greig, if they put this comfortable carcase to the rack itself. And was that all thy concern? Well, as I was saying – let us speak low lest some one be listening – this Father Fleuriau-”
Again I stopped him.
“You put me into a hard position, Father Hamilton,” I said. “My freedom – my life, perhaps – depends on whether I can tell them your secret or not, and here you throw it in my face.”
“And why not?” he asked, simply. “I merely wish to show myself largely the creature of circumstances, and so secure a decent Scot’s most favourable opinion of me before the end.”
“But I might be tempted to betray you.”
The old eagle looked again out at his eyes. He gently slapped my cheek with a curious touch of fondness almost womanly, and gave a low, contented laugh.
“Farceur!” he said. “As if I did not know my Don Dolorous, my merry Andrew’s nephew!” His confidence hugely moved me, and, lest he should think I feared to trust myself with his secrets, I listened to the remainder of his story, which I shall not here set down, as it bears but slightly on my own narrative, and may even yet be revealed only at cost of great distress among good families, not only on the Continent but in London itself.
When he had done, he thanked me for listening so attentively to a matter that was so much on his mind that it gave him relief to share it with some one. “And not only for that, M. Greig,” said he, “are my thanks due, for you saved the life that might have been the prince’s instead of my old gossip, Buhot’s. To take the bullet out of my pistol was the device your uncle himself would have followed in the like circumstances.”
“But I did not do that!” I protested.
He looked incredulous.
“Buhot said as much,” said he; “he let it out unwittingly that I had had my claws clipped by my own household.”
“Then assuredly not by me, Father Hamilton.”
“So!” said he, half incredulous, and a look of speculation came upon his countenance.
CHAPTER XXIV
PHILOSOPHY IN A FELON’S CELL
It seemed for a while as if we were fated to lie forgotten in Bicêtre till the crack of doom; not that we were many days there when all was done, but that in our natural hourly expectation at first of being called forth for trial the hours passed so sluggishly that Time seemed finally to sleep, and a week, to our fancy – to mine at all events – seemed a month at the most modest computation.
I should have lost my reason but for the company of the priest, who, for considerations best known to others and to me monstrously inadequate, was permitted all the time to share my cell. In his singular society there was a recreation that kept me from too feverishly brooding on my wrongs, and his character every day presented fresh features of interest and admiration. He had become quite cheerful again, and as content in the confine of his cell as he had been when the glass coach was jolting over the early stages of what had been intended for a gay procession round the courts of Europe. Once more he affected the Roman manner that was due to his devotion to Shakespeare and L’Estrange’s Seneca, and “Clarissa Harlowe,” a knowledge of which, next to the Scriptures, he counted the first essentials for a polite education. I protest he grew fatter every day, and for ease his corpulence was at last saved the restraint of buttons, which was an indolent indulgence so much to his liking that of itself it would have reconciled him to spend the remainder of his time in prison.
“Tiens! Paul,” he would say, “here’s an old fool has blundered through the greater part of his life without guessing till now how easy a thing content is to come by. Why, ‘tis no more than a loose waistcoat and a chemise unbuttoned at the neck. I dared not be happy thus in Dixmunde, where the folks were plaguily particular that their priest should be point-devise, as if mortal man had time to tend his soul and keep a constant eye on the lace of his fall.”
And he would stretch himself – a very mountain of sloth – in his chair.
With me ‘twas different. Even in a gaol I felt sure a day begun untidily was a day ill-done by. If I had no engagements with the fastidious fashionable world I had engagements with myself; moreover, I shared my father’s sentiment, that a good day’s darg of work with any thinking in it was never done in a pair of slippers down at the heel. Thus I was as peijink (as we say) in Bicêtre as I would have been at large in the genteel world.
“Not,” he would admit, “but that I love to see thee in a decent habit, and so constant plucking at thy hose, for I have been young myself, and had some right foppish follies, too. But now, my good man Dandiprat, my petit-maître, I am old – oh, so old! – and know so much of wisdom, and have seen such a confusion of matters, that I count comfort the greatest of blessings. The devil fly away with buttons and laces! say I, that have been parish priest of Dixmunde – and happily have not killed a man nor harmed a flea, though like enough to get killed myself.”
The weather was genial, yet he sat constantly hugging the fire, and I at the window, which happily gave a prospect of the yard between our building and that of Galbanon. I would be looking out there, and perhaps pining for freedom, while he went prating on upon the scurviest philosophy surely ever man gave air to.
“Behold, my scrivener, how little man wants for happiness! My constant fear in Dixmunde was that I would become so useless for all but eating and sleeping, when I was old, that no one would guarantee me either; poverty took that place at my table the skull took among the Romans – the thought on’t kept me in a perpetual apprehension. Nom de chien! and this was what I feared – this, a hard lodging, coarse viands, and sour wine! What was the fellow’s name? – Demetrius, upon the taking of Megara, asked Monsieur Un-tel the Philosopher what he had lost. ‘Nothing at all,’ said he, ‘for I have all that I could call my own about me,’ and yet ‘twas no more than the skin he stood in. A cell in Bicêtre would have been paradise to such a gallant fellow. Oh, Paul, I fear thou may’st be ungrateful – I would be looking out there, and perhaps pining for freedom,” he went prating on, “to this good Buhot, who has given us such a fine lodging, and saved us the care of providing for ourselves.”
“‘Tis all very well, father,” I said, leaning on the sill of the window, and looking at a gang of prisoners being removed from one part of Galbanon to another – “‘tis all very well, but I mind a priest that thought jaunting round the country in a chariot the pinnacle of bliss. And that was no further gone than a fortnight ago.”
“Bah!” said he, and stretched his fat fingers to the fire; “he that cannot live happily anywhere will live happily nowhere at all. What avails travel, if Care waits like a hostler to unyoke the horses at every stage? I tell thee, my boy, I never know what a fine fellow is Father Hamilton till I have him by himself at a fireside; ‘tis by firesides all the wisest notions come to one.”
“I wish there came a better dinner than to-day’s,” said I, for we had agreed an hour ago that smoked soup was not very palatable.
“La! la! la! there goes Sir Gourmet!” cried his reverence. “Have I infected this poor Scot that ate naught but oats ere he saw France, with mine own fever for fine feeding from which, praise le bon Dieu! I have recovered? ‘Tis a brutal entertainment, and unworthy of man, to place his felicity in the service of his senses. I maintain that even smoked soup is pleasant enough on the palate of a man with an easy conscience, and a mind purged of vulgar cares.”
“And you can be happy here, Father Hamilton?”
I asked, astonished at such sentiments from a man before so ill to please.
He heaved like a mountain in travail, and brought forth a peal of laughter out of all keeping with our melancholy situation. “Happy!” said he, “I have never been happy for twenty years till Buhot clapped claw upon my wrist. Thou may’st have seen a sort of mask of happiness, a false face of jollity in Dunkerque parlours, and heard a well-simulated laughter now and then as we drank by wayside inns, but may I be called coxcomb if the miserable wretch who playacted then was half so light of heart as this that sits here at ease, and has only one regret – that he should have dragged Andrew Greig’s nephew into trouble with him. What man can be perfectly happy that runs the risk of disappointment – which is the case of every man that fears or hopes for anything? Here am I, too old for the flame of love or the ardour of ambition; all that knew me and understood me best and liked me most are dead long since. I have a state palace prepared for me free; a domestic in livery to serve my meals; parishioners do not vex me with their trifling little hackneyed sins, and my conclusion seems like to come some morning after an omelet and a glass of wine.”
I could not withhold a shudder.
“But to die that way, Father!” I said.
“C’est égal!” said he, and crossed himself. “We must all die somehow, and I had ever a dread of a stone. Come, come, M. Croque-mort, enough of thy confounded dolours! I’ll be hanged if thou did’st not steal these shoes, and art after all but an impersonator of a Greig. The lusty spirit thou call’st thine uncle would have used his teeth ere now to gnaw his way through the walls of Bicêtre, and here thou must stop to converse cursedly on death to the fatted ox that smells the blood of the abattoir – oh lad, give’s thy snuff-box, sawdust again!”
Thus by the hour went on the poor wretch, resigned most obviously to whatever was in store for him, not so much from a native courage, I fear, as from a plethora of flesh that smothered every instinct of self-preservation. As for me I kept up hope for three days that Buhot would surely come to test my constancy again, and when that seemed unlikely, when day after day brought the same routine, the same cell with Hamilton, the same brief exercise in the yard, the same vulgar struggle at the gamelle in the salle d’épreuve– I could have welcomed Galbanon itself as a change, even if it meant all the horror that had been associated with it by Buhot and my friend the sous-officer.
Galbanon! I hope it has long been levelled with the dust, and even then I know the ghosts of those there tortured in their lives will habitate the same in whirling eddies, for a constant cry for generations has gone up to heaven from that foul spot. It must have been a devilish ingenuity, an invention of all the impish courts below, that placed me at a window where Galbanon faced me every hour of the day or night, its horror all revealed. I have seen in the pool of Earn in autumn weather, when the river was in spate, dead leaves and broken branches borne down dizzily upon the water to toss madly in the linn at the foot of the fall; no less helpless, no less seared by sin and sorrow, or broken by the storms of circumstance, were the wretches that came in droves to Galbanon. The stream of crime or tyranny bore them down (some from very high places), cast them into this boiling pool, and there they eddied in a circle of degraded tasks from which it seemed the fate of many of them never to escape, though their luckier fellows went in twos or threes every other day in a cart to their doom appointed.
Be sure it was not pleasant each day for me to hear the hiss of the lash and the moans of the bastinadoed wretch, to see the blood spurt, and witness the anguish of the men who dragged enormous bilboes on their galled ankles.
At last I felt I could stand it no longer, and one day intimated to Father Hamilton that I was determined on an escape.
“Good lad!” he cried, his eye brightening. “The most sensible thing thou hast said in twenty-four hours. ‘Twill be a recreation for myself to help,” and he buttoned his waistcoat.
“We can surely devise some means of breaking out if – ”
“We!” he repeated, shaking his head. “No, no, Paul, thou hast too risky a task before thee to burden thyself with behemoth. Shalt escape by thyself and a blessing with thee, but as for Father Hamilton he knows when he is well-off, and he shall not stir a step out of Buhot’s charming and commodious inn until the bill is presented.”
In vain I protested that I should not dream of leaving him there while I took flight; he would listen to none of my reasoning, and for that day at least I abandoned the project.
Next day Buhot helped me to a different conclusion, for I was summoned before him.
“Well, Monsieur,” he said, “is it that we have here a more discerning young gentleman than I had the honour to meet last time?”
“Just the very same, M. Buhot,” said I bluntly. He chewed the stump of his pen and shrugged his shoulders.
“Come, come, M. Greig,” he went on, “this is a bêtise of the most ridiculous. We have given you every opportunity of convincing yourself whether this Hamilton is a good man or a bad one, whether he is the tool of others or himself a genius of mischief.”
“The tool of others, certainly, that much I am prepared to tell you, but that you know already. And certainly no genius of mischief himself; man! he has not got the energy to kick a dog.”
“And – and – ” said Buhot softly, fancying he had me in the key of revelation.
“And that’s all, M. Buhot,” said I, with a carriage he could not mistake.
He shrugged his shoulders again, wrote something in a book on the desk before him with great deliberation and then asked me how I liked my quarters in Bicêtre.
“Tolerably well,” I said. “I’ve been in better, but I might be in waur.”
He laughed a little at the Scotticism that seemed to recall something – perhaps a pleasantry of my uncle’s – to him, and then said he, “I’m sorry they cannot be yours very much longer, M. Greig. We calculated that a week or two of this priest’s company would have been enough to inspire a distaste and secure his confession, but apparently we were mistaken. You shall be taken to other quarters on Saturday.”
“I hope, M. Buhot,” said I, “they are to be no worse than those I occupy now.”
His face reddened a little at this – I felt always there was some vein of special kindness to me in this man’s nature – and he said hesitatingly, “Well, the truth is, ‘tis Galbanon.”
