Dr. Sevier Part 6

No downward inflections from her.

"Well,"--the wife looked at the husband; he nodded,--"well, we'll take it."

"Yes?" responded the landlady; "well?" leaning against a bedpost and smiling with infantile diffidence, "you dunt want no ref'ence?"

"No," said John, generously, "oh, no; we can trust each other that far, eh?"

"Oh, yes?" replied the sweet creature; then suddenly changing countenance, as though she remembered something. "But daz de troub'--de room not goin' be vacate for t'ree mont'."

She stretched forth her open palms and smiled, with one arm still around the bedpost.

"Why," exclaimed Mrs. Richling, the very statue of astonishment, "you said just now we could have it at once!"

"Dis room? _Oh_, no; nod _dis_ room."

"I don't see how I could have misunderstood you."

The landlady lifted her shoulders, smiled, and clasped her hands across each other under her throat. Then throwing them apart she said brightly:--

"No, I say at Madame La Rose. Me, my room is all fill'. At Madame La Rose, I say, I think you be pritty well. I'm shoe you be verrie well at Madame La Rose. I'm sorry. But you kin paz yondeh--'tiz juz ad the cawneh? And I am shoe I think you be pritty well at Madame La Rose."

She kept up the repet.i.tion, though Mrs. Richling, incensed, had turned her back, and Richling was saying good-day.

"She did say the room was vacant!" exclaimed the little wife, as they reached the sidewalk. But the next moment there came a quick twinkle from her eye, and, waving her husband to go on without her, she said, "You kin paz yondeh; at Madame La Rose I am shoe you be pritty sick."

Thereupon she took his arm,--making everybody stare and smile to see a lady and gentleman arm in arm by daylight,--and they went merrily on their way.

The last place they stopped at was in Royal street. The entrance was bad. It was narrow even for those two. The walls were stained by dampness, and the smell of a totally undrained soil came up through the floor. The stairs ascended a few steps, came too near a low ceiling, and shot forward into cavernous gloom to find a second rising place farther on. But the rooms, when reached, were a tolerably pleasant disappointment, and the proprietress a person of rea.s.suring amiability.

She bestirred herself in an obliging way that was the most charming thing yet encountered. She gratified the young people every moment afresh with her readiness to understand or guess their English queries and remarks, hung her head archly when she had to explain away little objections, delivered her No sirs with gravity and her Yes sirs with bright eagerness, shook her head slowly with each negative announcement, and accompanied her affirmations with a gracious bow and a smile full of rice powder.

She rendered everything so agreeable, indeed, that it almost seemed impolite to inquire narrowly into matters, and when the question of price had to come up it was really difficult to bring it forward, and Richling quite lost sight of the economic rules to which he had silently acceded in the _Rue Du Maine_.

"And you will carpet the floor?" he asked, hovering off of the main issue.

"Put coppit? Ah! cettainlee!" she replied, with a lovely bow and a wave of the hand toward Mrs. Richling, whom she had already given the same a.s.surance.

"Yes," responded the little wife, with a captivated smile, and nodded to her husband.

"We want to get the decentest thing that is cheap," he said, as the three stood close together in the middle of the room.

The landlady flushed.

"No, no, John," said the wife, quickly, "don't you know what we said?"

Then, turning to the proprietress, she hurried to add, "We want the cheapest thing that is decent."

But the landlady had not waited for the correction.

"_Dis_sent! You want somesin _dis_sent!" She moved a step backward on the floor, scoured and smeared with brick-dust, her ire rising visibly at every heart-throb, and pointing her outward-turned open hand energetically downward, added:--

"'Tis yeh!" She breathed hard. "_Mais_, no; you don't _want_ somesin dissent. No!" She leaned forward interrogatively: "You want somesin tchip?" She threw both elbows to the one side, cast her spread hands off in the same direction, drew the cheek on that side down into the collar-bone, raised her eyebrows, and pushed her upper lip with her lower, scornfully.

At that moment her ear caught the words of the wife's apologetic amendment. They gave her fresh wrath and new opportunity. For her new foe was a woman, and a woman trying to speak in defence of the husband against whose arm she clung.

"Ah-h-h!" Her chin went up; her eyes shot lightning; she folded her arms fiercely, and drew herself to her best height; and, as Richling's eyes shot back in rising indignation, cried:--

"Ziss pless? 'Tis not ze pless! Zis pless--is diss'nt pless! I am diss'nt woman, me! Fo w'at you come in yeh?"

"My dear madam! My husband"--

"Da.s.s you' uzban'?" pointing at him.

"Yes!" cried the two Richlings at once.

The woman folded her arms again, turned half-aside, and, lifting her eyes to the ceiling, simply remarked, with an ecstatic smile:--

"Humph!" and left the pair, red with exasperation, to find the street again through the darkening cave of the stair-way.

It was still early the next morning, when Richling entered his wife's apartment with an air of brisk occupation. She was pinning her brooch at the bureau gla.s.s.

"Mary," he exclaimed, "put something on and come see what I've found! The queerest, most romantic old thing in the city; the most comfortable--and the cheapest! Here, is this the wardrobe key? To save time I'll get your bonnet."

"No, no, no!" cried the laughing wife, confronting him with sparkling eyes, and throwing herself before the wardrobe; "I can't let you touch my bonnet!"

There is a limit, it seems, even to a wife's subserviency.

However, in a very short time afterward, by the feminine measure, they were out in the street, and people were again smiling at the pretty pair to see her arm in his, and she actually _keeping step_. 'Twas very funny.

As they went John described his discovery: A pair of huge, solid green gates immediately on the sidewalk, in the dull facade of a tall, red brick building with old carved vinework on its window and door frames.

Hinges a yard long on the gates; over the gates a semi-circular grating of iron bars an inch in diameter; in one of these gates a wicket, and on the wicket a heavy, battered, highly burnished bra.s.s knocker. A short-legged, big-bodied, and very black slave to usher one through the wicket into a large, wide, paved corridor, where from the middle joist overhead hung a great iron lantern. Big double doors at the far end, standing open, flanked with diamond-paned side-lights of colored gla.s.s, and with an arch at the same, fan-shaped, above. Beyond these doors and showing through them, a flagged court, bordered all around by a narrow, raised parterre under pomegranate and fruit-laden orange, and over-towered by vine-covered and latticed walls, from whose ragged eaves vagabond weeds laughed down upon the flowers of the parterre below, robbed of late and early suns. Stairs old fas.h.i.+oned, broad; rooms, their choice of two; one looking down into the court, the other into the street; furniture faded, capacious; ceilings high; windows, each opening upon its own separate small balcony, where, instead of bal.u.s.trades, was graceful iron scroll-work, centered by some long-dead owner's monogram two feet in length; and on the balcony next the division wall, close to another on the adjoining property, a quarter circle of iron-work set like a blind-bridle, and armed with hideous p.r.o.ngs for house-breakers to get impaled on.

"Why, in there," said Richling, softly, as they hurried in, "we'll be hid from the whole world, and the whole world from us."

The wife's answer was only the upward glance of her blue eyes into his, and a faint smile.

The place was all it had been described to be, and more,--except in one particular.

"And my husband tells me"--The owner of said husband stood beside him, one foot a little in advance of the other, her folded parasol hanging down the front of her skirt from her gloved hands, her eyes just returning to the landlady's from an excursion around the ceiling, and her whole appearance as fresh as the pink flowers that nestled between her brow and the rim of its precious covering. She smiled as she began her speech, but not enough to spoil what she honestly believed to be a very business-like air and manner. John had quietly dropped out of the negotiations, and she felt herself put upon her mettle as his agent.

"And my husband tells me the price of this front room is ten dollars a month."

"Munse?"

The respondent was a very white, corpulent woman, who constantly panted for breath, and was everywhere sinking down into chairs, with her limp, unfortified skirt dropping between her knees, and her hands pressed on them exhaustedly.

"Munse?" She turned from husband to wife, and back again, a glance of alarmed inquiry.

Mary tried her hand at French.