A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others Part 10

The croupier looked at me fixedly, shrugged his shoulders, laughed between his teeth, a little, hissing laugh that sounded like escaping steam, and said slowly:--

"No; of a man."

Then, noticing my increasing interest, "Monsieur would know something of madame?"

He held up his hand, and began crooking one finger after another as he recounted her history. These bent keys, it seemed, unlocked secrets as well.

"Le voila! the drama of Madame la Baronne! The play opens when she is first a novice in the convent of Saint Ursula, devoted to good works and the church. Next you find her a grand dame and rich, the wife of Baron Alphonse de Frontignac, first secretary of legation at Vienna. Then a mother with one child,--a boy, now six or seven years old, who is hardly ever out of her arms." He stopped, toyed for a moment with his match-safe, slipped it into his pocket, and said carelessly, "So much for Act I."

Then, after a pause during which he traced again little diagrams in the gravel, he said suddenly:--

"Does this really interest you, monsieur?"

"Unquestionably."

"You know her, then?" This with a glance of suspicion as keen as it was unexpected by me.

"Never saw her in my life before," I answered frankly, "and never shall again. I leave for Paris to-day, and sail from Havre on Sat.u.r.day."

He drew in the point of his cane, looked me all over with one of those comprehensive sweeps of the eye, as if he would read my inmost thought, and then, with an expression of confidence born doubtless of my evident sincerity, continued:--

"In the next act Frontignac gets mixed up in some banking scandals,--he would, like a fool, play roulette--baccarat was always his strong game,--disappears from Vienna, is arrested at the frontier, escapes, and is found the next morning under a brush-heap with a bullet through his head. This ends the search. Two years later--this is now Act III.--Madame la Baronne, without a sou to her name, is hard at work in the hospitals of Metz. The child is pensioned out near by.

"Now comes the grand romance. An officer attached to the 13th Cuira.s.siers--a regiment with not men enough left after Metz to muster a company--is picked up for dead, with one arm torn off, and a sabre-slash over his head, and brought to her ward. She nurses him back to life, inch by inch, and in six months he joins his regiment. Now please follow the plot. It is quite interesting. Is it not easy to see what will happen?

Tender and beautiful, young and brave! Vive le bel amour! It is the old story, but it is also une affaire de coeur--la grande pa.s.sion. In a few months they are married, and he takes her to his home in Rouen. There he listens to her entreaties, and resigns his commission.

"This was five years ago. To-day he is a broken-down man, starving on his pension; a poor devil about the streets, instead of a general commanding a department; and all for love of her. Some, of course, said it was the sabre-cut; some that he could no longer hold his command, he was so badly slashed. But it is as I tell you. You can see him here any day, sitting under the trees, playing with the child, or along the lake front, leaning on her arm."

Here the croupier rose from the bench, looked critically over his case of cigarettes, selected one carefully, and began b.u.t.toning his coat as if to go.

By this time I had determined to know the end. I felt that he had told me the truth as far as he had gone; but I felt, also, that he had stopped at the most critical point of her career. I saw, too, that he was familiar with its details.

"Go on, please. Here, try a cigar." My interest in my heroine had even made me courteous. My aversion to him, too, was wearing off. Perhaps, after all, croupiers were no worse than other people. "Now, one thing more. Why was she in your gambling-house?"

He lighted the cigar, touched his hat with his forefinger, and again seated himself.

"Well, then, monsieur, as you will. I always trust you Americans. When you lose, you pay; when you win, you keep your mouths shut. Besides,"--this was spoken more to himself,--"you have never seen him, and never will. Le voila. One night,--this only a year ago, remember,--in one of the gardens at Baden, a hand touched the baroness's shoulder.

"It was _Frontignac's_.

"The body under the brush-heap had been that of another man dressed in Frontignac's clothes. The bullet-hole in his head was made by a ball from Frontignac's pistol. Since then he had been hiding in exile.

"He threatened exposure. She pleaded for her boy and her crippled husband.

She could, of course, have handed him over to the nearest gendarme; but that meant arrest, and arrest meant exposure. At their home in Vienna, let me tell you, baccarat had been played nightly as a pastime for their guests. So great was her luck that 'As lucky as the Baronne Frontignac'

was a byword. Frontignac's price was this: she must take his fifty louis and play that stake at the Casino that night; when she brought him ten thousand francs he would vanish.

"That night at Baden--I was dealing, and know--she won twelve thousand francs in as many minutes. Here her slavery began. It will continue until Frontignac is discovered and captured; then he will put a second bullet into his own head. When I saw her enter my room I knew he had turned up again. As she staggered out, one of my men shadowed her. I was right; Frontignac was skulking in the garden."

All my disgust for the croupier returned in an instant. He was still the same bloodless spider of the night before. I could hardly keep my hands off him.

"And you permit this, and let this woman suffer these tortures, her life made miserable by this scoundrel, when a word, even a look, from you would send him out of the country and"--

"Softly, monsieur, softly. Why blame me? What business is it of mine. Do I love the cripple? Have I robbed the bank and murdered my double? This is not my game; it is Frontignac's. Would you have me kick over his chess board?"

JONATHAN

He was so ugly,--outside, I mean: long and lank, flat-chested, shrunken, round-shouldered, stooping when he walked; body like a plank, arms and legs like split rails, feet immense, hands like paddles, head set on a neck scrawny as a picked chicken's, hair badly put on and in patches, some about his head, some around his jaws, some under his chin in a half moon,--a good deal on the back of his hands and on his chest. Nature had hewn him in the rough and had left him with every axe mark showing.

He wore big shoes tied with deer hide strings and nondescript breeches that wrinkled along his knotted legs like old gun covers. These were patched and repatched with various hues and textures,--parts of another pair,--bits of a coat and fragments of tailor's cuttings. Sewed in their seat was half of a cobbler's ap.r.o.n,--for greater safety in sliding over ledges and logs, he would tell you. Next came a leather belt polished with use, and then a woolen s.h.i.+rt,--any kind of a s.h.i.+rt,--cross-barred or striped,--whatever the store had cheapest, and over that a waistcoat with a cotton back and some kind of a front, looking like a state map, it had so many colored patches. There was never any coat,--none that I remember.

When he wore a coat he was another kind of a Jonathan,--a store-dealing Jonathan, or a church-going Jonathan, or a town-meeting Jonathan,--not the "go-a-fis.h.i.+n'," or "bee-huntin'," or "deer-stalkin'" Jonathan whom I knew.

There was a wide straw hat, too, that crowned his head and canted with the wind and flopped about his neck, and would have sailed away down many a mountain brook but for a faithful leather strap that lay buried in the half-moon whiskers and held on for dear life. And from under the rim of this thatch, and half hidden in the matted ma.s.ses of badly adjusted hair, was a thin, peaked nose, bridged by a pair of big spectacles, and somewhere below these, again, a pitfall of a mouth covered with twigs of hair and an underbrush of beard, while deep-set in the whole tangle, like still pools reflecting the blue and white of the sweet heavens above, lay his eyes,--eyes that won you, kindly, twinkling, merry, trustful, and trusting eyes. Beneath these pools of light, way down below, way down where his heart beat warm, lived Jonathan.

I know a fruit in Mexico, delicious in flavor, called Timburici, covered by a skin as rough and hairy as a cocoanut; and a flower that bristles with thorns before it blooms into waxen beauty; and there are agates encrusted with clay and pearls that lie hidden in oysters. All these things, somehow, remind me of Jonathan.

His cabin was the last bit of s.h.i.+ngle and brick chimney on that side of the Franconia Notch. There were others, farther on in the forest, with bark slants for shelter, and forked sticks for swinging kettles; but civilization ended with Jonathan's store-stove and the square of oil-cloth that covered his sitting-room floor. Upstairs, under the rafters, there was a guest-chamber smelling of pine boards and drying herbs, and sheltering a bed gridironed with bed-cord and softened by a thin layer of feathers encased in a ticking and covered with a cotton quilt. This bed always made a deep impression upon me mentally and bodily. Mentally, because I always slept so soundly in it whenever I visited Jonathan,--even with the rain pattering on the roof and the wind soughing through the big pine-trees; and bodily, because--well, because of the cords. Beside this bed was a chair for my candle, and on the floor a small square plank, laid loosely over the stovepipe hole which, in winter, held the pipe.

In summer mornings Jonathan made an alarm clock of this plank, flopping it about with the end of a fis.h.i.+ng-rod poked up from below, never stopping until he saw my sleepy face peering down into his own. There was no bureau, only a nail or so in the scantling, and no washstand, of course; the tin basin at the well outside was better.

Then there was an old wife that lived in the cabin,--an old wife made of sole leather, with yellow-white hair and a thin, pinched face and a body all angles,--chest, arms, everywhere,--outlined through her straight up and down calico dress. When she spoke, however, you stopped to listen,--it was like a wood sound, low and far away,--soft as a bird call. People living alone in the forests often have these voices.

Last there was a dog,--a mean, sniveling, stump-tailed dog, of no particular breed or kidney. One of those dogs whose ancestry went to the bad many generations before he was born. A dog part fox,--he got all his slyness here; and part wolf, this made him ravenous; and part bull-terrier, this made him ill-tempered; and all the rest poodle, that made him too lazy to move.

The wife knew this dog, and hung the bacon on a high nail out of his reach, and covered with a big dish the pies cooling on the bench; and the neighbors down the road knew him and chased him out of their dairy-cellars when he nosed into the milk-pans and cheese-pots; and even the little children found out what a coward he was, and sent him howling home to his hole under the porch, where he grumbled and pouted all day like a spoiled child that had been half whipped. Everybody knew him, and everybody despised him for a low-down, thieving, lazy cur,--everybody except Jonathan. Jonathan loved him,--loved his weepy, smeary eyes, and his rough, black hair, and his fat round body, short stumpy legs, and shorter stumpy tail,--especially the tail. Everything else that the dog lacked could be traced back to the peccadillos of his ancestors,--Jonathan was responsible for the tail.

"Ketched in a b'ar-trap I hed sot up back in thet green timber on Loon Pond Maountin' six year ago last fall, when he wuz a pup," he would say, holding the dog in his lap,--his favorite seat. "I swan, ef it warn't too bad! Thinks I, when I sot it, I'll tell the leetle cuss whar it wuz; then--I must hev forgot it. It warn't a week afore he wuz runnin' a rabbet and run right into it. Wall, sir, them iron jaws took thet tail er his'n off julluk a knife. He's allus been kinder sore ag'in me sence, and I dunno but he's right, fur it wuz mighty keerless in me. Wall, sir, he come yowlin' hum, and when he see me he did look saour,--no use talkin',--jest ez ef he wuz a-sayin', 'Yer think you're paowerful cunnin' with yer b'ar-traps, don't ye? Jest see what it's done to my tail. It's kinder sp'ilt me for a dog.' All my fault, warn't it, George?" patting his head.

(Only Jonathan would call a dog George.)

Here the dog would look up out of one eye as he spoke,--he hadn't forgotten the bear-trap, and never intended to let Jonathan forget it either. Then Jonathan would admire ruefully the end of the stump, stroking the dog all the while with his big, hairy, paddle-like hands, George rooting his head under the flap of the party-colored waistcoat.

One night, I remember, we had waited supper,--the wife and I,--we were obliged to wait, the trout being in Jonathan's creel,--when Jonathan walked in, looking tired and worried.

"Hez George come home, Marthy?" he asked, resting his long bamboo rod against the porch rail and handing the creel of trout to the wife. "No?

Wall, I'm beat ef thet ain't cur'us. Guess I got ter look him up." And he disappeared hurriedly into the darkening forest, his anxious, whistling call growing fainter and fainter as he was lost in its depths. Marthy was not uneasy,--not about the dog; it was the supper that troubled her. She knew Jonathan's ways, and she knew George. This was a favorite trick of the dog's,--this of losing Jonathan.

The trout were about burnt to a crisp and the corn-bread stone cold when Jonathan came trudging back, George in his arms,--a limp, soggy, half-dead dog, apparently. Marthy said nothing. It was an old story. Half the time Jonathan carried him home.

"Supper's ready," she said quietly, and we went in.

George slid out of Jonathan's arms, smelt about for a soft plank, and fell in a heap on the porch, his chin on his paws, his mean little eyes watching lazily,--speaking to n.o.body, noticing n.o.body, sulking all to himself. There he stayed until he caught a whiff of the fragrant, pungent odor of fried trout. Then he c.o.c.ked one eye and lifted an ear. He must not carry things too far. Next, I heard a single thump of his six-inch tail.

George was beginning to get pleased; he always did when there were things to eat.

All this time Jonathan, tired out, sat in his big splint chair at the supper-table. He had been thras.h.i.+ng the brook since daylight,--over his knees sometimes. I could still see the high-water mark on his patched trousers. Another whiff of the frying-pan, and George got up. He dared not poke his nose into Marthy's lap,--there were too many chunks of wood within easy reach of her hand. So he sidled up to Jonathan, rubbing his nose against his big knees, whining hungrily, looking up into his face.