Bohemian Days: Three American Tales. George Alfred Townsend
her red, swollen hands, and proposes now and then that he shall visit the wardrobe to look after his new hat; but Pisgah only passes his arm about her, and drains his absinthe, and sometimes, as if to reassure the company, shouts wildly at the wrong places: "'At's so, boys!" "Hoorah for you!" "Ay! capital, gen'l'men, capital!" And his partner, conscious that something has happened, laughs to her waist, and leans forward, quite overcome, as if she beheld something mirthful over her washboard.
The place was now quite dreamy with tobacco-smoke; Freckle was riotously sick at the window, and Andy Plade, who had been borrowing small sums from everybody who would lend, struck the table with a corkscrew, and called for order.
"Drire rup!" cried Mr. Freckle, looking very attentively, but seeing nothing.
"I have the honor to state, gentlemen of the Colony, that we have with us to-night an eloquent representative of our country—one whose business energy and enterprise have been useful both to his own fortunes and to the South—one who is a friend of yours, and more than a dear friend to me. We came from the same old Palmetto State, the first and the last ditch of our revolution. I give you a toast, gentlemen, to which Mr. Hugenot will respond:
"'The Mother Country and the Colony—good luck to both!'"
"Hoorah for you!" cried Pisgah, looking the wrong way.
The glasses rattled an instant, amid iterations of "Hear! hear!" and Mr. Hugenot, rising, as it appeared from a bandbox, carefully surveyed himself in a mirror opposite, and touched his nose with a small nosegay.
"I feel, my friends, rather as your host than your guest to-night—"
("It isn't yesternight"—from Freckle—"it's to-morroer night.")
"For I, gentlemen, stand upon my hereditary, if not my native heath; and you are, at most, Frenchmen by adoption. That ancestry whose deeds will live when the present poor representative of its name is departed drew from this martial land its blood and genius."
(Loud cries of "Gammon" from Freckle, and disapprobation from Simp.)
"From the past to the present, my friends, is a short transition. I found you in Paris a month ago, poor and dejected. You are here to-night, with that luxury which was your heritage. And how has it been restored?"
("'At's so!" earnestly, from Pisgah.)
"By hard, grovelling work? Never! No contact with vulgar clay has soiled these aristocratic hands. The cavalier cannot be a mudsill! You are not like the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin. You have not toiled, gentlemen, but you have spun!"
(Great awakening, doubt, and bewilderment.)
"You have spun the roulette ball, and you have won!"
(Ferocious and unparalleled cheering.)
"And it has occurred to me, my friends, that ou-ah cause, in the present tremendous struggle, has been well symbolized by these, its foreign representatives. Calamity came upon the South, as upon you. It had indebtedness, as you have had. Shall I say that you, like the South, repudiated? No! that is a slander of our adversaries. But the parallel holds good in that we found ourselves abandoned by the world. Nations abroad gave us no sympathy; our neighbors at home laughed at our affliction. They would wrest from us that bulwark of our liberties, the African."
"Capital, gentlemen, capital!" from Pisgah.
"They demanded that we should toil for ourselves. Did we do so? Never! We appealed to the chances, as you have done; we would fight the Yankee, but we would not work. You would fight the bank, but you would not slave; and as you have won at Wisbaden, so have we, in a thousand glorious contests. Fill, then, gentlemen, to the toast which your chairman has announced:
"'The Mother Country and the Colony—good luck to both!'"
The applause which ensued was of such a nature that the proprietors below endeavored to hasten the conclusion of the dinner by sending up the bill. Pisgah and the blanchisseuse were embracing in a spirited way, and Simp was holding back Freckle, who—persuaded that Hugenot's remarks were in some way derogatory to himself—wished to toss down his gauntlet.
"The next toast, gentlemen of the Colony," said Andy Plade, "is to be dispatched immediately by the waiter, whom you see upon my right hand, to the office of the telegraph; thence to Mr. Risque at Wisbaden:
"'The Southern exiles; doubtless the most immethodical men alive; but the results prove they have the best system: no Risque, no winnings.'
"You will see, gentlemen," continued Mr. Plade, when the enthusiasm had subsided, "that I place the toast in this envelope. It will go in two minutes to Mr. Auburn Risque!"
The waiter started for the door; it was dashed open in his face, and splattered, dirty, and travel-worn, Auburn Risque himself stood like an apparition on the threshold.
"Perdition!" thundered Plade, staggered and pale-faced; "you were not to break the bank till to-morrow."
The Colony, sober or inebriate, clustered about the door, and held to each other that they might hear the explanation aright.
Auburn Risque straightened himself and glared upon all the besiegers, till his pock-marked face grew white as leprosy, and every spot in his secretive eye faded out in the glitter of his defiance.
"To-morrow?" he said, in a voice hard, passionless, inflectionless; "how could one break the bank to-morrow, when all his money was gone yesterday?"
"Gone!" repeated the Colony, in a breath rather than a voice, and reeling as if a galvanic current had passed through the circle—"Gone!"
"Every sou," said Risque, sinking into a chair. "The bank gave me one hundred francs to return to Paris; I risked twenty-five of it, hopeful of better luck, and lost again. Then I had not enough money to get home, and for forty kilometres of the way I have driven a charette. See!" he cried, throwing open his coat; "I sold my vest at Compiègne last night, for a morsel of supper."
"But you had won seven thousand one hundred francs!"
"I won more—more than eighteen thousand francs; but, enlarging my stakes with my capital, one hour brought me down to a sou."
"The 'system' was a swindle," hissed Mr. Simp, looking up through red eyes which throbbed like pulses. "What right had you to plunder us upon your speculation?"
"The 'system' could not fail," answered the gamester, at bay; "it must have been my manner of play. I think that, upon one run of luck, I gave up my method."
"We do not know," cried Simp, tossing his hands wildly; "we may not accuse, we may not be enraged—we are nothing now but profligates without means, and beggars without hope!"
They sobbed together, bitterly and brokenly, till Freckle, not entirely sober, shouted, "Good God, is it that gammon-head, Hugenot, who has ruined us? Fetch him out from his ancestry; let me see him, I say! Where is the man who took my three hundred francs!"
"I wish," said Simp, in a suicidal way, "that I were lying by Lees in the fosse commune. But I will not slave; the world owes every man a living!"
"Ay!" echoed the rest, as desperately, but less resolutely.
"This noise," said one of the waiters politely, "cannot be continued. It is at any rate time for the salon to be closed. We will thank you to pay your bill, and settle your quarrels in the garden."
"Here is the account," interpolated Andy Plade, "dinner for thirteen persons, nineteen hundred and fifty francs.
"Manes of my ancestry!" shrieked Hugenot, overturning the blanchisseuse in his way, and rushing from the house.
"We have not the money!" cried the whole Colony in chorus; and, as if by concert, the company in mass, male and female, cleared the threshold and disappeared, headed by Andy Plade, who kept all the subscriptions in his pockets, and terminated by Freckle, who was caught at the base of the stairs and held for security.