Chapter I
Madame Schmid, round and red, with the spotless lappets of her washerwoman’s cap flapping angrily, was plainly in a rage; and the three loud whacks she gave at the garret door of 17 Rue Montignal caused two young gentlemen on the other side of the door to quake visibly. One of them, Fontaine, ran incontinently into a closet and hid, while Marsac, the other, after a ghastly pretence of a joke about Madame Schmid’s whacks sounding like the three given at the Comédie Française before the curtain goes up, stalked with dignity to a corridor door. But, Madame Schmid bouncing in suddenly, Marsac as suddenly whisked out of sight.
Madame Schmid was of that coarse, buxom beauty common enough in her class. She had one year been elected queen of the washer-women, in that picturesque festival peculiar to Paris, and it had been said that fear of her stout arm and robust tongue had some share in her election. But she had a good heart, along with her vile temper; and as she planted her basket viciously on the floor, and whipped out a tremendously long bill, her quick eye took in the poverty of the surroundings, and she was softened in spite of herself. However, as one whistles going through a graveyard, so Madame Schmid always stormed the more when her excellent heart prevented her from taking stronger measures.
The room was excessively shabby. A moth-eaten sofa, and a large but rickety table, covered with newspapers and the implements of the journalist’s trade, were the principal articles of furniture. The light of a gray day shone dully in at the curtainless windows. A number of pipes, together with a cracked mirror, ornamented the mantel, while scattered about the room were a violin and case, an easel, and painting materials.
Madame Schmid belonged to that large class of persons who believe that a man who engages in any form of art is necessarily a loafer. The sight of the painter’s tools, the violin, and especially the abundance of pens, ink, and paper, acted on her like a red rag on a bull, and gave her the excuse she wanted to raise a tempest. First, she exclaimed scornfully,—
“Painters!”
Next, more scornfully still,—
“Fiddlers!”
And last, with a concentration of contempt that would have made her fortune at any theatre in Paris,—
“Journalists!”
Then she began to bawl, in a voice like an auctioneer,—
“M’sieu Marsac! M’sieu Fontaine! Oh, I know you are somewhere about! This is an old dodge, running away when I come with my bill! You owe me, both of you, for seven weeks’ washing. Seven weeks have I rubbed and scrubbed for you, and I have not seen the colour of my money yet!”
Madame Schmid stopped for a moment to take breath, and then, noticing the door leading into the corridor, darted to it and began to tug vigorously at the knob. But Marsac, who was holding it on the other side, was Madame Schmid’s superior in muscle, though not in weight, and the door resisted successfully. She then marched over to the closet door; but Fontaine followed Marsac’s tactics, and Madame Schmid grew still redder in the face and shorter of breath, with no better luck than at the corridor door.
At that moment a very well-dressed little man entered the room, after an almost imperceptible knock, and, unrolling a bill about a yard long, began,—
“Gentlemen, I have a little bill here—” and then, raising his eyes, he said in a surprised voice, “Why, there aren’t any gentlemen here!”
“Not if gentlemen pay their bills, Monsieur Landais,” answered Madame Schmid, sarcastically, who recognised an old acquaintance in Monsieur Landais. Madame Schmid had had a good, obedient Alsatian husband, whom she had talked to death some years before, and Landais and the late lamented Schmid were from the same town.
Landais silently held out his bill, and Madame Schmid flourished hers in his face, with an air as if Landais owed the money instead of Marsac and Fontaine.
“Journalists are a bad lot, I can tell you,” rapidly began Madame Schmid, who liked to have the first as well as the last word, “and a lazy lot too. While you and I work for our living with our arms and our legs, Monsieur Marsac and that pretty boy Fontaine do nothing but sit in an easy-chair and write all day long. And they call that work!”
“I only wish I could sit in an easy-chair and amuse myself with a pen all day, instead of toiling over a cutting-board,” answered the tailor, ruefully.
“Painting and fiddling when they are not scribbling,—no wonder they can’t pay their wash-bills. I dare say they think washing is an elegant amusement. I’m sure I don’t know how I’ll ever get my money. Writing them letters is a sinful waste of paper and ink.”
“And calling to see them is a sinful waste of time. That Marsac always makes me laugh in spite of myself. The last time I saw him I put on a very determined air,” here little Landais assumed a fierce look, “and asked him why my bill had not been paid. He told me that he and Monsieur Fontaine threw all their bills into a basket, and every six months they drew one out at random and paid that bill,—and it so happened they had never drawn my bill! It was a wretched joke, but it made me laugh; and I assure you, the first thing I knew I was asking the fellow if he and his chum wanted anything in the tailoring line!”
“And he chucks me under the chin, and tells me I’m so young and handsome I’ll be getting married again; and then, like you, I turn fool and laugh, and pouf! goes my bill,” moaned Madame Schmid, wagging her head dolefully, while Landais shook his like a Chinese mandarin.
“Then,” said Landais, wearily, “what are we climbing up all these stairs for?”
“God knows,” answered Madame Schmid. “But I have no more time to waste on them, so I’ll leave my bill and go.”
“So will I,” said Landais; and they laid their bills on the rickety table and went out, Madame Schmid clacking angrily all the way downstairs.
The minute they disappeared, Fontaine slipped out of his closet, and locked the door after them. He was a handsome, fair-haired fellow of five-and-twenty, with the most winning air in the world; but it was plain at the first glance that, with all his grace and intelligence, he was a man to be led by his affections.
“I wish there was a drawbridge outside this door,” he muttered, and then began to rummage about the room. “I wonder where Marsac’s purse is,” he continued to himself. “Ah, here it is,—and only two francs five centimes in it; and the shoemaker wants three francs for half-soling Marsac’s shoes!” And then he began to call for Marsac, meanwhile going through the empty form of searching through his own pockets. In a moment Marsac entered the room.
It was easy enough to see who was the master mind there. Marsac was not so regularly handsome as Fontaine, but his dark bright eyes and captivating smile seemed to radiate brilliance all round him. After the first moment of seeing these two young men together, it was not necessary to explain their relations to each other. Fontaine could not look at Marsac without an almost feminine expression of fondness and tender reliance coming into his eyes; and at the bottom of his heart he thought Marsac the most brilliant, capable, and lovable of men. Marsac, on his part, could not look or speak to Fontaine without showing the affection of an elder for a younger brother.
They had been schoolmates, ten years before, at a provincial college. From the first moment of their meeting, they loved each other. Fontaine was of the best blood of the province; but he had neither father nor mother nor brother nor sister nor any near relative living. His was one of those hearts which must love something, and he could not help loving Marsac,—a tall, lithe boy, older than he, and quite able to fight Fontaine’s battles as well as his own. Marsac, like Fontaine, was fatherless and motherless. He was educated from a fund for the sons of poor gentlemen, which the recipient was expected to return when he was able. After taking all the honours in his classes, and being graduated with the highest distinction, Marsac went to Paris along with Fontaine, both to seek their fortunes in journalism. They soon got work, but they made precious little money. Marsac, inspired with but one idea, sent every franc he made back to the fund, and repaid the sum advanced in an astonishingly short time. But it was at the cost of getting into debt on all sides. Neither he nor his chum had that commercial knack, that intimate knowledge of the purchasing power of a franc, which comes naturally to young men whose lives have been spent in a large city. Marsac was of a buoyant temper, and constantly expected something to turn up which would relieve them of all their embarrassments. Meanwhile, confident of the honesty of his intentions, he met his debts, duns, and difficulties with an incomparable archness and good-humour.
When Fontaine asked him for a franc for the shoes, his reply was,—
“A franc! Do you think I have a complete counterfeiting apparatus, that I can produce such a sum as a franc at a moment’s notice?”
“Then,” said Fontaine, ruefully, who would willingly have given his only pair of shoes to Marsac would he accept them, “I don’t know what I am to do. The shoemaker said three francs or no shoes, and I have only two francs five centimes. You have already spent enough on them to have bought a new pair,—new vamps in December, new uppers in January, and now in February new soles.”
“Go along with you!” cried Marsac. “Tell the shoemaker I have a bad case of confluent small-pox, and I dare say he will be glad to let you have the shoes for nothing. But give me that paste-pot. Our friends Madame Schmid and Monsieur Landais have left us souvenirs which I can put to use.” And he began deftly cutting the bills, which were on stout paper, into square pieces to mend the screen with, which, like everything else in the room, had holes in it.
“I am afraid the small-pox story won’t be a—judicious subterfuge,” was Fontaine’s reply.
“What did you do with the eleven francs we had yesterday?”
“I bought four bottles of wine, a box of cigars, and two loaves of bread with it.”
“Why were you so extravagant about bread?” asked Marsac, very cheerfully working away at the old screen. “If you squander our substance on luxuries like bread, we sha’n’t have anything left for necessaries like wine and cigars. The fact is,” he continued, “when a man enters journalism, he ought to have an education suitable to the profession. Instead of going to the University, I should have been taught the shoemaking and tailoring trades. How often have I heard that no learning comes amiss in journalism! Now, if I had the most rudimentary knowledge of cobbling, I could have mended those shoes myself.”
“At all events,” said Fontaine, brushing his hat, “I am rather glad to be out of the way now; for this is the very day and hour that Madame Fleury always appears to ask for the rent.”
“There!” cried Marsac, for the first time showing impatience, “I have been trying for two weeks to forget what day the rent is due, and had just succeeded when you reminded me of it. I would rather see Joan of Arc coming at me full tilt on horseback, or Charlotte Corday with her dagger, than Madame Fleury with her bill.”
“I have heard it said that it is possible to live comfortably on a large capital of debts, but we have not found it so,” said Fontaine, still brushing his hat, which, however, not all the brushing in the world could benefit.
“But the debts must be on a respectable scale,” answered Marsac, “something like seventy or eighty thousand francs. I don’t believe, though, that everything we owe would mount up to ten thousand francs. I felt so humiliated the other day when one of the young fellows on the staff—a mere reporter, while I am an editorial writer—boasted of owing his tailor alone as much as we owe altogether. I could not help translating hundreds into thousands, and said I owed my tailor nearly seven thousand francs, when it is not quite seven hundred. But I saw that the youngster respected me more from that moment, and Maurepas, the editor-in-chief, asked me to breakfast the very next day. I was obliged to decline on account of these infernal shoes; but I said it was because I was sent for by the Minister of Public Instruction.”
“Marsac,” said Fontaine, after a pause, “how can you be so cheerful in the midst of our difficulties?”
“Have you not heard, my little man, that the laughing philosopher attained the goal of all wisdom, while the weeping philosopher stood whimpering at the starting-post? Does a long face pay a bill? Or a sour temper? Depend upon it, Fortune looks for the smiling faces; and so I try to keep mine ready to welcome her.”
Fontaine went out then, and Marsac, having finished the screen, took off his coat, and with a needle and thread began sewing awkwardly on it, whistling like a bird meanwhile. In the midst of it came a knock at the door,—not a whack like Madame Schmid’s, nor a tap like Landais’s, but a knock, delicate yet firm, polite but peremptory. Marsac turned pale. Nevertheless he hustled on his coat, and opened the door with his best air,—which was a very fine air, indeed,—and his landlady, Madame Fleury, entered.
Madame Fleury was a handsome woman of about five-and-thirty, with fine dark eyes, and a carriage full of grace and dignity; and, moreover, she exhibited a self-poise and self-possession which a prime minister might have envied. She was very simply dressed, as became the morning; but the simplicity was of the kind that costs. Marsac courteously placed a chair for her.
“I am glad to find you at home, Monsieur Marsac,” were Madame Fleury’s first words after the politest greetings had been exchanged. “I had not seen you go in or out for a day or two, and thought perhaps you were ill.”
“A trifle, a mere trifle,” answered Marsac, with much readiness; “a little dinner at a ministerial house,—those fellows give one such lots of champagne,—and I inherit gout, and it gave me a touch; so pray excuse my slippers. As soon as Fontaine returns, I shall put on my shoes and go for a little walk.” Then, seeing Madame Fleury’s handsome face assume its “business expression,” he hastened to add: “How wonderfully well you are looking! You are blooming like a rose.”
“Thank you,” answered Madame Fleury, calmly. “In a house like this, there are certain lodgers whom I am compelled to call on occasionally, in the way of business.”
“Do you know, Madame,” continued Marsac, who had not ceased to examine Madame Fleury’s features as if she were a beautiful portrait or a statue which he had never set eyes on before, “there is a picture in the Salon this year that might be taken for you? It is called ‘Springtime,’—a young girl standing under an almond-tree in bloom. The girl’s face—so fresh, so lovely—is simply yours.”
Madame Fleury’s discouraging reply to this was, “Business is business, Monsieur Marsac, and must be attended to.”
Marsac kept on as if he had not heard a word. “I can’t, for the life of me, recall the artist’s name; but I remarked aloud, ‘Madame Fleury must have sat for this charming face;’ and a very distinguished-looking man who stood next me said in English, ‘Then I would give a thousand pounds to know Madame Fleury!’”
“I wish you had accepted his offer,” responded Madame Fleury, in a tone that would have disconcerted a Talleyrand, “for never in my life would a thousand pounds or even a thousand francs be more acceptable.”
Marsac, however, not at all abashed, exclaimed enthusiastically: “Then, all you have to do is to offer to pose for a nymph or a goddess. Bouguereau and all those high-priced fellows will simply be tumbling over one another in their eagerness to paint you.”
“Monsieur Marsac,” said Madame Fleury, in a tone of velvet softness which Marsac perfectly understood and shuddered to hear, “I am talking business.”
“And I am talking art,” replied poor Marsac.
“If you will kindly recall the date,” continued Madame Fleury.
Marsac, taking up an almanac, began turning the leaves. “This is the 20th of February,” he mused. “Let me see—what happened on the 20th of February? Ah, I have it! It is your twenty-fifth birthday, and you have come to receive our felicitations.”
“Nonsense, Monsieur Marsac!” replied Madame Fleury, with the same tone of deadly sweetness. “It is the day your rent is due; and I have come to see if you are prepared to pay it, and also the arrears of two months you still owe.”
Marsac merely shook his head, and for several minutes there was unbroken silence in the room, each meanwhile closely attentive to the other. At last Madame Fleury spoke.
“It seems to me that two young men with your talents and character,—for I have found you both to have good characters, except for this rent business,—and of good families, should be able to make a better living out of journalism than you do.”
“Ah, Madame,” answered Marsac, sorrowfully, “modern journalism has but one essential,—it requires a man to be an accomplished, ready, and felicitous liar; and neither of us is that.”
“Then why don’t you—ahem!—try to acquire that one essential?”
“Transcendent liars, Madame Fleury, like poets, are born, not made. And then there is a great deal in being notorious. Fontaine and I have done everything short of felony, to bring ourselves before the public; but we have failed. We have tried to drown ourselves in the Seine,—with life-preservers on, of course; but the police found the life-preservers on us, and instead of making us favourably known, humph!—we were glad enough to hush up the affair. We have brought the most horrible charges against each other in print, but nobody appeared at all surprised at them; and the public, by its indifference, seemed to take it for granted that the worst was true. The only newspaper which took the trouble to investigate it sent a reporter here; and as ill-luck would have it, the fellow caught us waltzing in each other’s arms for joy because we had just got a dinner invitation,—and we had not had anything that could be called a dinner for three weeks. Our circumstances are indeed desperate. Yesterday we had some money, and Fontaine bought two loaves of bread. I reproached him for his extravagance in buying so much bread.”
With these words Marsac managed to cover dexterously a box of cigars on the table, which Madame Fleury had not noticed.
“That is, indeed, poverty,” said Madame Fleury, with some feeling; and Marsac, seeing she was a little touched, continued eagerly,—
“We have tried everything. I sent a play to a manager, and the only notice he has taken of it has been to write me that he didn’t believe it would draw. Of course it won’t draw, shut up in the manager’s strong box. I never expected it to draw until it was produced. I sent it under the name of Fontaine, as being more aristocratic than Marsac. Fontaine, you know, has graveyards full of noble ancestors, while I, like Napoleon, am the first of my family. Then I sent a picture, called ‘A Rough Sea,’ to the Salon, also under the name of Fontaine. One of the judges said the thing made the whole committee ill,—it was so realistic, I presume,—and yet they rejected it.”
Madame Fleury’s eyes softened, and with a glint of a “widow’s smile” upon her handsome mouth, she said gently, after a moment, “Have you—has either one of you—ever thought of—ahem!—marriage, as a way out of your troubles?”
“Often,” answered Marsac, promptly,—“that is, for Fontaine. He was to be the victim,—the Iphigenia, so to speak. As for myself, there are two things I dread,—death and marriage. I must die, but I need not marry. I have sworn I will never be taken alive.”
Madame Fleury blushed, smiled, and murmured, “More men marry than don’t. Most of them marry without a qualm.”
“True,” answered Marsac, gravely; “and there are men who will pick up a poisonous snake and dangle it in the air. But I am not one of them. I have no taste for dangling poisonous snakes. I am afraid of them.”
“And how stands Monsieur Fontaine on this subject?”
“He is brave to rashness. I believe him fully capable of marrying. In fact, Fontaine seems to have a penchant for Mademoiselle Claire Duval, daughter of Duval the rich old brewer.”
“There is a niece—Mademoiselle Delphine Duval—who has just gone to live with them,” said Madame Fleury, who liked to show her knowledge of the acquaintances of the two young men.
“I had not heard of that. The truth is, since we pawned our evening clothes we have not seen anything of the Duvals. However, as Fontaine could not marry Claire until he paid his debts, and he could not pay his debts until he married Claire, the matter seems to have settled itself.”
Madame Fleury assumed a striking attitude in her chair, and then began to speak, with an insinuating softness in every word and glance and motion: “You have told me much about you and your friend; now I will tell you something about myself, and it may result in—in—an arrangement mutually advantageous.” Her voice sank to a mere whisper. “As you know, I am a widow.”
“Certainly,” replied Marsac. “I knew it the very first moment I saw you: you had such a cheerful air.”
“I have every reason to look cheerful. The late Monsieur Fleury was nothing but a trouble to me, from the hour I married him until the day the news was brought me that his body had been found in the river.”
“Gracious powers!” cried Marsac, in astonishment; “was not the late Monsieur Fleury an angel?”
“No,” answered Madame Fleury; “and I don’t believe he is an angel now, either.”
“Strange, strange!” murmured Marsac. “A departed husband not an angel! This is a phenomenon. Allow me to make a note of it;” and taking out a note-book, he gravely made a memorandum.
“A husband, Monsieur Marsac, is very like a lobster salad. When it is good, it is very good, and when it is bad it is intolerable. Monsieur Fleury was very bad. At last he sank so low that he became janitor in a medical school. He was accused one day of stealing some valuable books and instruments, and soon after his body was found in the Seine. It is supposed he committed suicide, knowing himself to be guilty. I did not see the body, and tried to avoid all associations with the affair; but, do what I could, it became known that he had once been my husband. I find the name of a man so unpleasantly notorious very inconvenient to bear, and I should like to change it.”
Marsac, after listening intently to this, buried his ears in his hands and appeared to be thinking profoundly for some minutes. “I should think, Madame,” he said, after this pause of reflection, “that could be accomplished. The authorities on application will permit you to change your name.”
Something like contempt appeared in Madame Fleury’s dark eyes, and she responded coldly, “I should also like the protection which the name of some respectable man would give me.”
A pause, longer and more awkward, ensued. It seemed to Marsac as if he actually felt the temperature in the room falling ten degrees every second. For once, language failed him; and he heard himself saying, in a quavering voice and almost without his own volition,—
“Would that I were a respectable man!”
Madame Fleury turned her dark eyes on him and drew nearer. Her breathing quickened, and a faint pink rose in her smooth cheek, and she said in a laughing voice, which also trembled a little,—
“You are quite respectable enough for me.”
Proposals of marriage are always embarrassing, and none the less so when, as the Breton peasants say, “the haystack chases the cow.” Marsac felt himself suddenly grow hot, and as suddenly grow cold. He sat quite near Madame Fleury, her half-laughing and brightly burning eyes fixed on him. Every detail of her elegant and correct morning costume, her well-shod feet, her handsome figure, was abnormally present to him. But he found it impossible to raise his eyes to her face. The only clear idea in his mind was a frantic fury towards the women of the present day, who, he foresaw, would make these bad quarters of an hour, such as he was undergoing, common enough to men in the future.
As for Madame Fleury, Marsac’s embarrassment was not lost on her; and although a new woman, she was still a woman, and womanly pride impelled her to control the slight tremor of her nerves, and say in a voice, studiedly cold, “It is a mere matter of business and of convenience with me.”
This gave Marsac, as he thought, a loophole of escape, and he said hurriedly, “I, Madame, in my innocence, have regarded marriage as a matter of sentiment.”
Imagine his chagrin, though, when Madame Fleury, smiling and blushing like a girl, replied, “Well, Monsieur Marsac, if you will have it so—”
Marsac saw in a moment the pit he had dug for himself, but he preferred to play the part of a poltroon to stepping into it. He turned and fidgeted in his chair; he looked out of the window, down at the street, hoping to see Fontaine returning, and every moment the situation grew more appalling. Presently he managed to say,—
“Until he is forty, a man is too young to marry; and after he is forty, he is too old.”
Madame Fleury surveyed him all over, with a cool contempt which seemed to leave blisters on his body. Then a brilliant idea came to him. He glanced at Madame Fleury, and saw as well as felt the rage rising in her heart against him. He tried to speak calmly and naturally, but his words were jerked out of him with stammering and stuttering,—
“You are very, very g-g-good, Madame; and I feel more pleased—no, no, I mean honoured—than I can explain—express, that is. But you know how Fontaine and I have lived together since our boyhood. We have nobody but each other; we have shared everything as brothers. Now, d-d-do you think it quite fair that I should, like a pig, accept this dazzling offer without giving Fontaine a chance?”
It was blunderingly enough spoken, but it served. Marsac saw, in a moment, that Madame Fleury would much rather after that have killed him than married him; and when she spoke, her cold dignity made him feel like a mouse under an exhausted air-receiver.
“I don’t know but that you are right, after all, and Monsieur Fontaine is really the superior man, and consequently better suited to me.”
The door at that moment flew wide open, and Fontaine rushed in,—his coat a mass of mud and rags, and his trousers slit from the knee to the hip; and he did not have Marsac’s shoes. Without observing Madame Fleury, who sat a little to one side, he burst out,—
“It’s no good, Marsac; the shoemaker said three francs or no shoes.” Then seeing Madame Fleury, he stopped, overwhelmed with embarrassment. Not so the lady, who quietly remarked to Marsac,—
“This accounts for the story of the cabinet dinner, and the gout, and so on;” and she added, with an air of the finest sarcasm, “I see no earthly reason why you, Monsieur Marsac, should not succeed brilliantly in journalism.”
Marsac was quite disposed to let Fontaine take his part of the situation then, and said not a word; but Fontaine exclaimed,—
“I know what you have come for, Madame Fleury. It is the rent.”
“Then you show very superior intelligence to Monsieur Marsac, as I had the greatest difficulty in making him understand what I came for,” responded Madame Fleury.
“I am awfully sorry,” kept on Fontaine, “but we haven’t a sou except this,”—holding out two francs,—“and I had an accident on the way, and ruined my only coat and trousers, and Marsac has no shoes, and I don’t know what we shall do.” Fontaine stopped, half crying.
“I can suggest something,” said Madame Fleury, showing an amazing calmness. “Not to go over the same ground twice, I have determined to change my name and condition; and—” Here she paused for effect, and Marsac came unexpectedly to her assistance.
“Fontaine,” said he, solemnly, “I have been a true friend to you. As soon as Madame Fleury mentioned this, I offered her your hand.”
Fontaine looked at Marsac, supposing either he himself or his friend had gone crazy; but Marsac’s cool demeanour proved that he at least was sane. Fontaine, with his mouth open, but dumb with astonishment, gazed first at Marsac and then at Madame Fleury.
“He is speechless with happiness,” cried Marsac. “I knew he would be delighted. You see, marrying runs in Fontaine’s family. His father and mother were married, and his grandparents on both sides were married; and even his great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers were married. Isn’t that so, Fontaine?”
Fontaine, still dazed, mumbled, “I don’t know.”
“Fie, you bad man!” replied Marsac, laughing. “Pray, Madame Fleury, don’t believe that. I know what I am talking about, and I assure you that all these people in Fontaine’s family were married.”
Madame Fleury then rose majestically. “Gentlemen, this matter must be settled at once. You have your choice,—a marriage, or an eviction within twenty-four hours, and all the arrears of rent paid.”
Fontaine, who was gradually returning to his senses, said, “But, Madame, it is impossible. Marsac has no shoes; I have no clothes—”
“If you do not choose to accept my proposition, Monsieur Fontaine,” coolly interrupted Madame Fleury, “you will be put into the street within twenty-four hours; and when you reach the street, you will be arrested for non-payment of rent.”
“And if I go into the street without any coat or trousers, I shall certainly be arrested,” answered Fontaine, desperately.
Madame Fleury shook her head, as if the whole affair were nothing to her.
Marsac, advancing to Fontaine, whispered in his ear, “Promise her. Promising isn’t marrying, you know. You promise her.”
“No, you do it.”
“I can’t. She won’t have me. You do it. I have known several men who have escaped with their lives from widows.”
Fontaine, thus urged by Marsac, whom he had never resisted in his life, looked helplessly from his friend to his landlady, and from his landlady back to his friend. After all, promising was not marrying, and it was worth a good deal to get her out of the room.
Madame Fleury brought matters to a crisis by asking, smiling, “Which shall it be, gentlemen,—an engagement or an eviction?”
Fontaine could not bring himself to say the word, but he submitted silently when Marsac, taking his hand, led him to Madame Fleury, and placing their hands together said, with something dangerously near a wink,—
“Take the lovely hand held out to you. Quaff the cup of happiness held to your lips. Madame Fleury, you will exchange for your present name one of the most distinguished names among the great families of France,”—which was true enough as far as Fontaine’s name was concerned.
Madame Fleury, whose principle it was to get through quickly with an awkward business, asked Marsac to sit down and write out a little agreement, to be signed by Fontaine and herself. “And it might be as well,” she added, “to name the date of the fulfilment of this promise. Let me see,—this is the 20th of February.”
She paused and reflected. Marsac, who had seated himself at the table, reflected too; and then after a moment he said,—
“The 31st of April.”
“There is no 31st of April,” replied Madame Fleury.
“The first of April would seem appropriate,” kept on Marsac, very gravely.
“Don’t trouble yourself to be sarcastic, Monsieur Marsac,” replied Madame Fleury, with cutting emphasis. “It would do admirably if I were marrying you, but otherwise, not.”
“The twenty-ninth of February, then.”
“This is not leap year.”
“Oh, I thought it was.”
Madame Fleury did not condescend to notice this fling; and Marsac, writing very slowly, proceeded to draw up an informal agreement to marry, between Marie Fleury and Auguste Fontaine.
Fontaine had dropped limp upon a chair, and sat with his head buried in his arms, the picture of misery. But awkward and humiliating as it was, he had not the smallest doubt that Marsac, whom he thought capable of meeting any emergency, would eventually get him out of the scrape.
When Madame Fleury had signed the paper, Marsac called Fontaine, who remained motionless, without lifting his head.
“That’s his way of showing he is pleased,” explained Marsac in the most serious manner. “I told you he would be delighted, and I know at this moment he is revelling in rapture; only he has rather a singular manner of showing it.”
“He has, indeed,” said Madame Fleury; “but I am vain enough to think that it is merely the suddenness of the affair which has somewhat disconcerted him.”
Fontaine, almost dragged out of his chair by Marsac, sullenly signed the paper; and after taking possession of it, and recommending him to act in good faith with her, Madame Fleury departed, with the air of a person who has made a successful stroke of business.
As soon as she was gone, Fontaine with a loud groan threw himself on the sofa. Even Marsac began to be somewhat frightened at the turn of affairs. He thought it not unlikely that the prospect of marrying a handsome young man far above her in social position might be really in Madame Fleury’s mind. But he would not mention his fears to Fontaine; and as soon as Madame Fleury was safely out of hearing, Marsac contrived to raise a burst of rather hollow and hysterical laughter.
“To think she should imagine that she could trap us in any such way as that! Ha! ha!”
Fontaine’s reply, from the depths of the sofa, was something between a groan and a howl, and he moaned, “You know, Marsac, I love Claire Duval; and this devilish Madame Fleury has my written promise—”
“A bagatelle!” cried Marsac, still keeping up the pretence of laughter. “Do you suppose I would have let you get into such a trap if I could not have got you out?”
This gave some comfort to Fontaine, who had sublime faith in Marsac’s powers as well as his friendship. But in spite of all his efforts, Marsac pretty soon had to give up the hilarious view of the situation. Fontaine lay on the sofa, groaning, kicking, and occasionally sighing out the name of Claire Duval. Marsac looked out of the window at a prospect made up chiefly of chimney-pots and a fine small rain that began to fall, and for the first time realised their truly desperate situation. After half an hour of silence on his part, and complainings on Fontaine’s, a shadow of his old spirit came back to Marsac.
“If one of us only had a rich relation we could murder! But I don’t believe any two fellows in the world have so few near relations as we.”
Fontaine by this time was sitting up on the sofa, his head in his hands. Presently he said, with gloomy indifference,—
“I had an uncle, an American,—Uncle Maurice,—who has not been in France for twenty-five years; and the last we heard of him, he was living on fifteen cents a day in New York. Then we heard in a roundabout way that he was dead; but he had nothing to leave anybody.”
“Very likely,” sighed Marsac. “An American and his money are soon parted.”
The next moment, Fontaine believed that the last and greatest of misfortunes had befallen his friend; for Marsac, leaping up, began to charge about the room, shouting at the top of his lungs.
“Hurrah! Hurrah! Your Uncle Maurice has died, and has left you a fortune! Huzza! What a glorious idea! Huzza for Uncle Maurice!”
Fontaine, stunned at first, went up to Marsac, who was capering wildly about, and in a voice tremulous with apprehension, and himself deadly pale, said, “My dear, kind Marsac, be quiet, pray. You have taken our misfortunes too much to heart, and they have unbalanced you. Sit down awhile; I have some money,”—the poor lad had not a sou but the two francs,—“quite enough for several days.”
It was piteous to see his weak pretences. He rattled the two francs in his pocket and tried to smile. Marsac, seeing the dreadful thought in Fontaine’s mind, stopped his whooping, and seizing Fontaine in his arms, cried out,—
“You honest little simpleton! Of course Uncle Maurice hasn’t just died and left you a fortune; but let the world think so, and see if our fortunes are not made! How would a paragraph like this sound in the papers: ‘We are happy to announce that Monsieur Auguste Fontaine, the brilliant young journalist, has inherited a fortune of’—let me see, it’s as easy to give you two million francs as one million—‘from his lately deceased uncle, Monsieur Maurice Fontaine of New York, the celebrated’—wine-importer, I should say; that’s a good decent business. I can work the paragraph up more; tell about your Uncle Maurice going against the traditions of his family in entering trade, and all that sort of thing. Trust me to get it up!”
Fontaine was so delighted at finding Marsac was not crazy after all, that he could do nothing but hug him and say, “Marsac, I was so frightened when you began to talk so; and you may kill all my uncles and aunts, if you can find any to kill. But will—will this dazzling story be believed about Uncle What’s-his-name?”
“My dear fellow,” replied Marsac, in high good-humour, “don’t you know there is a large section of the human race that goes about actually begging to be humbugged? Did you ever know a wildly improbable story started yet that wasn’t readily believed? And the more it is contradicted, the more it is believed. At any rate, it can’t do us any harm; nothing can harm us in our present straits.”
“Well, if people should believe in Uncle Maurice,” began Fontaine, anxiously; but Marsac cut him short.
“Believe in Uncle Maurice! Why, I believe in him, and I created him myself,—that is, our Uncle Maurice. Dear kind old chap! I feel as if I had just shaken hands with him.”
“But,” persisted Fontaine, “if Madame Fleury should believe in him and the fortune, wouldn’t it be that much more difficult for me to escape from her?”
“We should be in that much better condition to fight her. No, my boy, don’t refuse a fortune of two million francs even on paper. Why,” continued Marsac, producing from a corner his palette, brushes, and an unfinished portrait of a Spanish bull-fighter, “look! I will make you a portrait of Uncle Maurice;” and with a few bold strokes the bull-fighter assumed the appearance of a hale old gentleman of sixty, in a black coat and a white tie. “But there is no time to lose,” cried he, throwing down his palette and brushes. “It ought to be in the afternoon papers. There is the clock on the church-tower striking eleven,—I shall have time yet before they go to press. Give me your shoes—” Fontaine kicked them off, and Marsac put them on. “And your hat is better than mine—” Fontaine ran and fetched the hat. “Let me see; the paragraph ought to be written out.” Marsac seated himself at the table, and Fontaine hung over him, while he rapidly wrote half a page, and then, rising and going out, cried: “Keep up your heart, old boy! You are not married yet; you are a long way off from being Monsieur Fleury!”
Left alone, Fontaine remained silent and overwhelmed at the various and startling incidents which had befallen him that morning. “How little one knows,” he thought, “what an hour may bring forth! It is now eleven o’clock: since ten o’clock, I have become engaged to be married; I have found a long-lost uncle; he has died, and left me two million francs.”
A slight sound caused him to raise his head, and he saw a letter pushed under the door. He ran forward and opened it, and then literally fell over on his chair with amazement and chagrin. The letter ran,—