Mated from the Morgue Part 8

The stranger produced a dust-covered bottle with a yellow seal from the same drawer as before, and placed it before his companion. 'Comes from Pfungst Brothers,' was the only recommendation he ventured; but that was enough. The bottle was fitted with a false neck, to which a siphon, closing hermetically, was attached, so that the champagne could be sipped gla.s.s by gla.s.s, if desired, without loss of first freshness and that t.i.tillating effervescence which makes its charm.

O'Hara drank.

'Drink again. 'Twill sweep the cobwebs from your throat.'

'Do you ever feel lonely?' demanded Friezecoat, after a pause.

'Yes, sometimes very much. Like most Irishmen, I am changeful in my moods; to-day I find myself in the height of good spirits, to-morrow in the lowest depths of depression.'

'That is because you are not in your native land--have no home here--no interior. It is not well to be alone.'

The pair continued smoking. They smoked as connoisseurs, enjoying each particular puff, following it with dreamy eyes as it ascended, until it lost itself in gradually widening rings of lessening haze, and they embraced the stems of their pipes for a new pull with gloating lips.

'Do you like the furniture of this room?' abruptly inquired the stranger.

'Yes,' replied O'Hara; 'rich, not gaudy, as Shakespeare says.'

'See any want?'

'Not particularly.'

'Ah! there is one piece of furniture particularly wanting,' said the stranger, with the manner of a man who endeavours to master bashfulness by an exaggerated show of good-humoured, rude self-possession.

'What's that?'

'A wife!'

O'Hara turned his eyes from the pipe to Friezecoat, and Friezecoat--the gruff, blunt-mannered, muscularly-educated Friezecoat--was positively embarra.s.sed, blushed like a callow boy.

'Were you ever in love?' said Friezecoat, probably with a sly view of diverting the enemy's attention by a movement in flank.

The answer was an involuntary sigh.

'Is that it? Do you believe in love at first sight?'

'I believe in anything where love exists; it makes fools of the wisest of us.'

'That's right; and now that the cat's out of the bag I may as well tell you that I have fallen in love at first sight, and that's what I have to say to you.'

O'Hara removed his pipe, and gave a long, low, significant whistle, which reached even unto the dog in the yard, and stimulated him into an inquisitive yelp, which might have been heard had it not been stifled in its birth.

'Who has glamoured you--a Frenchwoman?'

'Yes; Chauvin's grand-daughter.'

'The little Song-bird?'

'The same; and I intend to go to-morrow--no, perhaps this very night, to make a formal proposal for her hand to the old soldier.'

'In that instance, I believe, I am justified in telling you what I know of her history, as Captain Chauvin told it to me himself,' said O'Hara, laying down his pipe. Simply and briefly he proceeded to narrate to his companion the story which had been confided to him. 'So now you are the best judge,' he finished, 'whether you are justified in offering your hand to the daughter of a--a--to a woman who will bring a bend sinister to your escutcheon.'

'Who will bring cheerfulness to my fireside, you meant to say, sir,'

said Friezecoat, with a certain tone of displeasure in his voice. 'Bend sinister! There's your virtuous, charitable world, that would exact penalty of an innocent child for the sin of a progenitor who was mouldered in his tomb before she was born. Bend sinister be blowed!

Thank G.o.d, I'm burdened with no escutcheon to put it on. There's the coat of arms of the O'Hoolohan Roe,' stretching out his open palm, 'and there are its supporters,' pointing to the trophy and opening a drawer, filled with thick rouleaux of yellow Napoleons--'steel on one side and gold on the other.'

After finis.h.i.+ng the bottle in conjunction, they parted in good fellows.h.i.+p. We were near forgetting that O'Hara mentioned something about paying one hundred francs for which he was indebted, but the democrat thrust back the purse which was produced, and said, 'Whenever it suits you;' and as it didn't happen just then to suit the aristocrat, he returned the purse unopened to his pocket. There was not a syllable more of argument, if we except a friendly quotation which Friezecoat sent as a parting shot from his balcony to his retiring friend: 'Hallo!

Mr. O'Hara--

'When Adam dolve, and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?'

followed by a loud laugh.

'The O'Hoolohan Roe!' said O'Hara to himself, as he lingered at the gate of the Pension; 'that's what he called himself. Who the deuce can the O'Hoolohan Roe be? I have heard of the M'Carthy More, of the O'Conor Don, and of the O'Donoghue of the Glens; but never of him before.'

In the interests of our readers, we, too, must endeavour to find out who the O'Hoolohan Roe really was.

CHAPTER VIII.

POPPING THE QUESTION.

On the following day, true to his word, the O'Hoolohan Roe might be seen pulling the bell at the door of No. 39, in the Rue de la Vieille Estrapade. He was elaborately got up in a suit of brand-new garments of blue cloth, which did not fit his short, stout form too nicely. He had bought them at a cheap slop warehouse, and doubtless paid more than he would have been asked at one of the modest, humdrum establishments where clothes are made to wear as well as sell. His hat was new and glistened in the suns.h.i.+ne, for the day was one of those pet days which surprise us in early spring; in his gloved hands (yes, absolutely gloved) he flourished a silver-headed Malacca cane; on his broad breast were ranged in rainbow row, under a nosegay, perhaps a little too large, the vari-coloured ribbons of innumerable decorations. He marched up the staircase with a firm, a pretentiously firm step, until he reached the corridor, off which lay the apartment of Captain Chauvin; and then he stopped and listened. The tinkle-tinkle of a piano, lightly touched on the treble, reached his ears through the keyhole. He halted and blushed--searched in the back-pockets of his new coat for his handkerchief--drew it out and vehemently rubbed his face. His face looked hot; the application of the handkerchief seemed to make it hotter. When he put back his handkerchief, a waft of perfume rested on the air. Scarcely had he restored it to his pocket, when his hand sought the pocket again. What! can he be going to display it anew? How fidgety the man looks! No; that is not the loud-patterned square of cambric, three horses' heads printed on its corner, which he brings forth this time, but--it can hardly be believed--an oval pocket-mirror. He inspects his hot, red face in its disk, goes through the motion of raising his s.h.i.+rt-collar, brushes back his hair, replaces his hat on his head, and the mirror in his pocket, and coughs.

'Amour, amour, quand tu nous tiens.'

What it is to be in love!

Hist!--he speaks. Is he formulating the compliments he is about to make?

No; he soliloquizes, and in what a curt, unnatural voice--a shamefaced voice! Listen:

'I'm a fool. Rather lead a forlorn hope!'

And then he raps at the door with a desperate audacity, with the air of a man who had nerved himself to something heroic.

The door swung back on its hinges, and the tall brunette, with the proud melancholy face, she who was like to the dead Marguerite, stood before him. She did not know him at first, so completely had love and the new suit of clothes transformed him.

'Good-morning, ma'amselle; how is grandfather?'

Old Chauvin, who was seated in his armchair beside Berthe at the piano, rose at the sound of the voice, and, advancing to the door, grasped him by both hands and drew him into the middle of the room.

'Welcome, welcome, my Irish friend; I was afraid you had forgotten us. I was with Monsieur O'Hara, and he did not know your address, or I would have called on you in person to render you my thanks for your present to my little Song-bird. See, she was practising one of your plaintive airs as you entered. What a world of sadness is in your Irish music! It is like the sighing of the wind through a lonely forest in the night-time.'

The O'Hoolohan Roe approached the piano. A richly-bound volume of Gaelic music, a harp rising in golden relief from its ground of green on the cover, lay before Berthe. The page at which it was open was headed, in illuminated letters, _Eiblin-a-ruin_. The white neck of the maiden suffused with a delicate pink, such a pink as we see sometimes colouring the sea-sh.e.l.l, at the undisguised glance of admiration of the Irishman.

She tossed up her pretty head, looking so cla.s.sic under its canopy of chestnut hair, and regarded him with frank eyes as he began to speak. It was too much for the O'Hoolohan Roe; he was not proof against woman's gaze; he got embarra.s.sed, stuttered in the middle of some phrase of congratulation about the correctness of her taste, and finally fell back _hors de combat_. To add to his confusion, there was a traitorous crash as he flopped down in a chair--the hand-mirror in his back-pocket was broken! She followed him with an arch, wicked smile; her brown eyes wilfully sparkled, and a line of ivory showed itself between the cherry bordering of her lips.