A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories Part 18

"Well, but she's got your note. She'll understand--"

"What a fool _you_ are, Davis! _There's_ my note!" cried the colonel, opening his fist and showing a very small wad of paper in his palm.

"She'd have got my note if she'd been at the Kaiserin Elisabeth; but she's no more there than I am."

"Oh!" said his friend, sobered at this. "To be sure! Well?"

"Well, it's no use trying to tell a man like you; but I suppose that she's simply distracted by this time. You don't know what a woman is, and how she can suffer about a little matter when she gives her mind to it."

"Oh!" said the consul again, very contritely. "I'm very sorry I laughed; but"--here he looked into the colonel's gloomy face with a countenance contorted with agony--"this only makes it the more ridiculous, you know;" and he reeled away, drunk with the mirth which filled him from head to foot. But he repented again, and with a superhuman effort so far subdued his transports as merely to quake internally, and tremble all over, as he led the way to the next hotel, arm in arm with the bewildered and embittered colonel. He encouraged the latter with much genuine sympathy, and observed a proper decorum in his interviews with one portier after another, formulating the colonel's story very neatly, and explaining at the close that this American Herr, who had arrived at Vienna before daylight and directed his driver to take him to the Kaiserin Elisabeth, and had left his hotel at one o'clock in the belief that it was the Kaiserin Elisabeth, felt now an added eagerness to know what his hotel really was from the circ.u.mstance that his wife was there quite alone and in probable distress at his long absence. At first Colonel Kenton took a lively interest in this statement of his case, and prompted the consul with various remarks and sub-statements; he was grateful for the compa.s.sion generally shown him by the portiers, and he strove with himself to give some account of the exterior and locality of his mysterious hotel. But the fact was that he had not so much as looked behind him when he quitted it, and knew nothing about its appearance; and gradually the reiteration of the points of his misadventure to one portier after another began to be as "a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong." His personation of an American Herr in great trouble of mind was an entire failure, except as ill.u.s.trating the national apathy of countenance when under the influence of strong emotion. He ceased to take part in the consul's efforts in his behalf; the whole abominable affair seemed as far beyond his forecast or endeavor as some result of malign enchantment, and there was no such thing as carrying off the tragedy with self-respect. Distressing as it was, there could be no question but it was entirely ridiculous; he hung his head with shame before the portiers at being a party to it; he no longer felt like resenting Davis's amus.e.m.e.nt; he only wondered that he could keep his face in relating the idiotic mischance. Each successive failure to discover his lodging confirmed him in his humiliation and despair. Very likely there was a way out of the difficulty, but he did not know it. He became at last almost an indifferent spectator of the consul's perseverance. He began to look back with incredulity at the period of his life pa.s.sed before entering the fatal fiacre that morning.

He received the final portier's rejection with something like a personal derision.

"That's the last place I can think of," said the consul, wiping his brow as they emerged from the court-yard, for he had grown very warm with walking so much.

"Oh, all right," said the colonel languidly.

"But we won't give it up. Let's go in here and get some coffee, and think it over a bit." They were near one of the princ.i.p.al cafes, which was full of people smoking, and drinking the Viennese _melange_ out of tumblers.

"By all means," a.s.sented Colonel Kenton with inconsequent courtliness, "think it over. It's all that's left us."

Matters did not look so dark, quite, after a tumbler of coffee with milk, but they did not continue to brighten so much as they ought with the cigars. "Now let us go through the facts of the case," said the consul, and the colonel wearily reproduced his original narrative with every possible circ.u.mstance. "But you know all about it," he concluded.

"I don't see any end of it. I don't see but I'm to spend the rest of my life in hunting up a hotel that professes to be the Kaiserin Elisabeth, and isn't. I never knew anything like it."

"It certainly has the charm of novelty," gloomily a.s.sented the consul: it must be owned that his gloom was a respectful feint. "I have heard of men running away from their hotels, but I never did hear of a hotel running away from a man before now. Yes--hold on! I have, too. Aladdin's palace--and with Mrs. Aladdin in it, at that! It's a parallel case."

Here he abandoned himself as usual, while Colonel Kenton viewed his mirth with a dreary grin. When he at last caught his breath, "I beg your pardon, I do, indeed," the consul implored. "I know just how you feel, but of course it's coming out right. We've been to all the hotels I know of, but there must be others. We'll get some more names and start at once; and if the genie has dropped your hotel anywhere this side of Africa we shall find it. If the worst comes to the worst, you can stay at my house to-night and start new to-m--Oh, I forgot!--Mrs. Kenton!

Really, the whole thing is such an amusing muddle that I can't seem to get over it." He looked at Kenton with tears in his eyes, but contained himself and decorously summoned a waiter, who brought him whatever corresponds to a city directory in Vienna. "There!" he said, when he had copied into his note-book a number of addresses, "I don't think your hotel will escape us this time;" and discharging his account he led the way to the door, Colonel Kenton listlessly following.

The wretched husband was now suffering all the anguish of a just remorse, and the heartlessness of his behavior in going off upon his own pleasure the whole afternoon and leaving his wife alone in a strange hotel to pa.s.s the time as she might was no less a poignant reproach, because it seemed so inconceivable in connection with what he had always taken to be the kindness and unselfishness of his character. We all know the sensation; and I know none, on the whole, so disagreeable, so little flattering, so persistent when once it has established itself in the ill-doer's consciousness. To find out that you are not so good or generous or magnanimous as you thought is, next to having other people find it out, probably the unfriendliest discovery that can be made. But I suppose it has its uses. Colonel Kenton now saw the unhandsomeness of his leaving his wife at all, and he beheld in its true light his shabbiness in not going back to tell her he had found his old friend and was to bring him to dinner. The Lohndiener would of course have taken him straight to his hotel, and he would have been spared this shameful exposure, which, he knew well enough, Davis would never forget, but would tell all his life with an ever-increasing garniture of fiction. He cursed his weakness in allowing himself to dawdle about those a.r.s.enals and that parade-ground, and to be so far misguided by a hardened bachelor as to admire certain yellow-haired German and black-haired Hungarian women on the promenade; when he came to think of going out in that sledge, it was with anathema maranatha. He groaned in spirit, but he owned that he was rightly punished, though it seemed hard that his wife should be punished too. And then he went on miserably to figure first her slight surprise at his being gone so long; then her vague uneasiness and her conjectures; then her dawning apprehensions and her helplessness; her probable sending to the consulate to find out what had become of him; her dismay at learning nothing of him there; her waiting and waiting in wild dismay as the moments and hours went by; her frenzied running to the door at every step and her despair when it proved not his. He had seen her suffering from less causes. And where was she? In what low, shabby tavern had he left her? He choked with rage and grief, and could hardly speak to the gentleman, a naturalized fellow-citizen of Vienna, to whom he found the consul introducing him.

"I wonder if you can't help us," said the consul. "My friend here is the victim of a curious annoyance;" and he stated the case in language so sympathetic and decorous as to restore some small shreds of the colonel's self-respect.

"Ah," said their new acquaintance, who was mercifully not a man of humor, or too polite to seem so, "that's another trick of those scamps of fiacre-drivers. He took you purposely to the wrong hotel, and was probably feed by the landlord for bringing you. But why should you make yourselves so much trouble? You know Colonel Kenton's landlord had to send his name to the police as soon as he came, and you can get his address there at once."

"Good-by!" said the consul very hastily, with a crestfallen air. "Come along, Kenton."

"What did he send my name to the police for?" demanded the colonel, in the open air.

"Oh, it's a form. They do it with all travellers. It's merely to secure the imperial government against your machinations."

"And do you mean to say you ought to have known," cried the colonel, halting him, "that you could have found out where I was from the police at once, before we had walked all over this moral vineyard, and wasted half a precious lifetime?"

"Kenton," contritely admitted the other, "I never happened to think of it."

"Well, Davis, you're a pretty consul!" That was all the colonel said, and though his friend was voluble in self-exculpation and condemnation, he did not answer him a word till they arrived at the police office. A few brief questions and replies between the commissary and the consul solved the long mystery, and Colonel Kenton had once more a hotel over his head. The commissary certified to the respectability of the place, but invited the colonel to prosecute the driver of the fiacre in behalf of the general public,--which seemed so right a thing that the colonel entered into it with zeal, and then suddenly relinquished it, remembering that he had not the rogue's number, that he had not so much as looked at him, and that he knew no more what manner of man he was than his own image in a gla.s.s. Under the circ.u.mstances, the commissary admitted that it was impossible, and as to bringing the landlord to justice, nothing could be proved against him.

"Will you ask him," said the colonel, "the outside price of a first-cla.s.s a.s.sault and battery in Vienna?"

The consul put as much of this idea into German as the language would contain, which was enough to make the commissary laugh and shake his head warningly.

"It wouldn't do, he says, Kenton; it isn't the custom of the country."

"Very well, then, I don't see why we should occupy his time." He gave his hand to the commissary, whom he would have liked to embrace, and then hurried forth again with the consul. "There is one little thing that worries me still," he said. "I suppose Mrs. Kenton is simply crazy by this time."

"Is she of a very--nervous--disposition?" faltered the consul.

"Nervous? Well, if you could witness the expression of her emotions in regard to mice, you wouldn't ask that question, Davis."

At this desolating reply the consul was mute for a moment. Then he ventured: "I've heard--or read, I don't know which--that women have more real fort.i.tude than men, and that they find a kind of moral support in an actual emergency that they wouldn't find in--mice."

"Pshaw!" answered the colonel. "You wait till you see Mrs. Kenton."

"Look here, Kenton," said the consul seriously, and stopping short.

"I've been thinking that perhaps--I--I had better dine with you some other day. The fact is, the situation now seems so purely domestic that a third person, you know--"

"Come along!" cried the colonel. "I want you to help me out of this sc.r.a.pe. I'm going to leave that hotel as soon as I can put my things together, and you've got to browbeat the landlord for me while I go up and rea.s.sure my wife long enough to get her out of that den of thieves.

What did you say the scoundrelly name was?"

"The Gasthof zum Wilden Manne."

"And what does Wildun Manny mean?"

"The Sign of the Savage, we should make it, I suppose,--the Wild Man."

"Well, I don't know whether it was named after me or not; but if I'd found that sign anywhere for the last four or five hours, I should have known it for home. There hasn't been any wilder man in Vienna since the town was laid out, I reckon; and I don't believe there ever was a wilder woman anywhere than Mrs. Kenton is at this instant."

Arrived at the Sign of the Savage, Colonel Kenton left his friend below with the portier, and mounting the stairs three steps at a time flew to his room. Flinging open the door, he beheld his wife dressed in one of her best silks, before the mirror, bestowing some last prinks, touching her back hair with her hand and twitching the bow at her throat into perfect place. She smiled at him in the gla.s.s, and said, "Where's Captain Davis?"

"Captain Davis?" gasped the colonel, dry-tongued with anxiety and fatigue. "Oh! _He's_ down there. He'll be up directly."

She turned and came forward to him: "How do you like it?" Then she advanced near enough to encounter the moustache: "Why, how heated and tired you look!"

"Yes, yes,--we've been walking. I--I'm rather late, ain't I, Bessie?"

"About an hour. I ordered dinner at six, and it's nearly seven now." The colonel started; he had not dared to look at his watch, and he had supposed it must be about ten o'clock; it seemed years since his search for the hotel had begun. But he said nothing; he felt that in some mysterious and unmerited manner Heaven was having mercy upon him, and he accepted the grace in the sneaking way we all accept mercy. "I knew you'd stay longer than you expected, when you found it was Davis."

"How did you know it was Davis?" asked the colonel, blindly feeling his way.

Mrs. Kenton picked up her Almanach de Gotha. "It has all the consular and diplomatic corps in it."

"I won't laugh at it any more," said the colonel, humbly. "Weren't you--uneasy, Bessie?"

"No. I mended away, here, and fussed round the whole afternoon, putting the trunks to rights; and I got out this dress and ran a bit of lace into the collar; and then I ordered dinner, for I knew you'd bring the captain; and I took a nap, and by that it was nearly dinner-time."

"Oh!" said the colonel.

"Yes; and the head-waiter was as polite as peas; they've all been very attentive. I shall certainly recommend everybody to the Kaiserin Elisabeth."

"Yes," a.s.sented the wretched man. "I reckon it's about the best hotel in Vienna."