Lazarre Part 44

I put Annabel into the coach, and Miss Chantry made frigid room for me.

"Hasten yourself, Lazarre," said Mademoiselle de Chaumont.

I looked back at the poor man who was being played with, and she cried out laughing--

"Did you go to Russia a Parisian to come back a bear?"

I entered her coach, intending to take my leave as soon as I had seen Count de Chaumont. Annabel chattered all the way about civil marriage, and directed Miss Chantry to wait for us while we went in to the mayor.

I was perhaps too indifferent to the trick. The usually sharp governess, undecided and piqued, sat still.

The count was not in the mayor's office. A civil marriage was going forward, and a strange bridal party looked at us.

"Now, Lazarre," the strategist confided, "your dearest Annabel is going to cover herself with Parisian disgrace. You don't know how maddening it is to have every step dogged by a woman who never was, never could have been--and manifestly never will be--young! Wasn't that a divine flash about the corbeille and the mayor? Miss Chantry will wait outside half a day. As I said, she will be very tired of sitting in the carriage. This is what you must do; smuggle me out another way; call another carriage, and take me for a drive and wicked dinner. I don't care what the consequences are, if you don't!"

I said I certainly didn't, and that I was ready to throw myself in the Seine if that would amuse her; and she commended my improvement in manners. We had a drive, with a sympathetic coachman; and a wicked dinner in a suburb, which would have been quite harmless on American ground. The child was as full of spirits as she had been the night she mounted the cabin chimney. But I realized that more of my gold pieces were slipping away, and I had not seen Doctor Chantry.

"We were going to the mayor's," she maintained, when reproached. "My father would have joined us if he had been there. He would certainly have joined us if he had seen me alone with you. Nothing is so easy as civil marriage under the Empire. Of course the religious sacrament follows, when people want it, and if it is celebrated in the church of the Capuchins--or any other church--five minutes before midnight, it will make all Paris talk! Every word I said was true!"

"But Doctor Chantry believed something entirely different."

"You can't do anything for the English," said Annabel. "Next week he will say haw-haw."

Doctor Chantry could not be found when we returned to her father's hotel. She gave me her fingers to kiss in good-bye, and told me I was less doleful.

"We thought you were the Marquis du Plessy's son, Lazarre. I always have believed that story the Holland woman told in the cabin, about your rank being superior to mine. Don't be cut up about Madame de Ferrier! You may have to go to Russia again for her, but you'll get her!"

The witch shook the mist of hair at the sides of her pretty aquiline face, blew a kiss at me, and ran up the staircase and out of my life.

After waiting long for Doctor Chantry I hurried to Skenedonk and sent him with instructions to find my master and conclude our affair before coming back.

The Indian silently entered the Du Plessy hotel after dusk, crestfallen and suspicious. He brought nothing but a letter, left in Doctor Chantry's room; and no other trace remained of Doctor Chantry.

"What has he done with himself, Skenedonk?" I exclaimed.

The Oneida begged me to read that we might trail him.

It was a long and very tiresome letter written in my master's spider tracks, containing long and tiresome enumerations of his services. He presented a large bill for his guardianship on the voyage and across France. He said I was not only a Rich Man through his Influence, but I had proved myself an ungrateful one, and had robbed him of his only Sentiment after a disappointed Existence. My Impudence was equaled only by my astonishing Success, and he chose not to contemplate me as the Husband of Beauty and Lofty Station, whose Shoes he in his Modesty and Worth, felt unworthy to unlatch. Therefore he withdrew that very day from Paris, and would embrace the Opportunity of going into pensive Retirement and rural Contemplation, in his native Kingdom; where his Sister would join him when she could do so with Dignity and Propriety.

I glanced from line to line smiling, but the postscript brought me to my feet.

"The Deposit which you left with me I shall carry with me, as no more than my Due for lifting low Savagery to high Gentility, and beg to subscribe my Thanks for at least this small Tribute of Grat.i.tude."

"Doctor Chantry is gone with the money!"

Skenedonk bounded up grasping the knife which he always carried in a sheath hanging from his belt.

"Which way did the old woman go?"

"Stop," I said.

The Indian half crouched for counsel.

"I'll be a prince! Let him have it."

"Let him rob you?"

"We're quits, now. I've paid him for the lancet stab I gave him."

"But you haven't a whole bagful of coin left."

"We brought nothing into France, and it seems certain we shall take nothing but experience out of it. And I'm young, Skenedonk. He isn't."

The Oneida grunted. He was angrier than I had ever seen him.

"We ought to have knocked the old woman on the head at Saratoga," he responded.

Annabel's trick had swept away my little fortune. With recklessness which repeated loss engenders I proposed we scatter the remaining coin in the street, but Skenedonk prudently said we would divide and conceal it in our clothes. I gave the kind valet a handful to keep his heart warm; and our anxieties about our valuables were much lightened.

Then we consulted about our imminent start, and I told my servant it would be better to send the post-chaise across the Seine. He agreed with me. And for me to come to it as if by accident the moment we were ready to join each other on the road. He agreed to that. All of our belongings would be put into it by the valet and himself, and when we met we would make a circuit and go by the way of St. Denis.

"We will meet," I told him, "at eleven o'clock in front of the Tuileries."

Skenedonk looked at me without moving a muscle.

"I want to see the palace of the Tuileries before I leave France."

He still gazed at me.

"At any risk, I am going to the Tuileries to-night!"

My Iroquois grunted. A glow spread all over his copper face and head. If I had told him I was going to an enemy's central camp fire to shake a club in the face of the biggest chief, he could not have thought more of my daring or less of my common sense.

"You will never come out."

"If I don't, Skenedonk, go without me."

He pa.s.sed small heroics unnoticed.

"Why do you do it?"

I couldn't tell him. Neither could I leave Paris without doing it. I a.s.sured him many carriages would be there, near the entrance, which was called, I believed, the pavilion of Flora; and by showing boldness we might start from that spot as well as from any other. He abetted the reckless devil in me, and the outcome was that I crossed the Seine bridge by myself about ten o'clock; remembering my escape from Ste.

Pelagie; remembering I should never see the gargoyles on Notre Dame any more, or the golden dome of the Invalides, or hear the night hum of Paris, whether I succeeded or not. For if I succeeded I should be away toward the coast by morning; and if I did not succeed, I should be somewhere under arrest.

I can see the boy in white court dress, with no hint of the traveler about him, who stepped jauntily out of a carriage and added himself to groups entering the Tuileries. The white court dress was armor which he put on to serve him in the dangerous attempt to look once more on a woman's face. He mounted with a strut toward the guardians of the imperial court, not knowing how he might be challenged; and fortune was with him.

"Lazarre!" exclaimed Count de Chaumont, hurrying behind to take my elbow. "I want you to help me!"

Remembering with sudden remorse Annabel's escape and our wicked dinner, I halted eager to do him service. He was perhaps used to Annabel's escapes, for a very different annoyance puckered his forehead as he drew me aside within the entrance.

"Have you heard the Marquis de Ferrier is alive?"