Mated from the Morgue Part 12

'Is that true?' exclaimed O'Hoolohan angrily, starting forward to the table.

'What business of yours is it?' retorted the Gascon.

'Is it true?'

'I have said it, Mr. Insolent.'

'Then you're a beast, d'you hear?'

'And you, sir, are an intermeddling hound!' shouted the Gascon, foaming at the mouth in a spasm of fury.

O'Hoolohan shut his lips firmly a moment, and clenched his hands as if struggling to suppress his wrath. Then, having apparently succeeded, he said quietly and deliberately, while a smile that was near akin to a sneer played about his lips:

'You are a braggart and a bully, like most Gascons, and it is my private opinion at present that you are a coward into the bargain.'

There was an immediate springing to the feet of all present, and a confused hubbub of voices, everyone speaking at once.

'Silence!' shouted the Gascon. 'This is my concern. You'll have to answer for this, sir. Here is my friend's address.'

'I'm at your service, and the sooner the better. Your friend will not have to wait long for a visit from a friend of mine.' And O'Hoolohan handed his adversary his card, and took the proffered address with a bow. Then, removing his hat with a sarcastic coolness, he saluted the company and left.

Idiots, you will say, my dear sir or madame, to pick up this quarrel on such foolish grounds! I admit it. But do not most quarrels rest on the basis of folly? and are not most disputants idiots? So it has been, and so will it be to the crack of doom.

The three students were right in one point, however. Marguerite did not even tenant a grave in the paupers' corner of a cemetery. Her body was not claimed; in the darkness it had been bundled in a sack, and trotted to the Ecole Pratique in the Rue de l'Ecole de Medecine, there to contribute to the enlightenment of the rising generation of surgeons.

From the slab in the Morgue to the slab in the dissecting-room! Gruesome journey and grim destiny!

CHAPTER XI.

THE BONE OF CONTENTION.

'Poor Marguerite!' e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed O'Hara, when he had heard from his visitor an account of the scene in _La Jeune France_. 'So this was her kismet!

_Sic transit gloria Aspasiae._ Well, at all events, she may be more useful in death than ever she was in life. To think of Marguerite becoming a hand-maid of science! The wilful wench! How she would glory in the thought of setting two men by the ears, if she could only learn it in the sphere she now adorns! But do you know, O'Hoolohan, on reflection, I can't help thinking you are in the wrong. How does it harm the woman to have her shin-bone ministering to the needs of literature?

Ulric Zuingli bequeathed his skin to be made into a drum-head to rouse his followers; and Byron, if I'm not mistaken, was fond of taking his tipple out of a neatly-scooped skull.'

'Will you act for me? Right or wrong now the thing has gone too far for retreating.'

'I fear that is only too true. Of course I'll act for you. Let me see.

You're sure he called you Mr. Insolent first.'

'Certain.'

'That's one point in our favour. As we are the offended party, we have the choice of weapons. Have you any preference?'

'Cavalry pistols. French duellists, as a rule, have a rooted dislike to facing a bullet. As for small swords, that's only child's play. A scratch, and honour is satisfied.'

'Cavalry pistols be it. I shall let you know the time and place of rendezvous, at four this afternoon, at your boarding-house.'

'All right,' said O'Hoolohan; 'meantime I shall go and take a look at the bears in the Jardin des Plantes.'

'There goes a character!' muttered O'Hara to himself, as his visitor descended the stairs. 'Hang me if I can fathom him!'

The young Irishman dressed himself in his best, and was punctual in his call at the rooms of the youth in blue spectacles. The blear-eyed stripling was also present. Business was at once opened in a business-like manner. Explanations were tendered on neither side. The mutual insults were too gross and public to be blotted out except by blows. Apology was not asked or offered. The details of the hostile meeting were gone over with overwhelming affability and owl-like gravity. In negotiations of this kind, to smooth the pa.s.sage of one or two men to a premature eternity, the extremest forms of politeness are invariably observed. If there was to be a fight, the earlier it came off the more agreeable it must be to all concerned. Eight o'clock the next morning was fixed as the hour of rendezvous, by unanimous consent. As Eugene the Gascon, as his friends took care to remark, was a crack shot, they had no prejudice against the cavalry pistols.

The first discussion was on the question of the distance at which the adversaries should be placed from each other. O'Hara, with a charming readiness to oblige, suggested that shots should be exchanged across a table-napkin.

The Frenchman demurred.

'That would be slaughter,' said Blue Spectacles.

'Undoubtedly it would be very like it,' agreed O'Hara; 'but my man is used to slaughter on a wholesale scale--an old soldier of Africa, the Crimea, and Italy. Does your princ.i.p.al object to being shot?'

'If he does not, most certainly I do, to being arrested as accessory to murder,' chimed in Pale Face.

Finally it was decided that the adversaries should be placed twenty paces apart, with privilege to each to advance five paces before delivering his fire, if he so elected. There was to be no toss-up as to who was to fire first; they were to consult their own judgment as to that from the instant the signal for action, the dropping of a handkerchief, was given. If the first exchange was harmless, the renewal of the combat was to be left to the discretion of the witnesses.

'With your permission, messieurs,' said O'Hara, 'I vote for Clamart as the place of rendezvous. I know a retired garden there, walled round and perfectly secure from observation. It is a most convenient spot; looks as if it were designed by nature for the purpose. Besides, there is a deep disused draw-well there, so that we can get rid of any dangerous evidence of the morning's work in case of a fatal issue.'

The Frenchmen winced, but as they knew of no better site for the encounter, they agreed--provided there was a good restaurant in the vicinity. It was contrary to all the etiquette of the code of honour in Paris to have a duel without a breakfast after. In fact, a duel would not be a duel if it were not followed by a comfortable repast.

O'Hara eased their fears on this score.

'And now, messieurs,' he added in conclusion, 'I have two conditions to impose, in the interests of our own safety. The first is, that no one will seek to publish an account of this meeting in the papers; the next, that each of the princ.i.p.als will sign a paper to the effect that he was tired of a hollow and deceitful world, and meant to make away with himself, so as to exonerate his antagonist from all responsibility in the future.'

There was a twinkle in O'Hara's eyes as he spoke. He suspected the Gascon's witnesses would not relish a.s.sisting at the combat unless they were to borrow some reflected renown from it; and he knew that a doc.u.ment such as he mentioned would be valueless, seeing that the quarrel had been public, and the probable result was the common gossip of the quarter. But he plausibly wheedled the Frenchmen into a.s.senting to his propositions by putting the terrible perils that would accrue to them in the event of a death in very strong light.

As he was leaving, Blue Spectacles bethought him that they might have some trouble in finding cavalry pistols. Eugene had none, he thought, and it might lead to unpleasant consequences if they were to purchase the weapons at a gunsmith's; they would be sure to be identified by the prying _mouchards_.

'I can oblige, messieurs, if you will trust me,' said O'Hara. 'My friend has a brace in capital order. You can make your choice of them on the ground.'

This satisfied all requirements. O'Hara was thanked for his courtesy, and was ushered to the landing with an exquisite urbanity that was touching in its kindly, well-bred thoughtfulness; it positively recalled the manner in vogue when the Roi Soleil shed the l.u.s.tre of his countenance on Versailles. As he briskly descended the stairs, the students shut the door and looked at each other with faces overshadowed with anxiety.

'_Pardi!_' said Blue Spectacles, 'this is serious.'

'Serious!--'tis awful!' said Pale Face. 'I feel as if I must have an _absinthe pure_ at the Mere Moreau's. I would not be in Eugene's boots for a milliard. Come on.'

The morning of the duel broke with all the freshness and warmth and brilliancy of the genial spring in the lat.i.tude of Paris. In the picturesque Clamart suburb, with its market-gardens and white villas, its plantations, its windmills, and its vine-clad slopes, the aspect was one of ripe loveliness. It was a rosy, odorous, appetizing morn; a morn for a pleasant woodland walk under the branches where small birds chavished; a morn to drop gently down the river and ply the indolent rod; a morn for a canter on a brisk cob across the sweet-scented meadows; a morn for plucking flowers, smoking choice cigars, love-dreaming, or poetic musing--for anything, in fact, but thoughts of sudden and violent death. It has been remarked by some moralists that sunny, innocent, enjoyable morns, when the blood seems to bound joyously in the veins, and the very act of breathing is a vivid pleasure, have an ugly habit of intruding themselves unbidden when armies are about to join in strife or criminals are about to tread the scaffold.

The Gascon never before realized how very comfortable a world it is, and how very disagreeable it would be to leave it while he was yet young and healthy, with a sound stomach and a liver unconscious of derangement.

But his pride was greater than his fears, and coating his doubts and apprehensions under a veneer of indifference, he was the first to warn his friends of the necessity of being punctilious at the trysting-place.

As punctuality is the courtesy of kings, so also is it of duellists.

The Gascon and his party were first on the ground--four of them, the princ.i.p.al, Blue Spectacles, Pale Face, and a young medical pract.i.tioner with an ominous set of surgical instruments cunningly hidden in a fiddle-case to disarm suspicion.