Mated from the Morgue Part 5

He sat, gay as he looked, surrounded by lights and such flowers as the early season furnished; a burning pastille poured out a thick unctuous stream of perfume; fruits were on the table by his elbow, and in companionship beside them slender bottles of sparkling wine. He had a sensuous appreciation of the beautiful, had our friend; but not a selfish, for he did not sit alone. At his feet, curled like a hedgehog on a luxurious mat, snored Pat, the foundling dog, a half-eaten bone held between his paws. Pat had evidently fallen upon pleasant lines; he was plump and sleek as an incipient alderman after his seven days' good treatment, and now, as aspirants to the dignity of the fur collar and the rapture of turtle-soup are wont, he was enjoying the snooze of satisfaction after the repast of repletion. Then, again, another of our acquaintances was present. Stiff and stately, as a bare old oak in winter, on the opposite side of the fire, sat Captain Chauvin--white-bearded, the chocolate-coloured ribbon on his breast, his stick held bolt upright between his legs--a figure of dignity and firmness in the frivolous air of this bachelor-chamber in gala; yet, somehow, he did not look out of place. There was sweetness in the old man's face, and benevolence and truth, which is beautiful everywhere.

'You do not smoke, captain--you a _militaire_ of the First Empire. I wonder at that,' said O'Hara, languidly puffing the light cloud upwards in fantastic wreath from his Havana.

'No, _mon enfant_; there is a reason for it,' and the captain sighed.

O'Hara finished his cigar in peace--not that he did not notice the sigh of his guest, but he had too much delicacy to seek to fathom its cause.

'At least,' he said when he resumed conversation, 'you will not refuse to join me in a b.u.mper.'

The captain shook his head.

'It is the first time I've caught you at my fireside, Captain Chauvin, and in my land we account it the reverse of good-fellowship not to hobn.o.b at such a meeting. We shall drink together, as the Arabs break bread, to friendship and better knowledge of each other.'

The captain smiled--how charming is a smile on the face of manly masculine age!--and bowed.

'As it is the custom of your land, and as it is to be a gage of friendship, I even will,' said he, at the same time proffering a worn snuff-box, rudely wrought of horn, which he drew out of a gold case.

'_Mon enfant_, a pinch.'

O'Hara took of the snuff, though he found some difficulty in performing the operation of conveying the dust to his nostrils, sniffing it and afterwards sneezing. To tell the truth, he did not take snuff, considering it a dirty habit; but he felt constrained to do much to gratify the old man.

'Hola, you sneeze!' remarked the captain, surprised. 'It's rare fine snuff.'

'And that's a rare fine box you have it in; not the box, I mean, but the casket which holds it,' answered O'Hara, taking the gold case in his hands.

'What's this? The bees which the Bonapartes brought from Corsica, the eagle with the thunder-bolt in his talons, and the Imperial cipher. I'm not a judge of goldsmith's work, but I should say that's a piece of some value.'

'And the horn box--the box for which all this finery is the covering.

What d'ye think of that?'

'It is not valuable in material nor artistically, and yet it may be valuable as a souvenir,' said O'Hara, after regarding it.

'Ah! I would not give that box for ten--what?--a thousand times its weight in gems,' said the old man, kissing it reverently. 'There's a story attached to it.'

'Yes, yes, how we do cling to the relic of what has pa.s.sed from us, and each day, as we look upon it, it becomes more precious in our sight!'

said O'Hara, half in soliloquy, drawing a little parcel from his breast.

'Here it is now, only a lock of woman's hair, faded, flattened out of curl, and she--where is she?--what does she? Does she ever think of me?

Bah!'--with a violent jerk thrusting back the parcel to its resting-place; 'you're a fool, O'Hara! Come, captain, let me fill you a b.u.mper of the grape-juice.'

The captain had been watching the by-play with the tress of woman's hair with an amiable, almost sympathizing, eye. 'Young friend,' said he, 'you've loved and been disappointed, I take it; but do not despair.'

O'Hara blushed. 'At your time of life,' continued the captain, 'one does not die of those crosses. I know them. Do not blush; I, too, have been disappointed in what my heart had set its affections upon, and, alas! it has coloured my whole existence.'

'A good blood-colour, I fancy,' said O'Hara with a sardonic humour.

'Ah! you are disposed to take a cynical view of the s.e.x. That is too soon. Life for you should be a comedy, as yet violet-crowned; a toying with honey goblets and rose-leaves; it is too soon to bring in the daggers and the cups of gall and the cypress-wreaths.'

'Life violet-crowned for me!' said O'Hara mockingly. 'It is a vile, malodorous sham; there is nothing true, nothing sincere in it but sin and death. The world is a mercenary, peddling world--the one only trade which is not meanness and fraud is the soldier's trade, where man is paid for cutting the throat of his fellow-man.'

'Let us drink,' said the captain, perceiving that the better way to alter his young friend's mood was to steal him away on other paths, not to dip into deep reasoning with him.

'Ay, ay, _mon ami_,' cried O'Hara with a return of the reckless spirit we remarked in his character when he lay seemingly without a sou in his pocket on his bed of bitterness, 'that is the disappointed man's friend.

We will drink, drink, not to woman who drove Adam out of Paradise and your humble servant out of Ireland, but to man, to the real practical man, the man who tramples humbug and pretence under foot, and believes in himself alone, the solid, hard-hitting, clear-seeing man. Captain, here's to his health!'

'To his memory, rather,' said the captain, rising and touching the outstretched gla.s.s of his host with his own, 'for his soul is lost to us these five-and-forty years. Here's to Napoleon!'

'Yes, to Napoleon!' and they both drained their gla.s.ses to the lees. The captain resumed his seat as stiffly as ever; O'Hara took a cordial glance at the bottle, and replenishing his gla.s.s, cried as he held it aloft between him and the light, and watched the amber beads frothing in creamy tumult on its surface, 'Beautiful to the sight and to the taste, strange that that liquid should be the one sure friend to whom we can fly for the means to forget the world and its sorrows, our only certain refuge----'

'My young friend,' said the old man gravely, 'it seems to me you forget G.o.d!'

The tone in which these words were spoken was gentle rather than monitory. They fell on our friend's troubled soul like the rain which refreshes, not as advice too often does, and too often is meant to fall, like blistering drops of hot wax.

The youth, who had been contemplating the sparkling liquor as an artist might a great artist creation of beauty, looked at it a moment longer, then slowly lowering it, he said, in the calm voice of conviction, to his aged guest:

'You are right; G.o.d is _the_ refuge; we should not forget Him,' and the spirit of the grape blazed vividly up as it was spilt on the burning logs. 'I was wrong, we were both wrong, even in drinking to the memory of Napoleon.'

'Not in that, _mon enfant_; all great men such as he was, men who sink themselves into the time and mark it as theirs even as the maker does his name into the sword-blade--all such men are messengers from G.o.d.'

'And his nephew?'

'G.o.d's messages do not come by hereditary office. He is auspicious for France; it is strong and feared and full of prosperous life to-day; and he is Emperor of the French. That is enough for me.'

'The philosophy of a soldier' was the only comment of O'Hara.

'Are you of the Opposition?' queried the captain, fancying he detected a latent sneer at the ruling dynasty in the latter expression.

'Ah I my friend,' remarked O'Hara with a smile, 'that is a delicate question. How shall I answer it? Like an Irishman, by asking another.

Do you not know that I am a foreigner? I love your France, but I do not meddle in its politics. If I did, I suppose I should belong to the Opposition, for I was born in the Opposition in my own country, and as the sum of evil is greater than the sum of good, and usually preponderant, I take it that it is pretty safe ground to go on that whatever is, is wrong.'

'Have another pinch of snuff,' said the captain, shaking his head and proffering the golden box with its horn enclosure.

'This great N,' said O'Hara, again examining the ornamented outer lid with curiosity--'is that for the nephew or the uncle?'

'It is for the Man,' said Monsieur Chauvin, almost offended.

'Did you not say there was a story attached to it?' continued O'Hara.

'Yes; but would you laugh at an old man?'

'Captain Chauvin!'

'Pardon, my good young friend. I will tell it you. On the day of Mont St. Jean, the 18th of June, 1815, I was a sub-lieutenant of artillery in the column of our glorious Ney--the laurel to his ashes! Ah! your Wellington let him be slain like a dog; that was not soldierly. The Emperor directed a false attack on the chateau of Goumont; while the Englishman was gathering the best of his forces to its defence, the Man stood, pale and weary, with the same quiet, steady gaze, a smile fixed into the earnestness of a frown, which my comrades told me he had worn at Austerlitz, hands behind his back, and his gray great-coat lying moist over his boots. My battery was near, and I was on its right, quite close to the staff. "Messieurs," said he, as he saw the scarlet ma.s.ses pressing around Goumont, "we make our game. Where is Ney?" An aide-de-camp galloped off for the Marshal, who was close at hand. The Man, surveying Goumont with his gla.s.s, and occasionally looking intently at La Haie-Sainte, gradually approached to where I stood. A soldier of the battery lay dead on the ground before me--a veteran whom we all loved. Feeling that we should shortly get the order to advance, I resolved to secure some souvenir of Tampon, as we called him. I found a horn snuff-box in his hand, clenched in death. The Man happened to turn towards me, and observed the act.

'"Comrade, a pinch," he said, and I handed him the box--that box; look at it,' and the old soldier, the fire of foughten fields in his eyes, hung over it with tenderness as over a loved living object--'that box was in his fingers--out of it he took a pinch of snuff on the day of Mont St. Jean.'

'Did you see him after?'

'Not that day. We advanced on La Haie-Sainte ten minutes after and gave them a hail of h.e.l.l-fire. Our heavy artillery crashed through their ranks like bolts of thunder. They shook; Ney seized the moment to bring our guns right into the enemy's position, but we had a ravine to traverse; our pieces of twelve settled down in the muddy rye, a regiment of infantry came up from the rear to cover us, but Wellington was quicker. He saw our difficulty and poured a host of dragoons in on us in the valley. They cut our traces, overturned our guns, sabred our men.

But, sapristi! they paid for it--paid for it dearly. Our cuira.s.siers rushed to the rescue like a whirlwind and swept them from earth to the last man. Brave fellows they were! No, I did not see him after, until all Paris turned out, six-and-twenty years ago, to welcome his remains to the Church of the Invalides. You know his will, Monsieur O'Hara: "I desire that my dust may rest on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of the French people whom I loved so well."'

The enthusiastic young Irishman could not but be affected at this reminiscence of an era which appeals to all that is romantic in our nature, told, too, by one who was an actor in it, and who carried in his heart, still vivid and strong, the proud affection for Napoleon with which that genius of war inspired his followers to the humblest. Nor was his sole motive that of gratifying the captain when he demanded the horn-box for another pinch, and, to the exuberant delight of the old man, with it in his hand sung _Les Souvenirs du Peuple_ of Beranger.