Bohemian Days | Page 6

any such imputation.
His head was full of odd remembrances as he crossed the Place St.
Sulpice: his plain old father at the old border home, close and
hard-handed, who went afield with his own negroes, and made his sons

take the plough-handles, and marched them all before him every
Sunday to the plank church, and led the singing himself with an ancient
tuning-fork, and took up the collection in a black velvet bag fastened to
a pole.
He had foreseen the war, and sent his son abroad to avoid it. He had
given Freckle sufficient money to travel for five years, and told him in
the same sentence to guard his farthings and say his prayers. Freckle
could see the old man now, with a tear poised on his tangled eyelashes,
asking a farewell benediction from the front portico, upon himself
departing, while every woolly-head was uncovered, and the whole
assembled "property" had groaned "Amen" together.
That was patriarchal life; what was this? Freckle thought this much
finer and higher. He had not asked himself if it was better. He was
rather ashamed of his father now, and anxious to be a dashing
gentleman, like Plade or Pisgah.
Why did he play whist so badly? How chanced it that, having dwelt
eighteen months in Paris, he could speak no French? His only grisette
had both robbed him and been false to him. He knew that the Colony
tolerated him, merely. Was he indeed verdant, as they had said--obtuse,
stupid, lacking wit?
After all, he repeated to himself, what had the Colony done for him? He
had not now twenty francs to his name, and was a thousand francs in
debt; he had essayed to study medicine, but balked at the first lesson.
Yet, though these suggestions, rather than convictions, occurred to him,
they stirred no latent ambition. If he had ever known one high
resolution, the Southern Colony had pulled it up, and sown the place
with salt.
So he reached Master Lees' tenement; it was a long ascent, and toward
the last stages perilous; the stairs had a fashion of curving round
unexpectedly and bending against jambs and blank walls. He was quite
out of breath when he staggered against Lees' door and burst it open.
The light fell almost glaringly upon the bare, contracted chamber; for

this was next to the sky and close up to the clouds, and the window
looked toward the west, where the sun, sinking majestically, was
throwing its brightest smiles upon Paris, as it bade adieu.
And there, upon his tossed, neglected bed, in the full blaze of the sunset,
his sharp, sallow jaws dropped upon his neck, his cheeks colorless and
concave, his great eyes open wide and his hair unsmoothed, Master
Lees lay dead, with the roulette table upon his breast!
* * * * *
When Freckle had raised himself from the platform at the base of the
first flight of stairs, down which he had fallen in his fright, he hastened
to his own chamber and gave the Colony notice of the depletion of its
number.
A deep gloom, as may be surmised, fell upon all. Lees had been no
great favorite of late, and it had been the trite remark for a year that he
was looking like death; but at this juncture the tidings came ominously
enough. One member, at least, of the Southern Colony would never
share the winnings of Auburn Risque, and now that they referred to his
forebodings of the morning, it was recalled that with his own demise,
he had prophesied the failure of "the system."
His end seemed to each young exile a personal admonition; they had
known him strong and spirited, and with them he had grown poor and
unhappy. Poverty is a warning that talks like the wind, and we do not
heed it; but death raps at our door with bony knuckles, so that we grow
pale and think.
They shuddered, though they were hardened young men, so unfeeling,
even after this reprimand, that they would have left the corpse of their
companion to go unhonored to its grave; separately they wished to do
so--in community they were ashamed; and Pisgah had half a hope that
somebody would demur when he said, awkwardly:
"The Colony must attend the funeral, I suppose. God knows which of
us will take the next turn."

Freckle cried out, however, that he should go, if he were to be buried
alive in the same tomb, and on this occasion only he appeared in the
light of an influential spirit.

IV.
THE DESPERATE CHANCE.
During all this time Mr. Auburn Risque, packed away in the omnibus
train, with a cheap cigar between his lips, and a face like a refrigerator,
was scudding over the rolling provinces