Lippincotts Magazine, January 1875 | Page 3

of Acheron when a strong hand entered the carriage-door, helped me handsomely down the steps, and then began warmly to shake my own. Fortnoye!--Fortnoye in flesh and blood was before me. While my mouth was yet filled with maledictions he began to pour out a storm of thanks with all his own particular warmth, expressing the most effusive gratitude for the trouble I had taken in forsaking my route to be his wife's bridesmaid. That is what he called it. "She has but one other," said Fortnoye. At the same time I began to recognize other faces not unknown to me, crudely illuminated by the raw colors of the railway-lights. They all had black wedding-suits and enormous buttonhole nosegays of orange-flowers. I picked them out, with a particular recognition for each: 'twas the civil engineer of Noisy; the short gentleman named Somerard; James Athanasius Grandstone, with his saintly aureole upon him in the shape of a Yankee wide-awake; the nameless mutes, or rather chorus, of the champagne-crypt; in short, my nest of serpents in all its integrity. Still entangled with my slumbers, I hesitated to respond to the friendly hands that were everywhere thrust centripetally toward me.
I looked blackly at Hohenfels. He was chuckling.
At Heidelberg, making the acquaintance of M. Fortnoye contemporaneously with my departure, he had become more enthralled than he ever confessed to this radiant traveler--whom he called a packman, but regarded as a Mercury--and his pretty scheme of matrimony in motion. Even now, if I can believe my eyes, he goes up to the "vintner" and "peddler" of his objurgations, and meekly whispers into his ear with the air of a conspirator reporting a plot to his chief. Having engaged to produce me at the wedding of Fortnoye, and finding me unexpectedly recusant, he had adopted a little stratagem for bringing me to the scene while thinking to escape from it.
"Thou too, Brutus!" I said, and gave it up. It only remained for me to return all round, after five minutes of petrified stupidity, the hand-grasps that had been offered from every quarter of the compass-box.
Next morning, at an early hour, I was interrupted by a knock, just as Charles had buttoned my gaiters and the young man from the perruquier's (who had stolen in with that air of delicacy and of almost literary refinement which belongs to his gentle profession) had lathered me. A nick he gave my chin at the shock made my countenance all argent and gules, and the visitor entering saw me thus emblazoned, while the barber and Charles, "like two wild men supporters of a shield," could only stare at the untimely apparition.
"Do you know him, Charles?" I asked, not recognizing my guest, and putting over my painted face a mask of wet toweling.
"I know him intimately," replied my jester-in-ordinary: "I would thank Monsieur Paul just to tell me his name. Do you remember, monsieur, a sort of beggar, with a wagon and a stylish horse and a pretty wife, who limped a bit with his right hand, or perhaps his left hand? Does monsieur know what I mean? He used to come and see us at Passy; and monsieur even had some traffic with him in a little matter of two chickens."
"Father Joliet!" I cried.
"Present!" shouted the personage thus designated at my appeal to his name. I turned round, toweled, and he grasped my hands. The unusual hour, appropriate as I supposed only to some porter or other stipendiary visitor of my hotel, caused to shine out with startling refulgence the morning splendors in which Papa Joliet had arrayed himself. He wore a courtly dress, appropriate to the most formal possible ceremony; his black suit was glossy; his hat was glossy; his varnished pumps were more than glossy--they were phosphorescent. Gloves only were wanting to his honest hands.
[Illustration: PERRUQUIER.]
Soaped, napkined and generally extinguished, I could only stammer, "You here in Brussels? What a droll meeting!"
"Wherefore droll?" asked Joliet, with a huge surprise, which lasted him all through his next sentence. "I come here to marry my daughter. Everything is ready; we count on your presence at the wedding; the lawyer has drawn up the contract; and the breakfast is now cooking at the best restaurant in the place."
"Francine's wedding, my dear Joliet!" I exclaimed. And, going back to my apprehensions at her furtive disappearance from Carlsruhe, and to my conjectures of some amorous mystery between her and her Yankee traducer, Kraaniff, I added gravely, "It is very creditable!"
"How, creditable--and droll?" repeated the honest man, evidently much surprised at my own accumulating surprises. "Did not you hear?"
[Illustration: FATHER JOLIET.]
"Not the faintest word," I said, "but I am none the less gratified to find this affair ending, as it should, in the presence of a lawyer. As for your wedding-invitation, my good friend,