Part 6 (1/2)
The convalescent walked meditatively toward his quarters, with a faint feeling of having been found asleep on duty and awakened by a pa.s.sing stranger. It was an unpleasant feeling, and he caught himself more than once shaking his head. He stopped, at length, and looked back; but the Creole was long since out of sight. The mortified self-accuser little knew how very similar a feeling that vanished person was carrying away with him. He turned and resumed his walk, wondering who Monsieur might be, and a little impatient with himself that he had not asked.
”It is Honore Grandissime; it must be he!” he said.
Yet see how soon he felt obliged to change his mind.
CHAPTER VIII
SIGNED--HONORe GRANDISSIME
On the afternoon of the same day, having decided what he would ”do,” he started out in search of new quarters. He found nothing then, but next morning came upon a small, single-story building in the rue Royale,--corner of Conti,--which he thought would suit his plans. There were a door and show-window in the rue Royale, two doors in the intersecting street, and a small apartment in the rear which would answer for sleeping, eating, and studying purposes, and which connected with the front apartment by a door in the left-hand corner. This connection he would partially conceal by a prescription-desk. A counter would run lengthwise toward the rue Royale, along the wall opposite the side-doors. Such was the spot that soon became known as ”Frowenfeld's Corner.”
The notice ”a Louer” directed him to inquire at numero--rue Conde. Here he was ushered through the wicket of a _porte cochere_ into a broad, paved corridor, and up a stair into a large, cool room, and into the presence of a man who seemed, in some respects, the most remarkable figure he had yet seen in this little city of strange people. A strong, clear, olive complexion; features that were faultless (unless a woman-like delicacy, that was yet not effeminate, was a fault); hair _en queue_, the handsomer for its premature streakings of gray; a tall, well knit form, attired in cloth, linen and leather of the utmost fineness; manners Castilian, with a gravity almost oriental,--made him one of those rare masculine figures which, on the public promenade, men look back at and ladies inquire about.
Now, who might _this_ be? The rent poster had given no name. Even the incurious Frowenfeld would fain guess a little. For a man to be just of this sort, it seemed plain that he must live in an isolated ease upon the unceasing droppings of coupons, rents, and like receivables. Such was the immigrant's first conjecture; and, as with slow, scant questions and answers they made their bargain, every new glance strengthened it; he was evidently a _rentier_. What, then, was his astonishment when Monsieur bent down and made himself Frowenfeld's landlord, by writing what the universal mind esteemed the synonym of enterprise and activity--the name of Honore Grandissime. The landlord did not see, or ignored, his tenant's glance of surprise, and the tenant asked no questions.
We may add here an incident which seemed, when it took place, as unimportant as a single fact well could be.
The little sum that Frowenfeld had inherited from his father had been sadly depleted by the expenses of four funerals; yet he was still able to pay a month's rent in advance, to supply his shop with a scant stock of drugs, to purchase a celestial globe and some scientific apparatus, and to buy a dinner or two of sausages and crackers; but after this there was no necessity of hiding his purse.
His landlord early contracted a fondness for dropping in upon him, and conversing with him, as best the few and labored English phrases at his command would allow. Frowenfeld soon noticed that he never entered the shop unless its proprietor was alone, never sat down, and always, with the same perfection of dignity that characterized all his movements, departed immediately upon the arrival of any third person. One day, when the landlord was making one of these standing calls,--he always stood'
beside a high gla.s.s case, on the side of the shop opposite the counter,--he noticed in Joseph's hand a sprig of basil, and spoke of it.
”You ligue?”
The tenant did not understand. ”You--find--dad--nize?”
Frowenfeld replied that it had been left by the oversight of a customer, and expressed a liking for its odor.
”I sand you,” said the landlord,--a speech whose meaning Frowenfeld was not sure of until the next morning, when a small, nearly naked black boy, who could not speak a word of English, brought to the apothecary a luxuriant bunch of this basil, growing in a rough box.
CHAPTER IX
ILl.u.s.tRATING THE TRACTIVE POWER OF BASIL
On the twenty-fourth day of December, 1803, at two o'clock, P.M., the thermometer standing at 79, hygrometer 17, barometer 29.880, sky partly clouded, wind west, light, the apothecary of the rue Royale, now something more than a month established in his calling, might have been seen standing behind his counter and beginning to show embarra.s.sment in the presence of a lady, who, since she had got her prescription filled and had paid for it, ought in the conventional course of things to have hurried out, followed by the pathetically ugly black woman who tarried at the door as her attendant; for to be in an apothecary's shop at all was unconventional. She was heavily veiled; but the sparkle of her eyes, which no multiplication of veils could quite extinguish, her symmetrical and well-fitted figure, just escaping smallness, her grace of movement, and a soft, joyous voice, had several days before led Frowenfeld to the confident conclusion that she was young and beautiful.
For this was now the third time she had come to buy; and, though the purchases were unaccountably trivial, the purchaser seemed not so. On the two previous occasions she had been accompanied by a slender girl, somewhat taller than she, veiled also, of graver movement, a bearing that seemed to Joseph almost too regal, and a discernible unwillingness to enter or tarry. There seemed a certain family resemblance between her voice and that of the other, which proclaimed them--he incautiously a.s.sumed--sisters. This time, as we see, the smaller, and probably elder, came alone.
She still held in her hand the small silver which Frowenfeld had given her in change, and sighed after the laugh they had just enjoyed together over a slip in her English. A very grateful sip of sweet the laugh was to the all but friendless apothecary, and the embarra.s.sment that rushed in after it may have arisen in part from a conscious casting about in his mind for something--anything--that might prolong her stay an instant. He opened his lips to speak; but she was quicker than he, and said, in a stealthy way that seemed oddly unnecessary:
”You 'ave some basilic?”
She accompanied her words with a little peeping movement, directing his attention, through the open door, to his box of basil, on the floor in the rear room.
Frowenfeld stepped back to it, cut half the bunch and returned, with the bold intention of making her a present of it; but as he hastened back to the spot he had left, he was astonished to see the lady disappearing from his farthest front door, followed by her negress.