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Until I gazed upon the dead I did not feel quite sure of the identity of this pious Sister of Charity. But I only needed to look once upon the ghastly pallor, the ugly lip mark and the long slender figure on the bed before me to recognize her who had once been Mdme. Martinetti. "And now for the paper," I said. "It will be in the room that was hers, if monsieur will accompany."
Martinetti, asks you now if in what may be your last moments, you have anything to tell, anything to declare, or anybody to pardon. He would also ask what was done to the parrot? He, with his friend M. De Kock, were at your house in New York the night your husband disappeared." "Give her that," said I to the waiting sister, "and I will come to see how she is to-morrow."
The next moment we were in a kind of sitting room over the restaurant proper. Madame Martinetti lay as if exhausted on a sofa while the highly excited parrot sang and screamed and tore at its cage as if for life. Giuseppe was nowhere visible. "Now then where's the other?" demanded the policeman who had just entered behind us, "There's always two at this business. Show him up, now."
"Stay and dine with me tonight," Thorpe impulsively suggested, "and we'll go to some Music Hall afterward. There's a knock-about pantomime outfit at the Canterbury Martinetti I think the name is that's damned good. You get plenty of laugh, and no tiresome blab to listen to. The older I get, the more I think of people that keep their mouths shut." "Aye," observed Semple again.
Jane May and a French Company of Pantomimists. There are, however, several other very brilliant Pantomimists excellent in their Art, like the Martinetti troupe, the two brothers Renad, and the Leopolds.
I have seen the last of Madame; in all probability I shall see the last of the Pea-Green Parrot, and I cannot help wondering when I enter a cafe or ride on an omnibus whether I shall ever run across Giuseppe Martinetti in the flesh, or whether the last of him was seen in truth, five years ago. The Bishop of Saskabasquia. I have not a story, properly speaking, to tell about him.
"If throwing a cloth over your head would stop you, I'd do it, my dear," said I. To my surprise, it ceased its noise directly, and became perfectly quiet. Madame Martinetti looked around with a contemptuous smile. "You have the secret as well," said she. The bird turned to her and then returned to me. I became quite interested in it. "Pretty Poll, pretty bird; would you like a cracker?"
Why, he hugs it, and kisses it, and mows over it look at him now!" Sure, enough, there was Martinetti with the bird on his finger, kissing it, and otherwise making a fool of himself. He finished by actually putting it away inside his coat in a kind of breast pocket, I should imagine. "All this is good for business, perhaps," I said. "What, the parrot and so on?
The affair was dismissed in three lines, and although as De Kock swore, the case was one for Gaboriau, it certainly was not our business to look into it and in fact in a week's time I was back in Canada, and he up to his eyes in commercial pursuits. The main point remained clear, however, that Martinetti did not come back, nor was he found, or traced or ever heard of again.
You have had a soup, a mutton-chop, a triangle of pie, a lager beer, but you have not dined. You are not starving, and yet you have, from my present point of view, eaten nothing the whole of this day. Mon cher, it is necessary that you should dine for once in your life. Allons! We go to Giuseppe, Giuseppe Martinetti with the pale wife and the pea-green parrot allons, allons!"
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