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Updated: June 19, 2025
I strained my eyes through the darkness. Presently a small object floated within a few feet of the boat, which was rapidly passing it. It shone in the torchlight. I struck at it with a boat-hook, and brought it on board. It was a man's cap, covered with oilskin, and I remembered Van Haubitz wore such a one.
All were disgusted at his irregularities, angry at his marriage, incredulous of his promises of reform; and, after passing a miserable month in Amsterdam, he set out to accompany his wife to Vienna, whither she was compelled to repair under pain of fine and forfeiture of her engagement. Van Haubitz told me all this, and many other details, with an air of gloomy despondency.
"Worse quarters than we used to meet in," said he, with a bitter smile. "I will not ask you into this dog-hole. Wait an instant, and I will walk with you." Badly as I thought of Van Haubitz, and indisposed as I was to keep up any acquaintance with such an unprincipled adventurer, I had not the heart, seeing him so miserable and down in the world, to turn my back upon him at once.
Scarcely had I done so, when a carriage drove up at a rattling pace, a small spit of a boy in a smart green suit, and with an ambiguous sort of coronet embroidered in silver on the front of his cap, jumped off and opened the door, and there emerged from the vehicle, to my infinite dismay, the inevitable Van Haubitz.
Whereupon Lieutenant Van Haubitz passed half an hour in heaping maledictions on the head of his disobliging commander, and then sat down and wrote an application for an exchange to the authorities in Holland.
Breakfasts at the Rocher, dinners at the Café, balls at the opera, and the concomitant petits soupers and écarté parties with the fair denizens of the Quartier Lorette, soon operated a prodigious chasm in the monkey-money, as Van Haubitz irreverently styled his venerable aunt's bequest.
I was getting into bed that night, when Van Haubitz knocked at my door, and entered the room with a downcast and dejected air, very different from his usual boisterous headlong manner. "I am off to Holland," he said; "'tis my only chance, bad though it be." "I sincerely wish you success," replied I. "In any case, do not despair; something will turn up.
This had a good effect, establishing my connexion with the rich house of Van Haubitz; and I have taken care to confirm the favourable impression by the profuse expenditure which you, in your ignorance, have called extravagance, by treating money as if its abundance in my coffers made it valueless in my eyes, and by delicate generosity in the shape of presents to mother and daughter.
"Farewell, then, to the thousand franc note " "Pooh! Nonsense! You don't suppose I throw away my last cash that way. The Frankfort jewellers know me well, or think they do, which is the same thing. They have seen enough of my coin since I have been at Homburg. For them, as for my excellent mother-in-law, I am the wealthy partner in the undoubted good firm of Van Haubitz, Krummwinkel, & Co.
Haubitz junior took patience for another year, and then, in a moment of extreme disgust and ennui, threw up his commission and returned to Europe, trusting, he told me, that after five years' absence, the governor's bowels would yearn towards his youngest-born. In this he was entirely mistaken; he greatly underrated the toughness of paternal viscera.
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