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He stepped across to where the old man sat, with his bald head shining like ivory under the gas-jet, and his fine patriarchal length of bearded mask taking picturesque lights and shadows, and put out his hand to him. "Lindau! Isn't this Mr. Lindau?" The old man lifted himself slowly to his feet with mechanical politeness, and cautiously took March's hand.
As he set the flask down he made the reflection that if he would drink water instead of Chianti he could send his father three dollars a week, on his back debts, and he resolved to do it. "The main question, as March looks at it, is the question of punishing Lindau for his private opinions; he says that if he consents to my bouncing the old fellow it's the same as if he bounced him."
Fulkerson squared his feet in front of the bust and compared it by fleeting glances with the old man as he got stiffly up and suffered Beaton to help him on with his thin, shabby overcoat. "Can you come to-morrow, Lindau?" "No, not to-morrow, Mr. Peaton. I haf to zit for the young ladties." "Oh!" said Beaton. "Wet-more's class? Is Miss Leighton doing you?"
If he could have taken the living Lindau home with him, and cared for him all his days, what would it have profited the gentle creature whose life his worldly ambition vexed and thwarted here? He might as well offer a sacrifice at Conrad's grave. Children," said March, turning to them, "death is an exile that no remorse and no love can reach.
While the steamboat lay at the wharf at Rorschach, two stout porters came on board, and shouldered his baggage to take it ashore. To his remonstrances in English they paid no heed; and it was some time before they could be made to understand that the trunks were to go on to Lindau. "There," said he, "I should have lost my trunks. Nobody understands what I tell them: I can't get any information."
All the rest listened silently, except Lindau; at every point the colonel made against the present condition of things he said more and more fiercely, "You are righdt, you are righdt." His eyes glowed, his hand played with his knife-hilt. When the colonel demanded, "And what is the next thing?" he threw himself forward, and repeated: "Yes, sir! What is the next thing?"
"You don't mean to say that man was an impostor! And I've gone about, ever since, feeling that one such case in a million, the bare possibility of it, was enough to justify all that Lindau said about the rich and the poor!" March laughed teasingly. "Oh, I don't say he was an impostor.
Lindau could probably find as cheap a lodging in some decenter part of the town; and, in fact, there was some amelioration of the prevailing squalor in the quieter street which he turned into from Mott. A woman with a tied-up face of toothache opened the door for him when he pulled, with a shiver of foreboding, the bell-knob, from which a yard of rusty crape dangled.
Fulkerson squared his feet in front of the bust and compared it by fleeting glances with the old man as he got stiffly up and suffered Beaton to help him on with his thin, shabby overcoat. "Can you come to-morrow, Lindau?" "No, not to-morrow, Mr. Peaton. I haf to zit for the young ladties." "Oh!" said Beaton. "Wet-more's class? Is Miss Leighton doing you?"
"He was a pretty cay poy in those days, heigh, Lindau?" asked Fulkerson, burlesquing the old man's accent, with an impudent wink that made Lindau himself laugh. "But in the dark ages, I mean, there in Indianapolis. Just how long ago did you old codgers meet there, anyway?"
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