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"Sire, you know the story." "I know your story, but who bears witness to it? Do you, maiden, Castell the merchant's daughter?" "Aye, Sire. The man whom my cousin killed maltreated me, whose only wrong was that I waited to see your Grace pass by. Look on my torn cloak." "Little wonder that he killed him for the sake of those eyes of yours, maiden. But this witness may be tainted."
He never expressed publicly at least any preference for Royalism, Republicanism, or Imperialism; for fleur-de-lis, bonnet-rouge, or tricolore: in short, Jean Baptiste Véron was a stern, taciturn, self-absorbed man of business; and as nothing else was universally concluded, till the installation of a quasi legitimacy by Napoleon Bonaparte, when a circumstance, slight in itself, gave a clearer significance to the cold, haughty, repellent expression which played habitually about the merchant's gray, deep-set eyes, and thin, firmly-compressed lips.
She was quite cracked, into the bargain, and must have been born with a glass of absinthe in her stomach, which her mother drank at the moment she was being delivered, and she never got sober since, for her wet nurse, so she said, recruited her strength with draughts of rum, and she never called the bottles which were standing in a line at the back of the wine merchant's shop anything but 'My holy family.
I was relieved now, and could say all my say without any furtivenesses and without embarrassment. So I began: "Let us put sentiment and patriotic illusions aside, and look at the facts in the face. What do they say? They speak as plainly as the figures in a merchant's account-book.
The solemn moment had come; the pompa was about to begin. In the merchant's ward slaves hung red and green bunting from roof to roof which shaded the streets. The windows and terraces were draped with multicolored tapestries of complicated design, and slave women placed censers in the doorways for burning perfumes.
It was easy to believe after this that the princess was really going to marry a Turkish angel. As soon as the merchant's son had come down in his flying trunk to the wood after the fireworks, he thought, "I will go back into the town now, and hear what they think of the entertainment." It was very natural that he should wish to know.
I was startled by the hearty voice of the merchant's son. "Ah, my dear Fenwick, I was afraid you would not come, you are late. There is the new friend of whom I spoke to you last night; let me now make you acquainted with him." He drew my arm in his, and led me up to the young man, where he stood under the arching flowers, and whom he then introduced to me by the name of Margrave.
Right glad to get sight of your face again!" said the other familiarly, as he grasped the merchant's passive hand, and squeezed it until the joints cracked. "When did you arrive in the city?" returned Jasper, as he reached his visitor a chair. He did not speak with much warmth; and yet there was an effort to be at ease and cordial.
There was a formal, questioning note in the merchant's voice. "That is my name, yes, sir. Er Mr. Grafton," and, as though to refresh his memory, the colonel glanced at the card on his desk. "You are a private detective?" "Yes." Mr. Grafton was evidently sparring for time. He seemed uneasy he looked uneasy, and it required no very astute mind to know that he was uneasy out of his element.
Change the scene to any real street; to the Stock Exchange, or the City banker's; the merchant's counting- house, or even the tradesman's shop. See any one of these men fall, the more suddenly, and the nearer the zenith of his pride and riches, the better. What a wild hallo is raised over his prostrate carcase by the shouting mob; how they whoop and yell as he lies humbled beneath them!
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