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Updated: May 12, 2025
Cyrène had the good judgment to remain in the armoury. It was several hours before they were discovered. The reason, as they concluded by listening at the door in the passage, was the exploring of the wine-cellars by the besiegers, under the guidance of Cliquet. Blows, shouts, and crashes indicated numerous acts of destruction.
He kept one of the two hundred wine-cellars of the town, and was able to give me a good supper and a glass of wine with it. He was an aged Mingrelian, bald on his crown, but lank-haired, dreamy-eyed, stooping; he had a Robinson Crusoe type of countenance. I had come to one of the oldest inhabitants of Zugdida, an extraordinary character. I asked him how the town had grown in his memory.
On her way to the butler's office she had seen a stone archway at the head of a flight of stairs leading down into darkness. By this staircase she hoped to find the wine-cellars, and presently descended, her candlestick in one hand, and the two great keys in the other.
There, my dear child, put down the cup, and yield your place to this elderly gentleman, who treads so tenderly over the paving-stones, that I suspect he is afraid of breaking them. What! he limps by, without so much as thanking me, as if my hospitable offers were meant only for people who have no wine-cellars. Well, well, sir, no harm done, I hope!
True, he gave me gold; but he also taught me how to use this devil-key which unlocks the pathways of the world, wine-cellars and women's hearts. Respect? Has he ever taken me by the hand as natural fathers take their sons, and asked me to be his comrade? Has he ever taught me to rise to heights, to scorn the petty forms and molds of life?
What a villainous mess! These vulgar, showy rich! That champagne! He said it cost him six dollars a bottle, and no doubt it did. I doubt if it ever saw France. The dealers rarely waste genuine wine on such cattle. The wine-cellars of fine houses the world through are the laughing-stock of connoisseurs like their picture-galleries and their other attempts to make money do the work of taste.
In the wine-cellars, they forced their way into the earthen vessels: displacing the wine and choking them, to the brim, with dust. In the tombs, they forced the ashes of the dead from the funeral urns, and rained new ruin even into them. The mouths, and eyes, and skulls of all the skeletons, were stuffed with this terrible hail.
They told me that if I visited America I should be regaled privately with champagne from the huge reserves of private wine-cellars, but that as a resident I should be forbidden to drink anything that enlivened me. It was a great shock. I am not yet recovered from it. I see that I shall after all have to live quietly in England with my pipe and my abstemious bottle of beer.
"My reputation having crossed the ocean, through the men who knew me on Broadway coming over to visit friends in London, the Earl heard of me, and cabled me my expenses and an offer of double the salary I was getting there; so I snapped it up immediately, and here I am, in full charge of the ancient Puddingham wine-cellars." And Harrigan cleared his throat, threw out his chest, and winked at me.
"Store-rooms or wine-cellars, perhaps," Godfrey ventured, mounted the stairs again to the kitchen, and returned to the room whence we had started. Everything there was as we had left it. The dead man sat huddled forward in his chair; Swain was still on his knees beside the couch; the girl had not stirred.
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