That was the end of the letter. And for my part, with the sole exception of Georges Saint-Cyr, I never heard of any man who became rich over the tables of Monte Carlo.
V. Noemi; or, the Silver Ribbon
I.
I have often heard practising physicians and students of pathology a.s.sert that no one ever died of "a broken heart,"--that is, of course, in the popular sense of the phrase. Rupture of the heart, such as that which killed the pa.s.sionate tyrant John of Muscovy, is a rare accident, and has no connection with the mental trouble and strain implied in the common expression "heart-breaking." I have, however, my own theory upon this question,--a theory founded on some tolerably strong evidence which might serve more scientifically- minded persons than myself as a text for a medical thesis; but, as for me, I am no writer of theses, and had much ado to get honestly through the only production of the sort which ever issued from my pen, my These de Doctorat. For I studied the divine art of AEsculapius at the Ecole de Medicine of Paris, and it was there, just before taking my degree, that I became involved in a singular little history, the circ.u.mstances of which first led me to adopt my present views on the subject alluded to in the opening words of this story.
It is now many years since I inhabited the "students" quarter" in the gay city, and rented a couple of little rooms in an hotel meuble not far from the gardens of the Luxembourg. Medical students are never rich, and I was no exception to the rule, though, compared with many of my a.s.sociates, my pecuniary position was one of enviable affluence. I had a library of my own, I drank wine at a franc the litre, and occasionally smoked cigars. My little apartment overlooked a wide street busy with incessant traffic, and on warm evenings, after returning from dinner at the restaurant round the corner, it was my habit to throw open my window-cas.e.m.e.nt and lean out to inhale the fresh cool air of the coming night, and to watch the crowds of foot-pa.s.sengers and vehicles going and coming like swarms of ants along the paved street below.
On a certain lovely July evening towards the close of my student career, I took up my favourite position as usual, luxuriating in the fumes of my cigarette and in that sweetest of mental enjoyments, absolute idleness, carried at the cost of hard and long-continued toil. The sun had but just gone down, the sky was brilliant with pink lights and mellow tints of golden green blending with the blue of the deep vault overhead, scores of swift-darting birds were wheeling about in the still air, uttering sharp clear cries, as though calling one another to rest below, women stood at their house-doors gossiping with their neighbours; peals of laughter and the incessant chatter of feminine voices mingled with the din of horses" hoofs on the hard road and with the never-ending jingle of the harness-bells.
Gazing lazily down into the street, my attention was suddenly arrested by the singular appearance and behavior of an odd-looking brown dog, which seemed to be seeking someone among the hurrying crowds and rattling carts. Half-a-dozen times he ran up the street and disappeared from view, only to retrace his steps, each time with increasing agitation and eagerness of manner. I saw him cross the street again and again, scan the faces of the pa.s.sersby, dash up the various turnings and come panting back, his tongue, his tail drooping; one could even fancy there were tears in his eyes. At length, exhausted or despairing, he crossed the street for the last time and sat down on the doorstep of the house I inhabited, the picture of grief and dismay. He was lost! Now I had not served my five years" apprenticeship to medical science in Paris without becoming intimate with the horrible secrets of physiological laboratories.
I knew that a lost dog in Paris, if not handsome, and valuable to sell as a pet, runs a terrible chance of falling directly or indirectly into the hands of vivisecting professors, and dying a death of torture.
He may be picked up by an employee engaged in the search for fitting victims, and so handed over to immediate martyrdom, or he may be hurried off to languish for weeks in that horrible fourriere for lost dogs whose managers hang their wretched captives by fifties every Tuesday, and liberally supply the demands of all the physiologists who take the trouble to send to them for "subjects." Knowing these things, and perceiving that my concierge was absorbed in discussing scandal on the opposite side of the street, I took advantage of her absence from her post to slip down to the rez-de-chaussee, pounce on the unfortunate dog, whom I found seated hopelessly at the entrance, and smuggle him upstairs into my rooms. There I deposited him on the floor, patted him encouragingly, and gave him water and a couple of sweet biscuits. But he was abjectly miserable, and though he drank a little, would eat nothing. After taking two or three turns round the apartment and sniffing suspiciously at the legs of the chairs and wainscot of the walls, he returned to me where I stood with my back to the window watching him, looked up in my face, wagged his tail feebly, and whined. I stooped again to caress him, and, so doing, observed that he had, tied round his neck, and half-hidden in his rough brown hair, a ribbon of silver tinsel, uncommon both in material and design. I felt a.s.sured that the dog"s owner must be a woman, and hastily removed the ribbon, expecting to find embroidered upon it some such name as "Amelie"
or "Leontine." But my examination proved futile, the silver ribbon afforded me no clue to the antecedents of my canine waif. And indeed, as I stood contemplating him in some perplexity, the conviction forced itself on my mind that he was not exactly the kind of animal that Amelie or Leontine would be likely to select for a pet. He was a poodle certainly, but of an ill-bred and uncouth description, and instead of being shaved to his centre, and wearing frills round his paws, his coat had been suffered to grow in its natural manner,-- an indication either of neglect or of want of taste impossible in a feminine proprietor. But his fact was the most puzzling and at the same time the most fascinating thing about him. It bore a more human expression than I had ever before seen upon a dog"s countenance, an expression of singular appeal and childishness, so comic withal in its contrast with the rough hair, round eyes, and long nose of the creature, that as I watched him an involuntary laugh escaped me.
"Certainly," I said to him, "you are a droll dog. One might do a good deal with you in a traveling caravan!" As the evening wore on he became more tranquil. Perhaps he began to have confidence in me and to believe that I should restore him to his owner. At any rate, before we retired to rest he prevailed on himself to eat some supper which I prepared for him, pausing every now and then in his meal to lift his infantile face to mine and wag his tail in a half-hearted manner, as though he said, "You see I am doing my best to trust you, though you are a medical student!" Poor innocent beast! Well indeed for him that he had not chanced to stop at the door of my neighbor and camarade, Paul Bouchard, who had a pa.s.sion for practical physiology, and with whom no amount of animal suffering was of the smallest importance when weighed against the remote chance of an insignificant discovery, which would be challenged and contradicted as soon as announced by scores of his fellow- experimentalists. If torture were indeed the true method of science, then would the vaunted tree of knowledge be no other than the upas tree of oriental legend, beneath whose fatal shadow lie hecatombs of miserable victims slain by its poisonous exhalations, the odour of which is fraught with agony and death!
My poodle remained with me many days. No one appeared to claim him, and no inquiries elicited the least information regarding him. A douceur of five francs had soothed the natural indignation and resentment displayed by my concierge at the first sight of my canine protege; the restlessness and suspicion he had evinced on making my acquaintance had subsided; and we were getting on in a very comfortable and friendly manner together, when accident threw in my way the clue I had laboriously but vainly sought. Returning one day from a lecture, and being unusually pressed for time, I took a shorter cut homeward than was my wont, and at the corner of a narrow and ill-smelling street I came upon a little heterogeneous shop, in the windows of which were set out a variety of faded and bizarre articles of millinery. Hanging from a front shelf in a conspicuous position among the collection was a strip of the identical silver ribbon which had encircled Pepin"s throat--I called the dog Pepin--on the night I rescued him from the streets. Without hesitation I entered the shop and questioned a slatternly woman who sat behind the counter munching gruyere cheese and garlic.
"Will you tell me, madame," said I with my most agreeable air, "whether you recollect having sold any of that tinsel ribbon lately, and to whom?"
She was not likely to have much custom, I thought, and her clients would be easily remembered.
"What"s that to you?" was her retort, as she paused in her meal and stared at me; "do you want to buy the rest of it?"
I took the hint immediately, and produced my purse. "With all the pleasure in life," I said, "if you will do me the favour I ask."
She darted a keen look at me, laughed, pushed her cheese aside, and took the ribbon from its place in the shop window.
"I sold half a metre of it about three weeks ago," said she slowly, "to Noemi Bergeron; you know her, perhaps? She"s not been this way lately. There"s a metre of it left; it"s one franc twenty, monsieur."
"And where does Noemi Bergeron live?" I asked, as she dropped the money into her till.
"Well, she used to lodge at number ten in this street, with Maman Paquet. Maybe she"s gone. I"ve not seen either her or her dog this fortnight."
"A poodle dog," cried I eagerly, "with his coat unclipped,--a rough brown dog?"
"Yes, exactly. Ah, you know Noemi,--bien sur!" And she leered at me, and laughed again unpleasantly.
"I never saw her in my life," said I hotly; "but her dog has come astray to my lodgings, and he had a piece of this ribbon of yours round his throat; nothing more than that."
"Ah? Well, she lives at number ten. Tenez,--there"s Maman Paquet the other side of the street; you"d better go and speak to her."
She pointed to a hideous old harridan standing on the opposite pavement, her bare arms resting on her hips, and a greasy yellow kerchief twisted turban-wise round her head. My heart sank. Noemi must be very poor, or very unfortunate, to live under the same roof with such an old sorciere! Nevertheless, I crossed the street, and accosted the hag with a smile.
"Good-day, Maman Paquet. Can you tell me anything of your lodger, Noemi Bergeron?"
"Hein?" She was deaf and surly. I repeated my question in a louder key. "I know nothing of her," she answered, in a voice that sounded like the croak of a frog. "She couldn"t pay me her rent, and I told her to be off. Maybe she"s drowned by this."
"You turned her out?" I cried.
"Yes, turned her out," repeated the hag, with a savage oath. "It was her own fault; she might have sold her beast of a poodle to pay me, and she wouldn"t. Why not, I should like to know,--she sold everything else she had!"
"And you can tell me nothing about her now,--you know no more than that?"
"Nothing. Go and find her!" She muttered a curse, glared at me viciously, and hobbled off. I had turned to depart in another direction, when a skinny hand suddenly clutched my arm, and looking round, I found that Maman Paquet had followed and overtaken me.
"You know the girl," she squeaked, eyeing me greedily,--"will you pay her rent? She owed me a month"s lodging, seven francs."
She looked so loathsome and horrible with her withered evil face so close to mine that I gave a gesture of disgust and shook her off as though she had been a toad.
"No," said I, quickening my steps; "she is a stranger to me, and my pockets are empty."
Maman Paquet flung a curse after me, more foul and emphatic than the last, and went her way blaspheming.
I returned home to Pepin saddened and disquieted. "So, after all,"
I said to him, "your owner belongs to the fair s.e.x! But, heaven!
in what misery she and you must have lived! And yet you cried for her, Pepin!"
Not long after these incidents--three or four days at the latest-- a party of my fellow-students came to smoke with me, and as the sh.e.l.l always sounds of the sea, our conversation naturally savoured of our professional pursuits. We discussed our hospital chefs, their crotchets, their inventions, their medical successes, their politics; we criticised new methods of operation, related anecdotes of the theatre and consulting-room, and speculated on the chances of men about to go up for examination. Then we touched on the subject of obscure diseases, unusual mental conditions, prolonged delirium, and kindred topics. It was at this point that one of us, Eugene Grellois, a house-surgeon at a neighbouring hospital, remarked,--
"By the way, we have a curious case now in the women"s ward of my service, a pretty little Alsatian girl of eighteen or twenty. She was knocked down by a cart about three weeks ago and was brought in with a fracture of the neck of the left humerus, and two ribs broken. Well, there was perforation of the pleura, traumatic pleurisy and fever, and her temperature went up as high as 41-8.
She was delirious for three days, and talked incessantly; we had to put her in a separate cabinet, so that the other patients might not be disturbed. I sat by her bed for hours and listened. You never heard such odd things as she said. She let me into the whole of her history that way. I don"t think I should have cared for it though, if she were not so wonderfully pretty!"
"Was it a love story, Eugene?" asked Auguste Villemin, laughing.
"Not a bit of it; it was all about a dog who seemed to be her pet.
Such an extraordinary dog! From what she said I gathered that he was a brown poodle, that he could stand on his head, and walk on his hind paws, that he followed her about wherever she went, that he carved in wood for ill.u.s.trated books and journals, that he wore a silver collar, that she was engaged to be married to him when he had earned enough to keep house, and that his name was Antoine!"
All his hearers laughed except myself. As for me, my heart bounded, my face flushed, I was sensible of a keen sensation of pleasure in hearing Eugene describe his patient as "wonderfully pretty." I leapt from my chair, pointed to Pepin, who lay dozing in a corner of the room, and exclaimed,--
"I will wager anything that the name of your Alsatian is Noemi Bergeron, and that my dog there is Antoine himself!" And before any questions could be put I proceeded to recount the circ.u.mstances with which my reader is already acquainted. Of course Pepin was immediately summoned into the midst of the circle we had formed round the open window to have his reputed accomplishments tested as a criterion of his ident.i.ty with Antoine. Amid bursts of laughter and a clamour of encouragement and approbation, it was discovered that my canine protege possessed at least the first two of the qualifications imputed to him, and could walk on his hind legs or stand on his head for periods apparently unlimited.
In fact, so obedient and willing we found him, that when for the third time he had inverted himself, no persuasion short of picking him up by his tail, a proceeding which I deemed necessary to avert asphyxia, could induce him to resume his normal position. But that which rendered the entertainment specially fascinating and ludicrous was the inimitable and unbroken gravity of Pepin"s expression. No matter what his att.i.tude, his eyes retained always the solemnity one observes in the eyes of an infant to whom everything in the world is serious and nothing grotesque.
"But now for the engraving on wood!" cried Jules Leuret, when we had exhausted ourselves with laughing. "What a pity you have no implements of the art here, Gervais!"
"That"s Eugene"s chaff!" I cried. "Noemi never said anything of the sort, I warrant!"
"On my honour she did," said he, emphatically. "Come and see her tomorrow; she"s quite sane now, no fever left at all. She"ll be delighted to hear that you have her dog, and will tell you all about him, no doubt."
"After the chefs visit, then, and we"ll breakfast together at noon."