THE SPRIGHTLY ROMANCE OF MARSAC

BY MOLLY ELLIOT SEAWELL AUTHOR OF “CHILDREN OF DESTINY,” “A STRANGE SAD COMEDY,” “THROCKMORTON,” “LITTLE JARVIS,” ETC.

Illustrated by GUSTAVE VERBEEK

NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1897

Copyright, 1896, By Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Dramatic and all other rights reserved.

University Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.

NOTE.

“The Sprightly Romance of Marsac” obtained the first prize of $3,000 for the best novelette in the New York Herald competition in 1895.

[Pg ix]

List of Illustrations

[Pg xiii]

THE SPRIGHTLY ROMANCE OF MARSAC

[Pg 1]

The Sprightly Romance of Marsac[1]

[1] Dramatic and all other rights reserved.

Chapter I

Madame Schmid, round and red, with the spotless lappets of her washerwoman’s cap flapping angrily, was plainly in a rage; and the three loud whacks she gave at the garret door of 17 Rue Montignal caused two young gentlemen on the other side of the door to quake visibly. One of them, Fontaine, ran incontinently into a closet and hid, while Marsac, the other, after a ghastly pretence of a joke about Madame Schmid’s whacks sounding like the three given at the Comédie Française before the curtain goes up, stalked[Pg 2] with dignity to a corridor door. But, Madame Schmid bouncing in suddenly, Marsac as suddenly whisked out of sight.

Madame Schmid was of that coarse, buxom beauty common enough in her class. She had one year been elected queen of the washer-women, in that picturesque festival peculiar to Paris, and it had been said that fear of her stout arm and robust tongue had some share in her election. But she had a good heart, along with her vile temper; and as she planted her basket viciously on the floor, and whipped out a tremendously long bill, her quick eye took in the poverty of the surroundings, and she was softened in spite of herself. However, as one whistles going through a graveyard, so Madame[Pg 3] Schmid always stormed the more when her excellent heart prevented her from taking stronger measures.

The room was excessively shabby. A moth-eaten sofa, and a large but rickety table, covered with newspapers and the implements of the journalist’s trade, were the principal articles of furniture. The light of a gray day shone dully in at the curtainless windows. A number of pipes, together with a cracked mirror, ornamented the mantel, while scattered about the room were a violin and case, an easel, and painting materials.

Madame Schmid belonged to that large class of persons who believe that a man who engages in any form of art is necessarily a loafer. The sight of the painter’s tools, the violin, and especially the abundance of pens, ink, and paper, acted on her like a red rag on a bull, and gave her the excuse she wanted to raise a tempest. First, she exclaimed scornfully,—

[Pg 4]

“Painters!”

Next, more scornfully still,—

“Fiddlers!”

And last, with a concentration of contempt that would have made her fortune at any theatre in Paris,—

“Journalists!”

Then she began to bawl, in a voice like an auctioneer,—

“M’sieu Marsac! M’sieu Fontaine! Oh, I know you are somewhere about! This is an old dodge, running away when I come with my bill! You owe me, both of you, for seven weeks’ washing. Seven weeks have I rubbed and scrubbed for you, and I have not seen the colour of my money yet!”

Madame Schmid stopped for a moment to take breath, and then, noticing the door leading into the corridor, darted to it and began to tug vigorously at the knob. But Marsac, who was holding it on the other side, was Madame Schmid’s superior in muscle, though not in weight, and the door[Pg 5] resisted successfully. She then marched over to the closet door; but Fontaine followed Marsac’s tactics, and Madame Schmid grew still redder in the face and shorter of breath, with no better luck than at the corridor door.

At that moment a very well-dressed little man entered the room, after an almost imperceptible knock, and, unrolling a bill about a yard long, began,—

“Gentlemen, I have a little bill here—” and then, raising his eyes, he said in a surprised voice, “Why, there aren’t any gentlemen here!”

“Not if gentlemen pay their bills, Monsieur Landais,” answered Madame Schmid, sarcastically, who recognised an old acquaintance in Monsieur Landais. Madame Schmid had had a good, obedient Alsatian husband, whom she had talked to death some years before, and[Pg 6] Landais and the late lamented Schmid were from the same town.

Landais silently held out his bill, and Madame Schmid flourished hers in his face, with an air as if Landais owed the money instead of Marsac and Fontaine.

“Journalists are a bad lot, I can tell you,” rapidly began Madame Schmid, who liked to have the first as well as the last word, “and a lazy lot too. While you and I work for our living with our arms and our legs, Monsieur Marsac and that pretty boy Fontaine do nothing but sit in an easy-chair and write all day long. And they call that work!”

“I only wish I could sit in an easy-chair and amuse myself with a pen all day, instead of toiling over a cutting-board,” answered the tailor, ruefully.

“Painting and fiddling when they are not scribbling,—no wonder they can’t pay their wash-bills. I dare say they think washing is an elegant amusement.[Pg 7] I’m sure I don’t know how I’ll ever get my money. Writing them letters is a sinful waste of paper and ink.”

“And calling to see them is a sinful waste of time. That Marsac always makes me laugh in spite of myself. The last time I saw him I put on a very determined air,” here little Landais assumed a fierce look, “and asked him why my bill had not been paid. He told me that he and Monsieur Fontaine threw all their bills into a basket, and every six months they drew one out at random and paid that bill,—and it so happened they had never drawn my bill! It was a wretched joke, but it made me laugh; and I assure you, the first thing I knew I was asking the fellow if he and his chum wanted anything in the tailoring line!”

“And he chucks me under the chin, and tells me I’m so young and handsome I’ll be getting married[Pg 8] again; and then, like you, I turn fool and laugh, and pouf! goes my bill,” moaned Madame Schmid, wagging her head dolefully, while Landais shook his like a Chinese mandarin.

“Then,” said Landais, wearily, “what are we climbing up all these stairs for?”

“God knows,” answered Madame Schmid. “But I have no more time to waste on them, so I’ll leave my bill and go.”

“So will I,” said Landais; and they laid their bills on the rickety table and went out, Madame Schmid clacking angrily all the way downstairs.

The minute they disappeared, Fontaine slipped out of his closet, and locked the door after them. He was a handsome, fair-haired fellow of five-and-twenty, with the most winning air in the world; but it was plain at the first glance that, with all his grace and intelligence, he was a man to be led by his affections.

[Pg 9]

“I wish there was a drawbridge outside this door,” he muttered, and then began to rummage about the room. “I wonder where Marsac’s purse is,” he continued to himself. “Ah, here it is,—and only two francs five centimes in it; and the shoemaker wants three francs for half-soling Marsac’s shoes!” And then he began to call for Marsac, meanwhile going through the empty form of searching through his own pockets. In a moment Marsac entered the room.

It was easy enough to see who was the master mind there. Marsac was not so regularly handsome as Fontaine, but his dark bright eyes and captivating smile seemed to radiate brilliance all round him. After the first moment of seeing these two young men together, it was not necessary to explain their relations[Pg 10] to each other. Fontaine could not look at Marsac without an almost feminine expression of fondness and tender reliance coming into his eyes; and at the bottom of his heart he thought Marsac the most brilliant, capable, and lovable of men. Marsac, on his part, could not look or speak to Fontaine without showing the affection of an elder for a younger brother.

They had been schoolmates, ten years before, at a provincial college. From the first moment of their meeting, they loved each other. Fontaine was of the best blood of the province; but he had neither father nor mother nor brother nor sister nor any near relative living. His was one of those hearts which must love something, and he could not help loving Marsac,—a tall, lithe boy, older than he, and quite able to fight Fontaine’s battles as well as his own. Marsac, like Fontaine, was fatherless and motherless. He was educated from[Pg 11] a fund for the sons of poor gentlemen, which the recipient was expected to return when he was able. After taking all the honours in his classes, and being graduated with the highest distinction, Marsac went to Paris along with Fontaine, both to seek their fortunes in journalism. They soon got work, but they made precious little money. Marsac, inspired with but one idea, sent every franc he made back to the fund, and repaid the sum advanced in an astonishingly short time. But it was at the

cost of getting into debt on all sides. Neither he nor his chum had that commercial knack, that intimate knowledge of the purchasing power of a franc, which comes naturally to young men whose lives have been spent in a large city. Marsac was of a buoyant temper, and constantly expected something to turn up which would relieve them of all their embarrassments. Meanwhile, confident of the honesty of his intentions, he met his debts, duns,[Pg 12] and difficulties with an incomparable archness and good-humour.

When Fontaine asked him for a franc for the shoes, his reply was,—

“A franc! Do you think I have a complete counterfeiting apparatus, that I can produce such a sum as a franc at a moment’s notice?”

“Then,” said Fontaine, ruefully, who would willingly have given his only pair of shoes to Marsac would he accept them, “I don’t know what I am to do. The shoemaker said three francs or no shoes, and I have only two francs five centimes. You have already spent enough on them to have bought a new pair,—new vamps in December, new uppers in January, and now in February new soles.”

“Go along with you!” cried Marsac. “Tell the shoemaker I have a bad case of confluent small-pox, and I dare say he will be glad to let you have the shoes for nothing. But give me that paste-pot. Our friends Madame[Pg 13] Schmid and Monsieur Landais have left us souvenirs which I can put to use.” And he began deftly cutting the bills, which were on stout paper, into square pieces to mend the screen with, which, like everything else in the room, had holes in it.

“I am afraid the small-pox story won’t be a—judicious subterfuge,” was Fontaine’s reply.

“What did you do with the eleven francs we had yesterday?”

“I bought four bottles of wine, a box of cigars, and two loaves of bread with it.”

“Why were you so extravagant about bread?” asked Marsac, very cheerfully working away at the old screen. “If you squander our substance on luxuries like bread, we sha’n’t have anything left for necessaries like wine and cigars. The fact is,” he continued, “when a man enters journalism, he ought to have an education suitable to the profession. Instead of[Pg 14] going to the University, I should have been taught the shoemaking and tailoring trades. How often have I heard that no learning comes amiss in journalism! Now, if I had the most rudimentary knowledge of cobbling, I could have mended those shoes myself.”

“At all events,” said Fontaine, brushing his hat, “I am rather glad to be out of the way now; for this is the very day and hour that Madame Fleury always appears to ask for the rent.”

“There!” cried Marsac, for the first time showing impatience, “I have been trying for two weeks to forget what day the rent is due, and had just succeeded when you reminded me of it. I would rather see Joan of Arc coming at me full tilt on horseback, or Charlotte Corday with her dagger, than Madame Fleury with her bill.”

“I have heard it said that it is possible to live comfortably on a large capital of debts, but we have not found[Pg 15] it so,” said Fontaine, still brushing his hat, which, however, not all the brushing in the world could benefit.

“But the debts must be on a respectable scale,” answered Marsac, “something like seventy or eighty thousand francs. I don’t believe, though, that everything we owe would mount up to ten thousand francs. I felt so humiliated the other day when one of the young fellows on the staff—a mere reporter, while I am an editorial writer—boasted of owing his tailor alone as much as we owe altogether. I could not help translating hundreds into thousands, and said I owed my tailor nearly seven thousand francs, when it is not quite seven hundred. But I saw that the youngster respected me more from that moment, and Maurepas, the editor-in-chief, asked me to breakfast the very next day. I was obliged to decline on account of these infernal shoes; but I said it was because I was sent for by the Minister of Public Instruction.”

[Pg 16]

“Marsac,” said Fontaine, after a pause, “how can you be so cheerful in the midst of our difficulties?”

“Have you not heard, my little man, that the laughing philosopher attained the goal of all wisdom, while the weeping philosopher stood whimpering at the starting-post? Does a long face pay a bill? Or a sour temper? Depend upon it, Fortune looks for the smiling faces; and so I try to keep mine ready to welcome her.”

Fontaine went out then, and Marsac, having finished the screen, took off his coat, and with a needle and thread began sewing awkwardly on it, whistling like a bird meanwhile. In the midst of it came a knock at the door,—not a whack like Madame Schmid’s, nor a tap like Landais’s, but a knock, delicate yet firm, polite but peremptory. Marsac turned pale. Nevertheless he hustled on his coat, and opened the door with his best air,—which was a very fine air,[Pg 17] indeed,—and his landlady, Madame Fleury, entered.

Madame Fleury was a handsome woman of about five-and-thirty, with fine dark eyes, and a carriage full of grace and dignity; and, moreover, she exhibited a self-poise and self-possession which a prime minister might have envied. She was very simply dressed, as became the morning; but the simplicity was of the kind that costs. Marsac courteously placed a chair for her.

“I am glad to find you at home, Monsieur Marsac,” were Madame Fleury’s first words after the politest greetings had been exchanged. “I had not seen you go in or out for a day or two, and thought perhaps you were ill.”

“A trifle, a mere trifle,” answered Marsac, with much readiness; “a little[Pg 18] dinner at a ministerial house,—those fellows give one such lots of champagne,—and I inherit gout, and it gave me a touch; so pray excuse my slippers. As soon as Fontaine returns, I shall put on my shoes and go for a little walk.” Then, seeing Madame Fleury’s handsome face assume its “business expression,” he hastened to add: “How wonderfully well you are looking! You are blooming like a rose.”

“Thank you,” answered Madame Fleury, calmly. “In a house like this, there are certain lodgers whom I am compelled to call on occasionally, in the way of business.”

“Do you know, Madame,” continued Marsac, who had not ceased to examine Madame Fleury’s features as if she were a beautiful portrait or a statue which he had never set eyes on before, “there is a picture in the Salon this year that might be taken for you? It is called ‘Springtime,’—a[Pg 19] young girl standing under an almond-tree in bloom. The girl’s face—so fresh, so lovely—is simply yours.”

Madame Fleury’s discouraging reply to this was, “Business is business, Monsieur Marsac, and must be attended to.”

Marsac kept on as if he had not heard a word. “I can’t, for the life of me, recall the artist’s name; but I remarked aloud, ‘Madame Fleury must have sat for this charming face;’ and a very distinguished-looking man who stood next me said in English, ‘Then I would give a thousand pounds to know Madame Fleury!’”

“I wish you had accepted his offer,” responded Madame Fleury, in a tone that would have disconcerted a Talleyrand, “for never in my life would a thousand pounds or even a thousand francs be more acceptable.”

Marsac, however, not at all abashed, exclaimed enthusiastically: “Then, all you have to do is to offer to pose for a[Pg 20] nymph or a goddess. Bouguereau and all those high-priced fellows will simply be tumbling over one another in their eagerness to paint you.”

“Monsieur Marsac,” said Madame Fleury, in a tone of velvet softness which Marsac perfectly understood and shuddered to hear, “I am talking business.”

“And I am talking art,” replied poor Marsac.

“If you will kindly recall the date,” continued Madame Fleury.

Marsac, taking up an almanac, began turning the leaves. “This is the 20th of February,” he mused. “Let me see—what happened on the 20th of February? Ah, I have it! It is your twenty-fifth birthday, and you have come to receive our felicitations.”

“Nonsense, Monsieur Marsac!” replied Madame Fleury, with the same tone of deadly sweetness. “It is the day your rent is due; and I have come to see if you are prepared to pay it, and[Pg 21] also the arrears of two months you still owe.”

Marsac merely shook his head, and for several minutes there was unbroken silence in the room, each meanwhile closely attentive to the other. At last Madame Fleury spoke.

“It seems to me that two young men with your talents and character,—for I have found you both to have good characters, except for this rent business,—and of good families, should be able to make a better living out of journalism than you do.”

“Ah, Madame,” answered Marsac, sorrowfully, “modern journalism has but one essential,—it requires a man to be an accomplished, ready, and felicitous liar; and neither of us is that.”

“Then why don’t you—ahem!—try to acquire that one essential?”

“Transcendent liars, Madame Fleury, like poets, are born, not made. And then there is a great deal in being notorious. Fontaine and I have done[Pg 22] everything short of felony, to bring ourselves before the public; but we have failed. We have tried to drown ourselves in the Seine,—with life-preservers on, of course; but the police found the life-preservers on us, and instead of making us favourably known, humph!—we were glad enough to hush up the affair. We have brought the most horrible charges against each other in print, but nobody appeared at all surprised at them; and the public, by its indifference, seemed to take it for granted that the worst was true. The only newspaper which took the trouble to investigate it sent a reporter here; and as ill-luck would have it, the fellow caught us waltzing in each other’s arms for joy because we had just got a dinner invitation,—and we had not had anything that could be called a dinner for three weeks. Our circumstances are indeed desperate. Yesterday we had some money,

and Fontaine bought two loaves of bread. I reproached him for[Pg 23] his extravagance in buying so much bread.”

With these words Marsac managed to cover dexterously a box of cigars on the table, which Madame Fleury had not noticed.

“That is, indeed, poverty,” said Madame Fleury, with some feeling; and Marsac, seeing she was a little touched, continued eagerly,—