Chapter 24: Happy Family.

ON the evening of this same day, about five, a scene passed in the third and top flat of a dirty old tumbledown house in Juiverie Street which we would like our readers to behold.

The interior of the sitting-room denoted poverty, and it was inhabited by three persons, a man, a woman, and a boy.

The man looked to be over fifty; he was wearing an old uniform of a French Guards sergeant, a habit venerated since these troops sided with the people in the riots and exchanged shots with the German dragoons.

He was dealing out playing cards and trying to find an infallible means of winning; a card by his side, pricked full of pinholes, showed that he was keeping tally of the runs.

The woman was four-and-thirty and appeared forty; she wore an old silk dress; her poverty was the more dreadful as she exhibited tokens of splendor; her hair was built up in a knot over a brass comb once gilded: and her hands were scrupulously cared for with the nails properly trimmed in an aristocratic style. The slippers on her feet, over openwork stockings, had been worked with gold and silver.

Her face might pass in candlelight for about thirty; but, without paint and powder it looked five years older than reality.

Its resemblance to Queen Marie Antoinette’s was still so marked that one tried to recall it in the dusty clouds thrown up by royal horses around the window of a royal coach.

The boy was five years of age; his hair curled like a cherub’s; his cheeks were round as an apple; he had his mother’s diabolical eyes, and the sensual mouth of his father—in short, the idleness and whims of the pair.

He wore a faded pearl velvet suit and while munching a hunk of cake sandwiched with preserves, he frayed out the ends of an old tricolored scarf inside a pearl gray felt hat.

The family was illuminated by a candle with a large “thief in the gutter,” stuck in a bottle for holder, which light fell on the man and left most of the room in darkness.

“Mamma,” the child broke the silence by saying, as he threw the end of the cake on the mattress which served as bed, “I am tired of that kind of cake—faugh! I want a stick of red barley sugar candy.”

“Dear little Toussaint,” said the woman. “Do you hear that, Beausire?”

As the gamester was absorbed in his calculations, she lifted her foot within snatch of her hand and taking off the slipper, cast it to his nose.

“What is the matter?” he demanded, with plain ill-humor.

“Toussaint wants some candy, being tired of cheap cake.”

“He shall have it to-morrow.”

“I want it to-day—this evening—right now!” yelled the innocent in a tearful voice which threatened stormy weather.

“Toussaint, my boy, I advise you to give us quiet or papa will take you in hand,” said the parent.

The boy yelled again but more from deviltry than from fear.

“You drunken sot, you just touch my darling, and I will attend to you,” said the mother, stretching out the white hand towards the bully which her care of the nails made to become a claw at need.

“Who the deuse wants to touch the imp? you know it is only my style of speaking, my dear Oliva, and that though I may dust your skirt now and then I have always respected the kid’s jacket. Tut, tut, come and embrace your poor Beausire who will be rich as a King in a week; come, my little Nicole.”

“When you are rich as a king, it will be another matter: but up to that time no fooling.”

“But I tell you that it is as safe as if I had a million. You might be kind for a little while. Go and get credit of the baker.”

“A man rolling in millions wants a baker to let him have a loaf on trust, ha, ha!”

“I want some red barely sugar,” howled the child.

“Come, you king with the millions, give some sugar sticks to your prince.”

Beausire started to put his hand to his fob but stopped half way.

“You know I gave you my last piece yesterday.”

“Then, if you have the money,” said the child to the woman whom Beausire called indifferently Nicole or Oliva, “give me a penny to buy candy.”

“There are two cents, you naughty boy, and mind you do not fall in sliding down the bannisters.”

“Thank you, dear mother,” said the boy, capering for joy and holding out his hand.

“Come here till I set your hat on and adjust your sash: it must not be said that Captain Beausire let his son race about the streets in disorder—though it is all the same to him, the heartless fellow! I should die of shame!”

At the risk of whatever the neighbors might say against the heir to the Beausire name, the boy would have dispensed with the hat and band, of which he recognized the use before the other urchins did the freshness and beauty. But as the arrangement of his dress was a condition of the gift, the young Hector had to yield to it.

He consoled himself by taunting his father with the coin by thrusting it up under his nose; absorbed in his figuring the parent merely smiled at the pretty freak.

Soon they heard his timid step, though quickened by gluttony, descending the stairs.

“Now then, Captain Beausire,” snapped the woman after a pause, “your wits must lift us out of this miserable position, or else I must have recourse to mine.”

She spoke with a toss of the head as much as to say: “A lady of my lovely face never dies of starvation, never fear!”

“Just what I am busy about, my little Nicole,” responded Beausire.

“By shuffling the cards?”

“Did I not tell you that I have found the infallible coup?”

“At it again, eh? Captain Beausire, I warn you that I am going to hunt up my old acquaintances and see if one of them cannot have you shut up in the madhouse. Dear, dear, if Lord Richelieu were not dead, if Cardinal Rohan were not ruined, if Lady Lamotte Valois were not in London dodging the sheriff’s officers——”

“What are you talking about?”

“I should find means and not be obliged to share the misery of an old swashbuckler like this one.”

With a queenly flirt of the hand Oliva alias Nicole Legay, disdainfully indicated the gambler.

“But I keep telling you that I shall be rich to-morrow,” he repeated, himself at any rate convinced.

“Show me the first gold piece of your million and I shall believe the rest.”

“You will see ten gold pieces this evening—the very sum promised me. You can have five to buy a silk dress and a velvet suit for the youngster: with the balance I will bring you the million I promised.”

“You unhappy fellow, you mean to gamble again?”

“But I tell you again that I have lit on an infallible sequence.”

“Own brother to the one with which you threw away the sixty thousand livres from the amount you stole at the Portuguese Ambassador’s?”

“Money got over the devil’s back goes under his belly,” replied Beausire sententiously. “I always did think that the way I got that cash brought bad luck.”