“Monsieur need not disturb himself. Monsieur Valdez is not married, and for the rest—in my house! Mais non, Monsieur!”
“A thousand pardons, Madame,” said I, as I prepared to mount the stairs, which rose from the back of the shop.
“My husband is most scrupulous about my dignity,” she cried to me in a tone of great pride, as I ascended the first steps.
So that explained that; and I went upstairs.
There were only two rooms on the second floor—one to the front, the other to the back of the house. The door of the former was open; it was a bedroom with an obviously “double” appearance. I turned to the latter and tried the door. It opened. I walked in and closed the door softly behind me.
It was a small room, plainly but tidily furnished, and well lighted by a big window above the bed in which Arsenio lay. He was sleeping quietly. I stood by the door, watching him, for quite a long while. He was not greatly changed by the years and whatever experiences he had passed through; his face was hardened rather than coarsened, its lines not obliterated by any grossness of the flesh, but more sharply chiseled. A fallen spirit perhaps, but with the spiritual in him still. His devilry, his malice, would still have the redeeming savor of perception and humor; he might yet be responsive to a picturesque appeal, capable of a beau geste, even perhaps, on occasion, of a true vision of himself; but still also undoubtedly prone to those tricks which had earned for him in days of old his nickname of Monkey Valdez.
It was time to rouse him. I advanced towards the bed, took hold of a chair that stood by it, sat down, and forced a cough. He awoke directly, saw me, apparently without surprise, and sat up in bed.
“Ah, it’s you, Julius! You’ve turned up, as you said you might. But you’ve not come for your fifty pounds, I hope? My surroundings hardly suggest any success there, do they? What time is it? I’ve—shall we say lost?—my watch. Never mind. And I’m not going to ask you for another loan—oh, well, only a fiver perhaps—because I’m expecting a remittance any hour.” He looked up at the window. “Ah, I perceive that the day is advanced. I’ll get up. Don’t suppose that I can’t get up! I’ve got two good suits—one for the day, and one for the night; it’s a bad workman who pawns his tools! You smoke while I dress, and we’ll have a talk.”
He jumped lightly out of bed and proceeded to make his toilet, questioning me briskly the while about the state of affairs in England and what had happened to me since our last meeting; he did not refer to any of our common acquaintances. I observed with some surprise that, when the time for it came, the neatly folded suit which he took out of his chest of drawers was evening dress. It was only a little past three in the afternoon. He cast a mocking glance at me.
“In enforced intervals,” he explained, “I pursue an avocation that demands the garb of ceremony from five o’clock in the day onwards till—well, till it’s day again sometimes.”