“I creep, but I think of my beautiful château in Indre-et-Loire, all ruined, and my mother, who is already very old, and who has but little money for the candles she will burn in church at my safety in traveling, and then, by Jove, old chap, I say to me that the proof of the pudding sweeps clean, as your excellent English proverbs make it, and I decide to act.”
“Well, your proverbs are original, Marky, but I don’t know that they haven’t a queer sort of sense of their own. A pudding this size ought to sweep most things clean—if you will have it that way. And we’re not breaking any law of God or man that I know of, in taking a diamond from a corpse that didn’t know what to do with it when he was alive, and doesn’t need it now.”
“Perfectly.”
“There’s only one thing. Don’t get to asking any questions anywhere of any kind of person, about anything. I hope that’s definite. Because you might, without meaning it in the least, get George or some other fellow thinking, and we don’t want them to think.”
“I comprehend perfectly. Flint, this is altogether so good that I feel myself exalted. I will dance——”
“No, Marky, don’t,” I begged. “Somebody might come. I like your dancing all right, and I think you’d knock spots off Pavlova and Mordkin, and the girl who served up prophet’s head—but I don’t want you to dance now. Anything that excites remark and draws attention to us two is going to be bad policy at present. Swear off, Marky, if you’re wise.”
“It was but the dance of Marguerite with the casket of jewels that I desired to make—nothing more, my friend,” said the Marquis, a little wistfully. “The dance, I mean, that she ought to make—it is never right done by the theater.”
“Wait till you get the jewel before you start jewel dances,” I said. “Did you ever hear of the cuckoo clock and the parson?”
“Never; tell me of it.”
“Well, there was once a poor woman who had a cuckoo clock, and the clock stopped, and wouldn’t go on. Now it happened just then that the parson came in to make a call on her, and he was rather a bit of an amateur clock-maker.