“As to life,” he said presently, “my compact is with the senses. There is a higher ideal to reach to, no doubt; but Mordi! I confess, for myself I cannot feel the epicure and play the ascetic. To continue in love with virtue, one must take it only, like opium, in occasional doses. An habitual indulgence in it degrades the picturesqueness of its own early evoking. Perhaps it should be ethically grateful to me to remain here to contemplate the fruit of my generosity ripening for another’s picking. Perhaps the guillotine is awaiting me in Paris. Well, mademoiselle, of the two evils I prefer the latter. Here, to feed on my own self-righteousness would be to starve at the end of a day; there, the glory of doing, of directing, of enjoying, will soon woo me from memory of a sentiment that was no more part of my real self than the mistletoe is part of the harsh trunk it beautifies. For death, I do not fear it, if it will come to me passionately, like a mistress.”
“Monsieur!”
“Ah, mademoiselle! believe me that I can offer no higher testimony to your worth than the assurance that I have for six months lost myself in you!”
I looked at this ex-waiter in marvel. His dishes could never have shown a finer polish than his manners. Moreover, in what intervals of supplying food to others had he sat himself down to his own feast of reason? One was accustomed in those days to hear coal-heavers discussing Diderot, but not in the language of Diderot. I gazed on his face and thought I saw in it a neutral ground, whereon a beast and an angel hobnobbed in the intervals of combat.
Beside him the torch-bearer—silent, melancholy, astringent—held his brand aloft motionless, as if his arm were a sconce of iron.
“You are hurt, monsieur?” said Crépin, suddenly referring to me.
“It is nothing—a bite, a scratch; an excuse for a pillow.”
“Ah!” (he fetched a flask from his pocket and uncorked it)—“this is ethereal cream of mint—a liqueur I affect, in that it reminds me of lambs, and innocence—and shepherdesses. Let us pledge one another, like good friends, at parting! And it will confirm thy cure, monsieur, so happily begun.”
“Mademoiselle?” he said pleadingly, and offered it to Carinne.
She touched it with her lips—I, more effectively, with mine. Crépin cried “Trinquons!” and, taking a lusty pull, handed the flask to Gusman, who drained it.