How I detest the familiarity of a foreign waiter! The fellows cannot respond to the most ordinary question without an affectation of showing off their immense acuteness and knowledge of life. It is their eternal boast how they read people, and with what an instinctive subtlety they can decipher all the various characters that pass before them. Now this impertinent lackey, who is to say what has he not imputed to me? Utterly incapable as such a creature must necessarily be of the higher and nobler motives that sway men of my order, he will doubtless have ascribed to me the most base and degenerate motives.
I was wrong in speaking one word to the fellow. I might have said, “Take that note to Number Fourteen, and ask if there be an answer;” or, better still, if I had never written at all, but merely sent in my card to ask if the lady would vouchsafe to accord me an audience of a few minutes. Yes, such would have been the discreet course; and then I might have trusted to my manner, my tact, and a certain something in my general bearing, to have brought the matter to a successful issue. While I thus meditated, the waiter re-entered the room, and, cautiously closing the door, approached me with an ostentatious pretence of secrecy and mystery.
“I have given her the letter,” said he, in a whisper.
“Speak up!” said I, severely; “what answer has the lady given?”
“I think you 'll get the answer presently,” said he, with a sort of grin that actually thrilled through me.
“You may leave the room,” said I, with dignity, for I saw how the fellow was actually revelling in the enjoyment of my confusion.
“They were reading it over together for the third time when I came away,” said he, with a most peculiar look.
“Whom do you mean? Who are they that you speak of?”
“The gentleman that she was expecting. He came by the 9.40 train from Brussels. Just in time for your note.” As the wretch uttered these words, a violent ringing of bells resounded along the corridor, and he rushed out without waiting for more.
I turned in haste to my note-book; various copies of my letter were there, and I was eager to recall the expressions I had employed in addressing her. Good heavens! what had I really written? Here were scraps of all sorts of absurdity; poetry, too! verses to the “Fair Victim of a Recent War,” with a number of rhymes for the last word, such as “low,” “snow,” “mow,” &c.,—all evidences of composition under difficulty.