‘Overdrawn by fifteen hundred francs,’ said the other.
‘Overdrawn? Impossible!’ cried I, thunderstruck. ‘I had a credit for six hundred pounds.’
‘Which you drew out by cheque this morning,’ said the clerk. ‘Is not that your handwriting?’
‘It is,’ said I faintly, as I recognised my own scrawl, dated the evening before.
I had lost above seven hundred, and had not a sou left to pay post-horses.
I sauntered back sadly to the ‘France,’ a sadder man than ever in my life before. A thousand tormenting thoughts were in my brain; and a feeling of contempt for myself, somehow, occupied a very prominent place. Well, well; it’s all past and gone now, and I must not awaken buried griefs.
I never saw the count and countess again; and though I have since that been in St. Petersburg, the grand-duke seems to have forgotten my services, and a very pompous-looking porter in a bear-skin did not look exactly the kind of person to whom I should wish to communicate my impression about ‘Count Potoski’s house being my own.’
CHAPTER XI, A FRAGMENT OF FOREST LIFE
I am half sorry already that I have told that little story of myself. Somehow the recollection is painful. And now I would rather hasten away from Brussels, and wander on to other scenes; and yet there are many things I fain would speak of, and some people, too, worth a mention in passing. I should like to have taken you a moonlight walk through the Grande Place, and after tracing against the clear sky the delicate outline of the beautiful spire, whose gilded point seemed stretching away towards the bright star above it, to have shown you the interior of a Flemish club in the old Salle de Loyauté. Primitive, quaint fellows they are, these Flemings; consequential, sedate, self-satisfied, simple creatures; credulous to any extent of their own importance, but kindly withal; not hospitable themselves, but admirers of the virtue in others; easily pleased, when the amusement costs little; and, in a word, a people admirably adapted by nature to become a kind of territorial coinage alternately paid over by one great State to another, as the balance of Europe inclines to this side or that; with industry enough always to be worth robbing, and with a territory perfectly suitable to pitched battles—two admirable reasons for Belgium being a species of Houns-low Heath or Wormwood Scrubs, as the nations of the Continent feel disposed for theft or fighting. It was a cruel joke, however, to make them into a nation. One gets tired of laughing at them at last; and even Sancho’s Island of Barataria had become a nuisance, were it long-lived.