“You are certainly far more imposing as a prophet than I can pretend to be,” said he, laughing, as he lighted a cigar, and lay back indolently to await my revelations. I made a great display of knowledge in shuffling and arranging the cards, the better to think over what I was about; and at last, disposing some dozen in certain mystic positions before me, I began.
“You startled me, Chevalier, by a discovery which only wanted truth to make it very remarkable. Let me now repay you by another which I shrewdly suspect to be in the same condition. There are four cards now before me, whose meaning is most positive, and which distinctly assert that you, Chevalier de la Boutonerie, are no chevalier at all!”
“This is capital.” said he, filling out a glass of wine and drinking it off with the most consummate coolness.
“And here,” said I, not heeding his affected ease,—“here is another still stranger revelation, which says that you are not a Frenchman, but a native of a land which latterly has taken upon it to supply the rest of the world with adventurers,—in plain words, a Pole.”
“It is true that my father, who held a command in the Imperial army, lived some years in that country,” said he, hastily; “but I have yet to learn that he forfeited his nationality by so doing.”
“I only know what the cards tell me,” said I, spreading out a mass of them before me, and pretending to study them attentively; “and here is a complication which would need a cleverer expositor than I am. Of all the tangled webs ever I essayed to unravel, this is the knottiest. Why, really, Chevalier, yours must have been a life of more than ordinary vicissitude, or else my prophetic skill has suffered sadly from disuse.”
“Judging from what you have just told me, I rather lean to the latter explanation,” said he, swallowing down two glasses of wine with great rapidity.
“I suspect such to be the case, indeed,” said I, “for otherwise I could scarcely have such difficulty in reading these mystic signs, once so familiar to me, and from which I can now only pick up a stray phrase here and there. Thus I see what implies a high diplomatic employment, and yet, immediately after, I perceive that this is either a mistake of mine, or the thing itself a cheat and a deception.”
“It surely does not require divination to tell a diplomatic agent that he has served on a foreign mission,” said the Chevalier, with a sneer.
“Perhaps not, but I see here vestiges of strange occurrences in which this fact is concerned. A fleeting picture passes now before my eyes: I see a race-course, with its crowds of people and its throng of carriages, and the horses are led out to be saddled, and all is expectation and eagerness, and—what! This is most singular! the vision has passed away, and I am looking at two figures who stand side by side in a richly furnished room, a man and a woman. She is weeping, and he consoling her. Stay! He lifts his head—the man is yourself, Chevalier!”