“Sit down, and then write—”
“I'll not write another,” said she, rising. She moved slowly across the room; and as she gained the door, she turned and said, “If you don't want Kuffner, I 'd be glad to have him here;” and without awaiting his reply, she was gone.
“Haven't I made a precious mess of it?” cried Beecher, as he buried his head between his hands, and sat down before the fire.
CHAPTER XXX. MRS. SEACOLE'S
In a dense fog, and under a thin cold rain, the “Tigris” steamed slowly into the harbor of Balaklava. She had been chartered by the Government, and sent out with some seventy thousand pair of shoes, and other like indispensables for an army much in want, but destined to be ultimately re-despatched to Constantinople,—some grave omissions in red tapery having been discovered,—whereby she and the shoes remained till the conclusion of the war, when the shoes were sold to the Russians, and the ship returned to England.
Our concern is not, however, with the ship or the shoes, or the patent, barley, the potted meats, or the “printed instructions” with which she was copiously provided, but with two passengers who had come up in her from Constantinople, and had, in a manner, struck up a sort of intimacy by the way. They were each of them men rather advanced in life; somewhat ordinary in appearance, of that commonplace turn in look, dress, and bearing that rarely possesses attraction for the better-off class of travellers, but, by the force of a grand law of compensations, as certainly disposes them to fraternize with each other. There are, unquestionably, some very powerful affinities which draw together men past the prime of life, when they wear bad hats, seedy black coats very wide in the skirt, and Berlin gloves. It is not alone that if they smoke the tobacco is of the same coarse kind, and that brandy-and-water is a fountain where they frequently meet, but there are mysterious points of agreement about them which develop rapidly into close intimacy, and would even rise to friendship if either of them was capable of such a weakness.
They had met, casually, at “Miseri's” at Constantinople, and agreed to go up the Black Sea together. Now, though assuredly any common observer passing them might not readily be able to distinguish one from the other again, both being fat, broad-shouldered, vulgar-looking men of about fifty-four or more, yet each was a sort of puzzle to the other; and in the curiosity thus inspired, there grew up a bond between them that actually served to unite them.
If we forbore any attempt at mystification with our valued reader in an early stage of this history, it is not now, that we draw to its close, we would affect any secrecy. Let us, therefore, at once announce the travellers by their names; one being Terry Driscoll, the other the Reverend Paul Classon.
Driscoll had dropped hints—vague hints only—that he had come out to look after a nephew of his, a kind of scapegrace who was always in trouble; but in what regiment he served, or where, or whether he was yet alive, or had been broke and sent home, were all little casualties which he contemplated and discussed with a strange amount of composure. As for Paul, without ever entering directly upon the personal question, he suffered his ministerial character to ooze slowly out, and left it to be surmised that he was a gentleman of the press, unengaged, and a Christian minister, unattached.