‘Forget it! no,’ cried I;’ but who are you; and how comes it that—that——’ I stopped in confusion at the rudeness of the question I had begun. ‘That I stand here, half fed, and all but naked—a barber in a land where men don’t shave once a month. Parbleu! they’d come even seldomer to my shop if they knew how tempted I feel to draw the razor sharp and quick across the gullet of a fellow with a well-stocked pouch.’
As he continued to speak, his voice assumed a tone and cadence that sounded familiar to my ears as I stared at him in amazement.
‘Not know me yet!’ exclaimed he, laughing; ‘and yet all this poverty and squalor isn’t as great a disguise as your own, Tiernay. Come, lad, rub your eyes a bit, and try if you can’t recognise an old comrade.’
‘I know you, yet cannot remember how or where we met,’ said I, in bewilderment.
‘I’ll refresh your memory,’ said he, crossing his arms, and drawing himself proudly up. ‘If you can trace back in your mind to a certain hot and dusty day, on the Metz road, when you, a private in the Ninth Hussars, were eating an onion and a slice of black bread for your dinner, a young officer, well looking and well mounted, cantered up and threw you his brandy flask. Your acknowledgment of the civility showed you to be a gentleman; and the acquaintance thus opened soon ripened into intimacy.’
‘But he was the young Marquis de Saint-Trône,’ said I, perfectly remembering the incident.
‘Or Eugène Santron, of the republican army, or the barber at Albany, without any name at all,’ said he, laughing. ‘What, Maurice, don’t you know me yet?’
‘What! the lieutenant of my regiment? The dashing officer of hussars?’
‘Just so, and as ready to resume the old skin as ever,’ cried he, ‘and brandish a weapon somewhat longer, and perhaps somewhat sharper, too, than a razor.’
We shook hands with all the cordiality of old comrades, meeting far away from home, and in a land of strangers; and although each was full of curiosity to learn the other’s history, a kind of reserve held back the inquiry, till Santron said, ‘My confession is soon made, Maurice: I left the service in the Meuse, to escape being shot. One day, on returning from a field manouvre, I discovered that my portmanteau had been opened, and a number of letters and papers taken out. They were part of a correspondence I held with old General Lamarre, about the restoration of the Bourbons—a subject, I’m certain, that half the officers in the army were interested in, and, even to Bonaparte himself, deeply implicated in, too. No matter, my treason, as they called it, was too flagrant, and I had just twenty minutes’ start of the order which was issued for my arrest to make my escape into Holland. There I managed to pass several months in various disguises, part of the time being employed as a Dutch spy, and actually charged with an order to discover tidings of myself, until I finally got away in an Antwerp schooner to New York. From that time my life has been nothing but a struggle—a hard one, too, with actual want, for in this land of enterprise and activity, mere intelligence, without some craft or calling, will do nothing.