“You may write and write, mien lieber, but it won't come.”
Herr Heinfetter drained his tall glass, and, leaning his arms on the table, said: “I will tell you in German, you know it well enough.” And forthwith he began a story, which lost nothing of the pain and misery it caused me by the unsympathizing tone and stolid look of the narrator. For my reader's sake, as for my own, I will condense it into the fewest words I can, and omit all that Herr Heinfetter inserted either as comment or censure. My father had eloped with Madame Cleremont! They had fled to Inn-spruck, from which my father returned to the neighborhood of Belgium, to offer Cleremont a meeting. Cleremont, however, possessed in his hands a reparation he liked better,—my father's check-book, with a number of signed but unfilled checks. These he at once filled up to the last shilling of his credit, and drew out the money, so that my father's first draft on London was returned dishonored. The villa and all its splendid contents were sequestrated, and an action for divorce, with ten thousand pounds laid as damages, already commenced. Of three thousand francs, which our letter assured us at Zurich, Eccles had drawn two thousand: he would have taken all, but Heinfetter, who prudently foresaw I must be got rid of some day, retained one thousand to pay my way. Eccles had gone, promising to return when he had saved his own effects, or what he called his own, from the wreck; but a few lines had come from him to say the smash was complete, the “huissiers” in possession, seals on everything, and “not even the horses watered without a gendarme present in full uniform.”
“Tell Digby, if we travel together again, he 'll not have to complain of my puffing him off for a man of fortune; and, above all, advise him to avoid Brussels in his journey-ings. He 'll find his father's creditors, I 'm afraid, far more attached to him than Mademoiselle Pauline.”
His letter wound up with a complaint over his own blighted prospects, for, of course, his chance of the presentation was now next to hopeless, and he did not know what line of life he might be driven to.
And now, shall I own that, ruined and deserted as I was, overwhelmed with sorrow and shame, there was no part of all the misery I felt more bitterly than the fate of her who had been so kindly affectionate to me,—who had nursed me so tenderly in sickness, and been the charming companion of my happiest hours? At first it seemed incredible. My father's manner to her had ever been coldness itself, and I could only lead myself to believe the story by imagining how the continued cruelty of Cleremont had actually driven the unhappy woman to entreat protection against his barbarity. It was as well I should think so, and it served to soften the grief and assuage the intensity of the sorrow the event caused me. I cried over it two entire days and part of a third; and so engrossed was I with this affliction that not a thought of myself, or of my own destitution, ever crossed me.
“Do you know where my father is?” asked I of the banker.
“Yes,” said he, dryly.
“May I have his address? I wish to write to him.”
“This is what he send for message,” said he, producing a telegram, the address of which he had carefully torn off. “It is of you he speak: 'Do what you like with him except bother me. Let him have whatever money is in your hands to my credit, and let him understand he has no more to expect from Roger Norcott.'”
“May I keep this paper, sir?” asked I, in a humble tone.