About a week after that event I learned that he had deserted the navy and was among the missing. Apparently the poor fellow was a man running away from his past, and nothing was so disastrous to him as distinction.
I thus lost sight of Russell, and until August, 1873, I heard no more of him. I was editing a weekly family newspaper in New York at that time, and oddly enough I was just beginning to write this sketch of my singular acquaintance when Russell himself walked into my office at 245 Broadway and asked me if I remembered him. He was well dressed, in a quiet drab suit, and was scarcely at all changed. He told me that he was married and was living at a certain number in West 43d Street; that he was practising law, being senior member of the firm of Wintermute and Russell, for that his real name was Wintermute, and that his partner, Russell, was a cousin on the mother’s side.
He gave me the firm’s card, and begged me to call upon him, both at his house and at his office, which of course I promised to do.
I called first at the house. It was a well-built one of pressed brick, and seemed to wear something of Russell’s own air of quiet dignity, standing as it did in a row of more pretentious brown-stone mansions. The door-plate—for door-plates were then still in use—bore the simple word, “Wintermute.”
“Is Mr. Wintermute at home?” I asked.
“Commander Wintermute is in his library,” answered the lackey, laying special stress upon the naval title.
“Ah, certainly, Commander Wintermute,” I answered. “I had forgotten. Will you give him my card? I am an old friend.”
I was shown into the parlor,—a conspicuously tasteful apartment,—furnished exactly as I should have expected Russell to furnish it.
After a little the door opened, and an elderly gentleman, obviously English, entered, holding my card in a puzzled way before his spectacled nose.
“Pardon me,” he said. “The servant must have misunderstood you. He announced you as an old friend.”