But as he touched the curtain of the recess, he was palsied by a sudden thought.
"Ah, this cobbler, this Dermoyne! He will go to Madame Resimer's with my note in his hand, and pretend to come in my name. He will, at least, induce her to open the doors, and then force his way into her house. If he enters there, I am lost."
Turning to Bulgin, he flung his cloak around him, and took up his cap. "No, sir, I cannot go with you. Excuse me—I am in a great hurry."
He hurried to the door, and disappeared ere Bulgin could answer him with a word.
"Dermoyne has a half an hour's start of me," muttered Herman, as he disappeared, "I must be quick, or I am lost."
"That is cool!" soliloquized Bulgin: "some difficulty about a woman, I suppose: our young friend must be cautious: exposure in these matters is fatal."
Without bestowing another word upon his friend, the Rev. Dr. Bulgin, attired in the cardinal's hat and robe, sank in the arm-chair, and put his feet upon the table, and flung back his head, thus presenting one of the finest pictures of ecclesiastical ease, that ever gratified the eyes of mortal man.
He suffered himself to be seduced into the mazes of an enchanting reverie:
"Ah, that's my ideal of a man," he suffered his eye to rest upon the head of Leo the Tenth: "Without a particle of religion to trouble him, he took care of the spiritual destinies of the world, and at the same time enjoyed his palace, where the wine was of the choicest, and the women of the youngest and most beautiful. He was a gentleman. While poor Martin Luther was giving himself a great deal of trouble about this worthless world, Leo had a world of his own, within the Vatican, a world of wit, of wine and beauty. That's my ideal of an ecclesiastic. Religion, its machinery, and its terrors for the masses,—for ourselves," he glanced around his splendid room, "something like this, and five thousand a year."
And the good man shook with laughter.