Narcisse folded his arms. Richling flushed and flashed with the mortifying knowledge that his companion’s behavior was better than his own.
“If you want to borrow more money of me find me a chance to earn it!” He glanced so suddenly at two or three street lads, who were the only on-lookers, that they shrank back a step.
“Mistoo Itchlin,” began Narcisse, once more, in a tone of polite dismay, “you aztonizh me. I assu’ you, Mistoo Itchlin”—
Richling lifted his finger and shook it. “Don’t you tell me that, sir! I will not be an object of astonishment to you! Not to you, sir! Not to you!” He paused, trembling, his anger and his shame rising together.
Narcisse stood for a moment, silent, undaunted, the picture of amazed friendship and injured dignity, then raised his hat with the solemnity of affronted patience and said:—
“Mistoo Itchlin, seein’ as ’tis you, a puffic gen’leman, ’oo is not goin’ to ’efuse that satisfagtion w’at a gen’leman, always a-’eady to give a gen’leman,—I bid you—faw the pwesen’—good-evenin’, seh!” He walked away.
Richling stood in his tracks dumfounded, crushed. His eyes followed the receding form of the borrower until it disappeared around a distant corner, while the eye of his mind looked in upon himself and beheld, with a shame that overwhelmed anger, the folly and the puerility of his outburst. The nervous strain of twenty-four hours’ fast, without which he might not have slipped at all, only sharpened his self-condemnation. He turned and walked to his house, and all the misery that had oppressed him before he had seen the prison, and all that had come with that sight, and all this new shame, sank down upon his heart at once. “I am not a man! I am not a whole man!” he suddenly moaned to himself. “Something is wanting—oh! what is it?”—he lifted his eyes to the sky,—“what is it?”—when in truth, there was little wanting just then besides food.
He passed in at the narrow gate and up the slippery alley. Nearly at its end was the one window of the room he called home. Just under it—it was somewhat above his head—he stopped and listened. A step within was moving busily here and there, now fainter and now plainer; and a voice, the sweetest on earth to him, was singing to itself in its soft, habitual way.
He started round to the door with a firmer tread. It stood open. He halted on the threshold. There was a small table in the middle of the room, and there was food on it. A petty reward of his wife’s labor had brought it there.
“Mary,” he said, holding her off a little, “don’t kiss me yet.”