CHAPTER XLIX
Wherein the Rich Man’s Son seeks the Sweets of Poverty—not Wholly without Success
On the northern heights of Montmartre, into a paved courtyard, where Horace Malahide had his rooms, several laughing students were carrying forth the furnishments from one of the houses, piling them in a heap on the cobbled ground. A divan was already in the handcart, and on top of the divan sat a youth whom they called Gaston, who, with a great brass French horn round about his shoulders, was solemnly sounding a faulty rendering of a quaint old hunting call.
Out of the hurly-burly tripped into the court a pretty girl, carrying a couple of hat-boxes and some airy feminine wearing apparel. She halted before the handcart in evident anxiety as to a safe place for their stowage—a perplexed frown came over her handsome face. One of the noisy young fellows, who spoke his French with a strong American accent, saw her bewilderment, plucked the musical Gaston by the heel, and brought him with a clatter to the ground, where, rubbing the back of his skull, he settled himself on a rug, and, fixing his mouth to the horn again, took up the tune where he had left off. The young American flung open the lid of the divan and stowed away inside it the girl’s hat-boxes and scant wardrobe.
“That all, Babette?” he asked.
“No, mon ami—one minute!” she cried.
She skipped up the steps and disappeared into the doorway.
When she came back she was laden with linen and pillows and blankets. She laughed merrily. The young American calmly helped her to stow the things away in the divan; and she blithely skipped away again....
Before her doorway, at the passage leading into the court, watching what passed with a sour scowl, stood the hard-lipped little woman who was the concierge to the court; indeed, it was this lean woman’s shrewish tongue that was chiefest cause for the flitting—a clacking tongue that had wearied Horace for months. And now she had fallen foul of the girl and had slanged her from the bottom of the court with taunts and insinuations that Horace had felt compelled to put out of all remotest chance of repetition—and a restless longing to be back in the Latin quarter leaped with his desire and hastened it. The girl was not sorry either; but she was frugally loath to forfeit the remainder of his lease. He had taken her face between his two hands and kissed her upon the mouth: “Babette,” he had said—“no living soul does you an ill turn twice if I can prevent it; we leave to-morrow morning.”