“It is your romantic heart,” said Deulin, “that makes you see so much that perhaps does not exist.”
“If you want a story,” put in Joseph Mangles, suddenly, in his deep voice, “I can tell you one.”
And because Joseph rarely spoke, he was accorded a silence.
“Waiter's a Finn, and says he doesn't understand English?” began Mangles, looking interrogatively at Deulin, beneath his great eyebrows.
“Which I believe to be the truth,” assented the Frenchman.
“Cartoner and Deulin probably know the story,” continued Joseph, “but they won't admit that they do. There was once a nobleman in this city who was like Netty; he had a romantic heart. Dreamed that this country could be made a great country again, as it was in the past—dreamed that the peasants could be educated, could be civilized, could be turned into human beings. Dreamed that when Russia undertook that Poland should be an independent kingdom with a Polish governor, and a Polish Parliament, she would keep her word. Dreamed that when the powers, headed by France and England, promised to see that Russia kept to the terms of the treaty, they would do it. Dreamed that somebody out of all that crew, would keep his word. Comes from having a romantic heart.”
And he looked at Netty with his fierce smile, as if to warn her against this danger.
“My country,” he went on, “didn't take a hand in that deal. Bit out of breath and dizzy, as a young man would be that had had to fight his own father and whip him.”
And he bobbed his head apologetically towards Cartoner, as representing the other side in that great misunderstanding.
“Ever heard the Polish hymn?” he asked, abruptly. He was not a good story-teller perhaps. And while slowly cutting his beef across and across, in a forlorn hope that it might, perchance, not give him dyspepsia this time, he recited in a sing-song monotone: