The Gascon never before realized how very comfortable a world it is, and how very disagreeable it would be to leave it while he was yet young and healthy, with a sound stomach and a liver unconscious of derangement. But his pride was greater than his fears, and coating his doubts and apprehensions under a veneer of indifference, he was the first to warn his friends of the necessity of being punctilious at the trysting-place. As punctuality is the courtesy of kings, so also is it of duellists.
The Gascon and his party were first on the ground—four of them, the principal, Blue Spectacles, Pale Face, and a young medical practitioner with an ominous set of surgical instruments cunningly hidden in a fiddle-case to disarm suspicion.
Hardly had they alighted from their voiture, and walked towards the village where O'Hara had arranged to meet them, when a singular approaching whir of wheels was heard, blent with the noisy ululation of a dog. Turning the corner, there came into view O'Hara and the O'Hoolohan riding to the rendezvous on bicycles! They had adopted this original method of evading the prying gendarmes of the locality. Pat had followed them—followed them perforce; for the now lazy animal had been tied by a rope to the tool-box of a machine, and was forced to keep pace with the 'steel steed.'
'Pardon, gentlemen,' said O'Hara, jumping from his tiny saddle, 'but if we are a little late it is my fault I did not think the gradients on the road were so trying.'
The Gascon's friends advanced, accepted the excuse with excessive show of politeness, and Blue Spectacles, as the senior, presented the doctor in form.
'Very thoughtful of you, indeed!' said O'Hara, in an undertone. 'My man never hires a surgeon—never needs one, for the matter of that. Have you that letter I spoke of ready?' at the same time handing the young Frenchman a document to the following effect:
'This is to certify that the bearer, O'Hoolohan, 35, Irish of origin, and annuitant by station, unmarried, committed suicide on the 5th day of April, 1866, at Clamart, in the Department of the Seine, and that nobody is blamable for the despair which led him to the act.'
As Blue Spectacles read this curt, legally-framed document, he quaked and whitened, and a quiver of his eyes might be detected under their ultramarine protectors. But he nerved himself for the worst; after all, it is much easier to be brave when your bosom friend's fate is in the balance than when your own precious carcass is in peril. The Frenchman, in return, handed O'Hara a perfumed, gilt-edged billet, with an arrow-pierced heart in chromo-lithography at the top of it. As it was characteristic of the Gascon, it may be interesting to give its contents:
'Away, thou hollow world, with all thy vain pomps and glittering gauds! Farewell the friendship that is false, the love that is venal, the happiness that deceives like the desert mirage! Dash down the cup of revelry that brings but the fitful doze; welcome the bullet of relief that summons repose eternal! With my own hands I sign my doom; by my own hands I die! Not for me the roses of hope or the laurels of ambition, but the cypress of despair and disappointment. Cut off a tress of my hair and send it to my mother; a locket with a portrait will be discovered over my heart—bury it in my grave.
'EUGÈNE SIRAUDIN.'