The fortunes of Fifi

by Molly Elliot Seawell

“No,” replied Cartouche, who realized that the alleged diamond brooch gave much prestige to Fifi, with both the manager and the company. “However, better days are coming, Fifi, and if I could but live on a little less!”

The streets had been almost deserted up to that time, but suddenly and quietly, three figures showed darkly out of the mist. They kept well beyond the circle of light made by the swinging lamp, which made a great, yellow patch on the mud of the street.

All three of them wore long military cloaks with high collars, and their cocked hats were placed so as to conceal as much as possible of their features. Nevertheless, at the first sight of one of these figures, Cartouche started and his keen eyes wandered from Fifi’s face. But Fifi herself was looking toward the other end of the street, from which came the sound of horses’ hoofs and the rattle of a coach in the mud. It came into sight—a huge dark unwieldy thing, with four horses, followed by a couple of traveling chaises. As the coach lurched slowly along, it passed from the half-darkness into the circle of light of the swinging lamps. Within it sat a frail old man, wrapped up in a great white woolen cloak. He wore on his silvery hair a white beretta. His skin was of the delicate pallor seen in old persons who have lived clean and gentle lives, and he had a pair of light and piercing eyes, which saw everything, and had a mild, but compelling power in them.

Fifi, quite beside herself with curiosity, leaned forward, nearly putting her head in the coach window. At that very moment, the coach, almost wedged in the narrow street, came to a halt for a whole minute. The bright, fantastic light of the lamps overhead streamed full upon Fifi’s sparkling face, vivid with youth and hope and confidence, and a curiosity at once gay and tender, and she met the direct gaze of the gentle yet commanding eyes of the old man.

Instantly an electric current seemed established between the young eyes and the old. The old man, wrapped in his white mantle, raised himself from his corner in the coach, and leaned forward, so close to Fifi that they were not a foot apart. One delicate, withered hand rested on the coach window, while with an expression eager and disturbing, he studied Fifi’s face. Fifi, for her part, was bewitched with that mild and fatherly glance. She stood, one hand holding up her skirts, while involuntarily she laid the other on the coach window, beside the old man’s hand.

While Fifi gazed thus, attracted and subdued, the three figures in the black shadow were likewise studying the face of the old man, around which the lamps made a kind of halo in the darkness. Especially was this true of the shortest of the three, who with his head advanced and his arms folded, stood, fixed as a statue, eying the white figure in the coach. Suddenly the wheels revolved, and Fifi felt herself seized unceremoniously by Cartouche, to keep her from falling to the ground.

“Do you know whom you were staring at so rudely?” he asked, as he stood Fifi on her feet, and the coach moved down the street, followed by the traveling chaises. “It was the Pope—Pius the Seventh, who has come to Paris to crown the Emperor; and proud enough the Pope ought to be at the Emperor’s asking him. But that’s no reason you should stare the old man out of countenance, and peer into his carriage as if you were an impudent grisette.”

Cartouche had an ugly temper when he was roused, and he seemed bent on making himself disagreeable that night. The fact is, Cartouche had nerves in his strong, rough body, and the idea just broached to him, that Fifi would have to go two weeks or probably a month without a warm cloak, made him irritable. If it would have done any good, he would cheerfully have given his own skin to make Fifi a cloak.

Fifi, however, was used to Cartouche’s roughness, and, besides, she was under the spell of the venerable and benignant presence of the old man. So she gave Cartouche a soft answer.

“I did not mean to be rude, but something in that old man’s face touched me, and overcame me; and Cartouche, he felt it, too; he looked at me with a kind of—a kind of—surprised affection—”