The Jugglers: A Story

by Molly Elliot Seawell

There are some tricks of legerdemain which can be played without the aid of a confederate. In the midst of the breakfast, while François was telling some of his best stories, the Bishop inadvertently took his purse from his pocket with his handkerchief, and left the purse lying on the table. When breakfast was over, the purse was missing.

Mathilde assumed an air of triumph, and the Bishop looked very sheepish. At once a search wits begun, Mathilde shaking the cloth, looking under the chair occupied by François, and doing everything except rifling his pockets. The purse contained eighty francs, a large sum for the poor Bishop, who lived from hand to mouth. In the hunt the dining room soon looked as if a cyclone had struck it; drawers were pulled open, chairs knocked about, and Mathilde watched François with a hawk’s eye.

“That is a good bit of money to let lie around in the presence of a servant,” said François, impudently. “Come now, you woman, haven’t you got that purse in your pocket this moment?”

Mathilde, furious, thrust her hand into her own pocket where she carried a handkerchief, a notebook, a large bunch of keys, a prayer-book, a rosary, and a little figure of St. Joseph in a tin case, and her own purse. But what she brought out of her pocket was the Bishop’s purse. The Bishop laughed long and loud, and François laughed louder than the Bishop.

After this was over, the Bishop invited François into the study. François, in addition to telling some of his best stories, proceeded to go through some of his most comic antics. The good Bishop laughed until he cried, and excused himself on that ever excellent plea about his father being a laborer on the estates of François’ father. Then François went to a wheezy old piano in the room and began to play and sing some simple old songs of the Bishop’s youth—the songs his mother had sung to him in the laborer’s cottage in the meadows. Presently the tears were trickling down the Bishop’s face.

“Go on, M. le Bourgeois,” he said tremulously. “I love those simple old airs that take me back to my childhood when my good mother worked for us all day, and then had the heart to sing to us in the evening. As you sing, I can hear in my heart the tinkling of the cow-bells and the sharp little cries of the birds under the thatched roof—for our roof was only thatch, you remember. Oh, my mother, my dear, dear mother! Her hands were hard with toil, her back was bent with hanging over washing-tubs and the soup pot on the fire; but in Heaven I know she is straight and soft of hand, and one day all her children will surround her and pay her homage as if she, the peasant mother, were a queen!”

François continued to play soft chords, the Bishop listening and sighing and smiling. Presently François heard from the Bishop’s big chair a gentle snore. Then François, rising noiselessly, pulled off his own shoes, which were cracked, and with professional sleight-of-hand took off the Bishop’s new shoes, which he put on his own feet, and then slipped his own shoes on the Bishop’s feet. There was a desk in the room, and François scribbled on a piece of paper, “I would have taken your Grace’s stockings, but they are cotton. If I were a bishop, I would wear silk stockings. I hope your Grace will remedy this impropriety, and in the future wear silk stockings worth the taking.” This scrap of paper he pinned to the Bishop’s cassock, and went softly out through a door opening on a balcony, from which he swung himself down into the garden. As he walked along, he saw a row of beehives on a bench. Stepping gently, he took off his coat and threw it over a beehive, and then lifting it carried it out into the street. A policeman stopped him, saying:

“What have you got there, my man?”

“A beehive,” replied François, “just out of a hothouse, and the bees very active.”

The policeman suddenly backed off, and François marched away with his beehive, which he subsequently threw over the stone wall around the Bishop’s garden.