And there he let me go, and threw himself upon a chair, and gave his vast body to a convulsion of arid sobs. The man was in hysterics, compounding smiles and sobs a score to the minute, but at the end 'twas the natural man won the bout, else he had taken a stroke. I stood by him in perplexity of opinions whether to laugh or storm, whether to give myself to the righteous horror a good man ought to feel in the presence of a murtherer, or shrug my shoulders tolerantly at the imbecile.
“There!” said he, recovering his natural manner, “I have made a mortal enemy of Andrew Greig's nephew. Yes, yes, master, glower at Misery, fat Misery—and the devil take it!—old Misery, without a penny in 'ts pocket, and its next trip upon wheels a trip to the block to nuzzle at the dirty end in damp sawdust a nose that has appreciated the bouquet of the rarest wines. Paul, my boy, has't a pinch of snuff? A brutal bird out there sings a stave of the Chanson de la Veuve so like the confounded thing that I heard my own foolish old head drop into the basket, and there! I swear to you the smell of the sawdust is in my nostrils now.”
I handed him my box; 'twas a mull my Uncle Andy gave me before he died, made of the horn of a young bullock, with a blazon of the house on the silver lid. He took it eagerly and drenched himself with the contents.
“Oh, la! la!” he cried; “I give thanks. My head was like yeast. I wish it were Christmas last, and a man called Hamilton was back in Dixmunde parish. But there! that is enough, I have made my bed and I must lie on't, with a blight on all militant jesuitry! When last I had this box in my fingers they were as steady as Mont St. Michel, now look—they are trembling like aspen, n'est-ce pas? And all that's different is that I have eaten one or two better dinners and cracked a few pipkins of better wine, and—and—well-nigh killed a police officer. Did'st ever hear of one Hamilton, M. Greig? 'Twas a cheery old fellow in Dixmunde whose name was the same as mine, and had a garden and bee-hives, and I am on the rack for my sins.”
He might be on the rack—and, indeed, I daresay the man was in a passion of feelings so that he knew not what he was havering about, but what impressed me most of all about him was that he seemed to have some momentary gleams of satisfaction in his situation.
“I have every ground of complaint against you, sir,” I said.
“What!” he interrupted. “Would'st plague an old man with complaints when M. de Paris is tapping him on the shoulder to come away and smell the sawdust of his own coffin? Oh, 'tis not in this wise thy uncle had done, but no matter!”
“I have no wish, Father Hamilton, to revile you for what you have brought me,” I hastened to tell him. “That is far from my thoughts, though now that you put me in mind of it, there is some ground for my blaming you if blaming was in my intention. But I shall blame you for this, that you are a priest of the Church and a Frenchman, and yet did draw a murderous hand upon a prince of your own country.”
This took him somewhat aback. He helped himself to another voluminous pinch of my snuff to give him time for a rejoinder and then—“Regicide, M. Greig, is sometimes to be defended when——”
“Regicide!” I cried, losing all patience, “give us the plain English of it, Father Hamilton, and call it murder. To call it by a Latin name makes it none the more respectable a crime against the courts of heaven where the curse of Babel has an end. But for an accident, or the cunning of others, you had a corpse upon your conscience this day, and your name had been abhorred throughout the whole of Europe.”