Roger Ingleton, Minor

by Talbot Baines Reed

In the salon of a small dilapidated hotel in one of the southern suburbs of Paris sat Roger, three weeks after the event recorded in the last chapter. He had the dull place, apparently, to himself. The billiard-room, visible through the folding-doors, was deserted. In the dining-room the waiter dozed undisturbed by a single guest. The landlady in her bureau yawned and hummed, and had not even a bill to make out.

She had already made out that of the young English gentleman, and a pretty one it was! A guest such as he was worth a season to the landlady of “L’Hôtel Soult.” Three weeks ago, half dead with cold and weariness, he had come and asked for a bed; and in that bed till yesterday he had remained, feverish, coughing, sometimes gasping for breath. Compared with the attack he had had in London in the winter, this was a mild one; but in this dreary place, with not a friend at hand, with a doctor who could not understand a word he said, with a voluble landlady who, when she visited him, never gave him a chance of getting in a word, and with a few servants who stared at him blankly whenever he attempted to lift his voice, it was the most miserable of all his illnesses.

He was as close a prisoner as if he had been in jail. The doctor, who took apartments at his expense in the hotel, would not allow him to move. No one to whom he appealed could be made to understand that he had friends in England with whom he desired to communicate. One letter to Armstrong which he had tried to write the landlady impounded and destroyed as waste-paper, perhaps not quite by accident. This well-to-do young guest was worth nursing. His friends would only come and fetch him away; whereas she, motherly soul! was prepared to take him in and do for him. The pocket of the coat which on the day of his arrival she had carried off to her kitchen to dry contained satisfactory proof that Monsieur was a young gentleman who could pay; and although she was too honest to recoup herself for her services in advance, she had kept the coat hanging up in her room for a week, as a pleasant reminder of the joys of hospitality.

Only yesterday the invalid had recovered sufficiently to rout the doctor and stagger down to the telegraph-office; and to-day, propped up with pillows on the uncomfortable stuff-sofa, he was expiating his rashness with a day of miserable coughing.

At the sound of his handbell, the landlady, a buxom dame of forty-five autumns, hastened to the couch of her profitable visitor.

Roger was too weak to oppose the flood of her congratulations and compliments on his recovery, and allowed her to talk herself breathless before he put in his word.

“Madame has not been many years in these parts?” he inquired in his best French.

Madame threw up her shoulders and protested she had lived in those parts from a child, when the dull suburb was once a festive little rustic village, and the great city now gobbling it up once loomed mysteriously in the north, with acres and miles of green fields and woods between.

“But this hotel,” said Roger, “has not stood here so long?”

“Ma foi!” said she, “since I can remember, when I used to visit my good uncle here every Sunday, I remember ‘L’Hôtel Soult.’ Why, when I married my cousin and became Madame l’hôtesse, it was all fields between us and Paris. Yes, and little enough change about the house. We cannot afford, Monsieur, to build and decorate. By a miracle we escaped the German shells. Ah! a merry time was the year of the war! France suffered, alas! but the ‘L’Hôtel Soult’ prospered. ’Twas the year I was left a widow! I had ten waiters then, Monsieur, and two billiard-markers, a chef from the best kitchen in Paris, and stables, and chambrières, and—why, Monsieur, the wages of one week were twenty—twenty-five napoleons!”