“We would do our best to make monsieur’s delay agreeable,” said the waiter; “the beds of the Jacques Bonhomme are celebrated; the food is excellent and the cooking of the best; the landlord cuts himself into little pieces for his guests.”
“Good heavens!” ejaculated M. Gombard.
“It is a figure of speech, monsieur, a figure of rhetoric,” explained the waiter, who began to heap up blocks of wood on the hearth, as if he were preparing a funeral pyre for his unwilling guest.
“Tell the landlord I want to speak to him,” said M. Gombard.
Before he had finished his meal the landlord knocked at the door. M. Gombard said “Come in,” and the landlord entered. He was a solemn, melancholy-looking man, who spoke in a sepulchral voice, and seemed continually struggling to withhold his tears. He loved his inn, but the weight of responsibility it laid upon him was more than he could bear with a smiling countenance. Every traveller who slept beneath his roof was, for the time being, an object of the tenderest interest to him; it was no exaggeration to say, with the rhetorical waiter, that he cut himself into little pieces for each one of them. He made out imaginary histories of them, which he related afterwards for the entertainment of their successors. He was guided as to the facts of each subject by the peculiar make and fashion of their physiognomies; but he drew his inspiration chiefly from their noses: if the traveller wore his beard long and his nose turned up, he was set down as a philosopher travelling in the pursuit of knowledge; if he wore his beard cropped and his nose hooked, he was a banker whose financial genius and fabulous wealth were a source of terror to the money-markets of Europe; if he carried his nose flat against his face and wore a wig and spectacles, he was a desperate criminal with a huge price on his head, and the police scouring the country in pursuit of him; but he was safe beneath the roof of the Jacques Bonhomme, for his host would have sworn with the patriot bard: “I know not, I care not, if guilt’s in that heart; I but know that I’ll hide thee, whatever thou art!” All the pearls of Golconda, all the gold of
California, would not have bribed him into delivering up a man who enjoyed his hospitality. Many and thrilling were the tales he had to tell of these sinister guests, their hair-breadth escapes, and the silent but, to him, distinctly manifest rage of their baffled pursuers. This life of secret care and harrowing emotions had done its work on the landlord; you saw at a glance that his was a heavily-laden spirit, and that pale “melancholy had marked him for her own.” He bowed low, and in a voice of deep feeling inquired how he could serve M. Gombard.
“By getting me a pair of good post-horses,” replied his guest. “It is of the utmost importance that I reach X—— before five o’clock to-morrow afternoon, and your people say I have no chance of finding horses until Friday.”
The landlord stifled a sigh and replied: “That is only too true, monsieur.”
M. Gombard pushed away his plate, rose, walked up and down the room, and then stood at the window and looked out. It was a bleak look out; everything was covered with snow. Snow lay deep on the ground, on the trees, on the lamp-post, on the chimneys and the house-tops; and the sky looked as if it were still full of snow.
Just opposite there was a strange, grand old house that arrested M. Gombard’s attention; it was a gabled edifice with turrets at either end, and high pointed, mullioned windows filled with diamond-paned lattices. The roof slanted rapidly from the chimneys to the windows, and looked as if the north wind that had howled over it for centuries had blown it a little to one side and battered it a good deal; for you could see by the undulations of the snow