But the old servant was waiting for me to speak.
"Ah, Gustave," I replied, making a wry face at myself in the glass, for the old man had given my hair a tremendous twist with the tongs, "I doubt that we shall see the old days again. From what I hear, France seems to be getting ahead fairly well without such men as my grandfather. The people seem to be able to look out for themselves and struggle on."
I glanced at the reflection of the old man's face. On it was a compound of expressions.
"Monsieur le Marquis," he said, quietly, "had they not killed the kindest master in the world I should be one of them to-day. It is that alone that made me leave my country. Could I but forget the guillotine and the days of horror, and that I really loved my King, I could rejoice in France's every victory."
It rather surprised me to hear the old man speak thus, for his language was better than one might expect to hear from the lips of one who had been born and bred a lackey. But they set me to thinking, and his next question chimed in well with my thoughts.
"You have seen France, Monsieur le Marquis?" he asked.
"No, Gustave, I have never been there," I replied. "I have lived my life in far-off America."
Now with this word a surge of pride came over me. What was this France that I had never seen to me? What were the plottings of the little band of nobles who had been despoiled of what they called their rights? Why, I was an American! There was my heart! Could I ever truly enter in with all my will and spirit for the cause or the factions of another exiled government? What reward was there for me? Ay, what reward? I remembered those brave men whom I had left in prison. (Ah, one can learn patriotism in a prison!) Sutton, the boatswain's mate, with the stars and stripes as big as your two hands tatooed across his broad chest, came in my mind's eye. His country's flag was mine! The watchword of Lawrence, that had been brought to us by the prisoners from the Chesapeake, rang in my ears as it had rung through the crowded prison, "Don't give up the ship!" Of a truth I was no Frenchman, though I could pass as such, and had done so.
Wondering what my messmates had been saying about my strange disappearance, I fell into a reverie of retrospection. Where were Captain Temple and the Young Eagle? Where was Cy Plummer, who had loaned me his belongings, and who, in my mind's eye, I could see with his bundle over his shoulder, chanting his song as he went over the hill? Where was the brave sailor who had thrown his severed hand at the feet of the English officer, and what was I but a person who was allowing himself to become deeper embroiled in a cause in which he had no heart, and becoming committed deeper and deeper every day to plots and conspiracies for whose methods he had no stomach (yes, I may set it down—assassination, dagger, and pistol, were spoken of). Truly I had no place here, and a great wish came over me that I could exchange this borrowed finery, and this assumption of being what I was not, for a sailor's toggery, the wide sweep of the sea, and take up again my life on a vessel to whose peak I might look up and see the flag for whose sake my countrymen were dying, for whose sake I should and would be fighting as soon as God would let me.