“A becomin’ caskit, altogether,” exclaimed the proprietor of the Cosmopolitan, eyeing it critically.
“There’s somethin’ wanting all the same,” quoth “Mister,” after the continued pause had grown oppressive.
“Wantin’,” retorted Dennison; “I’d like to know what it is. Look at them there flags over the windows! Look at that there bar, where all that a man’s got to do is to walk up, after he’s paid his dollar, and help himself or let Pearl and Jinny here help him! Look at this here coffin—solid rosewood, round corners, carved legs and ag-graffe treble,” he went on, with a grin at his own wit. “Come, now, ‘Mister,’ what more could Jovanny or anybody else want?”
But “Mister” was paying no attention to this sally or the mirth it had provoked. “Flowers—flowers and fruit—fruit and flowers,” he was muttering to himself, apparently confounding a conventional Eastern attention from the friends of an afflicted family with the catalogue of some Maine county-fair. “Must come to the same thing—of course,” he exclaimed, conclusively, striding away from the de facto coffin and his companions. He disappeared within the barroom. “I’ve made free with them new stores of yourn, Dennison,” he called out presently, staggering down the room toward the expectant party, weighted with an awkward load—two stems of bananas and four spiky pineapples. “It won’t hurt their sellin’,” he apologized, as with a dexterous balancing and tying he disposed of the two first-named decorations upright, one upon either side of poor Professor Jovanny’s perpendicular feet—vegetable obelisks. A pineapple stood upon each one of the “round corners.” Dennison and the rest were hearty in commendations of their friend’s thoughtfulness and taste. “That just fixes her off too slick!” exclaimed Big Jinny, in high delight.
The sun mounted; the barkeeper appeared in the adjoining room. First stragglers, curious to learn the truth of any rumors concerning the day’s novelties at the Cosmopolitan, strolled across the threshold. Dennison put “Mister” and a table on which was deposited a loaded revolver and an empty biscuit-tin, with a slit in its cover, over against the door; Big Jinny and the Pearl, he posted at the special bar for the day, which he had by no means ungenerously furnished forth; himself, he stationed in an arm-chair, without the dance-room, to advertise the obsequies, urge entrance into the penetralia of the dance-room, as a matter of duty and pleasure, and act as master of ceremonies generally.
It will be remarked that, designedly or accidentally, Rioba Jack was appointed unto no prominent function in these festivities of grief, so he dropped an eagle into “Mister’s” resonant receptacle and walked out of the Cosmopolitan. The street was sparsely peopled at that early hour. He turned the corner of the hotel and halted abruptly to avoid collision with a figure—a girl standing motionless, and leaning against the wall, as if summoning up the courage to advance further. What told the Rioba instantly that it was Professor Jovanny’s daughter, was not difficult to appreciate. The set young face, tear-stained and pallid, but independent of a pair of dark, mournful eyes for its beauty, the slender form not ungracefully draped by the scanty, black-stuff dress; the head bared to the sharp morning wind—it was a vignette of young grief, passive, despairing, solitary, that the Rioba gazed at pityingly.
“Good—good-day,” he said, awkwardly. “You’re—his gal, I take it. Can I—might I help you, Miss?” The last word in respectful salute to the unmarried, weaker sex, had been a stranger to the Rioba’s lips for a dozen years.
“I am going to my father,” the girl replied, in a curiously abstracted fashion of speech; one wherein lay just a shadow of foreign accent. She looked away from the Rioba’s clear gaze, and continued, as if partly speaking to herself, “I wish to see where they have put my father. I must sit by him. He will need me.”
“But,” began the Rioba, in distressed perplexity, as she wrapped her shawl closer about her exposed throat (it was a beautiful throat), and made a motion to pass him, “yer father’s dead, Miss. Poor, old Jovanny’s dead. He’s layin’ in state in his pianny—coffin, I mean—round to the Cosmopolitan here. You wouldn’t like to be a sittin’ alone there all day ’side the coffin, and everybody starin’ at you. ’Twouldn’t do.”
“I want to sit by my father,” the girl answered more decidedly. “Take me to him.”