“This is a lovely night, and a pretty hour of this lovely night to come looking for lodging,” said the innkeeper, with facile irony, at which he was an adept; “but if ye are respectable, and can prove it, and let me know what brings ye here when all honest folk is abed, I’ll see what I can do.”
If Floog considered the last part of this speech with reference to its applicability to the maker of it, he kept his thoughts discreetly to himself.
“We are strangers in the town. We arrived from Arnhem an hour ago, and this is the only public-house we can find open. This boy’s father, Mynheer Underdonk, the merchant, died in Amsterdam last Thursday, and they sent me a letter to bring the boy, and make no delay, as they want to make a settlement for him. You see,” he went on, growing confidential, “my brother left home eight years ago and no one knew what became of him. His poor forsaken wife died, and I took care of the orphan.”
All this he uttered rapidly, with few pauses, as if he had learnt it by heart. So he had. Alas! poor Floog, thou wert no hero, not even morally; but shall we, entrenched in a castle of virtue, thrown stones at thee? No, albeit there was no more truth in thy story than suited thy own purposes.
II.
The Ferret was of ancient and noble lineage. There, that secret is out. Frank like himself, his historian scorns the subterfuge of keeping it till the end for the purpose of giving éclat to his exit, as they do in romances and on the stage. He was descended from Adam and Eve. This I am prepared to maintain in the face of the world, learned or unlearned. If any one wishes to be considered as descended from an oyster or an atom, we who are not so ambitious shall not cavil at their genealogy, but hope they find their protoplasms subjects of pleasant reflection. As for my hero, he was of a different breed. Whether the bars in his escutcheon were dexter or sinister did not concern him and need not concern us. Heraldry, in fact, disowned him; therein, however, heraldry was no worse than his own father. In his tenth year he was taken from the Asylum for Foundlings and indentured to Mme. Gemmel, who kept a manufactory of toys at Arnhem. On the day of his departure he went out into the large paved yard surrounded by an unbroken line of low stone buildings—his well-known and familiar playground, the only Arcadia he had ever known. Now that he was to bid it and his childish companions a long good-by, he felt irresolute and the farewell stuck in his throat. He tried hard to be brave, while little Hans, his inseparable playmate and bedfellow, stood regarding him with a sullen scowl, as if he considered it a personal insult to be thus suddenly left alone. The poor Ferret was entirely at his wits’ end and quite dumbfounded. Another look at Hans broke the unutterable spell; for he saw stealing down the chubby cheek of that smirched cherub a big tear, marking its course by a light streak on his smutty little face. Gulping down his sobs and forcing back the tears that now suffused his own eyes, he laid his hand lovingly on the shoulder of little Hans, and, bending down until their faces were on a level, he looked at him, and said in a voice broken by varying emotions and the poignant sorrow of childhood:
“Don’t—don’t cry, Hans; and when—and when I earn a hundred guilders I will come back for you, and we will have lots of puddin’ and new clothes, and I will buy you a pair of new skates.”
Then taking from his trousers’ pocket all his treasures—a large piece of gingerbread and a small old knife with a broken blade—he pressed his little friend to take them, forcing them into his unresisting hand, looked around once by way of final adieu, and ran through the passage that led to the front hall, where Mme. Gemmel’s man was waiting for him, and left poor little Hans bellowing as if his heart would break.
The moral supervision exercised by Mme. Gemmel over her new charge was radical. Its cardinal principles were, first, the duty of obedience and gratitude, and, secondly, the healthfulness of abstinence. These principles she inculcated by precept and enforced in practice by prescribing due penalties for their infraction. The good lady taught her apprentice, by every means within her power, that his life-long devotion to her service would ill repay her for the inestimable blessing she conferred in removing him from the Foundling Asylum and taking him under her own fostering roof. She was mindful of his health, too, for among her sanitary tenets was one to the effect that butter is injurious to immature years; and this she was in the habit of persistently enforcing for the special benefit of her charge. Inasmuch as temptation is dangerous, especially to the weak, she prudently adopted preventive measures by removing at once the temptation and the butter whenever he appeared at meals. So well did he profit by her discipline that after six months’ involuntary practice of it he determined to run away.
In spite of these drawbacks, in spite of the discipline and the dry bread, he made famous progress at his trade, and felt an artist’s glow of enthusiasm whenever he finished to his satisfaction the staring blue eyes and carmine cheeks of his waxen beauties. He felt, Pygmalion like, able to fall in love with them, could he but find the Promethean secret—not, indeed, that his thoughts ever took the classic shape, for he had never heard of the old Grecian fable; these were only the vague and undefined feelings of his heart. True it is he had little else to love, so that his affections, being narrowed down to the dolls, increased for them in the ratio that it diminished for their owner.