“Now,” said Charley, when he and the Don were left alone, “let’s adjourn to the dining-room and have a quiet pipe, after the labors of the evening. I don’t know why it is,” continued Charley, as they entered the room, “but fiddling—” Here Charley quickly drew back, as a horse when sharply reined up, with a look that seemed to show that his eyes had fallen upon some unwelcome object. The suppression of all appearance of emotion was, as we know, a foible of his. There was one thing, however, which he could not suppress; and it was this which often betrayed him to his friends; to wit, his infirmity of stammering; of which, as I do not care either to deface my pages or to make sport of my friend, I shall give but sparing typographical indication, leaving the rest to the reader’s imagination. “F-f-f-f-iddling,” continued he, “always gives me a consuming thirst for a smo-mo-mo-moke. By the way, thirst for a smoke strikes me as a mixed metaphor, but ‘hunger’ would scarcely improve matters. I presume that if our Aryan ancestors had known the divine weed, we should have had a better word wherewithal to express our longing for it.”
Whenever Charley began to stammer and philosophize, he always suggested to my mind a partridge tumbling and fluttering away through the grass; there was always a nest somewhere near.
“As it is,” continued he, “we must be content to borrow from the grovelling vocabulary of the eater and the drinker, leaving to civilization—there, toast your toes on that fender—to evolve a more fitting term.”
The Don, who had been looking serious enough before, could not suppress a smile at this quaint sally of our friend,—a smile that broadened into a laugh when Charley, having succeeded, after a protracted struggle, in shooting a word from his mouth as though from a pop-gun, parenthetically consigned all p’s and m’s to perdition; that being the class of letters which chiefly marred his utterance.
There is, about the damning of a mere labial, a grotesque impotency that goes far towards rescuing the oath from profanity; and we may hope that Uncle Toby’s accusing angel neglected to hand this one in for record.
“This is very snug,” said Charley, drawing together the ends of logs which had burned in two.
Charley had neglected to light the lamp, but the logs soon began to shed a ruddy glow about the room, in the obscure light of which the stranger began to look about him, as was natural. Charley could always see more with his eyes shut than I could with mine wide open; but I cannot very well understand how, in that dimly-lighted room, he contrived to observe all that he pretends to have seen on this occasion; especially as he acknowledges that he was steadily engaged at his old trick of blowing smoke-rings, sighting at them with one eye, and spearing them with the forefinger of his right hand.
The stranger did not stroll about the room with his hands behind his back, examining the objects on the sideboard, and yawning in the faces of the ancestral portraits, as he might have been pardoned for doing at that hour, and in the absence of the family. “Yes, this is very snug,” echoed he, in a rather hollow voice, while he glanced from object to object in the room with an eager interest that contrasted strangely with the immobility of his person; his almost motionless head giving a rather wild look to his rapidly-roving eyes. Presently, seeming to forget Charley’s presence, he gave vent to a sigh so deep that it was almost a groan. Charley removed his pipe from his mouth, and with the stem thereof slowly and carefully traced a very exact circle just within the interior edge of one of his whirling smoke-wreaths, in the spinning of which he was so consummate an artist.
The stranger, coming to himself with a little start, gave a quick glance at the sphinx beside him, who, with head resting on the back of his chair and eyes half closed, was lazily admiring another blue circle, that rose silently whirling in the still air. Had he heard the moan? And in his embarrassment the stranger seized the tongs and, with a nervous pull, tilted over one of the logs which Charley had drawn together on the hearth.
They flashed into a blaze.