"No. His name belongs to him. If he keeps it, he may be able to find out something about his family. He might be the heir to great possessions. One never knows. It's a clue anyway. Besides," he added, the sturdy North countryman asserting itself, "I'm not giving my name to any man save the son of my loins. It's a name where I come from that has never been dishonoured for a couple of hundred years."
"But it is just as you like, mon chéri," said Madame, who was the placidest thing in France.
For thirty years I had forgotten all this; but the "By Gum!" of Colonel Lackaday wiped out the superscription over the palimpsest of memory and revealed in startling clearness all these impressions of the past.
"Of course we're fond of the kid," said Ben Flint. "He's free from vice and as clever as paint. He's a born acrobat. Might as well try to teach a duck to swim. It comes natural. Heredity of course. There's nothing he won't be able to do when I'm finished with him. Yet there are some things which lick me altogether. He's an ugly son of a gun. His father and mother, by the way, were a damn good-looking pair. But their hands were the thick spread muscular hands of the acrobat. Where the deuce did he get his long, thin delicate fingers from? Already he can pass a coin from back to front----" he flicked an illustrative conjuror's hand--"at eight years old. To teach him was as easy as falling off a log. Still, that's mechanical. What I want to know is, where did he get his power of mimicry? That artistic sense of expressing personality? 'Pon my soul, he's damn well nearly as clever as Billy."
During the talk which followed the discovery of our former meeting, I reported to Colonel Lackaday these encomiums of years ago. He smiled wistfully.
"Most of the dear old fellow's swans were geese, I'm afraid," said he. "And I was the awkwardest gosling of them all. They tried for years to teach me the acrobat's business; but it was no good. They might just as well have spent their pains on a rheumatic young giraffe."
I looked at him and smiled. The simile was not inapposite. How, I asked myself, could the man into which he had developed, ever have become an acrobat? He was the leanest, scraggiest long thing I have ever seen. Six foot four of stringy sinew and bone, with inordinately long legs, around which his khaki slacks flapped, as though they hid stilts instead of human limbs. His arms swung long and ungainly, the sleeves of his tunic far above the bony wrist, as though his tailor in cutting the garment had repudiated as fantastic the evidence of his measurements. Yet, when one might have expected to find hands of a talon-like knottiness, to correspond with the sparse rugosity of his person, one found to one's astonishment the most delicately shaped hands in the world, with long, sensitive, nervous fingers, like those of the thousands of artists who have lived and died without being able to express themselves in any artistic medium. In a word, the fingers of the artiste manqué. I have told you what Ben Flint, shrewd observer, said about his hands, as a child of eight. They were the same hands thirty years after. To me, elderly observer of human things, they seemed, as he moved them so gracefully--the only touch of physical grace about him--to confer an air of pathos on the ungainly man, to serve as an index to a soul which otherwise could not be divined.
From this lean length of body rose a long stringy neck carrying a small head surmounted by closely cropped carotty thatch. His skin was drawn tight over the framework of his face, as though his Maker had been forced to observe the strictest economy in material. His complexion was brick red over a myriad freckles. His features preserved the irregular ugliness of the child I half remembered, but it was redeemed by light blue candid eyes set in a tight net of humorous lines, and by a large, mobile mouth, which, though it could shut grimly on occasions, yet, when relaxed in a smile, disarmed you by its ear-to-ear kindliness, and fascinated you by the disclosure of two rows of white teeth perfectly set in the healthy pink streaks of gum. He had the air of a man physically fit, inured to hardship; the air, too, in spite of his gentleness, of a man accustomed to command. In the country house at which we met it had not occurred to me to speculate on his social standing, as human frailty determined that one should do in the case of so many splendid and gallant officers of the New Army. His manners were marked by shy simplicity and quiet reserve. It was a shock to preconceived ideas to find him bred in a circus, even in so magnificent a circus as the Cirque Rocambeau, and brought up by a clown, even by such a superior clown as Ben Flint,
"And my old friend?" I asked. For I had lost knowledge of Ben practically from the time I ended my happy vagabondage. Maxima mea culpa.