“Well,” exclaimed the Count, “if he is but one of them, he will do.”
“If you interrupt so often, we shall never know where we are.”
“Besides, our friend here is not speaking to you,” added Georges to the Count.
“It is not good manners to interrupt,” said Mistigris sententiously. “However, we did the same; and we should all be the losers if we didn’t diversify the conversation by an exchange of reflections. All Frenchmen are equal in a public chaise, as the grandson of Czerni-Georges told us.—So pray go on, delightful old man, more of your bunkum. It is quite the correct thing in the best society; and you know the saying, Do in Turkey as the Turkeys do.”
“I had heard wonders of Dalmatia,” Schinner went on. “So off I went, leaving Mistigris at the inn at Venice.”
“At the locanda,” said Mistigris; “put in the local color.”
“Zara is, as I have been told, a vile hole—”
“Yes,” said Georges; “but it is fortified.”
“I should say so!” replied Schinner, “and the fortifications are an important feature in my story. At Zara there are a great many apothecaries, and I lodged with one of them. In foreign countries the principal business of every native is to let lodgings, his trade is purely accessory.
“In the evening, when I had changed my shirt, I went out on my balcony. Now on the opposite balcony I perceived a woman—oh! But a woman! A Greek; that says everything, the loveliest creature in all the town. Almond eyes, eyelids that came down over them like blinds, and lashes like paintbrushes; an oval face that might have turned Raphael’s brain, a complexion of exquisite hue, melting tones, a skin of velvet—hands—oh!”
“And not moulded in butter like those of David’s school,” said Mistigris.
“You insist on talking like a painter!” cried Georges.
“There, you see! drive nature out with a pitchfork and it comes back in a paintbox,” replied Mistigris.
“And her costume—a genuine Greek costume,” Schinner went on. “As you may suppose, I was in flames. I questioned my Diafoirus, and he informed me that my fair neighbor’s name was Zéna. I changed my shirt. To marry Zéna, her husband, an old villain, had paid her parents three hundred thousand francs, the girl’s beauty was so famous; and she really was the loveliest creature in all Dalmatia, Illyria, and the Adriatic.—In that part of the world you buy your wife, and without having seen her—”
“I will not go there,” said old Léger.
“My sleep, some nights, is illuminated by Zéna’s eyes,” said Schinner. “Her adoring young husband was sixty-seven. Good! But he was as jealous—not as a tiger, for they say a tiger is as jealous as a Dalmatian, and my man was worse than a Dalmatian; he was equal to three Dalmatians and a half. He was an Uscoque, a turkey-cock, a high cockalorum gamecock!”
“In short, the worthy hero of a cock-and-bull story,” said Mistigris.
“Good for you!” replied Georges, laughing.
“After being a corsair, and perhaps a pirate, my man thought no more of spitting a Christian than I do of spitting out of window,” Schinner went on. “A pretty lookout for me. And rich—rolling in millions, the old villain! And as ugly as a pirate may be, for some Pasha had wanted his ears, and he had dropped an eye somewhere on his travels. But my Uscoque made good use of the one he had, and you may take my word for it when I tell you he had eyes all round his head. ‘Never does he let his wife out of his sight,’ said my little Diafoirus.—‘If she should require your services, I would take your place in disguise,’ said I. ‘It is a trick that is very successful in our stage-plays.’—It would take too long to describe the most delightful period of my life, three days, to wit, that I spent at my window ogling Zéna, and putting on a clean shirt every morning. The situation was all the more ticklish and exciting because the least gesture bore some dangerous meaning. Finally, Zéna, no doubt, came to the conclusion that in all the world none but a foreigner, a Frenchman, and an artist would be capable of making eyes at her in the midst of the perils that surrounded him; so, as she execrated her hideous pirate, she responded to my gaze with glances that were enough to lift a man into the vault of Paradise without any need of pulleys. I was screwed up higher and higher! I was tuned to the pitch of Don Quixote. At last I exclaimed, ‘Well, the old wretch may kill me, but here goes!’—Not a landscape did I study; I was studying my corsair’s lair. At night, having put on my most highly scented clean shirt, I crossed the street and I went in—”
“Into the house?” said Oscar.
“Into the house?” said Georges.
“Into the house,” repeated Schinner.
“Well! you are as bold as brass!” cried the farmer. “I wouldn’t have gone, that’s all I can say—”
“With all the more reason that you would have stuck in the door,” replied Schinner. “Well, I went in,” he continued, “and I felt two hands which took hold of mine. I said nothing; for those hands, as smooth as the skin of an onion, impressed silence on me. A whisper in my ear said in Venetian, ‘He is asleep.’ Then, being sure that no one would meet us, Zéna and I went out on the ramparts for an airing, but escorted, if you please, by an old duenna as ugly as sin, who stuck to us like a shadow; and I could not induce Madame la Pirate to dismiss this ridiculous attendant.
“Next evening we did the same; I wanted to send the old woman home; Zéna refused. As my fair one spoke Greek, and I spoke Venetian, we could come to no understanding—we parted in anger. Said I to myself, as I changed my shirt, ‘Next time surely there will be no old
