the Morgue. He’s doing a great drama in which one half of the dramatis personæ recognise the other half dead on the marble slabs. He’s never been across the Channel, and I think his notions of the Morgue are somewhat foggy. He fancies it’s about as big as Westminster Abbey, I know, and he wants the governors to give him the whole depth of the stage for his great scene, and set it obliquely, like the Assyrian hall in ‘Sardanapalus,’ so as to give the idea of illimitable extent. I’m to paint the scene for him. ‘The interior of the Morgue by lamplight. The meeting of the living and the dead.’ That’ll be rather a strong line for the bill, at any rate. I’ll go and have some dinner in the Palais Royal, and then go down and have a look at the gloomy place. An exterior wouldn’t be bad, with Notre Dame in the distance, but an interior—Bah! J. T. J. is a clever fellow, but I wish his genius didn’t lie so much in the charnel-house.”
He put on his hat, left his room, locked the door, and ran down the polished staircase whistling merrily as he went. He was glad to be released from his work, pleased at the prospect of a few hours’ idleness in the foreign city. Many people, inhabitants and visitors, thought Paris dull, dreary, and deserted in this hot August weather, but it was a delightful change from the Pilasters and the primeval solitudes of Northumberland Square, that quaint, grim, quadrangle of big houses, whose prim middle-class inhabitants looked coldly over their smart wire window-blinds at poor Richard’s shabby coat.
Mr. Thornton got an excellent dinner at a great bustling restaurateur’s in the Palais Royal, where for two francs one might dine upon all the delicacies of the season, in a splendid saloon, enlivened by the martial braying of a brass band in the garden below.
The carte du jour almost bewildered Richard by its extent and grandeur, and he chose haphazard from the catalogue of soups which the obliging waiter gabbled over for his instruction. He read all the pleasing by-laws touching the non-division of dinners, and the admissibility of exchanges in the way of a dish for a dessert, or a dessert for a dish, by payment of a few extra centimes. He saw that almost all the diners hid themselves behind great wedges of orange-coloured melon at an early stage of the banquet, and generally wound up with a small white washing-basin of lobster salad, the preparation of which was a matter of slow and solemn care and thought. He ordered his dinner in humble imitation of these accomplished habitués, and got very good value for his two francs, and then paid his money, bowed to the graceful lady who sat in splendid attire in a very bower of salads and desserts, and went down a broad staircase that led into a street behind the Palais Royal, and thence to the Rue Richelieu.
He treated himself to a cup of coffee and a cigar at a café in the Place de la Bourse, and then strolled slowly away towards the Seine, smoking, and dawdling to look at this and that as he walked along. It was nearly eight o’clock therefore when he emerged, from some narrow street, upon the quay, and made his way towards that bridge beneath whose shadow the Morgue hides, like some foul and unhallowed thing. He did not much like the task which Mr. Jumballs had imposed upon him, but he was too good-natured to refuse compliance with the transpontine dramatist’s desire, and far too conscientious to break a promise once made, however disagreeable the performance of that promise might prove.
He walked on resolutely, therefore, towards the black, shed-like building.
“I hope there are no bodies there to-night,” he thought. “One glance round the place will show me all I want to see. I hope there are no poor dead creatures there to-night.”
He stopped before going in and looked at a couple of women who were standing near, chattering together with no little gesticulation.
He asked one of these women the question, Were there any bodies in the Morgue?
Yes,—the women both answered with one voice. There had not long been brought the body of a gentleman, an officer it was thought, poisoned in a gaming-house. A murder, perhaps, or a suicide; no one knew which.
Richard Thornton shrugged his shoulders as he turned away from the idle gossips.
“Some people would call me a coward if they knew how I dislike going into this place,” he thought.
He threw away his cigar, took off his hat, and slowly crossed the dark threshold of the Parisian dead-house.
When he came out again, which was not until after the lapse of at least a quarter of an hour, his face was almost as white as the face of the corpse he had left within. He went upon the bridge, scarcely knowing where he went, and walking like a man who walks in his sleep.
Not more than half a dozen yards from the Morgue he came suddenly upon the lonely figure of a girl, whose arm rested on the parapet of the bridge and whose pale face was turned towards the towers of Notre Dame.
She looked up as he approached, and called him by his name.
“You here, Eleanor,” he cried. “Come away, child; come away, for pity’s sake!”
THE PORTRAIT.
Her hair was a golden brown—
The photograph makes it black;
You may take the portrait out, if you will;
You’ll find a lock at the back.
Her eyes were a living blue,
And through their splendour rare,
You could gaze right into her soul, and see
The passions that sported there.
Why did we part? God knows!
It may be that she and I
Love still with as true and tender a love
As we swore in the days gone by.
To see a mighty rift
In a mountain, who would think
It was rent in twain by a tiny rill
That had trickled in at a chink
Needs but an angry thought,
Or a light word, lightly spoken,
And a mountain of love may be rent in twain,
And the chain of life be broken.
