As Jaune walked slowly homeward to his dismal studio, he meditated
deeply upon the adventure before him. He did not fancy it at all; but
it was the means to an end, and he was braced morally to go through
with it without flinching. For the chance of winning Rose he would have
stormed a battery single-handed; and not a bit more of moral courage
would have been needed for such desperate work than was needed for the
execution of the bloodless but soul-trying project that he had in hand.
For the life and spirit of him, though, he could not see how the tailor
was to get any good out of this magnificent masquerading.
In one of the evening papers, about a week later, there appeared a
half-column romance that quite took Jaune d'Antimoine's breath away. It
began with a reference to the distinguished elderly gentleman who,
during the past week, had been seen daily upon Broadway about the hour
of noon; who gazed with such intense though respectful curiosity into
every 'young woman's face; who, in the gay crowd, was conspicuous not
less by the elegance of his dress than by his air of profound
melancholy. Then briefly, but precisely, the sorrowful story of the
Marquis de ------ ("out of consideration for the nobleman's feelings"
the name was withheld) was told: how, the son of a peer of France, he
had married, while yet a minor, against the wishes of his stern father;
how his young wife and infant daughter had been spirited away by the
stern father's orders; how on his death-bed the father had confessed
his evil deed to his son, and had told that mother and child had been
banished to America, where the mother speedily had died of grief, and
where the child, though in ignorance of her noble origin, had been
adopted by an enormously rich American, about whom nothing more was
known than the fact that he lived in New York. The Marquis, the article
stated, now was engaged in searching for his long-lost daughter, and
among other means to the desired end had hit upon this--of walking New
York's chief thoroughfare in the faith that should he see his child his
paternal instinct would reveal to him her identity.
"I calculate that this will rather whoop up public interest in our
performance," said the tailor, cheerfully, the next day, as he handed
the newspaper containing the pleasing fiction to Jaune. "That's my
idea, for a starter. I've got the whole story ready to come out in
sections--paid a literary feller twenty dollars to get it up for me.
And you be careful to-day when you are interviewed" (Jaune shuddered)
"to keep the story up--or" (for Jaune was beginning a remonstrance)
"you can keep out of it altogether, if you'd rather. Say you must
refuse to talk upon so delicate a subject, or something of that sort.
Yes, that's your card. It'll make the mystery greater, you know--and
I'll see that the public gets the facts, all the same."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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