Terence O'Rourke/Part 1/Chapter 1
PART FIRST
The Empire of Illusion
CHAPTER I
HE IS ROWELED OF THE SPUR OF NECESSITY
MADAME THÉRÈSE was of a heavy build—round and stout and comfortable-looking; nevertheless she possessed a temper. The vicious bang of the door behind her was evidence of that sufficient unto O'Rourke, even if he had not the memory of her recent words to remind him of the fact.
He drew a long and disconsolate face, standing in the precise center of what he called his "compartment"—it was six feet one way by nine another, and boasted of but one window, set in a slanting roof. His mobile and sympathetic lips drooped dolefully at the corners; his expressive brows puckered wofully over the bridge of his nose; and even the nose itself was crinkling with dismay. Madame's words still rang in his ears, even as the sound of her descending footsteps was still distinctly audible—and Madame Therese was by then on the fifth flight down, the second up from the street.
"The rent!" she had shrilled tempestuously. "The rent, m'sieur, must be paid by to-morrow morning! Otherwise—"
O'Rourke sighed from the bottom of his heart. "Faith, yes!" he said plaintively. "Otherwise . . . Oh, sure!" He frowned at the cracks in the floor, and with one forefinger tentatively caressed a light stubble of beard on his square chin.
But presently it occurred to him that care had been responsible for the death of the domestic cat. He smiled faintly, apprehensively, as though half, afraid that a smile would hurt; finding the experiment painless he prolonged it, grinning broadly.
Below stairs, the last echoing thump of Madame's feet was to be heard. O'Rourke lifted his shoulders together, sighed, chuckled, and anathematized his landlady.
"Brrrrr!" cried O'Rourke, with a flirt of his hand in the general direction of the conciergerie. "Brrrrrp! And may the Old Boy fly away with ye!"
He turned to the window, dismissing his troubles with a second shrug of his broad shoulders, and, leaning his elbows on the sills and himself perilously far out over the eaves, stared earnestly at a window in the attic of the house that stood just behind O'Rourke's hôtel. But it proved vacant.
O'Rourke pursed his lips and whistled persuasively. "Faith, darlint," said he, and as earnestly as though he really expected to be heard, "'tis no more than a glimpse of your red cheeks and bright eyes that I'm needing to put the heart into me. Will ye not come,—only for one little minute?"
He whistled again, more piercingly. There was no response; the little dormer window, where a black-eyed and red-cheeked little seamstress ordinarily sat of a morning, sewing industriously—but not too industriously to be altogether unaware of the infatuated Irishman's burning glances—remained desolately empty.
"Oh, well!" conceded O'Rourke, in the end. "If 'tis obstinate ye are, me dear, sure and that only proves ye a true daughter of Mother Eve!"
And he swung a chair up to the window and sat down, cocking his feet upon the sill. A pipe lay convenient to his hand—a small and intensely black clay; unconsciously O'Rourke's fingers wandered towards it. They clasped with loving tenderness about the bowl, while the fingers of his other hand explored his coat pocket for a match. That found, the Irishman discovered a fresh beauty in the brilliant morning—a beauty but enhanced by the clouds of blue-gray incense that floated between him and the open casement.
By degrees, however, his smile faded. Not always was it possible for O'Rourke to laugh in the teeth of his adversities. His gaze wandered far out from the open window and over the billowy sea of Parisian roofs that lay steaming in a bath of May sunshine.
The morning was one clear and brilliant, following on the heels of a day of scourging rain. Paris was happy; her face was washed, and she had on a clean pinafore dashed with the perfume of the spring things that were budding in her gardens. O'Rourke alone, perhaps, was out of tune with the universal spirit of contentment.
Now, good reasons why a man may be out of sorts in a Parisian springtide are few and far between; but they exist; O'Rourke had brought his with him when he had moved upon the capital on the edge of the winter, just vanished; and thereafter he had eaten and slept, moved and had his being in their company, enduring them with what patience he might—which was not overmuch, in truth. But now he was especially wistful and uneasy in his actions.
His supply of ready cash was not alarmingly low; it was non-existent—one all-sufficient reason for the disquietude of his soul.
Again, city life irked the man, who was of a nature transient, delaying under one roof no longer than was unavoidable—happiest, indeed, with no more than the wide sky for his bed canopy, the soft stars for his night lamps.
Finally, for some months O'Rourke had been kicking the heels of him about the pavements of civilization, devoutly praying for a war of magnitude; but in answer to his prayers no war had been vouchsafed unto him.
The broad world drowsed, sluggish, at peace with its neighbors—save in a corner of Afghanistan, where the British Empire was hurling army corps after army corps at the devoted heads of an insignificant, bewildered tribe of hillmen who had presumed to call their souls their own—knowing no better.
But the tempest in that particular teapot had slight attractions for O'Rourke, sincere seeker after distraction and destruction that he was. He felt rather sorry for the hill tribe who at the same time were beginning to feel rather more than sorry for themselves, and to wish that they hadn't done so.
The Irishman, however, positively refused to fight with, if he did not care to fight against, England. So there was, in his own disconsolate phrasing, nothing doing at all, at all.
And now the concierge was insisting upon the payment of that overdue rent. Plainly, something must be contrived, and that with expedition.
O'Rourke swore, yawned, stretched widely. He removed his feet from the window sill, and arose.
"I'll do it," he said aloud. "Faith, 'tis like pulling teeth—but I'll do it. I despise the necessity. Conspuez the necessity! A bas the necessity!"
At the foot of the bed stood his sole personal property—a small, iron-bound trunk, aged and disreputable to the eye, sown broadcast with the labels of hotels, 'railways and steamships.
O'Rourke went to it with a deep and heartfelt sigh, unlocked it, and for a space delved into its tumbled contents, eventually emerging flushed and triumphant from his search, with a watch in his hand—a watch of fine gold, richly chased, and studded with gems.
He shook his head, gazing upon it, and sighed deeply.
Long since the timepiece had been presented to O'Rourke by the grateful president of a South American republic, in recognition of the Irish adventurer's services as a captain-general under that republic's flag. It was so stated, in an inscription within the case.
O'Rourke treasured it lovingly, as he treasured the portrait of his mother, his love for the land of his nativity, the parting smile of his last sweetheart. He treasured it as he valued his honorable discharge from the Foreign Legion, the sword he had won in Cuba, and the captain's commission he had once held under the Grecian flag.
But—the rent!
He slammed his hat upon his head, the watch into his pocket, and the door behind him; he was going to call upon his "aunt in Montmartre."
When he returned he was minus the timepiece, but able to reinstate himself in the concierge's graces. Indeed, as she signed the receipt, the lady declared that she had always known in her soul that monsieur was an honorable gentleman.
O'Rourke accepted the honeyed words sourly, disgruntled to the extreme. He had a residue of a very few francs: actual hardship was but staved off for several days. Nevertheless, he had indulged himself in the luxury of a complete file of the day's papers.
Back in his little room again he read them all, thoroughly, even with eagerness; read the foreign news first, then the native, the scandal, the advertisements—even the editorials.
He found that England had completed her subjugation of the hill tribes, and incidentally the education of her rawest troops. On the horizon no war cloud threatened—unless in one spot.
From a meager paragraph, eked out by his knowledge of Central American politics, O'Rourke gleaned a ray of hope: trouble boded on the Isthmus of Panama. But that was indeed far from Paris.
He put aside his pipe and the last sheet, and glowered longingly across the roofs to the western sky line.
What his eyes rested upon, he saw not; mentally he was imaging to himself, scenting, even feeling the heat haze that lowers above that narrow ribbon of swamp, rock-spined, which lies obdurate between two oceans.
On his businesses of the moment he had crossed the isthmus several times. He had warred in its vicinity. He knew it very well indeed, and were there to be ructions there he desired greatly to be in and a part of them—to grip the hilt of a sword, to hold a horse between his thighs, to sweat and swelter, to toil and to suffer, to fight—above all, to fight—!
Clearly the obvious course of action was to go—to stand not on the order of his going, but to go at once.
O'Rourke started from his chair, with some half-formulated notion of proceeding directly to the Gare du Nord, and taking train for Havre; thence, he would engage passage via the French line to New York, thence, by coasting steamer to Aspinwall.
The route mapped itself plain to his imagination; the way was simple, very; there was but one complication. Realizing which O'Rourke sat down again, and cursed bitterly, if fluently.
"The divvle!" he murmured in disgust. "Now, if I hadn't been so enthusiastic for paying me rent—"
He produced his fortune and contemplated it with a disgusted glare: five silver francs and a centime or two, glittering bright in the rays of the declining sun.
"Why, sure," he mused, "'tis not enough to buy the dinner for a little bird—and 'tis meself that's no small bird!"
Now, how may a man by taking thought increase five francs one or two or three hundred fold?
At nightfall he concluded to give it up, the problem looming unsolvable. There seemed to be no answer to it, and O'Rourke was considering himself a much abused person with no friend to call his own the wide world 'round, barring—
"Paz!" he cried suddenly. "And why did I not think of Paz before, will ye be telling me?"
He sat silent for some time, wrapped in thought, as in a mantle.
"Likely am I to go hungry, the night," he admitted at length, ruefully; "but I'll dine in style or not at all."
Incontinently, he began to bustle about the narrow room—how he had grown to hate its mean confines of late!—preparing to go out.
He started by shaving his lean cheeks, indelibly sun-burned, very closely; then he wriggled into the one immaculate shirt his wardrobe boasted, brushed with care and donned his evening clothes and an inverness; and completed his adornment with gloves and shoes of the sleekest—both of which he had been hoarding all the winter against just such an emergency.
When through he indulged in a moment's approving inspection in his mirror, and nodded with satisfaction because of the transformation he had brought about in his personal appearance.
"I'll say this for ye, Terence, me lad," he volunteered: "that when ye are of the mind to take trouble with yourself, 'tis the bould, dashing creature ye are!"
And he chuckled light-heartedly at his own conceit, extinguishing the lamp and locking his door.
Yet he had no more than hinted at the irrefutable truth, for he was by no means ill-favored by nature: a man tall and broad beyond the average, with square shoulders and a full chest, with lean yet muscular flanks and long and sinewy limbs, well-knit and well set-up. His countenance was dark,—as has been indicated, the hall mark of a veteran campaigner—but nevertheless of a versatile mobility, and illuminated with eyes of warm gray, steadfast yet alert, swift to mirror the play of his emotional and passionate nature, bespeaking good-humor, an easy temper and—ordinarily at least—a habit of optimism.
For the rest he carried himself with confidence and assurance, as fits well upon an Irish gentleman—was he not "the O'Rourke"?—but without any aggressiveness. He was ready of wit, quick of tongue, tolerant of disposition: a citizen of the wide world, seasoned, sure of himself, young.
He descended the stairs with spirit, passed out before the conciergerie with an air. Madame Thérèse, the vigilant, observed and admired, regretting the harsh terms she had applied to her lodger, earlier in the day. "He gives the hôtel distinction," she murmured; and resolved mentally that in the future she would accord this splendid young person more consideration.
Now, it so came about that Madame Thérèse was not afforded the opportunity of putting in effect that good resolution for many and many a long day; the turn of affairs presently precluded Colonel O'Rourke's return to his little room. Which, however, was not greatly to his dissatisfaction.
But at the moment, O'Rourke himself had no more apprehension of this than had she. He was, in point of fact, anticipating an early return and a penniless to-morrow. The prospect did not tend to lighten his mood.
In the street he turned and cocked a—momentarily—jaundiced eye up at the towering, smudged, gloomy façade of the lodging house.
"'Tis no palace ye are," he apostrophized it, hating it consumedly; "'tis no gilded cage ye are, for a bird of me brilliant plumage. But 'tis needs must whin the divvle drives, I've heard—and if wishes were motors, this beggar would ride!" And then, "Faith, 'tis damnable—no less!" he declared with a short laugh. "To think of me, the O'Rourke, in all me fine feathers, that can't so much as afford the price of a fiacre!"