FullReads

“Well, but she’s got your note. She’ll understand–“

“What a fool you are, Davis! There’s my note!” cried the colonel, opening his fist and showing a very small wad of paper in his palm. “She’d have got my note if she’d been at the Kaiserin Elisabeth; but she’s no more there than I am.”

“Oh!” said his friend, sobered at this. “To be sure! Well?”

“Well, it’s no use trying to tell a man like you; but I suppose that she’s simply distracted by this time. You don’t know what a woman is, and how she can suffer about a little matter when she gives her mind to it.”

“Oh!” said the consul again, very contritely. “I’m very sorry I laughed; but”–here he looked into the colonel’s gloomy face with a countenance contorted with agony–“this only makes it the more ridiculous, you know;” and he reeled away, drunk with the mirth which filled him from head to foot. But he repented again, and with a superhuman effort so far subdued his transports as merely to quake internally, and tremble all over, as he led the way to the next hotel, arm in arm with the bewildered and embittered colonel. He encouraged the latter with much genuine sympathy, and observed a proper decorum in his interviews with one portier after another, formulating the colonel’s story very neatly, and explaining at the close that this American Herr, who had arrived at Vienna before daylight and directed his driver to take him to the Kaiserin Elisabeth, and had left his hotel at one o’clock in the belief that it was the Kaiserin Elisabeth, felt now an added eagerness to know what his hotel really was from the circumstance that his wife was there quite alone and in probable distress at his long absence. At first Colonel Kenton took a lively interest in this statement of his case, and prompted the consul with various remarks and sub-statements; he was grateful for the compassion generally shown him by the portiers, and he strove with himself to give some account of the exterior and locality of his mysterious hotel. But the fact was that he had not so much as looked behind him when he quitted it, and knew nothing about its appearance; and gradually the reiteration of the points of his misadventure to one portier after another began to be as “a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong.” His personation of an American Herr in great trouble of mind was an entire failure, except as illustrating the national apathy of countenance when under the influence of strong emotion. He ceased to take part in the consul’s efforts in his behalf; the whole abominable affair seemed as far beyond his forecast or endeavor as some result of malign enchantment, and there was no such thing as carrying off the tragedy with self-respect. Distressing as it was, there could be no question but it was entirely ridiculous; he hung his head with shame before the portiers at being a party to it; he no longer felt like resenting Davis’s amusement; he only wondered that he could keep his face in relating the idiotic mischance. Each successive failure to discover his lodging confirmed him in his humiliation and despair. Very likely there was a way out of the difficulty, but he did not know it. He became at last almost an indifferent spectator of the consul’s perseverance. He began to look back with incredulity at the period of his life passed before entering the fatal fiacre that morning. He received the final portier’s rejection with something like a personal derision.

“That’s the last place I can think of,” said the consul, wiping his brow as they emerged from the court-yard, for he had grown very warm with walking so much.

“Oh, all right,” said the colonel languidly.

“But we won’t give it up. Let’s go in here and get some coffee, and think it over a bit.” They were near one of the principal cafes, which was full of people smoking, and drinking the Viennese melange out of tumblers.