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you fool enough to believe what such a scoundrel as I am tells you, captain, unless it has probability to back it? I know you are not: therefore I will give my facts and my opinions, and then leave you to chew on them, while I go and drink of your generosity. I know a man who is called Abiram White.--I believe the knave took that name to show his enmity to the race of blacks! But this gentleman is now, and has been for years, to my certain knowledge, a regular translator of the human body from one State to another. I have dealt with him in my time, and a cheating dog he is! No more honour in him than meat in my stomach. I saw him here in this very town, the day of your wedding. He was in company with his wife's brother, and pretended to be a settler on the hunt for new land. A noble set they were, to carry on business--seven sons, each of them as tall as your sergeant with his cap on. Well, the moment I heard that your wife was lost, I saw at once that Abiram had laid his hands on her." "Do you know this--can this be true? What reason have you to fancy a thing so wild?" "Reason enough; I know Abiram White. Now, will you add a trifle just to keep my throat from parching?" "Go, go; you are stupified with drink already, miserable man, and know not what you say. Go; go, and beware the drummer." "Experience is a good guide"--the fellow called after the retiring Middleton; and then turning with a chuckling laugh, like one well satisfied with himself, he made the best of his way towards the shop of the suttler. A hundred times in the course of that night did Middleton fancy that the communication of the miscreant was entitled to some attention, and as often did he reject the idea as too wild and visionary for another thought. He was awakened early on the following morning, after passing a restless and nearly sleepless night, by his orderly, who came to report that a man was found dead on the parade, at no great distance from his quarters. Throwing on his clothes he proceeded to the spot, and beheld the individual, with whom he had held the preceding conference, in the precise situation in which he had first been found. The miserable wretch had fallen a victim to his intemperance. This revolting fact was sufficiently proclaimed by his obtruding eye-balls, his bloated countenance, and the nearly insufferable odours that were even then exhaling from his carcass. Disgusted with the odious spectacle, the youth was turning from the sight, after ordering the corpse to be removed, when the position of one of the dead man's hands struck him. On examination, he found the fore-finger extended, as if in the act of writing in the sand, with the following incomplete sentence, nearly illegible, but yet in a state to be deciphered: "Captain, it is true, as I am a gentle--" He had either died, or fallen into a sleep, the forerunner of his death, before the latter word was finished. Concealing this fact from the others, Middleton repeated his orders and departed. The pertinacity of the deceased, and all the circumstances united, induced him to set on foot some secret enquiries. He found that a family answering the description which had been given him, had in fact passed the place the day of his nuptials. They were traced along the margin of the Mississippi, for some distance, until they took boat and ascended the river to its confluence with the Missouri. Here they had disappeared like hundreds of others, in pursuit of the hidden wealth of the interior. Furnished with these facts, Middleton detailed a small guard of his most trusty men, took leave of Don Augustin, without declaring his hopes or his fears, and having arrived at the indicated point, he pushed into the wilderness in pursuit. It was not difficult to trace a train like that of Ishmael, until he was well assured its object lay far beyond the usual limits of the settlements. This circumstance, in itself, quickened his suspicions, and gave additional force to his hopes of final success. After getting beyond the assistance of verbal directions, the anxious husband had recourse to the usual signs of a trail, in order to follow the fugitives. This he also found a task of no difficulty, until he reached the hard and unyielding soil of the rolling prairies. Here, indeed, he was completely at fault. He found himself, at length, compelled to divide his followers, appointing a place of rendezvous at a distant day, and to endeavour to find the lost trail by multiplying, as much as possible, the number of his eyes. He had been alone a week, when accident brought him in contact with the trapper and the bee-hunter. Part of their interview has been related, and the reader can readily imagine the explanations that succeeded the tale he recounted, and which led, as has already been seen, to the recovery of his bride. CHAPTER XVI These likelihoods confirm her flight from hence, Therefore, I pray you, stay not to discourse, But mount you presently. --Shakspeare. An hour had slid by, in hasty and nearly incoherent questions and answers, before Middleton, hanging over his recovered treasure with that sort of jealous watchfulness with which a miser would regard his hoards, closed the disjointed narrative of his own proceedings by demanding-- "And you, my Inez; in what manner were you treated?" "In every thing, but the great injustice they did in separating me so forcibly from my friends, as well perhaps as the circumstances of my captors would allow. I think the man, who is certainly the master here, is but a new beginner in wickedness. He quarrelled frightfully in my presence, with the wretch who seized me, and then they made an impious bargain, to which I was compelled to acquiesce, and to which they bound me as well as themselves by oaths. Ah! Middleton, I fear the heretics are not so heedful of their vows as we who are nurtured in the bosom of the true church!" "Believe it not; these villains are of no religion: did they forswear themselves?" "No, not perjured: but was it not awful to call upon the good God to witness so sinful a compact?" "And so we think, Inez, as truly as the most virtuous cardinal of Rome. But how did they observe their oath, and what was its purport?" "They conditioned to leave me unmolested, and free from their odious presence, provided I would give a pledge to make no effort to escape; and that I would not even show myself, until a time that my masters saw fit to name." "And that time?" demanded the impatient Middleton, who so well knew the religious scruples of his wife--"that time?" "It is already passed. I was sworn by my patron saint, and faithfully did I keep the vow, until the man they call Ishmael forgot the terms by offering violence. I then made my appearance on the rock, for the time too was passed; though I even think father Ignatius would have absolved me from the vow, on account of the treachery of my keepers." "If he had not," muttered the youth between his compressed teeth, "I would have absolved him for ever from his spiritual care of your conscience!" "You, Middleton!" returned his wife looking up into his flushed face, while a bright blush suffused her own sweet countenance; "you may receive my vows, but surely you can have no power to absolve me from their observance!" "No, no, no. Inez, you are right. I know but little of these conscientious subtilties, and I am any thing but a priest: yet tell me, what has induced these monsters to play this desperate game--to trifle thus with my happiness?" "You know my ignorance of the world, and how ill I am qualified to furnish reasons for the conduct of beings so different from any I have ever seen before. But does not love of money drive men to acts even worse than this? I believe they thought that an aged and wealthy father could be tempted to pay them a rich ransom for his child; and, perhaps," she added, stealing an enquiring glance through her tears, at the attentive Middleton, "they counted something on the fresh affections of a bridegroom." "They might have extracted the blood from my heart, drop by drop!" "Yes," resumed his young and timid wife, instantly withdrawing the stolen look she had hazarded, and hurriedly pursuing the train of the discourse, as if glad to make him forget the liberty she had just taken, "I have been told, there are men so base as to perjure themselves at the altar, in order to command the gold of ignorant and confiding girls; and if love of money will lead to such baseness, we may surely expect it will hurry those, who devote themselves to gain, into acts of lesser fraud." "It must be so; and now, Inez, though I am here to guard you with my life, and we are in possession of this rock, our difficulties, perhaps our dangers, are not ended. You will summon all your courage to meet the trial and prove yourself a soldier's wife, my Inez?" "I am ready to depart this instant. The letter you sent by the physician, had prepared me to hope for the best, and I have every thing arranged for flight, at the shortest warning." "Let us then leave this place and join our friends." "Friends!" interrupted Inez, glancing her eyes around the little tent in quest of the form of Ellen. "I, too, have a friend who must not be forgotten, but who is pledged to pass the remainder of her life with us. She is gone!" Middleton gently led her from the spot, as he smilingly answered-- "She may have had, like myself, her own private communications for some favoured ear." The young man had not however done justice to the motives of Ellen Wade. The sensitive and intelligent girl had readily perceived how little her presence was necessary in the interview that has just been related, and had retired with that intuitive delicacy of feeling which seems to belong more properly to her sex. She was now to be seen seated on a point of the rock, with her person so entirely enveloped in her dress as to conceal her features. Here she had remained for near an hour, no one approaching to address her, and as it appeared to her own quick and jealous eyes, totally unobserved. In the latter particular, however, even the vigilance of the quick-sighted Ellen was deceived. The first act of Paul Hover, on finding himself the master of Ishmael's citadel, had been to sound the note of victory, after the quaint and ludicrous manner that is so often practised among the borderers of the West. Flapping his sides with his hands, as the conquering game-cock is wont to do with his wings, he raised a loud and laughable imitation of the exultation of this bird; a cry which might have proved a dangerous challenge had any one of the athletic sons of the squatter been within hearing. "This has been a regular knock-down and drag-out," he cried, "and no bones broke! How now, old trapper, you have been one of your training, platoon, rank and file soldiers in your day, and have seen forts taken and batteries stormed before this--am I right?" "Ay, ay, that have I," answered the old man, who still maintained his post at the foot of the rock, so little disturbed by what he had just witnessed, as to return the grin of Paul, with a hearty indulgence in his own silent and peculiar laughter; "you have gone through the exploit like men!" "Now tell me, is it not in rule, to call over the names of the living, and to bury the dead, after every bloody battle?" "Some did and other some didn't. When Sir William push'd the German, Dieskau, thro' the defiles at the foot of the Hori--" "Your Sir William was a drone to Sir Paul, and knew nothing of regularity. So here begins the roll-call--by the by, old man, what between bee-hunting and buffaloe humps, and certain other matters, I have been too busy to ask your name; for I intend to begin with my rear-guard, well knowing that my man in front is too busy to answer." "Lord, lad, I've been called in my time by as many names as there are people among whom I've dwelt. Now the Delawares nam'd me for my eyes, and I was called after the far-sighted hawk. Then, ag'in, the settlers in the Otsego hills christened me anew, from the fashion of my leggings; and various have been the names by which I have gone through life; but little will it matter when the time shall come, that all are to be muster'd, face to face, by what titles a mortal has played his part! I humbly trust I shall be able to answer to any of mine, in a loud and manly voice." Paul paid little or no attention to this reply, more than half of which was lost in the distance, but pursuing the humour of the moment, he called out in a stentorian voice to the naturalist to answer to his name. Dr. Battius had not thought it necessary to push his success beyond the comfortable niche, which accident had so opportunely formed for his protection, and in which he now reposed from his labours, with a pleasing consciousness of security, added to great exultation at the possession of the botanical treasure already mentioned. "Mount, mount, my worthy mole-catcher! come and behold the prospect of skirting Ishmael; come and look nature boldly in the face, and not go sneaking any longer, among the prairie grass and mullein tops, like a gobbler nibbling for grasshoppers." The mouth of the light-hearted and reckless bee-hunter was instantly closed, and he was rendered as mute, as he had just been boisterous and talkative, by the appearance of Ellen Wade. When the melancholy maiden took her seat on the point of the rock as mentioned, Paul affected to employ himself in conducting a close inspection of the household effects of the squatter. He rummaged the drawers of Esther with no delicate hands, scattered the rustic finery of her girls on the ground, without the least deference to its quality or elegance, and tossed her pots and kettles here and there, as though they had been vessels of wood instead of iron. All this industry was, however, manifestly without an object. He reserved nothing for himself, not even appearing conscious of the nature of the articles which suffered by his familiarity. When he had examined the inside of every cabin, taken a fresh survey of the spot where he had confined the children, and where he had thoroughly secured them with cords, and kicked one of the pails of the woman, like a foot-ball, fifty feet into the air, in sheer wantonness, he returned to the edge of the rock, and thrusting both his hands through his wampum belt, he began to whistle the "Kentucky Hunters" as diligently as if he had been hired to supply his auditors with music by the hour. In this manner passed the remainder of the time, until Middleton, as has been related, led Inez forth from the tent, and gave a new direction to the thoughts of the whole party. He summoned Paul from his flourish of music, tore the Doctor from the study of his plant, and, as acknowledged leader, gave the necessary orders for immediate departure. In the bustle and confusion that were likely to succeed such a mandate, there was little opportunity to indulge in complaints or reflections. As the adventurers had not come unprepared for victory, each individual employed himself in such offices as were best adapted to his strength and situation. The trapper had already made himself master of the patient Asinus, who was quietly feeding at no great distance from the rock, and he was now busy in fitting his back with the complicated machinery that Dr. Battius saw fit to term a saddle of his own invention. The naturalist himself seized upon his portfolios, herbals, and collection of insects, which he quickly transferred from the encampment of the squatter, to certain pockets in the aforesaid ingenious invention, and which the trapper as uniformly cast away the moment his back was turned. Paul showed his dexterity in removing such light articles as Inez and Ellen had prepared for their flight to the foot of the citadel, while Middleton, after mingling threats and promises, in order to induce the children to remain quietly in their bondage, assisted the females to descend. As time began to press upon them, and there was great danger of Ishmael's returning, these several movements were made with singular industry and despatch. The trapper bestowed such articles as he conceived were necessary to the comfort of the weaker and more delicate members of the party, in those pockets from which he had so unceremoniously expelled the treasures of the unconscious naturalist, and then gave way for Middleton to place Inez in one of those seats which he had prepared on the back of the animal for her and her companion. "Go, child," the old man said, motioning to Ellen to follow the example of the lady, and turning his head a little anxiously to examine the waste behind him. "It cannot be long afore the owner of this place will be coming to look after his household; and he is not a man to give up his property, however obtained, without complaint!" "It is true," cried Middleton; "we have wasted moments that are precious, and have the utmost need of industry." "Ay, ay, I thought it; and would have said it, captain; but I remembered how your grand'ther used to love to look upon the face of her he led away for a wife, in the days of his youth and his happiness. 'Tis natur', 'tis natur', and 'tis wiser to give way a little before its feelings, than to try to stop a current that will have its course." Ellen advanced to the side of the beast, and seizing Inez by the hand, she said, with heartfelt warmth, after struggling to suppress an emotion that nearly choked her-- "God bless you, sweet lady! I hope you will forget and forgive the wrongs you have received from my uncle--" The humbled and sorrowful girl could say no more, her voice becoming entirely inaudible in an ungovernable burst of grief. "How is this?" cried Middleton; "did you not say, Inez, that this excellent young woman was to accompany us, and to live with us for the remainder of her life; or, at least, until she found some more agreeable residence for herself?" "I did; and I still hope it. She has always given me reason to believe, that after having shown so much commiseration and friendship in my misery, she would not desert me, should happier times return." "I cannot--I ought not," continued Ellen, getting the better of her momentary weakness. "It has pleased God to cast my lot among these people, and I ought not to quit them. It would be adding the appearance of treachery to what will already seem bad enough, with one of his opinions. He has been kind to me, an orphan, after his rough customs, and I cannot steal from him at such a moment." "She is just as much a relation of skirting Ishmael as I am a bishop!" said Paul, with a loud hem, as if his throat wanted clearing. "If the old fellow has done the honest thing by her, in giving her a morsel of venison now and then, or a spoon around his homminy dish, hasn't she pay'd him in teaching the young devils to read their Bible, or in helping old Esther to put her finery in shape and fashion. Tell me that a drone has a sting, and I'll believe you as easily as I will that this young woman is a debtor to any of the tribe of Bush!" "It is but little matter who owes me, or where I am in debt. There are none to care for a girl who is fatherless and motherless, and whose nearest kin are the offcasts of all honest people. No, no; go, lady, and Heaven for ever bless you! I am better here, in this desert, where there are none to know my shame." "Now, old trapper," retorted Paul, "this is what I call knowing which way the wind blows! You ar' a man that has seen life, and you know something of fashions; I put it to your judgment, plainly, isn't it in the nature of things for the hive to swarm when the young get their growth, and if children will quit their parents, ought one who is of no kith or kin--" "Hist!" interrupted the man he addressed, "Hector is discontented. Say it out, plainly, pup; what is it dog--what is it?" The venerable hound had risen, and was scenting the fresh breeze which continued to sweep heavily over the prairie. At the words of his master he growled and contracted the muscles of his lips, as if half disposed to threaten with the remnants of his teeth. The younger dog, who was resting after the chase of the morning, also made some signs that his nose detected a taint in the air, and then the two resumed their slumbers, as if they had done enough. The trapper seized the bridle of the ass, and cried, urging the beast onward-- "There is no time for words. The squatter and his brood are within a mile or two of this blessed spot!" Middleton lost all recollection of Ellen, in the danger which now so eminently beset his recovered bride; nor is it necessary to add, that Dr. Battius did not wait for a second admonition to commence his retreat. Following the route indicated by the old man, they turned the rock in a body, and pursued their way as fast as possible across the prairie, under the favour of the cover it afforded. Paul Hover, however, remained in his tracks, sullenly leaning on his rifle. Near a minute had elapsed before he was observed by Ellen, who had buried her face in her hands, to conceal her fancied desolation from herself. "Why do you not fly?" the weeping girl exclaimed, the instant she perceived she was not alone. "I'm not used to it." "My uncle will soon be here! you have nothing to hope from his pity." "Nor from that of his niece, I reckon. Let him come; he can only knock me on the head!" "Paul, Paul, if you love me, fly." "Alone!--if I do, may I be--" "If you value your life, fly!" "I value it not, compared to you." "Paul!" "Ellen!" She extended both her hands and burst into another and a still more violent flood of tears. The bee-hunter put one of his sturdy arms around her waist, and in another moment he was urging her over the plain, in rapid pursuit of their flying friends. CHAPTER XVII Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight With a new Gorgon--Do not bid me speak; See, and then speak yourselves. --Shakspeare. The little run, which supplied the family of the squatter with water, and nourished the trees and bushes that grew near the base of the rocky eminence, took its rise at no great distance from the latter, in a small thicket of cotton-wood and vines. Hither, then, the trapper directed the flight, as to the place affording the only available cover in so pressing an emergency. It will be remembered, that the sagacity of the old man, which, from long practice in similar scenes, amounted nearly to an instinct in all cases of sudden danger, had first induced him to take this course, as it placed the hill between them and the approaching party. Favoured by this circumstance, he succeeded in reaching the bushes in sufficient time and Paul Hover had just hurried the breathless Ellen into the tangled bush, as Ishmael gained the summit of the rock, in the manner already described, where he stood like a man momentarily bereft of sense, gazing at the confusion which had been created among his chattels, or at his gagged and bound children, who had been safely bestowed, by the forethought of the bee-hunter, under the cover of a bark roof, in a sort of irregular pile. A long rifle would have thrown a bullet from the height, on which the squatter now stood, into the very cover where the fugitives, who had wrought all this mischief, were clustered. The trapper was the first to speak, as the man on whose intelligence and experience they all depended for counsel, after running his eye over the different individuals who gathered about him, in order to see that none were missing. "Ah! natur' is natur', and has done its work!" he said, nodding to the exulting Paul, with a smile of approbation. "I thought it would be hard for those, who had so often met in fair and foul, by starlight and under the clouded moon, to part at last in anger. Now is there little time to lose in talk, and every thing to gain by industry! It cannot be long afore some of yonder brood will be nosing along the 'arth for our trail, and should they find it, as find it they surely will, and should they push us to a stand on our courage, the dispute must be settled with the rifle; which may He in heaven forbid! Captain, can you lead us to the place where any of your warriors lie?--For the stout sons of the squatter will make a manly brush of it, or I am but little of a judge in warlike dispositions!" "The place of rendezvous is many leagues from this, on the banks of La Platte." "It is bad--it is bad. If fighting is to be done, it is always wise to enter on it on equal terms. But what has one so near his time to do with ill-blood and hot-blood at his heart! Listen to what a grey head and some experience have to offer, and then if any among you can point out a wiser fashion for a retreat, we can just follow his design, and forget that I have spoken. This thicket stretches for near a mile as it may be slanting from the rock, and leads towards the sunset instead of the settlements." "Enough, enough," cried Middleton, too impatient to wait until the deliberative and perhaps loquacious old man could end his minute explanation. "Time is too precious for words. Let us fly." The trapper made a gesture of compliance, and turning in his tracks, he led Asinus across the trembling earth of the swale, and quickly emerged on the hard ground, on the side opposite to the encampment of the squatter. "If old Ishmael gets a squint at that highway through the brush," cried Paul, casting, as he left the place, a hasty glance at the broad trail the party had made through the thicket, "he'll need no finger-board to tell him which way his road lies. But let him follow! I know the vagabond would gladly cross his breed with a little honest blood, but if any son of his ever gets to be the husband of--" "Hush, Paul, hush," said the terrified young woman, who leaned on his arm for support; "your voice might be heard." The bee-hunter was silent, though he did not cease to cast ominous looks behind him, as they flew along the edge of the run, which sufficiently betrayed the belligerent condition of his mind. As each one was busy for himself, but a few minutes elapsed before the party rose a swell of the prairie, and descending without a moment's delay on the opposite side, they were at once removed from every danger of being seen by the sons of Ishmael, unless the pursuers should happen to fall upon their trail. The old man now profited by the formation of the land to take another direction, with a view to elude pursuit, as a vessel changes her course in fogs and darkness, to escape from the vigilance of her enemies. Two hours, passed in the utmost diligence, enabled them to make a half circuit around the rock, and to reach a point that was exactly opposite to the original direction of their flight. To most of the fugitives their situation was as entirely unknown as is that of a ship in the middle of the ocean to the uninstructed voyager: but the old man proceeded at every turn, and through every bottom, with a decision that inspired his followers with confidence, as it spoke favourably of his own knowledge of the localities. His hound, stopping now and then to catch the expression of his eye, had preceded the trapper throughout the whole distance, with as much certainty as though a previous and intelligible communion between them had established the route by which they were to proceed. But, at the expiration of the time just named, the dog suddenly came to a stand, and then seating himself on the prairie, he snuffed the air a moment, and began a low and piteous whining. "Ay--pup--ay. I know the spot--I know the spot, and reason there is to remember it well!" said the old man, stopping by the side of his uneasy associate,

sin,--known

How many times the word 'sin,--known' appears in the text?

you fool enough to believe what such a scoundrel as I am tells you, captain, unless it has probability to back it? I know you are not: therefore I will give my facts and my opinions, and then leave you to chew on them, while I go and drink of your generosity. I know a man who is called Abiram White.--I believe the knave took that name to show his enmity to the race of blacks! But this gentleman is now, and has been for years, to my certain knowledge, a regular translator of the human body from one State to another. I have dealt with him in my time, and a cheating dog he is! No more honour in him than meat in my stomach. I saw him here in this very town, the day of your wedding. He was in company with his wife's brother, and pretended to be a settler on the hunt for new land. A noble set they were, to carry on business--seven sons, each of them as tall as your sergeant with his cap on. Well, the moment I heard that your wife was lost, I saw at once that Abiram had laid his hands on her." "Do you know this--can this be true? What reason have you to fancy a thing so wild?" "Reason enough; I know Abiram White. Now, will you add a trifle just to keep my throat from parching?" "Go, go; you are stupified with drink already, miserable man, and know not what you say. Go; go, and beware the drummer." "Experience is a good guide"--the fellow called after the retiring Middleton; and then turning with a chuckling laugh, like one well satisfied with himself, he made the best of his way towards the shop of the suttler. A hundred times in the course of that night did Middleton fancy that the communication of the miscreant was entitled to some attention, and as often did he reject the idea as too wild and visionary for another thought. He was awakened early on the following morning, after passing a restless and nearly sleepless night, by his orderly, who came to report that a man was found dead on the parade, at no great distance from his quarters. Throwing on his clothes he proceeded to the spot, and beheld the individual, with whom he had held the preceding conference, in the precise situation in which he had first been found. The miserable wretch had fallen a victim to his intemperance. This revolting fact was sufficiently proclaimed by his obtruding eye-balls, his bloated countenance, and the nearly insufferable odours that were even then exhaling from his carcass. Disgusted with the odious spectacle, the youth was turning from the sight, after ordering the corpse to be removed, when the position of one of the dead man's hands struck him. On examination, he found the fore-finger extended, as if in the act of writing in the sand, with the following incomplete sentence, nearly illegible, but yet in a state to be deciphered: "Captain, it is true, as I am a gentle--" He had either died, or fallen into a sleep, the forerunner of his death, before the latter word was finished. Concealing this fact from the others, Middleton repeated his orders and departed. The pertinacity of the deceased, and all the circumstances united, induced him to set on foot some secret enquiries. He found that a family answering the description which had been given him, had in fact passed the place the day of his nuptials. They were traced along the margin of the Mississippi, for some distance, until they took boat and ascended the river to its confluence with the Missouri. Here they had disappeared like hundreds of others, in pursuit of the hidden wealth of the interior. Furnished with these facts, Middleton detailed a small guard of his most trusty men, took leave of Don Augustin, without declaring his hopes or his fears, and having arrived at the indicated point, he pushed into the wilderness in pursuit. It was not difficult to trace a train like that of Ishmael, until he was well assured its object lay far beyond the usual limits of the settlements. This circumstance, in itself, quickened his suspicions, and gave additional force to his hopes of final success. After getting beyond the assistance of verbal directions, the anxious husband had recourse to the usual signs of a trail, in order to follow the fugitives. This he also found a task of no difficulty, until he reached the hard and unyielding soil of the rolling prairies. Here, indeed, he was completely at fault. He found himself, at length, compelled to divide his followers, appointing a place of rendezvous at a distant day, and to endeavour to find the lost trail by multiplying, as much as possible, the number of his eyes. He had been alone a week, when accident brought him in contact with the trapper and the bee-hunter. Part of their interview has been related, and the reader can readily imagine the explanations that succeeded the tale he recounted, and which led, as has already been seen, to the recovery of his bride. CHAPTER XVI These likelihoods confirm her flight from hence, Therefore, I pray you, stay not to discourse, But mount you presently. --Shakspeare. An hour had slid by, in hasty and nearly incoherent questions and answers, before Middleton, hanging over his recovered treasure with that sort of jealous watchfulness with which a miser would regard his hoards, closed the disjointed narrative of his own proceedings by demanding-- "And you, my Inez; in what manner were you treated?" "In every thing, but the great injustice they did in separating me so forcibly from my friends, as well perhaps as the circumstances of my captors would allow. I think the man, who is certainly the master here, is but a new beginner in wickedness. He quarrelled frightfully in my presence, with the wretch who seized me, and then they made an impious bargain, to which I was compelled to acquiesce, and to which they bound me as well as themselves by oaths. Ah! Middleton, I fear the heretics are not so heedful of their vows as we who are nurtured in the bosom of the true church!" "Believe it not; these villains are of no religion: did they forswear themselves?" "No, not perjured: but was it not awful to call upon the good God to witness so sinful a compact?" "And so we think, Inez, as truly as the most virtuous cardinal of Rome. But how did they observe their oath, and what was its purport?" "They conditioned to leave me unmolested, and free from their odious presence, provided I would give a pledge to make no effort to escape; and that I would not even show myself, until a time that my masters saw fit to name." "And that time?" demanded the impatient Middleton, who so well knew the religious scruples of his wife--"that time?" "It is already passed. I was sworn by my patron saint, and faithfully did I keep the vow, until the man they call Ishmael forgot the terms by offering violence. I then made my appearance on the rock, for the time too was passed; though I even think father Ignatius would have absolved me from the vow, on account of the treachery of my keepers." "If he had not," muttered the youth between his compressed teeth, "I would have absolved him for ever from his spiritual care of your conscience!" "You, Middleton!" returned his wife looking up into his flushed face, while a bright blush suffused her own sweet countenance; "you may receive my vows, but surely you can have no power to absolve me from their observance!" "No, no, no. Inez, you are right. I know but little of these conscientious subtilties, and I am any thing but a priest: yet tell me, what has induced these monsters to play this desperate game--to trifle thus with my happiness?" "You know my ignorance of the world, and how ill I am qualified to furnish reasons for the conduct of beings so different from any I have ever seen before. But does not love of money drive men to acts even worse than this? I believe they thought that an aged and wealthy father could be tempted to pay them a rich ransom for his child; and, perhaps," she added, stealing an enquiring glance through her tears, at the attentive Middleton, "they counted something on the fresh affections of a bridegroom." "They might have extracted the blood from my heart, drop by drop!" "Yes," resumed his young and timid wife, instantly withdrawing the stolen look she had hazarded, and hurriedly pursuing the train of the discourse, as if glad to make him forget the liberty she had just taken, "I have been told, there are men so base as to perjure themselves at the altar, in order to command the gold of ignorant and confiding girls; and if love of money will lead to such baseness, we may surely expect it will hurry those, who devote themselves to gain, into acts of lesser fraud." "It must be so; and now, Inez, though I am here to guard you with my life, and we are in possession of this rock, our difficulties, perhaps our dangers, are not ended. You will summon all your courage to meet the trial and prove yourself a soldier's wife, my Inez?" "I am ready to depart this instant. The letter you sent by the physician, had prepared me to hope for the best, and I have every thing arranged for flight, at the shortest warning." "Let us then leave this place and join our friends." "Friends!" interrupted Inez, glancing her eyes around the little tent in quest of the form of Ellen. "I, too, have a friend who must not be forgotten, but who is pledged to pass the remainder of her life with us. She is gone!" Middleton gently led her from the spot, as he smilingly answered-- "She may have had, like myself, her own private communications for some favoured ear." The young man had not however done justice to the motives of Ellen Wade. The sensitive and intelligent girl had readily perceived how little her presence was necessary in the interview that has just been related, and had retired with that intuitive delicacy of feeling which seems to belong more properly to her sex. She was now to be seen seated on a point of the rock, with her person so entirely enveloped in her dress as to conceal her features. Here she had remained for near an hour, no one approaching to address her, and as it appeared to her own quick and jealous eyes, totally unobserved. In the latter particular, however, even the vigilance of the quick-sighted Ellen was deceived. The first act of Paul Hover, on finding himself the master of Ishmael's citadel, had been to sound the note of victory, after the quaint and ludicrous manner that is so often practised among the borderers of the West. Flapping his sides with his hands, as the conquering game-cock is wont to do with his wings, he raised a loud and laughable imitation of the exultation of this bird; a cry which might have proved a dangerous challenge had any one of the athletic sons of the squatter been within hearing. "This has been a regular knock-down and drag-out," he cried, "and no bones broke! How now, old trapper, you have been one of your training, platoon, rank and file soldiers in your day, and have seen forts taken and batteries stormed before this--am I right?" "Ay, ay, that have I," answered the old man, who still maintained his post at the foot of the rock, so little disturbed by what he had just witnessed, as to return the grin of Paul, with a hearty indulgence in his own silent and peculiar laughter; "you have gone through the exploit like men!" "Now tell me, is it not in rule, to call over the names of the living, and to bury the dead, after every bloody battle?" "Some did and other some didn't. When Sir William push'd the German, Dieskau, thro' the defiles at the foot of the Hori--" "Your Sir William was a drone to Sir Paul, and knew nothing of regularity. So here begins the roll-call--by the by, old man, what between bee-hunting and buffaloe humps, and certain other matters, I have been too busy to ask your name; for I intend to begin with my rear-guard, well knowing that my man in front is too busy to answer." "Lord, lad, I've been called in my time by as many names as there are people among whom I've dwelt. Now the Delawares nam'd me for my eyes, and I was called after the far-sighted hawk. Then, ag'in, the settlers in the Otsego hills christened me anew, from the fashion of my leggings; and various have been the names by which I have gone through life; but little will it matter when the time shall come, that all are to be muster'd, face to face, by what titles a mortal has played his part! I humbly trust I shall be able to answer to any of mine, in a loud and manly voice." Paul paid little or no attention to this reply, more than half of which was lost in the distance, but pursuing the humour of the moment, he called out in a stentorian voice to the naturalist to answer to his name. Dr. Battius had not thought it necessary to push his success beyond the comfortable niche, which accident had so opportunely formed for his protection, and in which he now reposed from his labours, with a pleasing consciousness of security, added to great exultation at the possession of the botanical treasure already mentioned. "Mount, mount, my worthy mole-catcher! come and behold the prospect of skirting Ishmael; come and look nature boldly in the face, and not go sneaking any longer, among the prairie grass and mullein tops, like a gobbler nibbling for grasshoppers." The mouth of the light-hearted and reckless bee-hunter was instantly closed, and he was rendered as mute, as he had just been boisterous and talkative, by the appearance of Ellen Wade. When the melancholy maiden took her seat on the point of the rock as mentioned, Paul affected to employ himself in conducting a close inspection of the household effects of the squatter. He rummaged the drawers of Esther with no delicate hands, scattered the rustic finery of her girls on the ground, without the least deference to its quality or elegance, and tossed her pots and kettles here and there, as though they had been vessels of wood instead of iron. All this industry was, however, manifestly without an object. He reserved nothing for himself, not even appearing conscious of the nature of the articles which suffered by his familiarity. When he had examined the inside of every cabin, taken a fresh survey of the spot where he had confined the children, and where he had thoroughly secured them with cords, and kicked one of the pails of the woman, like a foot-ball, fifty feet into the air, in sheer wantonness, he returned to the edge of the rock, and thrusting both his hands through his wampum belt, he began to whistle the "Kentucky Hunters" as diligently as if he had been hired to supply his auditors with music by the hour. In this manner passed the remainder of the time, until Middleton, as has been related, led Inez forth from the tent, and gave a new direction to the thoughts of the whole party. He summoned Paul from his flourish of music, tore the Doctor from the study of his plant, and, as acknowledged leader, gave the necessary orders for immediate departure. In the bustle and confusion that were likely to succeed such a mandate, there was little opportunity to indulge in complaints or reflections. As the adventurers had not come unprepared for victory, each individual employed himself in such offices as were best adapted to his strength and situation. The trapper had already made himself master of the patient Asinus, who was quietly feeding at no great distance from the rock, and he was now busy in fitting his back with the complicated machinery that Dr. Battius saw fit to term a saddle of his own invention. The naturalist himself seized upon his portfolios, herbals, and collection of insects, which he quickly transferred from the encampment of the squatter, to certain pockets in the aforesaid ingenious invention, and which the trapper as uniformly cast away the moment his back was turned. Paul showed his dexterity in removing such light articles as Inez and Ellen had prepared for their flight to the foot of the citadel, while Middleton, after mingling threats and promises, in order to induce the children to remain quietly in their bondage, assisted the females to descend. As time began to press upon them, and there was great danger of Ishmael's returning, these several movements were made with singular industry and despatch. The trapper bestowed such articles as he conceived were necessary to the comfort of the weaker and more delicate members of the party, in those pockets from which he had so unceremoniously expelled the treasures of the unconscious naturalist, and then gave way for Middleton to place Inez in one of those seats which he had prepared on the back of the animal for her and her companion. "Go, child," the old man said, motioning to Ellen to follow the example of the lady, and turning his head a little anxiously to examine the waste behind him. "It cannot be long afore the owner of this place will be coming to look after his household; and he is not a man to give up his property, however obtained, without complaint!" "It is true," cried Middleton; "we have wasted moments that are precious, and have the utmost need of industry." "Ay, ay, I thought it; and would have said it, captain; but I remembered how your grand'ther used to love to look upon the face of her he led away for a wife, in the days of his youth and his happiness. 'Tis natur', 'tis natur', and 'tis wiser to give way a little before its feelings, than to try to stop a current that will have its course." Ellen advanced to the side of the beast, and seizing Inez by the hand, she said, with heartfelt warmth, after struggling to suppress an emotion that nearly choked her-- "God bless you, sweet lady! I hope you will forget and forgive the wrongs you have received from my uncle--" The humbled and sorrowful girl could say no more, her voice becoming entirely inaudible in an ungovernable burst of grief. "How is this?" cried Middleton; "did you not say, Inez, that this excellent young woman was to accompany us, and to live with us for the remainder of her life; or, at least, until she found some more agreeable residence for herself?" "I did; and I still hope it. She has always given me reason to believe, that after having shown so much commiseration and friendship in my misery, she would not desert me, should happier times return." "I cannot--I ought not," continued Ellen, getting the better of her momentary weakness. "It has pleased God to cast my lot among these people, and I ought not to quit them. It would be adding the appearance of treachery to what will already seem bad enough, with one of his opinions. He has been kind to me, an orphan, after his rough customs, and I cannot steal from him at such a moment." "She is just as much a relation of skirting Ishmael as I am a bishop!" said Paul, with a loud hem, as if his throat wanted clearing. "If the old fellow has done the honest thing by her, in giving her a morsel of venison now and then, or a spoon around his homminy dish, hasn't she pay'd him in teaching the young devils to read their Bible, or in helping old Esther to put her finery in shape and fashion. Tell me that a drone has a sting, and I'll believe you as easily as I will that this young woman is a debtor to any of the tribe of Bush!" "It is but little matter who owes me, or where I am in debt. There are none to care for a girl who is fatherless and motherless, and whose nearest kin are the offcasts of all honest people. No, no; go, lady, and Heaven for ever bless you! I am better here, in this desert, where there are none to know my shame." "Now, old trapper," retorted Paul, "this is what I call knowing which way the wind blows! You ar' a man that has seen life, and you know something of fashions; I put it to your judgment, plainly, isn't it in the nature of things for the hive to swarm when the young get their growth, and if children will quit their parents, ought one who is of no kith or kin--" "Hist!" interrupted the man he addressed, "Hector is discontented. Say it out, plainly, pup; what is it dog--what is it?" The venerable hound had risen, and was scenting the fresh breeze which continued to sweep heavily over the prairie. At the words of his master he growled and contracted the muscles of his lips, as if half disposed to threaten with the remnants of his teeth. The younger dog, who was resting after the chase of the morning, also made some signs that his nose detected a taint in the air, and then the two resumed their slumbers, as if they had done enough. The trapper seized the bridle of the ass, and cried, urging the beast onward-- "There is no time for words. The squatter and his brood are within a mile or two of this blessed spot!" Middleton lost all recollection of Ellen, in the danger which now so eminently beset his recovered bride; nor is it necessary to add, that Dr. Battius did not wait for a second admonition to commence his retreat. Following the route indicated by the old man, they turned the rock in a body, and pursued their way as fast as possible across the prairie, under the favour of the cover it afforded. Paul Hover, however, remained in his tracks, sullenly leaning on his rifle. Near a minute had elapsed before he was observed by Ellen, who had buried her face in her hands, to conceal her fancied desolation from herself. "Why do you not fly?" the weeping girl exclaimed, the instant she perceived she was not alone. "I'm not used to it." "My uncle will soon be here! you have nothing to hope from his pity." "Nor from that of his niece, I reckon. Let him come; he can only knock me on the head!" "Paul, Paul, if you love me, fly." "Alone!--if I do, may I be--" "If you value your life, fly!" "I value it not, compared to you." "Paul!" "Ellen!" She extended both her hands and burst into another and a still more violent flood of tears. The bee-hunter put one of his sturdy arms around her waist, and in another moment he was urging her over the plain, in rapid pursuit of their flying friends. CHAPTER XVII Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight With a new Gorgon--Do not bid me speak; See, and then speak yourselves. --Shakspeare. The little run, which supplied the family of the squatter with water, and nourished the trees and bushes that grew near the base of the rocky eminence, took its rise at no great distance from the latter, in a small thicket of cotton-wood and vines. Hither, then, the trapper directed the flight, as to the place affording the only available cover in so pressing an emergency. It will be remembered, that the sagacity of the old man, which, from long practice in similar scenes, amounted nearly to an instinct in all cases of sudden danger, had first induced him to take this course, as it placed the hill between them and the approaching party. Favoured by this circumstance, he succeeded in reaching the bushes in sufficient time and Paul Hover had just hurried the breathless Ellen into the tangled bush, as Ishmael gained the summit of the rock, in the manner already described, where he stood like a man momentarily bereft of sense, gazing at the confusion which had been created among his chattels, or at his gagged and bound children, who had been safely bestowed, by the forethought of the bee-hunter, under the cover of a bark roof, in a sort of irregular pile. A long rifle would have thrown a bullet from the height, on which the squatter now stood, into the very cover where the fugitives, who had wrought all this mischief, were clustered. The trapper was the first to speak, as the man on whose intelligence and experience they all depended for counsel, after running his eye over the different individuals who gathered about him, in order to see that none were missing. "Ah! natur' is natur', and has done its work!" he said, nodding to the exulting Paul, with a smile of approbation. "I thought it would be hard for those, who had so often met in fair and foul, by starlight and under the clouded moon, to part at last in anger. Now is there little time to lose in talk, and every thing to gain by industry! It cannot be long afore some of yonder brood will be nosing along the 'arth for our trail, and should they find it, as find it they surely will, and should they push us to a stand on our courage, the dispute must be settled with the rifle; which may He in heaven forbid! Captain, can you lead us to the place where any of your warriors lie?--For the stout sons of the squatter will make a manly brush of it, or I am but little of a judge in warlike dispositions!" "The place of rendezvous is many leagues from this, on the banks of La Platte." "It is bad--it is bad. If fighting is to be done, it is always wise to enter on it on equal terms. But what has one so near his time to do with ill-blood and hot-blood at his heart! Listen to what a grey head and some experience have to offer, and then if any among you can point out a wiser fashion for a retreat, we can just follow his design, and forget that I have spoken. This thicket stretches for near a mile as it may be slanting from the rock, and leads towards the sunset instead of the settlements." "Enough, enough," cried Middleton, too impatient to wait until the deliberative and perhaps loquacious old man could end his minute explanation. "Time is too precious for words. Let us fly." The trapper made a gesture of compliance, and turning in his tracks, he led Asinus across the trembling earth of the swale, and quickly emerged on the hard ground, on the side opposite to the encampment of the squatter. "If old Ishmael gets a squint at that highway through the brush," cried Paul, casting, as he left the place, a hasty glance at the broad trail the party had made through the thicket, "he'll need no finger-board to tell him which way his road lies. But let him follow! I know the vagabond would gladly cross his breed with a little honest blood, but if any son of his ever gets to be the husband of--" "Hush, Paul, hush," said the terrified young woman, who leaned on his arm for support; "your voice might be heard." The bee-hunter was silent, though he did not cease to cast ominous looks behind him, as they flew along the edge of the run, which sufficiently betrayed the belligerent condition of his mind. As each one was busy for himself, but a few minutes elapsed before the party rose a swell of the prairie, and descending without a moment's delay on the opposite side, they were at once removed from every danger of being seen by the sons of Ishmael, unless the pursuers should happen to fall upon their trail. The old man now profited by the formation of the land to take another direction, with a view to elude pursuit, as a vessel changes her course in fogs and darkness, to escape from the vigilance of her enemies. Two hours, passed in the utmost diligence, enabled them to make a half circuit around the rock, and to reach a point that was exactly opposite to the original direction of their flight. To most of the fugitives their situation was as entirely unknown as is that of a ship in the middle of the ocean to the uninstructed voyager: but the old man proceeded at every turn, and through every bottom, with a decision that inspired his followers with confidence, as it spoke favourably of his own knowledge of the localities. His hound, stopping now and then to catch the expression of his eye, had preceded the trapper throughout the whole distance, with as much certainty as though a previous and intelligible communion between them had established the route by which they were to proceed. But, at the expiration of the time just named, the dog suddenly came to a stand, and then seating himself on the prairie, he snuffed the air a moment, and began a low and piteous whining. "Ay--pup--ay. I know the spot--I know the spot, and reason there is to remember it well!" said the old man, stopping by the side of his uneasy associate,

fact

How many times the word 'fact' appears in the text?

you fool enough to believe what such a scoundrel as I am tells you, captain, unless it has probability to back it? I know you are not: therefore I will give my facts and my opinions, and then leave you to chew on them, while I go and drink of your generosity. I know a man who is called Abiram White.--I believe the knave took that name to show his enmity to the race of blacks! But this gentleman is now, and has been for years, to my certain knowledge, a regular translator of the human body from one State to another. I have dealt with him in my time, and a cheating dog he is! No more honour in him than meat in my stomach. I saw him here in this very town, the day of your wedding. He was in company with his wife's brother, and pretended to be a settler on the hunt for new land. A noble set they were, to carry on business--seven sons, each of them as tall as your sergeant with his cap on. Well, the moment I heard that your wife was lost, I saw at once that Abiram had laid his hands on her." "Do you know this--can this be true? What reason have you to fancy a thing so wild?" "Reason enough; I know Abiram White. Now, will you add a trifle just to keep my throat from parching?" "Go, go; you are stupified with drink already, miserable man, and know not what you say. Go; go, and beware the drummer." "Experience is a good guide"--the fellow called after the retiring Middleton; and then turning with a chuckling laugh, like one well satisfied with himself, he made the best of his way towards the shop of the suttler. A hundred times in the course of that night did Middleton fancy that the communication of the miscreant was entitled to some attention, and as often did he reject the idea as too wild and visionary for another thought. He was awakened early on the following morning, after passing a restless and nearly sleepless night, by his orderly, who came to report that a man was found dead on the parade, at no great distance from his quarters. Throwing on his clothes he proceeded to the spot, and beheld the individual, with whom he had held the preceding conference, in the precise situation in which he had first been found. The miserable wretch had fallen a victim to his intemperance. This revolting fact was sufficiently proclaimed by his obtruding eye-balls, his bloated countenance, and the nearly insufferable odours that were even then exhaling from his carcass. Disgusted with the odious spectacle, the youth was turning from the sight, after ordering the corpse to be removed, when the position of one of the dead man's hands struck him. On examination, he found the fore-finger extended, as if in the act of writing in the sand, with the following incomplete sentence, nearly illegible, but yet in a state to be deciphered: "Captain, it is true, as I am a gentle--" He had either died, or fallen into a sleep, the forerunner of his death, before the latter word was finished. Concealing this fact from the others, Middleton repeated his orders and departed. The pertinacity of the deceased, and all the circumstances united, induced him to set on foot some secret enquiries. He found that a family answering the description which had been given him, had in fact passed the place the day of his nuptials. They were traced along the margin of the Mississippi, for some distance, until they took boat and ascended the river to its confluence with the Missouri. Here they had disappeared like hundreds of others, in pursuit of the hidden wealth of the interior. Furnished with these facts, Middleton detailed a small guard of his most trusty men, took leave of Don Augustin, without declaring his hopes or his fears, and having arrived at the indicated point, he pushed into the wilderness in pursuit. It was not difficult to trace a train like that of Ishmael, until he was well assured its object lay far beyond the usual limits of the settlements. This circumstance, in itself, quickened his suspicions, and gave additional force to his hopes of final success. After getting beyond the assistance of verbal directions, the anxious husband had recourse to the usual signs of a trail, in order to follow the fugitives. This he also found a task of no difficulty, until he reached the hard and unyielding soil of the rolling prairies. Here, indeed, he was completely at fault. He found himself, at length, compelled to divide his followers, appointing a place of rendezvous at a distant day, and to endeavour to find the lost trail by multiplying, as much as possible, the number of his eyes. He had been alone a week, when accident brought him in contact with the trapper and the bee-hunter. Part of their interview has been related, and the reader can readily imagine the explanations that succeeded the tale he recounted, and which led, as has already been seen, to the recovery of his bride. CHAPTER XVI These likelihoods confirm her flight from hence, Therefore, I pray you, stay not to discourse, But mount you presently. --Shakspeare. An hour had slid by, in hasty and nearly incoherent questions and answers, before Middleton, hanging over his recovered treasure with that sort of jealous watchfulness with which a miser would regard his hoards, closed the disjointed narrative of his own proceedings by demanding-- "And you, my Inez; in what manner were you treated?" "In every thing, but the great injustice they did in separating me so forcibly from my friends, as well perhaps as the circumstances of my captors would allow. I think the man, who is certainly the master here, is but a new beginner in wickedness. He quarrelled frightfully in my presence, with the wretch who seized me, and then they made an impious bargain, to which I was compelled to acquiesce, and to which they bound me as well as themselves by oaths. Ah! Middleton, I fear the heretics are not so heedful of their vows as we who are nurtured in the bosom of the true church!" "Believe it not; these villains are of no religion: did they forswear themselves?" "No, not perjured: but was it not awful to call upon the good God to witness so sinful a compact?" "And so we think, Inez, as truly as the most virtuous cardinal of Rome. But how did they observe their oath, and what was its purport?" "They conditioned to leave me unmolested, and free from their odious presence, provided I would give a pledge to make no effort to escape; and that I would not even show myself, until a time that my masters saw fit to name." "And that time?" demanded the impatient Middleton, who so well knew the religious scruples of his wife--"that time?" "It is already passed. I was sworn by my patron saint, and faithfully did I keep the vow, until the man they call Ishmael forgot the terms by offering violence. I then made my appearance on the rock, for the time too was passed; though I even think father Ignatius would have absolved me from the vow, on account of the treachery of my keepers." "If he had not," muttered the youth between his compressed teeth, "I would have absolved him for ever from his spiritual care of your conscience!" "You, Middleton!" returned his wife looking up into his flushed face, while a bright blush suffused her own sweet countenance; "you may receive my vows, but surely you can have no power to absolve me from their observance!" "No, no, no. Inez, you are right. I know but little of these conscientious subtilties, and I am any thing but a priest: yet tell me, what has induced these monsters to play this desperate game--to trifle thus with my happiness?" "You know my ignorance of the world, and how ill I am qualified to furnish reasons for the conduct of beings so different from any I have ever seen before. But does not love of money drive men to acts even worse than this? I believe they thought that an aged and wealthy father could be tempted to pay them a rich ransom for his child; and, perhaps," she added, stealing an enquiring glance through her tears, at the attentive Middleton, "they counted something on the fresh affections of a bridegroom." "They might have extracted the blood from my heart, drop by drop!" "Yes," resumed his young and timid wife, instantly withdrawing the stolen look she had hazarded, and hurriedly pursuing the train of the discourse, as if glad to make him forget the liberty she had just taken, "I have been told, there are men so base as to perjure themselves at the altar, in order to command the gold of ignorant and confiding girls; and if love of money will lead to such baseness, we may surely expect it will hurry those, who devote themselves to gain, into acts of lesser fraud." "It must be so; and now, Inez, though I am here to guard you with my life, and we are in possession of this rock, our difficulties, perhaps our dangers, are not ended. You will summon all your courage to meet the trial and prove yourself a soldier's wife, my Inez?" "I am ready to depart this instant. The letter you sent by the physician, had prepared me to hope for the best, and I have every thing arranged for flight, at the shortest warning." "Let us then leave this place and join our friends." "Friends!" interrupted Inez, glancing her eyes around the little tent in quest of the form of Ellen. "I, too, have a friend who must not be forgotten, but who is pledged to pass the remainder of her life with us. She is gone!" Middleton gently led her from the spot, as he smilingly answered-- "She may have had, like myself, her own private communications for some favoured ear." The young man had not however done justice to the motives of Ellen Wade. The sensitive and intelligent girl had readily perceived how little her presence was necessary in the interview that has just been related, and had retired with that intuitive delicacy of feeling which seems to belong more properly to her sex. She was now to be seen seated on a point of the rock, with her person so entirely enveloped in her dress as to conceal her features. Here she had remained for near an hour, no one approaching to address her, and as it appeared to her own quick and jealous eyes, totally unobserved. In the latter particular, however, even the vigilance of the quick-sighted Ellen was deceived. The first act of Paul Hover, on finding himself the master of Ishmael's citadel, had been to sound the note of victory, after the quaint and ludicrous manner that is so often practised among the borderers of the West. Flapping his sides with his hands, as the conquering game-cock is wont to do with his wings, he raised a loud and laughable imitation of the exultation of this bird; a cry which might have proved a dangerous challenge had any one of the athletic sons of the squatter been within hearing. "This has been a regular knock-down and drag-out," he cried, "and no bones broke! How now, old trapper, you have been one of your training, platoon, rank and file soldiers in your day, and have seen forts taken and batteries stormed before this--am I right?" "Ay, ay, that have I," answered the old man, who still maintained his post at the foot of the rock, so little disturbed by what he had just witnessed, as to return the grin of Paul, with a hearty indulgence in his own silent and peculiar laughter; "you have gone through the exploit like men!" "Now tell me, is it not in rule, to call over the names of the living, and to bury the dead, after every bloody battle?" "Some did and other some didn't. When Sir William push'd the German, Dieskau, thro' the defiles at the foot of the Hori--" "Your Sir William was a drone to Sir Paul, and knew nothing of regularity. So here begins the roll-call--by the by, old man, what between bee-hunting and buffaloe humps, and certain other matters, I have been too busy to ask your name; for I intend to begin with my rear-guard, well knowing that my man in front is too busy to answer." "Lord, lad, I've been called in my time by as many names as there are people among whom I've dwelt. Now the Delawares nam'd me for my eyes, and I was called after the far-sighted hawk. Then, ag'in, the settlers in the Otsego hills christened me anew, from the fashion of my leggings; and various have been the names by which I have gone through life; but little will it matter when the time shall come, that all are to be muster'd, face to face, by what titles a mortal has played his part! I humbly trust I shall be able to answer to any of mine, in a loud and manly voice." Paul paid little or no attention to this reply, more than half of which was lost in the distance, but pursuing the humour of the moment, he called out in a stentorian voice to the naturalist to answer to his name. Dr. Battius had not thought it necessary to push his success beyond the comfortable niche, which accident had so opportunely formed for his protection, and in which he now reposed from his labours, with a pleasing consciousness of security, added to great exultation at the possession of the botanical treasure already mentioned. "Mount, mount, my worthy mole-catcher! come and behold the prospect of skirting Ishmael; come and look nature boldly in the face, and not go sneaking any longer, among the prairie grass and mullein tops, like a gobbler nibbling for grasshoppers." The mouth of the light-hearted and reckless bee-hunter was instantly closed, and he was rendered as mute, as he had just been boisterous and talkative, by the appearance of Ellen Wade. When the melancholy maiden took her seat on the point of the rock as mentioned, Paul affected to employ himself in conducting a close inspection of the household effects of the squatter. He rummaged the drawers of Esther with no delicate hands, scattered the rustic finery of her girls on the ground, without the least deference to its quality or elegance, and tossed her pots and kettles here and there, as though they had been vessels of wood instead of iron. All this industry was, however, manifestly without an object. He reserved nothing for himself, not even appearing conscious of the nature of the articles which suffered by his familiarity. When he had examined the inside of every cabin, taken a fresh survey of the spot where he had confined the children, and where he had thoroughly secured them with cords, and kicked one of the pails of the woman, like a foot-ball, fifty feet into the air, in sheer wantonness, he returned to the edge of the rock, and thrusting both his hands through his wampum belt, he began to whistle the "Kentucky Hunters" as diligently as if he had been hired to supply his auditors with music by the hour. In this manner passed the remainder of the time, until Middleton, as has been related, led Inez forth from the tent, and gave a new direction to the thoughts of the whole party. He summoned Paul from his flourish of music, tore the Doctor from the study of his plant, and, as acknowledged leader, gave the necessary orders for immediate departure. In the bustle and confusion that were likely to succeed such a mandate, there was little opportunity to indulge in complaints or reflections. As the adventurers had not come unprepared for victory, each individual employed himself in such offices as were best adapted to his strength and situation. The trapper had already made himself master of the patient Asinus, who was quietly feeding at no great distance from the rock, and he was now busy in fitting his back with the complicated machinery that Dr. Battius saw fit to term a saddle of his own invention. The naturalist himself seized upon his portfolios, herbals, and collection of insects, which he quickly transferred from the encampment of the squatter, to certain pockets in the aforesaid ingenious invention, and which the trapper as uniformly cast away the moment his back was turned. Paul showed his dexterity in removing such light articles as Inez and Ellen had prepared for their flight to the foot of the citadel, while Middleton, after mingling threats and promises, in order to induce the children to remain quietly in their bondage, assisted the females to descend. As time began to press upon them, and there was great danger of Ishmael's returning, these several movements were made with singular industry and despatch. The trapper bestowed such articles as he conceived were necessary to the comfort of the weaker and more delicate members of the party, in those pockets from which he had so unceremoniously expelled the treasures of the unconscious naturalist, and then gave way for Middleton to place Inez in one of those seats which he had prepared on the back of the animal for her and her companion. "Go, child," the old man said, motioning to Ellen to follow the example of the lady, and turning his head a little anxiously to examine the waste behind him. "It cannot be long afore the owner of this place will be coming to look after his household; and he is not a man to give up his property, however obtained, without complaint!" "It is true," cried Middleton; "we have wasted moments that are precious, and have the utmost need of industry." "Ay, ay, I thought it; and would have said it, captain; but I remembered how your grand'ther used to love to look upon the face of her he led away for a wife, in the days of his youth and his happiness. 'Tis natur', 'tis natur', and 'tis wiser to give way a little before its feelings, than to try to stop a current that will have its course." Ellen advanced to the side of the beast, and seizing Inez by the hand, she said, with heartfelt warmth, after struggling to suppress an emotion that nearly choked her-- "God bless you, sweet lady! I hope you will forget and forgive the wrongs you have received from my uncle--" The humbled and sorrowful girl could say no more, her voice becoming entirely inaudible in an ungovernable burst of grief. "How is this?" cried Middleton; "did you not say, Inez, that this excellent young woman was to accompany us, and to live with us for the remainder of her life; or, at least, until she found some more agreeable residence for herself?" "I did; and I still hope it. She has always given me reason to believe, that after having shown so much commiseration and friendship in my misery, she would not desert me, should happier times return." "I cannot--I ought not," continued Ellen, getting the better of her momentary weakness. "It has pleased God to cast my lot among these people, and I ought not to quit them. It would be adding the appearance of treachery to what will already seem bad enough, with one of his opinions. He has been kind to me, an orphan, after his rough customs, and I cannot steal from him at such a moment." "She is just as much a relation of skirting Ishmael as I am a bishop!" said Paul, with a loud hem, as if his throat wanted clearing. "If the old fellow has done the honest thing by her, in giving her a morsel of venison now and then, or a spoon around his homminy dish, hasn't she pay'd him in teaching the young devils to read their Bible, or in helping old Esther to put her finery in shape and fashion. Tell me that a drone has a sting, and I'll believe you as easily as I will that this young woman is a debtor to any of the tribe of Bush!" "It is but little matter who owes me, or where I am in debt. There are none to care for a girl who is fatherless and motherless, and whose nearest kin are the offcasts of all honest people. No, no; go, lady, and Heaven for ever bless you! I am better here, in this desert, where there are none to know my shame." "Now, old trapper," retorted Paul, "this is what I call knowing which way the wind blows! You ar' a man that has seen life, and you know something of fashions; I put it to your judgment, plainly, isn't it in the nature of things for the hive to swarm when the young get their growth, and if children will quit their parents, ought one who is of no kith or kin--" "Hist!" interrupted the man he addressed, "Hector is discontented. Say it out, plainly, pup; what is it dog--what is it?" The venerable hound had risen, and was scenting the fresh breeze which continued to sweep heavily over the prairie. At the words of his master he growled and contracted the muscles of his lips, as if half disposed to threaten with the remnants of his teeth. The younger dog, who was resting after the chase of the morning, also made some signs that his nose detected a taint in the air, and then the two resumed their slumbers, as if they had done enough. The trapper seized the bridle of the ass, and cried, urging the beast onward-- "There is no time for words. The squatter and his brood are within a mile or two of this blessed spot!" Middleton lost all recollection of Ellen, in the danger which now so eminently beset his recovered bride; nor is it necessary to add, that Dr. Battius did not wait for a second admonition to commence his retreat. Following the route indicated by the old man, they turned the rock in a body, and pursued their way as fast as possible across the prairie, under the favour of the cover it afforded. Paul Hover, however, remained in his tracks, sullenly leaning on his rifle. Near a minute had elapsed before he was observed by Ellen, who had buried her face in her hands, to conceal her fancied desolation from herself. "Why do you not fly?" the weeping girl exclaimed, the instant she perceived she was not alone. "I'm not used to it." "My uncle will soon be here! you have nothing to hope from his pity." "Nor from that of his niece, I reckon. Let him come; he can only knock me on the head!" "Paul, Paul, if you love me, fly." "Alone!--if I do, may I be--" "If you value your life, fly!" "I value it not, compared to you." "Paul!" "Ellen!" She extended both her hands and burst into another and a still more violent flood of tears. The bee-hunter put one of his sturdy arms around her waist, and in another moment he was urging her over the plain, in rapid pursuit of their flying friends. CHAPTER XVII Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight With a new Gorgon--Do not bid me speak; See, and then speak yourselves. --Shakspeare. The little run, which supplied the family of the squatter with water, and nourished the trees and bushes that grew near the base of the rocky eminence, took its rise at no great distance from the latter, in a small thicket of cotton-wood and vines. Hither, then, the trapper directed the flight, as to the place affording the only available cover in so pressing an emergency. It will be remembered, that the sagacity of the old man, which, from long practice in similar scenes, amounted nearly to an instinct in all cases of sudden danger, had first induced him to take this course, as it placed the hill between them and the approaching party. Favoured by this circumstance, he succeeded in reaching the bushes in sufficient time and Paul Hover had just hurried the breathless Ellen into the tangled bush, as Ishmael gained the summit of the rock, in the manner already described, where he stood like a man momentarily bereft of sense, gazing at the confusion which had been created among his chattels, or at his gagged and bound children, who had been safely bestowed, by the forethought of the bee-hunter, under the cover of a bark roof, in a sort of irregular pile. A long rifle would have thrown a bullet from the height, on which the squatter now stood, into the very cover where the fugitives, who had wrought all this mischief, were clustered. The trapper was the first to speak, as the man on whose intelligence and experience they all depended for counsel, after running his eye over the different individuals who gathered about him, in order to see that none were missing. "Ah! natur' is natur', and has done its work!" he said, nodding to the exulting Paul, with a smile of approbation. "I thought it would be hard for those, who had so often met in fair and foul, by starlight and under the clouded moon, to part at last in anger. Now is there little time to lose in talk, and every thing to gain by industry! It cannot be long afore some of yonder brood will be nosing along the 'arth for our trail, and should they find it, as find it they surely will, and should they push us to a stand on our courage, the dispute must be settled with the rifle; which may He in heaven forbid! Captain, can you lead us to the place where any of your warriors lie?--For the stout sons of the squatter will make a manly brush of it, or I am but little of a judge in warlike dispositions!" "The place of rendezvous is many leagues from this, on the banks of La Platte." "It is bad--it is bad. If fighting is to be done, it is always wise to enter on it on equal terms. But what has one so near his time to do with ill-blood and hot-blood at his heart! Listen to what a grey head and some experience have to offer, and then if any among you can point out a wiser fashion for a retreat, we can just follow his design, and forget that I have spoken. This thicket stretches for near a mile as it may be slanting from the rock, and leads towards the sunset instead of the settlements." "Enough, enough," cried Middleton, too impatient to wait until the deliberative and perhaps loquacious old man could end his minute explanation. "Time is too precious for words. Let us fly." The trapper made a gesture of compliance, and turning in his tracks, he led Asinus across the trembling earth of the swale, and quickly emerged on the hard ground, on the side opposite to the encampment of the squatter. "If old Ishmael gets a squint at that highway through the brush," cried Paul, casting, as he left the place, a hasty glance at the broad trail the party had made through the thicket, "he'll need no finger-board to tell him which way his road lies. But let him follow! I know the vagabond would gladly cross his breed with a little honest blood, but if any son of his ever gets to be the husband of--" "Hush, Paul, hush," said the terrified young woman, who leaned on his arm for support; "your voice might be heard." The bee-hunter was silent, though he did not cease to cast ominous looks behind him, as they flew along the edge of the run, which sufficiently betrayed the belligerent condition of his mind. As each one was busy for himself, but a few minutes elapsed before the party rose a swell of the prairie, and descending without a moment's delay on the opposite side, they were at once removed from every danger of being seen by the sons of Ishmael, unless the pursuers should happen to fall upon their trail. The old man now profited by the formation of the land to take another direction, with a view to elude pursuit, as a vessel changes her course in fogs and darkness, to escape from the vigilance of her enemies. Two hours, passed in the utmost diligence, enabled them to make a half circuit around the rock, and to reach a point that was exactly opposite to the original direction of their flight. To most of the fugitives their situation was as entirely unknown as is that of a ship in the middle of the ocean to the uninstructed voyager: but the old man proceeded at every turn, and through every bottom, with a decision that inspired his followers with confidence, as it spoke favourably of his own knowledge of the localities. His hound, stopping now and then to catch the expression of his eye, had preceded the trapper throughout the whole distance, with as much certainty as though a previous and intelligible communion between them had established the route by which they were to proceed. But, at the expiration of the time just named, the dog suddenly came to a stand, and then seating himself on the prairie, he snuffed the air a moment, and began a low and piteous whining. "Ay--pup--ay. I know the spot--I know the spot, and reason there is to remember it well!" said the old man, stopping by the side of his uneasy associate,

miserable

How many times the word 'miserable' appears in the text?

you fool enough to believe what such a scoundrel as I am tells you, captain, unless it has probability to back it? I know you are not: therefore I will give my facts and my opinions, and then leave you to chew on them, while I go and drink of your generosity. I know a man who is called Abiram White.--I believe the knave took that name to show his enmity to the race of blacks! But this gentleman is now, and has been for years, to my certain knowledge, a regular translator of the human body from one State to another. I have dealt with him in my time, and a cheating dog he is! No more honour in him than meat in my stomach. I saw him here in this very town, the day of your wedding. He was in company with his wife's brother, and pretended to be a settler on the hunt for new land. A noble set they were, to carry on business--seven sons, each of them as tall as your sergeant with his cap on. Well, the moment I heard that your wife was lost, I saw at once that Abiram had laid his hands on her." "Do you know this--can this be true? What reason have you to fancy a thing so wild?" "Reason enough; I know Abiram White. Now, will you add a trifle just to keep my throat from parching?" "Go, go; you are stupified with drink already, miserable man, and know not what you say. Go; go, and beware the drummer." "Experience is a good guide"--the fellow called after the retiring Middleton; and then turning with a chuckling laugh, like one well satisfied with himself, he made the best of his way towards the shop of the suttler. A hundred times in the course of that night did Middleton fancy that the communication of the miscreant was entitled to some attention, and as often did he reject the idea as too wild and visionary for another thought. He was awakened early on the following morning, after passing a restless and nearly sleepless night, by his orderly, who came to report that a man was found dead on the parade, at no great distance from his quarters. Throwing on his clothes he proceeded to the spot, and beheld the individual, with whom he had held the preceding conference, in the precise situation in which he had first been found. The miserable wretch had fallen a victim to his intemperance. This revolting fact was sufficiently proclaimed by his obtruding eye-balls, his bloated countenance, and the nearly insufferable odours that were even then exhaling from his carcass. Disgusted with the odious spectacle, the youth was turning from the sight, after ordering the corpse to be removed, when the position of one of the dead man's hands struck him. On examination, he found the fore-finger extended, as if in the act of writing in the sand, with the following incomplete sentence, nearly illegible, but yet in a state to be deciphered: "Captain, it is true, as I am a gentle--" He had either died, or fallen into a sleep, the forerunner of his death, before the latter word was finished. Concealing this fact from the others, Middleton repeated his orders and departed. The pertinacity of the deceased, and all the circumstances united, induced him to set on foot some secret enquiries. He found that a family answering the description which had been given him, had in fact passed the place the day of his nuptials. They were traced along the margin of the Mississippi, for some distance, until they took boat and ascended the river to its confluence with the Missouri. Here they had disappeared like hundreds of others, in pursuit of the hidden wealth of the interior. Furnished with these facts, Middleton detailed a small guard of his most trusty men, took leave of Don Augustin, without declaring his hopes or his fears, and having arrived at the indicated point, he pushed into the wilderness in pursuit. It was not difficult to trace a train like that of Ishmael, until he was well assured its object lay far beyond the usual limits of the settlements. This circumstance, in itself, quickened his suspicions, and gave additional force to his hopes of final success. After getting beyond the assistance of verbal directions, the anxious husband had recourse to the usual signs of a trail, in order to follow the fugitives. This he also found a task of no difficulty, until he reached the hard and unyielding soil of the rolling prairies. Here, indeed, he was completely at fault. He found himself, at length, compelled to divide his followers, appointing a place of rendezvous at a distant day, and to endeavour to find the lost trail by multiplying, as much as possible, the number of his eyes. He had been alone a week, when accident brought him in contact with the trapper and the bee-hunter. Part of their interview has been related, and the reader can readily imagine the explanations that succeeded the tale he recounted, and which led, as has already been seen, to the recovery of his bride. CHAPTER XVI These likelihoods confirm her flight from hence, Therefore, I pray you, stay not to discourse, But mount you presently. --Shakspeare. An hour had slid by, in hasty and nearly incoherent questions and answers, before Middleton, hanging over his recovered treasure with that sort of jealous watchfulness with which a miser would regard his hoards, closed the disjointed narrative of his own proceedings by demanding-- "And you, my Inez; in what manner were you treated?" "In every thing, but the great injustice they did in separating me so forcibly from my friends, as well perhaps as the circumstances of my captors would allow. I think the man, who is certainly the master here, is but a new beginner in wickedness. He quarrelled frightfully in my presence, with the wretch who seized me, and then they made an impious bargain, to which I was compelled to acquiesce, and to which they bound me as well as themselves by oaths. Ah! Middleton, I fear the heretics are not so heedful of their vows as we who are nurtured in the bosom of the true church!" "Believe it not; these villains are of no religion: did they forswear themselves?" "No, not perjured: but was it not awful to call upon the good God to witness so sinful a compact?" "And so we think, Inez, as truly as the most virtuous cardinal of Rome. But how did they observe their oath, and what was its purport?" "They conditioned to leave me unmolested, and free from their odious presence, provided I would give a pledge to make no effort to escape; and that I would not even show myself, until a time that my masters saw fit to name." "And that time?" demanded the impatient Middleton, who so well knew the religious scruples of his wife--"that time?" "It is already passed. I was sworn by my patron saint, and faithfully did I keep the vow, until the man they call Ishmael forgot the terms by offering violence. I then made my appearance on the rock, for the time too was passed; though I even think father Ignatius would have absolved me from the vow, on account of the treachery of my keepers." "If he had not," muttered the youth between his compressed teeth, "I would have absolved him for ever from his spiritual care of your conscience!" "You, Middleton!" returned his wife looking up into his flushed face, while a bright blush suffused her own sweet countenance; "you may receive my vows, but surely you can have no power to absolve me from their observance!" "No, no, no. Inez, you are right. I know but little of these conscientious subtilties, and I am any thing but a priest: yet tell me, what has induced these monsters to play this desperate game--to trifle thus with my happiness?" "You know my ignorance of the world, and how ill I am qualified to furnish reasons for the conduct of beings so different from any I have ever seen before. But does not love of money drive men to acts even worse than this? I believe they thought that an aged and wealthy father could be tempted to pay them a rich ransom for his child; and, perhaps," she added, stealing an enquiring glance through her tears, at the attentive Middleton, "they counted something on the fresh affections of a bridegroom." "They might have extracted the blood from my heart, drop by drop!" "Yes," resumed his young and timid wife, instantly withdrawing the stolen look she had hazarded, and hurriedly pursuing the train of the discourse, as if glad to make him forget the liberty she had just taken, "I have been told, there are men so base as to perjure themselves at the altar, in order to command the gold of ignorant and confiding girls; and if love of money will lead to such baseness, we may surely expect it will hurry those, who devote themselves to gain, into acts of lesser fraud." "It must be so; and now, Inez, though I am here to guard you with my life, and we are in possession of this rock, our difficulties, perhaps our dangers, are not ended. You will summon all your courage to meet the trial and prove yourself a soldier's wife, my Inez?" "I am ready to depart this instant. The letter you sent by the physician, had prepared me to hope for the best, and I have every thing arranged for flight, at the shortest warning." "Let us then leave this place and join our friends." "Friends!" interrupted Inez, glancing her eyes around the little tent in quest of the form of Ellen. "I, too, have a friend who must not be forgotten, but who is pledged to pass the remainder of her life with us. She is gone!" Middleton gently led her from the spot, as he smilingly answered-- "She may have had, like myself, her own private communications for some favoured ear." The young man had not however done justice to the motives of Ellen Wade. The sensitive and intelligent girl had readily perceived how little her presence was necessary in the interview that has just been related, and had retired with that intuitive delicacy of feeling which seems to belong more properly to her sex. She was now to be seen seated on a point of the rock, with her person so entirely enveloped in her dress as to conceal her features. Here she had remained for near an hour, no one approaching to address her, and as it appeared to her own quick and jealous eyes, totally unobserved. In the latter particular, however, even the vigilance of the quick-sighted Ellen was deceived. The first act of Paul Hover, on finding himself the master of Ishmael's citadel, had been to sound the note of victory, after the quaint and ludicrous manner that is so often practised among the borderers of the West. Flapping his sides with his hands, as the conquering game-cock is wont to do with his wings, he raised a loud and laughable imitation of the exultation of this bird; a cry which might have proved a dangerous challenge had any one of the athletic sons of the squatter been within hearing. "This has been a regular knock-down and drag-out," he cried, "and no bones broke! How now, old trapper, you have been one of your training, platoon, rank and file soldiers in your day, and have seen forts taken and batteries stormed before this--am I right?" "Ay, ay, that have I," answered the old man, who still maintained his post at the foot of the rock, so little disturbed by what he had just witnessed, as to return the grin of Paul, with a hearty indulgence in his own silent and peculiar laughter; "you have gone through the exploit like men!" "Now tell me, is it not in rule, to call over the names of the living, and to bury the dead, after every bloody battle?" "Some did and other some didn't. When Sir William push'd the German, Dieskau, thro' the defiles at the foot of the Hori--" "Your Sir William was a drone to Sir Paul, and knew nothing of regularity. So here begins the roll-call--by the by, old man, what between bee-hunting and buffaloe humps, and certain other matters, I have been too busy to ask your name; for I intend to begin with my rear-guard, well knowing that my man in front is too busy to answer." "Lord, lad, I've been called in my time by as many names as there are people among whom I've dwelt. Now the Delawares nam'd me for my eyes, and I was called after the far-sighted hawk. Then, ag'in, the settlers in the Otsego hills christened me anew, from the fashion of my leggings; and various have been the names by which I have gone through life; but little will it matter when the time shall come, that all are to be muster'd, face to face, by what titles a mortal has played his part! I humbly trust I shall be able to answer to any of mine, in a loud and manly voice." Paul paid little or no attention to this reply, more than half of which was lost in the distance, but pursuing the humour of the moment, he called out in a stentorian voice to the naturalist to answer to his name. Dr. Battius had not thought it necessary to push his success beyond the comfortable niche, which accident had so opportunely formed for his protection, and in which he now reposed from his labours, with a pleasing consciousness of security, added to great exultation at the possession of the botanical treasure already mentioned. "Mount, mount, my worthy mole-catcher! come and behold the prospect of skirting Ishmael; come and look nature boldly in the face, and not go sneaking any longer, among the prairie grass and mullein tops, like a gobbler nibbling for grasshoppers." The mouth of the light-hearted and reckless bee-hunter was instantly closed, and he was rendered as mute, as he had just been boisterous and talkative, by the appearance of Ellen Wade. When the melancholy maiden took her seat on the point of the rock as mentioned, Paul affected to employ himself in conducting a close inspection of the household effects of the squatter. He rummaged the drawers of Esther with no delicate hands, scattered the rustic finery of her girls on the ground, without the least deference to its quality or elegance, and tossed her pots and kettles here and there, as though they had been vessels of wood instead of iron. All this industry was, however, manifestly without an object. He reserved nothing for himself, not even appearing conscious of the nature of the articles which suffered by his familiarity. When he had examined the inside of every cabin, taken a fresh survey of the spot where he had confined the children, and where he had thoroughly secured them with cords, and kicked one of the pails of the woman, like a foot-ball, fifty feet into the air, in sheer wantonness, he returned to the edge of the rock, and thrusting both his hands through his wampum belt, he began to whistle the "Kentucky Hunters" as diligently as if he had been hired to supply his auditors with music by the hour. In this manner passed the remainder of the time, until Middleton, as has been related, led Inez forth from the tent, and gave a new direction to the thoughts of the whole party. He summoned Paul from his flourish of music, tore the Doctor from the study of his plant, and, as acknowledged leader, gave the necessary orders for immediate departure. In the bustle and confusion that were likely to succeed such a mandate, there was little opportunity to indulge in complaints or reflections. As the adventurers had not come unprepared for victory, each individual employed himself in such offices as were best adapted to his strength and situation. The trapper had already made himself master of the patient Asinus, who was quietly feeding at no great distance from the rock, and he was now busy in fitting his back with the complicated machinery that Dr. Battius saw fit to term a saddle of his own invention. The naturalist himself seized upon his portfolios, herbals, and collection of insects, which he quickly transferred from the encampment of the squatter, to certain pockets in the aforesaid ingenious invention, and which the trapper as uniformly cast away the moment his back was turned. Paul showed his dexterity in removing such light articles as Inez and Ellen had prepared for their flight to the foot of the citadel, while Middleton, after mingling threats and promises, in order to induce the children to remain quietly in their bondage, assisted the females to descend. As time began to press upon them, and there was great danger of Ishmael's returning, these several movements were made with singular industry and despatch. The trapper bestowed such articles as he conceived were necessary to the comfort of the weaker and more delicate members of the party, in those pockets from which he had so unceremoniously expelled the treasures of the unconscious naturalist, and then gave way for Middleton to place Inez in one of those seats which he had prepared on the back of the animal for her and her companion. "Go, child," the old man said, motioning to Ellen to follow the example of the lady, and turning his head a little anxiously to examine the waste behind him. "It cannot be long afore the owner of this place will be coming to look after his household; and he is not a man to give up his property, however obtained, without complaint!" "It is true," cried Middleton; "we have wasted moments that are precious, and have the utmost need of industry." "Ay, ay, I thought it; and would have said it, captain; but I remembered how your grand'ther used to love to look upon the face of her he led away for a wife, in the days of his youth and his happiness. 'Tis natur', 'tis natur', and 'tis wiser to give way a little before its feelings, than to try to stop a current that will have its course." Ellen advanced to the side of the beast, and seizing Inez by the hand, she said, with heartfelt warmth, after struggling to suppress an emotion that nearly choked her-- "God bless you, sweet lady! I hope you will forget and forgive the wrongs you have received from my uncle--" The humbled and sorrowful girl could say no more, her voice becoming entirely inaudible in an ungovernable burst of grief. "How is this?" cried Middleton; "did you not say, Inez, that this excellent young woman was to accompany us, and to live with us for the remainder of her life; or, at least, until she found some more agreeable residence for herself?" "I did; and I still hope it. She has always given me reason to believe, that after having shown so much commiseration and friendship in my misery, she would not desert me, should happier times return." "I cannot--I ought not," continued Ellen, getting the better of her momentary weakness. "It has pleased God to cast my lot among these people, and I ought not to quit them. It would be adding the appearance of treachery to what will already seem bad enough, with one of his opinions. He has been kind to me, an orphan, after his rough customs, and I cannot steal from him at such a moment." "She is just as much a relation of skirting Ishmael as I am a bishop!" said Paul, with a loud hem, as if his throat wanted clearing. "If the old fellow has done the honest thing by her, in giving her a morsel of venison now and then, or a spoon around his homminy dish, hasn't she pay'd him in teaching the young devils to read their Bible, or in helping old Esther to put her finery in shape and fashion. Tell me that a drone has a sting, and I'll believe you as easily as I will that this young woman is a debtor to any of the tribe of Bush!" "It is but little matter who owes me, or where I am in debt. There are none to care for a girl who is fatherless and motherless, and whose nearest kin are the offcasts of all honest people. No, no; go, lady, and Heaven for ever bless you! I am better here, in this desert, where there are none to know my shame." "Now, old trapper," retorted Paul, "this is what I call knowing which way the wind blows! You ar' a man that has seen life, and you know something of fashions; I put it to your judgment, plainly, isn't it in the nature of things for the hive to swarm when the young get their growth, and if children will quit their parents, ought one who is of no kith or kin--" "Hist!" interrupted the man he addressed, "Hector is discontented. Say it out, plainly, pup; what is it dog--what is it?" The venerable hound had risen, and was scenting the fresh breeze which continued to sweep heavily over the prairie. At the words of his master he growled and contracted the muscles of his lips, as if half disposed to threaten with the remnants of his teeth. The younger dog, who was resting after the chase of the morning, also made some signs that his nose detected a taint in the air, and then the two resumed their slumbers, as if they had done enough. The trapper seized the bridle of the ass, and cried, urging the beast onward-- "There is no time for words. The squatter and his brood are within a mile or two of this blessed spot!" Middleton lost all recollection of Ellen, in the danger which now so eminently beset his recovered bride; nor is it necessary to add, that Dr. Battius did not wait for a second admonition to commence his retreat. Following the route indicated by the old man, they turned the rock in a body, and pursued their way as fast as possible across the prairie, under the favour of the cover it afforded. Paul Hover, however, remained in his tracks, sullenly leaning on his rifle. Near a minute had elapsed before he was observed by Ellen, who had buried her face in her hands, to conceal her fancied desolation from herself. "Why do you not fly?" the weeping girl exclaimed, the instant she perceived she was not alone. "I'm not used to it." "My uncle will soon be here! you have nothing to hope from his pity." "Nor from that of his niece, I reckon. Let him come; he can only knock me on the head!" "Paul, Paul, if you love me, fly." "Alone!--if I do, may I be--" "If you value your life, fly!" "I value it not, compared to you." "Paul!" "Ellen!" She extended both her hands and burst into another and a still more violent flood of tears. The bee-hunter put one of his sturdy arms around her waist, and in another moment he was urging her over the plain, in rapid pursuit of their flying friends. CHAPTER XVII Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight With a new Gorgon--Do not bid me speak; See, and then speak yourselves. --Shakspeare. The little run, which supplied the family of the squatter with water, and nourished the trees and bushes that grew near the base of the rocky eminence, took its rise at no great distance from the latter, in a small thicket of cotton-wood and vines. Hither, then, the trapper directed the flight, as to the place affording the only available cover in so pressing an emergency. It will be remembered, that the sagacity of the old man, which, from long practice in similar scenes, amounted nearly to an instinct in all cases of sudden danger, had first induced him to take this course, as it placed the hill between them and the approaching party. Favoured by this circumstance, he succeeded in reaching the bushes in sufficient time and Paul Hover had just hurried the breathless Ellen into the tangled bush, as Ishmael gained the summit of the rock, in the manner already described, where he stood like a man momentarily bereft of sense, gazing at the confusion which had been created among his chattels, or at his gagged and bound children, who had been safely bestowed, by the forethought of the bee-hunter, under the cover of a bark roof, in a sort of irregular pile. A long rifle would have thrown a bullet from the height, on which the squatter now stood, into the very cover where the fugitives, who had wrought all this mischief, were clustered. The trapper was the first to speak, as the man on whose intelligence and experience they all depended for counsel, after running his eye over the different individuals who gathered about him, in order to see that none were missing. "Ah! natur' is natur', and has done its work!" he said, nodding to the exulting Paul, with a smile of approbation. "I thought it would be hard for those, who had so often met in fair and foul, by starlight and under the clouded moon, to part at last in anger. Now is there little time to lose in talk, and every thing to gain by industry! It cannot be long afore some of yonder brood will be nosing along the 'arth for our trail, and should they find it, as find it they surely will, and should they push us to a stand on our courage, the dispute must be settled with the rifle; which may He in heaven forbid! Captain, can you lead us to the place where any of your warriors lie?--For the stout sons of the squatter will make a manly brush of it, or I am but little of a judge in warlike dispositions!" "The place of rendezvous is many leagues from this, on the banks of La Platte." "It is bad--it is bad. If fighting is to be done, it is always wise to enter on it on equal terms. But what has one so near his time to do with ill-blood and hot-blood at his heart! Listen to what a grey head and some experience have to offer, and then if any among you can point out a wiser fashion for a retreat, we can just follow his design, and forget that I have spoken. This thicket stretches for near a mile as it may be slanting from the rock, and leads towards the sunset instead of the settlements." "Enough, enough," cried Middleton, too impatient to wait until the deliberative and perhaps loquacious old man could end his minute explanation. "Time is too precious for words. Let us fly." The trapper made a gesture of compliance, and turning in his tracks, he led Asinus across the trembling earth of the swale, and quickly emerged on the hard ground, on the side opposite to the encampment of the squatter. "If old Ishmael gets a squint at that highway through the brush," cried Paul, casting, as he left the place, a hasty glance at the broad trail the party had made through the thicket, "he'll need no finger-board to tell him which way his road lies. But let him follow! I know the vagabond would gladly cross his breed with a little honest blood, but if any son of his ever gets to be the husband of--" "Hush, Paul, hush," said the terrified young woman, who leaned on his arm for support; "your voice might be heard." The bee-hunter was silent, though he did not cease to cast ominous looks behind him, as they flew along the edge of the run, which sufficiently betrayed the belligerent condition of his mind. As each one was busy for himself, but a few minutes elapsed before the party rose a swell of the prairie, and descending without a moment's delay on the opposite side, they were at once removed from every danger of being seen by the sons of Ishmael, unless the pursuers should happen to fall upon their trail. The old man now profited by the formation of the land to take another direction, with a view to elude pursuit, as a vessel changes her course in fogs and darkness, to escape from the vigilance of her enemies. Two hours, passed in the utmost diligence, enabled them to make a half circuit around the rock, and to reach a point that was exactly opposite to the original direction of their flight. To most of the fugitives their situation was as entirely unknown as is that of a ship in the middle of the ocean to the uninstructed voyager: but the old man proceeded at every turn, and through every bottom, with a decision that inspired his followers with confidence, as it spoke favourably of his own knowledge of the localities. His hound, stopping now and then to catch the expression of his eye, had preceded the trapper throughout the whole distance, with as much certainty as though a previous and intelligible communion between them had established the route by which they were to proceed. But, at the expiration of the time just named, the dog suddenly came to a stand, and then seating himself on the prairie, he snuffed the air a moment, and began a low and piteous whining. "Ay--pup--ay. I know the spot--I know the spot, and reason there is to remember it well!" said the old man, stopping by the side of his uneasy associate,

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you fool enough to believe what such a scoundrel as I am tells you, captain, unless it has probability to back it? I know you are not: therefore I will give my facts and my opinions, and then leave you to chew on them, while I go and drink of your generosity. I know a man who is called Abiram White.--I believe the knave took that name to show his enmity to the race of blacks! But this gentleman is now, and has been for years, to my certain knowledge, a regular translator of the human body from one State to another. I have dealt with him in my time, and a cheating dog he is! No more honour in him than meat in my stomach. I saw him here in this very town, the day of your wedding. He was in company with his wife's brother, and pretended to be a settler on the hunt for new land. A noble set they were, to carry on business--seven sons, each of them as tall as your sergeant with his cap on. Well, the moment I heard that your wife was lost, I saw at once that Abiram had laid his hands on her." "Do you know this--can this be true? What reason have you to fancy a thing so wild?" "Reason enough; I know Abiram White. Now, will you add a trifle just to keep my throat from parching?" "Go, go; you are stupified with drink already, miserable man, and know not what you say. Go; go, and beware the drummer." "Experience is a good guide"--the fellow called after the retiring Middleton; and then turning with a chuckling laugh, like one well satisfied with himself, he made the best of his way towards the shop of the suttler. A hundred times in the course of that night did Middleton fancy that the communication of the miscreant was entitled to some attention, and as often did he reject the idea as too wild and visionary for another thought. He was awakened early on the following morning, after passing a restless and nearly sleepless night, by his orderly, who came to report that a man was found dead on the parade, at no great distance from his quarters. Throwing on his clothes he proceeded to the spot, and beheld the individual, with whom he had held the preceding conference, in the precise situation in which he had first been found. The miserable wretch had fallen a victim to his intemperance. This revolting fact was sufficiently proclaimed by his obtruding eye-balls, his bloated countenance, and the nearly insufferable odours that were even then exhaling from his carcass. Disgusted with the odious spectacle, the youth was turning from the sight, after ordering the corpse to be removed, when the position of one of the dead man's hands struck him. On examination, he found the fore-finger extended, as if in the act of writing in the sand, with the following incomplete sentence, nearly illegible, but yet in a state to be deciphered: "Captain, it is true, as I am a gentle--" He had either died, or fallen into a sleep, the forerunner of his death, before the latter word was finished. Concealing this fact from the others, Middleton repeated his orders and departed. The pertinacity of the deceased, and all the circumstances united, induced him to set on foot some secret enquiries. He found that a family answering the description which had been given him, had in fact passed the place the day of his nuptials. They were traced along the margin of the Mississippi, for some distance, until they took boat and ascended the river to its confluence with the Missouri. Here they had disappeared like hundreds of others, in pursuit of the hidden wealth of the interior. Furnished with these facts, Middleton detailed a small guard of his most trusty men, took leave of Don Augustin, without declaring his hopes or his fears, and having arrived at the indicated point, he pushed into the wilderness in pursuit. It was not difficult to trace a train like that of Ishmael, until he was well assured its object lay far beyond the usual limits of the settlements. This circumstance, in itself, quickened his suspicions, and gave additional force to his hopes of final success. After getting beyond the assistance of verbal directions, the anxious husband had recourse to the usual signs of a trail, in order to follow the fugitives. This he also found a task of no difficulty, until he reached the hard and unyielding soil of the rolling prairies. Here, indeed, he was completely at fault. He found himself, at length, compelled to divide his followers, appointing a place of rendezvous at a distant day, and to endeavour to find the lost trail by multiplying, as much as possible, the number of his eyes. He had been alone a week, when accident brought him in contact with the trapper and the bee-hunter. Part of their interview has been related, and the reader can readily imagine the explanations that succeeded the tale he recounted, and which led, as has already been seen, to the recovery of his bride. CHAPTER XVI These likelihoods confirm her flight from hence, Therefore, I pray you, stay not to discourse, But mount you presently. --Shakspeare. An hour had slid by, in hasty and nearly incoherent questions and answers, before Middleton, hanging over his recovered treasure with that sort of jealous watchfulness with which a miser would regard his hoards, closed the disjointed narrative of his own proceedings by demanding-- "And you, my Inez; in what manner were you treated?" "In every thing, but the great injustice they did in separating me so forcibly from my friends, as well perhaps as the circumstances of my captors would allow. I think the man, who is certainly the master here, is but a new beginner in wickedness. He quarrelled frightfully in my presence, with the wretch who seized me, and then they made an impious bargain, to which I was compelled to acquiesce, and to which they bound me as well as themselves by oaths. Ah! Middleton, I fear the heretics are not so heedful of their vows as we who are nurtured in the bosom of the true church!" "Believe it not; these villains are of no religion: did they forswear themselves?" "No, not perjured: but was it not awful to call upon the good God to witness so sinful a compact?" "And so we think, Inez, as truly as the most virtuous cardinal of Rome. But how did they observe their oath, and what was its purport?" "They conditioned to leave me unmolested, and free from their odious presence, provided I would give a pledge to make no effort to escape; and that I would not even show myself, until a time that my masters saw fit to name." "And that time?" demanded the impatient Middleton, who so well knew the religious scruples of his wife--"that time?" "It is already passed. I was sworn by my patron saint, and faithfully did I keep the vow, until the man they call Ishmael forgot the terms by offering violence. I then made my appearance on the rock, for the time too was passed; though I even think father Ignatius would have absolved me from the vow, on account of the treachery of my keepers." "If he had not," muttered the youth between his compressed teeth, "I would have absolved him for ever from his spiritual care of your conscience!" "You, Middleton!" returned his wife looking up into his flushed face, while a bright blush suffused her own sweet countenance; "you may receive my vows, but surely you can have no power to absolve me from their observance!" "No, no, no. Inez, you are right. I know but little of these conscientious subtilties, and I am any thing but a priest: yet tell me, what has induced these monsters to play this desperate game--to trifle thus with my happiness?" "You know my ignorance of the world, and how ill I am qualified to furnish reasons for the conduct of beings so different from any I have ever seen before. But does not love of money drive men to acts even worse than this? I believe they thought that an aged and wealthy father could be tempted to pay them a rich ransom for his child; and, perhaps," she added, stealing an enquiring glance through her tears, at the attentive Middleton, "they counted something on the fresh affections of a bridegroom." "They might have extracted the blood from my heart, drop by drop!" "Yes," resumed his young and timid wife, instantly withdrawing the stolen look she had hazarded, and hurriedly pursuing the train of the discourse, as if glad to make him forget the liberty she had just taken, "I have been told, there are men so base as to perjure themselves at the altar, in order to command the gold of ignorant and confiding girls; and if love of money will lead to such baseness, we may surely expect it will hurry those, who devote themselves to gain, into acts of lesser fraud." "It must be so; and now, Inez, though I am here to guard you with my life, and we are in possession of this rock, our difficulties, perhaps our dangers, are not ended. You will summon all your courage to meet the trial and prove yourself a soldier's wife, my Inez?" "I am ready to depart this instant. The letter you sent by the physician, had prepared me to hope for the best, and I have every thing arranged for flight, at the shortest warning." "Let us then leave this place and join our friends." "Friends!" interrupted Inez, glancing her eyes around the little tent in quest of the form of Ellen. "I, too, have a friend who must not be forgotten, but who is pledged to pass the remainder of her life with us. She is gone!" Middleton gently led her from the spot, as he smilingly answered-- "She may have had, like myself, her own private communications for some favoured ear." The young man had not however done justice to the motives of Ellen Wade. The sensitive and intelligent girl had readily perceived how little her presence was necessary in the interview that has just been related, and had retired with that intuitive delicacy of feeling which seems to belong more properly to her sex. She was now to be seen seated on a point of the rock, with her person so entirely enveloped in her dress as to conceal her features. Here she had remained for near an hour, no one approaching to address her, and as it appeared to her own quick and jealous eyes, totally unobserved. In the latter particular, however, even the vigilance of the quick-sighted Ellen was deceived. The first act of Paul Hover, on finding himself the master of Ishmael's citadel, had been to sound the note of victory, after the quaint and ludicrous manner that is so often practised among the borderers of the West. Flapping his sides with his hands, as the conquering game-cock is wont to do with his wings, he raised a loud and laughable imitation of the exultation of this bird; a cry which might have proved a dangerous challenge had any one of the athletic sons of the squatter been within hearing. "This has been a regular knock-down and drag-out," he cried, "and no bones broke! How now, old trapper, you have been one of your training, platoon, rank and file soldiers in your day, and have seen forts taken and batteries stormed before this--am I right?" "Ay, ay, that have I," answered the old man, who still maintained his post at the foot of the rock, so little disturbed by what he had just witnessed, as to return the grin of Paul, with a hearty indulgence in his own silent and peculiar laughter; "you have gone through the exploit like men!" "Now tell me, is it not in rule, to call over the names of the living, and to bury the dead, after every bloody battle?" "Some did and other some didn't. When Sir William push'd the German, Dieskau, thro' the defiles at the foot of the Hori--" "Your Sir William was a drone to Sir Paul, and knew nothing of regularity. So here begins the roll-call--by the by, old man, what between bee-hunting and buffaloe humps, and certain other matters, I have been too busy to ask your name; for I intend to begin with my rear-guard, well knowing that my man in front is too busy to answer." "Lord, lad, I've been called in my time by as many names as there are people among whom I've dwelt. Now the Delawares nam'd me for my eyes, and I was called after the far-sighted hawk. Then, ag'in, the settlers in the Otsego hills christened me anew, from the fashion of my leggings; and various have been the names by which I have gone through life; but little will it matter when the time shall come, that all are to be muster'd, face to face, by what titles a mortal has played his part! I humbly trust I shall be able to answer to any of mine, in a loud and manly voice." Paul paid little or no attention to this reply, more than half of which was lost in the distance, but pursuing the humour of the moment, he called out in a stentorian voice to the naturalist to answer to his name. Dr. Battius had not thought it necessary to push his success beyond the comfortable niche, which accident had so opportunely formed for his protection, and in which he now reposed from his labours, with a pleasing consciousness of security, added to great exultation at the possession of the botanical treasure already mentioned. "Mount, mount, my worthy mole-catcher! come and behold the prospect of skirting Ishmael; come and look nature boldly in the face, and not go sneaking any longer, among the prairie grass and mullein tops, like a gobbler nibbling for grasshoppers." The mouth of the light-hearted and reckless bee-hunter was instantly closed, and he was rendered as mute, as he had just been boisterous and talkative, by the appearance of Ellen Wade. When the melancholy maiden took her seat on the point of the rock as mentioned, Paul affected to employ himself in conducting a close inspection of the household effects of the squatter. He rummaged the drawers of Esther with no delicate hands, scattered the rustic finery of her girls on the ground, without the least deference to its quality or elegance, and tossed her pots and kettles here and there, as though they had been vessels of wood instead of iron. All this industry was, however, manifestly without an object. He reserved nothing for himself, not even appearing conscious of the nature of the articles which suffered by his familiarity. When he had examined the inside of every cabin, taken a fresh survey of the spot where he had confined the children, and where he had thoroughly secured them with cords, and kicked one of the pails of the woman, like a foot-ball, fifty feet into the air, in sheer wantonness, he returned to the edge of the rock, and thrusting both his hands through his wampum belt, he began to whistle the "Kentucky Hunters" as diligently as if he had been hired to supply his auditors with music by the hour. In this manner passed the remainder of the time, until Middleton, as has been related, led Inez forth from the tent, and gave a new direction to the thoughts of the whole party. He summoned Paul from his flourish of music, tore the Doctor from the study of his plant, and, as acknowledged leader, gave the necessary orders for immediate departure. In the bustle and confusion that were likely to succeed such a mandate, there was little opportunity to indulge in complaints or reflections. As the adventurers had not come unprepared for victory, each individual employed himself in such offices as were best adapted to his strength and situation. The trapper had already made himself master of the patient Asinus, who was quietly feeding at no great distance from the rock, and he was now busy in fitting his back with the complicated machinery that Dr. Battius saw fit to term a saddle of his own invention. The naturalist himself seized upon his portfolios, herbals, and collection of insects, which he quickly transferred from the encampment of the squatter, to certain pockets in the aforesaid ingenious invention, and which the trapper as uniformly cast away the moment his back was turned. Paul showed his dexterity in removing such light articles as Inez and Ellen had prepared for their flight to the foot of the citadel, while Middleton, after mingling threats and promises, in order to induce the children to remain quietly in their bondage, assisted the females to descend. As time began to press upon them, and there was great danger of Ishmael's returning, these several movements were made with singular industry and despatch. The trapper bestowed such articles as he conceived were necessary to the comfort of the weaker and more delicate members of the party, in those pockets from which he had so unceremoniously expelled the treasures of the unconscious naturalist, and then gave way for Middleton to place Inez in one of those seats which he had prepared on the back of the animal for her and her companion. "Go, child," the old man said, motioning to Ellen to follow the example of the lady, and turning his head a little anxiously to examine the waste behind him. "It cannot be long afore the owner of this place will be coming to look after his household; and he is not a man to give up his property, however obtained, without complaint!" "It is true," cried Middleton; "we have wasted moments that are precious, and have the utmost need of industry." "Ay, ay, I thought it; and would have said it, captain; but I remembered how your grand'ther used to love to look upon the face of her he led away for a wife, in the days of his youth and his happiness. 'Tis natur', 'tis natur', and 'tis wiser to give way a little before its feelings, than to try to stop a current that will have its course." Ellen advanced to the side of the beast, and seizing Inez by the hand, she said, with heartfelt warmth, after struggling to suppress an emotion that nearly choked her-- "God bless you, sweet lady! I hope you will forget and forgive the wrongs you have received from my uncle--" The humbled and sorrowful girl could say no more, her voice becoming entirely inaudible in an ungovernable burst of grief. "How is this?" cried Middleton; "did you not say, Inez, that this excellent young woman was to accompany us, and to live with us for the remainder of her life; or, at least, until she found some more agreeable residence for herself?" "I did; and I still hope it. She has always given me reason to believe, that after having shown so much commiseration and friendship in my misery, she would not desert me, should happier times return." "I cannot--I ought not," continued Ellen, getting the better of her momentary weakness. "It has pleased God to cast my lot among these people, and I ought not to quit them. It would be adding the appearance of treachery to what will already seem bad enough, with one of his opinions. He has been kind to me, an orphan, after his rough customs, and I cannot steal from him at such a moment." "She is just as much a relation of skirting Ishmael as I am a bishop!" said Paul, with a loud hem, as if his throat wanted clearing. "If the old fellow has done the honest thing by her, in giving her a morsel of venison now and then, or a spoon around his homminy dish, hasn't she pay'd him in teaching the young devils to read their Bible, or in helping old Esther to put her finery in shape and fashion. Tell me that a drone has a sting, and I'll believe you as easily as I will that this young woman is a debtor to any of the tribe of Bush!" "It is but little matter who owes me, or where I am in debt. There are none to care for a girl who is fatherless and motherless, and whose nearest kin are the offcasts of all honest people. No, no; go, lady, and Heaven for ever bless you! I am better here, in this desert, where there are none to know my shame." "Now, old trapper," retorted Paul, "this is what I call knowing which way the wind blows! You ar' a man that has seen life, and you know something of fashions; I put it to your judgment, plainly, isn't it in the nature of things for the hive to swarm when the young get their growth, and if children will quit their parents, ought one who is of no kith or kin--" "Hist!" interrupted the man he addressed, "Hector is discontented. Say it out, plainly, pup; what is it dog--what is it?" The venerable hound had risen, and was scenting the fresh breeze which continued to sweep heavily over the prairie. At the words of his master he growled and contracted the muscles of his lips, as if half disposed to threaten with the remnants of his teeth. The younger dog, who was resting after the chase of the morning, also made some signs that his nose detected a taint in the air, and then the two resumed their slumbers, as if they had done enough. The trapper seized the bridle of the ass, and cried, urging the beast onward-- "There is no time for words. The squatter and his brood are within a mile or two of this blessed spot!" Middleton lost all recollection of Ellen, in the danger which now so eminently beset his recovered bride; nor is it necessary to add, that Dr. Battius did not wait for a second admonition to commence his retreat. Following the route indicated by the old man, they turned the rock in a body, and pursued their way as fast as possible across the prairie, under the favour of the cover it afforded. Paul Hover, however, remained in his tracks, sullenly leaning on his rifle. Near a minute had elapsed before he was observed by Ellen, who had buried her face in her hands, to conceal her fancied desolation from herself. "Why do you not fly?" the weeping girl exclaimed, the instant she perceived she was not alone. "I'm not used to it." "My uncle will soon be here! you have nothing to hope from his pity." "Nor from that of his niece, I reckon. Let him come; he can only knock me on the head!" "Paul, Paul, if you love me, fly." "Alone!--if I do, may I be--" "If you value your life, fly!" "I value it not, compared to you." "Paul!" "Ellen!" She extended both her hands and burst into another and a still more violent flood of tears. The bee-hunter put one of his sturdy arms around her waist, and in another moment he was urging her over the plain, in rapid pursuit of their flying friends. CHAPTER XVII Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight With a new Gorgon--Do not bid me speak; See, and then speak yourselves. --Shakspeare. The little run, which supplied the family of the squatter with water, and nourished the trees and bushes that grew near the base of the rocky eminence, took its rise at no great distance from the latter, in a small thicket of cotton-wood and vines. Hither, then, the trapper directed the flight, as to the place affording the only available cover in so pressing an emergency. It will be remembered, that the sagacity of the old man, which, from long practice in similar scenes, amounted nearly to an instinct in all cases of sudden danger, had first induced him to take this course, as it placed the hill between them and the approaching party. Favoured by this circumstance, he succeeded in reaching the bushes in sufficient time and Paul Hover had just hurried the breathless Ellen into the tangled bush, as Ishmael gained the summit of the rock, in the manner already described, where he stood like a man momentarily bereft of sense, gazing at the confusion which had been created among his chattels, or at his gagged and bound children, who had been safely bestowed, by the forethought of the bee-hunter, under the cover of a bark roof, in a sort of irregular pile. A long rifle would have thrown a bullet from the height, on which the squatter now stood, into the very cover where the fugitives, who had wrought all this mischief, were clustered. The trapper was the first to speak, as the man on whose intelligence and experience they all depended for counsel, after running his eye over the different individuals who gathered about him, in order to see that none were missing. "Ah! natur' is natur', and has done its work!" he said, nodding to the exulting Paul, with a smile of approbation. "I thought it would be hard for those, who had so often met in fair and foul, by starlight and under the clouded moon, to part at last in anger. Now is there little time to lose in talk, and every thing to gain by industry! It cannot be long afore some of yonder brood will be nosing along the 'arth for our trail, and should they find it, as find it they surely will, and should they push us to a stand on our courage, the dispute must be settled with the rifle; which may He in heaven forbid! Captain, can you lead us to the place where any of your warriors lie?--For the stout sons of the squatter will make a manly brush of it, or I am but little of a judge in warlike dispositions!" "The place of rendezvous is many leagues from this, on the banks of La Platte." "It is bad--it is bad. If fighting is to be done, it is always wise to enter on it on equal terms. But what has one so near his time to do with ill-blood and hot-blood at his heart! Listen to what a grey head and some experience have to offer, and then if any among you can point out a wiser fashion for a retreat, we can just follow his design, and forget that I have spoken. This thicket stretches for near a mile as it may be slanting from the rock, and leads towards the sunset instead of the settlements." "Enough, enough," cried Middleton, too impatient to wait until the deliberative and perhaps loquacious old man could end his minute explanation. "Time is too precious for words. Let us fly." The trapper made a gesture of compliance, and turning in his tracks, he led Asinus across the trembling earth of the swale, and quickly emerged on the hard ground, on the side opposite to the encampment of the squatter. "If old Ishmael gets a squint at that highway through the brush," cried Paul, casting, as he left the place, a hasty glance at the broad trail the party had made through the thicket, "he'll need no finger-board to tell him which way his road lies. But let him follow! I know the vagabond would gladly cross his breed with a little honest blood, but if any son of his ever gets to be the husband of--" "Hush, Paul, hush," said the terrified young woman, who leaned on his arm for support; "your voice might be heard." The bee-hunter was silent, though he did not cease to cast ominous looks behind him, as they flew along the edge of the run, which sufficiently betrayed the belligerent condition of his mind. As each one was busy for himself, but a few minutes elapsed before the party rose a swell of the prairie, and descending without a moment's delay on the opposite side, they were at once removed from every danger of being seen by the sons of Ishmael, unless the pursuers should happen to fall upon their trail. The old man now profited by the formation of the land to take another direction, with a view to elude pursuit, as a vessel changes her course in fogs and darkness, to escape from the vigilance of her enemies. Two hours, passed in the utmost diligence, enabled them to make a half circuit around the rock, and to reach a point that was exactly opposite to the original direction of their flight. To most of the fugitives their situation was as entirely unknown as is that of a ship in the middle of the ocean to the uninstructed voyager: but the old man proceeded at every turn, and through every bottom, with a decision that inspired his followers with confidence, as it spoke favourably of his own knowledge of the localities. His hound, stopping now and then to catch the expression of his eye, had preceded the trapper throughout the whole distance, with as much certainty as though a previous and intelligible communion between them had established the route by which they were to proceed. But, at the expiration of the time just named, the dog suddenly came to a stand, and then seating himself on the prairie, he snuffed the air a moment, and began a low and piteous whining. "Ay--pup--ay. I know the spot--I know the spot, and reason there is to remember it well!" said the old man, stopping by the side of his uneasy associate,

daily

How many times the word 'daily' appears in the text?

you fool enough to believe what such a scoundrel as I am tells you, captain, unless it has probability to back it? I know you are not: therefore I will give my facts and my opinions, and then leave you to chew on them, while I go and drink of your generosity. I know a man who is called Abiram White.--I believe the knave took that name to show his enmity to the race of blacks! But this gentleman is now, and has been for years, to my certain knowledge, a regular translator of the human body from one State to another. I have dealt with him in my time, and a cheating dog he is! No more honour in him than meat in my stomach. I saw him here in this very town, the day of your wedding. He was in company with his wife's brother, and pretended to be a settler on the hunt for new land. A noble set they were, to carry on business--seven sons, each of them as tall as your sergeant with his cap on. Well, the moment I heard that your wife was lost, I saw at once that Abiram had laid his hands on her." "Do you know this--can this be true? What reason have you to fancy a thing so wild?" "Reason enough; I know Abiram White. Now, will you add a trifle just to keep my throat from parching?" "Go, go; you are stupified with drink already, miserable man, and know not what you say. Go; go, and beware the drummer." "Experience is a good guide"--the fellow called after the retiring Middleton; and then turning with a chuckling laugh, like one well satisfied with himself, he made the best of his way towards the shop of the suttler. A hundred times in the course of that night did Middleton fancy that the communication of the miscreant was entitled to some attention, and as often did he reject the idea as too wild and visionary for another thought. He was awakened early on the following morning, after passing a restless and nearly sleepless night, by his orderly, who came to report that a man was found dead on the parade, at no great distance from his quarters. Throwing on his clothes he proceeded to the spot, and beheld the individual, with whom he had held the preceding conference, in the precise situation in which he had first been found. The miserable wretch had fallen a victim to his intemperance. This revolting fact was sufficiently proclaimed by his obtruding eye-balls, his bloated countenance, and the nearly insufferable odours that were even then exhaling from his carcass. Disgusted with the odious spectacle, the youth was turning from the sight, after ordering the corpse to be removed, when the position of one of the dead man's hands struck him. On examination, he found the fore-finger extended, as if in the act of writing in the sand, with the following incomplete sentence, nearly illegible, but yet in a state to be deciphered: "Captain, it is true, as I am a gentle--" He had either died, or fallen into a sleep, the forerunner of his death, before the latter word was finished. Concealing this fact from the others, Middleton repeated his orders and departed. The pertinacity of the deceased, and all the circumstances united, induced him to set on foot some secret enquiries. He found that a family answering the description which had been given him, had in fact passed the place the day of his nuptials. They were traced along the margin of the Mississippi, for some distance, until they took boat and ascended the river to its confluence with the Missouri. Here they had disappeared like hundreds of others, in pursuit of the hidden wealth of the interior. Furnished with these facts, Middleton detailed a small guard of his most trusty men, took leave of Don Augustin, without declaring his hopes or his fears, and having arrived at the indicated point, he pushed into the wilderness in pursuit. It was not difficult to trace a train like that of Ishmael, until he was well assured its object lay far beyond the usual limits of the settlements. This circumstance, in itself, quickened his suspicions, and gave additional force to his hopes of final success. After getting beyond the assistance of verbal directions, the anxious husband had recourse to the usual signs of a trail, in order to follow the fugitives. This he also found a task of no difficulty, until he reached the hard and unyielding soil of the rolling prairies. Here, indeed, he was completely at fault. He found himself, at length, compelled to divide his followers, appointing a place of rendezvous at a distant day, and to endeavour to find the lost trail by multiplying, as much as possible, the number of his eyes. He had been alone a week, when accident brought him in contact with the trapper and the bee-hunter. Part of their interview has been related, and the reader can readily imagine the explanations that succeeded the tale he recounted, and which led, as has already been seen, to the recovery of his bride. CHAPTER XVI These likelihoods confirm her flight from hence, Therefore, I pray you, stay not to discourse, But mount you presently. --Shakspeare. An hour had slid by, in hasty and nearly incoherent questions and answers, before Middleton, hanging over his recovered treasure with that sort of jealous watchfulness with which a miser would regard his hoards, closed the disjointed narrative of his own proceedings by demanding-- "And you, my Inez; in what manner were you treated?" "In every thing, but the great injustice they did in separating me so forcibly from my friends, as well perhaps as the circumstances of my captors would allow. I think the man, who is certainly the master here, is but a new beginner in wickedness. He quarrelled frightfully in my presence, with the wretch who seized me, and then they made an impious bargain, to which I was compelled to acquiesce, and to which they bound me as well as themselves by oaths. Ah! Middleton, I fear the heretics are not so heedful of their vows as we who are nurtured in the bosom of the true church!" "Believe it not; these villains are of no religion: did they forswear themselves?" "No, not perjured: but was it not awful to call upon the good God to witness so sinful a compact?" "And so we think, Inez, as truly as the most virtuous cardinal of Rome. But how did they observe their oath, and what was its purport?" "They conditioned to leave me unmolested, and free from their odious presence, provided I would give a pledge to make no effort to escape; and that I would not even show myself, until a time that my masters saw fit to name." "And that time?" demanded the impatient Middleton, who so well knew the religious scruples of his wife--"that time?" "It is already passed. I was sworn by my patron saint, and faithfully did I keep the vow, until the man they call Ishmael forgot the terms by offering violence. I then made my appearance on the rock, for the time too was passed; though I even think father Ignatius would have absolved me from the vow, on account of the treachery of my keepers." "If he had not," muttered the youth between his compressed teeth, "I would have absolved him for ever from his spiritual care of your conscience!" "You, Middleton!" returned his wife looking up into his flushed face, while a bright blush suffused her own sweet countenance; "you may receive my vows, but surely you can have no power to absolve me from their observance!" "No, no, no. Inez, you are right. I know but little of these conscientious subtilties, and I am any thing but a priest: yet tell me, what has induced these monsters to play this desperate game--to trifle thus with my happiness?" "You know my ignorance of the world, and how ill I am qualified to furnish reasons for the conduct of beings so different from any I have ever seen before. But does not love of money drive men to acts even worse than this? I believe they thought that an aged and wealthy father could be tempted to pay them a rich ransom for his child; and, perhaps," she added, stealing an enquiring glance through her tears, at the attentive Middleton, "they counted something on the fresh affections of a bridegroom." "They might have extracted the blood from my heart, drop by drop!" "Yes," resumed his young and timid wife, instantly withdrawing the stolen look she had hazarded, and hurriedly pursuing the train of the discourse, as if glad to make him forget the liberty she had just taken, "I have been told, there are men so base as to perjure themselves at the altar, in order to command the gold of ignorant and confiding girls; and if love of money will lead to such baseness, we may surely expect it will hurry those, who devote themselves to gain, into acts of lesser fraud." "It must be so; and now, Inez, though I am here to guard you with my life, and we are in possession of this rock, our difficulties, perhaps our dangers, are not ended. You will summon all your courage to meet the trial and prove yourself a soldier's wife, my Inez?" "I am ready to depart this instant. The letter you sent by the physician, had prepared me to hope for the best, and I have every thing arranged for flight, at the shortest warning." "Let us then leave this place and join our friends." "Friends!" interrupted Inez, glancing her eyes around the little tent in quest of the form of Ellen. "I, too, have a friend who must not be forgotten, but who is pledged to pass the remainder of her life with us. She is gone!" Middleton gently led her from the spot, as he smilingly answered-- "She may have had, like myself, her own private communications for some favoured ear." The young man had not however done justice to the motives of Ellen Wade. The sensitive and intelligent girl had readily perceived how little her presence was necessary in the interview that has just been related, and had retired with that intuitive delicacy of feeling which seems to belong more properly to her sex. She was now to be seen seated on a point of the rock, with her person so entirely enveloped in her dress as to conceal her features. Here she had remained for near an hour, no one approaching to address her, and as it appeared to her own quick and jealous eyes, totally unobserved. In the latter particular, however, even the vigilance of the quick-sighted Ellen was deceived. The first act of Paul Hover, on finding himself the master of Ishmael's citadel, had been to sound the note of victory, after the quaint and ludicrous manner that is so often practised among the borderers of the West. Flapping his sides with his hands, as the conquering game-cock is wont to do with his wings, he raised a loud and laughable imitation of the exultation of this bird; a cry which might have proved a dangerous challenge had any one of the athletic sons of the squatter been within hearing. "This has been a regular knock-down and drag-out," he cried, "and no bones broke! How now, old trapper, you have been one of your training, platoon, rank and file soldiers in your day, and have seen forts taken and batteries stormed before this--am I right?" "Ay, ay, that have I," answered the old man, who still maintained his post at the foot of the rock, so little disturbed by what he had just witnessed, as to return the grin of Paul, with a hearty indulgence in his own silent and peculiar laughter; "you have gone through the exploit like men!" "Now tell me, is it not in rule, to call over the names of the living, and to bury the dead, after every bloody battle?" "Some did and other some didn't. When Sir William push'd the German, Dieskau, thro' the defiles at the foot of the Hori--" "Your Sir William was a drone to Sir Paul, and knew nothing of regularity. So here begins the roll-call--by the by, old man, what between bee-hunting and buffaloe humps, and certain other matters, I have been too busy to ask your name; for I intend to begin with my rear-guard, well knowing that my man in front is too busy to answer." "Lord, lad, I've been called in my time by as many names as there are people among whom I've dwelt. Now the Delawares nam'd me for my eyes, and I was called after the far-sighted hawk. Then, ag'in, the settlers in the Otsego hills christened me anew, from the fashion of my leggings; and various have been the names by which I have gone through life; but little will it matter when the time shall come, that all are to be muster'd, face to face, by what titles a mortal has played his part! I humbly trust I shall be able to answer to any of mine, in a loud and manly voice." Paul paid little or no attention to this reply, more than half of which was lost in the distance, but pursuing the humour of the moment, he called out in a stentorian voice to the naturalist to answer to his name. Dr. Battius had not thought it necessary to push his success beyond the comfortable niche, which accident had so opportunely formed for his protection, and in which he now reposed from his labours, with a pleasing consciousness of security, added to great exultation at the possession of the botanical treasure already mentioned. "Mount, mount, my worthy mole-catcher! come and behold the prospect of skirting Ishmael; come and look nature boldly in the face, and not go sneaking any longer, among the prairie grass and mullein tops, like a gobbler nibbling for grasshoppers." The mouth of the light-hearted and reckless bee-hunter was instantly closed, and he was rendered as mute, as he had just been boisterous and talkative, by the appearance of Ellen Wade. When the melancholy maiden took her seat on the point of the rock as mentioned, Paul affected to employ himself in conducting a close inspection of the household effects of the squatter. He rummaged the drawers of Esther with no delicate hands, scattered the rustic finery of her girls on the ground, without the least deference to its quality or elegance, and tossed her pots and kettles here and there, as though they had been vessels of wood instead of iron. All this industry was, however, manifestly without an object. He reserved nothing for himself, not even appearing conscious of the nature of the articles which suffered by his familiarity. When he had examined the inside of every cabin, taken a fresh survey of the spot where he had confined the children, and where he had thoroughly secured them with cords, and kicked one of the pails of the woman, like a foot-ball, fifty feet into the air, in sheer wantonness, he returned to the edge of the rock, and thrusting both his hands through his wampum belt, he began to whistle the "Kentucky Hunters" as diligently as if he had been hired to supply his auditors with music by the hour. In this manner passed the remainder of the time, until Middleton, as has been related, led Inez forth from the tent, and gave a new direction to the thoughts of the whole party. He summoned Paul from his flourish of music, tore the Doctor from the study of his plant, and, as acknowledged leader, gave the necessary orders for immediate departure. In the bustle and confusion that were likely to succeed such a mandate, there was little opportunity to indulge in complaints or reflections. As the adventurers had not come unprepared for victory, each individual employed himself in such offices as were best adapted to his strength and situation. The trapper had already made himself master of the patient Asinus, who was quietly feeding at no great distance from the rock, and he was now busy in fitting his back with the complicated machinery that Dr. Battius saw fit to term a saddle of his own invention. The naturalist himself seized upon his portfolios, herbals, and collection of insects, which he quickly transferred from the encampment of the squatter, to certain pockets in the aforesaid ingenious invention, and which the trapper as uniformly cast away the moment his back was turned. Paul showed his dexterity in removing such light articles as Inez and Ellen had prepared for their flight to the foot of the citadel, while Middleton, after mingling threats and promises, in order to induce the children to remain quietly in their bondage, assisted the females to descend. As time began to press upon them, and there was great danger of Ishmael's returning, these several movements were made with singular industry and despatch. The trapper bestowed such articles as he conceived were necessary to the comfort of the weaker and more delicate members of the party, in those pockets from which he had so unceremoniously expelled the treasures of the unconscious naturalist, and then gave way for Middleton to place Inez in one of those seats which he had prepared on the back of the animal for her and her companion. "Go, child," the old man said, motioning to Ellen to follow the example of the lady, and turning his head a little anxiously to examine the waste behind him. "It cannot be long afore the owner of this place will be coming to look after his household; and he is not a man to give up his property, however obtained, without complaint!" "It is true," cried Middleton; "we have wasted moments that are precious, and have the utmost need of industry." "Ay, ay, I thought it; and would have said it, captain; but I remembered how your grand'ther used to love to look upon the face of her he led away for a wife, in the days of his youth and his happiness. 'Tis natur', 'tis natur', and 'tis wiser to give way a little before its feelings, than to try to stop a current that will have its course." Ellen advanced to the side of the beast, and seizing Inez by the hand, she said, with heartfelt warmth, after struggling to suppress an emotion that nearly choked her-- "God bless you, sweet lady! I hope you will forget and forgive the wrongs you have received from my uncle--" The humbled and sorrowful girl could say no more, her voice becoming entirely inaudible in an ungovernable burst of grief. "How is this?" cried Middleton; "did you not say, Inez, that this excellent young woman was to accompany us, and to live with us for the remainder of her life; or, at least, until she found some more agreeable residence for herself?" "I did; and I still hope it. She has always given me reason to believe, that after having shown so much commiseration and friendship in my misery, she would not desert me, should happier times return." "I cannot--I ought not," continued Ellen, getting the better of her momentary weakness. "It has pleased God to cast my lot among these people, and I ought not to quit them. It would be adding the appearance of treachery to what will already seem bad enough, with one of his opinions. He has been kind to me, an orphan, after his rough customs, and I cannot steal from him at such a moment." "She is just as much a relation of skirting Ishmael as I am a bishop!" said Paul, with a loud hem, as if his throat wanted clearing. "If the old fellow has done the honest thing by her, in giving her a morsel of venison now and then, or a spoon around his homminy dish, hasn't she pay'd him in teaching the young devils to read their Bible, or in helping old Esther to put her finery in shape and fashion. Tell me that a drone has a sting, and I'll believe you as easily as I will that this young woman is a debtor to any of the tribe of Bush!" "It is but little matter who owes me, or where I am in debt. There are none to care for a girl who is fatherless and motherless, and whose nearest kin are the offcasts of all honest people. No, no; go, lady, and Heaven for ever bless you! I am better here, in this desert, where there are none to know my shame." "Now, old trapper," retorted Paul, "this is what I call knowing which way the wind blows! You ar' a man that has seen life, and you know something of fashions; I put it to your judgment, plainly, isn't it in the nature of things for the hive to swarm when the young get their growth, and if children will quit their parents, ought one who is of no kith or kin--" "Hist!" interrupted the man he addressed, "Hector is discontented. Say it out, plainly, pup; what is it dog--what is it?" The venerable hound had risen, and was scenting the fresh breeze which continued to sweep heavily over the prairie. At the words of his master he growled and contracted the muscles of his lips, as if half disposed to threaten with the remnants of his teeth. The younger dog, who was resting after the chase of the morning, also made some signs that his nose detected a taint in the air, and then the two resumed their slumbers, as if they had done enough. The trapper seized the bridle of the ass, and cried, urging the beast onward-- "There is no time for words. The squatter and his brood are within a mile or two of this blessed spot!" Middleton lost all recollection of Ellen, in the danger which now so eminently beset his recovered bride; nor is it necessary to add, that Dr. Battius did not wait for a second admonition to commence his retreat. Following the route indicated by the old man, they turned the rock in a body, and pursued their way as fast as possible across the prairie, under the favour of the cover it afforded. Paul Hover, however, remained in his tracks, sullenly leaning on his rifle. Near a minute had elapsed before he was observed by Ellen, who had buried her face in her hands, to conceal her fancied desolation from herself. "Why do you not fly?" the weeping girl exclaimed, the instant she perceived she was not alone. "I'm not used to it." "My uncle will soon be here! you have nothing to hope from his pity." "Nor from that of his niece, I reckon. Let him come; he can only knock me on the head!" "Paul, Paul, if you love me, fly." "Alone!--if I do, may I be--" "If you value your life, fly!" "I value it not, compared to you." "Paul!" "Ellen!" She extended both her hands and burst into another and a still more violent flood of tears. The bee-hunter put one of his sturdy arms around her waist, and in another moment he was urging her over the plain, in rapid pursuit of their flying friends. CHAPTER XVII Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight With a new Gorgon--Do not bid me speak; See, and then speak yourselves. --Shakspeare. The little run, which supplied the family of the squatter with water, and nourished the trees and bushes that grew near the base of the rocky eminence, took its rise at no great distance from the latter, in a small thicket of cotton-wood and vines. Hither, then, the trapper directed the flight, as to the place affording the only available cover in so pressing an emergency. It will be remembered, that the sagacity of the old man, which, from long practice in similar scenes, amounted nearly to an instinct in all cases of sudden danger, had first induced him to take this course, as it placed the hill between them and the approaching party. Favoured by this circumstance, he succeeded in reaching the bushes in sufficient time and Paul Hover had just hurried the breathless Ellen into the tangled bush, as Ishmael gained the summit of the rock, in the manner already described, where he stood like a man momentarily bereft of sense, gazing at the confusion which had been created among his chattels, or at his gagged and bound children, who had been safely bestowed, by the forethought of the bee-hunter, under the cover of a bark roof, in a sort of irregular pile. A long rifle would have thrown a bullet from the height, on which the squatter now stood, into the very cover where the fugitives, who had wrought all this mischief, were clustered. The trapper was the first to speak, as the man on whose intelligence and experience they all depended for counsel, after running his eye over the different individuals who gathered about him, in order to see that none were missing. "Ah! natur' is natur', and has done its work!" he said, nodding to the exulting Paul, with a smile of approbation. "I thought it would be hard for those, who had so often met in fair and foul, by starlight and under the clouded moon, to part at last in anger. Now is there little time to lose in talk, and every thing to gain by industry! It cannot be long afore some of yonder brood will be nosing along the 'arth for our trail, and should they find it, as find it they surely will, and should they push us to a stand on our courage, the dispute must be settled with the rifle; which may He in heaven forbid! Captain, can you lead us to the place where any of your warriors lie?--For the stout sons of the squatter will make a manly brush of it, or I am but little of a judge in warlike dispositions!" "The place of rendezvous is many leagues from this, on the banks of La Platte." "It is bad--it is bad. If fighting is to be done, it is always wise to enter on it on equal terms. But what has one so near his time to do with ill-blood and hot-blood at his heart! Listen to what a grey head and some experience have to offer, and then if any among you can point out a wiser fashion for a retreat, we can just follow his design, and forget that I have spoken. This thicket stretches for near a mile as it may be slanting from the rock, and leads towards the sunset instead of the settlements." "Enough, enough," cried Middleton, too impatient to wait until the deliberative and perhaps loquacious old man could end his minute explanation. "Time is too precious for words. Let us fly." The trapper made a gesture of compliance, and turning in his tracks, he led Asinus across the trembling earth of the swale, and quickly emerged on the hard ground, on the side opposite to the encampment of the squatter. "If old Ishmael gets a squint at that highway through the brush," cried Paul, casting, as he left the place, a hasty glance at the broad trail the party had made through the thicket, "he'll need no finger-board to tell him which way his road lies. But let him follow! I know the vagabond would gladly cross his breed with a little honest blood, but if any son of his ever gets to be the husband of--" "Hush, Paul, hush," said the terrified young woman, who leaned on his arm for support; "your voice might be heard." The bee-hunter was silent, though he did not cease to cast ominous looks behind him, as they flew along the edge of the run, which sufficiently betrayed the belligerent condition of his mind. As each one was busy for himself, but a few minutes elapsed before the party rose a swell of the prairie, and descending without a moment's delay on the opposite side, they were at once removed from every danger of being seen by the sons of Ishmael, unless the pursuers should happen to fall upon their trail. The old man now profited by the formation of the land to take another direction, with a view to elude pursuit, as a vessel changes her course in fogs and darkness, to escape from the vigilance of her enemies. Two hours, passed in the utmost diligence, enabled them to make a half circuit around the rock, and to reach a point that was exactly opposite to the original direction of their flight. To most of the fugitives their situation was as entirely unknown as is that of a ship in the middle of the ocean to the uninstructed voyager: but the old man proceeded at every turn, and through every bottom, with a decision that inspired his followers with confidence, as it spoke favourably of his own knowledge of the localities. His hound, stopping now and then to catch the expression of his eye, had preceded the trapper throughout the whole distance, with as much certainty as though a previous and intelligible communion between them had established the route by which they were to proceed. But, at the expiration of the time just named, the dog suddenly came to a stand, and then seating himself on the prairie, he snuffed the air a moment, and began a low and piteous whining. "Ay--pup--ay. I know the spot--I know the spot, and reason there is to remember it well!" said the old man, stopping by the side of his uneasy associate,

obtruding

How many times the word 'obtruding' appears in the text?

you fool enough to believe what such a scoundrel as I am tells you, captain, unless it has probability to back it? I know you are not: therefore I will give my facts and my opinions, and then leave you to chew on them, while I go and drink of your generosity. I know a man who is called Abiram White.--I believe the knave took that name to show his enmity to the race of blacks! But this gentleman is now, and has been for years, to my certain knowledge, a regular translator of the human body from one State to another. I have dealt with him in my time, and a cheating dog he is! No more honour in him than meat in my stomach. I saw him here in this very town, the day of your wedding. He was in company with his wife's brother, and pretended to be a settler on the hunt for new land. A noble set they were, to carry on business--seven sons, each of them as tall as your sergeant with his cap on. Well, the moment I heard that your wife was lost, I saw at once that Abiram had laid his hands on her." "Do you know this--can this be true? What reason have you to fancy a thing so wild?" "Reason enough; I know Abiram White. Now, will you add a trifle just to keep my throat from parching?" "Go, go; you are stupified with drink already, miserable man, and know not what you say. Go; go, and beware the drummer." "Experience is a good guide"--the fellow called after the retiring Middleton; and then turning with a chuckling laugh, like one well satisfied with himself, he made the best of his way towards the shop of the suttler. A hundred times in the course of that night did Middleton fancy that the communication of the miscreant was entitled to some attention, and as often did he reject the idea as too wild and visionary for another thought. He was awakened early on the following morning, after passing a restless and nearly sleepless night, by his orderly, who came to report that a man was found dead on the parade, at no great distance from his quarters. Throwing on his clothes he proceeded to the spot, and beheld the individual, with whom he had held the preceding conference, in the precise situation in which he had first been found. The miserable wretch had fallen a victim to his intemperance. This revolting fact was sufficiently proclaimed by his obtruding eye-balls, his bloated countenance, and the nearly insufferable odours that were even then exhaling from his carcass. Disgusted with the odious spectacle, the youth was turning from the sight, after ordering the corpse to be removed, when the position of one of the dead man's hands struck him. On examination, he found the fore-finger extended, as if in the act of writing in the sand, with the following incomplete sentence, nearly illegible, but yet in a state to be deciphered: "Captain, it is true, as I am a gentle--" He had either died, or fallen into a sleep, the forerunner of his death, before the latter word was finished. Concealing this fact from the others, Middleton repeated his orders and departed. The pertinacity of the deceased, and all the circumstances united, induced him to set on foot some secret enquiries. He found that a family answering the description which had been given him, had in fact passed the place the day of his nuptials. They were traced along the margin of the Mississippi, for some distance, until they took boat and ascended the river to its confluence with the Missouri. Here they had disappeared like hundreds of others, in pursuit of the hidden wealth of the interior. Furnished with these facts, Middleton detailed a small guard of his most trusty men, took leave of Don Augustin, without declaring his hopes or his fears, and having arrived at the indicated point, he pushed into the wilderness in pursuit. It was not difficult to trace a train like that of Ishmael, until he was well assured its object lay far beyond the usual limits of the settlements. This circumstance, in itself, quickened his suspicions, and gave additional force to his hopes of final success. After getting beyond the assistance of verbal directions, the anxious husband had recourse to the usual signs of a trail, in order to follow the fugitives. This he also found a task of no difficulty, until he reached the hard and unyielding soil of the rolling prairies. Here, indeed, he was completely at fault. He found himself, at length, compelled to divide his followers, appointing a place of rendezvous at a distant day, and to endeavour to find the lost trail by multiplying, as much as possible, the number of his eyes. He had been alone a week, when accident brought him in contact with the trapper and the bee-hunter. Part of their interview has been related, and the reader can readily imagine the explanations that succeeded the tale he recounted, and which led, as has already been seen, to the recovery of his bride. CHAPTER XVI These likelihoods confirm her flight from hence, Therefore, I pray you, stay not to discourse, But mount you presently. --Shakspeare. An hour had slid by, in hasty and nearly incoherent questions and answers, before Middleton, hanging over his recovered treasure with that sort of jealous watchfulness with which a miser would regard his hoards, closed the disjointed narrative of his own proceedings by demanding-- "And you, my Inez; in what manner were you treated?" "In every thing, but the great injustice they did in separating me so forcibly from my friends, as well perhaps as the circumstances of my captors would allow. I think the man, who is certainly the master here, is but a new beginner in wickedness. He quarrelled frightfully in my presence, with the wretch who seized me, and then they made an impious bargain, to which I was compelled to acquiesce, and to which they bound me as well as themselves by oaths. Ah! Middleton, I fear the heretics are not so heedful of their vows as we who are nurtured in the bosom of the true church!" "Believe it not; these villains are of no religion: did they forswear themselves?" "No, not perjured: but was it not awful to call upon the good God to witness so sinful a compact?" "And so we think, Inez, as truly as the most virtuous cardinal of Rome. But how did they observe their oath, and what was its purport?" "They conditioned to leave me unmolested, and free from their odious presence, provided I would give a pledge to make no effort to escape; and that I would not even show myself, until a time that my masters saw fit to name." "And that time?" demanded the impatient Middleton, who so well knew the religious scruples of his wife--"that time?" "It is already passed. I was sworn by my patron saint, and faithfully did I keep the vow, until the man they call Ishmael forgot the terms by offering violence. I then made my appearance on the rock, for the time too was passed; though I even think father Ignatius would have absolved me from the vow, on account of the treachery of my keepers." "If he had not," muttered the youth between his compressed teeth, "I would have absolved him for ever from his spiritual care of your conscience!" "You, Middleton!" returned his wife looking up into his flushed face, while a bright blush suffused her own sweet countenance; "you may receive my vows, but surely you can have no power to absolve me from their observance!" "No, no, no. Inez, you are right. I know but little of these conscientious subtilties, and I am any thing but a priest: yet tell me, what has induced these monsters to play this desperate game--to trifle thus with my happiness?" "You know my ignorance of the world, and how ill I am qualified to furnish reasons for the conduct of beings so different from any I have ever seen before. But does not love of money drive men to acts even worse than this? I believe they thought that an aged and wealthy father could be tempted to pay them a rich ransom for his child; and, perhaps," she added, stealing an enquiring glance through her tears, at the attentive Middleton, "they counted something on the fresh affections of a bridegroom." "They might have extracted the blood from my heart, drop by drop!" "Yes," resumed his young and timid wife, instantly withdrawing the stolen look she had hazarded, and hurriedly pursuing the train of the discourse, as if glad to make him forget the liberty she had just taken, "I have been told, there are men so base as to perjure themselves at the altar, in order to command the gold of ignorant and confiding girls; and if love of money will lead to such baseness, we may surely expect it will hurry those, who devote themselves to gain, into acts of lesser fraud." "It must be so; and now, Inez, though I am here to guard you with my life, and we are in possession of this rock, our difficulties, perhaps our dangers, are not ended. You will summon all your courage to meet the trial and prove yourself a soldier's wife, my Inez?" "I am ready to depart this instant. The letter you sent by the physician, had prepared me to hope for the best, and I have every thing arranged for flight, at the shortest warning." "Let us then leave this place and join our friends." "Friends!" interrupted Inez, glancing her eyes around the little tent in quest of the form of Ellen. "I, too, have a friend who must not be forgotten, but who is pledged to pass the remainder of her life with us. She is gone!" Middleton gently led her from the spot, as he smilingly answered-- "She may have had, like myself, her own private communications for some favoured ear." The young man had not however done justice to the motives of Ellen Wade. The sensitive and intelligent girl had readily perceived how little her presence was necessary in the interview that has just been related, and had retired with that intuitive delicacy of feeling which seems to belong more properly to her sex. She was now to be seen seated on a point of the rock, with her person so entirely enveloped in her dress as to conceal her features. Here she had remained for near an hour, no one approaching to address her, and as it appeared to her own quick and jealous eyes, totally unobserved. In the latter particular, however, even the vigilance of the quick-sighted Ellen was deceived. The first act of Paul Hover, on finding himself the master of Ishmael's citadel, had been to sound the note of victory, after the quaint and ludicrous manner that is so often practised among the borderers of the West. Flapping his sides with his hands, as the conquering game-cock is wont to do with his wings, he raised a loud and laughable imitation of the exultation of this bird; a cry which might have proved a dangerous challenge had any one of the athletic sons of the squatter been within hearing. "This has been a regular knock-down and drag-out," he cried, "and no bones broke! How now, old trapper, you have been one of your training, platoon, rank and file soldiers in your day, and have seen forts taken and batteries stormed before this--am I right?" "Ay, ay, that have I," answered the old man, who still maintained his post at the foot of the rock, so little disturbed by what he had just witnessed, as to return the grin of Paul, with a hearty indulgence in his own silent and peculiar laughter; "you have gone through the exploit like men!" "Now tell me, is it not in rule, to call over the names of the living, and to bury the dead, after every bloody battle?" "Some did and other some didn't. When Sir William push'd the German, Dieskau, thro' the defiles at the foot of the Hori--" "Your Sir William was a drone to Sir Paul, and knew nothing of regularity. So here begins the roll-call--by the by, old man, what between bee-hunting and buffaloe humps, and certain other matters, I have been too busy to ask your name; for I intend to begin with my rear-guard, well knowing that my man in front is too busy to answer." "Lord, lad, I've been called in my time by as many names as there are people among whom I've dwelt. Now the Delawares nam'd me for my eyes, and I was called after the far-sighted hawk. Then, ag'in, the settlers in the Otsego hills christened me anew, from the fashion of my leggings; and various have been the names by which I have gone through life; but little will it matter when the time shall come, that all are to be muster'd, face to face, by what titles a mortal has played his part! I humbly trust I shall be able to answer to any of mine, in a loud and manly voice." Paul paid little or no attention to this reply, more than half of which was lost in the distance, but pursuing the humour of the moment, he called out in a stentorian voice to the naturalist to answer to his name. Dr. Battius had not thought it necessary to push his success beyond the comfortable niche, which accident had so opportunely formed for his protection, and in which he now reposed from his labours, with a pleasing consciousness of security, added to great exultation at the possession of the botanical treasure already mentioned. "Mount, mount, my worthy mole-catcher! come and behold the prospect of skirting Ishmael; come and look nature boldly in the face, and not go sneaking any longer, among the prairie grass and mullein tops, like a gobbler nibbling for grasshoppers." The mouth of the light-hearted and reckless bee-hunter was instantly closed, and he was rendered as mute, as he had just been boisterous and talkative, by the appearance of Ellen Wade. When the melancholy maiden took her seat on the point of the rock as mentioned, Paul affected to employ himself in conducting a close inspection of the household effects of the squatter. He rummaged the drawers of Esther with no delicate hands, scattered the rustic finery of her girls on the ground, without the least deference to its quality or elegance, and tossed her pots and kettles here and there, as though they had been vessels of wood instead of iron. All this industry was, however, manifestly without an object. He reserved nothing for himself, not even appearing conscious of the nature of the articles which suffered by his familiarity. When he had examined the inside of every cabin, taken a fresh survey of the spot where he had confined the children, and where he had thoroughly secured them with cords, and kicked one of the pails of the woman, like a foot-ball, fifty feet into the air, in sheer wantonness, he returned to the edge of the rock, and thrusting both his hands through his wampum belt, he began to whistle the "Kentucky Hunters" as diligently as if he had been hired to supply his auditors with music by the hour. In this manner passed the remainder of the time, until Middleton, as has been related, led Inez forth from the tent, and gave a new direction to the thoughts of the whole party. He summoned Paul from his flourish of music, tore the Doctor from the study of his plant, and, as acknowledged leader, gave the necessary orders for immediate departure. In the bustle and confusion that were likely to succeed such a mandate, there was little opportunity to indulge in complaints or reflections. As the adventurers had not come unprepared for victory, each individual employed himself in such offices as were best adapted to his strength and situation. The trapper had already made himself master of the patient Asinus, who was quietly feeding at no great distance from the rock, and he was now busy in fitting his back with the complicated machinery that Dr. Battius saw fit to term a saddle of his own invention. The naturalist himself seized upon his portfolios, herbals, and collection of insects, which he quickly transferred from the encampment of the squatter, to certain pockets in the aforesaid ingenious invention, and which the trapper as uniformly cast away the moment his back was turned. Paul showed his dexterity in removing such light articles as Inez and Ellen had prepared for their flight to the foot of the citadel, while Middleton, after mingling threats and promises, in order to induce the children to remain quietly in their bondage, assisted the females to descend. As time began to press upon them, and there was great danger of Ishmael's returning, these several movements were made with singular industry and despatch. The trapper bestowed such articles as he conceived were necessary to the comfort of the weaker and more delicate members of the party, in those pockets from which he had so unceremoniously expelled the treasures of the unconscious naturalist, and then gave way for Middleton to place Inez in one of those seats which he had prepared on the back of the animal for her and her companion. "Go, child," the old man said, motioning to Ellen to follow the example of the lady, and turning his head a little anxiously to examine the waste behind him. "It cannot be long afore the owner of this place will be coming to look after his household; and he is not a man to give up his property, however obtained, without complaint!" "It is true," cried Middleton; "we have wasted moments that are precious, and have the utmost need of industry." "Ay, ay, I thought it; and would have said it, captain; but I remembered how your grand'ther used to love to look upon the face of her he led away for a wife, in the days of his youth and his happiness. 'Tis natur', 'tis natur', and 'tis wiser to give way a little before its feelings, than to try to stop a current that will have its course." Ellen advanced to the side of the beast, and seizing Inez by the hand, she said, with heartfelt warmth, after struggling to suppress an emotion that nearly choked her-- "God bless you, sweet lady! I hope you will forget and forgive the wrongs you have received from my uncle--" The humbled and sorrowful girl could say no more, her voice becoming entirely inaudible in an ungovernable burst of grief. "How is this?" cried Middleton; "did you not say, Inez, that this excellent young woman was to accompany us, and to live with us for the remainder of her life; or, at least, until she found some more agreeable residence for herself?" "I did; and I still hope it. She has always given me reason to believe, that after having shown so much commiseration and friendship in my misery, she would not desert me, should happier times return." "I cannot--I ought not," continued Ellen, getting the better of her momentary weakness. "It has pleased God to cast my lot among these people, and I ought not to quit them. It would be adding the appearance of treachery to what will already seem bad enough, with one of his opinions. He has been kind to me, an orphan, after his rough customs, and I cannot steal from him at such a moment." "She is just as much a relation of skirting Ishmael as I am a bishop!" said Paul, with a loud hem, as if his throat wanted clearing. "If the old fellow has done the honest thing by her, in giving her a morsel of venison now and then, or a spoon around his homminy dish, hasn't she pay'd him in teaching the young devils to read their Bible, or in helping old Esther to put her finery in shape and fashion. Tell me that a drone has a sting, and I'll believe you as easily as I will that this young woman is a debtor to any of the tribe of Bush!" "It is but little matter who owes me, or where I am in debt. There are none to care for a girl who is fatherless and motherless, and whose nearest kin are the offcasts of all honest people. No, no; go, lady, and Heaven for ever bless you! I am better here, in this desert, where there are none to know my shame." "Now, old trapper," retorted Paul, "this is what I call knowing which way the wind blows! You ar' a man that has seen life, and you know something of fashions; I put it to your judgment, plainly, isn't it in the nature of things for the hive to swarm when the young get their growth, and if children will quit their parents, ought one who is of no kith or kin--" "Hist!" interrupted the man he addressed, "Hector is discontented. Say it out, plainly, pup; what is it dog--what is it?" The venerable hound had risen, and was scenting the fresh breeze which continued to sweep heavily over the prairie. At the words of his master he growled and contracted the muscles of his lips, as if half disposed to threaten with the remnants of his teeth. The younger dog, who was resting after the chase of the morning, also made some signs that his nose detected a taint in the air, and then the two resumed their slumbers, as if they had done enough. The trapper seized the bridle of the ass, and cried, urging the beast onward-- "There is no time for words. The squatter and his brood are within a mile or two of this blessed spot!" Middleton lost all recollection of Ellen, in the danger which now so eminently beset his recovered bride; nor is it necessary to add, that Dr. Battius did not wait for a second admonition to commence his retreat. Following the route indicated by the old man, they turned the rock in a body, and pursued their way as fast as possible across the prairie, under the favour of the cover it afforded. Paul Hover, however, remained in his tracks, sullenly leaning on his rifle. Near a minute had elapsed before he was observed by Ellen, who had buried her face in her hands, to conceal her fancied desolation from herself. "Why do you not fly?" the weeping girl exclaimed, the instant she perceived she was not alone. "I'm not used to it." "My uncle will soon be here! you have nothing to hope from his pity." "Nor from that of his niece, I reckon. Let him come; he can only knock me on the head!" "Paul, Paul, if you love me, fly." "Alone!--if I do, may I be--" "If you value your life, fly!" "I value it not, compared to you." "Paul!" "Ellen!" She extended both her hands and burst into another and a still more violent flood of tears. The bee-hunter put one of his sturdy arms around her waist, and in another moment he was urging her over the plain, in rapid pursuit of their flying friends. CHAPTER XVII Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight With a new Gorgon--Do not bid me speak; See, and then speak yourselves. --Shakspeare. The little run, which supplied the family of the squatter with water, and nourished the trees and bushes that grew near the base of the rocky eminence, took its rise at no great distance from the latter, in a small thicket of cotton-wood and vines. Hither, then, the trapper directed the flight, as to the place affording the only available cover in so pressing an emergency. It will be remembered, that the sagacity of the old man, which, from long practice in similar scenes, amounted nearly to an instinct in all cases of sudden danger, had first induced him to take this course, as it placed the hill between them and the approaching party. Favoured by this circumstance, he succeeded in reaching the bushes in sufficient time and Paul Hover had just hurried the breathless Ellen into the tangled bush, as Ishmael gained the summit of the rock, in the manner already described, where he stood like a man momentarily bereft of sense, gazing at the confusion which had been created among his chattels, or at his gagged and bound children, who had been safely bestowed, by the forethought of the bee-hunter, under the cover of a bark roof, in a sort of irregular pile. A long rifle would have thrown a bullet from the height, on which the squatter now stood, into the very cover where the fugitives, who had wrought all this mischief, were clustered. The trapper was the first to speak, as the man on whose intelligence and experience they all depended for counsel, after running his eye over the different individuals who gathered about him, in order to see that none were missing. "Ah! natur' is natur', and has done its work!" he said, nodding to the exulting Paul, with a smile of approbation. "I thought it would be hard for those, who had so often met in fair and foul, by starlight and under the clouded moon, to part at last in anger. Now is there little time to lose in talk, and every thing to gain by industry! It cannot be long afore some of yonder brood will be nosing along the 'arth for our trail, and should they find it, as find it they surely will, and should they push us to a stand on our courage, the dispute must be settled with the rifle; which may He in heaven forbid! Captain, can you lead us to the place where any of your warriors lie?--For the stout sons of the squatter will make a manly brush of it, or I am but little of a judge in warlike dispositions!" "The place of rendezvous is many leagues from this, on the banks of La Platte." "It is bad--it is bad. If fighting is to be done, it is always wise to enter on it on equal terms. But what has one so near his time to do with ill-blood and hot-blood at his heart! Listen to what a grey head and some experience have to offer, and then if any among you can point out a wiser fashion for a retreat, we can just follow his design, and forget that I have spoken. This thicket stretches for near a mile as it may be slanting from the rock, and leads towards the sunset instead of the settlements." "Enough, enough," cried Middleton, too impatient to wait until the deliberative and perhaps loquacious old man could end his minute explanation. "Time is too precious for words. Let us fly." The trapper made a gesture of compliance, and turning in his tracks, he led Asinus across the trembling earth of the swale, and quickly emerged on the hard ground, on the side opposite to the encampment of the squatter. "If old Ishmael gets a squint at that highway through the brush," cried Paul, casting, as he left the place, a hasty glance at the broad trail the party had made through the thicket, "he'll need no finger-board to tell him which way his road lies. But let him follow! I know the vagabond would gladly cross his breed with a little honest blood, but if any son of his ever gets to be the husband of--" "Hush, Paul, hush," said the terrified young woman, who leaned on his arm for support; "your voice might be heard." The bee-hunter was silent, though he did not cease to cast ominous looks behind him, as they flew along the edge of the run, which sufficiently betrayed the belligerent condition of his mind. As each one was busy for himself, but a few minutes elapsed before the party rose a swell of the prairie, and descending without a moment's delay on the opposite side, they were at once removed from every danger of being seen by the sons of Ishmael, unless the pursuers should happen to fall upon their trail. The old man now profited by the formation of the land to take another direction, with a view to elude pursuit, as a vessel changes her course in fogs and darkness, to escape from the vigilance of her enemies. Two hours, passed in the utmost diligence, enabled them to make a half circuit around the rock, and to reach a point that was exactly opposite to the original direction of their flight. To most of the fugitives their situation was as entirely unknown as is that of a ship in the middle of the ocean to the uninstructed voyager: but the old man proceeded at every turn, and through every bottom, with a decision that inspired his followers with confidence, as it spoke favourably of his own knowledge of the localities. His hound, stopping now and then to catch the expression of his eye, had preceded the trapper throughout the whole distance, with as much certainty as though a previous and intelligible communion between them had established the route by which they were to proceed. But, at the expiration of the time just named, the dog suddenly came to a stand, and then seating himself on the prairie, he snuffed the air a moment, and began a low and piteous whining. "Ay--pup--ay. I know the spot--I know the spot, and reason there is to remember it well!" said the old man, stopping by the side of his uneasy associate,

compelled

How many times the word 'compelled' appears in the text?

you fool enough to believe what such a scoundrel as I am tells you, captain, unless it has probability to back it? I know you are not: therefore I will give my facts and my opinions, and then leave you to chew on them, while I go and drink of your generosity. I know a man who is called Abiram White.--I believe the knave took that name to show his enmity to the race of blacks! But this gentleman is now, and has been for years, to my certain knowledge, a regular translator of the human body from one State to another. I have dealt with him in my time, and a cheating dog he is! No more honour in him than meat in my stomach. I saw him here in this very town, the day of your wedding. He was in company with his wife's brother, and pretended to be a settler on the hunt for new land. A noble set they were, to carry on business--seven sons, each of them as tall as your sergeant with his cap on. Well, the moment I heard that your wife was lost, I saw at once that Abiram had laid his hands on her." "Do you know this--can this be true? What reason have you to fancy a thing so wild?" "Reason enough; I know Abiram White. Now, will you add a trifle just to keep my throat from parching?" "Go, go; you are stupified with drink already, miserable man, and know not what you say. Go; go, and beware the drummer." "Experience is a good guide"--the fellow called after the retiring Middleton; and then turning with a chuckling laugh, like one well satisfied with himself, he made the best of his way towards the shop of the suttler. A hundred times in the course of that night did Middleton fancy that the communication of the miscreant was entitled to some attention, and as often did he reject the idea as too wild and visionary for another thought. He was awakened early on the following morning, after passing a restless and nearly sleepless night, by his orderly, who came to report that a man was found dead on the parade, at no great distance from his quarters. Throwing on his clothes he proceeded to the spot, and beheld the individual, with whom he had held the preceding conference, in the precise situation in which he had first been found. The miserable wretch had fallen a victim to his intemperance. This revolting fact was sufficiently proclaimed by his obtruding eye-balls, his bloated countenance, and the nearly insufferable odours that were even then exhaling from his carcass. Disgusted with the odious spectacle, the youth was turning from the sight, after ordering the corpse to be removed, when the position of one of the dead man's hands struck him. On examination, he found the fore-finger extended, as if in the act of writing in the sand, with the following incomplete sentence, nearly illegible, but yet in a state to be deciphered: "Captain, it is true, as I am a gentle--" He had either died, or fallen into a sleep, the forerunner of his death, before the latter word was finished. Concealing this fact from the others, Middleton repeated his orders and departed. The pertinacity of the deceased, and all the circumstances united, induced him to set on foot some secret enquiries. He found that a family answering the description which had been given him, had in fact passed the place the day of his nuptials. They were traced along the margin of the Mississippi, for some distance, until they took boat and ascended the river to its confluence with the Missouri. Here they had disappeared like hundreds of others, in pursuit of the hidden wealth of the interior. Furnished with these facts, Middleton detailed a small guard of his most trusty men, took leave of Don Augustin, without declaring his hopes or his fears, and having arrived at the indicated point, he pushed into the wilderness in pursuit. It was not difficult to trace a train like that of Ishmael, until he was well assured its object lay far beyond the usual limits of the settlements. This circumstance, in itself, quickened his suspicions, and gave additional force to his hopes of final success. After getting beyond the assistance of verbal directions, the anxious husband had recourse to the usual signs of a trail, in order to follow the fugitives. This he also found a task of no difficulty, until he reached the hard and unyielding soil of the rolling prairies. Here, indeed, he was completely at fault. He found himself, at length, compelled to divide his followers, appointing a place of rendezvous at a distant day, and to endeavour to find the lost trail by multiplying, as much as possible, the number of his eyes. He had been alone a week, when accident brought him in contact with the trapper and the bee-hunter. Part of their interview has been related, and the reader can readily imagine the explanations that succeeded the tale he recounted, and which led, as has already been seen, to the recovery of his bride. CHAPTER XVI These likelihoods confirm her flight from hence, Therefore, I pray you, stay not to discourse, But mount you presently. --Shakspeare. An hour had slid by, in hasty and nearly incoherent questions and answers, before Middleton, hanging over his recovered treasure with that sort of jealous watchfulness with which a miser would regard his hoards, closed the disjointed narrative of his own proceedings by demanding-- "And you, my Inez; in what manner were you treated?" "In every thing, but the great injustice they did in separating me so forcibly from my friends, as well perhaps as the circumstances of my captors would allow. I think the man, who is certainly the master here, is but a new beginner in wickedness. He quarrelled frightfully in my presence, with the wretch who seized me, and then they made an impious bargain, to which I was compelled to acquiesce, and to which they bound me as well as themselves by oaths. Ah! Middleton, I fear the heretics are not so heedful of their vows as we who are nurtured in the bosom of the true church!" "Believe it not; these villains are of no religion: did they forswear themselves?" "No, not perjured: but was it not awful to call upon the good God to witness so sinful a compact?" "And so we think, Inez, as truly as the most virtuous cardinal of Rome. But how did they observe their oath, and what was its purport?" "They conditioned to leave me unmolested, and free from their odious presence, provided I would give a pledge to make no effort to escape; and that I would not even show myself, until a time that my masters saw fit to name." "And that time?" demanded the impatient Middleton, who so well knew the religious scruples of his wife--"that time?" "It is already passed. I was sworn by my patron saint, and faithfully did I keep the vow, until the man they call Ishmael forgot the terms by offering violence. I then made my appearance on the rock, for the time too was passed; though I even think father Ignatius would have absolved me from the vow, on account of the treachery of my keepers." "If he had not," muttered the youth between his compressed teeth, "I would have absolved him for ever from his spiritual care of your conscience!" "You, Middleton!" returned his wife looking up into his flushed face, while a bright blush suffused her own sweet countenance; "you may receive my vows, but surely you can have no power to absolve me from their observance!" "No, no, no. Inez, you are right. I know but little of these conscientious subtilties, and I am any thing but a priest: yet tell me, what has induced these monsters to play this desperate game--to trifle thus with my happiness?" "You know my ignorance of the world, and how ill I am qualified to furnish reasons for the conduct of beings so different from any I have ever seen before. But does not love of money drive men to acts even worse than this? I believe they thought that an aged and wealthy father could be tempted to pay them a rich ransom for his child; and, perhaps," she added, stealing an enquiring glance through her tears, at the attentive Middleton, "they counted something on the fresh affections of a bridegroom." "They might have extracted the blood from my heart, drop by drop!" "Yes," resumed his young and timid wife, instantly withdrawing the stolen look she had hazarded, and hurriedly pursuing the train of the discourse, as if glad to make him forget the liberty she had just taken, "I have been told, there are men so base as to perjure themselves at the altar, in order to command the gold of ignorant and confiding girls; and if love of money will lead to such baseness, we may surely expect it will hurry those, who devote themselves to gain, into acts of lesser fraud." "It must be so; and now, Inez, though I am here to guard you with my life, and we are in possession of this rock, our difficulties, perhaps our dangers, are not ended. You will summon all your courage to meet the trial and prove yourself a soldier's wife, my Inez?" "I am ready to depart this instant. The letter you sent by the physician, had prepared me to hope for the best, and I have every thing arranged for flight, at the shortest warning." "Let us then leave this place and join our friends." "Friends!" interrupted Inez, glancing her eyes around the little tent in quest of the form of Ellen. "I, too, have a friend who must not be forgotten, but who is pledged to pass the remainder of her life with us. She is gone!" Middleton gently led her from the spot, as he smilingly answered-- "She may have had, like myself, her own private communications for some favoured ear." The young man had not however done justice to the motives of Ellen Wade. The sensitive and intelligent girl had readily perceived how little her presence was necessary in the interview that has just been related, and had retired with that intuitive delicacy of feeling which seems to belong more properly to her sex. She was now to be seen seated on a point of the rock, with her person so entirely enveloped in her dress as to conceal her features. Here she had remained for near an hour, no one approaching to address her, and as it appeared to her own quick and jealous eyes, totally unobserved. In the latter particular, however, even the vigilance of the quick-sighted Ellen was deceived. The first act of Paul Hover, on finding himself the master of Ishmael's citadel, had been to sound the note of victory, after the quaint and ludicrous manner that is so often practised among the borderers of the West. Flapping his sides with his hands, as the conquering game-cock is wont to do with his wings, he raised a loud and laughable imitation of the exultation of this bird; a cry which might have proved a dangerous challenge had any one of the athletic sons of the squatter been within hearing. "This has been a regular knock-down and drag-out," he cried, "and no bones broke! How now, old trapper, you have been one of your training, platoon, rank and file soldiers in your day, and have seen forts taken and batteries stormed before this--am I right?" "Ay, ay, that have I," answered the old man, who still maintained his post at the foot of the rock, so little disturbed by what he had just witnessed, as to return the grin of Paul, with a hearty indulgence in his own silent and peculiar laughter; "you have gone through the exploit like men!" "Now tell me, is it not in rule, to call over the names of the living, and to bury the dead, after every bloody battle?" "Some did and other some didn't. When Sir William push'd the German, Dieskau, thro' the defiles at the foot of the Hori--" "Your Sir William was a drone to Sir Paul, and knew nothing of regularity. So here begins the roll-call--by the by, old man, what between bee-hunting and buffaloe humps, and certain other matters, I have been too busy to ask your name; for I intend to begin with my rear-guard, well knowing that my man in front is too busy to answer." "Lord, lad, I've been called in my time by as many names as there are people among whom I've dwelt. Now the Delawares nam'd me for my eyes, and I was called after the far-sighted hawk. Then, ag'in, the settlers in the Otsego hills christened me anew, from the fashion of my leggings; and various have been the names by which I have gone through life; but little will it matter when the time shall come, that all are to be muster'd, face to face, by what titles a mortal has played his part! I humbly trust I shall be able to answer to any of mine, in a loud and manly voice." Paul paid little or no attention to this reply, more than half of which was lost in the distance, but pursuing the humour of the moment, he called out in a stentorian voice to the naturalist to answer to his name. Dr. Battius had not thought it necessary to push his success beyond the comfortable niche, which accident had so opportunely formed for his protection, and in which he now reposed from his labours, with a pleasing consciousness of security, added to great exultation at the possession of the botanical treasure already mentioned. "Mount, mount, my worthy mole-catcher! come and behold the prospect of skirting Ishmael; come and look nature boldly in the face, and not go sneaking any longer, among the prairie grass and mullein tops, like a gobbler nibbling for grasshoppers." The mouth of the light-hearted and reckless bee-hunter was instantly closed, and he was rendered as mute, as he had just been boisterous and talkative, by the appearance of Ellen Wade. When the melancholy maiden took her seat on the point of the rock as mentioned, Paul affected to employ himself in conducting a close inspection of the household effects of the squatter. He rummaged the drawers of Esther with no delicate hands, scattered the rustic finery of her girls on the ground, without the least deference to its quality or elegance, and tossed her pots and kettles here and there, as though they had been vessels of wood instead of iron. All this industry was, however, manifestly without an object. He reserved nothing for himself, not even appearing conscious of the nature of the articles which suffered by his familiarity. When he had examined the inside of every cabin, taken a fresh survey of the spot where he had confined the children, and where he had thoroughly secured them with cords, and kicked one of the pails of the woman, like a foot-ball, fifty feet into the air, in sheer wantonness, he returned to the edge of the rock, and thrusting both his hands through his wampum belt, he began to whistle the "Kentucky Hunters" as diligently as if he had been hired to supply his auditors with music by the hour. In this manner passed the remainder of the time, until Middleton, as has been related, led Inez forth from the tent, and gave a new direction to the thoughts of the whole party. He summoned Paul from his flourish of music, tore the Doctor from the study of his plant, and, as acknowledged leader, gave the necessary orders for immediate departure. In the bustle and confusion that were likely to succeed such a mandate, there was little opportunity to indulge in complaints or reflections. As the adventurers had not come unprepared for victory, each individual employed himself in such offices as were best adapted to his strength and situation. The trapper had already made himself master of the patient Asinus, who was quietly feeding at no great distance from the rock, and he was now busy in fitting his back with the complicated machinery that Dr. Battius saw fit to term a saddle of his own invention. The naturalist himself seized upon his portfolios, herbals, and collection of insects, which he quickly transferred from the encampment of the squatter, to certain pockets in the aforesaid ingenious invention, and which the trapper as uniformly cast away the moment his back was turned. Paul showed his dexterity in removing such light articles as Inez and Ellen had prepared for their flight to the foot of the citadel, while Middleton, after mingling threats and promises, in order to induce the children to remain quietly in their bondage, assisted the females to descend. As time began to press upon them, and there was great danger of Ishmael's returning, these several movements were made with singular industry and despatch. The trapper bestowed such articles as he conceived were necessary to the comfort of the weaker and more delicate members of the party, in those pockets from which he had so unceremoniously expelled the treasures of the unconscious naturalist, and then gave way for Middleton to place Inez in one of those seats which he had prepared on the back of the animal for her and her companion. "Go, child," the old man said, motioning to Ellen to follow the example of the lady, and turning his head a little anxiously to examine the waste behind him. "It cannot be long afore the owner of this place will be coming to look after his household; and he is not a man to give up his property, however obtained, without complaint!" "It is true," cried Middleton; "we have wasted moments that are precious, and have the utmost need of industry." "Ay, ay, I thought it; and would have said it, captain; but I remembered how your grand'ther used to love to look upon the face of her he led away for a wife, in the days of his youth and his happiness. 'Tis natur', 'tis natur', and 'tis wiser to give way a little before its feelings, than to try to stop a current that will have its course." Ellen advanced to the side of the beast, and seizing Inez by the hand, she said, with heartfelt warmth, after struggling to suppress an emotion that nearly choked her-- "God bless you, sweet lady! I hope you will forget and forgive the wrongs you have received from my uncle--" The humbled and sorrowful girl could say no more, her voice becoming entirely inaudible in an ungovernable burst of grief. "How is this?" cried Middleton; "did you not say, Inez, that this excellent young woman was to accompany us, and to live with us for the remainder of her life; or, at least, until she found some more agreeable residence for herself?" "I did; and I still hope it. She has always given me reason to believe, that after having shown so much commiseration and friendship in my misery, she would not desert me, should happier times return." "I cannot--I ought not," continued Ellen, getting the better of her momentary weakness. "It has pleased God to cast my lot among these people, and I ought not to quit them. It would be adding the appearance of treachery to what will already seem bad enough, with one of his opinions. He has been kind to me, an orphan, after his rough customs, and I cannot steal from him at such a moment." "She is just as much a relation of skirting Ishmael as I am a bishop!" said Paul, with a loud hem, as if his throat wanted clearing. "If the old fellow has done the honest thing by her, in giving her a morsel of venison now and then, or a spoon around his homminy dish, hasn't she pay'd him in teaching the young devils to read their Bible, or in helping old Esther to put her finery in shape and fashion. Tell me that a drone has a sting, and I'll believe you as easily as I will that this young woman is a debtor to any of the tribe of Bush!" "It is but little matter who owes me, or where I am in debt. There are none to care for a girl who is fatherless and motherless, and whose nearest kin are the offcasts of all honest people. No, no; go, lady, and Heaven for ever bless you! I am better here, in this desert, where there are none to know my shame." "Now, old trapper," retorted Paul, "this is what I call knowing which way the wind blows! You ar' a man that has seen life, and you know something of fashions; I put it to your judgment, plainly, isn't it in the nature of things for the hive to swarm when the young get their growth, and if children will quit their parents, ought one who is of no kith or kin--" "Hist!" interrupted the man he addressed, "Hector is discontented. Say it out, plainly, pup; what is it dog--what is it?" The venerable hound had risen, and was scenting the fresh breeze which continued to sweep heavily over the prairie. At the words of his master he growled and contracted the muscles of his lips, as if half disposed to threaten with the remnants of his teeth. The younger dog, who was resting after the chase of the morning, also made some signs that his nose detected a taint in the air, and then the two resumed their slumbers, as if they had done enough. The trapper seized the bridle of the ass, and cried, urging the beast onward-- "There is no time for words. The squatter and his brood are within a mile or two of this blessed spot!" Middleton lost all recollection of Ellen, in the danger which now so eminently beset his recovered bride; nor is it necessary to add, that Dr. Battius did not wait for a second admonition to commence his retreat. Following the route indicated by the old man, they turned the rock in a body, and pursued their way as fast as possible across the prairie, under the favour of the cover it afforded. Paul Hover, however, remained in his tracks, sullenly leaning on his rifle. Near a minute had elapsed before he was observed by Ellen, who had buried her face in her hands, to conceal her fancied desolation from herself. "Why do you not fly?" the weeping girl exclaimed, the instant she perceived she was not alone. "I'm not used to it." "My uncle will soon be here! you have nothing to hope from his pity." "Nor from that of his niece, I reckon. Let him come; he can only knock me on the head!" "Paul, Paul, if you love me, fly." "Alone!--if I do, may I be--" "If you value your life, fly!" "I value it not, compared to you." "Paul!" "Ellen!" She extended both her hands and burst into another and a still more violent flood of tears. The bee-hunter put one of his sturdy arms around her waist, and in another moment he was urging her over the plain, in rapid pursuit of their flying friends. CHAPTER XVII Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight With a new Gorgon--Do not bid me speak; See, and then speak yourselves. --Shakspeare. The little run, which supplied the family of the squatter with water, and nourished the trees and bushes that grew near the base of the rocky eminence, took its rise at no great distance from the latter, in a small thicket of cotton-wood and vines. Hither, then, the trapper directed the flight, as to the place affording the only available cover in so pressing an emergency. It will be remembered, that the sagacity of the old man, which, from long practice in similar scenes, amounted nearly to an instinct in all cases of sudden danger, had first induced him to take this course, as it placed the hill between them and the approaching party. Favoured by this circumstance, he succeeded in reaching the bushes in sufficient time and Paul Hover had just hurried the breathless Ellen into the tangled bush, as Ishmael gained the summit of the rock, in the manner already described, where he stood like a man momentarily bereft of sense, gazing at the confusion which had been created among his chattels, or at his gagged and bound children, who had been safely bestowed, by the forethought of the bee-hunter, under the cover of a bark roof, in a sort of irregular pile. A long rifle would have thrown a bullet from the height, on which the squatter now stood, into the very cover where the fugitives, who had wrought all this mischief, were clustered. The trapper was the first to speak, as the man on whose intelligence and experience they all depended for counsel, after running his eye over the different individuals who gathered about him, in order to see that none were missing. "Ah! natur' is natur', and has done its work!" he said, nodding to the exulting Paul, with a smile of approbation. "I thought it would be hard for those, who had so often met in fair and foul, by starlight and under the clouded moon, to part at last in anger. Now is there little time to lose in talk, and every thing to gain by industry! It cannot be long afore some of yonder brood will be nosing along the 'arth for our trail, and should they find it, as find it they surely will, and should they push us to a stand on our courage, the dispute must be settled with the rifle; which may He in heaven forbid! Captain, can you lead us to the place where any of your warriors lie?--For the stout sons of the squatter will make a manly brush of it, or I am but little of a judge in warlike dispositions!" "The place of rendezvous is many leagues from this, on the banks of La Platte." "It is bad--it is bad. If fighting is to be done, it is always wise to enter on it on equal terms. But what has one so near his time to do with ill-blood and hot-blood at his heart! Listen to what a grey head and some experience have to offer, and then if any among you can point out a wiser fashion for a retreat, we can just follow his design, and forget that I have spoken. This thicket stretches for near a mile as it may be slanting from the rock, and leads towards the sunset instead of the settlements." "Enough, enough," cried Middleton, too impatient to wait until the deliberative and perhaps loquacious old man could end his minute explanation. "Time is too precious for words. Let us fly." The trapper made a gesture of compliance, and turning in his tracks, he led Asinus across the trembling earth of the swale, and quickly emerged on the hard ground, on the side opposite to the encampment of the squatter. "If old Ishmael gets a squint at that highway through the brush," cried Paul, casting, as he left the place, a hasty glance at the broad trail the party had made through the thicket, "he'll need no finger-board to tell him which way his road lies. But let him follow! I know the vagabond would gladly cross his breed with a little honest blood, but if any son of his ever gets to be the husband of--" "Hush, Paul, hush," said the terrified young woman, who leaned on his arm for support; "your voice might be heard." The bee-hunter was silent, though he did not cease to cast ominous looks behind him, as they flew along the edge of the run, which sufficiently betrayed the belligerent condition of his mind. As each one was busy for himself, but a few minutes elapsed before the party rose a swell of the prairie, and descending without a moment's delay on the opposite side, they were at once removed from every danger of being seen by the sons of Ishmael, unless the pursuers should happen to fall upon their trail. The old man now profited by the formation of the land to take another direction, with a view to elude pursuit, as a vessel changes her course in fogs and darkness, to escape from the vigilance of her enemies. Two hours, passed in the utmost diligence, enabled them to make a half circuit around the rock, and to reach a point that was exactly opposite to the original direction of their flight. To most of the fugitives their situation was as entirely unknown as is that of a ship in the middle of the ocean to the uninstructed voyager: but the old man proceeded at every turn, and through every bottom, with a decision that inspired his followers with confidence, as it spoke favourably of his own knowledge of the localities. His hound, stopping now and then to catch the expression of his eye, had preceded the trapper throughout the whole distance, with as much certainty as though a previous and intelligible communion between them had established the route by which they were to proceed. But, at the expiration of the time just named, the dog suddenly came to a stand, and then seating himself on the prairie, he snuffed the air a moment, and began a low and piteous whining. "Ay--pup--ay. I know the spot--I know the spot, and reason there is to remember it well!" said the old man, stopping by the side of his uneasy associate,

five

How many times the word 'five' appears in the text?

you fool enough to believe what such a scoundrel as I am tells you, captain, unless it has probability to back it? I know you are not: therefore I will give my facts and my opinions, and then leave you to chew on them, while I go and drink of your generosity. I know a man who is called Abiram White.--I believe the knave took that name to show his enmity to the race of blacks! But this gentleman is now, and has been for years, to my certain knowledge, a regular translator of the human body from one State to another. I have dealt with him in my time, and a cheating dog he is! No more honour in him than meat in my stomach. I saw him here in this very town, the day of your wedding. He was in company with his wife's brother, and pretended to be a settler on the hunt for new land. A noble set they were, to carry on business--seven sons, each of them as tall as your sergeant with his cap on. Well, the moment I heard that your wife was lost, I saw at once that Abiram had laid his hands on her." "Do you know this--can this be true? What reason have you to fancy a thing so wild?" "Reason enough; I know Abiram White. Now, will you add a trifle just to keep my throat from parching?" "Go, go; you are stupified with drink already, miserable man, and know not what you say. Go; go, and beware the drummer." "Experience is a good guide"--the fellow called after the retiring Middleton; and then turning with a chuckling laugh, like one well satisfied with himself, he made the best of his way towards the shop of the suttler. A hundred times in the course of that night did Middleton fancy that the communication of the miscreant was entitled to some attention, and as often did he reject the idea as too wild and visionary for another thought. He was awakened early on the following morning, after passing a restless and nearly sleepless night, by his orderly, who came to report that a man was found dead on the parade, at no great distance from his quarters. Throwing on his clothes he proceeded to the spot, and beheld the individual, with whom he had held the preceding conference, in the precise situation in which he had first been found. The miserable wretch had fallen a victim to his intemperance. This revolting fact was sufficiently proclaimed by his obtruding eye-balls, his bloated countenance, and the nearly insufferable odours that were even then exhaling from his carcass. Disgusted with the odious spectacle, the youth was turning from the sight, after ordering the corpse to be removed, when the position of one of the dead man's hands struck him. On examination, he found the fore-finger extended, as if in the act of writing in the sand, with the following incomplete sentence, nearly illegible, but yet in a state to be deciphered: "Captain, it is true, as I am a gentle--" He had either died, or fallen into a sleep, the forerunner of his death, before the latter word was finished. Concealing this fact from the others, Middleton repeated his orders and departed. The pertinacity of the deceased, and all the circumstances united, induced him to set on foot some secret enquiries. He found that a family answering the description which had been given him, had in fact passed the place the day of his nuptials. They were traced along the margin of the Mississippi, for some distance, until they took boat and ascended the river to its confluence with the Missouri. Here they had disappeared like hundreds of others, in pursuit of the hidden wealth of the interior. Furnished with these facts, Middleton detailed a small guard of his most trusty men, took leave of Don Augustin, without declaring his hopes or his fears, and having arrived at the indicated point, he pushed into the wilderness in pursuit. It was not difficult to trace a train like that of Ishmael, until he was well assured its object lay far beyond the usual limits of the settlements. This circumstance, in itself, quickened his suspicions, and gave additional force to his hopes of final success. After getting beyond the assistance of verbal directions, the anxious husband had recourse to the usual signs of a trail, in order to follow the fugitives. This he also found a task of no difficulty, until he reached the hard and unyielding soil of the rolling prairies. Here, indeed, he was completely at fault. He found himself, at length, compelled to divide his followers, appointing a place of rendezvous at a distant day, and to endeavour to find the lost trail by multiplying, as much as possible, the number of his eyes. He had been alone a week, when accident brought him in contact with the trapper and the bee-hunter. Part of their interview has been related, and the reader can readily imagine the explanations that succeeded the tale he recounted, and which led, as has already been seen, to the recovery of his bride. CHAPTER XVI These likelihoods confirm her flight from hence, Therefore, I pray you, stay not to discourse, But mount you presently. --Shakspeare. An hour had slid by, in hasty and nearly incoherent questions and answers, before Middleton, hanging over his recovered treasure with that sort of jealous watchfulness with which a miser would regard his hoards, closed the disjointed narrative of his own proceedings by demanding-- "And you, my Inez; in what manner were you treated?" "In every thing, but the great injustice they did in separating me so forcibly from my friends, as well perhaps as the circumstances of my captors would allow. I think the man, who is certainly the master here, is but a new beginner in wickedness. He quarrelled frightfully in my presence, with the wretch who seized me, and then they made an impious bargain, to which I was compelled to acquiesce, and to which they bound me as well as themselves by oaths. Ah! Middleton, I fear the heretics are not so heedful of their vows as we who are nurtured in the bosom of the true church!" "Believe it not; these villains are of no religion: did they forswear themselves?" "No, not perjured: but was it not awful to call upon the good God to witness so sinful a compact?" "And so we think, Inez, as truly as the most virtuous cardinal of Rome. But how did they observe their oath, and what was its purport?" "They conditioned to leave me unmolested, and free from their odious presence, provided I would give a pledge to make no effort to escape; and that I would not even show myself, until a time that my masters saw fit to name." "And that time?" demanded the impatient Middleton, who so well knew the religious scruples of his wife--"that time?" "It is already passed. I was sworn by my patron saint, and faithfully did I keep the vow, until the man they call Ishmael forgot the terms by offering violence. I then made my appearance on the rock, for the time too was passed; though I even think father Ignatius would have absolved me from the vow, on account of the treachery of my keepers." "If he had not," muttered the youth between his compressed teeth, "I would have absolved him for ever from his spiritual care of your conscience!" "You, Middleton!" returned his wife looking up into his flushed face, while a bright blush suffused her own sweet countenance; "you may receive my vows, but surely you can have no power to absolve me from their observance!" "No, no, no. Inez, you are right. I know but little of these conscientious subtilties, and I am any thing but a priest: yet tell me, what has induced these monsters to play this desperate game--to trifle thus with my happiness?" "You know my ignorance of the world, and how ill I am qualified to furnish reasons for the conduct of beings so different from any I have ever seen before. But does not love of money drive men to acts even worse than this? I believe they thought that an aged and wealthy father could be tempted to pay them a rich ransom for his child; and, perhaps," she added, stealing an enquiring glance through her tears, at the attentive Middleton, "they counted something on the fresh affections of a bridegroom." "They might have extracted the blood from my heart, drop by drop!" "Yes," resumed his young and timid wife, instantly withdrawing the stolen look she had hazarded, and hurriedly pursuing the train of the discourse, as if glad to make him forget the liberty she had just taken, "I have been told, there are men so base as to perjure themselves at the altar, in order to command the gold of ignorant and confiding girls; and if love of money will lead to such baseness, we may surely expect it will hurry those, who devote themselves to gain, into acts of lesser fraud." "It must be so; and now, Inez, though I am here to guard you with my life, and we are in possession of this rock, our difficulties, perhaps our dangers, are not ended. You will summon all your courage to meet the trial and prove yourself a soldier's wife, my Inez?" "I am ready to depart this instant. The letter you sent by the physician, had prepared me to hope for the best, and I have every thing arranged for flight, at the shortest warning." "Let us then leave this place and join our friends." "Friends!" interrupted Inez, glancing her eyes around the little tent in quest of the form of Ellen. "I, too, have a friend who must not be forgotten, but who is pledged to pass the remainder of her life with us. She is gone!" Middleton gently led her from the spot, as he smilingly answered-- "She may have had, like myself, her own private communications for some favoured ear." The young man had not however done justice to the motives of Ellen Wade. The sensitive and intelligent girl had readily perceived how little her presence was necessary in the interview that has just been related, and had retired with that intuitive delicacy of feeling which seems to belong more properly to her sex. She was now to be seen seated on a point of the rock, with her person so entirely enveloped in her dress as to conceal her features. Here she had remained for near an hour, no one approaching to address her, and as it appeared to her own quick and jealous eyes, totally unobserved. In the latter particular, however, even the vigilance of the quick-sighted Ellen was deceived. The first act of Paul Hover, on finding himself the master of Ishmael's citadel, had been to sound the note of victory, after the quaint and ludicrous manner that is so often practised among the borderers of the West. Flapping his sides with his hands, as the conquering game-cock is wont to do with his wings, he raised a loud and laughable imitation of the exultation of this bird; a cry which might have proved a dangerous challenge had any one of the athletic sons of the squatter been within hearing. "This has been a regular knock-down and drag-out," he cried, "and no bones broke! How now, old trapper, you have been one of your training, platoon, rank and file soldiers in your day, and have seen forts taken and batteries stormed before this--am I right?" "Ay, ay, that have I," answered the old man, who still maintained his post at the foot of the rock, so little disturbed by what he had just witnessed, as to return the grin of Paul, with a hearty indulgence in his own silent and peculiar laughter; "you have gone through the exploit like men!" "Now tell me, is it not in rule, to call over the names of the living, and to bury the dead, after every bloody battle?" "Some did and other some didn't. When Sir William push'd the German, Dieskau, thro' the defiles at the foot of the Hori--" "Your Sir William was a drone to Sir Paul, and knew nothing of regularity. So here begins the roll-call--by the by, old man, what between bee-hunting and buffaloe humps, and certain other matters, I have been too busy to ask your name; for I intend to begin with my rear-guard, well knowing that my man in front is too busy to answer." "Lord, lad, I've been called in my time by as many names as there are people among whom I've dwelt. Now the Delawares nam'd me for my eyes, and I was called after the far-sighted hawk. Then, ag'in, the settlers in the Otsego hills christened me anew, from the fashion of my leggings; and various have been the names by which I have gone through life; but little will it matter when the time shall come, that all are to be muster'd, face to face, by what titles a mortal has played his part! I humbly trust I shall be able to answer to any of mine, in a loud and manly voice." Paul paid little or no attention to this reply, more than half of which was lost in the distance, but pursuing the humour of the moment, he called out in a stentorian voice to the naturalist to answer to his name. Dr. Battius had not thought it necessary to push his success beyond the comfortable niche, which accident had so opportunely formed for his protection, and in which he now reposed from his labours, with a pleasing consciousness of security, added to great exultation at the possession of the botanical treasure already mentioned. "Mount, mount, my worthy mole-catcher! come and behold the prospect of skirting Ishmael; come and look nature boldly in the face, and not go sneaking any longer, among the prairie grass and mullein tops, like a gobbler nibbling for grasshoppers." The mouth of the light-hearted and reckless bee-hunter was instantly closed, and he was rendered as mute, as he had just been boisterous and talkative, by the appearance of Ellen Wade. When the melancholy maiden took her seat on the point of the rock as mentioned, Paul affected to employ himself in conducting a close inspection of the household effects of the squatter. He rummaged the drawers of Esther with no delicate hands, scattered the rustic finery of her girls on the ground, without the least deference to its quality or elegance, and tossed her pots and kettles here and there, as though they had been vessels of wood instead of iron. All this industry was, however, manifestly without an object. He reserved nothing for himself, not even appearing conscious of the nature of the articles which suffered by his familiarity. When he had examined the inside of every cabin, taken a fresh survey of the spot where he had confined the children, and where he had thoroughly secured them with cords, and kicked one of the pails of the woman, like a foot-ball, fifty feet into the air, in sheer wantonness, he returned to the edge of the rock, and thrusting both his hands through his wampum belt, he began to whistle the "Kentucky Hunters" as diligently as if he had been hired to supply his auditors with music by the hour. In this manner passed the remainder of the time, until Middleton, as has been related, led Inez forth from the tent, and gave a new direction to the thoughts of the whole party. He summoned Paul from his flourish of music, tore the Doctor from the study of his plant, and, as acknowledged leader, gave the necessary orders for immediate departure. In the bustle and confusion that were likely to succeed such a mandate, there was little opportunity to indulge in complaints or reflections. As the adventurers had not come unprepared for victory, each individual employed himself in such offices as were best adapted to his strength and situation. The trapper had already made himself master of the patient Asinus, who was quietly feeding at no great distance from the rock, and he was now busy in fitting his back with the complicated machinery that Dr. Battius saw fit to term a saddle of his own invention. The naturalist himself seized upon his portfolios, herbals, and collection of insects, which he quickly transferred from the encampment of the squatter, to certain pockets in the aforesaid ingenious invention, and which the trapper as uniformly cast away the moment his back was turned. Paul showed his dexterity in removing such light articles as Inez and Ellen had prepared for their flight to the foot of the citadel, while Middleton, after mingling threats and promises, in order to induce the children to remain quietly in their bondage, assisted the females to descend. As time began to press upon them, and there was great danger of Ishmael's returning, these several movements were made with singular industry and despatch. The trapper bestowed such articles as he conceived were necessary to the comfort of the weaker and more delicate members of the party, in those pockets from which he had so unceremoniously expelled the treasures of the unconscious naturalist, and then gave way for Middleton to place Inez in one of those seats which he had prepared on the back of the animal for her and her companion. "Go, child," the old man said, motioning to Ellen to follow the example of the lady, and turning his head a little anxiously to examine the waste behind him. "It cannot be long afore the owner of this place will be coming to look after his household; and he is not a man to give up his property, however obtained, without complaint!" "It is true," cried Middleton; "we have wasted moments that are precious, and have the utmost need of industry." "Ay, ay, I thought it; and would have said it, captain; but I remembered how your grand'ther used to love to look upon the face of her he led away for a wife, in the days of his youth and his happiness. 'Tis natur', 'tis natur', and 'tis wiser to give way a little before its feelings, than to try to stop a current that will have its course." Ellen advanced to the side of the beast, and seizing Inez by the hand, she said, with heartfelt warmth, after struggling to suppress an emotion that nearly choked her-- "God bless you, sweet lady! I hope you will forget and forgive the wrongs you have received from my uncle--" The humbled and sorrowful girl could say no more, her voice becoming entirely inaudible in an ungovernable burst of grief. "How is this?" cried Middleton; "did you not say, Inez, that this excellent young woman was to accompany us, and to live with us for the remainder of her life; or, at least, until she found some more agreeable residence for herself?" "I did; and I still hope it. She has always given me reason to believe, that after having shown so much commiseration and friendship in my misery, she would not desert me, should happier times return." "I cannot--I ought not," continued Ellen, getting the better of her momentary weakness. "It has pleased God to cast my lot among these people, and I ought not to quit them. It would be adding the appearance of treachery to what will already seem bad enough, with one of his opinions. He has been kind to me, an orphan, after his rough customs, and I cannot steal from him at such a moment." "She is just as much a relation of skirting Ishmael as I am a bishop!" said Paul, with a loud hem, as if his throat wanted clearing. "If the old fellow has done the honest thing by her, in giving her a morsel of venison now and then, or a spoon around his homminy dish, hasn't she pay'd him in teaching the young devils to read their Bible, or in helping old Esther to put her finery in shape and fashion. Tell me that a drone has a sting, and I'll believe you as easily as I will that this young woman is a debtor to any of the tribe of Bush!" "It is but little matter who owes me, or where I am in debt. There are none to care for a girl who is fatherless and motherless, and whose nearest kin are the offcasts of all honest people. No, no; go, lady, and Heaven for ever bless you! I am better here, in this desert, where there are none to know my shame." "Now, old trapper," retorted Paul, "this is what I call knowing which way the wind blows! You ar' a man that has seen life, and you know something of fashions; I put it to your judgment, plainly, isn't it in the nature of things for the hive to swarm when the young get their growth, and if children will quit their parents, ought one who is of no kith or kin--" "Hist!" interrupted the man he addressed, "Hector is discontented. Say it out, plainly, pup; what is it dog--what is it?" The venerable hound had risen, and was scenting the fresh breeze which continued to sweep heavily over the prairie. At the words of his master he growled and contracted the muscles of his lips, as if half disposed to threaten with the remnants of his teeth. The younger dog, who was resting after the chase of the morning, also made some signs that his nose detected a taint in the air, and then the two resumed their slumbers, as if they had done enough. The trapper seized the bridle of the ass, and cried, urging the beast onward-- "There is no time for words. The squatter and his brood are within a mile or two of this blessed spot!" Middleton lost all recollection of Ellen, in the danger which now so eminently beset his recovered bride; nor is it necessary to add, that Dr. Battius did not wait for a second admonition to commence his retreat. Following the route indicated by the old man, they turned the rock in a body, and pursued their way as fast as possible across the prairie, under the favour of the cover it afforded. Paul Hover, however, remained in his tracks, sullenly leaning on his rifle. Near a minute had elapsed before he was observed by Ellen, who had buried her face in her hands, to conceal her fancied desolation from herself. "Why do you not fly?" the weeping girl exclaimed, the instant she perceived she was not alone. "I'm not used to it." "My uncle will soon be here! you have nothing to hope from his pity." "Nor from that of his niece, I reckon. Let him come; he can only knock me on the head!" "Paul, Paul, if you love me, fly." "Alone!--if I do, may I be--" "If you value your life, fly!" "I value it not, compared to you." "Paul!" "Ellen!" She extended both her hands and burst into another and a still more violent flood of tears. The bee-hunter put one of his sturdy arms around her waist, and in another moment he was urging her over the plain, in rapid pursuit of their flying friends. CHAPTER XVII Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight With a new Gorgon--Do not bid me speak; See, and then speak yourselves. --Shakspeare. The little run, which supplied the family of the squatter with water, and nourished the trees and bushes that grew near the base of the rocky eminence, took its rise at no great distance from the latter, in a small thicket of cotton-wood and vines. Hither, then, the trapper directed the flight, as to the place affording the only available cover in so pressing an emergency. It will be remembered, that the sagacity of the old man, which, from long practice in similar scenes, amounted nearly to an instinct in all cases of sudden danger, had first induced him to take this course, as it placed the hill between them and the approaching party. Favoured by this circumstance, he succeeded in reaching the bushes in sufficient time and Paul Hover had just hurried the breathless Ellen into the tangled bush, as Ishmael gained the summit of the rock, in the manner already described, where he stood like a man momentarily bereft of sense, gazing at the confusion which had been created among his chattels, or at his gagged and bound children, who had been safely bestowed, by the forethought of the bee-hunter, under the cover of a bark roof, in a sort of irregular pile. A long rifle would have thrown a bullet from the height, on which the squatter now stood, into the very cover where the fugitives, who had wrought all this mischief, were clustered. The trapper was the first to speak, as the man on whose intelligence and experience they all depended for counsel, after running his eye over the different individuals who gathered about him, in order to see that none were missing. "Ah! natur' is natur', and has done its work!" he said, nodding to the exulting Paul, with a smile of approbation. "I thought it would be hard for those, who had so often met in fair and foul, by starlight and under the clouded moon, to part at last in anger. Now is there little time to lose in talk, and every thing to gain by industry! It cannot be long afore some of yonder brood will be nosing along the 'arth for our trail, and should they find it, as find it they surely will, and should they push us to a stand on our courage, the dispute must be settled with the rifle; which may He in heaven forbid! Captain, can you lead us to the place where any of your warriors lie?--For the stout sons of the squatter will make a manly brush of it, or I am but little of a judge in warlike dispositions!" "The place of rendezvous is many leagues from this, on the banks of La Platte." "It is bad--it is bad. If fighting is to be done, it is always wise to enter on it on equal terms. But what has one so near his time to do with ill-blood and hot-blood at his heart! Listen to what a grey head and some experience have to offer, and then if any among you can point out a wiser fashion for a retreat, we can just follow his design, and forget that I have spoken. This thicket stretches for near a mile as it may be slanting from the rock, and leads towards the sunset instead of the settlements." "Enough, enough," cried Middleton, too impatient to wait until the deliberative and perhaps loquacious old man could end his minute explanation. "Time is too precious for words. Let us fly." The trapper made a gesture of compliance, and turning in his tracks, he led Asinus across the trembling earth of the swale, and quickly emerged on the hard ground, on the side opposite to the encampment of the squatter. "If old Ishmael gets a squint at that highway through the brush," cried Paul, casting, as he left the place, a hasty glance at the broad trail the party had made through the thicket, "he'll need no finger-board to tell him which way his road lies. But let him follow! I know the vagabond would gladly cross his breed with a little honest blood, but if any son of his ever gets to be the husband of--" "Hush, Paul, hush," said the terrified young woman, who leaned on his arm for support; "your voice might be heard." The bee-hunter was silent, though he did not cease to cast ominous looks behind him, as they flew along the edge of the run, which sufficiently betrayed the belligerent condition of his mind. As each one was busy for himself, but a few minutes elapsed before the party rose a swell of the prairie, and descending without a moment's delay on the opposite side, they were at once removed from every danger of being seen by the sons of Ishmael, unless the pursuers should happen to fall upon their trail. The old man now profited by the formation of the land to take another direction, with a view to elude pursuit, as a vessel changes her course in fogs and darkness, to escape from the vigilance of her enemies. Two hours, passed in the utmost diligence, enabled them to make a half circuit around the rock, and to reach a point that was exactly opposite to the original direction of their flight. To most of the fugitives their situation was as entirely unknown as is that of a ship in the middle of the ocean to the uninstructed voyager: but the old man proceeded at every turn, and through every bottom, with a decision that inspired his followers with confidence, as it spoke favourably of his own knowledge of the localities. His hound, stopping now and then to catch the expression of his eye, had preceded the trapper throughout the whole distance, with as much certainty as though a previous and intelligible communion between them had established the route by which they were to proceed. But, at the expiration of the time just named, the dog suddenly came to a stand, and then seating himself on the prairie, he snuffed the air a moment, and began a low and piteous whining. "Ay--pup--ay. I know the spot--I know the spot, and reason there is to remember it well!" said the old man, stopping by the side of his uneasy associate,

keep

How many times the word 'keep' appears in the text?

you fool enough to believe what such a scoundrel as I am tells you, captain, unless it has probability to back it? I know you are not: therefore I will give my facts and my opinions, and then leave you to chew on them, while I go and drink of your generosity. I know a man who is called Abiram White.--I believe the knave took that name to show his enmity to the race of blacks! But this gentleman is now, and has been for years, to my certain knowledge, a regular translator of the human body from one State to another. I have dealt with him in my time, and a cheating dog he is! No more honour in him than meat in my stomach. I saw him here in this very town, the day of your wedding. He was in company with his wife's brother, and pretended to be a settler on the hunt for new land. A noble set they were, to carry on business--seven sons, each of them as tall as your sergeant with his cap on. Well, the moment I heard that your wife was lost, I saw at once that Abiram had laid his hands on her." "Do you know this--can this be true? What reason have you to fancy a thing so wild?" "Reason enough; I know Abiram White. Now, will you add a trifle just to keep my throat from parching?" "Go, go; you are stupified with drink already, miserable man, and know not what you say. Go; go, and beware the drummer." "Experience is a good guide"--the fellow called after the retiring Middleton; and then turning with a chuckling laugh, like one well satisfied with himself, he made the best of his way towards the shop of the suttler. A hundred times in the course of that night did Middleton fancy that the communication of the miscreant was entitled to some attention, and as often did he reject the idea as too wild and visionary for another thought. He was awakened early on the following morning, after passing a restless and nearly sleepless night, by his orderly, who came to report that a man was found dead on the parade, at no great distance from his quarters. Throwing on his clothes he proceeded to the spot, and beheld the individual, with whom he had held the preceding conference, in the precise situation in which he had first been found. The miserable wretch had fallen a victim to his intemperance. This revolting fact was sufficiently proclaimed by his obtruding eye-balls, his bloated countenance, and the nearly insufferable odours that were even then exhaling from his carcass. Disgusted with the odious spectacle, the youth was turning from the sight, after ordering the corpse to be removed, when the position of one of the dead man's hands struck him. On examination, he found the fore-finger extended, as if in the act of writing in the sand, with the following incomplete sentence, nearly illegible, but yet in a state to be deciphered: "Captain, it is true, as I am a gentle--" He had either died, or fallen into a sleep, the forerunner of his death, before the latter word was finished. Concealing this fact from the others, Middleton repeated his orders and departed. The pertinacity of the deceased, and all the circumstances united, induced him to set on foot some secret enquiries. He found that a family answering the description which had been given him, had in fact passed the place the day of his nuptials. They were traced along the margin of the Mississippi, for some distance, until they took boat and ascended the river to its confluence with the Missouri. Here they had disappeared like hundreds of others, in pursuit of the hidden wealth of the interior. Furnished with these facts, Middleton detailed a small guard of his most trusty men, took leave of Don Augustin, without declaring his hopes or his fears, and having arrived at the indicated point, he pushed into the wilderness in pursuit. It was not difficult to trace a train like that of Ishmael, until he was well assured its object lay far beyond the usual limits of the settlements. This circumstance, in itself, quickened his suspicions, and gave additional force to his hopes of final success. After getting beyond the assistance of verbal directions, the anxious husband had recourse to the usual signs of a trail, in order to follow the fugitives. This he also found a task of no difficulty, until he reached the hard and unyielding soil of the rolling prairies. Here, indeed, he was completely at fault. He found himself, at length, compelled to divide his followers, appointing a place of rendezvous at a distant day, and to endeavour to find the lost trail by multiplying, as much as possible, the number of his eyes. He had been alone a week, when accident brought him in contact with the trapper and the bee-hunter. Part of their interview has been related, and the reader can readily imagine the explanations that succeeded the tale he recounted, and which led, as has already been seen, to the recovery of his bride. CHAPTER XVI These likelihoods confirm her flight from hence, Therefore, I pray you, stay not to discourse, But mount you presently. --Shakspeare. An hour had slid by, in hasty and nearly incoherent questions and answers, before Middleton, hanging over his recovered treasure with that sort of jealous watchfulness with which a miser would regard his hoards, closed the disjointed narrative of his own proceedings by demanding-- "And you, my Inez; in what manner were you treated?" "In every thing, but the great injustice they did in separating me so forcibly from my friends, as well perhaps as the circumstances of my captors would allow. I think the man, who is certainly the master here, is but a new beginner in wickedness. He quarrelled frightfully in my presence, with the wretch who seized me, and then they made an impious bargain, to which I was compelled to acquiesce, and to which they bound me as well as themselves by oaths. Ah! Middleton, I fear the heretics are not so heedful of their vows as we who are nurtured in the bosom of the true church!" "Believe it not; these villains are of no religion: did they forswear themselves?" "No, not perjured: but was it not awful to call upon the good God to witness so sinful a compact?" "And so we think, Inez, as truly as the most virtuous cardinal of Rome. But how did they observe their oath, and what was its purport?" "They conditioned to leave me unmolested, and free from their odious presence, provided I would give a pledge to make no effort to escape; and that I would not even show myself, until a time that my masters saw fit to name." "And that time?" demanded the impatient Middleton, who so well knew the religious scruples of his wife--"that time?" "It is already passed. I was sworn by my patron saint, and faithfully did I keep the vow, until the man they call Ishmael forgot the terms by offering violence. I then made my appearance on the rock, for the time too was passed; though I even think father Ignatius would have absolved me from the vow, on account of the treachery of my keepers." "If he had not," muttered the youth between his compressed teeth, "I would have absolved him for ever from his spiritual care of your conscience!" "You, Middleton!" returned his wife looking up into his flushed face, while a bright blush suffused her own sweet countenance; "you may receive my vows, but surely you can have no power to absolve me from their observance!" "No, no, no. Inez, you are right. I know but little of these conscientious subtilties, and I am any thing but a priest: yet tell me, what has induced these monsters to play this desperate game--to trifle thus with my happiness?" "You know my ignorance of the world, and how ill I am qualified to furnish reasons for the conduct of beings so different from any I have ever seen before. But does not love of money drive men to acts even worse than this? I believe they thought that an aged and wealthy father could be tempted to pay them a rich ransom for his child; and, perhaps," she added, stealing an enquiring glance through her tears, at the attentive Middleton, "they counted something on the fresh affections of a bridegroom." "They might have extracted the blood from my heart, drop by drop!" "Yes," resumed his young and timid wife, instantly withdrawing the stolen look she had hazarded, and hurriedly pursuing the train of the discourse, as if glad to make him forget the liberty she had just taken, "I have been told, there are men so base as to perjure themselves at the altar, in order to command the gold of ignorant and confiding girls; and if love of money will lead to such baseness, we may surely expect it will hurry those, who devote themselves to gain, into acts of lesser fraud." "It must be so; and now, Inez, though I am here to guard you with my life, and we are in possession of this rock, our difficulties, perhaps our dangers, are not ended. You will summon all your courage to meet the trial and prove yourself a soldier's wife, my Inez?" "I am ready to depart this instant. The letter you sent by the physician, had prepared me to hope for the best, and I have every thing arranged for flight, at the shortest warning." "Let us then leave this place and join our friends." "Friends!" interrupted Inez, glancing her eyes around the little tent in quest of the form of Ellen. "I, too, have a friend who must not be forgotten, but who is pledged to pass the remainder of her life with us. She is gone!" Middleton gently led her from the spot, as he smilingly answered-- "She may have had, like myself, her own private communications for some favoured ear." The young man had not however done justice to the motives of Ellen Wade. The sensitive and intelligent girl had readily perceived how little her presence was necessary in the interview that has just been related, and had retired with that intuitive delicacy of feeling which seems to belong more properly to her sex. She was now to be seen seated on a point of the rock, with her person so entirely enveloped in her dress as to conceal her features. Here she had remained for near an hour, no one approaching to address her, and as it appeared to her own quick and jealous eyes, totally unobserved. In the latter particular, however, even the vigilance of the quick-sighted Ellen was deceived. The first act of Paul Hover, on finding himself the master of Ishmael's citadel, had been to sound the note of victory, after the quaint and ludicrous manner that is so often practised among the borderers of the West. Flapping his sides with his hands, as the conquering game-cock is wont to do with his wings, he raised a loud and laughable imitation of the exultation of this bird; a cry which might have proved a dangerous challenge had any one of the athletic sons of the squatter been within hearing. "This has been a regular knock-down and drag-out," he cried, "and no bones broke! How now, old trapper, you have been one of your training, platoon, rank and file soldiers in your day, and have seen forts taken and batteries stormed before this--am I right?" "Ay, ay, that have I," answered the old man, who still maintained his post at the foot of the rock, so little disturbed by what he had just witnessed, as to return the grin of Paul, with a hearty indulgence in his own silent and peculiar laughter; "you have gone through the exploit like men!" "Now tell me, is it not in rule, to call over the names of the living, and to bury the dead, after every bloody battle?" "Some did and other some didn't. When Sir William push'd the German, Dieskau, thro' the defiles at the foot of the Hori--" "Your Sir William was a drone to Sir Paul, and knew nothing of regularity. So here begins the roll-call--by the by, old man, what between bee-hunting and buffaloe humps, and certain other matters, I have been too busy to ask your name; for I intend to begin with my rear-guard, well knowing that my man in front is too busy to answer." "Lord, lad, I've been called in my time by as many names as there are people among whom I've dwelt. Now the Delawares nam'd me for my eyes, and I was called after the far-sighted hawk. Then, ag'in, the settlers in the Otsego hills christened me anew, from the fashion of my leggings; and various have been the names by which I have gone through life; but little will it matter when the time shall come, that all are to be muster'd, face to face, by what titles a mortal has played his part! I humbly trust I shall be able to answer to any of mine, in a loud and manly voice." Paul paid little or no attention to this reply, more than half of which was lost in the distance, but pursuing the humour of the moment, he called out in a stentorian voice to the naturalist to answer to his name. Dr. Battius had not thought it necessary to push his success beyond the comfortable niche, which accident had so opportunely formed for his protection, and in which he now reposed from his labours, with a pleasing consciousness of security, added to great exultation at the possession of the botanical treasure already mentioned. "Mount, mount, my worthy mole-catcher! come and behold the prospect of skirting Ishmael; come and look nature boldly in the face, and not go sneaking any longer, among the prairie grass and mullein tops, like a gobbler nibbling for grasshoppers." The mouth of the light-hearted and reckless bee-hunter was instantly closed, and he was rendered as mute, as he had just been boisterous and talkative, by the appearance of Ellen Wade. When the melancholy maiden took her seat on the point of the rock as mentioned, Paul affected to employ himself in conducting a close inspection of the household effects of the squatter. He rummaged the drawers of Esther with no delicate hands, scattered the rustic finery of her girls on the ground, without the least deference to its quality or elegance, and tossed her pots and kettles here and there, as though they had been vessels of wood instead of iron. All this industry was, however, manifestly without an object. He reserved nothing for himself, not even appearing conscious of the nature of the articles which suffered by his familiarity. When he had examined the inside of every cabin, taken a fresh survey of the spot where he had confined the children, and where he had thoroughly secured them with cords, and kicked one of the pails of the woman, like a foot-ball, fifty feet into the air, in sheer wantonness, he returned to the edge of the rock, and thrusting both his hands through his wampum belt, he began to whistle the "Kentucky Hunters" as diligently as if he had been hired to supply his auditors with music by the hour. In this manner passed the remainder of the time, until Middleton, as has been related, led Inez forth from the tent, and gave a new direction to the thoughts of the whole party. He summoned Paul from his flourish of music, tore the Doctor from the study of his plant, and, as acknowledged leader, gave the necessary orders for immediate departure. In the bustle and confusion that were likely to succeed such a mandate, there was little opportunity to indulge in complaints or reflections. As the adventurers had not come unprepared for victory, each individual employed himself in such offices as were best adapted to his strength and situation. The trapper had already made himself master of the patient Asinus, who was quietly feeding at no great distance from the rock, and he was now busy in fitting his back with the complicated machinery that Dr. Battius saw fit to term a saddle of his own invention. The naturalist himself seized upon his portfolios, herbals, and collection of insects, which he quickly transferred from the encampment of the squatter, to certain pockets in the aforesaid ingenious invention, and which the trapper as uniformly cast away the moment his back was turned. Paul showed his dexterity in removing such light articles as Inez and Ellen had prepared for their flight to the foot of the citadel, while Middleton, after mingling threats and promises, in order to induce the children to remain quietly in their bondage, assisted the females to descend. As time began to press upon them, and there was great danger of Ishmael's returning, these several movements were made with singular industry and despatch. The trapper bestowed such articles as he conceived were necessary to the comfort of the weaker and more delicate members of the party, in those pockets from which he had so unceremoniously expelled the treasures of the unconscious naturalist, and then gave way for Middleton to place Inez in one of those seats which he had prepared on the back of the animal for her and her companion. "Go, child," the old man said, motioning to Ellen to follow the example of the lady, and turning his head a little anxiously to examine the waste behind him. "It cannot be long afore the owner of this place will be coming to look after his household; and he is not a man to give up his property, however obtained, without complaint!" "It is true," cried Middleton; "we have wasted moments that are precious, and have the utmost need of industry." "Ay, ay, I thought it; and would have said it, captain; but I remembered how your grand'ther used to love to look upon the face of her he led away for a wife, in the days of his youth and his happiness. 'Tis natur', 'tis natur', and 'tis wiser to give way a little before its feelings, than to try to stop a current that will have its course." Ellen advanced to the side of the beast, and seizing Inez by the hand, she said, with heartfelt warmth, after struggling to suppress an emotion that nearly choked her-- "God bless you, sweet lady! I hope you will forget and forgive the wrongs you have received from my uncle--" The humbled and sorrowful girl could say no more, her voice becoming entirely inaudible in an ungovernable burst of grief. "How is this?" cried Middleton; "did you not say, Inez, that this excellent young woman was to accompany us, and to live with us for the remainder of her life; or, at least, until she found some more agreeable residence for herself?" "I did; and I still hope it. She has always given me reason to believe, that after having shown so much commiseration and friendship in my misery, she would not desert me, should happier times return." "I cannot--I ought not," continued Ellen, getting the better of her momentary weakness. "It has pleased God to cast my lot among these people, and I ought not to quit them. It would be adding the appearance of treachery to what will already seem bad enough, with one of his opinions. He has been kind to me, an orphan, after his rough customs, and I cannot steal from him at such a moment." "She is just as much a relation of skirting Ishmael as I am a bishop!" said Paul, with a loud hem, as if his throat wanted clearing. "If the old fellow has done the honest thing by her, in giving her a morsel of venison now and then, or a spoon around his homminy dish, hasn't she pay'd him in teaching the young devils to read their Bible, or in helping old Esther to put her finery in shape and fashion. Tell me that a drone has a sting, and I'll believe you as easily as I will that this young woman is a debtor to any of the tribe of Bush!" "It is but little matter who owes me, or where I am in debt. There are none to care for a girl who is fatherless and motherless, and whose nearest kin are the offcasts of all honest people. No, no; go, lady, and Heaven for ever bless you! I am better here, in this desert, where there are none to know my shame." "Now, old trapper," retorted Paul, "this is what I call knowing which way the wind blows! You ar' a man that has seen life, and you know something of fashions; I put it to your judgment, plainly, isn't it in the nature of things for the hive to swarm when the young get their growth, and if children will quit their parents, ought one who is of no kith or kin--" "Hist!" interrupted the man he addressed, "Hector is discontented. Say it out, plainly, pup; what is it dog--what is it?" The venerable hound had risen, and was scenting the fresh breeze which continued to sweep heavily over the prairie. At the words of his master he growled and contracted the muscles of his lips, as if half disposed to threaten with the remnants of his teeth. The younger dog, who was resting after the chase of the morning, also made some signs that his nose detected a taint in the air, and then the two resumed their slumbers, as if they had done enough. The trapper seized the bridle of the ass, and cried, urging the beast onward-- "There is no time for words. The squatter and his brood are within a mile or two of this blessed spot!" Middleton lost all recollection of Ellen, in the danger which now so eminently beset his recovered bride; nor is it necessary to add, that Dr. Battius did not wait for a second admonition to commence his retreat. Following the route indicated by the old man, they turned the rock in a body, and pursued their way as fast as possible across the prairie, under the favour of the cover it afforded. Paul Hover, however, remained in his tracks, sullenly leaning on his rifle. Near a minute had elapsed before he was observed by Ellen, who had buried her face in her hands, to conceal her fancied desolation from herself. "Why do you not fly?" the weeping girl exclaimed, the instant she perceived she was not alone. "I'm not used to it." "My uncle will soon be here! you have nothing to hope from his pity." "Nor from that of his niece, I reckon. Let him come; he can only knock me on the head!" "Paul, Paul, if you love me, fly." "Alone!--if I do, may I be--" "If you value your life, fly!" "I value it not, compared to you." "Paul!" "Ellen!" She extended both her hands and burst into another and a still more violent flood of tears. The bee-hunter put one of his sturdy arms around her waist, and in another moment he was urging her over the plain, in rapid pursuit of their flying friends. CHAPTER XVII Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight With a new Gorgon--Do not bid me speak; See, and then speak yourselves. --Shakspeare. The little run, which supplied the family of the squatter with water, and nourished the trees and bushes that grew near the base of the rocky eminence, took its rise at no great distance from the latter, in a small thicket of cotton-wood and vines. Hither, then, the trapper directed the flight, as to the place affording the only available cover in so pressing an emergency. It will be remembered, that the sagacity of the old man, which, from long practice in similar scenes, amounted nearly to an instinct in all cases of sudden danger, had first induced him to take this course, as it placed the hill between them and the approaching party. Favoured by this circumstance, he succeeded in reaching the bushes in sufficient time and Paul Hover had just hurried the breathless Ellen into the tangled bush, as Ishmael gained the summit of the rock, in the manner already described, where he stood like a man momentarily bereft of sense, gazing at the confusion which had been created among his chattels, or at his gagged and bound children, who had been safely bestowed, by the forethought of the bee-hunter, under the cover of a bark roof, in a sort of irregular pile. A long rifle would have thrown a bullet from the height, on which the squatter now stood, into the very cover where the fugitives, who had wrought all this mischief, were clustered. The trapper was the first to speak, as the man on whose intelligence and experience they all depended for counsel, after running his eye over the different individuals who gathered about him, in order to see that none were missing. "Ah! natur' is natur', and has done its work!" he said, nodding to the exulting Paul, with a smile of approbation. "I thought it would be hard for those, who had so often met in fair and foul, by starlight and under the clouded moon, to part at last in anger. Now is there little time to lose in talk, and every thing to gain by industry! It cannot be long afore some of yonder brood will be nosing along the 'arth for our trail, and should they find it, as find it they surely will, and should they push us to a stand on our courage, the dispute must be settled with the rifle; which may He in heaven forbid! Captain, can you lead us to the place where any of your warriors lie?--For the stout sons of the squatter will make a manly brush of it, or I am but little of a judge in warlike dispositions!" "The place of rendezvous is many leagues from this, on the banks of La Platte." "It is bad--it is bad. If fighting is to be done, it is always wise to enter on it on equal terms. But what has one so near his time to do with ill-blood and hot-blood at his heart! Listen to what a grey head and some experience have to offer, and then if any among you can point out a wiser fashion for a retreat, we can just follow his design, and forget that I have spoken. This thicket stretches for near a mile as it may be slanting from the rock, and leads towards the sunset instead of the settlements." "Enough, enough," cried Middleton, too impatient to wait until the deliberative and perhaps loquacious old man could end his minute explanation. "Time is too precious for words. Let us fly." The trapper made a gesture of compliance, and turning in his tracks, he led Asinus across the trembling earth of the swale, and quickly emerged on the hard ground, on the side opposite to the encampment of the squatter. "If old Ishmael gets a squint at that highway through the brush," cried Paul, casting, as he left the place, a hasty glance at the broad trail the party had made through the thicket, "he'll need no finger-board to tell him which way his road lies. But let him follow! I know the vagabond would gladly cross his breed with a little honest blood, but if any son of his ever gets to be the husband of--" "Hush, Paul, hush," said the terrified young woman, who leaned on his arm for support; "your voice might be heard." The bee-hunter was silent, though he did not cease to cast ominous looks behind him, as they flew along the edge of the run, which sufficiently betrayed the belligerent condition of his mind. As each one was busy for himself, but a few minutes elapsed before the party rose a swell of the prairie, and descending without a moment's delay on the opposite side, they were at once removed from every danger of being seen by the sons of Ishmael, unless the pursuers should happen to fall upon their trail. The old man now profited by the formation of the land to take another direction, with a view to elude pursuit, as a vessel changes her course in fogs and darkness, to escape from the vigilance of her enemies. Two hours, passed in the utmost diligence, enabled them to make a half circuit around the rock, and to reach a point that was exactly opposite to the original direction of their flight. To most of the fugitives their situation was as entirely unknown as is that of a ship in the middle of the ocean to the uninstructed voyager: but the old man proceeded at every turn, and through every bottom, with a decision that inspired his followers with confidence, as it spoke favourably of his own knowledge of the localities. His hound, stopping now and then to catch the expression of his eye, had preceded the trapper throughout the whole distance, with as much certainty as though a previous and intelligible communion between them had established the route by which they were to proceed. But, at the expiration of the time just named, the dog suddenly came to a stand, and then seating himself on the prairie, he snuffed the air a moment, and began a low and piteous whining. "Ay--pup--ay. I know the spot--I know the spot, and reason there is to remember it well!" said the old man, stopping by the side of his uneasy associate,

true

How many times the word 'true' appears in the text?

you fool enough to believe what such a scoundrel as I am tells you, captain, unless it has probability to back it? I know you are not: therefore I will give my facts and my opinions, and then leave you to chew on them, while I go and drink of your generosity. I know a man who is called Abiram White.--I believe the knave took that name to show his enmity to the race of blacks! But this gentleman is now, and has been for years, to my certain knowledge, a regular translator of the human body from one State to another. I have dealt with him in my time, and a cheating dog he is! No more honour in him than meat in my stomach. I saw him here in this very town, the day of your wedding. He was in company with his wife's brother, and pretended to be a settler on the hunt for new land. A noble set they were, to carry on business--seven sons, each of them as tall as your sergeant with his cap on. Well, the moment I heard that your wife was lost, I saw at once that Abiram had laid his hands on her." "Do you know this--can this be true? What reason have you to fancy a thing so wild?" "Reason enough; I know Abiram White. Now, will you add a trifle just to keep my throat from parching?" "Go, go; you are stupified with drink already, miserable man, and know not what you say. Go; go, and beware the drummer." "Experience is a good guide"--the fellow called after the retiring Middleton; and then turning with a chuckling laugh, like one well satisfied with himself, he made the best of his way towards the shop of the suttler. A hundred times in the course of that night did Middleton fancy that the communication of the miscreant was entitled to some attention, and as often did he reject the idea as too wild and visionary for another thought. He was awakened early on the following morning, after passing a restless and nearly sleepless night, by his orderly, who came to report that a man was found dead on the parade, at no great distance from his quarters. Throwing on his clothes he proceeded to the spot, and beheld the individual, with whom he had held the preceding conference, in the precise situation in which he had first been found. The miserable wretch had fallen a victim to his intemperance. This revolting fact was sufficiently proclaimed by his obtruding eye-balls, his bloated countenance, and the nearly insufferable odours that were even then exhaling from his carcass. Disgusted with the odious spectacle, the youth was turning from the sight, after ordering the corpse to be removed, when the position of one of the dead man's hands struck him. On examination, he found the fore-finger extended, as if in the act of writing in the sand, with the following incomplete sentence, nearly illegible, but yet in a state to be deciphered: "Captain, it is true, as I am a gentle--" He had either died, or fallen into a sleep, the forerunner of his death, before the latter word was finished. Concealing this fact from the others, Middleton repeated his orders and departed. The pertinacity of the deceased, and all the circumstances united, induced him to set on foot some secret enquiries. He found that a family answering the description which had been given him, had in fact passed the place the day of his nuptials. They were traced along the margin of the Mississippi, for some distance, until they took boat and ascended the river to its confluence with the Missouri. Here they had disappeared like hundreds of others, in pursuit of the hidden wealth of the interior. Furnished with these facts, Middleton detailed a small guard of his most trusty men, took leave of Don Augustin, without declaring his hopes or his fears, and having arrived at the indicated point, he pushed into the wilderness in pursuit. It was not difficult to trace a train like that of Ishmael, until he was well assured its object lay far beyond the usual limits of the settlements. This circumstance, in itself, quickened his suspicions, and gave additional force to his hopes of final success. After getting beyond the assistance of verbal directions, the anxious husband had recourse to the usual signs of a trail, in order to follow the fugitives. This he also found a task of no difficulty, until he reached the hard and unyielding soil of the rolling prairies. Here, indeed, he was completely at fault. He found himself, at length, compelled to divide his followers, appointing a place of rendezvous at a distant day, and to endeavour to find the lost trail by multiplying, as much as possible, the number of his eyes. He had been alone a week, when accident brought him in contact with the trapper and the bee-hunter. Part of their interview has been related, and the reader can readily imagine the explanations that succeeded the tale he recounted, and which led, as has already been seen, to the recovery of his bride. CHAPTER XVI These likelihoods confirm her flight from hence, Therefore, I pray you, stay not to discourse, But mount you presently. --Shakspeare. An hour had slid by, in hasty and nearly incoherent questions and answers, before Middleton, hanging over his recovered treasure with that sort of jealous watchfulness with which a miser would regard his hoards, closed the disjointed narrative of his own proceedings by demanding-- "And you, my Inez; in what manner were you treated?" "In every thing, but the great injustice they did in separating me so forcibly from my friends, as well perhaps as the circumstances of my captors would allow. I think the man, who is certainly the master here, is but a new beginner in wickedness. He quarrelled frightfully in my presence, with the wretch who seized me, and then they made an impious bargain, to which I was compelled to acquiesce, and to which they bound me as well as themselves by oaths. Ah! Middleton, I fear the heretics are not so heedful of their vows as we who are nurtured in the bosom of the true church!" "Believe it not; these villains are of no religion: did they forswear themselves?" "No, not perjured: but was it not awful to call upon the good God to witness so sinful a compact?" "And so we think, Inez, as truly as the most virtuous cardinal of Rome. But how did they observe their oath, and what was its purport?" "They conditioned to leave me unmolested, and free from their odious presence, provided I would give a pledge to make no effort to escape; and that I would not even show myself, until a time that my masters saw fit to name." "And that time?" demanded the impatient Middleton, who so well knew the religious scruples of his wife--"that time?" "It is already passed. I was sworn by my patron saint, and faithfully did I keep the vow, until the man they call Ishmael forgot the terms by offering violence. I then made my appearance on the rock, for the time too was passed; though I even think father Ignatius would have absolved me from the vow, on account of the treachery of my keepers." "If he had not," muttered the youth between his compressed teeth, "I would have absolved him for ever from his spiritual care of your conscience!" "You, Middleton!" returned his wife looking up into his flushed face, while a bright blush suffused her own sweet countenance; "you may receive my vows, but surely you can have no power to absolve me from their observance!" "No, no, no. Inez, you are right. I know but little of these conscientious subtilties, and I am any thing but a priest: yet tell me, what has induced these monsters to play this desperate game--to trifle thus with my happiness?" "You know my ignorance of the world, and how ill I am qualified to furnish reasons for the conduct of beings so different from any I have ever seen before. But does not love of money drive men to acts even worse than this? I believe they thought that an aged and wealthy father could be tempted to pay them a rich ransom for his child; and, perhaps," she added, stealing an enquiring glance through her tears, at the attentive Middleton, "they counted something on the fresh affections of a bridegroom." "They might have extracted the blood from my heart, drop by drop!" "Yes," resumed his young and timid wife, instantly withdrawing the stolen look she had hazarded, and hurriedly pursuing the train of the discourse, as if glad to make him forget the liberty she had just taken, "I have been told, there are men so base as to perjure themselves at the altar, in order to command the gold of ignorant and confiding girls; and if love of money will lead to such baseness, we may surely expect it will hurry those, who devote themselves to gain, into acts of lesser fraud." "It must be so; and now, Inez, though I am here to guard you with my life, and we are in possession of this rock, our difficulties, perhaps our dangers, are not ended. You will summon all your courage to meet the trial and prove yourself a soldier's wife, my Inez?" "I am ready to depart this instant. The letter you sent by the physician, had prepared me to hope for the best, and I have every thing arranged for flight, at the shortest warning." "Let us then leave this place and join our friends." "Friends!" interrupted Inez, glancing her eyes around the little tent in quest of the form of Ellen. "I, too, have a friend who must not be forgotten, but who is pledged to pass the remainder of her life with us. She is gone!" Middleton gently led her from the spot, as he smilingly answered-- "She may have had, like myself, her own private communications for some favoured ear." The young man had not however done justice to the motives of Ellen Wade. The sensitive and intelligent girl had readily perceived how little her presence was necessary in the interview that has just been related, and had retired with that intuitive delicacy of feeling which seems to belong more properly to her sex. She was now to be seen seated on a point of the rock, with her person so entirely enveloped in her dress as to conceal her features. Here she had remained for near an hour, no one approaching to address her, and as it appeared to her own quick and jealous eyes, totally unobserved. In the latter particular, however, even the vigilance of the quick-sighted Ellen was deceived. The first act of Paul Hover, on finding himself the master of Ishmael's citadel, had been to sound the note of victory, after the quaint and ludicrous manner that is so often practised among the borderers of the West. Flapping his sides with his hands, as the conquering game-cock is wont to do with his wings, he raised a loud and laughable imitation of the exultation of this bird; a cry which might have proved a dangerous challenge had any one of the athletic sons of the squatter been within hearing. "This has been a regular knock-down and drag-out," he cried, "and no bones broke! How now, old trapper, you have been one of your training, platoon, rank and file soldiers in your day, and have seen forts taken and batteries stormed before this--am I right?" "Ay, ay, that have I," answered the old man, who still maintained his post at the foot of the rock, so little disturbed by what he had just witnessed, as to return the grin of Paul, with a hearty indulgence in his own silent and peculiar laughter; "you have gone through the exploit like men!" "Now tell me, is it not in rule, to call over the names of the living, and to bury the dead, after every bloody battle?" "Some did and other some didn't. When Sir William push'd the German, Dieskau, thro' the defiles at the foot of the Hori--" "Your Sir William was a drone to Sir Paul, and knew nothing of regularity. So here begins the roll-call--by the by, old man, what between bee-hunting and buffaloe humps, and certain other matters, I have been too busy to ask your name; for I intend to begin with my rear-guard, well knowing that my man in front is too busy to answer." "Lord, lad, I've been called in my time by as many names as there are people among whom I've dwelt. Now the Delawares nam'd me for my eyes, and I was called after the far-sighted hawk. Then, ag'in, the settlers in the Otsego hills christened me anew, from the fashion of my leggings; and various have been the names by which I have gone through life; but little will it matter when the time shall come, that all are to be muster'd, face to face, by what titles a mortal has played his part! I humbly trust I shall be able to answer to any of mine, in a loud and manly voice." Paul paid little or no attention to this reply, more than half of which was lost in the distance, but pursuing the humour of the moment, he called out in a stentorian voice to the naturalist to answer to his name. Dr. Battius had not thought it necessary to push his success beyond the comfortable niche, which accident had so opportunely formed for his protection, and in which he now reposed from his labours, with a pleasing consciousness of security, added to great exultation at the possession of the botanical treasure already mentioned. "Mount, mount, my worthy mole-catcher! come and behold the prospect of skirting Ishmael; come and look nature boldly in the face, and not go sneaking any longer, among the prairie grass and mullein tops, like a gobbler nibbling for grasshoppers." The mouth of the light-hearted and reckless bee-hunter was instantly closed, and he was rendered as mute, as he had just been boisterous and talkative, by the appearance of Ellen Wade. When the melancholy maiden took her seat on the point of the rock as mentioned, Paul affected to employ himself in conducting a close inspection of the household effects of the squatter. He rummaged the drawers of Esther with no delicate hands, scattered the rustic finery of her girls on the ground, without the least deference to its quality or elegance, and tossed her pots and kettles here and there, as though they had been vessels of wood instead of iron. All this industry was, however, manifestly without an object. He reserved nothing for himself, not even appearing conscious of the nature of the articles which suffered by his familiarity. When he had examined the inside of every cabin, taken a fresh survey of the spot where he had confined the children, and where he had thoroughly secured them with cords, and kicked one of the pails of the woman, like a foot-ball, fifty feet into the air, in sheer wantonness, he returned to the edge of the rock, and thrusting both his hands through his wampum belt, he began to whistle the "Kentucky Hunters" as diligently as if he had been hired to supply his auditors with music by the hour. In this manner passed the remainder of the time, until Middleton, as has been related, led Inez forth from the tent, and gave a new direction to the thoughts of the whole party. He summoned Paul from his flourish of music, tore the Doctor from the study of his plant, and, as acknowledged leader, gave the necessary orders for immediate departure. In the bustle and confusion that were likely to succeed such a mandate, there was little opportunity to indulge in complaints or reflections. As the adventurers had not come unprepared for victory, each individual employed himself in such offices as were best adapted to his strength and situation. The trapper had already made himself master of the patient Asinus, who was quietly feeding at no great distance from the rock, and he was now busy in fitting his back with the complicated machinery that Dr. Battius saw fit to term a saddle of his own invention. The naturalist himself seized upon his portfolios, herbals, and collection of insects, which he quickly transferred from the encampment of the squatter, to certain pockets in the aforesaid ingenious invention, and which the trapper as uniformly cast away the moment his back was turned. Paul showed his dexterity in removing such light articles as Inez and Ellen had prepared for their flight to the foot of the citadel, while Middleton, after mingling threats and promises, in order to induce the children to remain quietly in their bondage, assisted the females to descend. As time began to press upon them, and there was great danger of Ishmael's returning, these several movements were made with singular industry and despatch. The trapper bestowed such articles as he conceived were necessary to the comfort of the weaker and more delicate members of the party, in those pockets from which he had so unceremoniously expelled the treasures of the unconscious naturalist, and then gave way for Middleton to place Inez in one of those seats which he had prepared on the back of the animal for her and her companion. "Go, child," the old man said, motioning to Ellen to follow the example of the lady, and turning his head a little anxiously to examine the waste behind him. "It cannot be long afore the owner of this place will be coming to look after his household; and he is not a man to give up his property, however obtained, without complaint!" "It is true," cried Middleton; "we have wasted moments that are precious, and have the utmost need of industry." "Ay, ay, I thought it; and would have said it, captain; but I remembered how your grand'ther used to love to look upon the face of her he led away for a wife, in the days of his youth and his happiness. 'Tis natur', 'tis natur', and 'tis wiser to give way a little before its feelings, than to try to stop a current that will have its course." Ellen advanced to the side of the beast, and seizing Inez by the hand, she said, with heartfelt warmth, after struggling to suppress an emotion that nearly choked her-- "God bless you, sweet lady! I hope you will forget and forgive the wrongs you have received from my uncle--" The humbled and sorrowful girl could say no more, her voice becoming entirely inaudible in an ungovernable burst of grief. "How is this?" cried Middleton; "did you not say, Inez, that this excellent young woman was to accompany us, and to live with us for the remainder of her life; or, at least, until she found some more agreeable residence for herself?" "I did; and I still hope it. She has always given me reason to believe, that after having shown so much commiseration and friendship in my misery, she would not desert me, should happier times return." "I cannot--I ought not," continued Ellen, getting the better of her momentary weakness. "It has pleased God to cast my lot among these people, and I ought not to quit them. It would be adding the appearance of treachery to what will already seem bad enough, with one of his opinions. He has been kind to me, an orphan, after his rough customs, and I cannot steal from him at such a moment." "She is just as much a relation of skirting Ishmael as I am a bishop!" said Paul, with a loud hem, as if his throat wanted clearing. "If the old fellow has done the honest thing by her, in giving her a morsel of venison now and then, or a spoon around his homminy dish, hasn't she pay'd him in teaching the young devils to read their Bible, or in helping old Esther to put her finery in shape and fashion. Tell me that a drone has a sting, and I'll believe you as easily as I will that this young woman is a debtor to any of the tribe of Bush!" "It is but little matter who owes me, or where I am in debt. There are none to care for a girl who is fatherless and motherless, and whose nearest kin are the offcasts of all honest people. No, no; go, lady, and Heaven for ever bless you! I am better here, in this desert, where there are none to know my shame." "Now, old trapper," retorted Paul, "this is what I call knowing which way the wind blows! You ar' a man that has seen life, and you know something of fashions; I put it to your judgment, plainly, isn't it in the nature of things for the hive to swarm when the young get their growth, and if children will quit their parents, ought one who is of no kith or kin--" "Hist!" interrupted the man he addressed, "Hector is discontented. Say it out, plainly, pup; what is it dog--what is it?" The venerable hound had risen, and was scenting the fresh breeze which continued to sweep heavily over the prairie. At the words of his master he growled and contracted the muscles of his lips, as if half disposed to threaten with the remnants of his teeth. The younger dog, who was resting after the chase of the morning, also made some signs that his nose detected a taint in the air, and then the two resumed their slumbers, as if they had done enough. The trapper seized the bridle of the ass, and cried, urging the beast onward-- "There is no time for words. The squatter and his brood are within a mile or two of this blessed spot!" Middleton lost all recollection of Ellen, in the danger which now so eminently beset his recovered bride; nor is it necessary to add, that Dr. Battius did not wait for a second admonition to commence his retreat. Following the route indicated by the old man, they turned the rock in a body, and pursued their way as fast as possible across the prairie, under the favour of the cover it afforded. Paul Hover, however, remained in his tracks, sullenly leaning on his rifle. Near a minute had elapsed before he was observed by Ellen, who had buried her face in her hands, to conceal her fancied desolation from herself. "Why do you not fly?" the weeping girl exclaimed, the instant she perceived she was not alone. "I'm not used to it." "My uncle will soon be here! you have nothing to hope from his pity." "Nor from that of his niece, I reckon. Let him come; he can only knock me on the head!" "Paul, Paul, if you love me, fly." "Alone!--if I do, may I be--" "If you value your life, fly!" "I value it not, compared to you." "Paul!" "Ellen!" She extended both her hands and burst into another and a still more violent flood of tears. The bee-hunter put one of his sturdy arms around her waist, and in another moment he was urging her over the plain, in rapid pursuit of their flying friends. CHAPTER XVII Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight With a new Gorgon--Do not bid me speak; See, and then speak yourselves. --Shakspeare. The little run, which supplied the family of the squatter with water, and nourished the trees and bushes that grew near the base of the rocky eminence, took its rise at no great distance from the latter, in a small thicket of cotton-wood and vines. Hither, then, the trapper directed the flight, as to the place affording the only available cover in so pressing an emergency. It will be remembered, that the sagacity of the old man, which, from long practice in similar scenes, amounted nearly to an instinct in all cases of sudden danger, had first induced him to take this course, as it placed the hill between them and the approaching party. Favoured by this circumstance, he succeeded in reaching the bushes in sufficient time and Paul Hover had just hurried the breathless Ellen into the tangled bush, as Ishmael gained the summit of the rock, in the manner already described, where he stood like a man momentarily bereft of sense, gazing at the confusion which had been created among his chattels, or at his gagged and bound children, who had been safely bestowed, by the forethought of the bee-hunter, under the cover of a bark roof, in a sort of irregular pile. A long rifle would have thrown a bullet from the height, on which the squatter now stood, into the very cover where the fugitives, who had wrought all this mischief, were clustered. The trapper was the first to speak, as the man on whose intelligence and experience they all depended for counsel, after running his eye over the different individuals who gathered about him, in order to see that none were missing. "Ah! natur' is natur', and has done its work!" he said, nodding to the exulting Paul, with a smile of approbation. "I thought it would be hard for those, who had so often met in fair and foul, by starlight and under the clouded moon, to part at last in anger. Now is there little time to lose in talk, and every thing to gain by industry! It cannot be long afore some of yonder brood will be nosing along the 'arth for our trail, and should they find it, as find it they surely will, and should they push us to a stand on our courage, the dispute must be settled with the rifle; which may He in heaven forbid! Captain, can you lead us to the place where any of your warriors lie?--For the stout sons of the squatter will make a manly brush of it, or I am but little of a judge in warlike dispositions!" "The place of rendezvous is many leagues from this, on the banks of La Platte." "It is bad--it is bad. If fighting is to be done, it is always wise to enter on it on equal terms. But what has one so near his time to do with ill-blood and hot-blood at his heart! Listen to what a grey head and some experience have to offer, and then if any among you can point out a wiser fashion for a retreat, we can just follow his design, and forget that I have spoken. This thicket stretches for near a mile as it may be slanting from the rock, and leads towards the sunset instead of the settlements." "Enough, enough," cried Middleton, too impatient to wait until the deliberative and perhaps loquacious old man could end his minute explanation. "Time is too precious for words. Let us fly." The trapper made a gesture of compliance, and turning in his tracks, he led Asinus across the trembling earth of the swale, and quickly emerged on the hard ground, on the side opposite to the encampment of the squatter. "If old Ishmael gets a squint at that highway through the brush," cried Paul, casting, as he left the place, a hasty glance at the broad trail the party had made through the thicket, "he'll need no finger-board to tell him which way his road lies. But let him follow! I know the vagabond would gladly cross his breed with a little honest blood, but if any son of his ever gets to be the husband of--" "Hush, Paul, hush," said the terrified young woman, who leaned on his arm for support; "your voice might be heard." The bee-hunter was silent, though he did not cease to cast ominous looks behind him, as they flew along the edge of the run, which sufficiently betrayed the belligerent condition of his mind. As each one was busy for himself, but a few minutes elapsed before the party rose a swell of the prairie, and descending without a moment's delay on the opposite side, they were at once removed from every danger of being seen by the sons of Ishmael, unless the pursuers should happen to fall upon their trail. The old man now profited by the formation of the land to take another direction, with a view to elude pursuit, as a vessel changes her course in fogs and darkness, to escape from the vigilance of her enemies. Two hours, passed in the utmost diligence, enabled them to make a half circuit around the rock, and to reach a point that was exactly opposite to the original direction of their flight. To most of the fugitives their situation was as entirely unknown as is that of a ship in the middle of the ocean to the uninstructed voyager: but the old man proceeded at every turn, and through every bottom, with a decision that inspired his followers with confidence, as it spoke favourably of his own knowledge of the localities. His hound, stopping now and then to catch the expression of his eye, had preceded the trapper throughout the whole distance, with as much certainty as though a previous and intelligible communion between them had established the route by which they were to proceed. But, at the expiration of the time just named, the dog suddenly came to a stand, and then seating himself on the prairie, he snuffed the air a moment, and began a low and piteous whining. "Ay--pup--ay. I know the spot--I know the spot, and reason there is to remember it well!" said the old man, stopping by the side of his uneasy associate,

dismissed

How many times the word 'dismissed' appears in the text?

you fool enough to believe what such a scoundrel as I am tells you, captain, unless it has probability to back it? I know you are not: therefore I will give my facts and my opinions, and then leave you to chew on them, while I go and drink of your generosity. I know a man who is called Abiram White.--I believe the knave took that name to show his enmity to the race of blacks! But this gentleman is now, and has been for years, to my certain knowledge, a regular translator of the human body from one State to another. I have dealt with him in my time, and a cheating dog he is! No more honour in him than meat in my stomach. I saw him here in this very town, the day of your wedding. He was in company with his wife's brother, and pretended to be a settler on the hunt for new land. A noble set they were, to carry on business--seven sons, each of them as tall as your sergeant with his cap on. Well, the moment I heard that your wife was lost, I saw at once that Abiram had laid his hands on her." "Do you know this--can this be true? What reason have you to fancy a thing so wild?" "Reason enough; I know Abiram White. Now, will you add a trifle just to keep my throat from parching?" "Go, go; you are stupified with drink already, miserable man, and know not what you say. Go; go, and beware the drummer." "Experience is a good guide"--the fellow called after the retiring Middleton; and then turning with a chuckling laugh, like one well satisfied with himself, he made the best of his way towards the shop of the suttler. A hundred times in the course of that night did Middleton fancy that the communication of the miscreant was entitled to some attention, and as often did he reject the idea as too wild and visionary for another thought. He was awakened early on the following morning, after passing a restless and nearly sleepless night, by his orderly, who came to report that a man was found dead on the parade, at no great distance from his quarters. Throwing on his clothes he proceeded to the spot, and beheld the individual, with whom he had held the preceding conference, in the precise situation in which he had first been found. The miserable wretch had fallen a victim to his intemperance. This revolting fact was sufficiently proclaimed by his obtruding eye-balls, his bloated countenance, and the nearly insufferable odours that were even then exhaling from his carcass. Disgusted with the odious spectacle, the youth was turning from the sight, after ordering the corpse to be removed, when the position of one of the dead man's hands struck him. On examination, he found the fore-finger extended, as if in the act of writing in the sand, with the following incomplete sentence, nearly illegible, but yet in a state to be deciphered: "Captain, it is true, as I am a gentle--" He had either died, or fallen into a sleep, the forerunner of his death, before the latter word was finished. Concealing this fact from the others, Middleton repeated his orders and departed. The pertinacity of the deceased, and all the circumstances united, induced him to set on foot some secret enquiries. He found that a family answering the description which had been given him, had in fact passed the place the day of his nuptials. They were traced along the margin of the Mississippi, for some distance, until they took boat and ascended the river to its confluence with the Missouri. Here they had disappeared like hundreds of others, in pursuit of the hidden wealth of the interior. Furnished with these facts, Middleton detailed a small guard of his most trusty men, took leave of Don Augustin, without declaring his hopes or his fears, and having arrived at the indicated point, he pushed into the wilderness in pursuit. It was not difficult to trace a train like that of Ishmael, until he was well assured its object lay far beyond the usual limits of the settlements. This circumstance, in itself, quickened his suspicions, and gave additional force to his hopes of final success. After getting beyond the assistance of verbal directions, the anxious husband had recourse to the usual signs of a trail, in order to follow the fugitives. This he also found a task of no difficulty, until he reached the hard and unyielding soil of the rolling prairies. Here, indeed, he was completely at fault. He found himself, at length, compelled to divide his followers, appointing a place of rendezvous at a distant day, and to endeavour to find the lost trail by multiplying, as much as possible, the number of his eyes. He had been alone a week, when accident brought him in contact with the trapper and the bee-hunter. Part of their interview has been related, and the reader can readily imagine the explanations that succeeded the tale he recounted, and which led, as has already been seen, to the recovery of his bride. CHAPTER XVI These likelihoods confirm her flight from hence, Therefore, I pray you, stay not to discourse, But mount you presently. --Shakspeare. An hour had slid by, in hasty and nearly incoherent questions and answers, before Middleton, hanging over his recovered treasure with that sort of jealous watchfulness with which a miser would regard his hoards, closed the disjointed narrative of his own proceedings by demanding-- "And you, my Inez; in what manner were you treated?" "In every thing, but the great injustice they did in separating me so forcibly from my friends, as well perhaps as the circumstances of my captors would allow. I think the man, who is certainly the master here, is but a new beginner in wickedness. He quarrelled frightfully in my presence, with the wretch who seized me, and then they made an impious bargain, to which I was compelled to acquiesce, and to which they bound me as well as themselves by oaths. Ah! Middleton, I fear the heretics are not so heedful of their vows as we who are nurtured in the bosom of the true church!" "Believe it not; these villains are of no religion: did they forswear themselves?" "No, not perjured: but was it not awful to call upon the good God to witness so sinful a compact?" "And so we think, Inez, as truly as the most virtuous cardinal of Rome. But how did they observe their oath, and what was its purport?" "They conditioned to leave me unmolested, and free from their odious presence, provided I would give a pledge to make no effort to escape; and that I would not even show myself, until a time that my masters saw fit to name." "And that time?" demanded the impatient Middleton, who so well knew the religious scruples of his wife--"that time?" "It is already passed. I was sworn by my patron saint, and faithfully did I keep the vow, until the man they call Ishmael forgot the terms by offering violence. I then made my appearance on the rock, for the time too was passed; though I even think father Ignatius would have absolved me from the vow, on account of the treachery of my keepers." "If he had not," muttered the youth between his compressed teeth, "I would have absolved him for ever from his spiritual care of your conscience!" "You, Middleton!" returned his wife looking up into his flushed face, while a bright blush suffused her own sweet countenance; "you may receive my vows, but surely you can have no power to absolve me from their observance!" "No, no, no. Inez, you are right. I know but little of these conscientious subtilties, and I am any thing but a priest: yet tell me, what has induced these monsters to play this desperate game--to trifle thus with my happiness?" "You know my ignorance of the world, and how ill I am qualified to furnish reasons for the conduct of beings so different from any I have ever seen before. But does not love of money drive men to acts even worse than this? I believe they thought that an aged and wealthy father could be tempted to pay them a rich ransom for his child; and, perhaps," she added, stealing an enquiring glance through her tears, at the attentive Middleton, "they counted something on the fresh affections of a bridegroom." "They might have extracted the blood from my heart, drop by drop!" "Yes," resumed his young and timid wife, instantly withdrawing the stolen look she had hazarded, and hurriedly pursuing the train of the discourse, as if glad to make him forget the liberty she had just taken, "I have been told, there are men so base as to perjure themselves at the altar, in order to command the gold of ignorant and confiding girls; and if love of money will lead to such baseness, we may surely expect it will hurry those, who devote themselves to gain, into acts of lesser fraud." "It must be so; and now, Inez, though I am here to guard you with my life, and we are in possession of this rock, our difficulties, perhaps our dangers, are not ended. You will summon all your courage to meet the trial and prove yourself a soldier's wife, my Inez?" "I am ready to depart this instant. The letter you sent by the physician, had prepared me to hope for the best, and I have every thing arranged for flight, at the shortest warning." "Let us then leave this place and join our friends." "Friends!" interrupted Inez, glancing her eyes around the little tent in quest of the form of Ellen. "I, too, have a friend who must not be forgotten, but who is pledged to pass the remainder of her life with us. She is gone!" Middleton gently led her from the spot, as he smilingly answered-- "She may have had, like myself, her own private communications for some favoured ear." The young man had not however done justice to the motives of Ellen Wade. The sensitive and intelligent girl had readily perceived how little her presence was necessary in the interview that has just been related, and had retired with that intuitive delicacy of feeling which seems to belong more properly to her sex. She was now to be seen seated on a point of the rock, with her person so entirely enveloped in her dress as to conceal her features. Here she had remained for near an hour, no one approaching to address her, and as it appeared to her own quick and jealous eyes, totally unobserved. In the latter particular, however, even the vigilance of the quick-sighted Ellen was deceived. The first act of Paul Hover, on finding himself the master of Ishmael's citadel, had been to sound the note of victory, after the quaint and ludicrous manner that is so often practised among the borderers of the West. Flapping his sides with his hands, as the conquering game-cock is wont to do with his wings, he raised a loud and laughable imitation of the exultation of this bird; a cry which might have proved a dangerous challenge had any one of the athletic sons of the squatter been within hearing. "This has been a regular knock-down and drag-out," he cried, "and no bones broke! How now, old trapper, you have been one of your training, platoon, rank and file soldiers in your day, and have seen forts taken and batteries stormed before this--am I right?" "Ay, ay, that have I," answered the old man, who still maintained his post at the foot of the rock, so little disturbed by what he had just witnessed, as to return the grin of Paul, with a hearty indulgence in his own silent and peculiar laughter; "you have gone through the exploit like men!" "Now tell me, is it not in rule, to call over the names of the living, and to bury the dead, after every bloody battle?" "Some did and other some didn't. When Sir William push'd the German, Dieskau, thro' the defiles at the foot of the Hori--" "Your Sir William was a drone to Sir Paul, and knew nothing of regularity. So here begins the roll-call--by the by, old man, what between bee-hunting and buffaloe humps, and certain other matters, I have been too busy to ask your name; for I intend to begin with my rear-guard, well knowing that my man in front is too busy to answer." "Lord, lad, I've been called in my time by as many names as there are people among whom I've dwelt. Now the Delawares nam'd me for my eyes, and I was called after the far-sighted hawk. Then, ag'in, the settlers in the Otsego hills christened me anew, from the fashion of my leggings; and various have been the names by which I have gone through life; but little will it matter when the time shall come, that all are to be muster'd, face to face, by what titles a mortal has played his part! I humbly trust I shall be able to answer to any of mine, in a loud and manly voice." Paul paid little or no attention to this reply, more than half of which was lost in the distance, but pursuing the humour of the moment, he called out in a stentorian voice to the naturalist to answer to his name. Dr. Battius had not thought it necessary to push his success beyond the comfortable niche, which accident had so opportunely formed for his protection, and in which he now reposed from his labours, with a pleasing consciousness of security, added to great exultation at the possession of the botanical treasure already mentioned. "Mount, mount, my worthy mole-catcher! come and behold the prospect of skirting Ishmael; come and look nature boldly in the face, and not go sneaking any longer, among the prairie grass and mullein tops, like a gobbler nibbling for grasshoppers." The mouth of the light-hearted and reckless bee-hunter was instantly closed, and he was rendered as mute, as he had just been boisterous and talkative, by the appearance of Ellen Wade. When the melancholy maiden took her seat on the point of the rock as mentioned, Paul affected to employ himself in conducting a close inspection of the household effects of the squatter. He rummaged the drawers of Esther with no delicate hands, scattered the rustic finery of her girls on the ground, without the least deference to its quality or elegance, and tossed her pots and kettles here and there, as though they had been vessels of wood instead of iron. All this industry was, however, manifestly without an object. He reserved nothing for himself, not even appearing conscious of the nature of the articles which suffered by his familiarity. When he had examined the inside of every cabin, taken a fresh survey of the spot where he had confined the children, and where he had thoroughly secured them with cords, and kicked one of the pails of the woman, like a foot-ball, fifty feet into the air, in sheer wantonness, he returned to the edge of the rock, and thrusting both his hands through his wampum belt, he began to whistle the "Kentucky Hunters" as diligently as if he had been hired to supply his auditors with music by the hour. In this manner passed the remainder of the time, until Middleton, as has been related, led Inez forth from the tent, and gave a new direction to the thoughts of the whole party. He summoned Paul from his flourish of music, tore the Doctor from the study of his plant, and, as acknowledged leader, gave the necessary orders for immediate departure. In the bustle and confusion that were likely to succeed such a mandate, there was little opportunity to indulge in complaints or reflections. As the adventurers had not come unprepared for victory, each individual employed himself in such offices as were best adapted to his strength and situation. The trapper had already made himself master of the patient Asinus, who was quietly feeding at no great distance from the rock, and he was now busy in fitting his back with the complicated machinery that Dr. Battius saw fit to term a saddle of his own invention. The naturalist himself seized upon his portfolios, herbals, and collection of insects, which he quickly transferred from the encampment of the squatter, to certain pockets in the aforesaid ingenious invention, and which the trapper as uniformly cast away the moment his back was turned. Paul showed his dexterity in removing such light articles as Inez and Ellen had prepared for their flight to the foot of the citadel, while Middleton, after mingling threats and promises, in order to induce the children to remain quietly in their bondage, assisted the females to descend. As time began to press upon them, and there was great danger of Ishmael's returning, these several movements were made with singular industry and despatch. The trapper bestowed such articles as he conceived were necessary to the comfort of the weaker and more delicate members of the party, in those pockets from which he had so unceremoniously expelled the treasures of the unconscious naturalist, and then gave way for Middleton to place Inez in one of those seats which he had prepared on the back of the animal for her and her companion. "Go, child," the old man said, motioning to Ellen to follow the example of the lady, and turning his head a little anxiously to examine the waste behind him. "It cannot be long afore the owner of this place will be coming to look after his household; and he is not a man to give up his property, however obtained, without complaint!" "It is true," cried Middleton; "we have wasted moments that are precious, and have the utmost need of industry." "Ay, ay, I thought it; and would have said it, captain; but I remembered how your grand'ther used to love to look upon the face of her he led away for a wife, in the days of his youth and his happiness. 'Tis natur', 'tis natur', and 'tis wiser to give way a little before its feelings, than to try to stop a current that will have its course." Ellen advanced to the side of the beast, and seizing Inez by the hand, she said, with heartfelt warmth, after struggling to suppress an emotion that nearly choked her-- "God bless you, sweet lady! I hope you will forget and forgive the wrongs you have received from my uncle--" The humbled and sorrowful girl could say no more, her voice becoming entirely inaudible in an ungovernable burst of grief. "How is this?" cried Middleton; "did you not say, Inez, that this excellent young woman was to accompany us, and to live with us for the remainder of her life; or, at least, until she found some more agreeable residence for herself?" "I did; and I still hope it. She has always given me reason to believe, that after having shown so much commiseration and friendship in my misery, she would not desert me, should happier times return." "I cannot--I ought not," continued Ellen, getting the better of her momentary weakness. "It has pleased God to cast my lot among these people, and I ought not to quit them. It would be adding the appearance of treachery to what will already seem bad enough, with one of his opinions. He has been kind to me, an orphan, after his rough customs, and I cannot steal from him at such a moment." "She is just as much a relation of skirting Ishmael as I am a bishop!" said Paul, with a loud hem, as if his throat wanted clearing. "If the old fellow has done the honest thing by her, in giving her a morsel of venison now and then, or a spoon around his homminy dish, hasn't she pay'd him in teaching the young devils to read their Bible, or in helping old Esther to put her finery in shape and fashion. Tell me that a drone has a sting, and I'll believe you as easily as I will that this young woman is a debtor to any of the tribe of Bush!" "It is but little matter who owes me, or where I am in debt. There are none to care for a girl who is fatherless and motherless, and whose nearest kin are the offcasts of all honest people. No, no; go, lady, and Heaven for ever bless you! I am better here, in this desert, where there are none to know my shame." "Now, old trapper," retorted Paul, "this is what I call knowing which way the wind blows! You ar' a man that has seen life, and you know something of fashions; I put it to your judgment, plainly, isn't it in the nature of things for the hive to swarm when the young get their growth, and if children will quit their parents, ought one who is of no kith or kin--" "Hist!" interrupted the man he addressed, "Hector is discontented. Say it out, plainly, pup; what is it dog--what is it?" The venerable hound had risen, and was scenting the fresh breeze which continued to sweep heavily over the prairie. At the words of his master he growled and contracted the muscles of his lips, as if half disposed to threaten with the remnants of his teeth. The younger dog, who was resting after the chase of the morning, also made some signs that his nose detected a taint in the air, and then the two resumed their slumbers, as if they had done enough. The trapper seized the bridle of the ass, and cried, urging the beast onward-- "There is no time for words. The squatter and his brood are within a mile or two of this blessed spot!" Middleton lost all recollection of Ellen, in the danger which now so eminently beset his recovered bride; nor is it necessary to add, that Dr. Battius did not wait for a second admonition to commence his retreat. Following the route indicated by the old man, they turned the rock in a body, and pursued their way as fast as possible across the prairie, under the favour of the cover it afforded. Paul Hover, however, remained in his tracks, sullenly leaning on his rifle. Near a minute had elapsed before he was observed by Ellen, who had buried her face in her hands, to conceal her fancied desolation from herself. "Why do you not fly?" the weeping girl exclaimed, the instant she perceived she was not alone. "I'm not used to it." "My uncle will soon be here! you have nothing to hope from his pity." "Nor from that of his niece, I reckon. Let him come; he can only knock me on the head!" "Paul, Paul, if you love me, fly." "Alone!--if I do, may I be--" "If you value your life, fly!" "I value it not, compared to you." "Paul!" "Ellen!" She extended both her hands and burst into another and a still more violent flood of tears. The bee-hunter put one of his sturdy arms around her waist, and in another moment he was urging her over the plain, in rapid pursuit of their flying friends. CHAPTER XVII Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight With a new Gorgon--Do not bid me speak; See, and then speak yourselves. --Shakspeare. The little run, which supplied the family of the squatter with water, and nourished the trees and bushes that grew near the base of the rocky eminence, took its rise at no great distance from the latter, in a small thicket of cotton-wood and vines. Hither, then, the trapper directed the flight, as to the place affording the only available cover in so pressing an emergency. It will be remembered, that the sagacity of the old man, which, from long practice in similar scenes, amounted nearly to an instinct in all cases of sudden danger, had first induced him to take this course, as it placed the hill between them and the approaching party. Favoured by this circumstance, he succeeded in reaching the bushes in sufficient time and Paul Hover had just hurried the breathless Ellen into the tangled bush, as Ishmael gained the summit of the rock, in the manner already described, where he stood like a man momentarily bereft of sense, gazing at the confusion which had been created among his chattels, or at his gagged and bound children, who had been safely bestowed, by the forethought of the bee-hunter, under the cover of a bark roof, in a sort of irregular pile. A long rifle would have thrown a bullet from the height, on which the squatter now stood, into the very cover where the fugitives, who had wrought all this mischief, were clustered. The trapper was the first to speak, as the man on whose intelligence and experience they all depended for counsel, after running his eye over the different individuals who gathered about him, in order to see that none were missing. "Ah! natur' is natur', and has done its work!" he said, nodding to the exulting Paul, with a smile of approbation. "I thought it would be hard for those, who had so often met in fair and foul, by starlight and under the clouded moon, to part at last in anger. Now is there little time to lose in talk, and every thing to gain by industry! It cannot be long afore some of yonder brood will be nosing along the 'arth for our trail, and should they find it, as find it they surely will, and should they push us to a stand on our courage, the dispute must be settled with the rifle; which may He in heaven forbid! Captain, can you lead us to the place where any of your warriors lie?--For the stout sons of the squatter will make a manly brush of it, or I am but little of a judge in warlike dispositions!" "The place of rendezvous is many leagues from this, on the banks of La Platte." "It is bad--it is bad. If fighting is to be done, it is always wise to enter on it on equal terms. But what has one so near his time to do with ill-blood and hot-blood at his heart! Listen to what a grey head and some experience have to offer, and then if any among you can point out a wiser fashion for a retreat, we can just follow his design, and forget that I have spoken. This thicket stretches for near a mile as it may be slanting from the rock, and leads towards the sunset instead of the settlements." "Enough, enough," cried Middleton, too impatient to wait until the deliberative and perhaps loquacious old man could end his minute explanation. "Time is too precious for words. Let us fly." The trapper made a gesture of compliance, and turning in his tracks, he led Asinus across the trembling earth of the swale, and quickly emerged on the hard ground, on the side opposite to the encampment of the squatter. "If old Ishmael gets a squint at that highway through the brush," cried Paul, casting, as he left the place, a hasty glance at the broad trail the party had made through the thicket, "he'll need no finger-board to tell him which way his road lies. But let him follow! I know the vagabond would gladly cross his breed with a little honest blood, but if any son of his ever gets to be the husband of--" "Hush, Paul, hush," said the terrified young woman, who leaned on his arm for support; "your voice might be heard." The bee-hunter was silent, though he did not cease to cast ominous looks behind him, as they flew along the edge of the run, which sufficiently betrayed the belligerent condition of his mind. As each one was busy for himself, but a few minutes elapsed before the party rose a swell of the prairie, and descending without a moment's delay on the opposite side, they were at once removed from every danger of being seen by the sons of Ishmael, unless the pursuers should happen to fall upon their trail. The old man now profited by the formation of the land to take another direction, with a view to elude pursuit, as a vessel changes her course in fogs and darkness, to escape from the vigilance of her enemies. Two hours, passed in the utmost diligence, enabled them to make a half circuit around the rock, and to reach a point that was exactly opposite to the original direction of their flight. To most of the fugitives their situation was as entirely unknown as is that of a ship in the middle of the ocean to the uninstructed voyager: but the old man proceeded at every turn, and through every bottom, with a decision that inspired his followers with confidence, as it spoke favourably of his own knowledge of the localities. His hound, stopping now and then to catch the expression of his eye, had preceded the trapper throughout the whole distance, with as much certainty as though a previous and intelligible communion between them had established the route by which they were to proceed. But, at the expiration of the time just named, the dog suddenly came to a stand, and then seating himself on the prairie, he snuffed the air a moment, and began a low and piteous whining. "Ay--pup--ay. I know the spot--I know the spot, and reason there is to remember it well!" said the old man, stopping by the side of his uneasy associate,

evil

How many times the word 'evil' appears in the text?

you fool enough to believe what such a scoundrel as I am tells you, captain, unless it has probability to back it? I know you are not: therefore I will give my facts and my opinions, and then leave you to chew on them, while I go and drink of your generosity. I know a man who is called Abiram White.--I believe the knave took that name to show his enmity to the race of blacks! But this gentleman is now, and has been for years, to my certain knowledge, a regular translator of the human body from one State to another. I have dealt with him in my time, and a cheating dog he is! No more honour in him than meat in my stomach. I saw him here in this very town, the day of your wedding. He was in company with his wife's brother, and pretended to be a settler on the hunt for new land. A noble set they were, to carry on business--seven sons, each of them as tall as your sergeant with his cap on. Well, the moment I heard that your wife was lost, I saw at once that Abiram had laid his hands on her." "Do you know this--can this be true? What reason have you to fancy a thing so wild?" "Reason enough; I know Abiram White. Now, will you add a trifle just to keep my throat from parching?" "Go, go; you are stupified with drink already, miserable man, and know not what you say. Go; go, and beware the drummer." "Experience is a good guide"--the fellow called after the retiring Middleton; and then turning with a chuckling laugh, like one well satisfied with himself, he made the best of his way towards the shop of the suttler. A hundred times in the course of that night did Middleton fancy that the communication of the miscreant was entitled to some attention, and as often did he reject the idea as too wild and visionary for another thought. He was awakened early on the following morning, after passing a restless and nearly sleepless night, by his orderly, who came to report that a man was found dead on the parade, at no great distance from his quarters. Throwing on his clothes he proceeded to the spot, and beheld the individual, with whom he had held the preceding conference, in the precise situation in which he had first been found. The miserable wretch had fallen a victim to his intemperance. This revolting fact was sufficiently proclaimed by his obtruding eye-balls, his bloated countenance, and the nearly insufferable odours that were even then exhaling from his carcass. Disgusted with the odious spectacle, the youth was turning from the sight, after ordering the corpse to be removed, when the position of one of the dead man's hands struck him. On examination, he found the fore-finger extended, as if in the act of writing in the sand, with the following incomplete sentence, nearly illegible, but yet in a state to be deciphered: "Captain, it is true, as I am a gentle--" He had either died, or fallen into a sleep, the forerunner of his death, before the latter word was finished. Concealing this fact from the others, Middleton repeated his orders and departed. The pertinacity of the deceased, and all the circumstances united, induced him to set on foot some secret enquiries. He found that a family answering the description which had been given him, had in fact passed the place the day of his nuptials. They were traced along the margin of the Mississippi, for some distance, until they took boat and ascended the river to its confluence with the Missouri. Here they had disappeared like hundreds of others, in pursuit of the hidden wealth of the interior. Furnished with these facts, Middleton detailed a small guard of his most trusty men, took leave of Don Augustin, without declaring his hopes or his fears, and having arrived at the indicated point, he pushed into the wilderness in pursuit. It was not difficult to trace a train like that of Ishmael, until he was well assured its object lay far beyond the usual limits of the settlements. This circumstance, in itself, quickened his suspicions, and gave additional force to his hopes of final success. After getting beyond the assistance of verbal directions, the anxious husband had recourse to the usual signs of a trail, in order to follow the fugitives. This he also found a task of no difficulty, until he reached the hard and unyielding soil of the rolling prairies. Here, indeed, he was completely at fault. He found himself, at length, compelled to divide his followers, appointing a place of rendezvous at a distant day, and to endeavour to find the lost trail by multiplying, as much as possible, the number of his eyes. He had been alone a week, when accident brought him in contact with the trapper and the bee-hunter. Part of their interview has been related, and the reader can readily imagine the explanations that succeeded the tale he recounted, and which led, as has already been seen, to the recovery of his bride. CHAPTER XVI These likelihoods confirm her flight from hence, Therefore, I pray you, stay not to discourse, But mount you presently. --Shakspeare. An hour had slid by, in hasty and nearly incoherent questions and answers, before Middleton, hanging over his recovered treasure with that sort of jealous watchfulness with which a miser would regard his hoards, closed the disjointed narrative of his own proceedings by demanding-- "And you, my Inez; in what manner were you treated?" "In every thing, but the great injustice they did in separating me so forcibly from my friends, as well perhaps as the circumstances of my captors would allow. I think the man, who is certainly the master here, is but a new beginner in wickedness. He quarrelled frightfully in my presence, with the wretch who seized me, and then they made an impious bargain, to which I was compelled to acquiesce, and to which they bound me as well as themselves by oaths. Ah! Middleton, I fear the heretics are not so heedful of their vows as we who are nurtured in the bosom of the true church!" "Believe it not; these villains are of no religion: did they forswear themselves?" "No, not perjured: but was it not awful to call upon the good God to witness so sinful a compact?" "And so we think, Inez, as truly as the most virtuous cardinal of Rome. But how did they observe their oath, and what was its purport?" "They conditioned to leave me unmolested, and free from their odious presence, provided I would give a pledge to make no effort to escape; and that I would not even show myself, until a time that my masters saw fit to name." "And that time?" demanded the impatient Middleton, who so well knew the religious scruples of his wife--"that time?" "It is already passed. I was sworn by my patron saint, and faithfully did I keep the vow, until the man they call Ishmael forgot the terms by offering violence. I then made my appearance on the rock, for the time too was passed; though I even think father Ignatius would have absolved me from the vow, on account of the treachery of my keepers." "If he had not," muttered the youth between his compressed teeth, "I would have absolved him for ever from his spiritual care of your conscience!" "You, Middleton!" returned his wife looking up into his flushed face, while a bright blush suffused her own sweet countenance; "you may receive my vows, but surely you can have no power to absolve me from their observance!" "No, no, no. Inez, you are right. I know but little of these conscientious subtilties, and I am any thing but a priest: yet tell me, what has induced these monsters to play this desperate game--to trifle thus with my happiness?" "You know my ignorance of the world, and how ill I am qualified to furnish reasons for the conduct of beings so different from any I have ever seen before. But does not love of money drive men to acts even worse than this? I believe they thought that an aged and wealthy father could be tempted to pay them a rich ransom for his child; and, perhaps," she added, stealing an enquiring glance through her tears, at the attentive Middleton, "they counted something on the fresh affections of a bridegroom." "They might have extracted the blood from my heart, drop by drop!" "Yes," resumed his young and timid wife, instantly withdrawing the stolen look she had hazarded, and hurriedly pursuing the train of the discourse, as if glad to make him forget the liberty she had just taken, "I have been told, there are men so base as to perjure themselves at the altar, in order to command the gold of ignorant and confiding girls; and if love of money will lead to such baseness, we may surely expect it will hurry those, who devote themselves to gain, into acts of lesser fraud." "It must be so; and now, Inez, though I am here to guard you with my life, and we are in possession of this rock, our difficulties, perhaps our dangers, are not ended. You will summon all your courage to meet the trial and prove yourself a soldier's wife, my Inez?" "I am ready to depart this instant. The letter you sent by the physician, had prepared me to hope for the best, and I have every thing arranged for flight, at the shortest warning." "Let us then leave this place and join our friends." "Friends!" interrupted Inez, glancing her eyes around the little tent in quest of the form of Ellen. "I, too, have a friend who must not be forgotten, but who is pledged to pass the remainder of her life with us. She is gone!" Middleton gently led her from the spot, as he smilingly answered-- "She may have had, like myself, her own private communications for some favoured ear." The young man had not however done justice to the motives of Ellen Wade. The sensitive and intelligent girl had readily perceived how little her presence was necessary in the interview that has just been related, and had retired with that intuitive delicacy of feeling which seems to belong more properly to her sex. She was now to be seen seated on a point of the rock, with her person so entirely enveloped in her dress as to conceal her features. Here she had remained for near an hour, no one approaching to address her, and as it appeared to her own quick and jealous eyes, totally unobserved. In the latter particular, however, even the vigilance of the quick-sighted Ellen was deceived. The first act of Paul Hover, on finding himself the master of Ishmael's citadel, had been to sound the note of victory, after the quaint and ludicrous manner that is so often practised among the borderers of the West. Flapping his sides with his hands, as the conquering game-cock is wont to do with his wings, he raised a loud and laughable imitation of the exultation of this bird; a cry which might have proved a dangerous challenge had any one of the athletic sons of the squatter been within hearing. "This has been a regular knock-down and drag-out," he cried, "and no bones broke! How now, old trapper, you have been one of your training, platoon, rank and file soldiers in your day, and have seen forts taken and batteries stormed before this--am I right?" "Ay, ay, that have I," answered the old man, who still maintained his post at the foot of the rock, so little disturbed by what he had just witnessed, as to return the grin of Paul, with a hearty indulgence in his own silent and peculiar laughter; "you have gone through the exploit like men!" "Now tell me, is it not in rule, to call over the names of the living, and to bury the dead, after every bloody battle?" "Some did and other some didn't. When Sir William push'd the German, Dieskau, thro' the defiles at the foot of the Hori--" "Your Sir William was a drone to Sir Paul, and knew nothing of regularity. So here begins the roll-call--by the by, old man, what between bee-hunting and buffaloe humps, and certain other matters, I have been too busy to ask your name; for I intend to begin with my rear-guard, well knowing that my man in front is too busy to answer." "Lord, lad, I've been called in my time by as many names as there are people among whom I've dwelt. Now the Delawares nam'd me for my eyes, and I was called after the far-sighted hawk. Then, ag'in, the settlers in the Otsego hills christened me anew, from the fashion of my leggings; and various have been the names by which I have gone through life; but little will it matter when the time shall come, that all are to be muster'd, face to face, by what titles a mortal has played his part! I humbly trust I shall be able to answer to any of mine, in a loud and manly voice." Paul paid little or no attention to this reply, more than half of which was lost in the distance, but pursuing the humour of the moment, he called out in a stentorian voice to the naturalist to answer to his name. Dr. Battius had not thought it necessary to push his success beyond the comfortable niche, which accident had so opportunely formed for his protection, and in which he now reposed from his labours, with a pleasing consciousness of security, added to great exultation at the possession of the botanical treasure already mentioned. "Mount, mount, my worthy mole-catcher! come and behold the prospect of skirting Ishmael; come and look nature boldly in the face, and not go sneaking any longer, among the prairie grass and mullein tops, like a gobbler nibbling for grasshoppers." The mouth of the light-hearted and reckless bee-hunter was instantly closed, and he was rendered as mute, as he had just been boisterous and talkative, by the appearance of Ellen Wade. When the melancholy maiden took her seat on the point of the rock as mentioned, Paul affected to employ himself in conducting a close inspection of the household effects of the squatter. He rummaged the drawers of Esther with no delicate hands, scattered the rustic finery of her girls on the ground, without the least deference to its quality or elegance, and tossed her pots and kettles here and there, as though they had been vessels of wood instead of iron. All this industry was, however, manifestly without an object. He reserved nothing for himself, not even appearing conscious of the nature of the articles which suffered by his familiarity. When he had examined the inside of every cabin, taken a fresh survey of the spot where he had confined the children, and where he had thoroughly secured them with cords, and kicked one of the pails of the woman, like a foot-ball, fifty feet into the air, in sheer wantonness, he returned to the edge of the rock, and thrusting both his hands through his wampum belt, he began to whistle the "Kentucky Hunters" as diligently as if he had been hired to supply his auditors with music by the hour. In this manner passed the remainder of the time, until Middleton, as has been related, led Inez forth from the tent, and gave a new direction to the thoughts of the whole party. He summoned Paul from his flourish of music, tore the Doctor from the study of his plant, and, as acknowledged leader, gave the necessary orders for immediate departure. In the bustle and confusion that were likely to succeed such a mandate, there was little opportunity to indulge in complaints or reflections. As the adventurers had not come unprepared for victory, each individual employed himself in such offices as were best adapted to his strength and situation. The trapper had already made himself master of the patient Asinus, who was quietly feeding at no great distance from the rock, and he was now busy in fitting his back with the complicated machinery that Dr. Battius saw fit to term a saddle of his own invention. The naturalist himself seized upon his portfolios, herbals, and collection of insects, which he quickly transferred from the encampment of the squatter, to certain pockets in the aforesaid ingenious invention, and which the trapper as uniformly cast away the moment his back was turned. Paul showed his dexterity in removing such light articles as Inez and Ellen had prepared for their flight to the foot of the citadel, while Middleton, after mingling threats and promises, in order to induce the children to remain quietly in their bondage, assisted the females to descend. As time began to press upon them, and there was great danger of Ishmael's returning, these several movements were made with singular industry and despatch. The trapper bestowed such articles as he conceived were necessary to the comfort of the weaker and more delicate members of the party, in those pockets from which he had so unceremoniously expelled the treasures of the unconscious naturalist, and then gave way for Middleton to place Inez in one of those seats which he had prepared on the back of the animal for her and her companion. "Go, child," the old man said, motioning to Ellen to follow the example of the lady, and turning his head a little anxiously to examine the waste behind him. "It cannot be long afore the owner of this place will be coming to look after his household; and he is not a man to give up his property, however obtained, without complaint!" "It is true," cried Middleton; "we have wasted moments that are precious, and have the utmost need of industry." "Ay, ay, I thought it; and would have said it, captain; but I remembered how your grand'ther used to love to look upon the face of her he led away for a wife, in the days of his youth and his happiness. 'Tis natur', 'tis natur', and 'tis wiser to give way a little before its feelings, than to try to stop a current that will have its course." Ellen advanced to the side of the beast, and seizing Inez by the hand, she said, with heartfelt warmth, after struggling to suppress an emotion that nearly choked her-- "God bless you, sweet lady! I hope you will forget and forgive the wrongs you have received from my uncle--" The humbled and sorrowful girl could say no more, her voice becoming entirely inaudible in an ungovernable burst of grief. "How is this?" cried Middleton; "did you not say, Inez, that this excellent young woman was to accompany us, and to live with us for the remainder of her life; or, at least, until she found some more agreeable residence for herself?" "I did; and I still hope it. She has always given me reason to believe, that after having shown so much commiseration and friendship in my misery, she would not desert me, should happier times return." "I cannot--I ought not," continued Ellen, getting the better of her momentary weakness. "It has pleased God to cast my lot among these people, and I ought not to quit them. It would be adding the appearance of treachery to what will already seem bad enough, with one of his opinions. He has been kind to me, an orphan, after his rough customs, and I cannot steal from him at such a moment." "She is just as much a relation of skirting Ishmael as I am a bishop!" said Paul, with a loud hem, as if his throat wanted clearing. "If the old fellow has done the honest thing by her, in giving her a morsel of venison now and then, or a spoon around his homminy dish, hasn't she pay'd him in teaching the young devils to read their Bible, or in helping old Esther to put her finery in shape and fashion. Tell me that a drone has a sting, and I'll believe you as easily as I will that this young woman is a debtor to any of the tribe of Bush!" "It is but little matter who owes me, or where I am in debt. There are none to care for a girl who is fatherless and motherless, and whose nearest kin are the offcasts of all honest people. No, no; go, lady, and Heaven for ever bless you! I am better here, in this desert, where there are none to know my shame." "Now, old trapper," retorted Paul, "this is what I call knowing which way the wind blows! You ar' a man that has seen life, and you know something of fashions; I put it to your judgment, plainly, isn't it in the nature of things for the hive to swarm when the young get their growth, and if children will quit their parents, ought one who is of no kith or kin--" "Hist!" interrupted the man he addressed, "Hector is discontented. Say it out, plainly, pup; what is it dog--what is it?" The venerable hound had risen, and was scenting the fresh breeze which continued to sweep heavily over the prairie. At the words of his master he growled and contracted the muscles of his lips, as if half disposed to threaten with the remnants of his teeth. The younger dog, who was resting after the chase of the morning, also made some signs that his nose detected a taint in the air, and then the two resumed their slumbers, as if they had done enough. The trapper seized the bridle of the ass, and cried, urging the beast onward-- "There is no time for words. The squatter and his brood are within a mile or two of this blessed spot!" Middleton lost all recollection of Ellen, in the danger which now so eminently beset his recovered bride; nor is it necessary to add, that Dr. Battius did not wait for a second admonition to commence his retreat. Following the route indicated by the old man, they turned the rock in a body, and pursued their way as fast as possible across the prairie, under the favour of the cover it afforded. Paul Hover, however, remained in his tracks, sullenly leaning on his rifle. Near a minute had elapsed before he was observed by Ellen, who had buried her face in her hands, to conceal her fancied desolation from herself. "Why do you not fly?" the weeping girl exclaimed, the instant she perceived she was not alone. "I'm not used to it." "My uncle will soon be here! you have nothing to hope from his pity." "Nor from that of his niece, I reckon. Let him come; he can only knock me on the head!" "Paul, Paul, if you love me, fly." "Alone!--if I do, may I be--" "If you value your life, fly!" "I value it not, compared to you." "Paul!" "Ellen!" She extended both her hands and burst into another and a still more violent flood of tears. The bee-hunter put one of his sturdy arms around her waist, and in another moment he was urging her over the plain, in rapid pursuit of their flying friends. CHAPTER XVII Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight With a new Gorgon--Do not bid me speak; See, and then speak yourselves. --Shakspeare. The little run, which supplied the family of the squatter with water, and nourished the trees and bushes that grew near the base of the rocky eminence, took its rise at no great distance from the latter, in a small thicket of cotton-wood and vines. Hither, then, the trapper directed the flight, as to the place affording the only available cover in so pressing an emergency. It will be remembered, that the sagacity of the old man, which, from long practice in similar scenes, amounted nearly to an instinct in all cases of sudden danger, had first induced him to take this course, as it placed the hill between them and the approaching party. Favoured by this circumstance, he succeeded in reaching the bushes in sufficient time and Paul Hover had just hurried the breathless Ellen into the tangled bush, as Ishmael gained the summit of the rock, in the manner already described, where he stood like a man momentarily bereft of sense, gazing at the confusion which had been created among his chattels, or at his gagged and bound children, who had been safely bestowed, by the forethought of the bee-hunter, under the cover of a bark roof, in a sort of irregular pile. A long rifle would have thrown a bullet from the height, on which the squatter now stood, into the very cover where the fugitives, who had wrought all this mischief, were clustered. The trapper was the first to speak, as the man on whose intelligence and experience they all depended for counsel, after running his eye over the different individuals who gathered about him, in order to see that none were missing. "Ah! natur' is natur', and has done its work!" he said, nodding to the exulting Paul, with a smile of approbation. "I thought it would be hard for those, who had so often met in fair and foul, by starlight and under the clouded moon, to part at last in anger. Now is there little time to lose in talk, and every thing to gain by industry! It cannot be long afore some of yonder brood will be nosing along the 'arth for our trail, and should they find it, as find it they surely will, and should they push us to a stand on our courage, the dispute must be settled with the rifle; which may He in heaven forbid! Captain, can you lead us to the place where any of your warriors lie?--For the stout sons of the squatter will make a manly brush of it, or I am but little of a judge in warlike dispositions!" "The place of rendezvous is many leagues from this, on the banks of La Platte." "It is bad--it is bad. If fighting is to be done, it is always wise to enter on it on equal terms. But what has one so near his time to do with ill-blood and hot-blood at his heart! Listen to what a grey head and some experience have to offer, and then if any among you can point out a wiser fashion for a retreat, we can just follow his design, and forget that I have spoken. This thicket stretches for near a mile as it may be slanting from the rock, and leads towards the sunset instead of the settlements." "Enough, enough," cried Middleton, too impatient to wait until the deliberative and perhaps loquacious old man could end his minute explanation. "Time is too precious for words. Let us fly." The trapper made a gesture of compliance, and turning in his tracks, he led Asinus across the trembling earth of the swale, and quickly emerged on the hard ground, on the side opposite to the encampment of the squatter. "If old Ishmael gets a squint at that highway through the brush," cried Paul, casting, as he left the place, a hasty glance at the broad trail the party had made through the thicket, "he'll need no finger-board to tell him which way his road lies. But let him follow! I know the vagabond would gladly cross his breed with a little honest blood, but if any son of his ever gets to be the husband of--" "Hush, Paul, hush," said the terrified young woman, who leaned on his arm for support; "your voice might be heard." The bee-hunter was silent, though he did not cease to cast ominous looks behind him, as they flew along the edge of the run, which sufficiently betrayed the belligerent condition of his mind. As each one was busy for himself, but a few minutes elapsed before the party rose a swell of the prairie, and descending without a moment's delay on the opposite side, they were at once removed from every danger of being seen by the sons of Ishmael, unless the pursuers should happen to fall upon their trail. The old man now profited by the formation of the land to take another direction, with a view to elude pursuit, as a vessel changes her course in fogs and darkness, to escape from the vigilance of her enemies. Two hours, passed in the utmost diligence, enabled them to make a half circuit around the rock, and to reach a point that was exactly opposite to the original direction of their flight. To most of the fugitives their situation was as entirely unknown as is that of a ship in the middle of the ocean to the uninstructed voyager: but the old man proceeded at every turn, and through every bottom, with a decision that inspired his followers with confidence, as it spoke favourably of his own knowledge of the localities. His hound, stopping now and then to catch the expression of his eye, had preceded the trapper throughout the whole distance, with as much certainty as though a previous and intelligible communion between them had established the route by which they were to proceed. But, at the expiration of the time just named, the dog suddenly came to a stand, and then seating himself on the prairie, he snuffed the air a moment, and began a low and piteous whining. "Ay--pup--ay. I know the spot--I know the spot, and reason there is to remember it well!" said the old man, stopping by the side of his uneasy associate,

set

How many times the word 'set' appears in the text?

you fool enough to believe what such a scoundrel as I am tells you, captain, unless it has probability to back it? I know you are not: therefore I will give my facts and my opinions, and then leave you to chew on them, while I go and drink of your generosity. I know a man who is called Abiram White.--I believe the knave took that name to show his enmity to the race of blacks! But this gentleman is now, and has been for years, to my certain knowledge, a regular translator of the human body from one State to another. I have dealt with him in my time, and a cheating dog he is! No more honour in him than meat in my stomach. I saw him here in this very town, the day of your wedding. He was in company with his wife's brother, and pretended to be a settler on the hunt for new land. A noble set they were, to carry on business--seven sons, each of them as tall as your sergeant with his cap on. Well, the moment I heard that your wife was lost, I saw at once that Abiram had laid his hands on her." "Do you know this--can this be true? What reason have you to fancy a thing so wild?" "Reason enough; I know Abiram White. Now, will you add a trifle just to keep my throat from parching?" "Go, go; you are stupified with drink already, miserable man, and know not what you say. Go; go, and beware the drummer." "Experience is a good guide"--the fellow called after the retiring Middleton; and then turning with a chuckling laugh, like one well satisfied with himself, he made the best of his way towards the shop of the suttler. A hundred times in the course of that night did Middleton fancy that the communication of the miscreant was entitled to some attention, and as often did he reject the idea as too wild and visionary for another thought. He was awakened early on the following morning, after passing a restless and nearly sleepless night, by his orderly, who came to report that a man was found dead on the parade, at no great distance from his quarters. Throwing on his clothes he proceeded to the spot, and beheld the individual, with whom he had held the preceding conference, in the precise situation in which he had first been found. The miserable wretch had fallen a victim to his intemperance. This revolting fact was sufficiently proclaimed by his obtruding eye-balls, his bloated countenance, and the nearly insufferable odours that were even then exhaling from his carcass. Disgusted with the odious spectacle, the youth was turning from the sight, after ordering the corpse to be removed, when the position of one of the dead man's hands struck him. On examination, he found the fore-finger extended, as if in the act of writing in the sand, with the following incomplete sentence, nearly illegible, but yet in a state to be deciphered: "Captain, it is true, as I am a gentle--" He had either died, or fallen into a sleep, the forerunner of his death, before the latter word was finished. Concealing this fact from the others, Middleton repeated his orders and departed. The pertinacity of the deceased, and all the circumstances united, induced him to set on foot some secret enquiries. He found that a family answering the description which had been given him, had in fact passed the place the day of his nuptials. They were traced along the margin of the Mississippi, for some distance, until they took boat and ascended the river to its confluence with the Missouri. Here they had disappeared like hundreds of others, in pursuit of the hidden wealth of the interior. Furnished with these facts, Middleton detailed a small guard of his most trusty men, took leave of Don Augustin, without declaring his hopes or his fears, and having arrived at the indicated point, he pushed into the wilderness in pursuit. It was not difficult to trace a train like that of Ishmael, until he was well assured its object lay far beyond the usual limits of the settlements. This circumstance, in itself, quickened his suspicions, and gave additional force to his hopes of final success. After getting beyond the assistance of verbal directions, the anxious husband had recourse to the usual signs of a trail, in order to follow the fugitives. This he also found a task of no difficulty, until he reached the hard and unyielding soil of the rolling prairies. Here, indeed, he was completely at fault. He found himself, at length, compelled to divide his followers, appointing a place of rendezvous at a distant day, and to endeavour to find the lost trail by multiplying, as much as possible, the number of his eyes. He had been alone a week, when accident brought him in contact with the trapper and the bee-hunter. Part of their interview has been related, and the reader can readily imagine the explanations that succeeded the tale he recounted, and which led, as has already been seen, to the recovery of his bride. CHAPTER XVI These likelihoods confirm her flight from hence, Therefore, I pray you, stay not to discourse, But mount you presently. --Shakspeare. An hour had slid by, in hasty and nearly incoherent questions and answers, before Middleton, hanging over his recovered treasure with that sort of jealous watchfulness with which a miser would regard his hoards, closed the disjointed narrative of his own proceedings by demanding-- "And you, my Inez; in what manner were you treated?" "In every thing, but the great injustice they did in separating me so forcibly from my friends, as well perhaps as the circumstances of my captors would allow. I think the man, who is certainly the master here, is but a new beginner in wickedness. He quarrelled frightfully in my presence, with the wretch who seized me, and then they made an impious bargain, to which I was compelled to acquiesce, and to which they bound me as well as themselves by oaths. Ah! Middleton, I fear the heretics are not so heedful of their vows as we who are nurtured in the bosom of the true church!" "Believe it not; these villains are of no religion: did they forswear themselves?" "No, not perjured: but was it not awful to call upon the good God to witness so sinful a compact?" "And so we think, Inez, as truly as the most virtuous cardinal of Rome. But how did they observe their oath, and what was its purport?" "They conditioned to leave me unmolested, and free from their odious presence, provided I would give a pledge to make no effort to escape; and that I would not even show myself, until a time that my masters saw fit to name." "And that time?" demanded the impatient Middleton, who so well knew the religious scruples of his wife--"that time?" "It is already passed. I was sworn by my patron saint, and faithfully did I keep the vow, until the man they call Ishmael forgot the terms by offering violence. I then made my appearance on the rock, for the time too was passed; though I even think father Ignatius would have absolved me from the vow, on account of the treachery of my keepers." "If he had not," muttered the youth between his compressed teeth, "I would have absolved him for ever from his spiritual care of your conscience!" "You, Middleton!" returned his wife looking up into his flushed face, while a bright blush suffused her own sweet countenance; "you may receive my vows, but surely you can have no power to absolve me from their observance!" "No, no, no. Inez, you are right. I know but little of these conscientious subtilties, and I am any thing but a priest: yet tell me, what has induced these monsters to play this desperate game--to trifle thus with my happiness?" "You know my ignorance of the world, and how ill I am qualified to furnish reasons for the conduct of beings so different from any I have ever seen before. But does not love of money drive men to acts even worse than this? I believe they thought that an aged and wealthy father could be tempted to pay them a rich ransom for his child; and, perhaps," she added, stealing an enquiring glance through her tears, at the attentive Middleton, "they counted something on the fresh affections of a bridegroom." "They might have extracted the blood from my heart, drop by drop!" "Yes," resumed his young and timid wife, instantly withdrawing the stolen look she had hazarded, and hurriedly pursuing the train of the discourse, as if glad to make him forget the liberty she had just taken, "I have been told, there are men so base as to perjure themselves at the altar, in order to command the gold of ignorant and confiding girls; and if love of money will lead to such baseness, we may surely expect it will hurry those, who devote themselves to gain, into acts of lesser fraud." "It must be so; and now, Inez, though I am here to guard you with my life, and we are in possession of this rock, our difficulties, perhaps our dangers, are not ended. You will summon all your courage to meet the trial and prove yourself a soldier's wife, my Inez?" "I am ready to depart this instant. The letter you sent by the physician, had prepared me to hope for the best, and I have every thing arranged for flight, at the shortest warning." "Let us then leave this place and join our friends." "Friends!" interrupted Inez, glancing her eyes around the little tent in quest of the form of Ellen. "I, too, have a friend who must not be forgotten, but who is pledged to pass the remainder of her life with us. She is gone!" Middleton gently led her from the spot, as he smilingly answered-- "She may have had, like myself, her own private communications for some favoured ear." The young man had not however done justice to the motives of Ellen Wade. The sensitive and intelligent girl had readily perceived how little her presence was necessary in the interview that has just been related, and had retired with that intuitive delicacy of feeling which seems to belong more properly to her sex. She was now to be seen seated on a point of the rock, with her person so entirely enveloped in her dress as to conceal her features. Here she had remained for near an hour, no one approaching to address her, and as it appeared to her own quick and jealous eyes, totally unobserved. In the latter particular, however, even the vigilance of the quick-sighted Ellen was deceived. The first act of Paul Hover, on finding himself the master of Ishmael's citadel, had been to sound the note of victory, after the quaint and ludicrous manner that is so often practised among the borderers of the West. Flapping his sides with his hands, as the conquering game-cock is wont to do with his wings, he raised a loud and laughable imitation of the exultation of this bird; a cry which might have proved a dangerous challenge had any one of the athletic sons of the squatter been within hearing. "This has been a regular knock-down and drag-out," he cried, "and no bones broke! How now, old trapper, you have been one of your training, platoon, rank and file soldiers in your day, and have seen forts taken and batteries stormed before this--am I right?" "Ay, ay, that have I," answered the old man, who still maintained his post at the foot of the rock, so little disturbed by what he had just witnessed, as to return the grin of Paul, with a hearty indulgence in his own silent and peculiar laughter; "you have gone through the exploit like men!" "Now tell me, is it not in rule, to call over the names of the living, and to bury the dead, after every bloody battle?" "Some did and other some didn't. When Sir William push'd the German, Dieskau, thro' the defiles at the foot of the Hori--" "Your Sir William was a drone to Sir Paul, and knew nothing of regularity. So here begins the roll-call--by the by, old man, what between bee-hunting and buffaloe humps, and certain other matters, I have been too busy to ask your name; for I intend to begin with my rear-guard, well knowing that my man in front is too busy to answer." "Lord, lad, I've been called in my time by as many names as there are people among whom I've dwelt. Now the Delawares nam'd me for my eyes, and I was called after the far-sighted hawk. Then, ag'in, the settlers in the Otsego hills christened me anew, from the fashion of my leggings; and various have been the names by which I have gone through life; but little will it matter when the time shall come, that all are to be muster'd, face to face, by what titles a mortal has played his part! I humbly trust I shall be able to answer to any of mine, in a loud and manly voice." Paul paid little or no attention to this reply, more than half of which was lost in the distance, but pursuing the humour of the moment, he called out in a stentorian voice to the naturalist to answer to his name. Dr. Battius had not thought it necessary to push his success beyond the comfortable niche, which accident had so opportunely formed for his protection, and in which he now reposed from his labours, with a pleasing consciousness of security, added to great exultation at the possession of the botanical treasure already mentioned. "Mount, mount, my worthy mole-catcher! come and behold the prospect of skirting Ishmael; come and look nature boldly in the face, and not go sneaking any longer, among the prairie grass and mullein tops, like a gobbler nibbling for grasshoppers." The mouth of the light-hearted and reckless bee-hunter was instantly closed, and he was rendered as mute, as he had just been boisterous and talkative, by the appearance of Ellen Wade. When the melancholy maiden took her seat on the point of the rock as mentioned, Paul affected to employ himself in conducting a close inspection of the household effects of the squatter. He rummaged the drawers of Esther with no delicate hands, scattered the rustic finery of her girls on the ground, without the least deference to its quality or elegance, and tossed her pots and kettles here and there, as though they had been vessels of wood instead of iron. All this industry was, however, manifestly without an object. He reserved nothing for himself, not even appearing conscious of the nature of the articles which suffered by his familiarity. When he had examined the inside of every cabin, taken a fresh survey of the spot where he had confined the children, and where he had thoroughly secured them with cords, and kicked one of the pails of the woman, like a foot-ball, fifty feet into the air, in sheer wantonness, he returned to the edge of the rock, and thrusting both his hands through his wampum belt, he began to whistle the "Kentucky Hunters" as diligently as if he had been hired to supply his auditors with music by the hour. In this manner passed the remainder of the time, until Middleton, as has been related, led Inez forth from the tent, and gave a new direction to the thoughts of the whole party. He summoned Paul from his flourish of music, tore the Doctor from the study of his plant, and, as acknowledged leader, gave the necessary orders for immediate departure. In the bustle and confusion that were likely to succeed such a mandate, there was little opportunity to indulge in complaints or reflections. As the adventurers had not come unprepared for victory, each individual employed himself in such offices as were best adapted to his strength and situation. The trapper had already made himself master of the patient Asinus, who was quietly feeding at no great distance from the rock, and he was now busy in fitting his back with the complicated machinery that Dr. Battius saw fit to term a saddle of his own invention. The naturalist himself seized upon his portfolios, herbals, and collection of insects, which he quickly transferred from the encampment of the squatter, to certain pockets in the aforesaid ingenious invention, and which the trapper as uniformly cast away the moment his back was turned. Paul showed his dexterity in removing such light articles as Inez and Ellen had prepared for their flight to the foot of the citadel, while Middleton, after mingling threats and promises, in order to induce the children to remain quietly in their bondage, assisted the females to descend. As time began to press upon them, and there was great danger of Ishmael's returning, these several movements were made with singular industry and despatch. The trapper bestowed such articles as he conceived were necessary to the comfort of the weaker and more delicate members of the party, in those pockets from which he had so unceremoniously expelled the treasures of the unconscious naturalist, and then gave way for Middleton to place Inez in one of those seats which he had prepared on the back of the animal for her and her companion. "Go, child," the old man said, motioning to Ellen to follow the example of the lady, and turning his head a little anxiously to examine the waste behind him. "It cannot be long afore the owner of this place will be coming to look after his household; and he is not a man to give up his property, however obtained, without complaint!" "It is true," cried Middleton; "we have wasted moments that are precious, and have the utmost need of industry." "Ay, ay, I thought it; and would have said it, captain; but I remembered how your grand'ther used to love to look upon the face of her he led away for a wife, in the days of his youth and his happiness. 'Tis natur', 'tis natur', and 'tis wiser to give way a little before its feelings, than to try to stop a current that will have its course." Ellen advanced to the side of the beast, and seizing Inez by the hand, she said, with heartfelt warmth, after struggling to suppress an emotion that nearly choked her-- "God bless you, sweet lady! I hope you will forget and forgive the wrongs you have received from my uncle--" The humbled and sorrowful girl could say no more, her voice becoming entirely inaudible in an ungovernable burst of grief. "How is this?" cried Middleton; "did you not say, Inez, that this excellent young woman was to accompany us, and to live with us for the remainder of her life; or, at least, until she found some more agreeable residence for herself?" "I did; and I still hope it. She has always given me reason to believe, that after having shown so much commiseration and friendship in my misery, she would not desert me, should happier times return." "I cannot--I ought not," continued Ellen, getting the better of her momentary weakness. "It has pleased God to cast my lot among these people, and I ought not to quit them. It would be adding the appearance of treachery to what will already seem bad enough, with one of his opinions. He has been kind to me, an orphan, after his rough customs, and I cannot steal from him at such a moment." "She is just as much a relation of skirting Ishmael as I am a bishop!" said Paul, with a loud hem, as if his throat wanted clearing. "If the old fellow has done the honest thing by her, in giving her a morsel of venison now and then, or a spoon around his homminy dish, hasn't she pay'd him in teaching the young devils to read their Bible, or in helping old Esther to put her finery in shape and fashion. Tell me that a drone has a sting, and I'll believe you as easily as I will that this young woman is a debtor to any of the tribe of Bush!" "It is but little matter who owes me, or where I am in debt. There are none to care for a girl who is fatherless and motherless, and whose nearest kin are the offcasts of all honest people. No, no; go, lady, and Heaven for ever bless you! I am better here, in this desert, where there are none to know my shame." "Now, old trapper," retorted Paul, "this is what I call knowing which way the wind blows! You ar' a man that has seen life, and you know something of fashions; I put it to your judgment, plainly, isn't it in the nature of things for the hive to swarm when the young get their growth, and if children will quit their parents, ought one who is of no kith or kin--" "Hist!" interrupted the man he addressed, "Hector is discontented. Say it out, plainly, pup; what is it dog--what is it?" The venerable hound had risen, and was scenting the fresh breeze which continued to sweep heavily over the prairie. At the words of his master he growled and contracted the muscles of his lips, as if half disposed to threaten with the remnants of his teeth. The younger dog, who was resting after the chase of the morning, also made some signs that his nose detected a taint in the air, and then the two resumed their slumbers, as if they had done enough. The trapper seized the bridle of the ass, and cried, urging the beast onward-- "There is no time for words. The squatter and his brood are within a mile or two of this blessed spot!" Middleton lost all recollection of Ellen, in the danger which now so eminently beset his recovered bride; nor is it necessary to add, that Dr. Battius did not wait for a second admonition to commence his retreat. Following the route indicated by the old man, they turned the rock in a body, and pursued their way as fast as possible across the prairie, under the favour of the cover it afforded. Paul Hover, however, remained in his tracks, sullenly leaning on his rifle. Near a minute had elapsed before he was observed by Ellen, who had buried her face in her hands, to conceal her fancied desolation from herself. "Why do you not fly?" the weeping girl exclaimed, the instant she perceived she was not alone. "I'm not used to it." "My uncle will soon be here! you have nothing to hope from his pity." "Nor from that of his niece, I reckon. Let him come; he can only knock me on the head!" "Paul, Paul, if you love me, fly." "Alone!--if I do, may I be--" "If you value your life, fly!" "I value it not, compared to you." "Paul!" "Ellen!" She extended both her hands and burst into another and a still more violent flood of tears. The bee-hunter put one of his sturdy arms around her waist, and in another moment he was urging her over the plain, in rapid pursuit of their flying friends. CHAPTER XVII Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight With a new Gorgon--Do not bid me speak; See, and then speak yourselves. --Shakspeare. The little run, which supplied the family of the squatter with water, and nourished the trees and bushes that grew near the base of the rocky eminence, took its rise at no great distance from the latter, in a small thicket of cotton-wood and vines. Hither, then, the trapper directed the flight, as to the place affording the only available cover in so pressing an emergency. It will be remembered, that the sagacity of the old man, which, from long practice in similar scenes, amounted nearly to an instinct in all cases of sudden danger, had first induced him to take this course, as it placed the hill between them and the approaching party. Favoured by this circumstance, he succeeded in reaching the bushes in sufficient time and Paul Hover had just hurried the breathless Ellen into the tangled bush, as Ishmael gained the summit of the rock, in the manner already described, where he stood like a man momentarily bereft of sense, gazing at the confusion which had been created among his chattels, or at his gagged and bound children, who had been safely bestowed, by the forethought of the bee-hunter, under the cover of a bark roof, in a sort of irregular pile. A long rifle would have thrown a bullet from the height, on which the squatter now stood, into the very cover where the fugitives, who had wrought all this mischief, were clustered. The trapper was the first to speak, as the man on whose intelligence and experience they all depended for counsel, after running his eye over the different individuals who gathered about him, in order to see that none were missing. "Ah! natur' is natur', and has done its work!" he said, nodding to the exulting Paul, with a smile of approbation. "I thought it would be hard for those, who had so often met in fair and foul, by starlight and under the clouded moon, to part at last in anger. Now is there little time to lose in talk, and every thing to gain by industry! It cannot be long afore some of yonder brood will be nosing along the 'arth for our trail, and should they find it, as find it they surely will, and should they push us to a stand on our courage, the dispute must be settled with the rifle; which may He in heaven forbid! Captain, can you lead us to the place where any of your warriors lie?--For the stout sons of the squatter will make a manly brush of it, or I am but little of a judge in warlike dispositions!" "The place of rendezvous is many leagues from this, on the banks of La Platte." "It is bad--it is bad. If fighting is to be done, it is always wise to enter on it on equal terms. But what has one so near his time to do with ill-blood and hot-blood at his heart! Listen to what a grey head and some experience have to offer, and then if any among you can point out a wiser fashion for a retreat, we can just follow his design, and forget that I have spoken. This thicket stretches for near a mile as it may be slanting from the rock, and leads towards the sunset instead of the settlements." "Enough, enough," cried Middleton, too impatient to wait until the deliberative and perhaps loquacious old man could end his minute explanation. "Time is too precious for words. Let us fly." The trapper made a gesture of compliance, and turning in his tracks, he led Asinus across the trembling earth of the swale, and quickly emerged on the hard ground, on the side opposite to the encampment of the squatter. "If old Ishmael gets a squint at that highway through the brush," cried Paul, casting, as he left the place, a hasty glance at the broad trail the party had made through the thicket, "he'll need no finger-board to tell him which way his road lies. But let him follow! I know the vagabond would gladly cross his breed with a little honest blood, but if any son of his ever gets to be the husband of--" "Hush, Paul, hush," said the terrified young woman, who leaned on his arm for support; "your voice might be heard." The bee-hunter was silent, though he did not cease to cast ominous looks behind him, as they flew along the edge of the run, which sufficiently betrayed the belligerent condition of his mind. As each one was busy for himself, but a few minutes elapsed before the party rose a swell of the prairie, and descending without a moment's delay on the opposite side, they were at once removed from every danger of being seen by the sons of Ishmael, unless the pursuers should happen to fall upon their trail. The old man now profited by the formation of the land to take another direction, with a view to elude pursuit, as a vessel changes her course in fogs and darkness, to escape from the vigilance of her enemies. Two hours, passed in the utmost diligence, enabled them to make a half circuit around the rock, and to reach a point that was exactly opposite to the original direction of their flight. To most of the fugitives their situation was as entirely unknown as is that of a ship in the middle of the ocean to the uninstructed voyager: but the old man proceeded at every turn, and through every bottom, with a decision that inspired his followers with confidence, as it spoke favourably of his own knowledge of the localities. His hound, stopping now and then to catch the expression of his eye, had preceded the trapper throughout the whole distance, with as much certainty as though a previous and intelligible communion between them had established the route by which they were to proceed. But, at the expiration of the time just named, the dog suddenly came to a stand, and then seating himself on the prairie, he snuffed the air a moment, and began a low and piteous whining. "Ay--pup--ay. I know the spot--I know the spot, and reason there is to remember it well!" said the old man, stopping by the side of his uneasy associate,

anxious

How many times the word 'anxious' appears in the text?

you fool enough to believe what such a scoundrel as I am tells you, captain, unless it has probability to back it? I know you are not: therefore I will give my facts and my opinions, and then leave you to chew on them, while I go and drink of your generosity. I know a man who is called Abiram White.--I believe the knave took that name to show his enmity to the race of blacks! But this gentleman is now, and has been for years, to my certain knowledge, a regular translator of the human body from one State to another. I have dealt with him in my time, and a cheating dog he is! No more honour in him than meat in my stomach. I saw him here in this very town, the day of your wedding. He was in company with his wife's brother, and pretended to be a settler on the hunt for new land. A noble set they were, to carry on business--seven sons, each of them as tall as your sergeant with his cap on. Well, the moment I heard that your wife was lost, I saw at once that Abiram had laid his hands on her." "Do you know this--can this be true? What reason have you to fancy a thing so wild?" "Reason enough; I know Abiram White. Now, will you add a trifle just to keep my throat from parching?" "Go, go; you are stupified with drink already, miserable man, and know not what you say. Go; go, and beware the drummer." "Experience is a good guide"--the fellow called after the retiring Middleton; and then turning with a chuckling laugh, like one well satisfied with himself, he made the best of his way towards the shop of the suttler. A hundred times in the course of that night did Middleton fancy that the communication of the miscreant was entitled to some attention, and as often did he reject the idea as too wild and visionary for another thought. He was awakened early on the following morning, after passing a restless and nearly sleepless night, by his orderly, who came to report that a man was found dead on the parade, at no great distance from his quarters. Throwing on his clothes he proceeded to the spot, and beheld the individual, with whom he had held the preceding conference, in the precise situation in which he had first been found. The miserable wretch had fallen a victim to his intemperance. This revolting fact was sufficiently proclaimed by his obtruding eye-balls, his bloated countenance, and the nearly insufferable odours that were even then exhaling from his carcass. Disgusted with the odious spectacle, the youth was turning from the sight, after ordering the corpse to be removed, when the position of one of the dead man's hands struck him. On examination, he found the fore-finger extended, as if in the act of writing in the sand, with the following incomplete sentence, nearly illegible, but yet in a state to be deciphered: "Captain, it is true, as I am a gentle--" He had either died, or fallen into a sleep, the forerunner of his death, before the latter word was finished. Concealing this fact from the others, Middleton repeated his orders and departed. The pertinacity of the deceased, and all the circumstances united, induced him to set on foot some secret enquiries. He found that a family answering the description which had been given him, had in fact passed the place the day of his nuptials. They were traced along the margin of the Mississippi, for some distance, until they took boat and ascended the river to its confluence with the Missouri. Here they had disappeared like hundreds of others, in pursuit of the hidden wealth of the interior. Furnished with these facts, Middleton detailed a small guard of his most trusty men, took leave of Don Augustin, without declaring his hopes or his fears, and having arrived at the indicated point, he pushed into the wilderness in pursuit. It was not difficult to trace a train like that of Ishmael, until he was well assured its object lay far beyond the usual limits of the settlements. This circumstance, in itself, quickened his suspicions, and gave additional force to his hopes of final success. After getting beyond the assistance of verbal directions, the anxious husband had recourse to the usual signs of a trail, in order to follow the fugitives. This he also found a task of no difficulty, until he reached the hard and unyielding soil of the rolling prairies. Here, indeed, he was completely at fault. He found himself, at length, compelled to divide his followers, appointing a place of rendezvous at a distant day, and to endeavour to find the lost trail by multiplying, as much as possible, the number of his eyes. He had been alone a week, when accident brought him in contact with the trapper and the bee-hunter. Part of their interview has been related, and the reader can readily imagine the explanations that succeeded the tale he recounted, and which led, as has already been seen, to the recovery of his bride. CHAPTER XVI These likelihoods confirm her flight from hence, Therefore, I pray you, stay not to discourse, But mount you presently. --Shakspeare. An hour had slid by, in hasty and nearly incoherent questions and answers, before Middleton, hanging over his recovered treasure with that sort of jealous watchfulness with which a miser would regard his hoards, closed the disjointed narrative of his own proceedings by demanding-- "And you, my Inez; in what manner were you treated?" "In every thing, but the great injustice they did in separating me so forcibly from my friends, as well perhaps as the circumstances of my captors would allow. I think the man, who is certainly the master here, is but a new beginner in wickedness. He quarrelled frightfully in my presence, with the wretch who seized me, and then they made an impious bargain, to which I was compelled to acquiesce, and to which they bound me as well as themselves by oaths. Ah! Middleton, I fear the heretics are not so heedful of their vows as we who are nurtured in the bosom of the true church!" "Believe it not; these villains are of no religion: did they forswear themselves?" "No, not perjured: but was it not awful to call upon the good God to witness so sinful a compact?" "And so we think, Inez, as truly as the most virtuous cardinal of Rome. But how did they observe their oath, and what was its purport?" "They conditioned to leave me unmolested, and free from their odious presence, provided I would give a pledge to make no effort to escape; and that I would not even show myself, until a time that my masters saw fit to name." "And that time?" demanded the impatient Middleton, who so well knew the religious scruples of his wife--"that time?" "It is already passed. I was sworn by my patron saint, and faithfully did I keep the vow, until the man they call Ishmael forgot the terms by offering violence. I then made my appearance on the rock, for the time too was passed; though I even think father Ignatius would have absolved me from the vow, on account of the treachery of my keepers." "If he had not," muttered the youth between his compressed teeth, "I would have absolved him for ever from his spiritual care of your conscience!" "You, Middleton!" returned his wife looking up into his flushed face, while a bright blush suffused her own sweet countenance; "you may receive my vows, but surely you can have no power to absolve me from their observance!" "No, no, no. Inez, you are right. I know but little of these conscientious subtilties, and I am any thing but a priest: yet tell me, what has induced these monsters to play this desperate game--to trifle thus with my happiness?" "You know my ignorance of the world, and how ill I am qualified to furnish reasons for the conduct of beings so different from any I have ever seen before. But does not love of money drive men to acts even worse than this? I believe they thought that an aged and wealthy father could be tempted to pay them a rich ransom for his child; and, perhaps," she added, stealing an enquiring glance through her tears, at the attentive Middleton, "they counted something on the fresh affections of a bridegroom." "They might have extracted the blood from my heart, drop by drop!" "Yes," resumed his young and timid wife, instantly withdrawing the stolen look she had hazarded, and hurriedly pursuing the train of the discourse, as if glad to make him forget the liberty she had just taken, "I have been told, there are men so base as to perjure themselves at the altar, in order to command the gold of ignorant and confiding girls; and if love of money will lead to such baseness, we may surely expect it will hurry those, who devote themselves to gain, into acts of lesser fraud." "It must be so; and now, Inez, though I am here to guard you with my life, and we are in possession of this rock, our difficulties, perhaps our dangers, are not ended. You will summon all your courage to meet the trial and prove yourself a soldier's wife, my Inez?" "I am ready to depart this instant. The letter you sent by the physician, had prepared me to hope for the best, and I have every thing arranged for flight, at the shortest warning." "Let us then leave this place and join our friends." "Friends!" interrupted Inez, glancing her eyes around the little tent in quest of the form of Ellen. "I, too, have a friend who must not be forgotten, but who is pledged to pass the remainder of her life with us. She is gone!" Middleton gently led her from the spot, as he smilingly answered-- "She may have had, like myself, her own private communications for some favoured ear." The young man had not however done justice to the motives of Ellen Wade. The sensitive and intelligent girl had readily perceived how little her presence was necessary in the interview that has just been related, and had retired with that intuitive delicacy of feeling which seems to belong more properly to her sex. She was now to be seen seated on a point of the rock, with her person so entirely enveloped in her dress as to conceal her features. Here she had remained for near an hour, no one approaching to address her, and as it appeared to her own quick and jealous eyes, totally unobserved. In the latter particular, however, even the vigilance of the quick-sighted Ellen was deceived. The first act of Paul Hover, on finding himself the master of Ishmael's citadel, had been to sound the note of victory, after the quaint and ludicrous manner that is so often practised among the borderers of the West. Flapping his sides with his hands, as the conquering game-cock is wont to do with his wings, he raised a loud and laughable imitation of the exultation of this bird; a cry which might have proved a dangerous challenge had any one of the athletic sons of the squatter been within hearing. "This has been a regular knock-down and drag-out," he cried, "and no bones broke! How now, old trapper, you have been one of your training, platoon, rank and file soldiers in your day, and have seen forts taken and batteries stormed before this--am I right?" "Ay, ay, that have I," answered the old man, who still maintained his post at the foot of the rock, so little disturbed by what he had just witnessed, as to return the grin of Paul, with a hearty indulgence in his own silent and peculiar laughter; "you have gone through the exploit like men!" "Now tell me, is it not in rule, to call over the names of the living, and to bury the dead, after every bloody battle?" "Some did and other some didn't. When Sir William push'd the German, Dieskau, thro' the defiles at the foot of the Hori--" "Your Sir William was a drone to Sir Paul, and knew nothing of regularity. So here begins the roll-call--by the by, old man, what between bee-hunting and buffaloe humps, and certain other matters, I have been too busy to ask your name; for I intend to begin with my rear-guard, well knowing that my man in front is too busy to answer." "Lord, lad, I've been called in my time by as many names as there are people among whom I've dwelt. Now the Delawares nam'd me for my eyes, and I was called after the far-sighted hawk. Then, ag'in, the settlers in the Otsego hills christened me anew, from the fashion of my leggings; and various have been the names by which I have gone through life; but little will it matter when the time shall come, that all are to be muster'd, face to face, by what titles a mortal has played his part! I humbly trust I shall be able to answer to any of mine, in a loud and manly voice." Paul paid little or no attention to this reply, more than half of which was lost in the distance, but pursuing the humour of the moment, he called out in a stentorian voice to the naturalist to answer to his name. Dr. Battius had not thought it necessary to push his success beyond the comfortable niche, which accident had so opportunely formed for his protection, and in which he now reposed from his labours, with a pleasing consciousness of security, added to great exultation at the possession of the botanical treasure already mentioned. "Mount, mount, my worthy mole-catcher! come and behold the prospect of skirting Ishmael; come and look nature boldly in the face, and not go sneaking any longer, among the prairie grass and mullein tops, like a gobbler nibbling for grasshoppers." The mouth of the light-hearted and reckless bee-hunter was instantly closed, and he was rendered as mute, as he had just been boisterous and talkative, by the appearance of Ellen Wade. When the melancholy maiden took her seat on the point of the rock as mentioned, Paul affected to employ himself in conducting a close inspection of the household effects of the squatter. He rummaged the drawers of Esther with no delicate hands, scattered the rustic finery of her girls on the ground, without the least deference to its quality or elegance, and tossed her pots and kettles here and there, as though they had been vessels of wood instead of iron. All this industry was, however, manifestly without an object. He reserved nothing for himself, not even appearing conscious of the nature of the articles which suffered by his familiarity. When he had examined the inside of every cabin, taken a fresh survey of the spot where he had confined the children, and where he had thoroughly secured them with cords, and kicked one of the pails of the woman, like a foot-ball, fifty feet into the air, in sheer wantonness, he returned to the edge of the rock, and thrusting both his hands through his wampum belt, he began to whistle the "Kentucky Hunters" as diligently as if he had been hired to supply his auditors with music by the hour. In this manner passed the remainder of the time, until Middleton, as has been related, led Inez forth from the tent, and gave a new direction to the thoughts of the whole party. He summoned Paul from his flourish of music, tore the Doctor from the study of his plant, and, as acknowledged leader, gave the necessary orders for immediate departure. In the bustle and confusion that were likely to succeed such a mandate, there was little opportunity to indulge in complaints or reflections. As the adventurers had not come unprepared for victory, each individual employed himself in such offices as were best adapted to his strength and situation. The trapper had already made himself master of the patient Asinus, who was quietly feeding at no great distance from the rock, and he was now busy in fitting his back with the complicated machinery that Dr. Battius saw fit to term a saddle of his own invention. The naturalist himself seized upon his portfolios, herbals, and collection of insects, which he quickly transferred from the encampment of the squatter, to certain pockets in the aforesaid ingenious invention, and which the trapper as uniformly cast away the moment his back was turned. Paul showed his dexterity in removing such light articles as Inez and Ellen had prepared for their flight to the foot of the citadel, while Middleton, after mingling threats and promises, in order to induce the children to remain quietly in their bondage, assisted the females to descend. As time began to press upon them, and there was great danger of Ishmael's returning, these several movements were made with singular industry and despatch. The trapper bestowed such articles as he conceived were necessary to the comfort of the weaker and more delicate members of the party, in those pockets from which he had so unceremoniously expelled the treasures of the unconscious naturalist, and then gave way for Middleton to place Inez in one of those seats which he had prepared on the back of the animal for her and her companion. "Go, child," the old man said, motioning to Ellen to follow the example of the lady, and turning his head a little anxiously to examine the waste behind him. "It cannot be long afore the owner of this place will be coming to look after his household; and he is not a man to give up his property, however obtained, without complaint!" "It is true," cried Middleton; "we have wasted moments that are precious, and have the utmost need of industry." "Ay, ay, I thought it; and would have said it, captain; but I remembered how your grand'ther used to love to look upon the face of her he led away for a wife, in the days of his youth and his happiness. 'Tis natur', 'tis natur', and 'tis wiser to give way a little before its feelings, than to try to stop a current that will have its course." Ellen advanced to the side of the beast, and seizing Inez by the hand, she said, with heartfelt warmth, after struggling to suppress an emotion that nearly choked her-- "God bless you, sweet lady! I hope you will forget and forgive the wrongs you have received from my uncle--" The humbled and sorrowful girl could say no more, her voice becoming entirely inaudible in an ungovernable burst of grief. "How is this?" cried Middleton; "did you not say, Inez, that this excellent young woman was to accompany us, and to live with us for the remainder of her life; or, at least, until she found some more agreeable residence for herself?" "I did; and I still hope it. She has always given me reason to believe, that after having shown so much commiseration and friendship in my misery, she would not desert me, should happier times return." "I cannot--I ought not," continued Ellen, getting the better of her momentary weakness. "It has pleased God to cast my lot among these people, and I ought not to quit them. It would be adding the appearance of treachery to what will already seem bad enough, with one of his opinions. He has been kind to me, an orphan, after his rough customs, and I cannot steal from him at such a moment." "She is just as much a relation of skirting Ishmael as I am a bishop!" said Paul, with a loud hem, as if his throat wanted clearing. "If the old fellow has done the honest thing by her, in giving her a morsel of venison now and then, or a spoon around his homminy dish, hasn't she pay'd him in teaching the young devils to read their Bible, or in helping old Esther to put her finery in shape and fashion. Tell me that a drone has a sting, and I'll believe you as easily as I will that this young woman is a debtor to any of the tribe of Bush!" "It is but little matter who owes me, or where I am in debt. There are none to care for a girl who is fatherless and motherless, and whose nearest kin are the offcasts of all honest people. No, no; go, lady, and Heaven for ever bless you! I am better here, in this desert, where there are none to know my shame." "Now, old trapper," retorted Paul, "this is what I call knowing which way the wind blows! You ar' a man that has seen life, and you know something of fashions; I put it to your judgment, plainly, isn't it in the nature of things for the hive to swarm when the young get their growth, and if children will quit their parents, ought one who is of no kith or kin--" "Hist!" interrupted the man he addressed, "Hector is discontented. Say it out, plainly, pup; what is it dog--what is it?" The venerable hound had risen, and was scenting the fresh breeze which continued to sweep heavily over the prairie. At the words of his master he growled and contracted the muscles of his lips, as if half disposed to threaten with the remnants of his teeth. The younger dog, who was resting after the chase of the morning, also made some signs that his nose detected a taint in the air, and then the two resumed their slumbers, as if they had done enough. The trapper seized the bridle of the ass, and cried, urging the beast onward-- "There is no time for words. The squatter and his brood are within a mile or two of this blessed spot!" Middleton lost all recollection of Ellen, in the danger which now so eminently beset his recovered bride; nor is it necessary to add, that Dr. Battius did not wait for a second admonition to commence his retreat. Following the route indicated by the old man, they turned the rock in a body, and pursued their way as fast as possible across the prairie, under the favour of the cover it afforded. Paul Hover, however, remained in his tracks, sullenly leaning on his rifle. Near a minute had elapsed before he was observed by Ellen, who had buried her face in her hands, to conceal her fancied desolation from herself. "Why do you not fly?" the weeping girl exclaimed, the instant she perceived she was not alone. "I'm not used to it." "My uncle will soon be here! you have nothing to hope from his pity." "Nor from that of his niece, I reckon. Let him come; he can only knock me on the head!" "Paul, Paul, if you love me, fly." "Alone!--if I do, may I be--" "If you value your life, fly!" "I value it not, compared to you." "Paul!" "Ellen!" She extended both her hands and burst into another and a still more violent flood of tears. The bee-hunter put one of his sturdy arms around her waist, and in another moment he was urging her over the plain, in rapid pursuit of their flying friends. CHAPTER XVII Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight With a new Gorgon--Do not bid me speak; See, and then speak yourselves. --Shakspeare. The little run, which supplied the family of the squatter with water, and nourished the trees and bushes that grew near the base of the rocky eminence, took its rise at no great distance from the latter, in a small thicket of cotton-wood and vines. Hither, then, the trapper directed the flight, as to the place affording the only available cover in so pressing an emergency. It will be remembered, that the sagacity of the old man, which, from long practice in similar scenes, amounted nearly to an instinct in all cases of sudden danger, had first induced him to take this course, as it placed the hill between them and the approaching party. Favoured by this circumstance, he succeeded in reaching the bushes in sufficient time and Paul Hover had just hurried the breathless Ellen into the tangled bush, as Ishmael gained the summit of the rock, in the manner already described, where he stood like a man momentarily bereft of sense, gazing at the confusion which had been created among his chattels, or at his gagged and bound children, who had been safely bestowed, by the forethought of the bee-hunter, under the cover of a bark roof, in a sort of irregular pile. A long rifle would have thrown a bullet from the height, on which the squatter now stood, into the very cover where the fugitives, who had wrought all this mischief, were clustered. The trapper was the first to speak, as the man on whose intelligence and experience they all depended for counsel, after running his eye over the different individuals who gathered about him, in order to see that none were missing. "Ah! natur' is natur', and has done its work!" he said, nodding to the exulting Paul, with a smile of approbation. "I thought it would be hard for those, who had so often met in fair and foul, by starlight and under the clouded moon, to part at last in anger. Now is there little time to lose in talk, and every thing to gain by industry! It cannot be long afore some of yonder brood will be nosing along the 'arth for our trail, and should they find it, as find it they surely will, and should they push us to a stand on our courage, the dispute must be settled with the rifle; which may He in heaven forbid! Captain, can you lead us to the place where any of your warriors lie?--For the stout sons of the squatter will make a manly brush of it, or I am but little of a judge in warlike dispositions!" "The place of rendezvous is many leagues from this, on the banks of La Platte." "It is bad--it is bad. If fighting is to be done, it is always wise to enter on it on equal terms. But what has one so near his time to do with ill-blood and hot-blood at his heart! Listen to what a grey head and some experience have to offer, and then if any among you can point out a wiser fashion for a retreat, we can just follow his design, and forget that I have spoken. This thicket stretches for near a mile as it may be slanting from the rock, and leads towards the sunset instead of the settlements." "Enough, enough," cried Middleton, too impatient to wait until the deliberative and perhaps loquacious old man could end his minute explanation. "Time is too precious for words. Let us fly." The trapper made a gesture of compliance, and turning in his tracks, he led Asinus across the trembling earth of the swale, and quickly emerged on the hard ground, on the side opposite to the encampment of the squatter. "If old Ishmael gets a squint at that highway through the brush," cried Paul, casting, as he left the place, a hasty glance at the broad trail the party had made through the thicket, "he'll need no finger-board to tell him which way his road lies. But let him follow! I know the vagabond would gladly cross his breed with a little honest blood, but if any son of his ever gets to be the husband of--" "Hush, Paul, hush," said the terrified young woman, who leaned on his arm for support; "your voice might be heard." The bee-hunter was silent, though he did not cease to cast ominous looks behind him, as they flew along the edge of the run, which sufficiently betrayed the belligerent condition of his mind. As each one was busy for himself, but a few minutes elapsed before the party rose a swell of the prairie, and descending without a moment's delay on the opposite side, they were at once removed from every danger of being seen by the sons of Ishmael, unless the pursuers should happen to fall upon their trail. The old man now profited by the formation of the land to take another direction, with a view to elude pursuit, as a vessel changes her course in fogs and darkness, to escape from the vigilance of her enemies. Two hours, passed in the utmost diligence, enabled them to make a half circuit around the rock, and to reach a point that was exactly opposite to the original direction of their flight. To most of the fugitives their situation was as entirely unknown as is that of a ship in the middle of the ocean to the uninstructed voyager: but the old man proceeded at every turn, and through every bottom, with a decision that inspired his followers with confidence, as it spoke favourably of his own knowledge of the localities. His hound, stopping now and then to catch the expression of his eye, had preceded the trapper throughout the whole distance, with as much certainty as though a previous and intelligible communion between them had established the route by which they were to proceed. But, at the expiration of the time just named, the dog suddenly came to a stand, and then seating himself on the prairie, he snuffed the air a moment, and began a low and piteous whining. "Ay--pup--ay. I know the spot--I know the spot, and reason there is to remember it well!" said the old man, stopping by the side of his uneasy associate,

faithfully

How many times the word 'faithfully' appears in the text?

you fool enough to believe what such a scoundrel as I am tells you, captain, unless it has probability to back it? I know you are not: therefore I will give my facts and my opinions, and then leave you to chew on them, while I go and drink of your generosity. I know a man who is called Abiram White.--I believe the knave took that name to show his enmity to the race of blacks! But this gentleman is now, and has been for years, to my certain knowledge, a regular translator of the human body from one State to another. I have dealt with him in my time, and a cheating dog he is! No more honour in him than meat in my stomach. I saw him here in this very town, the day of your wedding. He was in company with his wife's brother, and pretended to be a settler on the hunt for new land. A noble set they were, to carry on business--seven sons, each of them as tall as your sergeant with his cap on. Well, the moment I heard that your wife was lost, I saw at once that Abiram had laid his hands on her." "Do you know this--can this be true? What reason have you to fancy a thing so wild?" "Reason enough; I know Abiram White. Now, will you add a trifle just to keep my throat from parching?" "Go, go; you are stupified with drink already, miserable man, and know not what you say. Go; go, and beware the drummer." "Experience is a good guide"--the fellow called after the retiring Middleton; and then turning with a chuckling laugh, like one well satisfied with himself, he made the best of his way towards the shop of the suttler. A hundred times in the course of that night did Middleton fancy that the communication of the miscreant was entitled to some attention, and as often did he reject the idea as too wild and visionary for another thought. He was awakened early on the following morning, after passing a restless and nearly sleepless night, by his orderly, who came to report that a man was found dead on the parade, at no great distance from his quarters. Throwing on his clothes he proceeded to the spot, and beheld the individual, with whom he had held the preceding conference, in the precise situation in which he had first been found. The miserable wretch had fallen a victim to his intemperance. This revolting fact was sufficiently proclaimed by his obtruding eye-balls, his bloated countenance, and the nearly insufferable odours that were even then exhaling from his carcass. Disgusted with the odious spectacle, the youth was turning from the sight, after ordering the corpse to be removed, when the position of one of the dead man's hands struck him. On examination, he found the fore-finger extended, as if in the act of writing in the sand, with the following incomplete sentence, nearly illegible, but yet in a state to be deciphered: "Captain, it is true, as I am a gentle--" He had either died, or fallen into a sleep, the forerunner of his death, before the latter word was finished. Concealing this fact from the others, Middleton repeated his orders and departed. The pertinacity of the deceased, and all the circumstances united, induced him to set on foot some secret enquiries. He found that a family answering the description which had been given him, had in fact passed the place the day of his nuptials. They were traced along the margin of the Mississippi, for some distance, until they took boat and ascended the river to its confluence with the Missouri. Here they had disappeared like hundreds of others, in pursuit of the hidden wealth of the interior. Furnished with these facts, Middleton detailed a small guard of his most trusty men, took leave of Don Augustin, without declaring his hopes or his fears, and having arrived at the indicated point, he pushed into the wilderness in pursuit. It was not difficult to trace a train like that of Ishmael, until he was well assured its object lay far beyond the usual limits of the settlements. This circumstance, in itself, quickened his suspicions, and gave additional force to his hopes of final success. After getting beyond the assistance of verbal directions, the anxious husband had recourse to the usual signs of a trail, in order to follow the fugitives. This he also found a task of no difficulty, until he reached the hard and unyielding soil of the rolling prairies. Here, indeed, he was completely at fault. He found himself, at length, compelled to divide his followers, appointing a place of rendezvous at a distant day, and to endeavour to find the lost trail by multiplying, as much as possible, the number of his eyes. He had been alone a week, when accident brought him in contact with the trapper and the bee-hunter. Part of their interview has been related, and the reader can readily imagine the explanations that succeeded the tale he recounted, and which led, as has already been seen, to the recovery of his bride. CHAPTER XVI These likelihoods confirm her flight from hence, Therefore, I pray you, stay not to discourse, But mount you presently. --Shakspeare. An hour had slid by, in hasty and nearly incoherent questions and answers, before Middleton, hanging over his recovered treasure with that sort of jealous watchfulness with which a miser would regard his hoards, closed the disjointed narrative of his own proceedings by demanding-- "And you, my Inez; in what manner were you treated?" "In every thing, but the great injustice they did in separating me so forcibly from my friends, as well perhaps as the circumstances of my captors would allow. I think the man, who is certainly the master here, is but a new beginner in wickedness. He quarrelled frightfully in my presence, with the wretch who seized me, and then they made an impious bargain, to which I was compelled to acquiesce, and to which they bound me as well as themselves by oaths. Ah! Middleton, I fear the heretics are not so heedful of their vows as we who are nurtured in the bosom of the true church!" "Believe it not; these villains are of no religion: did they forswear themselves?" "No, not perjured: but was it not awful to call upon the good God to witness so sinful a compact?" "And so we think, Inez, as truly as the most virtuous cardinal of Rome. But how did they observe their oath, and what was its purport?" "They conditioned to leave me unmolested, and free from their odious presence, provided I would give a pledge to make no effort to escape; and that I would not even show myself, until a time that my masters saw fit to name." "And that time?" demanded the impatient Middleton, who so well knew the religious scruples of his wife--"that time?" "It is already passed. I was sworn by my patron saint, and faithfully did I keep the vow, until the man they call Ishmael forgot the terms by offering violence. I then made my appearance on the rock, for the time too was passed; though I even think father Ignatius would have absolved me from the vow, on account of the treachery of my keepers." "If he had not," muttered the youth between his compressed teeth, "I would have absolved him for ever from his spiritual care of your conscience!" "You, Middleton!" returned his wife looking up into his flushed face, while a bright blush suffused her own sweet countenance; "you may receive my vows, but surely you can have no power to absolve me from their observance!" "No, no, no. Inez, you are right. I know but little of these conscientious subtilties, and I am any thing but a priest: yet tell me, what has induced these monsters to play this desperate game--to trifle thus with my happiness?" "You know my ignorance of the world, and how ill I am qualified to furnish reasons for the conduct of beings so different from any I have ever seen before. But does not love of money drive men to acts even worse than this? I believe they thought that an aged and wealthy father could be tempted to pay them a rich ransom for his child; and, perhaps," she added, stealing an enquiring glance through her tears, at the attentive Middleton, "they counted something on the fresh affections of a bridegroom." "They might have extracted the blood from my heart, drop by drop!" "Yes," resumed his young and timid wife, instantly withdrawing the stolen look she had hazarded, and hurriedly pursuing the train of the discourse, as if glad to make him forget the liberty she had just taken, "I have been told, there are men so base as to perjure themselves at the altar, in order to command the gold of ignorant and confiding girls; and if love of money will lead to such baseness, we may surely expect it will hurry those, who devote themselves to gain, into acts of lesser fraud." "It must be so; and now, Inez, though I am here to guard you with my life, and we are in possession of this rock, our difficulties, perhaps our dangers, are not ended. You will summon all your courage to meet the trial and prove yourself a soldier's wife, my Inez?" "I am ready to depart this instant. The letter you sent by the physician, had prepared me to hope for the best, and I have every thing arranged for flight, at the shortest warning." "Let us then leave this place and join our friends." "Friends!" interrupted Inez, glancing her eyes around the little tent in quest of the form of Ellen. "I, too, have a friend who must not be forgotten, but who is pledged to pass the remainder of her life with us. She is gone!" Middleton gently led her from the spot, as he smilingly answered-- "She may have had, like myself, her own private communications for some favoured ear." The young man had not however done justice to the motives of Ellen Wade. The sensitive and intelligent girl had readily perceived how little her presence was necessary in the interview that has just been related, and had retired with that intuitive delicacy of feeling which seems to belong more properly to her sex. She was now to be seen seated on a point of the rock, with her person so entirely enveloped in her dress as to conceal her features. Here she had remained for near an hour, no one approaching to address her, and as it appeared to her own quick and jealous eyes, totally unobserved. In the latter particular, however, even the vigilance of the quick-sighted Ellen was deceived. The first act of Paul Hover, on finding himself the master of Ishmael's citadel, had been to sound the note of victory, after the quaint and ludicrous manner that is so often practised among the borderers of the West. Flapping his sides with his hands, as the conquering game-cock is wont to do with his wings, he raised a loud and laughable imitation of the exultation of this bird; a cry which might have proved a dangerous challenge had any one of the athletic sons of the squatter been within hearing. "This has been a regular knock-down and drag-out," he cried, "and no bones broke! How now, old trapper, you have been one of your training, platoon, rank and file soldiers in your day, and have seen forts taken and batteries stormed before this--am I right?" "Ay, ay, that have I," answered the old man, who still maintained his post at the foot of the rock, so little disturbed by what he had just witnessed, as to return the grin of Paul, with a hearty indulgence in his own silent and peculiar laughter; "you have gone through the exploit like men!" "Now tell me, is it not in rule, to call over the names of the living, and to bury the dead, after every bloody battle?" "Some did and other some didn't. When Sir William push'd the German, Dieskau, thro' the defiles at the foot of the Hori--" "Your Sir William was a drone to Sir Paul, and knew nothing of regularity. So here begins the roll-call--by the by, old man, what between bee-hunting and buffaloe humps, and certain other matters, I have been too busy to ask your name; for I intend to begin with my rear-guard, well knowing that my man in front is too busy to answer." "Lord, lad, I've been called in my time by as many names as there are people among whom I've dwelt. Now the Delawares nam'd me for my eyes, and I was called after the far-sighted hawk. Then, ag'in, the settlers in the Otsego hills christened me anew, from the fashion of my leggings; and various have been the names by which I have gone through life; but little will it matter when the time shall come, that all are to be muster'd, face to face, by what titles a mortal has played his part! I humbly trust I shall be able to answer to any of mine, in a loud and manly voice." Paul paid little or no attention to this reply, more than half of which was lost in the distance, but pursuing the humour of the moment, he called out in a stentorian voice to the naturalist to answer to his name. Dr. Battius had not thought it necessary to push his success beyond the comfortable niche, which accident had so opportunely formed for his protection, and in which he now reposed from his labours, with a pleasing consciousness of security, added to great exultation at the possession of the botanical treasure already mentioned. "Mount, mount, my worthy mole-catcher! come and behold the prospect of skirting Ishmael; come and look nature boldly in the face, and not go sneaking any longer, among the prairie grass and mullein tops, like a gobbler nibbling for grasshoppers." The mouth of the light-hearted and reckless bee-hunter was instantly closed, and he was rendered as mute, as he had just been boisterous and talkative, by the appearance of Ellen Wade. When the melancholy maiden took her seat on the point of the rock as mentioned, Paul affected to employ himself in conducting a close inspection of the household effects of the squatter. He rummaged the drawers of Esther with no delicate hands, scattered the rustic finery of her girls on the ground, without the least deference to its quality or elegance, and tossed her pots and kettles here and there, as though they had been vessels of wood instead of iron. All this industry was, however, manifestly without an object. He reserved nothing for himself, not even appearing conscious of the nature of the articles which suffered by his familiarity. When he had examined the inside of every cabin, taken a fresh survey of the spot where he had confined the children, and where he had thoroughly secured them with cords, and kicked one of the pails of the woman, like a foot-ball, fifty feet into the air, in sheer wantonness, he returned to the edge of the rock, and thrusting both his hands through his wampum belt, he began to whistle the "Kentucky Hunters" as diligently as if he had been hired to supply his auditors with music by the hour. In this manner passed the remainder of the time, until Middleton, as has been related, led Inez forth from the tent, and gave a new direction to the thoughts of the whole party. He summoned Paul from his flourish of music, tore the Doctor from the study of his plant, and, as acknowledged leader, gave the necessary orders for immediate departure. In the bustle and confusion that were likely to succeed such a mandate, there was little opportunity to indulge in complaints or reflections. As the adventurers had not come unprepared for victory, each individual employed himself in such offices as were best adapted to his strength and situation. The trapper had already made himself master of the patient Asinus, who was quietly feeding at no great distance from the rock, and he was now busy in fitting his back with the complicated machinery that Dr. Battius saw fit to term a saddle of his own invention. The naturalist himself seized upon his portfolios, herbals, and collection of insects, which he quickly transferred from the encampment of the squatter, to certain pockets in the aforesaid ingenious invention, and which the trapper as uniformly cast away the moment his back was turned. Paul showed his dexterity in removing such light articles as Inez and Ellen had prepared for their flight to the foot of the citadel, while Middleton, after mingling threats and promises, in order to induce the children to remain quietly in their bondage, assisted the females to descend. As time began to press upon them, and there was great danger of Ishmael's returning, these several movements were made with singular industry and despatch. The trapper bestowed such articles as he conceived were necessary to the comfort of the weaker and more delicate members of the party, in those pockets from which he had so unceremoniously expelled the treasures of the unconscious naturalist, and then gave way for Middleton to place Inez in one of those seats which he had prepared on the back of the animal for her and her companion. "Go, child," the old man said, motioning to Ellen to follow the example of the lady, and turning his head a little anxiously to examine the waste behind him. "It cannot be long afore the owner of this place will be coming to look after his household; and he is not a man to give up his property, however obtained, without complaint!" "It is true," cried Middleton; "we have wasted moments that are precious, and have the utmost need of industry." "Ay, ay, I thought it; and would have said it, captain; but I remembered how your grand'ther used to love to look upon the face of her he led away for a wife, in the days of his youth and his happiness. 'Tis natur', 'tis natur', and 'tis wiser to give way a little before its feelings, than to try to stop a current that will have its course." Ellen advanced to the side of the beast, and seizing Inez by the hand, she said, with heartfelt warmth, after struggling to suppress an emotion that nearly choked her-- "God bless you, sweet lady! I hope you will forget and forgive the wrongs you have received from my uncle--" The humbled and sorrowful girl could say no more, her voice becoming entirely inaudible in an ungovernable burst of grief. "How is this?" cried Middleton; "did you not say, Inez, that this excellent young woman was to accompany us, and to live with us for the remainder of her life; or, at least, until she found some more agreeable residence for herself?" "I did; and I still hope it. She has always given me reason to believe, that after having shown so much commiseration and friendship in my misery, she would not desert me, should happier times return." "I cannot--I ought not," continued Ellen, getting the better of her momentary weakness. "It has pleased God to cast my lot among these people, and I ought not to quit them. It would be adding the appearance of treachery to what will already seem bad enough, with one of his opinions. He has been kind to me, an orphan, after his rough customs, and I cannot steal from him at such a moment." "She is just as much a relation of skirting Ishmael as I am a bishop!" said Paul, with a loud hem, as if his throat wanted clearing. "If the old fellow has done the honest thing by her, in giving her a morsel of venison now and then, or a spoon around his homminy dish, hasn't she pay'd him in teaching the young devils to read their Bible, or in helping old Esther to put her finery in shape and fashion. Tell me that a drone has a sting, and I'll believe you as easily as I will that this young woman is a debtor to any of the tribe of Bush!" "It is but little matter who owes me, or where I am in debt. There are none to care for a girl who is fatherless and motherless, and whose nearest kin are the offcasts of all honest people. No, no; go, lady, and Heaven for ever bless you! I am better here, in this desert, where there are none to know my shame." "Now, old trapper," retorted Paul, "this is what I call knowing which way the wind blows! You ar' a man that has seen life, and you know something of fashions; I put it to your judgment, plainly, isn't it in the nature of things for the hive to swarm when the young get their growth, and if children will quit their parents, ought one who is of no kith or kin--" "Hist!" interrupted the man he addressed, "Hector is discontented. Say it out, plainly, pup; what is it dog--what is it?" The venerable hound had risen, and was scenting the fresh breeze which continued to sweep heavily over the prairie. At the words of his master he growled and contracted the muscles of his lips, as if half disposed to threaten with the remnants of his teeth. The younger dog, who was resting after the chase of the morning, also made some signs that his nose detected a taint in the air, and then the two resumed their slumbers, as if they had done enough. The trapper seized the bridle of the ass, and cried, urging the beast onward-- "There is no time for words. The squatter and his brood are within a mile or two of this blessed spot!" Middleton lost all recollection of Ellen, in the danger which now so eminently beset his recovered bride; nor is it necessary to add, that Dr. Battius did not wait for a second admonition to commence his retreat. Following the route indicated by the old man, they turned the rock in a body, and pursued their way as fast as possible across the prairie, under the favour of the cover it afforded. Paul Hover, however, remained in his tracks, sullenly leaning on his rifle. Near a minute had elapsed before he was observed by Ellen, who had buried her face in her hands, to conceal her fancied desolation from herself. "Why do you not fly?" the weeping girl exclaimed, the instant she perceived she was not alone. "I'm not used to it." "My uncle will soon be here! you have nothing to hope from his pity." "Nor from that of his niece, I reckon. Let him come; he can only knock me on the head!" "Paul, Paul, if you love me, fly." "Alone!--if I do, may I be--" "If you value your life, fly!" "I value it not, compared to you." "Paul!" "Ellen!" She extended both her hands and burst into another and a still more violent flood of tears. The bee-hunter put one of his sturdy arms around her waist, and in another moment he was urging her over the plain, in rapid pursuit of their flying friends. CHAPTER XVII Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight With a new Gorgon--Do not bid me speak; See, and then speak yourselves. --Shakspeare. The little run, which supplied the family of the squatter with water, and nourished the trees and bushes that grew near the base of the rocky eminence, took its rise at no great distance from the latter, in a small thicket of cotton-wood and vines. Hither, then, the trapper directed the flight, as to the place affording the only available cover in so pressing an emergency. It will be remembered, that the sagacity of the old man, which, from long practice in similar scenes, amounted nearly to an instinct in all cases of sudden danger, had first induced him to take this course, as it placed the hill between them and the approaching party. Favoured by this circumstance, he succeeded in reaching the bushes in sufficient time and Paul Hover had just hurried the breathless Ellen into the tangled bush, as Ishmael gained the summit of the rock, in the manner already described, where he stood like a man momentarily bereft of sense, gazing at the confusion which had been created among his chattels, or at his gagged and bound children, who had been safely bestowed, by the forethought of the bee-hunter, under the cover of a bark roof, in a sort of irregular pile. A long rifle would have thrown a bullet from the height, on which the squatter now stood, into the very cover where the fugitives, who had wrought all this mischief, were clustered. The trapper was the first to speak, as the man on whose intelligence and experience they all depended for counsel, after running his eye over the different individuals who gathered about him, in order to see that none were missing. "Ah! natur' is natur', and has done its work!" he said, nodding to the exulting Paul, with a smile of approbation. "I thought it would be hard for those, who had so often met in fair and foul, by starlight and under the clouded moon, to part at last in anger. Now is there little time to lose in talk, and every thing to gain by industry! It cannot be long afore some of yonder brood will be nosing along the 'arth for our trail, and should they find it, as find it they surely will, and should they push us to a stand on our courage, the dispute must be settled with the rifle; which may He in heaven forbid! Captain, can you lead us to the place where any of your warriors lie?--For the stout sons of the squatter will make a manly brush of it, or I am but little of a judge in warlike dispositions!" "The place of rendezvous is many leagues from this, on the banks of La Platte." "It is bad--it is bad. If fighting is to be done, it is always wise to enter on it on equal terms. But what has one so near his time to do with ill-blood and hot-blood at his heart! Listen to what a grey head and some experience have to offer, and then if any among you can point out a wiser fashion for a retreat, we can just follow his design, and forget that I have spoken. This thicket stretches for near a mile as it may be slanting from the rock, and leads towards the sunset instead of the settlements." "Enough, enough," cried Middleton, too impatient to wait until the deliberative and perhaps loquacious old man could end his minute explanation. "Time is too precious for words. Let us fly." The trapper made a gesture of compliance, and turning in his tracks, he led Asinus across the trembling earth of the swale, and quickly emerged on the hard ground, on the side opposite to the encampment of the squatter. "If old Ishmael gets a squint at that highway through the brush," cried Paul, casting, as he left the place, a hasty glance at the broad trail the party had made through the thicket, "he'll need no finger-board to tell him which way his road lies. But let him follow! I know the vagabond would gladly cross his breed with a little honest blood, but if any son of his ever gets to be the husband of--" "Hush, Paul, hush," said the terrified young woman, who leaned on his arm for support; "your voice might be heard." The bee-hunter was silent, though he did not cease to cast ominous looks behind him, as they flew along the edge of the run, which sufficiently betrayed the belligerent condition of his mind. As each one was busy for himself, but a few minutes elapsed before the party rose a swell of the prairie, and descending without a moment's delay on the opposite side, they were at once removed from every danger of being seen by the sons of Ishmael, unless the pursuers should happen to fall upon their trail. The old man now profited by the formation of the land to take another direction, with a view to elude pursuit, as a vessel changes her course in fogs and darkness, to escape from the vigilance of her enemies. Two hours, passed in the utmost diligence, enabled them to make a half circuit around the rock, and to reach a point that was exactly opposite to the original direction of their flight. To most of the fugitives their situation was as entirely unknown as is that of a ship in the middle of the ocean to the uninstructed voyager: but the old man proceeded at every turn, and through every bottom, with a decision that inspired his followers with confidence, as it spoke favourably of his own knowledge of the localities. His hound, stopping now and then to catch the expression of his eye, had preceded the trapper throughout the whole distance, with as much certainty as though a previous and intelligible communion between them had established the route by which they were to proceed. But, at the expiration of the time just named, the dog suddenly came to a stand, and then seating himself on the prairie, he snuffed the air a moment, and began a low and piteous whining. "Ay--pup--ay. I know the spot--I know the spot, and reason there is to remember it well!" said the old man, stopping by the side of his uneasy associate,

bargain

How many times the word 'bargain' appears in the text?

you fool enough to believe what such a scoundrel as I am tells you, captain, unless it has probability to back it? I know you are not: therefore I will give my facts and my opinions, and then leave you to chew on them, while I go and drink of your generosity. I know a man who is called Abiram White.--I believe the knave took that name to show his enmity to the race of blacks! But this gentleman is now, and has been for years, to my certain knowledge, a regular translator of the human body from one State to another. I have dealt with him in my time, and a cheating dog he is! No more honour in him than meat in my stomach. I saw him here in this very town, the day of your wedding. He was in company with his wife's brother, and pretended to be a settler on the hunt for new land. A noble set they were, to carry on business--seven sons, each of them as tall as your sergeant with his cap on. Well, the moment I heard that your wife was lost, I saw at once that Abiram had laid his hands on her." "Do you know this--can this be true? What reason have you to fancy a thing so wild?" "Reason enough; I know Abiram White. Now, will you add a trifle just to keep my throat from parching?" "Go, go; you are stupified with drink already, miserable man, and know not what you say. Go; go, and beware the drummer." "Experience is a good guide"--the fellow called after the retiring Middleton; and then turning with a chuckling laugh, like one well satisfied with himself, he made the best of his way towards the shop of the suttler. A hundred times in the course of that night did Middleton fancy that the communication of the miscreant was entitled to some attention, and as often did he reject the idea as too wild and visionary for another thought. He was awakened early on the following morning, after passing a restless and nearly sleepless night, by his orderly, who came to report that a man was found dead on the parade, at no great distance from his quarters. Throwing on his clothes he proceeded to the spot, and beheld the individual, with whom he had held the preceding conference, in the precise situation in which he had first been found. The miserable wretch had fallen a victim to his intemperance. This revolting fact was sufficiently proclaimed by his obtruding eye-balls, his bloated countenance, and the nearly insufferable odours that were even then exhaling from his carcass. Disgusted with the odious spectacle, the youth was turning from the sight, after ordering the corpse to be removed, when the position of one of the dead man's hands struck him. On examination, he found the fore-finger extended, as if in the act of writing in the sand, with the following incomplete sentence, nearly illegible, but yet in a state to be deciphered: "Captain, it is true, as I am a gentle--" He had either died, or fallen into a sleep, the forerunner of his death, before the latter word was finished. Concealing this fact from the others, Middleton repeated his orders and departed. The pertinacity of the deceased, and all the circumstances united, induced him to set on foot some secret enquiries. He found that a family answering the description which had been given him, had in fact passed the place the day of his nuptials. They were traced along the margin of the Mississippi, for some distance, until they took boat and ascended the river to its confluence with the Missouri. Here they had disappeared like hundreds of others, in pursuit of the hidden wealth of the interior. Furnished with these facts, Middleton detailed a small guard of his most trusty men, took leave of Don Augustin, without declaring his hopes or his fears, and having arrived at the indicated point, he pushed into the wilderness in pursuit. It was not difficult to trace a train like that of Ishmael, until he was well assured its object lay far beyond the usual limits of the settlements. This circumstance, in itself, quickened his suspicions, and gave additional force to his hopes of final success. After getting beyond the assistance of verbal directions, the anxious husband had recourse to the usual signs of a trail, in order to follow the fugitives. This he also found a task of no difficulty, until he reached the hard and unyielding soil of the rolling prairies. Here, indeed, he was completely at fault. He found himself, at length, compelled to divide his followers, appointing a place of rendezvous at a distant day, and to endeavour to find the lost trail by multiplying, as much as possible, the number of his eyes. He had been alone a week, when accident brought him in contact with the trapper and the bee-hunter. Part of their interview has been related, and the reader can readily imagine the explanations that succeeded the tale he recounted, and which led, as has already been seen, to the recovery of his bride. CHAPTER XVI These likelihoods confirm her flight from hence, Therefore, I pray you, stay not to discourse, But mount you presently. --Shakspeare. An hour had slid by, in hasty and nearly incoherent questions and answers, before Middleton, hanging over his recovered treasure with that sort of jealous watchfulness with which a miser would regard his hoards, closed the disjointed narrative of his own proceedings by demanding-- "And you, my Inez; in what manner were you treated?" "In every thing, but the great injustice they did in separating me so forcibly from my friends, as well perhaps as the circumstances of my captors would allow. I think the man, who is certainly the master here, is but a new beginner in wickedness. He quarrelled frightfully in my presence, with the wretch who seized me, and then they made an impious bargain, to which I was compelled to acquiesce, and to which they bound me as well as themselves by oaths. Ah! Middleton, I fear the heretics are not so heedful of their vows as we who are nurtured in the bosom of the true church!" "Believe it not; these villains are of no religion: did they forswear themselves?" "No, not perjured: but was it not awful to call upon the good God to witness so sinful a compact?" "And so we think, Inez, as truly as the most virtuous cardinal of Rome. But how did they observe their oath, and what was its purport?" "They conditioned to leave me unmolested, and free from their odious presence, provided I would give a pledge to make no effort to escape; and that I would not even show myself, until a time that my masters saw fit to name." "And that time?" demanded the impatient Middleton, who so well knew the religious scruples of his wife--"that time?" "It is already passed. I was sworn by my patron saint, and faithfully did I keep the vow, until the man they call Ishmael forgot the terms by offering violence. I then made my appearance on the rock, for the time too was passed; though I even think father Ignatius would have absolved me from the vow, on account of the treachery of my keepers." "If he had not," muttered the youth between his compressed teeth, "I would have absolved him for ever from his spiritual care of your conscience!" "You, Middleton!" returned his wife looking up into his flushed face, while a bright blush suffused her own sweet countenance; "you may receive my vows, but surely you can have no power to absolve me from their observance!" "No, no, no. Inez, you are right. I know but little of these conscientious subtilties, and I am any thing but a priest: yet tell me, what has induced these monsters to play this desperate game--to trifle thus with my happiness?" "You know my ignorance of the world, and how ill I am qualified to furnish reasons for the conduct of beings so different from any I have ever seen before. But does not love of money drive men to acts even worse than this? I believe they thought that an aged and wealthy father could be tempted to pay them a rich ransom for his child; and, perhaps," she added, stealing an enquiring glance through her tears, at the attentive Middleton, "they counted something on the fresh affections of a bridegroom." "They might have extracted the blood from my heart, drop by drop!" "Yes," resumed his young and timid wife, instantly withdrawing the stolen look she had hazarded, and hurriedly pursuing the train of the discourse, as if glad to make him forget the liberty she had just taken, "I have been told, there are men so base as to perjure themselves at the altar, in order to command the gold of ignorant and confiding girls; and if love of money will lead to such baseness, we may surely expect it will hurry those, who devote themselves to gain, into acts of lesser fraud." "It must be so; and now, Inez, though I am here to guard you with my life, and we are in possession of this rock, our difficulties, perhaps our dangers, are not ended. You will summon all your courage to meet the trial and prove yourself a soldier's wife, my Inez?" "I am ready to depart this instant. The letter you sent by the physician, had prepared me to hope for the best, and I have every thing arranged for flight, at the shortest warning." "Let us then leave this place and join our friends." "Friends!" interrupted Inez, glancing her eyes around the little tent in quest of the form of Ellen. "I, too, have a friend who must not be forgotten, but who is pledged to pass the remainder of her life with us. She is gone!" Middleton gently led her from the spot, as he smilingly answered-- "She may have had, like myself, her own private communications for some favoured ear." The young man had not however done justice to the motives of Ellen Wade. The sensitive and intelligent girl had readily perceived how little her presence was necessary in the interview that has just been related, and had retired with that intuitive delicacy of feeling which seems to belong more properly to her sex. She was now to be seen seated on a point of the rock, with her person so entirely enveloped in her dress as to conceal her features. Here she had remained for near an hour, no one approaching to address her, and as it appeared to her own quick and jealous eyes, totally unobserved. In the latter particular, however, even the vigilance of the quick-sighted Ellen was deceived. The first act of Paul Hover, on finding himself the master of Ishmael's citadel, had been to sound the note of victory, after the quaint and ludicrous manner that is so often practised among the borderers of the West. Flapping his sides with his hands, as the conquering game-cock is wont to do with his wings, he raised a loud and laughable imitation of the exultation of this bird; a cry which might have proved a dangerous challenge had any one of the athletic sons of the squatter been within hearing. "This has been a regular knock-down and drag-out," he cried, "and no bones broke! How now, old trapper, you have been one of your training, platoon, rank and file soldiers in your day, and have seen forts taken and batteries stormed before this--am I right?" "Ay, ay, that have I," answered the old man, who still maintained his post at the foot of the rock, so little disturbed by what he had just witnessed, as to return the grin of Paul, with a hearty indulgence in his own silent and peculiar laughter; "you have gone through the exploit like men!" "Now tell me, is it not in rule, to call over the names of the living, and to bury the dead, after every bloody battle?" "Some did and other some didn't. When Sir William push'd the German, Dieskau, thro' the defiles at the foot of the Hori--" "Your Sir William was a drone to Sir Paul, and knew nothing of regularity. So here begins the roll-call--by the by, old man, what between bee-hunting and buffaloe humps, and certain other matters, I have been too busy to ask your name; for I intend to begin with my rear-guard, well knowing that my man in front is too busy to answer." "Lord, lad, I've been called in my time by as many names as there are people among whom I've dwelt. Now the Delawares nam'd me for my eyes, and I was called after the far-sighted hawk. Then, ag'in, the settlers in the Otsego hills christened me anew, from the fashion of my leggings; and various have been the names by which I have gone through life; but little will it matter when the time shall come, that all are to be muster'd, face to face, by what titles a mortal has played his part! I humbly trust I shall be able to answer to any of mine, in a loud and manly voice." Paul paid little or no attention to this reply, more than half of which was lost in the distance, but pursuing the humour of the moment, he called out in a stentorian voice to the naturalist to answer to his name. Dr. Battius had not thought it necessary to push his success beyond the comfortable niche, which accident had so opportunely formed for his protection, and in which he now reposed from his labours, with a pleasing consciousness of security, added to great exultation at the possession of the botanical treasure already mentioned. "Mount, mount, my worthy mole-catcher! come and behold the prospect of skirting Ishmael; come and look nature boldly in the face, and not go sneaking any longer, among the prairie grass and mullein tops, like a gobbler nibbling for grasshoppers." The mouth of the light-hearted and reckless bee-hunter was instantly closed, and he was rendered as mute, as he had just been boisterous and talkative, by the appearance of Ellen Wade. When the melancholy maiden took her seat on the point of the rock as mentioned, Paul affected to employ himself in conducting a close inspection of the household effects of the squatter. He rummaged the drawers of Esther with no delicate hands, scattered the rustic finery of her girls on the ground, without the least deference to its quality or elegance, and tossed her pots and kettles here and there, as though they had been vessels of wood instead of iron. All this industry was, however, manifestly without an object. He reserved nothing for himself, not even appearing conscious of the nature of the articles which suffered by his familiarity. When he had examined the inside of every cabin, taken a fresh survey of the spot where he had confined the children, and where he had thoroughly secured them with cords, and kicked one of the pails of the woman, like a foot-ball, fifty feet into the air, in sheer wantonness, he returned to the edge of the rock, and thrusting both his hands through his wampum belt, he began to whistle the "Kentucky Hunters" as diligently as if he had been hired to supply his auditors with music by the hour. In this manner passed the remainder of the time, until Middleton, as has been related, led Inez forth from the tent, and gave a new direction to the thoughts of the whole party. He summoned Paul from his flourish of music, tore the Doctor from the study of his plant, and, as acknowledged leader, gave the necessary orders for immediate departure. In the bustle and confusion that were likely to succeed such a mandate, there was little opportunity to indulge in complaints or reflections. As the adventurers had not come unprepared for victory, each individual employed himself in such offices as were best adapted to his strength and situation. The trapper had already made himself master of the patient Asinus, who was quietly feeding at no great distance from the rock, and he was now busy in fitting his back with the complicated machinery that Dr. Battius saw fit to term a saddle of his own invention. The naturalist himself seized upon his portfolios, herbals, and collection of insects, which he quickly transferred from the encampment of the squatter, to certain pockets in the aforesaid ingenious invention, and which the trapper as uniformly cast away the moment his back was turned. Paul showed his dexterity in removing such light articles as Inez and Ellen had prepared for their flight to the foot of the citadel, while Middleton, after mingling threats and promises, in order to induce the children to remain quietly in their bondage, assisted the females to descend. As time began to press upon them, and there was great danger of Ishmael's returning, these several movements were made with singular industry and despatch. The trapper bestowed such articles as he conceived were necessary to the comfort of the weaker and more delicate members of the party, in those pockets from which he had so unceremoniously expelled the treasures of the unconscious naturalist, and then gave way for Middleton to place Inez in one of those seats which he had prepared on the back of the animal for her and her companion. "Go, child," the old man said, motioning to Ellen to follow the example of the lady, and turning his head a little anxiously to examine the waste behind him. "It cannot be long afore the owner of this place will be coming to look after his household; and he is not a man to give up his property, however obtained, without complaint!" "It is true," cried Middleton; "we have wasted moments that are precious, and have the utmost need of industry." "Ay, ay, I thought it; and would have said it, captain; but I remembered how your grand'ther used to love to look upon the face of her he led away for a wife, in the days of his youth and his happiness. 'Tis natur', 'tis natur', and 'tis wiser to give way a little before its feelings, than to try to stop a current that will have its course." Ellen advanced to the side of the beast, and seizing Inez by the hand, she said, with heartfelt warmth, after struggling to suppress an emotion that nearly choked her-- "God bless you, sweet lady! I hope you will forget and forgive the wrongs you have received from my uncle--" The humbled and sorrowful girl could say no more, her voice becoming entirely inaudible in an ungovernable burst of grief. "How is this?" cried Middleton; "did you not say, Inez, that this excellent young woman was to accompany us, and to live with us for the remainder of her life; or, at least, until she found some more agreeable residence for herself?" "I did; and I still hope it. She has always given me reason to believe, that after having shown so much commiseration and friendship in my misery, she would not desert me, should happier times return." "I cannot--I ought not," continued Ellen, getting the better of her momentary weakness. "It has pleased God to cast my lot among these people, and I ought not to quit them. It would be adding the appearance of treachery to what will already seem bad enough, with one of his opinions. He has been kind to me, an orphan, after his rough customs, and I cannot steal from him at such a moment." "She is just as much a relation of skirting Ishmael as I am a bishop!" said Paul, with a loud hem, as if his throat wanted clearing. "If the old fellow has done the honest thing by her, in giving her a morsel of venison now and then, or a spoon around his homminy dish, hasn't she pay'd him in teaching the young devils to read their Bible, or in helping old Esther to put her finery in shape and fashion. Tell me that a drone has a sting, and I'll believe you as easily as I will that this young woman is a debtor to any of the tribe of Bush!" "It is but little matter who owes me, or where I am in debt. There are none to care for a girl who is fatherless and motherless, and whose nearest kin are the offcasts of all honest people. No, no; go, lady, and Heaven for ever bless you! I am better here, in this desert, where there are none to know my shame." "Now, old trapper," retorted Paul, "this is what I call knowing which way the wind blows! You ar' a man that has seen life, and you know something of fashions; I put it to your judgment, plainly, isn't it in the nature of things for the hive to swarm when the young get their growth, and if children will quit their parents, ought one who is of no kith or kin--" "Hist!" interrupted the man he addressed, "Hector is discontented. Say it out, plainly, pup; what is it dog--what is it?" The venerable hound had risen, and was scenting the fresh breeze which continued to sweep heavily over the prairie. At the words of his master he growled and contracted the muscles of his lips, as if half disposed to threaten with the remnants of his teeth. The younger dog, who was resting after the chase of the morning, also made some signs that his nose detected a taint in the air, and then the two resumed their slumbers, as if they had done enough. The trapper seized the bridle of the ass, and cried, urging the beast onward-- "There is no time for words. The squatter and his brood are within a mile or two of this blessed spot!" Middleton lost all recollection of Ellen, in the danger which now so eminently beset his recovered bride; nor is it necessary to add, that Dr. Battius did not wait for a second admonition to commence his retreat. Following the route indicated by the old man, they turned the rock in a body, and pursued their way as fast as possible across the prairie, under the favour of the cover it afforded. Paul Hover, however, remained in his tracks, sullenly leaning on his rifle. Near a minute had elapsed before he was observed by Ellen, who had buried her face in her hands, to conceal her fancied desolation from herself. "Why do you not fly?" the weeping girl exclaimed, the instant she perceived she was not alone. "I'm not used to it." "My uncle will soon be here! you have nothing to hope from his pity." "Nor from that of his niece, I reckon. Let him come; he can only knock me on the head!" "Paul, Paul, if you love me, fly." "Alone!--if I do, may I be--" "If you value your life, fly!" "I value it not, compared to you." "Paul!" "Ellen!" She extended both her hands and burst into another and a still more violent flood of tears. The bee-hunter put one of his sturdy arms around her waist, and in another moment he was urging her over the plain, in rapid pursuit of their flying friends. CHAPTER XVII Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight With a new Gorgon--Do not bid me speak; See, and then speak yourselves. --Shakspeare. The little run, which supplied the family of the squatter with water, and nourished the trees and bushes that grew near the base of the rocky eminence, took its rise at no great distance from the latter, in a small thicket of cotton-wood and vines. Hither, then, the trapper directed the flight, as to the place affording the only available cover in so pressing an emergency. It will be remembered, that the sagacity of the old man, which, from long practice in similar scenes, amounted nearly to an instinct in all cases of sudden danger, had first induced him to take this course, as it placed the hill between them and the approaching party. Favoured by this circumstance, he succeeded in reaching the bushes in sufficient time and Paul Hover had just hurried the breathless Ellen into the tangled bush, as Ishmael gained the summit of the rock, in the manner already described, where he stood like a man momentarily bereft of sense, gazing at the confusion which had been created among his chattels, or at his gagged and bound children, who had been safely bestowed, by the forethought of the bee-hunter, under the cover of a bark roof, in a sort of irregular pile. A long rifle would have thrown a bullet from the height, on which the squatter now stood, into the very cover where the fugitives, who had wrought all this mischief, were clustered. The trapper was the first to speak, as the man on whose intelligence and experience they all depended for counsel, after running his eye over the different individuals who gathered about him, in order to see that none were missing. "Ah! natur' is natur', and has done its work!" he said, nodding to the exulting Paul, with a smile of approbation. "I thought it would be hard for those, who had so often met in fair and foul, by starlight and under the clouded moon, to part at last in anger. Now is there little time to lose in talk, and every thing to gain by industry! It cannot be long afore some of yonder brood will be nosing along the 'arth for our trail, and should they find it, as find it they surely will, and should they push us to a stand on our courage, the dispute must be settled with the rifle; which may He in heaven forbid! Captain, can you lead us to the place where any of your warriors lie?--For the stout sons of the squatter will make a manly brush of it, or I am but little of a judge in warlike dispositions!" "The place of rendezvous is many leagues from this, on the banks of La Platte." "It is bad--it is bad. If fighting is to be done, it is always wise to enter on it on equal terms. But what has one so near his time to do with ill-blood and hot-blood at his heart! Listen to what a grey head and some experience have to offer, and then if any among you can point out a wiser fashion for a retreat, we can just follow his design, and forget that I have spoken. This thicket stretches for near a mile as it may be slanting from the rock, and leads towards the sunset instead of the settlements." "Enough, enough," cried Middleton, too impatient to wait until the deliberative and perhaps loquacious old man could end his minute explanation. "Time is too precious for words. Let us fly." The trapper made a gesture of compliance, and turning in his tracks, he led Asinus across the trembling earth of the swale, and quickly emerged on the hard ground, on the side opposite to the encampment of the squatter. "If old Ishmael gets a squint at that highway through the brush," cried Paul, casting, as he left the place, a hasty glance at the broad trail the party had made through the thicket, "he'll need no finger-board to tell him which way his road lies. But let him follow! I know the vagabond would gladly cross his breed with a little honest blood, but if any son of his ever gets to be the husband of--" "Hush, Paul, hush," said the terrified young woman, who leaned on his arm for support; "your voice might be heard." The bee-hunter was silent, though he did not cease to cast ominous looks behind him, as they flew along the edge of the run, which sufficiently betrayed the belligerent condition of his mind. As each one was busy for himself, but a few minutes elapsed before the party rose a swell of the prairie, and descending without a moment's delay on the opposite side, they were at once removed from every danger of being seen by the sons of Ishmael, unless the pursuers should happen to fall upon their trail. The old man now profited by the formation of the land to take another direction, with a view to elude pursuit, as a vessel changes her course in fogs and darkness, to escape from the vigilance of her enemies. Two hours, passed in the utmost diligence, enabled them to make a half circuit around the rock, and to reach a point that was exactly opposite to the original direction of their flight. To most of the fugitives their situation was as entirely unknown as is that of a ship in the middle of the ocean to the uninstructed voyager: but the old man proceeded at every turn, and through every bottom, with a decision that inspired his followers with confidence, as it spoke favourably of his own knowledge of the localities. His hound, stopping now and then to catch the expression of his eye, had preceded the trapper throughout the whole distance, with as much certainty as though a previous and intelligible communion between them had established the route by which they were to proceed. But, at the expiration of the time just named, the dog suddenly came to a stand, and then seating himself on the prairie, he snuffed the air a moment, and began a low and piteous whining. "Ay--pup--ay. I know the spot--I know the spot, and reason there is to remember it well!" said the old man, stopping by the side of his uneasy associate,

abiram

How many times the word 'abiram' appears in the text?

you fool enough to believe what such a scoundrel as I am tells you, captain, unless it has probability to back it? I know you are not: therefore I will give my facts and my opinions, and then leave you to chew on them, while I go and drink of your generosity. I know a man who is called Abiram White.--I believe the knave took that name to show his enmity to the race of blacks! But this gentleman is now, and has been for years, to my certain knowledge, a regular translator of the human body from one State to another. I have dealt with him in my time, and a cheating dog he is! No more honour in him than meat in my stomach. I saw him here in this very town, the day of your wedding. He was in company with his wife's brother, and pretended to be a settler on the hunt for new land. A noble set they were, to carry on business--seven sons, each of them as tall as your sergeant with his cap on. Well, the moment I heard that your wife was lost, I saw at once that Abiram had laid his hands on her." "Do you know this--can this be true? What reason have you to fancy a thing so wild?" "Reason enough; I know Abiram White. Now, will you add a trifle just to keep my throat from parching?" "Go, go; you are stupified with drink already, miserable man, and know not what you say. Go; go, and beware the drummer." "Experience is a good guide"--the fellow called after the retiring Middleton; and then turning with a chuckling laugh, like one well satisfied with himself, he made the best of his way towards the shop of the suttler. A hundred times in the course of that night did Middleton fancy that the communication of the miscreant was entitled to some attention, and as often did he reject the idea as too wild and visionary for another thought. He was awakened early on the following morning, after passing a restless and nearly sleepless night, by his orderly, who came to report that a man was found dead on the parade, at no great distance from his quarters. Throwing on his clothes he proceeded to the spot, and beheld the individual, with whom he had held the preceding conference, in the precise situation in which he had first been found. The miserable wretch had fallen a victim to his intemperance. This revolting fact was sufficiently proclaimed by his obtruding eye-balls, his bloated countenance, and the nearly insufferable odours that were even then exhaling from his carcass. Disgusted with the odious spectacle, the youth was turning from the sight, after ordering the corpse to be removed, when the position of one of the dead man's hands struck him. On examination, he found the fore-finger extended, as if in the act of writing in the sand, with the following incomplete sentence, nearly illegible, but yet in a state to be deciphered: "Captain, it is true, as I am a gentle--" He had either died, or fallen into a sleep, the forerunner of his death, before the latter word was finished. Concealing this fact from the others, Middleton repeated his orders and departed. The pertinacity of the deceased, and all the circumstances united, induced him to set on foot some secret enquiries. He found that a family answering the description which had been given him, had in fact passed the place the day of his nuptials. They were traced along the margin of the Mississippi, for some distance, until they took boat and ascended the river to its confluence with the Missouri. Here they had disappeared like hundreds of others, in pursuit of the hidden wealth of the interior. Furnished with these facts, Middleton detailed a small guard of his most trusty men, took leave of Don Augustin, without declaring his hopes or his fears, and having arrived at the indicated point, he pushed into the wilderness in pursuit. It was not difficult to trace a train like that of Ishmael, until he was well assured its object lay far beyond the usual limits of the settlements. This circumstance, in itself, quickened his suspicions, and gave additional force to his hopes of final success. After getting beyond the assistance of verbal directions, the anxious husband had recourse to the usual signs of a trail, in order to follow the fugitives. This he also found a task of no difficulty, until he reached the hard and unyielding soil of the rolling prairies. Here, indeed, he was completely at fault. He found himself, at length, compelled to divide his followers, appointing a place of rendezvous at a distant day, and to endeavour to find the lost trail by multiplying, as much as possible, the number of his eyes. He had been alone a week, when accident brought him in contact with the trapper and the bee-hunter. Part of their interview has been related, and the reader can readily imagine the explanations that succeeded the tale he recounted, and which led, as has already been seen, to the recovery of his bride. CHAPTER XVI These likelihoods confirm her flight from hence, Therefore, I pray you, stay not to discourse, But mount you presently. --Shakspeare. An hour had slid by, in hasty and nearly incoherent questions and answers, before Middleton, hanging over his recovered treasure with that sort of jealous watchfulness with which a miser would regard his hoards, closed the disjointed narrative of his own proceedings by demanding-- "And you, my Inez; in what manner were you treated?" "In every thing, but the great injustice they did in separating me so forcibly from my friends, as well perhaps as the circumstances of my captors would allow. I think the man, who is certainly the master here, is but a new beginner in wickedness. He quarrelled frightfully in my presence, with the wretch who seized me, and then they made an impious bargain, to which I was compelled to acquiesce, and to which they bound me as well as themselves by oaths. Ah! Middleton, I fear the heretics are not so heedful of their vows as we who are nurtured in the bosom of the true church!" "Believe it not; these villains are of no religion: did they forswear themselves?" "No, not perjured: but was it not awful to call upon the good God to witness so sinful a compact?" "And so we think, Inez, as truly as the most virtuous cardinal of Rome. But how did they observe their oath, and what was its purport?" "They conditioned to leave me unmolested, and free from their odious presence, provided I would give a pledge to make no effort to escape; and that I would not even show myself, until a time that my masters saw fit to name." "And that time?" demanded the impatient Middleton, who so well knew the religious scruples of his wife--"that time?" "It is already passed. I was sworn by my patron saint, and faithfully did I keep the vow, until the man they call Ishmael forgot the terms by offering violence. I then made my appearance on the rock, for the time too was passed; though I even think father Ignatius would have absolved me from the vow, on account of the treachery of my keepers." "If he had not," muttered the youth between his compressed teeth, "I would have absolved him for ever from his spiritual care of your conscience!" "You, Middleton!" returned his wife looking up into his flushed face, while a bright blush suffused her own sweet countenance; "you may receive my vows, but surely you can have no power to absolve me from their observance!" "No, no, no. Inez, you are right. I know but little of these conscientious subtilties, and I am any thing but a priest: yet tell me, what has induced these monsters to play this desperate game--to trifle thus with my happiness?" "You know my ignorance of the world, and how ill I am qualified to furnish reasons for the conduct of beings so different from any I have ever seen before. But does not love of money drive men to acts even worse than this? I believe they thought that an aged and wealthy father could be tempted to pay them a rich ransom for his child; and, perhaps," she added, stealing an enquiring glance through her tears, at the attentive Middleton, "they counted something on the fresh affections of a bridegroom." "They might have extracted the blood from my heart, drop by drop!" "Yes," resumed his young and timid wife, instantly withdrawing the stolen look she had hazarded, and hurriedly pursuing the train of the discourse, as if glad to make him forget the liberty she had just taken, "I have been told, there are men so base as to perjure themselves at the altar, in order to command the gold of ignorant and confiding girls; and if love of money will lead to such baseness, we may surely expect it will hurry those, who devote themselves to gain, into acts of lesser fraud." "It must be so; and now, Inez, though I am here to guard you with my life, and we are in possession of this rock, our difficulties, perhaps our dangers, are not ended. You will summon all your courage to meet the trial and prove yourself a soldier's wife, my Inez?" "I am ready to depart this instant. The letter you sent by the physician, had prepared me to hope for the best, and I have every thing arranged for flight, at the shortest warning." "Let us then leave this place and join our friends." "Friends!" interrupted Inez, glancing her eyes around the little tent in quest of the form of Ellen. "I, too, have a friend who must not be forgotten, but who is pledged to pass the remainder of her life with us. She is gone!" Middleton gently led her from the spot, as he smilingly answered-- "She may have had, like myself, her own private communications for some favoured ear." The young man had not however done justice to the motives of Ellen Wade. The sensitive and intelligent girl had readily perceived how little her presence was necessary in the interview that has just been related, and had retired with that intuitive delicacy of feeling which seems to belong more properly to her sex. She was now to be seen seated on a point of the rock, with her person so entirely enveloped in her dress as to conceal her features. Here she had remained for near an hour, no one approaching to address her, and as it appeared to her own quick and jealous eyes, totally unobserved. In the latter particular, however, even the vigilance of the quick-sighted Ellen was deceived. The first act of Paul Hover, on finding himself the master of Ishmael's citadel, had been to sound the note of victory, after the quaint and ludicrous manner that is so often practised among the borderers of the West. Flapping his sides with his hands, as the conquering game-cock is wont to do with his wings, he raised a loud and laughable imitation of the exultation of this bird; a cry which might have proved a dangerous challenge had any one of the athletic sons of the squatter been within hearing. "This has been a regular knock-down and drag-out," he cried, "and no bones broke! How now, old trapper, you have been one of your training, platoon, rank and file soldiers in your day, and have seen forts taken and batteries stormed before this--am I right?" "Ay, ay, that have I," answered the old man, who still maintained his post at the foot of the rock, so little disturbed by what he had just witnessed, as to return the grin of Paul, with a hearty indulgence in his own silent and peculiar laughter; "you have gone through the exploit like men!" "Now tell me, is it not in rule, to call over the names of the living, and to bury the dead, after every bloody battle?" "Some did and other some didn't. When Sir William push'd the German, Dieskau, thro' the defiles at the foot of the Hori--" "Your Sir William was a drone to Sir Paul, and knew nothing of regularity. So here begins the roll-call--by the by, old man, what between bee-hunting and buffaloe humps, and certain other matters, I have been too busy to ask your name; for I intend to begin with my rear-guard, well knowing that my man in front is too busy to answer." "Lord, lad, I've been called in my time by as many names as there are people among whom I've dwelt. Now the Delawares nam'd me for my eyes, and I was called after the far-sighted hawk. Then, ag'in, the settlers in the Otsego hills christened me anew, from the fashion of my leggings; and various have been the names by which I have gone through life; but little will it matter when the time shall come, that all are to be muster'd, face to face, by what titles a mortal has played his part! I humbly trust I shall be able to answer to any of mine, in a loud and manly voice." Paul paid little or no attention to this reply, more than half of which was lost in the distance, but pursuing the humour of the moment, he called out in a stentorian voice to the naturalist to answer to his name. Dr. Battius had not thought it necessary to push his success beyond the comfortable niche, which accident had so opportunely formed for his protection, and in which he now reposed from his labours, with a pleasing consciousness of security, added to great exultation at the possession of the botanical treasure already mentioned. "Mount, mount, my worthy mole-catcher! come and behold the prospect of skirting Ishmael; come and look nature boldly in the face, and not go sneaking any longer, among the prairie grass and mullein tops, like a gobbler nibbling for grasshoppers." The mouth of the light-hearted and reckless bee-hunter was instantly closed, and he was rendered as mute, as he had just been boisterous and talkative, by the appearance of Ellen Wade. When the melancholy maiden took her seat on the point of the rock as mentioned, Paul affected to employ himself in conducting a close inspection of the household effects of the squatter. He rummaged the drawers of Esther with no delicate hands, scattered the rustic finery of her girls on the ground, without the least deference to its quality or elegance, and tossed her pots and kettles here and there, as though they had been vessels of wood instead of iron. All this industry was, however, manifestly without an object. He reserved nothing for himself, not even appearing conscious of the nature of the articles which suffered by his familiarity. When he had examined the inside of every cabin, taken a fresh survey of the spot where he had confined the children, and where he had thoroughly secured them with cords, and kicked one of the pails of the woman, like a foot-ball, fifty feet into the air, in sheer wantonness, he returned to the edge of the rock, and thrusting both his hands through his wampum belt, he began to whistle the "Kentucky Hunters" as diligently as if he had been hired to supply his auditors with music by the hour. In this manner passed the remainder of the time, until Middleton, as has been related, led Inez forth from the tent, and gave a new direction to the thoughts of the whole party. He summoned Paul from his flourish of music, tore the Doctor from the study of his plant, and, as acknowledged leader, gave the necessary orders for immediate departure. In the bustle and confusion that were likely to succeed such a mandate, there was little opportunity to indulge in complaints or reflections. As the adventurers had not come unprepared for victory, each individual employed himself in such offices as were best adapted to his strength and situation. The trapper had already made himself master of the patient Asinus, who was quietly feeding at no great distance from the rock, and he was now busy in fitting his back with the complicated machinery that Dr. Battius saw fit to term a saddle of his own invention. The naturalist himself seized upon his portfolios, herbals, and collection of insects, which he quickly transferred from the encampment of the squatter, to certain pockets in the aforesaid ingenious invention, and which the trapper as uniformly cast away the moment his back was turned. Paul showed his dexterity in removing such light articles as Inez and Ellen had prepared for their flight to the foot of the citadel, while Middleton, after mingling threats and promises, in order to induce the children to remain quietly in their bondage, assisted the females to descend. As time began to press upon them, and there was great danger of Ishmael's returning, these several movements were made with singular industry and despatch. The trapper bestowed such articles as he conceived were necessary to the comfort of the weaker and more delicate members of the party, in those pockets from which he had so unceremoniously expelled the treasures of the unconscious naturalist, and then gave way for Middleton to place Inez in one of those seats which he had prepared on the back of the animal for her and her companion. "Go, child," the old man said, motioning to Ellen to follow the example of the lady, and turning his head a little anxiously to examine the waste behind him. "It cannot be long afore the owner of this place will be coming to look after his household; and he is not a man to give up his property, however obtained, without complaint!" "It is true," cried Middleton; "we have wasted moments that are precious, and have the utmost need of industry." "Ay, ay, I thought it; and would have said it, captain; but I remembered how your grand'ther used to love to look upon the face of her he led away for a wife, in the days of his youth and his happiness. 'Tis natur', 'tis natur', and 'tis wiser to give way a little before its feelings, than to try to stop a current that will have its course." Ellen advanced to the side of the beast, and seizing Inez by the hand, she said, with heartfelt warmth, after struggling to suppress an emotion that nearly choked her-- "God bless you, sweet lady! I hope you will forget and forgive the wrongs you have received from my uncle--" The humbled and sorrowful girl could say no more, her voice becoming entirely inaudible in an ungovernable burst of grief. "How is this?" cried Middleton; "did you not say, Inez, that this excellent young woman was to accompany us, and to live with us for the remainder of her life; or, at least, until she found some more agreeable residence for herself?" "I did; and I still hope it. She has always given me reason to believe, that after having shown so much commiseration and friendship in my misery, she would not desert me, should happier times return." "I cannot--I ought not," continued Ellen, getting the better of her momentary weakness. "It has pleased God to cast my lot among these people, and I ought not to quit them. It would be adding the appearance of treachery to what will already seem bad enough, with one of his opinions. He has been kind to me, an orphan, after his rough customs, and I cannot steal from him at such a moment." "She is just as much a relation of skirting Ishmael as I am a bishop!" said Paul, with a loud hem, as if his throat wanted clearing. "If the old fellow has done the honest thing by her, in giving her a morsel of venison now and then, or a spoon around his homminy dish, hasn't she pay'd him in teaching the young devils to read their Bible, or in helping old Esther to put her finery in shape and fashion. Tell me that a drone has a sting, and I'll believe you as easily as I will that this young woman is a debtor to any of the tribe of Bush!" "It is but little matter who owes me, or where I am in debt. There are none to care for a girl who is fatherless and motherless, and whose nearest kin are the offcasts of all honest people. No, no; go, lady, and Heaven for ever bless you! I am better here, in this desert, where there are none to know my shame." "Now, old trapper," retorted Paul, "this is what I call knowing which way the wind blows! You ar' a man that has seen life, and you know something of fashions; I put it to your judgment, plainly, isn't it in the nature of things for the hive to swarm when the young get their growth, and if children will quit their parents, ought one who is of no kith or kin--" "Hist!" interrupted the man he addressed, "Hector is discontented. Say it out, plainly, pup; what is it dog--what is it?" The venerable hound had risen, and was scenting the fresh breeze which continued to sweep heavily over the prairie. At the words of his master he growled and contracted the muscles of his lips, as if half disposed to threaten with the remnants of his teeth. The younger dog, who was resting after the chase of the morning, also made some signs that his nose detected a taint in the air, and then the two resumed their slumbers, as if they had done enough. The trapper seized the bridle of the ass, and cried, urging the beast onward-- "There is no time for words. The squatter and his brood are within a mile or two of this blessed spot!" Middleton lost all recollection of Ellen, in the danger which now so eminently beset his recovered bride; nor is it necessary to add, that Dr. Battius did not wait for a second admonition to commence his retreat. Following the route indicated by the old man, they turned the rock in a body, and pursued their way as fast as possible across the prairie, under the favour of the cover it afforded. Paul Hover, however, remained in his tracks, sullenly leaning on his rifle. Near a minute had elapsed before he was observed by Ellen, who had buried her face in her hands, to conceal her fancied desolation from herself. "Why do you not fly?" the weeping girl exclaimed, the instant she perceived she was not alone. "I'm not used to it." "My uncle will soon be here! you have nothing to hope from his pity." "Nor from that of his niece, I reckon. Let him come; he can only knock me on the head!" "Paul, Paul, if you love me, fly." "Alone!--if I do, may I be--" "If you value your life, fly!" "I value it not, compared to you." "Paul!" "Ellen!" She extended both her hands and burst into another and a still more violent flood of tears. The bee-hunter put one of his sturdy arms around her waist, and in another moment he was urging her over the plain, in rapid pursuit of their flying friends. CHAPTER XVII Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight With a new Gorgon--Do not bid me speak; See, and then speak yourselves. --Shakspeare. The little run, which supplied the family of the squatter with water, and nourished the trees and bushes that grew near the base of the rocky eminence, took its rise at no great distance from the latter, in a small thicket of cotton-wood and vines. Hither, then, the trapper directed the flight, as to the place affording the only available cover in so pressing an emergency. It will be remembered, that the sagacity of the old man, which, from long practice in similar scenes, amounted nearly to an instinct in all cases of sudden danger, had first induced him to take this course, as it placed the hill between them and the approaching party. Favoured by this circumstance, he succeeded in reaching the bushes in sufficient time and Paul Hover had just hurried the breathless Ellen into the tangled bush, as Ishmael gained the summit of the rock, in the manner already described, where he stood like a man momentarily bereft of sense, gazing at the confusion which had been created among his chattels, or at his gagged and bound children, who had been safely bestowed, by the forethought of the bee-hunter, under the cover of a bark roof, in a sort of irregular pile. A long rifle would have thrown a bullet from the height, on which the squatter now stood, into the very cover where the fugitives, who had wrought all this mischief, were clustered. The trapper was the first to speak, as the man on whose intelligence and experience they all depended for counsel, after running his eye over the different individuals who gathered about him, in order to see that none were missing. "Ah! natur' is natur', and has done its work!" he said, nodding to the exulting Paul, with a smile of approbation. "I thought it would be hard for those, who had so often met in fair and foul, by starlight and under the clouded moon, to part at last in anger. Now is there little time to lose in talk, and every thing to gain by industry! It cannot be long afore some of yonder brood will be nosing along the 'arth for our trail, and should they find it, as find it they surely will, and should they push us to a stand on our courage, the dispute must be settled with the rifle; which may He in heaven forbid! Captain, can you lead us to the place where any of your warriors lie?--For the stout sons of the squatter will make a manly brush of it, or I am but little of a judge in warlike dispositions!" "The place of rendezvous is many leagues from this, on the banks of La Platte." "It is bad--it is bad. If fighting is to be done, it is always wise to enter on it on equal terms. But what has one so near his time to do with ill-blood and hot-blood at his heart! Listen to what a grey head and some experience have to offer, and then if any among you can point out a wiser fashion for a retreat, we can just follow his design, and forget that I have spoken. This thicket stretches for near a mile as it may be slanting from the rock, and leads towards the sunset instead of the settlements." "Enough, enough," cried Middleton, too impatient to wait until the deliberative and perhaps loquacious old man could end his minute explanation. "Time is too precious for words. Let us fly." The trapper made a gesture of compliance, and turning in his tracks, he led Asinus across the trembling earth of the swale, and quickly emerged on the hard ground, on the side opposite to the encampment of the squatter. "If old Ishmael gets a squint at that highway through the brush," cried Paul, casting, as he left the place, a hasty glance at the broad trail the party had made through the thicket, "he'll need no finger-board to tell him which way his road lies. But let him follow! I know the vagabond would gladly cross his breed with a little honest blood, but if any son of his ever gets to be the husband of--" "Hush, Paul, hush," said the terrified young woman, who leaned on his arm for support; "your voice might be heard." The bee-hunter was silent, though he did not cease to cast ominous looks behind him, as they flew along the edge of the run, which sufficiently betrayed the belligerent condition of his mind. As each one was busy for himself, but a few minutes elapsed before the party rose a swell of the prairie, and descending without a moment's delay on the opposite side, they were at once removed from every danger of being seen by the sons of Ishmael, unless the pursuers should happen to fall upon their trail. The old man now profited by the formation of the land to take another direction, with a view to elude pursuit, as a vessel changes her course in fogs and darkness, to escape from the vigilance of her enemies. Two hours, passed in the utmost diligence, enabled them to make a half circuit around the rock, and to reach a point that was exactly opposite to the original direction of their flight. To most of the fugitives their situation was as entirely unknown as is that of a ship in the middle of the ocean to the uninstructed voyager: but the old man proceeded at every turn, and through every bottom, with a decision that inspired his followers with confidence, as it spoke favourably of his own knowledge of the localities. His hound, stopping now and then to catch the expression of his eye, had preceded the trapper throughout the whole distance, with as much certainty as though a previous and intelligible communion between them had established the route by which they were to proceed. But, at the expiration of the time just named, the dog suddenly came to a stand, and then seating himself on the prairie, he snuffed the air a moment, and began a low and piteous whining. "Ay--pup--ay. I know the spot--I know the spot, and reason there is to remember it well!" said the old man, stopping by the side of his uneasy associate,

enmity

How many times the word 'enmity' appears in the text?

you fool enough to believe what such a scoundrel as I am tells you, captain, unless it has probability to back it? I know you are not: therefore I will give my facts and my opinions, and then leave you to chew on them, while I go and drink of your generosity. I know a man who is called Abiram White.--I believe the knave took that name to show his enmity to the race of blacks! But this gentleman is now, and has been for years, to my certain knowledge, a regular translator of the human body from one State to another. I have dealt with him in my time, and a cheating dog he is! No more honour in him than meat in my stomach. I saw him here in this very town, the day of your wedding. He was in company with his wife's brother, and pretended to be a settler on the hunt for new land. A noble set they were, to carry on business--seven sons, each of them as tall as your sergeant with his cap on. Well, the moment I heard that your wife was lost, I saw at once that Abiram had laid his hands on her." "Do you know this--can this be true? What reason have you to fancy a thing so wild?" "Reason enough; I know Abiram White. Now, will you add a trifle just to keep my throat from parching?" "Go, go; you are stupified with drink already, miserable man, and know not what you say. Go; go, and beware the drummer." "Experience is a good guide"--the fellow called after the retiring Middleton; and then turning with a chuckling laugh, like one well satisfied with himself, he made the best of his way towards the shop of the suttler. A hundred times in the course of that night did Middleton fancy that the communication of the miscreant was entitled to some attention, and as often did he reject the idea as too wild and visionary for another thought. He was awakened early on the following morning, after passing a restless and nearly sleepless night, by his orderly, who came to report that a man was found dead on the parade, at no great distance from his quarters. Throwing on his clothes he proceeded to the spot, and beheld the individual, with whom he had held the preceding conference, in the precise situation in which he had first been found. The miserable wretch had fallen a victim to his intemperance. This revolting fact was sufficiently proclaimed by his obtruding eye-balls, his bloated countenance, and the nearly insufferable odours that were even then exhaling from his carcass. Disgusted with the odious spectacle, the youth was turning from the sight, after ordering the corpse to be removed, when the position of one of the dead man's hands struck him. On examination, he found the fore-finger extended, as if in the act of writing in the sand, with the following incomplete sentence, nearly illegible, but yet in a state to be deciphered: "Captain, it is true, as I am a gentle--" He had either died, or fallen into a sleep, the forerunner of his death, before the latter word was finished. Concealing this fact from the others, Middleton repeated his orders and departed. The pertinacity of the deceased, and all the circumstances united, induced him to set on foot some secret enquiries. He found that a family answering the description which had been given him, had in fact passed the place the day of his nuptials. They were traced along the margin of the Mississippi, for some distance, until they took boat and ascended the river to its confluence with the Missouri. Here they had disappeared like hundreds of others, in pursuit of the hidden wealth of the interior. Furnished with these facts, Middleton detailed a small guard of his most trusty men, took leave of Don Augustin, without declaring his hopes or his fears, and having arrived at the indicated point, he pushed into the wilderness in pursuit. It was not difficult to trace a train like that of Ishmael, until he was well assured its object lay far beyond the usual limits of the settlements. This circumstance, in itself, quickened his suspicions, and gave additional force to his hopes of final success. After getting beyond the assistance of verbal directions, the anxious husband had recourse to the usual signs of a trail, in order to follow the fugitives. This he also found a task of no difficulty, until he reached the hard and unyielding soil of the rolling prairies. Here, indeed, he was completely at fault. He found himself, at length, compelled to divide his followers, appointing a place of rendezvous at a distant day, and to endeavour to find the lost trail by multiplying, as much as possible, the number of his eyes. He had been alone a week, when accident brought him in contact with the trapper and the bee-hunter. Part of their interview has been related, and the reader can readily imagine the explanations that succeeded the tale he recounted, and which led, as has already been seen, to the recovery of his bride. CHAPTER XVI These likelihoods confirm her flight from hence, Therefore, I pray you, stay not to discourse, But mount you presently. --Shakspeare. An hour had slid by, in hasty and nearly incoherent questions and answers, before Middleton, hanging over his recovered treasure with that sort of jealous watchfulness with which a miser would regard his hoards, closed the disjointed narrative of his own proceedings by demanding-- "And you, my Inez; in what manner were you treated?" "In every thing, but the great injustice they did in separating me so forcibly from my friends, as well perhaps as the circumstances of my captors would allow. I think the man, who is certainly the master here, is but a new beginner in wickedness. He quarrelled frightfully in my presence, with the wretch who seized me, and then they made an impious bargain, to which I was compelled to acquiesce, and to which they bound me as well as themselves by oaths. Ah! Middleton, I fear the heretics are not so heedful of their vows as we who are nurtured in the bosom of the true church!" "Believe it not; these villains are of no religion: did they forswear themselves?" "No, not perjured: but was it not awful to call upon the good God to witness so sinful a compact?" "And so we think, Inez, as truly as the most virtuous cardinal of Rome. But how did they observe their oath, and what was its purport?" "They conditioned to leave me unmolested, and free from their odious presence, provided I would give a pledge to make no effort to escape; and that I would not even show myself, until a time that my masters saw fit to name." "And that time?" demanded the impatient Middleton, who so well knew the religious scruples of his wife--"that time?" "It is already passed. I was sworn by my patron saint, and faithfully did I keep the vow, until the man they call Ishmael forgot the terms by offering violence. I then made my appearance on the rock, for the time too was passed; though I even think father Ignatius would have absolved me from the vow, on account of the treachery of my keepers." "If he had not," muttered the youth between his compressed teeth, "I would have absolved him for ever from his spiritual care of your conscience!" "You, Middleton!" returned his wife looking up into his flushed face, while a bright blush suffused her own sweet countenance; "you may receive my vows, but surely you can have no power to absolve me from their observance!" "No, no, no. Inez, you are right. I know but little of these conscientious subtilties, and I am any thing but a priest: yet tell me, what has induced these monsters to play this desperate game--to trifle thus with my happiness?" "You know my ignorance of the world, and how ill I am qualified to furnish reasons for the conduct of beings so different from any I have ever seen before. But does not love of money drive men to acts even worse than this? I believe they thought that an aged and wealthy father could be tempted to pay them a rich ransom for his child; and, perhaps," she added, stealing an enquiring glance through her tears, at the attentive Middleton, "they counted something on the fresh affections of a bridegroom." "They might have extracted the blood from my heart, drop by drop!" "Yes," resumed his young and timid wife, instantly withdrawing the stolen look she had hazarded, and hurriedly pursuing the train of the discourse, as if glad to make him forget the liberty she had just taken, "I have been told, there are men so base as to perjure themselves at the altar, in order to command the gold of ignorant and confiding girls; and if love of money will lead to such baseness, we may surely expect it will hurry those, who devote themselves to gain, into acts of lesser fraud." "It must be so; and now, Inez, though I am here to guard you with my life, and we are in possession of this rock, our difficulties, perhaps our dangers, are not ended. You will summon all your courage to meet the trial and prove yourself a soldier's wife, my Inez?" "I am ready to depart this instant. The letter you sent by the physician, had prepared me to hope for the best, and I have every thing arranged for flight, at the shortest warning." "Let us then leave this place and join our friends." "Friends!" interrupted Inez, glancing her eyes around the little tent in quest of the form of Ellen. "I, too, have a friend who must not be forgotten, but who is pledged to pass the remainder of her life with us. She is gone!" Middleton gently led her from the spot, as he smilingly answered-- "She may have had, like myself, her own private communications for some favoured ear." The young man had not however done justice to the motives of Ellen Wade. The sensitive and intelligent girl had readily perceived how little her presence was necessary in the interview that has just been related, and had retired with that intuitive delicacy of feeling which seems to belong more properly to her sex. She was now to be seen seated on a point of the rock, with her person so entirely enveloped in her dress as to conceal her features. Here she had remained for near an hour, no one approaching to address her, and as it appeared to her own quick and jealous eyes, totally unobserved. In the latter particular, however, even the vigilance of the quick-sighted Ellen was deceived. The first act of Paul Hover, on finding himself the master of Ishmael's citadel, had been to sound the note of victory, after the quaint and ludicrous manner that is so often practised among the borderers of the West. Flapping his sides with his hands, as the conquering game-cock is wont to do with his wings, he raised a loud and laughable imitation of the exultation of this bird; a cry which might have proved a dangerous challenge had any one of the athletic sons of the squatter been within hearing. "This has been a regular knock-down and drag-out," he cried, "and no bones broke! How now, old trapper, you have been one of your training, platoon, rank and file soldiers in your day, and have seen forts taken and batteries stormed before this--am I right?" "Ay, ay, that have I," answered the old man, who still maintained his post at the foot of the rock, so little disturbed by what he had just witnessed, as to return the grin of Paul, with a hearty indulgence in his own silent and peculiar laughter; "you have gone through the exploit like men!" "Now tell me, is it not in rule, to call over the names of the living, and to bury the dead, after every bloody battle?" "Some did and other some didn't. When Sir William push'd the German, Dieskau, thro' the defiles at the foot of the Hori--" "Your Sir William was a drone to Sir Paul, and knew nothing of regularity. So here begins the roll-call--by the by, old man, what between bee-hunting and buffaloe humps, and certain other matters, I have been too busy to ask your name; for I intend to begin with my rear-guard, well knowing that my man in front is too busy to answer." "Lord, lad, I've been called in my time by as many names as there are people among whom I've dwelt. Now the Delawares nam'd me for my eyes, and I was called after the far-sighted hawk. Then, ag'in, the settlers in the Otsego hills christened me anew, from the fashion of my leggings; and various have been the names by which I have gone through life; but little will it matter when the time shall come, that all are to be muster'd, face to face, by what titles a mortal has played his part! I humbly trust I shall be able to answer to any of mine, in a loud and manly voice." Paul paid little or no attention to this reply, more than half of which was lost in the distance, but pursuing the humour of the moment, he called out in a stentorian voice to the naturalist to answer to his name. Dr. Battius had not thought it necessary to push his success beyond the comfortable niche, which accident had so opportunely formed for his protection, and in which he now reposed from his labours, with a pleasing consciousness of security, added to great exultation at the possession of the botanical treasure already mentioned. "Mount, mount, my worthy mole-catcher! come and behold the prospect of skirting Ishmael; come and look nature boldly in the face, and not go sneaking any longer, among the prairie grass and mullein tops, like a gobbler nibbling for grasshoppers." The mouth of the light-hearted and reckless bee-hunter was instantly closed, and he was rendered as mute, as he had just been boisterous and talkative, by the appearance of Ellen Wade. When the melancholy maiden took her seat on the point of the rock as mentioned, Paul affected to employ himself in conducting a close inspection of the household effects of the squatter. He rummaged the drawers of Esther with no delicate hands, scattered the rustic finery of her girls on the ground, without the least deference to its quality or elegance, and tossed her pots and kettles here and there, as though they had been vessels of wood instead of iron. All this industry was, however, manifestly without an object. He reserved nothing for himself, not even appearing conscious of the nature of the articles which suffered by his familiarity. When he had examined the inside of every cabin, taken a fresh survey of the spot where he had confined the children, and where he had thoroughly secured them with cords, and kicked one of the pails of the woman, like a foot-ball, fifty feet into the air, in sheer wantonness, he returned to the edge of the rock, and thrusting both his hands through his wampum belt, he began to whistle the "Kentucky Hunters" as diligently as if he had been hired to supply his auditors with music by the hour. In this manner passed the remainder of the time, until Middleton, as has been related, led Inez forth from the tent, and gave a new direction to the thoughts of the whole party. He summoned Paul from his flourish of music, tore the Doctor from the study of his plant, and, as acknowledged leader, gave the necessary orders for immediate departure. In the bustle and confusion that were likely to succeed such a mandate, there was little opportunity to indulge in complaints or reflections. As the adventurers had not come unprepared for victory, each individual employed himself in such offices as were best adapted to his strength and situation. The trapper had already made himself master of the patient Asinus, who was quietly feeding at no great distance from the rock, and he was now busy in fitting his back with the complicated machinery that Dr. Battius saw fit to term a saddle of his own invention. The naturalist himself seized upon his portfolios, herbals, and collection of insects, which he quickly transferred from the encampment of the squatter, to certain pockets in the aforesaid ingenious invention, and which the trapper as uniformly cast away the moment his back was turned. Paul showed his dexterity in removing such light articles as Inez and Ellen had prepared for their flight to the foot of the citadel, while Middleton, after mingling threats and promises, in order to induce the children to remain quietly in their bondage, assisted the females to descend. As time began to press upon them, and there was great danger of Ishmael's returning, these several movements were made with singular industry and despatch. The trapper bestowed such articles as he conceived were necessary to the comfort of the weaker and more delicate members of the party, in those pockets from which he had so unceremoniously expelled the treasures of the unconscious naturalist, and then gave way for Middleton to place Inez in one of those seats which he had prepared on the back of the animal for her and her companion. "Go, child," the old man said, motioning to Ellen to follow the example of the lady, and turning his head a little anxiously to examine the waste behind him. "It cannot be long afore the owner of this place will be coming to look after his household; and he is not a man to give up his property, however obtained, without complaint!" "It is true," cried Middleton; "we have wasted moments that are precious, and have the utmost need of industry." "Ay, ay, I thought it; and would have said it, captain; but I remembered how your grand'ther used to love to look upon the face of her he led away for a wife, in the days of his youth and his happiness. 'Tis natur', 'tis natur', and 'tis wiser to give way a little before its feelings, than to try to stop a current that will have its course." Ellen advanced to the side of the beast, and seizing Inez by the hand, she said, with heartfelt warmth, after struggling to suppress an emotion that nearly choked her-- "God bless you, sweet lady! I hope you will forget and forgive the wrongs you have received from my uncle--" The humbled and sorrowful girl could say no more, her voice becoming entirely inaudible in an ungovernable burst of grief. "How is this?" cried Middleton; "did you not say, Inez, that this excellent young woman was to accompany us, and to live with us for the remainder of her life; or, at least, until she found some more agreeable residence for herself?" "I did; and I still hope it. She has always given me reason to believe, that after having shown so much commiseration and friendship in my misery, she would not desert me, should happier times return." "I cannot--I ought not," continued Ellen, getting the better of her momentary weakness. "It has pleased God to cast my lot among these people, and I ought not to quit them. It would be adding the appearance of treachery to what will already seem bad enough, with one of his opinions. He has been kind to me, an orphan, after his rough customs, and I cannot steal from him at such a moment." "She is just as much a relation of skirting Ishmael as I am a bishop!" said Paul, with a loud hem, as if his throat wanted clearing. "If the old fellow has done the honest thing by her, in giving her a morsel of venison now and then, or a spoon around his homminy dish, hasn't she pay'd him in teaching the young devils to read their Bible, or in helping old Esther to put her finery in shape and fashion. Tell me that a drone has a sting, and I'll believe you as easily as I will that this young woman is a debtor to any of the tribe of Bush!" "It is but little matter who owes me, or where I am in debt. There are none to care for a girl who is fatherless and motherless, and whose nearest kin are the offcasts of all honest people. No, no; go, lady, and Heaven for ever bless you! I am better here, in this desert, where there are none to know my shame." "Now, old trapper," retorted Paul, "this is what I call knowing which way the wind blows! You ar' a man that has seen life, and you know something of fashions; I put it to your judgment, plainly, isn't it in the nature of things for the hive to swarm when the young get their growth, and if children will quit their parents, ought one who is of no kith or kin--" "Hist!" interrupted the man he addressed, "Hector is discontented. Say it out, plainly, pup; what is it dog--what is it?" The venerable hound had risen, and was scenting the fresh breeze which continued to sweep heavily over the prairie. At the words of his master he growled and contracted the muscles of his lips, as if half disposed to threaten with the remnants of his teeth. The younger dog, who was resting after the chase of the morning, also made some signs that his nose detected a taint in the air, and then the two resumed their slumbers, as if they had done enough. The trapper seized the bridle of the ass, and cried, urging the beast onward-- "There is no time for words. The squatter and his brood are within a mile or two of this blessed spot!" Middleton lost all recollection of Ellen, in the danger which now so eminently beset his recovered bride; nor is it necessary to add, that Dr. Battius did not wait for a second admonition to commence his retreat. Following the route indicated by the old man, they turned the rock in a body, and pursued their way as fast as possible across the prairie, under the favour of the cover it afforded. Paul Hover, however, remained in his tracks, sullenly leaning on his rifle. Near a minute had elapsed before he was observed by Ellen, who had buried her face in her hands, to conceal her fancied desolation from herself. "Why do you not fly?" the weeping girl exclaimed, the instant she perceived she was not alone. "I'm not used to it." "My uncle will soon be here! you have nothing to hope from his pity." "Nor from that of his niece, I reckon. Let him come; he can only knock me on the head!" "Paul, Paul, if you love me, fly." "Alone!--if I do, may I be--" "If you value your life, fly!" "I value it not, compared to you." "Paul!" "Ellen!" She extended both her hands and burst into another and a still more violent flood of tears. The bee-hunter put one of his sturdy arms around her waist, and in another moment he was urging her over the plain, in rapid pursuit of their flying friends. CHAPTER XVII Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight With a new Gorgon--Do not bid me speak; See, and then speak yourselves. --Shakspeare. The little run, which supplied the family of the squatter with water, and nourished the trees and bushes that grew near the base of the rocky eminence, took its rise at no great distance from the latter, in a small thicket of cotton-wood and vines. Hither, then, the trapper directed the flight, as to the place affording the only available cover in so pressing an emergency. It will be remembered, that the sagacity of the old man, which, from long practice in similar scenes, amounted nearly to an instinct in all cases of sudden danger, had first induced him to take this course, as it placed the hill between them and the approaching party. Favoured by this circumstance, he succeeded in reaching the bushes in sufficient time and Paul Hover had just hurried the breathless Ellen into the tangled bush, as Ishmael gained the summit of the rock, in the manner already described, where he stood like a man momentarily bereft of sense, gazing at the confusion which had been created among his chattels, or at his gagged and bound children, who had been safely bestowed, by the forethought of the bee-hunter, under the cover of a bark roof, in a sort of irregular pile. A long rifle would have thrown a bullet from the height, on which the squatter now stood, into the very cover where the fugitives, who had wrought all this mischief, were clustered. The trapper was the first to speak, as the man on whose intelligence and experience they all depended for counsel, after running his eye over the different individuals who gathered about him, in order to see that none were missing. "Ah! natur' is natur', and has done its work!" he said, nodding to the exulting Paul, with a smile of approbation. "I thought it would be hard for those, who had so often met in fair and foul, by starlight and under the clouded moon, to part at last in anger. Now is there little time to lose in talk, and every thing to gain by industry! It cannot be long afore some of yonder brood will be nosing along the 'arth for our trail, and should they find it, as find it they surely will, and should they push us to a stand on our courage, the dispute must be settled with the rifle; which may He in heaven forbid! Captain, can you lead us to the place where any of your warriors lie?--For the stout sons of the squatter will make a manly brush of it, or I am but little of a judge in warlike dispositions!" "The place of rendezvous is many leagues from this, on the banks of La Platte." "It is bad--it is bad. If fighting is to be done, it is always wise to enter on it on equal terms. But what has one so near his time to do with ill-blood and hot-blood at his heart! Listen to what a grey head and some experience have to offer, and then if any among you can point out a wiser fashion for a retreat, we can just follow his design, and forget that I have spoken. This thicket stretches for near a mile as it may be slanting from the rock, and leads towards the sunset instead of the settlements." "Enough, enough," cried Middleton, too impatient to wait until the deliberative and perhaps loquacious old man could end his minute explanation. "Time is too precious for words. Let us fly." The trapper made a gesture of compliance, and turning in his tracks, he led Asinus across the trembling earth of the swale, and quickly emerged on the hard ground, on the side opposite to the encampment of the squatter. "If old Ishmael gets a squint at that highway through the brush," cried Paul, casting, as he left the place, a hasty glance at the broad trail the party had made through the thicket, "he'll need no finger-board to tell him which way his road lies. But let him follow! I know the vagabond would gladly cross his breed with a little honest blood, but if any son of his ever gets to be the husband of--" "Hush, Paul, hush," said the terrified young woman, who leaned on his arm for support; "your voice might be heard." The bee-hunter was silent, though he did not cease to cast ominous looks behind him, as they flew along the edge of the run, which sufficiently betrayed the belligerent condition of his mind. As each one was busy for himself, but a few minutes elapsed before the party rose a swell of the prairie, and descending without a moment's delay on the opposite side, they were at once removed from every danger of being seen by the sons of Ishmael, unless the pursuers should happen to fall upon their trail. The old man now profited by the formation of the land to take another direction, with a view to elude pursuit, as a vessel changes her course in fogs and darkness, to escape from the vigilance of her enemies. Two hours, passed in the utmost diligence, enabled them to make a half circuit around the rock, and to reach a point that was exactly opposite to the original direction of their flight. To most of the fugitives their situation was as entirely unknown as is that of a ship in the middle of the ocean to the uninstructed voyager: but the old man proceeded at every turn, and through every bottom, with a decision that inspired his followers with confidence, as it spoke favourably of his own knowledge of the localities. His hound, stopping now and then to catch the expression of his eye, had preceded the trapper throughout the whole distance, with as much certainty as though a previous and intelligible communion between them had established the route by which they were to proceed. But, at the expiration of the time just named, the dog suddenly came to a stand, and then seating himself on the prairie, he snuffed the air a moment, and began a low and piteous whining. "Ay--pup--ay. I know the spot--I know the spot, and reason there is to remember it well!" said the old man, stopping by the side of his uneasy associate,

past

How many times the word 'past' appears in the text?

you fool enough to believe what such a scoundrel as I am tells you, captain, unless it has probability to back it? I know you are not: therefore I will give my facts and my opinions, and then leave you to chew on them, while I go and drink of your generosity. I know a man who is called Abiram White.--I believe the knave took that name to show his enmity to the race of blacks! But this gentleman is now, and has been for years, to my certain knowledge, a regular translator of the human body from one State to another. I have dealt with him in my time, and a cheating dog he is! No more honour in him than meat in my stomach. I saw him here in this very town, the day of your wedding. He was in company with his wife's brother, and pretended to be a settler on the hunt for new land. A noble set they were, to carry on business--seven sons, each of them as tall as your sergeant with his cap on. Well, the moment I heard that your wife was lost, I saw at once that Abiram had laid his hands on her." "Do you know this--can this be true? What reason have you to fancy a thing so wild?" "Reason enough; I know Abiram White. Now, will you add a trifle just to keep my throat from parching?" "Go, go; you are stupified with drink already, miserable man, and know not what you say. Go; go, and beware the drummer." "Experience is a good guide"--the fellow called after the retiring Middleton; and then turning with a chuckling laugh, like one well satisfied with himself, he made the best of his way towards the shop of the suttler. A hundred times in the course of that night did Middleton fancy that the communication of the miscreant was entitled to some attention, and as often did he reject the idea as too wild and visionary for another thought. He was awakened early on the following morning, after passing a restless and nearly sleepless night, by his orderly, who came to report that a man was found dead on the parade, at no great distance from his quarters. Throwing on his clothes he proceeded to the spot, and beheld the individual, with whom he had held the preceding conference, in the precise situation in which he had first been found. The miserable wretch had fallen a victim to his intemperance. This revolting fact was sufficiently proclaimed by his obtruding eye-balls, his bloated countenance, and the nearly insufferable odours that were even then exhaling from his carcass. Disgusted with the odious spectacle, the youth was turning from the sight, after ordering the corpse to be removed, when the position of one of the dead man's hands struck him. On examination, he found the fore-finger extended, as if in the act of writing in the sand, with the following incomplete sentence, nearly illegible, but yet in a state to be deciphered: "Captain, it is true, as I am a gentle--" He had either died, or fallen into a sleep, the forerunner of his death, before the latter word was finished. Concealing this fact from the others, Middleton repeated his orders and departed. The pertinacity of the deceased, and all the circumstances united, induced him to set on foot some secret enquiries. He found that a family answering the description which had been given him, had in fact passed the place the day of his nuptials. They were traced along the margin of the Mississippi, for some distance, until they took boat and ascended the river to its confluence with the Missouri. Here they had disappeared like hundreds of others, in pursuit of the hidden wealth of the interior. Furnished with these facts, Middleton detailed a small guard of his most trusty men, took leave of Don Augustin, without declaring his hopes or his fears, and having arrived at the indicated point, he pushed into the wilderness in pursuit. It was not difficult to trace a train like that of Ishmael, until he was well assured its object lay far beyond the usual limits of the settlements. This circumstance, in itself, quickened his suspicions, and gave additional force to his hopes of final success. After getting beyond the assistance of verbal directions, the anxious husband had recourse to the usual signs of a trail, in order to follow the fugitives. This he also found a task of no difficulty, until he reached the hard and unyielding soil of the rolling prairies. Here, indeed, he was completely at fault. He found himself, at length, compelled to divide his followers, appointing a place of rendezvous at a distant day, and to endeavour to find the lost trail by multiplying, as much as possible, the number of his eyes. He had been alone a week, when accident brought him in contact with the trapper and the bee-hunter. Part of their interview has been related, and the reader can readily imagine the explanations that succeeded the tale he recounted, and which led, as has already been seen, to the recovery of his bride. CHAPTER XVI These likelihoods confirm her flight from hence, Therefore, I pray you, stay not to discourse, But mount you presently. --Shakspeare. An hour had slid by, in hasty and nearly incoherent questions and answers, before Middleton, hanging over his recovered treasure with that sort of jealous watchfulness with which a miser would regard his hoards, closed the disjointed narrative of his own proceedings by demanding-- "And you, my Inez; in what manner were you treated?" "In every thing, but the great injustice they did in separating me so forcibly from my friends, as well perhaps as the circumstances of my captors would allow. I think the man, who is certainly the master here, is but a new beginner in wickedness. He quarrelled frightfully in my presence, with the wretch who seized me, and then they made an impious bargain, to which I was compelled to acquiesce, and to which they bound me as well as themselves by oaths. Ah! Middleton, I fear the heretics are not so heedful of their vows as we who are nurtured in the bosom of the true church!" "Believe it not; these villains are of no religion: did they forswear themselves?" "No, not perjured: but was it not awful to call upon the good God to witness so sinful a compact?" "And so we think, Inez, as truly as the most virtuous cardinal of Rome. But how did they observe their oath, and what was its purport?" "They conditioned to leave me unmolested, and free from their odious presence, provided I would give a pledge to make no effort to escape; and that I would not even show myself, until a time that my masters saw fit to name." "And that time?" demanded the impatient Middleton, who so well knew the religious scruples of his wife--"that time?" "It is already passed. I was sworn by my patron saint, and faithfully did I keep the vow, until the man they call Ishmael forgot the terms by offering violence. I then made my appearance on the rock, for the time too was passed; though I even think father Ignatius would have absolved me from the vow, on account of the treachery of my keepers." "If he had not," muttered the youth between his compressed teeth, "I would have absolved him for ever from his spiritual care of your conscience!" "You, Middleton!" returned his wife looking up into his flushed face, while a bright blush suffused her own sweet countenance; "you may receive my vows, but surely you can have no power to absolve me from their observance!" "No, no, no. Inez, you are right. I know but little of these conscientious subtilties, and I am any thing but a priest: yet tell me, what has induced these monsters to play this desperate game--to trifle thus with my happiness?" "You know my ignorance of the world, and how ill I am qualified to furnish reasons for the conduct of beings so different from any I have ever seen before. But does not love of money drive men to acts even worse than this? I believe they thought that an aged and wealthy father could be tempted to pay them a rich ransom for his child; and, perhaps," she added, stealing an enquiring glance through her tears, at the attentive Middleton, "they counted something on the fresh affections of a bridegroom." "They might have extracted the blood from my heart, drop by drop!" "Yes," resumed his young and timid wife, instantly withdrawing the stolen look she had hazarded, and hurriedly pursuing the train of the discourse, as if glad to make him forget the liberty she had just taken, "I have been told, there are men so base as to perjure themselves at the altar, in order to command the gold of ignorant and confiding girls; and if love of money will lead to such baseness, we may surely expect it will hurry those, who devote themselves to gain, into acts of lesser fraud." "It must be so; and now, Inez, though I am here to guard you with my life, and we are in possession of this rock, our difficulties, perhaps our dangers, are not ended. You will summon all your courage to meet the trial and prove yourself a soldier's wife, my Inez?" "I am ready to depart this instant. The letter you sent by the physician, had prepared me to hope for the best, and I have every thing arranged for flight, at the shortest warning." "Let us then leave this place and join our friends." "Friends!" interrupted Inez, glancing her eyes around the little tent in quest of the form of Ellen. "I, too, have a friend who must not be forgotten, but who is pledged to pass the remainder of her life with us. She is gone!" Middleton gently led her from the spot, as he smilingly answered-- "She may have had, like myself, her own private communications for some favoured ear." The young man had not however done justice to the motives of Ellen Wade. The sensitive and intelligent girl had readily perceived how little her presence was necessary in the interview that has just been related, and had retired with that intuitive delicacy of feeling which seems to belong more properly to her sex. She was now to be seen seated on a point of the rock, with her person so entirely enveloped in her dress as to conceal her features. Here she had remained for near an hour, no one approaching to address her, and as it appeared to her own quick and jealous eyes, totally unobserved. In the latter particular, however, even the vigilance of the quick-sighted Ellen was deceived. The first act of Paul Hover, on finding himself the master of Ishmael's citadel, had been to sound the note of victory, after the quaint and ludicrous manner that is so often practised among the borderers of the West. Flapping his sides with his hands, as the conquering game-cock is wont to do with his wings, he raised a loud and laughable imitation of the exultation of this bird; a cry which might have proved a dangerous challenge had any one of the athletic sons of the squatter been within hearing. "This has been a regular knock-down and drag-out," he cried, "and no bones broke! How now, old trapper, you have been one of your training, platoon, rank and file soldiers in your day, and have seen forts taken and batteries stormed before this--am I right?" "Ay, ay, that have I," answered the old man, who still maintained his post at the foot of the rock, so little disturbed by what he had just witnessed, as to return the grin of Paul, with a hearty indulgence in his own silent and peculiar laughter; "you have gone through the exploit like men!" "Now tell me, is it not in rule, to call over the names of the living, and to bury the dead, after every bloody battle?" "Some did and other some didn't. When Sir William push'd the German, Dieskau, thro' the defiles at the foot of the Hori--" "Your Sir William was a drone to Sir Paul, and knew nothing of regularity. So here begins the roll-call--by the by, old man, what between bee-hunting and buffaloe humps, and certain other matters, I have been too busy to ask your name; for I intend to begin with my rear-guard, well knowing that my man in front is too busy to answer." "Lord, lad, I've been called in my time by as many names as there are people among whom I've dwelt. Now the Delawares nam'd me for my eyes, and I was called after the far-sighted hawk. Then, ag'in, the settlers in the Otsego hills christened me anew, from the fashion of my leggings; and various have been the names by which I have gone through life; but little will it matter when the time shall come, that all are to be muster'd, face to face, by what titles a mortal has played his part! I humbly trust I shall be able to answer to any of mine, in a loud and manly voice." Paul paid little or no attention to this reply, more than half of which was lost in the distance, but pursuing the humour of the moment, he called out in a stentorian voice to the naturalist to answer to his name. Dr. Battius had not thought it necessary to push his success beyond the comfortable niche, which accident had so opportunely formed for his protection, and in which he now reposed from his labours, with a pleasing consciousness of security, added to great exultation at the possession of the botanical treasure already mentioned. "Mount, mount, my worthy mole-catcher! come and behold the prospect of skirting Ishmael; come and look nature boldly in the face, and not go sneaking any longer, among the prairie grass and mullein tops, like a gobbler nibbling for grasshoppers." The mouth of the light-hearted and reckless bee-hunter was instantly closed, and he was rendered as mute, as he had just been boisterous and talkative, by the appearance of Ellen Wade. When the melancholy maiden took her seat on the point of the rock as mentioned, Paul affected to employ himself in conducting a close inspection of the household effects of the squatter. He rummaged the drawers of Esther with no delicate hands, scattered the rustic finery of her girls on the ground, without the least deference to its quality or elegance, and tossed her pots and kettles here and there, as though they had been vessels of wood instead of iron. All this industry was, however, manifestly without an object. He reserved nothing for himself, not even appearing conscious of the nature of the articles which suffered by his familiarity. When he had examined the inside of every cabin, taken a fresh survey of the spot where he had confined the children, and where he had thoroughly secured them with cords, and kicked one of the pails of the woman, like a foot-ball, fifty feet into the air, in sheer wantonness, he returned to the edge of the rock, and thrusting both his hands through his wampum belt, he began to whistle the "Kentucky Hunters" as diligently as if he had been hired to supply his auditors with music by the hour. In this manner passed the remainder of the time, until Middleton, as has been related, led Inez forth from the tent, and gave a new direction to the thoughts of the whole party. He summoned Paul from his flourish of music, tore the Doctor from the study of his plant, and, as acknowledged leader, gave the necessary orders for immediate departure. In the bustle and confusion that were likely to succeed such a mandate, there was little opportunity to indulge in complaints or reflections. As the adventurers had not come unprepared for victory, each individual employed himself in such offices as were best adapted to his strength and situation. The trapper had already made himself master of the patient Asinus, who was quietly feeding at no great distance from the rock, and he was now busy in fitting his back with the complicated machinery that Dr. Battius saw fit to term a saddle of his own invention. The naturalist himself seized upon his portfolios, herbals, and collection of insects, which he quickly transferred from the encampment of the squatter, to certain pockets in the aforesaid ingenious invention, and which the trapper as uniformly cast away the moment his back was turned. Paul showed his dexterity in removing such light articles as Inez and Ellen had prepared for their flight to the foot of the citadel, while Middleton, after mingling threats and promises, in order to induce the children to remain quietly in their bondage, assisted the females to descend. As time began to press upon them, and there was great danger of Ishmael's returning, these several movements were made with singular industry and despatch. The trapper bestowed such articles as he conceived were necessary to the comfort of the weaker and more delicate members of the party, in those pockets from which he had so unceremoniously expelled the treasures of the unconscious naturalist, and then gave way for Middleton to place Inez in one of those seats which he had prepared on the back of the animal for her and her companion. "Go, child," the old man said, motioning to Ellen to follow the example of the lady, and turning his head a little anxiously to examine the waste behind him. "It cannot be long afore the owner of this place will be coming to look after his household; and he is not a man to give up his property, however obtained, without complaint!" "It is true," cried Middleton; "we have wasted moments that are precious, and have the utmost need of industry." "Ay, ay, I thought it; and would have said it, captain; but I remembered how your grand'ther used to love to look upon the face of her he led away for a wife, in the days of his youth and his happiness. 'Tis natur', 'tis natur', and 'tis wiser to give way a little before its feelings, than to try to stop a current that will have its course." Ellen advanced to the side of the beast, and seizing Inez by the hand, she said, with heartfelt warmth, after struggling to suppress an emotion that nearly choked her-- "God bless you, sweet lady! I hope you will forget and forgive the wrongs you have received from my uncle--" The humbled and sorrowful girl could say no more, her voice becoming entirely inaudible in an ungovernable burst of grief. "How is this?" cried Middleton; "did you not say, Inez, that this excellent young woman was to accompany us, and to live with us for the remainder of her life; or, at least, until she found some more agreeable residence for herself?" "I did; and I still hope it. She has always given me reason to believe, that after having shown so much commiseration and friendship in my misery, she would not desert me, should happier times return." "I cannot--I ought not," continued Ellen, getting the better of her momentary weakness. "It has pleased God to cast my lot among these people, and I ought not to quit them. It would be adding the appearance of treachery to what will already seem bad enough, with one of his opinions. He has been kind to me, an orphan, after his rough customs, and I cannot steal from him at such a moment." "She is just as much a relation of skirting Ishmael as I am a bishop!" said Paul, with a loud hem, as if his throat wanted clearing. "If the old fellow has done the honest thing by her, in giving her a morsel of venison now and then, or a spoon around his homminy dish, hasn't she pay'd him in teaching the young devils to read their Bible, or in helping old Esther to put her finery in shape and fashion. Tell me that a drone has a sting, and I'll believe you as easily as I will that this young woman is a debtor to any of the tribe of Bush!" "It is but little matter who owes me, or where I am in debt. There are none to care for a girl who is fatherless and motherless, and whose nearest kin are the offcasts of all honest people. No, no; go, lady, and Heaven for ever bless you! I am better here, in this desert, where there are none to know my shame." "Now, old trapper," retorted Paul, "this is what I call knowing which way the wind blows! You ar' a man that has seen life, and you know something of fashions; I put it to your judgment, plainly, isn't it in the nature of things for the hive to swarm when the young get their growth, and if children will quit their parents, ought one who is of no kith or kin--" "Hist!" interrupted the man he addressed, "Hector is discontented. Say it out, plainly, pup; what is it dog--what is it?" The venerable hound had risen, and was scenting the fresh breeze which continued to sweep heavily over the prairie. At the words of his master he growled and contracted the muscles of his lips, as if half disposed to threaten with the remnants of his teeth. The younger dog, who was resting after the chase of the morning, also made some signs that his nose detected a taint in the air, and then the two resumed their slumbers, as if they had done enough. The trapper seized the bridle of the ass, and cried, urging the beast onward-- "There is no time for words. The squatter and his brood are within a mile or two of this blessed spot!" Middleton lost all recollection of Ellen, in the danger which now so eminently beset his recovered bride; nor is it necessary to add, that Dr. Battius did not wait for a second admonition to commence his retreat. Following the route indicated by the old man, they turned the rock in a body, and pursued their way as fast as possible across the prairie, under the favour of the cover it afforded. Paul Hover, however, remained in his tracks, sullenly leaning on his rifle. Near a minute had elapsed before he was observed by Ellen, who had buried her face in her hands, to conceal her fancied desolation from herself. "Why do you not fly?" the weeping girl exclaimed, the instant she perceived she was not alone. "I'm not used to it." "My uncle will soon be here! you have nothing to hope from his pity." "Nor from that of his niece, I reckon. Let him come; he can only knock me on the head!" "Paul, Paul, if you love me, fly." "Alone!--if I do, may I be--" "If you value your life, fly!" "I value it not, compared to you." "Paul!" "Ellen!" She extended both her hands and burst into another and a still more violent flood of tears. The bee-hunter put one of his sturdy arms around her waist, and in another moment he was urging her over the plain, in rapid pursuit of their flying friends. CHAPTER XVII Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight With a new Gorgon--Do not bid me speak; See, and then speak yourselves. --Shakspeare. The little run, which supplied the family of the squatter with water, and nourished the trees and bushes that grew near the base of the rocky eminence, took its rise at no great distance from the latter, in a small thicket of cotton-wood and vines. Hither, then, the trapper directed the flight, as to the place affording the only available cover in so pressing an emergency. It will be remembered, that the sagacity of the old man, which, from long practice in similar scenes, amounted nearly to an instinct in all cases of sudden danger, had first induced him to take this course, as it placed the hill between them and the approaching party. Favoured by this circumstance, he succeeded in reaching the bushes in sufficient time and Paul Hover had just hurried the breathless Ellen into the tangled bush, as Ishmael gained the summit of the rock, in the manner already described, where he stood like a man momentarily bereft of sense, gazing at the confusion which had been created among his chattels, or at his gagged and bound children, who had been safely bestowed, by the forethought of the bee-hunter, under the cover of a bark roof, in a sort of irregular pile. A long rifle would have thrown a bullet from the height, on which the squatter now stood, into the very cover where the fugitives, who had wrought all this mischief, were clustered. The trapper was the first to speak, as the man on whose intelligence and experience they all depended for counsel, after running his eye over the different individuals who gathered about him, in order to see that none were missing. "Ah! natur' is natur', and has done its work!" he said, nodding to the exulting Paul, with a smile of approbation. "I thought it would be hard for those, who had so often met in fair and foul, by starlight and under the clouded moon, to part at last in anger. Now is there little time to lose in talk, and every thing to gain by industry! It cannot be long afore some of yonder brood will be nosing along the 'arth for our trail, and should they find it, as find it they surely will, and should they push us to a stand on our courage, the dispute must be settled with the rifle; which may He in heaven forbid! Captain, can you lead us to the place where any of your warriors lie?--For the stout sons of the squatter will make a manly brush of it, or I am but little of a judge in warlike dispositions!" "The place of rendezvous is many leagues from this, on the banks of La Platte." "It is bad--it is bad. If fighting is to be done, it is always wise to enter on it on equal terms. But what has one so near his time to do with ill-blood and hot-blood at his heart! Listen to what a grey head and some experience have to offer, and then if any among you can point out a wiser fashion for a retreat, we can just follow his design, and forget that I have spoken. This thicket stretches for near a mile as it may be slanting from the rock, and leads towards the sunset instead of the settlements." "Enough, enough," cried Middleton, too impatient to wait until the deliberative and perhaps loquacious old man could end his minute explanation. "Time is too precious for words. Let us fly." The trapper made a gesture of compliance, and turning in his tracks, he led Asinus across the trembling earth of the swale, and quickly emerged on the hard ground, on the side opposite to the encampment of the squatter. "If old Ishmael gets a squint at that highway through the brush," cried Paul, casting, as he left the place, a hasty glance at the broad trail the party had made through the thicket, "he'll need no finger-board to tell him which way his road lies. But let him follow! I know the vagabond would gladly cross his breed with a little honest blood, but if any son of his ever gets to be the husband of--" "Hush, Paul, hush," said the terrified young woman, who leaned on his arm for support; "your voice might be heard." The bee-hunter was silent, though he did not cease to cast ominous looks behind him, as they flew along the edge of the run, which sufficiently betrayed the belligerent condition of his mind. As each one was busy for himself, but a few minutes elapsed before the party rose a swell of the prairie, and descending without a moment's delay on the opposite side, they were at once removed from every danger of being seen by the sons of Ishmael, unless the pursuers should happen to fall upon their trail. The old man now profited by the formation of the land to take another direction, with a view to elude pursuit, as a vessel changes her course in fogs and darkness, to escape from the vigilance of her enemies. Two hours, passed in the utmost diligence, enabled them to make a half circuit around the rock, and to reach a point that was exactly opposite to the original direction of their flight. To most of the fugitives their situation was as entirely unknown as is that of a ship in the middle of the ocean to the uninstructed voyager: but the old man proceeded at every turn, and through every bottom, with a decision that inspired his followers with confidence, as it spoke favourably of his own knowledge of the localities. His hound, stopping now and then to catch the expression of his eye, had preceded the trapper throughout the whole distance, with as much certainty as though a previous and intelligible communion between them had established the route by which they were to proceed. But, at the expiration of the time just named, the dog suddenly came to a stand, and then seating himself on the prairie, he snuffed the air a moment, and began a low and piteous whining. "Ay--pup--ay. I know the spot--I know the spot, and reason there is to remember it well!" said the old man, stopping by the side of his uneasy associate,

day

How many times the word 'day' appears in the text?

you shall being me luck! See, here are my last hundred francs." And the "marquise" took out from her purse, the rings of which were adorned with diamonds, five gold pieces. Oscar pulled out his hundred in silver five-franc pieces, much ashamed at having to mingle such ignoble coins with gold. In ten throws the actress lost the two hundred francs. "Oh! how stupid!" she cried. "I'm banker now. But we'll play together still, won't we?" Fanny Beaupre rose to take her place as banker, and Oscar, finding himself observed by the whole table, dared not retire on the ground that he had no money. Speech failed him, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. "Lend me five hundred francs," said the actress to the danseuse. Florentine brought the money, which she obtained from Georges, who had just passed eight times at ecarte. "Nathan has won twelve hundred francs," said the actress to Oscar. "Bankers always win; we won't let them fool us, will we?" she whispered in his ear. Persons of nerve, imagination, and dash will understand how it was that poor Oscar opened his pocket-book and took out the note of five hundred francs which Desroches had given him. He looked at Nathan, the distinguished author, who now began, with Florine, to play a heavy game against the bank. "Come, my little man, take 'em up," cried Fanny Beaupre, signing to Oscar to rake in the two hundred francs which Nathan and Florine had punted. The actress did not spare taunts or jests on those who lost. She enlivened the game with jokes which Oscar thought singular; but reflection was stifled by joy; for the first two throws produced a gain of two thousand francs. Oscar then thought of feigning illness and making his escape, leaving his partner behind him; but "honor" kept him there. Three more turns and the gains were lost. Oscar felt a cold sweat running down his back, and he was sobered completely. The next two throws carried off the thousand francs of their mutual stake. Oscar was consumed with thirst, and drank three glasses of iced punch one after the other. The actress now led him into the bed-chamber, where the rest of the company were playing, talking frivolities with an easy air. But by this time the sense of his wrong-doing overcame him; the figure of Desroches appeared to him like a vision. He turned aside to a dark corner and sat down, putting his handkerchief to his eyes, and wept. Florentine noticed the attitude of true grief, which, because it is sincere, is certain to strike the eye of one who acts. She ran to him, took the handkerchief from his hand, and saw his tears; then she led him into a boudoir alone. "What is it, my child?" she said. At the tone and accent of that voice Oscar recognized a motherly kindness which is often found in women of her kind, and he answered openly:-- "I have lost five hundred francs which my employer gave me to obtain a document to-morrow morning; there's nothing for me but to fling myself into the river; I am dishonored." "How silly you are!" she said. "Stay where you are; I'll get you a thousand francs and you can win back what you've lost; but don't risk more than five hundred, so that you may be sure of your master's money. Georges plays a fine game at ecarte; bet on him." Oscar, frightened by his position, accepted the offer of the mistress of the house. "Ah!" he thought, "it is only women of rank who are capable of such kindness. Beautiful, noble, rich! how lucky Georges is!" He received the thousand francs from Florentine and returned to bet on his hoaxer. Georges had just passed for the fourth time when Oscar sat down beside him. The other players saw with satisfaction the arrival of a new better; for all, with the instinct of gamblers, took the side of Giroudeau, the old officer of the Empire. "Messieurs," said Georges, "you'll be punished for deserting me; I feel in the vein. Come, Oscar, we'll make an end of them!" Georges and his partner lost five games running. After losing the thousand francs Oscar was seized with the fury of play and insisted on taking the cards himself. By the result of a chance not at all uncommon with those who play for the first time, he won. But Georges bewildered him with advice; told him when to throw the cards, and even snatched them from his hand; so that this conflict of wills and intuitions injured his vein. By three o'clock in the morning, after various changes of fortune, and still drinking punch, Oscar came down to his last hundred francs. He rose with a heavy head, completely stupefied, took a few steps forward, and fell upon a sofa in the boudoir, his eyes closing in a leaden sleep. "Mariette," said Fanny Beaupre to Godeschal's sister, who had come in about two o'clock, "do you dine here to-morrow? Camusot and Pere Cardot are coming, and we'll have some fun." "What!" cried Florentine, "and my old fellow never told me!" "He said he'd tell you to-morrow morning," remarked Fanny Beaupre. "The devil take him and his orgies!" exclaimed Florentine. "He and Camusot are worse than magistrates or stage-managers. But we have very good dinners here, Mariette," she continued. "Cardot always orders them from Chevet's; bring your Duc de Maufrigneuse and we'll make them dance like Tritons." Hearing the names of Cardot and Camusot, Oscar made an effort to throw off his sleep; but he could only mutter a few words which were not understood, and then he fell back upon the silken cushions. "You'll have to keep him here all night," said Fanny Beaupre, laughing, to Florentine. "Oh! poor boy! he is drunk with punch and despair both. It is the second clerk in your brother's office," she said to Mariette. "He has lost the money his master gave him for some legal affair. He wanted to drown himself; so I lent him a thousand francs, but those brigands Finot and Giroudeau won them from him. Poor innocent!" "But we ought to wake him," said Mariette. "My brother won't make light of it, nor his master either." "Oh, wake him if you can, and carry him off with you!" said Florentine, returning to the salon to receive the adieux of some departing guests. Presently those who remained began what was called "character dancing," and by the time it was broad daylight, Florentine, tired out, went to bed, oblivious to Oscar, who was still in the boudoir sound asleep. CHAPTER X. ANOTHER CATASTROPHE About eleven the next morning, a terrible sound awoke the unfortunate clerk. Recognizing the voice of his uncle Cardot, he thought it wise to feign sleep, and so turned his face into the yellow velvet cushions on which he had passed the night. "Really, my little Florentine," said the old gentleman, "this is neither right nor sensible; you danced last evening in 'Les Ruines,' and you have spent the night in an orgy. That's deliberately going to work to lose your freshness. Besides which, it was ungrateful to inaugurate this beautiful apartment without even letting me know. Who knows what has been going on here?" "Old monster!" cried Florentine, "haven't you a key that lets you in at all hours? My ball lasted till five in the morning, and you have the cruelty to come and wake me up at eleven!" "Half-past eleven, Titine," observed Cardot, humbly. "I came out early to order a dinner fit for an archbishop at Chevet's. Just see how the carpets are stained! What sort of people did you have here?" "You needn't complain, for Fanny Beaupre told me you were coming to dinner with Camusot, and to please you I've invited Tullia, du Bruel, Mariette, the Duc de Maufrigneuse, Florine, and Nathan. So you'll have the four loveliest creatures ever seen behind the foot-lights; we'll dance you a 'pas de Zephire.'" "It is enough to kill you to lead such a life!" cried old Cardot; "and look at the broken glasses! What pillage! The antechamber actually makes me shudder--" At this instant the wrathful old gentleman stopped short as if magnetized, like a bird which a snake is charming. He saw the outline of a form in a black coat through the door of the boudoir. "Ah, Mademoiselle Cabirolle!" he said at last. "Well, what?" she asked. The eyes of the danseuse followed those of the little old man; and when she recognized the presence of the clerk she went off into such fits of laughter that not only was the old gentleman nonplussed, but Oscar was compelled to appear; for Florentine took him by the arm, still pealing with laughter at the conscience-stricken faces of the uncle and nephew. "You here, nephew?" "Nephew! so he's your nephew?" cried Florentine, with another burst of laughter. "You never told me about him. Why didn't Mariette carry you off?" she said to Oscar, who stood there petrified. "What can he do now, poor boy?" "Whatever he pleases!" said Cardot, sharply, marching to the door as if to go away. "One moment, papa Cardot. You will be so good as to get your nephew out of a scrape into which I led him; for he played the money of his master and lost it, and I lend him a thousand francs to win it back, and he lost that too." "Miserable boy! you lost fifteen hundred francs at play at your age?" "Oh, uncle, uncle!" cried poor Oscar, plunged by these words into all the horrors of his position, and falling on his knees before his uncle, with clasped hands, "It is twelve o'clock! I am lost, dishonored! Monsieur Desroches will have no pity! He gave me the money for an important affair, in which his pride was concerned. I was to get a paper at the Palais in the case of Vandernesse versus Vandernesse! What will become of me? Oh, save me for the sake of my father and aunt! Come with me to Monsieur Desroches, and explain it to him; make some excuse,--anything!" These sentences were jerked out through sobs and tears that might have moved the sphinx of Luxor. "Old skinflint!" said the danseuse, who was crying, "will you let your own nephew be dishonored,--the son of the man to whom you owe your fortune?--for his name is Oscar Husson. Save him, or Titine will deny you forever!" "But how did he come here?" asked Cardot. "Don't you see that the reason he forgot to go for those papers was because he was drunk and overslept himself. Georges and his cousin Frederic took all the clerks in his office to a feast at the Rocher de Cancale." Pere Cardot looked at Florentine and hesitated. "Come, come," she said, "you old monkey, shouldn't I have hid him better if there had been anything else in it?" "There, take your five hundred francs, you scamp!" said Cardot to his nephew, "and remember, that's the last penny you'll ever get from me. Go and make it up with your master if you can. I'll return the thousand francs which you borrowed of mademoiselle; but I'll never hear another word about you." Oscar disappeared, not wishing to hear more. Once in the street, however, he knew not where to go. Chance which destroys men and chance which saves them were both making equal efforts for and against Oscar during that fateful morning. But he was doomed to fall before a master who forgave no failure in any affair he had once undertaken. When Mariette reached home that night, she felt alarmed at what might happen to the youth in whom her brother took interest and she wrote a hasty note to Godeschal, telling him what had happened to Oscar and inclosing a bank bill for five hundred francs to repair his loss. The kind-hearted creature went to sleep after charging her maid to carry the little note to Desroches' office before seven o'clock in the morning. Godeschal, on his side, getting up at six and finding that Oscar had not returned, guessed what had happened. He took the five hundred francs from his own little hoard and rushed to the Palais, where he obtained a copy of the judgment and returned in time to lay it before Desroches by eight o'clock. Meantime Desroches, who always rose at four, was in his office by seven. Mariette's maid, not finding the brother of her mistress in his bedroom, came down to the office and there met Desroches, to whom she very naturally offered the note. "Is it about business?" he said; "I am Monsieur Desroches." "You can see, monsieur," replied the maid. Desroches opened the letter and read it. Finding the five-hundred-franc note, he went into his private office furiously angry with his second clerk. About half-past seven he heard Godeschal dictating to the second head-clerk a copy of the document in question, and a few moments later the good fellow entered his master's office with an air of triumph in his heart. "Did Oscar Husson fetch the paper this morning from Simon?" inquired Desroches. "Yes, monsieur." "Who gave him the money?" "Why, you did, Saturday," replied Godeschal. "Then it rains five-hundred-franc notes," cried Desroches. "Look here, Godeschal, you are a fine fellow, but that little Husson does not deserve such generosity. I hate idiots, but I hate still more the men who will go wrong in spite of the fatherly care which watches over them." He gave Godeschal Mariette's letter and the five-hundred-franc note which she had sent. "You must excuse my having opened it," he said, "but your sister's maid told me it was on business. Dismiss Husson." "Poor unhappy boy! what grief he has caused me!" said Godeschal, "that tall ne'er-do-well of a Georges Marest is his evil genius; he ought to flee him like the plague; if not, he'll bring him to some third disgrace." "What do you mean by that?" asked Desroches. Godeschal then related briefly the affair of the journey to Presles. "Ah! yes," said the lawyer, "I remember Joseph Bridau told me that story about the time it happened. It is to that meeting that we owe the favor Monsieur de Serizy has since shown in the matter of Joseph's brother, Philippe Bridau." At this moment Moreau, to whom the case of the Vandernesse estate was of much importance, entered the office. The marquis wished to sell the land in parcels and the count was opposed to such a sale. The land-agent received therefore the first fire of Desroches' wrath against his ex-second clerk and all the threatening prophecies which he fulminated against him. The result was that this most sincere friend and protector of the unhappy youth came to the conclusion that his vanity was incorrigible. "Make him a barrister," said Desroches. "He has only his last examination to pass. In that line, his defects might prove virtues, for self-love and vanity give tongues to half the attorneys." At this time Clapart, who was ill, was being nursed by his wife,--a painful task, a duty without reward. The sick man tormented the poor creature, who was now doomed to learn what venomous and spiteful teasing a half-imbecile man, whom poverty had rendered craftily savage, could be capable of in the weary tete-a-tete of each endless day. Delighted to turn a sharpened arrow in the sensitive heart of the mother, he had, in a measure, studied the fears that Oscar's behavior and defects inspired in the poor woman. When a mother receives from her child a shock like that of the affair at Presles, she continues in a state of constant fear, and, by the manner in which his wife boasted of Oscar every time he obtained the slightest success, Clapart knew the extent of her secret uneasiness, and he took pains to rouse it on every occasion. "Well, Madame," Clapart would say, "Oscar is doing better than I even hoped. That journey to Presles was only a heedlessness of youth. Where can you find young lads who do not commit just such faults? Poor child! he bears his privations heroically! If his father had lived, he would never have had any. God grant he may know how to control his passions!" etc., etc. While all these catastrophes were happening in the rue de Vendome and the rue de Bethisy, Clapart, sitting in the chimney corner, wrapped in an old dressing-gown, watched his wife, who was engaged over the fire in their bedroom in simultaneously making the family broth, Clapart's "tisane," and her own breakfast. "Mon Dieu! I wish I knew how the affair of yesterday ended. Oscar was to breakfast at the Rocher de Cancale and spend the evening with a marquise--" "Don't trouble yourself! Sooner or later you'll find out about your swan," said her husband. "Do you really believe in that marquise? Pooh! A young man who has senses and a taste for extravagance like Oscar can find such ladies as that on every bush--if he pays for them. Some fine morning you'll find yourself with a load of debt on your back." "You are always trying to put me in despair!" cried Madame Clapart. "You complained that my son lived on your salary, and never has he cost you a penny. For two years you haven't had the slightest cause of complaint against him; here he is second clerk, his uncle and Monsieur Moreau pay all expenses, and he earns, himself, a salary of eight hundred francs. If we have bread to eat in our old age we may owe it all to that dear boy. You are really too unjust--" "You call my foresight unjust, do you?" replied the invalid, crossly. Just then the bell rang loudly. Madame Clapart ran to open the door, and remained in the outer room with Moreau, who had come to soften the blow which Oscar's new folly would deal to the heart of his poor mother. "What! he gambled with the money of the office?" she cried, bursting into tears. "Didn't I tell you so, hey?" said Clapart, appearing like a spectre at the door of the salon whither his curiosity had brought him. "Oh! what shall we do with him?" said Madame Clapart, whose grief made her impervious to Clapart's taunt. "If he bore my name," replied Moreau, "I should wait composedly till he draws for the conscription, and if he gets a fatal number I should not provide him with a substitute. This is the second time your son has committed a folly out of sheer vanity. Well, vanity may inspire fine deeds in war and may advance him in the career of a soldier. Besides, six years of military service will put some lead into his head; and as he has only his last legal examination to pass, it won't be much ill-luck for him if he doesn't become a lawyer till he is twenty-six; that is, if he wants to continue in the law after paying, as they say, his tax of blood. By that time, at any rate, he will have been severely punished, he will have learned experience, and contracted habits of subordination. Before making his probation at the bar he will have gone through his probations in life." "If that is your decision for a son," said Madame Clapart, "I see that the heart of a father is not like that of a mother. My poor Oscar a common soldier!--" "Would you rather he flung himself headforemost into the Seine after committing a dishonorable action? He cannot now become a solicitor; do you think him steady and wise enough to be a barrister? No. While his reason is maturing, what will he become? A dissipated fellow. The discipline of the army will, at least, preserve him from that." "Could he not go into some other office? His uncle Cardot has promised to pay for his substitute; Oscar is to dedicate his graduating thesis to him." At this moment carriage-wheels were heard, and a hackney-coach containing Oscar and all his worldly belongings stopped before the door. The luckless young man came up at once. "Ah! here you are, Monsieur Joli-Coeur!" cried Clapart. Oscar kissed his mother, and held out to Moreau a hand which the latter refused to take. To this rebuff Oscar replied by a reproachful look, the boldness of which he had never shown before. Then he turned on Clapart. "Listen to me, monsieur," said the youth, transformed into a man. "You worry my poor mother devilishly, and that's your right, for she is, unfortunately, your wife. But as for me, it is another thing. I shall be of age in a few months; and you have no rights over me even as a minor. I have never asked anything of you. Thanks to Monsieur Moreau, I have never cost you one penny, and I owe you no gratitude. Therefore, I say, let me alone!" Clapart, hearing this apostrophe, slunk back to his sofa in the chimney corner. The reasoning and the inward fury of the young man, who had just received a lecture from his friend Godeschal, silenced the imbecile mind of the sick man. "A momentary temptation, such as you yourself would have yielded to at my age," said Oscar to Moreau, "has made me commit a fault which Desroches thinks serious, though it is only a peccadillo. I am more provoked with myself for taking Florentine of the Gaiete for a marquise than I am for losing fifteen hundred francs after a little debauch in which everybody, even Godeschal, was half-seas over. This time, at any rate, I've hurt no one by myself. I'm cured of such things forever. If you are willing to help me, Monsieur Moreau, I swear to you that the six years I must still stay a clerk before I can get a practice shall be spent without--" "Stop there!" said Moreau. "I have three children, and I can make no promises." "Never mind, never mind," said Madame Clapart to her son, casting a reproachful glance at Moreau. "Your uncle Cardot--" "I have no longer an uncle Cardot," replied Oscar, who related the scene at the rue de Vendome. Madame Clapart, feeling her legs give way under the weight of her body, staggered to a chair in the dining-room, where she fell as if struck by lightning. "All the miseries together!" she said, as she fainted. Moreau took the poor mother in his arms, and carried her to the bed in her chamber. Oscar remained motionless, as if crushed. "There is nothing left for you," said Moreau, coming back to him, "but to make yourself a soldier. That idiot of a Clapart looks to me as though he couldn't live three months, and then your mother will be without a penny. Ought I not, therefore, to reserve for her the little money I am able to give? It was impossible to tell you this before her. As a soldier, you'll eat plain bread and reflect on life such as it is to those who are born into it without fortune." "I may get a lucky number," said Oscar. "Suppose you do, what then? Your mother has well fulfilled her duty towards you. She gave you an education; she placed you on the right road, and secured you a career. You have left it. Now, what can you do? Without money, nothing; as you know by this time. You are not a man who can begin a new career by taking off your coat and going to work in your shirt-sleeves with the tools of an artisan. Besides, your mother loves you, and she would die to see you come to that." Oscar sat down and no longer restrained his tears, which flowed copiously. At last he understood this language, so completely unintelligible to him ever since his first fault. "Men without means ought to be perfect," added Moreau, not suspecting the profundity of that cruel sentence. "My fate will soon be decided," said Oscar. "I draw my number the day after to-morrow. Between now and then I will decide upon my future." Moreau, deeply distressed in spite of his stern bearing, left the household in the rue de la Cerisaie to its despair. Three days later Oscar drew the number twenty-seven. In the interests of the poor lad the former steward of Presles had the courage to go to the Comte de Serizy and ask for his influence to get Oscar into the cavalry. It happened that the count's son, having left the Ecole Polytechnique rather low in his class, was appointed, as a favor, sub-lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry commanded by the Duc de Maufrigneuse. Oscar had, therefore, in his great misfortune, the small luck of being, at the Comte de Serizy's instigation, drafted into that noble regiment, with the promise of promotion to quartermaster within a year. Chance had thus placed the ex-clerk under the command of the son of the Comte de Serizy. Madame Clapart, after languishing for some days, so keenly was she affected by these catastrophes, became a victim to the remorse which seizes upon many a mother whose conduct has been frail in her youth, and who, in her old age, turns to repentance. She now considered herself under a curse. She attributed the sorrows of her second marriage and the misfortunes of her son to a just retribution by which God was compelling her to expiate the errors and pleasures of her youth. This opinion soon became a certainty in her mind. The poor woman went, for the first time in forty years, to confess herself to the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul's, who led her into the practice of devotion. But so ill-used and loving a soul as that of Madame Clapart's could never be anything but simply pious. The Aspasia of the Directory wanted to expiate her sins in order to draw down the blessing of God on the head of her poor Oscar, and she henceforth vowed herself to works and deeds of the purest piety. She believed she had won the attention of heaven when she saved the life of Monsieur Clapart, who, thanks to her devotion, lived on to torture her; but she chose to see, in the tyranny of that imbecile mind, a trial inflicted by the hand of one who loveth while he chasteneth. Oscar, meantime, behaved so well that in 1830 he was first sergeant of the company of the Vicomte de Serizy, which gave him the rank of sub-lieutenant of the line. Oscar Husson was by that time twenty-five years old. As the Royal Guard, to which his regiment was attached, was always in garrison in Paris, or within a circumference of thirty miles around the capital, he came to see his mother from time to time, and tell her his griefs; for he had the sense to see that he could never become an officer as matters then were. At that time the cavalry grades were all being taken up by the younger sons of noble families, and men without the article to their names found promotion difficult. Oscar's sole ambition was to leave the Guards and be appointed sub-lieutenant in a regiment of the cavalry of the line. In the month of February, 1830, Madame Clapart obtained this promotion for her son through the influence of Madame la Dauphine, granted to the Abbe Gaudron, now rector of Saint-Pauls. Although Oscar outwardly professed to be devoted to the Bourbons, in the depths of his heart he was a liberal. Therefore, in the struggle of 1830, he went over to the side of the people. This desertion, which had an importance due to the crisis in which it took place, brought him before the eyes of the public. During the excitement of triumph in the month of August he was promoted lieutenant, received the cross of the Legion of honor, and was attached as aide-de-camp to La Fayette, who gave him the rank of captain in 1832. When the amateur of the best of all possible republics was removed from the command of the National guard, Oscar Husson, whose devotion to the new dynasty amounted to fanaticism, was appointed major of a regiment sent to Africa at the time of the first expedition undertaken by the Prince-royal. The Vicomte de Serizy chanced to be the lieutenant-colonel of this regiment. At the affair of the Makta, where the field had to be abandoned to the Arabs, Monsieur de Serizy was left wounded under a dead horse. Oscar, discovering this, called out to the squadron: "Messieurs, it is going to death, but we cannot abandon our colonel." He dashed upon the enemy, and his electrified soldiers followed him. The Arabs, in their first astonishment at this furious and unlooked-for return, allowed Oscar to seize the viscount, whom he flung across his horse, and carried off at full gallop,--receiving, as he did so, two slashes from yataghans on his left arm. Oscar's conduct on this occasion was rewarded with the officer's cross of the Legion of honor, and by his promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He took the most affectionate care of the Vicomte de Serizy, whose mother came to meet him on the arrival of the regiment at Toulon, where, as we know, the young man died of his wounds. The Comtesse de Serizy had not separated her son from the man who had shown him such devotion. Oscar himself was so seriously wounded that the surgeons whom the countess had brought with her from Paris thought best to amputate his left arm. Thus the Comte de Serizy was led not only to forgive Oscar for his painful remarks on the journey to Presles, but to feel himself his debtor on behalf

womanish

How many times the word 'womanish' appears in the text?

you shall being me luck! See, here are my last hundred francs." And the "marquise" took out from her purse, the rings of which were adorned with diamonds, five gold pieces. Oscar pulled out his hundred in silver five-franc pieces, much ashamed at having to mingle such ignoble coins with gold. In ten throws the actress lost the two hundred francs. "Oh! how stupid!" she cried. "I'm banker now. But we'll play together still, won't we?" Fanny Beaupre rose to take her place as banker, and Oscar, finding himself observed by the whole table, dared not retire on the ground that he had no money. Speech failed him, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. "Lend me five hundred francs," said the actress to the danseuse. Florentine brought the money, which she obtained from Georges, who had just passed eight times at ecarte. "Nathan has won twelve hundred francs," said the actress to Oscar. "Bankers always win; we won't let them fool us, will we?" she whispered in his ear. Persons of nerve, imagination, and dash will understand how it was that poor Oscar opened his pocket-book and took out the note of five hundred francs which Desroches had given him. He looked at Nathan, the distinguished author, who now began, with Florine, to play a heavy game against the bank. "Come, my little man, take 'em up," cried Fanny Beaupre, signing to Oscar to rake in the two hundred francs which Nathan and Florine had punted. The actress did not spare taunts or jests on those who lost. She enlivened the game with jokes which Oscar thought singular; but reflection was stifled by joy; for the first two throws produced a gain of two thousand francs. Oscar then thought of feigning illness and making his escape, leaving his partner behind him; but "honor" kept him there. Three more turns and the gains were lost. Oscar felt a cold sweat running down his back, and he was sobered completely. The next two throws carried off the thousand francs of their mutual stake. Oscar was consumed with thirst, and drank three glasses of iced punch one after the other. The actress now led him into the bed-chamber, where the rest of the company were playing, talking frivolities with an easy air. But by this time the sense of his wrong-doing overcame him; the figure of Desroches appeared to him like a vision. He turned aside to a dark corner and sat down, putting his handkerchief to his eyes, and wept. Florentine noticed the attitude of true grief, which, because it is sincere, is certain to strike the eye of one who acts. She ran to him, took the handkerchief from his hand, and saw his tears; then she led him into a boudoir alone. "What is it, my child?" she said. At the tone and accent of that voice Oscar recognized a motherly kindness which is often found in women of her kind, and he answered openly:-- "I have lost five hundred francs which my employer gave me to obtain a document to-morrow morning; there's nothing for me but to fling myself into the river; I am dishonored." "How silly you are!" she said. "Stay where you are; I'll get you a thousand francs and you can win back what you've lost; but don't risk more than five hundred, so that you may be sure of your master's money. Georges plays a fine game at ecarte; bet on him." Oscar, frightened by his position, accepted the offer of the mistress of the house. "Ah!" he thought, "it is only women of rank who are capable of such kindness. Beautiful, noble, rich! how lucky Georges is!" He received the thousand francs from Florentine and returned to bet on his hoaxer. Georges had just passed for the fourth time when Oscar sat down beside him. The other players saw with satisfaction the arrival of a new better; for all, with the instinct of gamblers, took the side of Giroudeau, the old officer of the Empire. "Messieurs," said Georges, "you'll be punished for deserting me; I feel in the vein. Come, Oscar, we'll make an end of them!" Georges and his partner lost five games running. After losing the thousand francs Oscar was seized with the fury of play and insisted on taking the cards himself. By the result of a chance not at all uncommon with those who play for the first time, he won. But Georges bewildered him with advice; told him when to throw the cards, and even snatched them from his hand; so that this conflict of wills and intuitions injured his vein. By three o'clock in the morning, after various changes of fortune, and still drinking punch, Oscar came down to his last hundred francs. He rose with a heavy head, completely stupefied, took a few steps forward, and fell upon a sofa in the boudoir, his eyes closing in a leaden sleep. "Mariette," said Fanny Beaupre to Godeschal's sister, who had come in about two o'clock, "do you dine here to-morrow? Camusot and Pere Cardot are coming, and we'll have some fun." "What!" cried Florentine, "and my old fellow never told me!" "He said he'd tell you to-morrow morning," remarked Fanny Beaupre. "The devil take him and his orgies!" exclaimed Florentine. "He and Camusot are worse than magistrates or stage-managers. But we have very good dinners here, Mariette," she continued. "Cardot always orders them from Chevet's; bring your Duc de Maufrigneuse and we'll make them dance like Tritons." Hearing the names of Cardot and Camusot, Oscar made an effort to throw off his sleep; but he could only mutter a few words which were not understood, and then he fell back upon the silken cushions. "You'll have to keep him here all night," said Fanny Beaupre, laughing, to Florentine. "Oh! poor boy! he is drunk with punch and despair both. It is the second clerk in your brother's office," she said to Mariette. "He has lost the money his master gave him for some legal affair. He wanted to drown himself; so I lent him a thousand francs, but those brigands Finot and Giroudeau won them from him. Poor innocent!" "But we ought to wake him," said Mariette. "My brother won't make light of it, nor his master either." "Oh, wake him if you can, and carry him off with you!" said Florentine, returning to the salon to receive the adieux of some departing guests. Presently those who remained began what was called "character dancing," and by the time it was broad daylight, Florentine, tired out, went to bed, oblivious to Oscar, who was still in the boudoir sound asleep. CHAPTER X. ANOTHER CATASTROPHE About eleven the next morning, a terrible sound awoke the unfortunate clerk. Recognizing the voice of his uncle Cardot, he thought it wise to feign sleep, and so turned his face into the yellow velvet cushions on which he had passed the night. "Really, my little Florentine," said the old gentleman, "this is neither right nor sensible; you danced last evening in 'Les Ruines,' and you have spent the night in an orgy. That's deliberately going to work to lose your freshness. Besides which, it was ungrateful to inaugurate this beautiful apartment without even letting me know. Who knows what has been going on here?" "Old monster!" cried Florentine, "haven't you a key that lets you in at all hours? My ball lasted till five in the morning, and you have the cruelty to come and wake me up at eleven!" "Half-past eleven, Titine," observed Cardot, humbly. "I came out early to order a dinner fit for an archbishop at Chevet's. Just see how the carpets are stained! What sort of people did you have here?" "You needn't complain, for Fanny Beaupre told me you were coming to dinner with Camusot, and to please you I've invited Tullia, du Bruel, Mariette, the Duc de Maufrigneuse, Florine, and Nathan. So you'll have the four loveliest creatures ever seen behind the foot-lights; we'll dance you a 'pas de Zephire.'" "It is enough to kill you to lead such a life!" cried old Cardot; "and look at the broken glasses! What pillage! The antechamber actually makes me shudder--" At this instant the wrathful old gentleman stopped short as if magnetized, like a bird which a snake is charming. He saw the outline of a form in a black coat through the door of the boudoir. "Ah, Mademoiselle Cabirolle!" he said at last. "Well, what?" she asked. The eyes of the danseuse followed those of the little old man; and when she recognized the presence of the clerk she went off into such fits of laughter that not only was the old gentleman nonplussed, but Oscar was compelled to appear; for Florentine took him by the arm, still pealing with laughter at the conscience-stricken faces of the uncle and nephew. "You here, nephew?" "Nephew! so he's your nephew?" cried Florentine, with another burst of laughter. "You never told me about him. Why didn't Mariette carry you off?" she said to Oscar, who stood there petrified. "What can he do now, poor boy?" "Whatever he pleases!" said Cardot, sharply, marching to the door as if to go away. "One moment, papa Cardot. You will be so good as to get your nephew out of a scrape into which I led him; for he played the money of his master and lost it, and I lend him a thousand francs to win it back, and he lost that too." "Miserable boy! you lost fifteen hundred francs at play at your age?" "Oh, uncle, uncle!" cried poor Oscar, plunged by these words into all the horrors of his position, and falling on his knees before his uncle, with clasped hands, "It is twelve o'clock! I am lost, dishonored! Monsieur Desroches will have no pity! He gave me the money for an important affair, in which his pride was concerned. I was to get a paper at the Palais in the case of Vandernesse versus Vandernesse! What will become of me? Oh, save me for the sake of my father and aunt! Come with me to Monsieur Desroches, and explain it to him; make some excuse,--anything!" These sentences were jerked out through sobs and tears that might have moved the sphinx of Luxor. "Old skinflint!" said the danseuse, who was crying, "will you let your own nephew be dishonored,--the son of the man to whom you owe your fortune?--for his name is Oscar Husson. Save him, or Titine will deny you forever!" "But how did he come here?" asked Cardot. "Don't you see that the reason he forgot to go for those papers was because he was drunk and overslept himself. Georges and his cousin Frederic took all the clerks in his office to a feast at the Rocher de Cancale." Pere Cardot looked at Florentine and hesitated. "Come, come," she said, "you old monkey, shouldn't I have hid him better if there had been anything else in it?" "There, take your five hundred francs, you scamp!" said Cardot to his nephew, "and remember, that's the last penny you'll ever get from me. Go and make it up with your master if you can. I'll return the thousand francs which you borrowed of mademoiselle; but I'll never hear another word about you." Oscar disappeared, not wishing to hear more. Once in the street, however, he knew not where to go. Chance which destroys men and chance which saves them were both making equal efforts for and against Oscar during that fateful morning. But he was doomed to fall before a master who forgave no failure in any affair he had once undertaken. When Mariette reached home that night, she felt alarmed at what might happen to the youth in whom her brother took interest and she wrote a hasty note to Godeschal, telling him what had happened to Oscar and inclosing a bank bill for five hundred francs to repair his loss. The kind-hearted creature went to sleep after charging her maid to carry the little note to Desroches' office before seven o'clock in the morning. Godeschal, on his side, getting up at six and finding that Oscar had not returned, guessed what had happened. He took the five hundred francs from his own little hoard and rushed to the Palais, where he obtained a copy of the judgment and returned in time to lay it before Desroches by eight o'clock. Meantime Desroches, who always rose at four, was in his office by seven. Mariette's maid, not finding the brother of her mistress in his bedroom, came down to the office and there met Desroches, to whom she very naturally offered the note. "Is it about business?" he said; "I am Monsieur Desroches." "You can see, monsieur," replied the maid. Desroches opened the letter and read it. Finding the five-hundred-franc note, he went into his private office furiously angry with his second clerk. About half-past seven he heard Godeschal dictating to the second head-clerk a copy of the document in question, and a few moments later the good fellow entered his master's office with an air of triumph in his heart. "Did Oscar Husson fetch the paper this morning from Simon?" inquired Desroches. "Yes, monsieur." "Who gave him the money?" "Why, you did, Saturday," replied Godeschal. "Then it rains five-hundred-franc notes," cried Desroches. "Look here, Godeschal, you are a fine fellow, but that little Husson does not deserve such generosity. I hate idiots, but I hate still more the men who will go wrong in spite of the fatherly care which watches over them." He gave Godeschal Mariette's letter and the five-hundred-franc note which she had sent. "You must excuse my having opened it," he said, "but your sister's maid told me it was on business. Dismiss Husson." "Poor unhappy boy! what grief he has caused me!" said Godeschal, "that tall ne'er-do-well of a Georges Marest is his evil genius; he ought to flee him like the plague; if not, he'll bring him to some third disgrace." "What do you mean by that?" asked Desroches. Godeschal then related briefly the affair of the journey to Presles. "Ah! yes," said the lawyer, "I remember Joseph Bridau told me that story about the time it happened. It is to that meeting that we owe the favor Monsieur de Serizy has since shown in the matter of Joseph's brother, Philippe Bridau." At this moment Moreau, to whom the case of the Vandernesse estate was of much importance, entered the office. The marquis wished to sell the land in parcels and the count was opposed to such a sale. The land-agent received therefore the first fire of Desroches' wrath against his ex-second clerk and all the threatening prophecies which he fulminated against him. The result was that this most sincere friend and protector of the unhappy youth came to the conclusion that his vanity was incorrigible. "Make him a barrister," said Desroches. "He has only his last examination to pass. In that line, his defects might prove virtues, for self-love and vanity give tongues to half the attorneys." At this time Clapart, who was ill, was being nursed by his wife,--a painful task, a duty without reward. The sick man tormented the poor creature, who was now doomed to learn what venomous and spiteful teasing a half-imbecile man, whom poverty had rendered craftily savage, could be capable of in the weary tete-a-tete of each endless day. Delighted to turn a sharpened arrow in the sensitive heart of the mother, he had, in a measure, studied the fears that Oscar's behavior and defects inspired in the poor woman. When a mother receives from her child a shock like that of the affair at Presles, she continues in a state of constant fear, and, by the manner in which his wife boasted of Oscar every time he obtained the slightest success, Clapart knew the extent of her secret uneasiness, and he took pains to rouse it on every occasion. "Well, Madame," Clapart would say, "Oscar is doing better than I even hoped. That journey to Presles was only a heedlessness of youth. Where can you find young lads who do not commit just such faults? Poor child! he bears his privations heroically! If his father had lived, he would never have had any. God grant he may know how to control his passions!" etc., etc. While all these catastrophes were happening in the rue de Vendome and the rue de Bethisy, Clapart, sitting in the chimney corner, wrapped in an old dressing-gown, watched his wife, who was engaged over the fire in their bedroom in simultaneously making the family broth, Clapart's "tisane," and her own breakfast. "Mon Dieu! I wish I knew how the affair of yesterday ended. Oscar was to breakfast at the Rocher de Cancale and spend the evening with a marquise--" "Don't trouble yourself! Sooner or later you'll find out about your swan," said her husband. "Do you really believe in that marquise? Pooh! A young man who has senses and a taste for extravagance like Oscar can find such ladies as that on every bush--if he pays for them. Some fine morning you'll find yourself with a load of debt on your back." "You are always trying to put me in despair!" cried Madame Clapart. "You complained that my son lived on your salary, and never has he cost you a penny. For two years you haven't had the slightest cause of complaint against him; here he is second clerk, his uncle and Monsieur Moreau pay all expenses, and he earns, himself, a salary of eight hundred francs. If we have bread to eat in our old age we may owe it all to that dear boy. You are really too unjust--" "You call my foresight unjust, do you?" replied the invalid, crossly. Just then the bell rang loudly. Madame Clapart ran to open the door, and remained in the outer room with Moreau, who had come to soften the blow which Oscar's new folly would deal to the heart of his poor mother. "What! he gambled with the money of the office?" she cried, bursting into tears. "Didn't I tell you so, hey?" said Clapart, appearing like a spectre at the door of the salon whither his curiosity had brought him. "Oh! what shall we do with him?" said Madame Clapart, whose grief made her impervious to Clapart's taunt. "If he bore my name," replied Moreau, "I should wait composedly till he draws for the conscription, and if he gets a fatal number I should not provide him with a substitute. This is the second time your son has committed a folly out of sheer vanity. Well, vanity may inspire fine deeds in war and may advance him in the career of a soldier. Besides, six years of military service will put some lead into his head; and as he has only his last legal examination to pass, it won't be much ill-luck for him if he doesn't become a lawyer till he is twenty-six; that is, if he wants to continue in the law after paying, as they say, his tax of blood. By that time, at any rate, he will have been severely punished, he will have learned experience, and contracted habits of subordination. Before making his probation at the bar he will have gone through his probations in life." "If that is your decision for a son," said Madame Clapart, "I see that the heart of a father is not like that of a mother. My poor Oscar a common soldier!--" "Would you rather he flung himself headforemost into the Seine after committing a dishonorable action? He cannot now become a solicitor; do you think him steady and wise enough to be a barrister? No. While his reason is maturing, what will he become? A dissipated fellow. The discipline of the army will, at least, preserve him from that." "Could he not go into some other office? His uncle Cardot has promised to pay for his substitute; Oscar is to dedicate his graduating thesis to him." At this moment carriage-wheels were heard, and a hackney-coach containing Oscar and all his worldly belongings stopped before the door. The luckless young man came up at once. "Ah! here you are, Monsieur Joli-Coeur!" cried Clapart. Oscar kissed his mother, and held out to Moreau a hand which the latter refused to take. To this rebuff Oscar replied by a reproachful look, the boldness of which he had never shown before. Then he turned on Clapart. "Listen to me, monsieur," said the youth, transformed into a man. "You worry my poor mother devilishly, and that's your right, for she is, unfortunately, your wife. But as for me, it is another thing. I shall be of age in a few months; and you have no rights over me even as a minor. I have never asked anything of you. Thanks to Monsieur Moreau, I have never cost you one penny, and I owe you no gratitude. Therefore, I say, let me alone!" Clapart, hearing this apostrophe, slunk back to his sofa in the chimney corner. The reasoning and the inward fury of the young man, who had just received a lecture from his friend Godeschal, silenced the imbecile mind of the sick man. "A momentary temptation, such as you yourself would have yielded to at my age," said Oscar to Moreau, "has made me commit a fault which Desroches thinks serious, though it is only a peccadillo. I am more provoked with myself for taking Florentine of the Gaiete for a marquise than I am for losing fifteen hundred francs after a little debauch in which everybody, even Godeschal, was half-seas over. This time, at any rate, I've hurt no one by myself. I'm cured of such things forever. If you are willing to help me, Monsieur Moreau, I swear to you that the six years I must still stay a clerk before I can get a practice shall be spent without--" "Stop there!" said Moreau. "I have three children, and I can make no promises." "Never mind, never mind," said Madame Clapart to her son, casting a reproachful glance at Moreau. "Your uncle Cardot--" "I have no longer an uncle Cardot," replied Oscar, who related the scene at the rue de Vendome. Madame Clapart, feeling her legs give way under the weight of her body, staggered to a chair in the dining-room, where she fell as if struck by lightning. "All the miseries together!" she said, as she fainted. Moreau took the poor mother in his arms, and carried her to the bed in her chamber. Oscar remained motionless, as if crushed. "There is nothing left for you," said Moreau, coming back to him, "but to make yourself a soldier. That idiot of a Clapart looks to me as though he couldn't live three months, and then your mother will be without a penny. Ought I not, therefore, to reserve for her the little money I am able to give? It was impossible to tell you this before her. As a soldier, you'll eat plain bread and reflect on life such as it is to those who are born into it without fortune." "I may get a lucky number," said Oscar. "Suppose you do, what then? Your mother has well fulfilled her duty towards you. She gave you an education; she placed you on the right road, and secured you a career. You have left it. Now, what can you do? Without money, nothing; as you know by this time. You are not a man who can begin a new career by taking off your coat and going to work in your shirt-sleeves with the tools of an artisan. Besides, your mother loves you, and she would die to see you come to that." Oscar sat down and no longer restrained his tears, which flowed copiously. At last he understood this language, so completely unintelligible to him ever since his first fault. "Men without means ought to be perfect," added Moreau, not suspecting the profundity of that cruel sentence. "My fate will soon be decided," said Oscar. "I draw my number the day after to-morrow. Between now and then I will decide upon my future." Moreau, deeply distressed in spite of his stern bearing, left the household in the rue de la Cerisaie to its despair. Three days later Oscar drew the number twenty-seven. In the interests of the poor lad the former steward of Presles had the courage to go to the Comte de Serizy and ask for his influence to get Oscar into the cavalry. It happened that the count's son, having left the Ecole Polytechnique rather low in his class, was appointed, as a favor, sub-lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry commanded by the Duc de Maufrigneuse. Oscar had, therefore, in his great misfortune, the small luck of being, at the Comte de Serizy's instigation, drafted into that noble regiment, with the promise of promotion to quartermaster within a year. Chance had thus placed the ex-clerk under the command of the son of the Comte de Serizy. Madame Clapart, after languishing for some days, so keenly was she affected by these catastrophes, became a victim to the remorse which seizes upon many a mother whose conduct has been frail in her youth, and who, in her old age, turns to repentance. She now considered herself under a curse. She attributed the sorrows of her second marriage and the misfortunes of her son to a just retribution by which God was compelling her to expiate the errors and pleasures of her youth. This opinion soon became a certainty in her mind. The poor woman went, for the first time in forty years, to confess herself to the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul's, who led her into the practice of devotion. But so ill-used and loving a soul as that of Madame Clapart's could never be anything but simply pious. The Aspasia of the Directory wanted to expiate her sins in order to draw down the blessing of God on the head of her poor Oscar, and she henceforth vowed herself to works and deeds of the purest piety. She believed she had won the attention of heaven when she saved the life of Monsieur Clapart, who, thanks to her devotion, lived on to torture her; but she chose to see, in the tyranny of that imbecile mind, a trial inflicted by the hand of one who loveth while he chasteneth. Oscar, meantime, behaved so well that in 1830 he was first sergeant of the company of the Vicomte de Serizy, which gave him the rank of sub-lieutenant of the line. Oscar Husson was by that time twenty-five years old. As the Royal Guard, to which his regiment was attached, was always in garrison in Paris, or within a circumference of thirty miles around the capital, he came to see his mother from time to time, and tell her his griefs; for he had the sense to see that he could never become an officer as matters then were. At that time the cavalry grades were all being taken up by the younger sons of noble families, and men without the article to their names found promotion difficult. Oscar's sole ambition was to leave the Guards and be appointed sub-lieutenant in a regiment of the cavalry of the line. In the month of February, 1830, Madame Clapart obtained this promotion for her son through the influence of Madame la Dauphine, granted to the Abbe Gaudron, now rector of Saint-Pauls. Although Oscar outwardly professed to be devoted to the Bourbons, in the depths of his heart he was a liberal. Therefore, in the struggle of 1830, he went over to the side of the people. This desertion, which had an importance due to the crisis in which it took place, brought him before the eyes of the public. During the excitement of triumph in the month of August he was promoted lieutenant, received the cross of the Legion of honor, and was attached as aide-de-camp to La Fayette, who gave him the rank of captain in 1832. When the amateur of the best of all possible republics was removed from the command of the National guard, Oscar Husson, whose devotion to the new dynasty amounted to fanaticism, was appointed major of a regiment sent to Africa at the time of the first expedition undertaken by the Prince-royal. The Vicomte de Serizy chanced to be the lieutenant-colonel of this regiment. At the affair of the Makta, where the field had to be abandoned to the Arabs, Monsieur de Serizy was left wounded under a dead horse. Oscar, discovering this, called out to the squadron: "Messieurs, it is going to death, but we cannot abandon our colonel." He dashed upon the enemy, and his electrified soldiers followed him. The Arabs, in their first astonishment at this furious and unlooked-for return, allowed Oscar to seize the viscount, whom he flung across his horse, and carried off at full gallop,--receiving, as he did so, two slashes from yataghans on his left arm. Oscar's conduct on this occasion was rewarded with the officer's cross of the Legion of honor, and by his promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He took the most affectionate care of the Vicomte de Serizy, whose mother came to meet him on the arrival of the regiment at Toulon, where, as we know, the young man died of his wounds. The Comtesse de Serizy had not separated her son from the man who had shown him such devotion. Oscar himself was so seriously wounded that the surgeons whom the countess had brought with her from Paris thought best to amputate his left arm. Thus the Comte de Serizy was led not only to forgive Oscar for his painful remarks on the journey to Presles, but to feel himself his debtor on behalf

iced

How many times the word 'iced' appears in the text?

you shall being me luck! See, here are my last hundred francs." And the "marquise" took out from her purse, the rings of which were adorned with diamonds, five gold pieces. Oscar pulled out his hundred in silver five-franc pieces, much ashamed at having to mingle such ignoble coins with gold. In ten throws the actress lost the two hundred francs. "Oh! how stupid!" she cried. "I'm banker now. But we'll play together still, won't we?" Fanny Beaupre rose to take her place as banker, and Oscar, finding himself observed by the whole table, dared not retire on the ground that he had no money. Speech failed him, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. "Lend me five hundred francs," said the actress to the danseuse. Florentine brought the money, which she obtained from Georges, who had just passed eight times at ecarte. "Nathan has won twelve hundred francs," said the actress to Oscar. "Bankers always win; we won't let them fool us, will we?" she whispered in his ear. Persons of nerve, imagination, and dash will understand how it was that poor Oscar opened his pocket-book and took out the note of five hundred francs which Desroches had given him. He looked at Nathan, the distinguished author, who now began, with Florine, to play a heavy game against the bank. "Come, my little man, take 'em up," cried Fanny Beaupre, signing to Oscar to rake in the two hundred francs which Nathan and Florine had punted. The actress did not spare taunts or jests on those who lost. She enlivened the game with jokes which Oscar thought singular; but reflection was stifled by joy; for the first two throws produced a gain of two thousand francs. Oscar then thought of feigning illness and making his escape, leaving his partner behind him; but "honor" kept him there. Three more turns and the gains were lost. Oscar felt a cold sweat running down his back, and he was sobered completely. The next two throws carried off the thousand francs of their mutual stake. Oscar was consumed with thirst, and drank three glasses of iced punch one after the other. The actress now led him into the bed-chamber, where the rest of the company were playing, talking frivolities with an easy air. But by this time the sense of his wrong-doing overcame him; the figure of Desroches appeared to him like a vision. He turned aside to a dark corner and sat down, putting his handkerchief to his eyes, and wept. Florentine noticed the attitude of true grief, which, because it is sincere, is certain to strike the eye of one who acts. She ran to him, took the handkerchief from his hand, and saw his tears; then she led him into a boudoir alone. "What is it, my child?" she said. At the tone and accent of that voice Oscar recognized a motherly kindness which is often found in women of her kind, and he answered openly:-- "I have lost five hundred francs which my employer gave me to obtain a document to-morrow morning; there's nothing for me but to fling myself into the river; I am dishonored." "How silly you are!" she said. "Stay where you are; I'll get you a thousand francs and you can win back what you've lost; but don't risk more than five hundred, so that you may be sure of your master's money. Georges plays a fine game at ecarte; bet on him." Oscar, frightened by his position, accepted the offer of the mistress of the house. "Ah!" he thought, "it is only women of rank who are capable of such kindness. Beautiful, noble, rich! how lucky Georges is!" He received the thousand francs from Florentine and returned to bet on his hoaxer. Georges had just passed for the fourth time when Oscar sat down beside him. The other players saw with satisfaction the arrival of a new better; for all, with the instinct of gamblers, took the side of Giroudeau, the old officer of the Empire. "Messieurs," said Georges, "you'll be punished for deserting me; I feel in the vein. Come, Oscar, we'll make an end of them!" Georges and his partner lost five games running. After losing the thousand francs Oscar was seized with the fury of play and insisted on taking the cards himself. By the result of a chance not at all uncommon with those who play for the first time, he won. But Georges bewildered him with advice; told him when to throw the cards, and even snatched them from his hand; so that this conflict of wills and intuitions injured his vein. By three o'clock in the morning, after various changes of fortune, and still drinking punch, Oscar came down to his last hundred francs. He rose with a heavy head, completely stupefied, took a few steps forward, and fell upon a sofa in the boudoir, his eyes closing in a leaden sleep. "Mariette," said Fanny Beaupre to Godeschal's sister, who had come in about two o'clock, "do you dine here to-morrow? Camusot and Pere Cardot are coming, and we'll have some fun." "What!" cried Florentine, "and my old fellow never told me!" "He said he'd tell you to-morrow morning," remarked Fanny Beaupre. "The devil take him and his orgies!" exclaimed Florentine. "He and Camusot are worse than magistrates or stage-managers. But we have very good dinners here, Mariette," she continued. "Cardot always orders them from Chevet's; bring your Duc de Maufrigneuse and we'll make them dance like Tritons." Hearing the names of Cardot and Camusot, Oscar made an effort to throw off his sleep; but he could only mutter a few words which were not understood, and then he fell back upon the silken cushions. "You'll have to keep him here all night," said Fanny Beaupre, laughing, to Florentine. "Oh! poor boy! he is drunk with punch and despair both. It is the second clerk in your brother's office," she said to Mariette. "He has lost the money his master gave him for some legal affair. He wanted to drown himself; so I lent him a thousand francs, but those brigands Finot and Giroudeau won them from him. Poor innocent!" "But we ought to wake him," said Mariette. "My brother won't make light of it, nor his master either." "Oh, wake him if you can, and carry him off with you!" said Florentine, returning to the salon to receive the adieux of some departing guests. Presently those who remained began what was called "character dancing," and by the time it was broad daylight, Florentine, tired out, went to bed, oblivious to Oscar, who was still in the boudoir sound asleep. CHAPTER X. ANOTHER CATASTROPHE About eleven the next morning, a terrible sound awoke the unfortunate clerk. Recognizing the voice of his uncle Cardot, he thought it wise to feign sleep, and so turned his face into the yellow velvet cushions on which he had passed the night. "Really, my little Florentine," said the old gentleman, "this is neither right nor sensible; you danced last evening in 'Les Ruines,' and you have spent the night in an orgy. That's deliberately going to work to lose your freshness. Besides which, it was ungrateful to inaugurate this beautiful apartment without even letting me know. Who knows what has been going on here?" "Old monster!" cried Florentine, "haven't you a key that lets you in at all hours? My ball lasted till five in the morning, and you have the cruelty to come and wake me up at eleven!" "Half-past eleven, Titine," observed Cardot, humbly. "I came out early to order a dinner fit for an archbishop at Chevet's. Just see how the carpets are stained! What sort of people did you have here?" "You needn't complain, for Fanny Beaupre told me you were coming to dinner with Camusot, and to please you I've invited Tullia, du Bruel, Mariette, the Duc de Maufrigneuse, Florine, and Nathan. So you'll have the four loveliest creatures ever seen behind the foot-lights; we'll dance you a 'pas de Zephire.'" "It is enough to kill you to lead such a life!" cried old Cardot; "and look at the broken glasses! What pillage! The antechamber actually makes me shudder--" At this instant the wrathful old gentleman stopped short as if magnetized, like a bird which a snake is charming. He saw the outline of a form in a black coat through the door of the boudoir. "Ah, Mademoiselle Cabirolle!" he said at last. "Well, what?" she asked. The eyes of the danseuse followed those of the little old man; and when she recognized the presence of the clerk she went off into such fits of laughter that not only was the old gentleman nonplussed, but Oscar was compelled to appear; for Florentine took him by the arm, still pealing with laughter at the conscience-stricken faces of the uncle and nephew. "You here, nephew?" "Nephew! so he's your nephew?" cried Florentine, with another burst of laughter. "You never told me about him. Why didn't Mariette carry you off?" she said to Oscar, who stood there petrified. "What can he do now, poor boy?" "Whatever he pleases!" said Cardot, sharply, marching to the door as if to go away. "One moment, papa Cardot. You will be so good as to get your nephew out of a scrape into which I led him; for he played the money of his master and lost it, and I lend him a thousand francs to win it back, and he lost that too." "Miserable boy! you lost fifteen hundred francs at play at your age?" "Oh, uncle, uncle!" cried poor Oscar, plunged by these words into all the horrors of his position, and falling on his knees before his uncle, with clasped hands, "It is twelve o'clock! I am lost, dishonored! Monsieur Desroches will have no pity! He gave me the money for an important affair, in which his pride was concerned. I was to get a paper at the Palais in the case of Vandernesse versus Vandernesse! What will become of me? Oh, save me for the sake of my father and aunt! Come with me to Monsieur Desroches, and explain it to him; make some excuse,--anything!" These sentences were jerked out through sobs and tears that might have moved the sphinx of Luxor. "Old skinflint!" said the danseuse, who was crying, "will you let your own nephew be dishonored,--the son of the man to whom you owe your fortune?--for his name is Oscar Husson. Save him, or Titine will deny you forever!" "But how did he come here?" asked Cardot. "Don't you see that the reason he forgot to go for those papers was because he was drunk and overslept himself. Georges and his cousin Frederic took all the clerks in his office to a feast at the Rocher de Cancale." Pere Cardot looked at Florentine and hesitated. "Come, come," she said, "you old monkey, shouldn't I have hid him better if there had been anything else in it?" "There, take your five hundred francs, you scamp!" said Cardot to his nephew, "and remember, that's the last penny you'll ever get from me. Go and make it up with your master if you can. I'll return the thousand francs which you borrowed of mademoiselle; but I'll never hear another word about you." Oscar disappeared, not wishing to hear more. Once in the street, however, he knew not where to go. Chance which destroys men and chance which saves them were both making equal efforts for and against Oscar during that fateful morning. But he was doomed to fall before a master who forgave no failure in any affair he had once undertaken. When Mariette reached home that night, she felt alarmed at what might happen to the youth in whom her brother took interest and she wrote a hasty note to Godeschal, telling him what had happened to Oscar and inclosing a bank bill for five hundred francs to repair his loss. The kind-hearted creature went to sleep after charging her maid to carry the little note to Desroches' office before seven o'clock in the morning. Godeschal, on his side, getting up at six and finding that Oscar had not returned, guessed what had happened. He took the five hundred francs from his own little hoard and rushed to the Palais, where he obtained a copy of the judgment and returned in time to lay it before Desroches by eight o'clock. Meantime Desroches, who always rose at four, was in his office by seven. Mariette's maid, not finding the brother of her mistress in his bedroom, came down to the office and there met Desroches, to whom she very naturally offered the note. "Is it about business?" he said; "I am Monsieur Desroches." "You can see, monsieur," replied the maid. Desroches opened the letter and read it. Finding the five-hundred-franc note, he went into his private office furiously angry with his second clerk. About half-past seven he heard Godeschal dictating to the second head-clerk a copy of the document in question, and a few moments later the good fellow entered his master's office with an air of triumph in his heart. "Did Oscar Husson fetch the paper this morning from Simon?" inquired Desroches. "Yes, monsieur." "Who gave him the money?" "Why, you did, Saturday," replied Godeschal. "Then it rains five-hundred-franc notes," cried Desroches. "Look here, Godeschal, you are a fine fellow, but that little Husson does not deserve such generosity. I hate idiots, but I hate still more the men who will go wrong in spite of the fatherly care which watches over them." He gave Godeschal Mariette's letter and the five-hundred-franc note which she had sent. "You must excuse my having opened it," he said, "but your sister's maid told me it was on business. Dismiss Husson." "Poor unhappy boy! what grief he has caused me!" said Godeschal, "that tall ne'er-do-well of a Georges Marest is his evil genius; he ought to flee him like the plague; if not, he'll bring him to some third disgrace." "What do you mean by that?" asked Desroches. Godeschal then related briefly the affair of the journey to Presles. "Ah! yes," said the lawyer, "I remember Joseph Bridau told me that story about the time it happened. It is to that meeting that we owe the favor Monsieur de Serizy has since shown in the matter of Joseph's brother, Philippe Bridau." At this moment Moreau, to whom the case of the Vandernesse estate was of much importance, entered the office. The marquis wished to sell the land in parcels and the count was opposed to such a sale. The land-agent received therefore the first fire of Desroches' wrath against his ex-second clerk and all the threatening prophecies which he fulminated against him. The result was that this most sincere friend and protector of the unhappy youth came to the conclusion that his vanity was incorrigible. "Make him a barrister," said Desroches. "He has only his last examination to pass. In that line, his defects might prove virtues, for self-love and vanity give tongues to half the attorneys." At this time Clapart, who was ill, was being nursed by his wife,--a painful task, a duty without reward. The sick man tormented the poor creature, who was now doomed to learn what venomous and spiteful teasing a half-imbecile man, whom poverty had rendered craftily savage, could be capable of in the weary tete-a-tete of each endless day. Delighted to turn a sharpened arrow in the sensitive heart of the mother, he had, in a measure, studied the fears that Oscar's behavior and defects inspired in the poor woman. When a mother receives from her child a shock like that of the affair at Presles, she continues in a state of constant fear, and, by the manner in which his wife boasted of Oscar every time he obtained the slightest success, Clapart knew the extent of her secret uneasiness, and he took pains to rouse it on every occasion. "Well, Madame," Clapart would say, "Oscar is doing better than I even hoped. That journey to Presles was only a heedlessness of youth. Where can you find young lads who do not commit just such faults? Poor child! he bears his privations heroically! If his father had lived, he would never have had any. God grant he may know how to control his passions!" etc., etc. While all these catastrophes were happening in the rue de Vendome and the rue de Bethisy, Clapart, sitting in the chimney corner, wrapped in an old dressing-gown, watched his wife, who was engaged over the fire in their bedroom in simultaneously making the family broth, Clapart's "tisane," and her own breakfast. "Mon Dieu! I wish I knew how the affair of yesterday ended. Oscar was to breakfast at the Rocher de Cancale and spend the evening with a marquise--" "Don't trouble yourself! Sooner or later you'll find out about your swan," said her husband. "Do you really believe in that marquise? Pooh! A young man who has senses and a taste for extravagance like Oscar can find such ladies as that on every bush--if he pays for them. Some fine morning you'll find yourself with a load of debt on your back." "You are always trying to put me in despair!" cried Madame Clapart. "You complained that my son lived on your salary, and never has he cost you a penny. For two years you haven't had the slightest cause of complaint against him; here he is second clerk, his uncle and Monsieur Moreau pay all expenses, and he earns, himself, a salary of eight hundred francs. If we have bread to eat in our old age we may owe it all to that dear boy. You are really too unjust--" "You call my foresight unjust, do you?" replied the invalid, crossly. Just then the bell rang loudly. Madame Clapart ran to open the door, and remained in the outer room with Moreau, who had come to soften the blow which Oscar's new folly would deal to the heart of his poor mother. "What! he gambled with the money of the office?" she cried, bursting into tears. "Didn't I tell you so, hey?" said Clapart, appearing like a spectre at the door of the salon whither his curiosity had brought him. "Oh! what shall we do with him?" said Madame Clapart, whose grief made her impervious to Clapart's taunt. "If he bore my name," replied Moreau, "I should wait composedly till he draws for the conscription, and if he gets a fatal number I should not provide him with a substitute. This is the second time your son has committed a folly out of sheer vanity. Well, vanity may inspire fine deeds in war and may advance him in the career of a soldier. Besides, six years of military service will put some lead into his head; and as he has only his last legal examination to pass, it won't be much ill-luck for him if he doesn't become a lawyer till he is twenty-six; that is, if he wants to continue in the law after paying, as they say, his tax of blood. By that time, at any rate, he will have been severely punished, he will have learned experience, and contracted habits of subordination. Before making his probation at the bar he will have gone through his probations in life." "If that is your decision for a son," said Madame Clapart, "I see that the heart of a father is not like that of a mother. My poor Oscar a common soldier!--" "Would you rather he flung himself headforemost into the Seine after committing a dishonorable action? He cannot now become a solicitor; do you think him steady and wise enough to be a barrister? No. While his reason is maturing, what will he become? A dissipated fellow. The discipline of the army will, at least, preserve him from that." "Could he not go into some other office? His uncle Cardot has promised to pay for his substitute; Oscar is to dedicate his graduating thesis to him." At this moment carriage-wheels were heard, and a hackney-coach containing Oscar and all his worldly belongings stopped before the door. The luckless young man came up at once. "Ah! here you are, Monsieur Joli-Coeur!" cried Clapart. Oscar kissed his mother, and held out to Moreau a hand which the latter refused to take. To this rebuff Oscar replied by a reproachful look, the boldness of which he had never shown before. Then he turned on Clapart. "Listen to me, monsieur," said the youth, transformed into a man. "You worry my poor mother devilishly, and that's your right, for she is, unfortunately, your wife. But as for me, it is another thing. I shall be of age in a few months; and you have no rights over me even as a minor. I have never asked anything of you. Thanks to Monsieur Moreau, I have never cost you one penny, and I owe you no gratitude. Therefore, I say, let me alone!" Clapart, hearing this apostrophe, slunk back to his sofa in the chimney corner. The reasoning and the inward fury of the young man, who had just received a lecture from his friend Godeschal, silenced the imbecile mind of the sick man. "A momentary temptation, such as you yourself would have yielded to at my age," said Oscar to Moreau, "has made me commit a fault which Desroches thinks serious, though it is only a peccadillo. I am more provoked with myself for taking Florentine of the Gaiete for a marquise than I am for losing fifteen hundred francs after a little debauch in which everybody, even Godeschal, was half-seas over. This time, at any rate, I've hurt no one by myself. I'm cured of such things forever. If you are willing to help me, Monsieur Moreau, I swear to you that the six years I must still stay a clerk before I can get a practice shall be spent without--" "Stop there!" said Moreau. "I have three children, and I can make no promises." "Never mind, never mind," said Madame Clapart to her son, casting a reproachful glance at Moreau. "Your uncle Cardot--" "I have no longer an uncle Cardot," replied Oscar, who related the scene at the rue de Vendome. Madame Clapart, feeling her legs give way under the weight of her body, staggered to a chair in the dining-room, where she fell as if struck by lightning. "All the miseries together!" she said, as she fainted. Moreau took the poor mother in his arms, and carried her to the bed in her chamber. Oscar remained motionless, as if crushed. "There is nothing left for you," said Moreau, coming back to him, "but to make yourself a soldier. That idiot of a Clapart looks to me as though he couldn't live three months, and then your mother will be without a penny. Ought I not, therefore, to reserve for her the little money I am able to give? It was impossible to tell you this before her. As a soldier, you'll eat plain bread and reflect on life such as it is to those who are born into it without fortune." "I may get a lucky number," said Oscar. "Suppose you do, what then? Your mother has well fulfilled her duty towards you. She gave you an education; she placed you on the right road, and secured you a career. You have left it. Now, what can you do? Without money, nothing; as you know by this time. You are not a man who can begin a new career by taking off your coat and going to work in your shirt-sleeves with the tools of an artisan. Besides, your mother loves you, and she would die to see you come to that." Oscar sat down and no longer restrained his tears, which flowed copiously. At last he understood this language, so completely unintelligible to him ever since his first fault. "Men without means ought to be perfect," added Moreau, not suspecting the profundity of that cruel sentence. "My fate will soon be decided," said Oscar. "I draw my number the day after to-morrow. Between now and then I will decide upon my future." Moreau, deeply distressed in spite of his stern bearing, left the household in the rue de la Cerisaie to its despair. Three days later Oscar drew the number twenty-seven. In the interests of the poor lad the former steward of Presles had the courage to go to the Comte de Serizy and ask for his influence to get Oscar into the cavalry. It happened that the count's son, having left the Ecole Polytechnique rather low in his class, was appointed, as a favor, sub-lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry commanded by the Duc de Maufrigneuse. Oscar had, therefore, in his great misfortune, the small luck of being, at the Comte de Serizy's instigation, drafted into that noble regiment, with the promise of promotion to quartermaster within a year. Chance had thus placed the ex-clerk under the command of the son of the Comte de Serizy. Madame Clapart, after languishing for some days, so keenly was she affected by these catastrophes, became a victim to the remorse which seizes upon many a mother whose conduct has been frail in her youth, and who, in her old age, turns to repentance. She now considered herself under a curse. She attributed the sorrows of her second marriage and the misfortunes of her son to a just retribution by which God was compelling her to expiate the errors and pleasures of her youth. This opinion soon became a certainty in her mind. The poor woman went, for the first time in forty years, to confess herself to the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul's, who led her into the practice of devotion. But so ill-used and loving a soul as that of Madame Clapart's could never be anything but simply pious. The Aspasia of the Directory wanted to expiate her sins in order to draw down the blessing of God on the head of her poor Oscar, and she henceforth vowed herself to works and deeds of the purest piety. She believed she had won the attention of heaven when she saved the life of Monsieur Clapart, who, thanks to her devotion, lived on to torture her; but she chose to see, in the tyranny of that imbecile mind, a trial inflicted by the hand of one who loveth while he chasteneth. Oscar, meantime, behaved so well that in 1830 he was first sergeant of the company of the Vicomte de Serizy, which gave him the rank of sub-lieutenant of the line. Oscar Husson was by that time twenty-five years old. As the Royal Guard, to which his regiment was attached, was always in garrison in Paris, or within a circumference of thirty miles around the capital, he came to see his mother from time to time, and tell her his griefs; for he had the sense to see that he could never become an officer as matters then were. At that time the cavalry grades were all being taken up by the younger sons of noble families, and men without the article to their names found promotion difficult. Oscar's sole ambition was to leave the Guards and be appointed sub-lieutenant in a regiment of the cavalry of the line. In the month of February, 1830, Madame Clapart obtained this promotion for her son through the influence of Madame la Dauphine, granted to the Abbe Gaudron, now rector of Saint-Pauls. Although Oscar outwardly professed to be devoted to the Bourbons, in the depths of his heart he was a liberal. Therefore, in the struggle of 1830, he went over to the side of the people. This desertion, which had an importance due to the crisis in which it took place, brought him before the eyes of the public. During the excitement of triumph in the month of August he was promoted lieutenant, received the cross of the Legion of honor, and was attached as aide-de-camp to La Fayette, who gave him the rank of captain in 1832. When the amateur of the best of all possible republics was removed from the command of the National guard, Oscar Husson, whose devotion to the new dynasty amounted to fanaticism, was appointed major of a regiment sent to Africa at the time of the first expedition undertaken by the Prince-royal. The Vicomte de Serizy chanced to be the lieutenant-colonel of this regiment. At the affair of the Makta, where the field had to be abandoned to the Arabs, Monsieur de Serizy was left wounded under a dead horse. Oscar, discovering this, called out to the squadron: "Messieurs, it is going to death, but we cannot abandon our colonel." He dashed upon the enemy, and his electrified soldiers followed him. The Arabs, in their first astonishment at this furious and unlooked-for return, allowed Oscar to seize the viscount, whom he flung across his horse, and carried off at full gallop,--receiving, as he did so, two slashes from yataghans on his left arm. Oscar's conduct on this occasion was rewarded with the officer's cross of the Legion of honor, and by his promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He took the most affectionate care of the Vicomte de Serizy, whose mother came to meet him on the arrival of the regiment at Toulon, where, as we know, the young man died of his wounds. The Comtesse de Serizy had not separated her son from the man who had shown him such devotion. Oscar himself was so seriously wounded that the surgeons whom the countess had brought with her from Paris thought best to amputate his left arm. Thus the Comte de Serizy was led not only to forgive Oscar for his painful remarks on the journey to Presles, but to feel himself his debtor on behalf

heavy

How many times the word 'heavy' appears in the text?

you shall being me luck! See, here are my last hundred francs." And the "marquise" took out from her purse, the rings of which were adorned with diamonds, five gold pieces. Oscar pulled out his hundred in silver five-franc pieces, much ashamed at having to mingle such ignoble coins with gold. In ten throws the actress lost the two hundred francs. "Oh! how stupid!" she cried. "I'm banker now. But we'll play together still, won't we?" Fanny Beaupre rose to take her place as banker, and Oscar, finding himself observed by the whole table, dared not retire on the ground that he had no money. Speech failed him, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. "Lend me five hundred francs," said the actress to the danseuse. Florentine brought the money, which she obtained from Georges, who had just passed eight times at ecarte. "Nathan has won twelve hundred francs," said the actress to Oscar. "Bankers always win; we won't let them fool us, will we?" she whispered in his ear. Persons of nerve, imagination, and dash will understand how it was that poor Oscar opened his pocket-book and took out the note of five hundred francs which Desroches had given him. He looked at Nathan, the distinguished author, who now began, with Florine, to play a heavy game against the bank. "Come, my little man, take 'em up," cried Fanny Beaupre, signing to Oscar to rake in the two hundred francs which Nathan and Florine had punted. The actress did not spare taunts or jests on those who lost. She enlivened the game with jokes which Oscar thought singular; but reflection was stifled by joy; for the first two throws produced a gain of two thousand francs. Oscar then thought of feigning illness and making his escape, leaving his partner behind him; but "honor" kept him there. Three more turns and the gains were lost. Oscar felt a cold sweat running down his back, and he was sobered completely. The next two throws carried off the thousand francs of their mutual stake. Oscar was consumed with thirst, and drank three glasses of iced punch one after the other. The actress now led him into the bed-chamber, where the rest of the company were playing, talking frivolities with an easy air. But by this time the sense of his wrong-doing overcame him; the figure of Desroches appeared to him like a vision. He turned aside to a dark corner and sat down, putting his handkerchief to his eyes, and wept. Florentine noticed the attitude of true grief, which, because it is sincere, is certain to strike the eye of one who acts. She ran to him, took the handkerchief from his hand, and saw his tears; then she led him into a boudoir alone. "What is it, my child?" she said. At the tone and accent of that voice Oscar recognized a motherly kindness which is often found in women of her kind, and he answered openly:-- "I have lost five hundred francs which my employer gave me to obtain a document to-morrow morning; there's nothing for me but to fling myself into the river; I am dishonored." "How silly you are!" she said. "Stay where you are; I'll get you a thousand francs and you can win back what you've lost; but don't risk more than five hundred, so that you may be sure of your master's money. Georges plays a fine game at ecarte; bet on him." Oscar, frightened by his position, accepted the offer of the mistress of the house. "Ah!" he thought, "it is only women of rank who are capable of such kindness. Beautiful, noble, rich! how lucky Georges is!" He received the thousand francs from Florentine and returned to bet on his hoaxer. Georges had just passed for the fourth time when Oscar sat down beside him. The other players saw with satisfaction the arrival of a new better; for all, with the instinct of gamblers, took the side of Giroudeau, the old officer of the Empire. "Messieurs," said Georges, "you'll be punished for deserting me; I feel in the vein. Come, Oscar, we'll make an end of them!" Georges and his partner lost five games running. After losing the thousand francs Oscar was seized with the fury of play and insisted on taking the cards himself. By the result of a chance not at all uncommon with those who play for the first time, he won. But Georges bewildered him with advice; told him when to throw the cards, and even snatched them from his hand; so that this conflict of wills and intuitions injured his vein. By three o'clock in the morning, after various changes of fortune, and still drinking punch, Oscar came down to his last hundred francs. He rose with a heavy head, completely stupefied, took a few steps forward, and fell upon a sofa in the boudoir, his eyes closing in a leaden sleep. "Mariette," said Fanny Beaupre to Godeschal's sister, who had come in about two o'clock, "do you dine here to-morrow? Camusot and Pere Cardot are coming, and we'll have some fun." "What!" cried Florentine, "and my old fellow never told me!" "He said he'd tell you to-morrow morning," remarked Fanny Beaupre. "The devil take him and his orgies!" exclaimed Florentine. "He and Camusot are worse than magistrates or stage-managers. But we have very good dinners here, Mariette," she continued. "Cardot always orders them from Chevet's; bring your Duc de Maufrigneuse and we'll make them dance like Tritons." Hearing the names of Cardot and Camusot, Oscar made an effort to throw off his sleep; but he could only mutter a few words which were not understood, and then he fell back upon the silken cushions. "You'll have to keep him here all night," said Fanny Beaupre, laughing, to Florentine. "Oh! poor boy! he is drunk with punch and despair both. It is the second clerk in your brother's office," she said to Mariette. "He has lost the money his master gave him for some legal affair. He wanted to drown himself; so I lent him a thousand francs, but those brigands Finot and Giroudeau won them from him. Poor innocent!" "But we ought to wake him," said Mariette. "My brother won't make light of it, nor his master either." "Oh, wake him if you can, and carry him off with you!" said Florentine, returning to the salon to receive the adieux of some departing guests. Presently those who remained began what was called "character dancing," and by the time it was broad daylight, Florentine, tired out, went to bed, oblivious to Oscar, who was still in the boudoir sound asleep. CHAPTER X. ANOTHER CATASTROPHE About eleven the next morning, a terrible sound awoke the unfortunate clerk. Recognizing the voice of his uncle Cardot, he thought it wise to feign sleep, and so turned his face into the yellow velvet cushions on which he had passed the night. "Really, my little Florentine," said the old gentleman, "this is neither right nor sensible; you danced last evening in 'Les Ruines,' and you have spent the night in an orgy. That's deliberately going to work to lose your freshness. Besides which, it was ungrateful to inaugurate this beautiful apartment without even letting me know. Who knows what has been going on here?" "Old monster!" cried Florentine, "haven't you a key that lets you in at all hours? My ball lasted till five in the morning, and you have the cruelty to come and wake me up at eleven!" "Half-past eleven, Titine," observed Cardot, humbly. "I came out early to order a dinner fit for an archbishop at Chevet's. Just see how the carpets are stained! What sort of people did you have here?" "You needn't complain, for Fanny Beaupre told me you were coming to dinner with Camusot, and to please you I've invited Tullia, du Bruel, Mariette, the Duc de Maufrigneuse, Florine, and Nathan. So you'll have the four loveliest creatures ever seen behind the foot-lights; we'll dance you a 'pas de Zephire.'" "It is enough to kill you to lead such a life!" cried old Cardot; "and look at the broken glasses! What pillage! The antechamber actually makes me shudder--" At this instant the wrathful old gentleman stopped short as if magnetized, like a bird which a snake is charming. He saw the outline of a form in a black coat through the door of the boudoir. "Ah, Mademoiselle Cabirolle!" he said at last. "Well, what?" she asked. The eyes of the danseuse followed those of the little old man; and when she recognized the presence of the clerk she went off into such fits of laughter that not only was the old gentleman nonplussed, but Oscar was compelled to appear; for Florentine took him by the arm, still pealing with laughter at the conscience-stricken faces of the uncle and nephew. "You here, nephew?" "Nephew! so he's your nephew?" cried Florentine, with another burst of laughter. "You never told me about him. Why didn't Mariette carry you off?" she said to Oscar, who stood there petrified. "What can he do now, poor boy?" "Whatever he pleases!" said Cardot, sharply, marching to the door as if to go away. "One moment, papa Cardot. You will be so good as to get your nephew out of a scrape into which I led him; for he played the money of his master and lost it, and I lend him a thousand francs to win it back, and he lost that too." "Miserable boy! you lost fifteen hundred francs at play at your age?" "Oh, uncle, uncle!" cried poor Oscar, plunged by these words into all the horrors of his position, and falling on his knees before his uncle, with clasped hands, "It is twelve o'clock! I am lost, dishonored! Monsieur Desroches will have no pity! He gave me the money for an important affair, in which his pride was concerned. I was to get a paper at the Palais in the case of Vandernesse versus Vandernesse! What will become of me? Oh, save me for the sake of my father and aunt! Come with me to Monsieur Desroches, and explain it to him; make some excuse,--anything!" These sentences were jerked out through sobs and tears that might have moved the sphinx of Luxor. "Old skinflint!" said the danseuse, who was crying, "will you let your own nephew be dishonored,--the son of the man to whom you owe your fortune?--for his name is Oscar Husson. Save him, or Titine will deny you forever!" "But how did he come here?" asked Cardot. "Don't you see that the reason he forgot to go for those papers was because he was drunk and overslept himself. Georges and his cousin Frederic took all the clerks in his office to a feast at the Rocher de Cancale." Pere Cardot looked at Florentine and hesitated. "Come, come," she said, "you old monkey, shouldn't I have hid him better if there had been anything else in it?" "There, take your five hundred francs, you scamp!" said Cardot to his nephew, "and remember, that's the last penny you'll ever get from me. Go and make it up with your master if you can. I'll return the thousand francs which you borrowed of mademoiselle; but I'll never hear another word about you." Oscar disappeared, not wishing to hear more. Once in the street, however, he knew not where to go. Chance which destroys men and chance which saves them were both making equal efforts for and against Oscar during that fateful morning. But he was doomed to fall before a master who forgave no failure in any affair he had once undertaken. When Mariette reached home that night, she felt alarmed at what might happen to the youth in whom her brother took interest and she wrote a hasty note to Godeschal, telling him what had happened to Oscar and inclosing a bank bill for five hundred francs to repair his loss. The kind-hearted creature went to sleep after charging her maid to carry the little note to Desroches' office before seven o'clock in the morning. Godeschal, on his side, getting up at six and finding that Oscar had not returned, guessed what had happened. He took the five hundred francs from his own little hoard and rushed to the Palais, where he obtained a copy of the judgment and returned in time to lay it before Desroches by eight o'clock. Meantime Desroches, who always rose at four, was in his office by seven. Mariette's maid, not finding the brother of her mistress in his bedroom, came down to the office and there met Desroches, to whom she very naturally offered the note. "Is it about business?" he said; "I am Monsieur Desroches." "You can see, monsieur," replied the maid. Desroches opened the letter and read it. Finding the five-hundred-franc note, he went into his private office furiously angry with his second clerk. About half-past seven he heard Godeschal dictating to the second head-clerk a copy of the document in question, and a few moments later the good fellow entered his master's office with an air of triumph in his heart. "Did Oscar Husson fetch the paper this morning from Simon?" inquired Desroches. "Yes, monsieur." "Who gave him the money?" "Why, you did, Saturday," replied Godeschal. "Then it rains five-hundred-franc notes," cried Desroches. "Look here, Godeschal, you are a fine fellow, but that little Husson does not deserve such generosity. I hate idiots, but I hate still more the men who will go wrong in spite of the fatherly care which watches over them." He gave Godeschal Mariette's letter and the five-hundred-franc note which she had sent. "You must excuse my having opened it," he said, "but your sister's maid told me it was on business. Dismiss Husson." "Poor unhappy boy! what grief he has caused me!" said Godeschal, "that tall ne'er-do-well of a Georges Marest is his evil genius; he ought to flee him like the plague; if not, he'll bring him to some third disgrace." "What do you mean by that?" asked Desroches. Godeschal then related briefly the affair of the journey to Presles. "Ah! yes," said the lawyer, "I remember Joseph Bridau told me that story about the time it happened. It is to that meeting that we owe the favor Monsieur de Serizy has since shown in the matter of Joseph's brother, Philippe Bridau." At this moment Moreau, to whom the case of the Vandernesse estate was of much importance, entered the office. The marquis wished to sell the land in parcels and the count was opposed to such a sale. The land-agent received therefore the first fire of Desroches' wrath against his ex-second clerk and all the threatening prophecies which he fulminated against him. The result was that this most sincere friend and protector of the unhappy youth came to the conclusion that his vanity was incorrigible. "Make him a barrister," said Desroches. "He has only his last examination to pass. In that line, his defects might prove virtues, for self-love and vanity give tongues to half the attorneys." At this time Clapart, who was ill, was being nursed by his wife,--a painful task, a duty without reward. The sick man tormented the poor creature, who was now doomed to learn what venomous and spiteful teasing a half-imbecile man, whom poverty had rendered craftily savage, could be capable of in the weary tete-a-tete of each endless day. Delighted to turn a sharpened arrow in the sensitive heart of the mother, he had, in a measure, studied the fears that Oscar's behavior and defects inspired in the poor woman. When a mother receives from her child a shock like that of the affair at Presles, she continues in a state of constant fear, and, by the manner in which his wife boasted of Oscar every time he obtained the slightest success, Clapart knew the extent of her secret uneasiness, and he took pains to rouse it on every occasion. "Well, Madame," Clapart would say, "Oscar is doing better than I even hoped. That journey to Presles was only a heedlessness of youth. Where can you find young lads who do not commit just such faults? Poor child! he bears his privations heroically! If his father had lived, he would never have had any. God grant he may know how to control his passions!" etc., etc. While all these catastrophes were happening in the rue de Vendome and the rue de Bethisy, Clapart, sitting in the chimney corner, wrapped in an old dressing-gown, watched his wife, who was engaged over the fire in their bedroom in simultaneously making the family broth, Clapart's "tisane," and her own breakfast. "Mon Dieu! I wish I knew how the affair of yesterday ended. Oscar was to breakfast at the Rocher de Cancale and spend the evening with a marquise--" "Don't trouble yourself! Sooner or later you'll find out about your swan," said her husband. "Do you really believe in that marquise? Pooh! A young man who has senses and a taste for extravagance like Oscar can find such ladies as that on every bush--if he pays for them. Some fine morning you'll find yourself with a load of debt on your back." "You are always trying to put me in despair!" cried Madame Clapart. "You complained that my son lived on your salary, and never has he cost you a penny. For two years you haven't had the slightest cause of complaint against him; here he is second clerk, his uncle and Monsieur Moreau pay all expenses, and he earns, himself, a salary of eight hundred francs. If we have bread to eat in our old age we may owe it all to that dear boy. You are really too unjust--" "You call my foresight unjust, do you?" replied the invalid, crossly. Just then the bell rang loudly. Madame Clapart ran to open the door, and remained in the outer room with Moreau, who had come to soften the blow which Oscar's new folly would deal to the heart of his poor mother. "What! he gambled with the money of the office?" she cried, bursting into tears. "Didn't I tell you so, hey?" said Clapart, appearing like a spectre at the door of the salon whither his curiosity had brought him. "Oh! what shall we do with him?" said Madame Clapart, whose grief made her impervious to Clapart's taunt. "If he bore my name," replied Moreau, "I should wait composedly till he draws for the conscription, and if he gets a fatal number I should not provide him with a substitute. This is the second time your son has committed a folly out of sheer vanity. Well, vanity may inspire fine deeds in war and may advance him in the career of a soldier. Besides, six years of military service will put some lead into his head; and as he has only his last legal examination to pass, it won't be much ill-luck for him if he doesn't become a lawyer till he is twenty-six; that is, if he wants to continue in the law after paying, as they say, his tax of blood. By that time, at any rate, he will have been severely punished, he will have learned experience, and contracted habits of subordination. Before making his probation at the bar he will have gone through his probations in life." "If that is your decision for a son," said Madame Clapart, "I see that the heart of a father is not like that of a mother. My poor Oscar a common soldier!--" "Would you rather he flung himself headforemost into the Seine after committing a dishonorable action? He cannot now become a solicitor; do you think him steady and wise enough to be a barrister? No. While his reason is maturing, what will he become? A dissipated fellow. The discipline of the army will, at least, preserve him from that." "Could he not go into some other office? His uncle Cardot has promised to pay for his substitute; Oscar is to dedicate his graduating thesis to him." At this moment carriage-wheels were heard, and a hackney-coach containing Oscar and all his worldly belongings stopped before the door. The luckless young man came up at once. "Ah! here you are, Monsieur Joli-Coeur!" cried Clapart. Oscar kissed his mother, and held out to Moreau a hand which the latter refused to take. To this rebuff Oscar replied by a reproachful look, the boldness of which he had never shown before. Then he turned on Clapart. "Listen to me, monsieur," said the youth, transformed into a man. "You worry my poor mother devilishly, and that's your right, for she is, unfortunately, your wife. But as for me, it is another thing. I shall be of age in a few months; and you have no rights over me even as a minor. I have never asked anything of you. Thanks to Monsieur Moreau, I have never cost you one penny, and I owe you no gratitude. Therefore, I say, let me alone!" Clapart, hearing this apostrophe, slunk back to his sofa in the chimney corner. The reasoning and the inward fury of the young man, who had just received a lecture from his friend Godeschal, silenced the imbecile mind of the sick man. "A momentary temptation, such as you yourself would have yielded to at my age," said Oscar to Moreau, "has made me commit a fault which Desroches thinks serious, though it is only a peccadillo. I am more provoked with myself for taking Florentine of the Gaiete for a marquise than I am for losing fifteen hundred francs after a little debauch in which everybody, even Godeschal, was half-seas over. This time, at any rate, I've hurt no one by myself. I'm cured of such things forever. If you are willing to help me, Monsieur Moreau, I swear to you that the six years I must still stay a clerk before I can get a practice shall be spent without--" "Stop there!" said Moreau. "I have three children, and I can make no promises." "Never mind, never mind," said Madame Clapart to her son, casting a reproachful glance at Moreau. "Your uncle Cardot--" "I have no longer an uncle Cardot," replied Oscar, who related the scene at the rue de Vendome. Madame Clapart, feeling her legs give way under the weight of her body, staggered to a chair in the dining-room, where she fell as if struck by lightning. "All the miseries together!" she said, as she fainted. Moreau took the poor mother in his arms, and carried her to the bed in her chamber. Oscar remained motionless, as if crushed. "There is nothing left for you," said Moreau, coming back to him, "but to make yourself a soldier. That idiot of a Clapart looks to me as though he couldn't live three months, and then your mother will be without a penny. Ought I not, therefore, to reserve for her the little money I am able to give? It was impossible to tell you this before her. As a soldier, you'll eat plain bread and reflect on life such as it is to those who are born into it without fortune." "I may get a lucky number," said Oscar. "Suppose you do, what then? Your mother has well fulfilled her duty towards you. She gave you an education; she placed you on the right road, and secured you a career. You have left it. Now, what can you do? Without money, nothing; as you know by this time. You are not a man who can begin a new career by taking off your coat and going to work in your shirt-sleeves with the tools of an artisan. Besides, your mother loves you, and she would die to see you come to that." Oscar sat down and no longer restrained his tears, which flowed copiously. At last he understood this language, so completely unintelligible to him ever since his first fault. "Men without means ought to be perfect," added Moreau, not suspecting the profundity of that cruel sentence. "My fate will soon be decided," said Oscar. "I draw my number the day after to-morrow. Between now and then I will decide upon my future." Moreau, deeply distressed in spite of his stern bearing, left the household in the rue de la Cerisaie to its despair. Three days later Oscar drew the number twenty-seven. In the interests of the poor lad the former steward of Presles had the courage to go to the Comte de Serizy and ask for his influence to get Oscar into the cavalry. It happened that the count's son, having left the Ecole Polytechnique rather low in his class, was appointed, as a favor, sub-lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry commanded by the Duc de Maufrigneuse. Oscar had, therefore, in his great misfortune, the small luck of being, at the Comte de Serizy's instigation, drafted into that noble regiment, with the promise of promotion to quartermaster within a year. Chance had thus placed the ex-clerk under the command of the son of the Comte de Serizy. Madame Clapart, after languishing for some days, so keenly was she affected by these catastrophes, became a victim to the remorse which seizes upon many a mother whose conduct has been frail in her youth, and who, in her old age, turns to repentance. She now considered herself under a curse. She attributed the sorrows of her second marriage and the misfortunes of her son to a just retribution by which God was compelling her to expiate the errors and pleasures of her youth. This opinion soon became a certainty in her mind. The poor woman went, for the first time in forty years, to confess herself to the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul's, who led her into the practice of devotion. But so ill-used and loving a soul as that of Madame Clapart's could never be anything but simply pious. The Aspasia of the Directory wanted to expiate her sins in order to draw down the blessing of God on the head of her poor Oscar, and she henceforth vowed herself to works and deeds of the purest piety. She believed she had won the attention of heaven when she saved the life of Monsieur Clapart, who, thanks to her devotion, lived on to torture her; but she chose to see, in the tyranny of that imbecile mind, a trial inflicted by the hand of one who loveth while he chasteneth. Oscar, meantime, behaved so well that in 1830 he was first sergeant of the company of the Vicomte de Serizy, which gave him the rank of sub-lieutenant of the line. Oscar Husson was by that time twenty-five years old. As the Royal Guard, to which his regiment was attached, was always in garrison in Paris, or within a circumference of thirty miles around the capital, he came to see his mother from time to time, and tell her his griefs; for he had the sense to see that he could never become an officer as matters then were. At that time the cavalry grades were all being taken up by the younger sons of noble families, and men without the article to their names found promotion difficult. Oscar's sole ambition was to leave the Guards and be appointed sub-lieutenant in a regiment of the cavalry of the line. In the month of February, 1830, Madame Clapart obtained this promotion for her son through the influence of Madame la Dauphine, granted to the Abbe Gaudron, now rector of Saint-Pauls. Although Oscar outwardly professed to be devoted to the Bourbons, in the depths of his heart he was a liberal. Therefore, in the struggle of 1830, he went over to the side of the people. This desertion, which had an importance due to the crisis in which it took place, brought him before the eyes of the public. During the excitement of triumph in the month of August he was promoted lieutenant, received the cross of the Legion of honor, and was attached as aide-de-camp to La Fayette, who gave him the rank of captain in 1832. When the amateur of the best of all possible republics was removed from the command of the National guard, Oscar Husson, whose devotion to the new dynasty amounted to fanaticism, was appointed major of a regiment sent to Africa at the time of the first expedition undertaken by the Prince-royal. The Vicomte de Serizy chanced to be the lieutenant-colonel of this regiment. At the affair of the Makta, where the field had to be abandoned to the Arabs, Monsieur de Serizy was left wounded under a dead horse. Oscar, discovering this, called out to the squadron: "Messieurs, it is going to death, but we cannot abandon our colonel." He dashed upon the enemy, and his electrified soldiers followed him. The Arabs, in their first astonishment at this furious and unlooked-for return, allowed Oscar to seize the viscount, whom he flung across his horse, and carried off at full gallop,--receiving, as he did so, two slashes from yataghans on his left arm. Oscar's conduct on this occasion was rewarded with the officer's cross of the Legion of honor, and by his promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He took the most affectionate care of the Vicomte de Serizy, whose mother came to meet him on the arrival of the regiment at Toulon, where, as we know, the young man died of his wounds. The Comtesse de Serizy had not separated her son from the man who had shown him such devotion. Oscar himself was so seriously wounded that the surgeons whom the countess had brought with her from Paris thought best to amputate his left arm. Thus the Comte de Serizy was led not only to forgive Oscar for his painful remarks on the journey to Presles, but to feel himself his debtor on behalf

purse

How many times the word 'purse' appears in the text?

you shall being me luck! See, here are my last hundred francs." And the "marquise" took out from her purse, the rings of which were adorned with diamonds, five gold pieces. Oscar pulled out his hundred in silver five-franc pieces, much ashamed at having to mingle such ignoble coins with gold. In ten throws the actress lost the two hundred francs. "Oh! how stupid!" she cried. "I'm banker now. But we'll play together still, won't we?" Fanny Beaupre rose to take her place as banker, and Oscar, finding himself observed by the whole table, dared not retire on the ground that he had no money. Speech failed him, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. "Lend me five hundred francs," said the actress to the danseuse. Florentine brought the money, which she obtained from Georges, who had just passed eight times at ecarte. "Nathan has won twelve hundred francs," said the actress to Oscar. "Bankers always win; we won't let them fool us, will we?" she whispered in his ear. Persons of nerve, imagination, and dash will understand how it was that poor Oscar opened his pocket-book and took out the note of five hundred francs which Desroches had given him. He looked at Nathan, the distinguished author, who now began, with Florine, to play a heavy game against the bank. "Come, my little man, take 'em up," cried Fanny Beaupre, signing to Oscar to rake in the two hundred francs which Nathan and Florine had punted. The actress did not spare taunts or jests on those who lost. She enlivened the game with jokes which Oscar thought singular; but reflection was stifled by joy; for the first two throws produced a gain of two thousand francs. Oscar then thought of feigning illness and making his escape, leaving his partner behind him; but "honor" kept him there. Three more turns and the gains were lost. Oscar felt a cold sweat running down his back, and he was sobered completely. The next two throws carried off the thousand francs of their mutual stake. Oscar was consumed with thirst, and drank three glasses of iced punch one after the other. The actress now led him into the bed-chamber, where the rest of the company were playing, talking frivolities with an easy air. But by this time the sense of his wrong-doing overcame him; the figure of Desroches appeared to him like a vision. He turned aside to a dark corner and sat down, putting his handkerchief to his eyes, and wept. Florentine noticed the attitude of true grief, which, because it is sincere, is certain to strike the eye of one who acts. She ran to him, took the handkerchief from his hand, and saw his tears; then she led him into a boudoir alone. "What is it, my child?" she said. At the tone and accent of that voice Oscar recognized a motherly kindness which is often found in women of her kind, and he answered openly:-- "I have lost five hundred francs which my employer gave me to obtain a document to-morrow morning; there's nothing for me but to fling myself into the river; I am dishonored." "How silly you are!" she said. "Stay where you are; I'll get you a thousand francs and you can win back what you've lost; but don't risk more than five hundred, so that you may be sure of your master's money. Georges plays a fine game at ecarte; bet on him." Oscar, frightened by his position, accepted the offer of the mistress of the house. "Ah!" he thought, "it is only women of rank who are capable of such kindness. Beautiful, noble, rich! how lucky Georges is!" He received the thousand francs from Florentine and returned to bet on his hoaxer. Georges had just passed for the fourth time when Oscar sat down beside him. The other players saw with satisfaction the arrival of a new better; for all, with the instinct of gamblers, took the side of Giroudeau, the old officer of the Empire. "Messieurs," said Georges, "you'll be punished for deserting me; I feel in the vein. Come, Oscar, we'll make an end of them!" Georges and his partner lost five games running. After losing the thousand francs Oscar was seized with the fury of play and insisted on taking the cards himself. By the result of a chance not at all uncommon with those who play for the first time, he won. But Georges bewildered him with advice; told him when to throw the cards, and even snatched them from his hand; so that this conflict of wills and intuitions injured his vein. By three o'clock in the morning, after various changes of fortune, and still drinking punch, Oscar came down to his last hundred francs. He rose with a heavy head, completely stupefied, took a few steps forward, and fell upon a sofa in the boudoir, his eyes closing in a leaden sleep. "Mariette," said Fanny Beaupre to Godeschal's sister, who had come in about two o'clock, "do you dine here to-morrow? Camusot and Pere Cardot are coming, and we'll have some fun." "What!" cried Florentine, "and my old fellow never told me!" "He said he'd tell you to-morrow morning," remarked Fanny Beaupre. "The devil take him and his orgies!" exclaimed Florentine. "He and Camusot are worse than magistrates or stage-managers. But we have very good dinners here, Mariette," she continued. "Cardot always orders them from Chevet's; bring your Duc de Maufrigneuse and we'll make them dance like Tritons." Hearing the names of Cardot and Camusot, Oscar made an effort to throw off his sleep; but he could only mutter a few words which were not understood, and then he fell back upon the silken cushions. "You'll have to keep him here all night," said Fanny Beaupre, laughing, to Florentine. "Oh! poor boy! he is drunk with punch and despair both. It is the second clerk in your brother's office," she said to Mariette. "He has lost the money his master gave him for some legal affair. He wanted to drown himself; so I lent him a thousand francs, but those brigands Finot and Giroudeau won them from him. Poor innocent!" "But we ought to wake him," said Mariette. "My brother won't make light of it, nor his master either." "Oh, wake him if you can, and carry him off with you!" said Florentine, returning to the salon to receive the adieux of some departing guests. Presently those who remained began what was called "character dancing," and by the time it was broad daylight, Florentine, tired out, went to bed, oblivious to Oscar, who was still in the boudoir sound asleep. CHAPTER X. ANOTHER CATASTROPHE About eleven the next morning, a terrible sound awoke the unfortunate clerk. Recognizing the voice of his uncle Cardot, he thought it wise to feign sleep, and so turned his face into the yellow velvet cushions on which he had passed the night. "Really, my little Florentine," said the old gentleman, "this is neither right nor sensible; you danced last evening in 'Les Ruines,' and you have spent the night in an orgy. That's deliberately going to work to lose your freshness. Besides which, it was ungrateful to inaugurate this beautiful apartment without even letting me know. Who knows what has been going on here?" "Old monster!" cried Florentine, "haven't you a key that lets you in at all hours? My ball lasted till five in the morning, and you have the cruelty to come and wake me up at eleven!" "Half-past eleven, Titine," observed Cardot, humbly. "I came out early to order a dinner fit for an archbishop at Chevet's. Just see how the carpets are stained! What sort of people did you have here?" "You needn't complain, for Fanny Beaupre told me you were coming to dinner with Camusot, and to please you I've invited Tullia, du Bruel, Mariette, the Duc de Maufrigneuse, Florine, and Nathan. So you'll have the four loveliest creatures ever seen behind the foot-lights; we'll dance you a 'pas de Zephire.'" "It is enough to kill you to lead such a life!" cried old Cardot; "and look at the broken glasses! What pillage! The antechamber actually makes me shudder--" At this instant the wrathful old gentleman stopped short as if magnetized, like a bird which a snake is charming. He saw the outline of a form in a black coat through the door of the boudoir. "Ah, Mademoiselle Cabirolle!" he said at last. "Well, what?" she asked. The eyes of the danseuse followed those of the little old man; and when she recognized the presence of the clerk she went off into such fits of laughter that not only was the old gentleman nonplussed, but Oscar was compelled to appear; for Florentine took him by the arm, still pealing with laughter at the conscience-stricken faces of the uncle and nephew. "You here, nephew?" "Nephew! so he's your nephew?" cried Florentine, with another burst of laughter. "You never told me about him. Why didn't Mariette carry you off?" she said to Oscar, who stood there petrified. "What can he do now, poor boy?" "Whatever he pleases!" said Cardot, sharply, marching to the door as if to go away. "One moment, papa Cardot. You will be so good as to get your nephew out of a scrape into which I led him; for he played the money of his master and lost it, and I lend him a thousand francs to win it back, and he lost that too." "Miserable boy! you lost fifteen hundred francs at play at your age?" "Oh, uncle, uncle!" cried poor Oscar, plunged by these words into all the horrors of his position, and falling on his knees before his uncle, with clasped hands, "It is twelve o'clock! I am lost, dishonored! Monsieur Desroches will have no pity! He gave me the money for an important affair, in which his pride was concerned. I was to get a paper at the Palais in the case of Vandernesse versus Vandernesse! What will become of me? Oh, save me for the sake of my father and aunt! Come with me to Monsieur Desroches, and explain it to him; make some excuse,--anything!" These sentences were jerked out through sobs and tears that might have moved the sphinx of Luxor. "Old skinflint!" said the danseuse, who was crying, "will you let your own nephew be dishonored,--the son of the man to whom you owe your fortune?--for his name is Oscar Husson. Save him, or Titine will deny you forever!" "But how did he come here?" asked Cardot. "Don't you see that the reason he forgot to go for those papers was because he was drunk and overslept himself. Georges and his cousin Frederic took all the clerks in his office to a feast at the Rocher de Cancale." Pere Cardot looked at Florentine and hesitated. "Come, come," she said, "you old monkey, shouldn't I have hid him better if there had been anything else in it?" "There, take your five hundred francs, you scamp!" said Cardot to his nephew, "and remember, that's the last penny you'll ever get from me. Go and make it up with your master if you can. I'll return the thousand francs which you borrowed of mademoiselle; but I'll never hear another word about you." Oscar disappeared, not wishing to hear more. Once in the street, however, he knew not where to go. Chance which destroys men and chance which saves them were both making equal efforts for and against Oscar during that fateful morning. But he was doomed to fall before a master who forgave no failure in any affair he had once undertaken. When Mariette reached home that night, she felt alarmed at what might happen to the youth in whom her brother took interest and she wrote a hasty note to Godeschal, telling him what had happened to Oscar and inclosing a bank bill for five hundred francs to repair his loss. The kind-hearted creature went to sleep after charging her maid to carry the little note to Desroches' office before seven o'clock in the morning. Godeschal, on his side, getting up at six and finding that Oscar had not returned, guessed what had happened. He took the five hundred francs from his own little hoard and rushed to the Palais, where he obtained a copy of the judgment and returned in time to lay it before Desroches by eight o'clock. Meantime Desroches, who always rose at four, was in his office by seven. Mariette's maid, not finding the brother of her mistress in his bedroom, came down to the office and there met Desroches, to whom she very naturally offered the note. "Is it about business?" he said; "I am Monsieur Desroches." "You can see, monsieur," replied the maid. Desroches opened the letter and read it. Finding the five-hundred-franc note, he went into his private office furiously angry with his second clerk. About half-past seven he heard Godeschal dictating to the second head-clerk a copy of the document in question, and a few moments later the good fellow entered his master's office with an air of triumph in his heart. "Did Oscar Husson fetch the paper this morning from Simon?" inquired Desroches. "Yes, monsieur." "Who gave him the money?" "Why, you did, Saturday," replied Godeschal. "Then it rains five-hundred-franc notes," cried Desroches. "Look here, Godeschal, you are a fine fellow, but that little Husson does not deserve such generosity. I hate idiots, but I hate still more the men who will go wrong in spite of the fatherly care which watches over them." He gave Godeschal Mariette's letter and the five-hundred-franc note which she had sent. "You must excuse my having opened it," he said, "but your sister's maid told me it was on business. Dismiss Husson." "Poor unhappy boy! what grief he has caused me!" said Godeschal, "that tall ne'er-do-well of a Georges Marest is his evil genius; he ought to flee him like the plague; if not, he'll bring him to some third disgrace." "What do you mean by that?" asked Desroches. Godeschal then related briefly the affair of the journey to Presles. "Ah! yes," said the lawyer, "I remember Joseph Bridau told me that story about the time it happened. It is to that meeting that we owe the favor Monsieur de Serizy has since shown in the matter of Joseph's brother, Philippe Bridau." At this moment Moreau, to whom the case of the Vandernesse estate was of much importance, entered the office. The marquis wished to sell the land in parcels and the count was opposed to such a sale. The land-agent received therefore the first fire of Desroches' wrath against his ex-second clerk and all the threatening prophecies which he fulminated against him. The result was that this most sincere friend and protector of the unhappy youth came to the conclusion that his vanity was incorrigible. "Make him a barrister," said Desroches. "He has only his last examination to pass. In that line, his defects might prove virtues, for self-love and vanity give tongues to half the attorneys." At this time Clapart, who was ill, was being nursed by his wife,--a painful task, a duty without reward. The sick man tormented the poor creature, who was now doomed to learn what venomous and spiteful teasing a half-imbecile man, whom poverty had rendered craftily savage, could be capable of in the weary tete-a-tete of each endless day. Delighted to turn a sharpened arrow in the sensitive heart of the mother, he had, in a measure, studied the fears that Oscar's behavior and defects inspired in the poor woman. When a mother receives from her child a shock like that of the affair at Presles, she continues in a state of constant fear, and, by the manner in which his wife boasted of Oscar every time he obtained the slightest success, Clapart knew the extent of her secret uneasiness, and he took pains to rouse it on every occasion. "Well, Madame," Clapart would say, "Oscar is doing better than I even hoped. That journey to Presles was only a heedlessness of youth. Where can you find young lads who do not commit just such faults? Poor child! he bears his privations heroically! If his father had lived, he would never have had any. God grant he may know how to control his passions!" etc., etc. While all these catastrophes were happening in the rue de Vendome and the rue de Bethisy, Clapart, sitting in the chimney corner, wrapped in an old dressing-gown, watched his wife, who was engaged over the fire in their bedroom in simultaneously making the family broth, Clapart's "tisane," and her own breakfast. "Mon Dieu! I wish I knew how the affair of yesterday ended. Oscar was to breakfast at the Rocher de Cancale and spend the evening with a marquise--" "Don't trouble yourself! Sooner or later you'll find out about your swan," said her husband. "Do you really believe in that marquise? Pooh! A young man who has senses and a taste for extravagance like Oscar can find such ladies as that on every bush--if he pays for them. Some fine morning you'll find yourself with a load of debt on your back." "You are always trying to put me in despair!" cried Madame Clapart. "You complained that my son lived on your salary, and never has he cost you a penny. For two years you haven't had the slightest cause of complaint against him; here he is second clerk, his uncle and Monsieur Moreau pay all expenses, and he earns, himself, a salary of eight hundred francs. If we have bread to eat in our old age we may owe it all to that dear boy. You are really too unjust--" "You call my foresight unjust, do you?" replied the invalid, crossly. Just then the bell rang loudly. Madame Clapart ran to open the door, and remained in the outer room with Moreau, who had come to soften the blow which Oscar's new folly would deal to the heart of his poor mother. "What! he gambled with the money of the office?" she cried, bursting into tears. "Didn't I tell you so, hey?" said Clapart, appearing like a spectre at the door of the salon whither his curiosity had brought him. "Oh! what shall we do with him?" said Madame Clapart, whose grief made her impervious to Clapart's taunt. "If he bore my name," replied Moreau, "I should wait composedly till he draws for the conscription, and if he gets a fatal number I should not provide him with a substitute. This is the second time your son has committed a folly out of sheer vanity. Well, vanity may inspire fine deeds in war and may advance him in the career of a soldier. Besides, six years of military service will put some lead into his head; and as he has only his last legal examination to pass, it won't be much ill-luck for him if he doesn't become a lawyer till he is twenty-six; that is, if he wants to continue in the law after paying, as they say, his tax of blood. By that time, at any rate, he will have been severely punished, he will have learned experience, and contracted habits of subordination. Before making his probation at the bar he will have gone through his probations in life." "If that is your decision for a son," said Madame Clapart, "I see that the heart of a father is not like that of a mother. My poor Oscar a common soldier!--" "Would you rather he flung himself headforemost into the Seine after committing a dishonorable action? He cannot now become a solicitor; do you think him steady and wise enough to be a barrister? No. While his reason is maturing, what will he become? A dissipated fellow. The discipline of the army will, at least, preserve him from that." "Could he not go into some other office? His uncle Cardot has promised to pay for his substitute; Oscar is to dedicate his graduating thesis to him." At this moment carriage-wheels were heard, and a hackney-coach containing Oscar and all his worldly belongings stopped before the door. The luckless young man came up at once. "Ah! here you are, Monsieur Joli-Coeur!" cried Clapart. Oscar kissed his mother, and held out to Moreau a hand which the latter refused to take. To this rebuff Oscar replied by a reproachful look, the boldness of which he had never shown before. Then he turned on Clapart. "Listen to me, monsieur," said the youth, transformed into a man. "You worry my poor mother devilishly, and that's your right, for she is, unfortunately, your wife. But as for me, it is another thing. I shall be of age in a few months; and you have no rights over me even as a minor. I have never asked anything of you. Thanks to Monsieur Moreau, I have never cost you one penny, and I owe you no gratitude. Therefore, I say, let me alone!" Clapart, hearing this apostrophe, slunk back to his sofa in the chimney corner. The reasoning and the inward fury of the young man, who had just received a lecture from his friend Godeschal, silenced the imbecile mind of the sick man. "A momentary temptation, such as you yourself would have yielded to at my age," said Oscar to Moreau, "has made me commit a fault which Desroches thinks serious, though it is only a peccadillo. I am more provoked with myself for taking Florentine of the Gaiete for a marquise than I am for losing fifteen hundred francs after a little debauch in which everybody, even Godeschal, was half-seas over. This time, at any rate, I've hurt no one by myself. I'm cured of such things forever. If you are willing to help me, Monsieur Moreau, I swear to you that the six years I must still stay a clerk before I can get a practice shall be spent without--" "Stop there!" said Moreau. "I have three children, and I can make no promises." "Never mind, never mind," said Madame Clapart to her son, casting a reproachful glance at Moreau. "Your uncle Cardot--" "I have no longer an uncle Cardot," replied Oscar, who related the scene at the rue de Vendome. Madame Clapart, feeling her legs give way under the weight of her body, staggered to a chair in the dining-room, where she fell as if struck by lightning. "All the miseries together!" she said, as she fainted. Moreau took the poor mother in his arms, and carried her to the bed in her chamber. Oscar remained motionless, as if crushed. "There is nothing left for you," said Moreau, coming back to him, "but to make yourself a soldier. That idiot of a Clapart looks to me as though he couldn't live three months, and then your mother will be without a penny. Ought I not, therefore, to reserve for her the little money I am able to give? It was impossible to tell you this before her. As a soldier, you'll eat plain bread and reflect on life such as it is to those who are born into it without fortune." "I may get a lucky number," said Oscar. "Suppose you do, what then? Your mother has well fulfilled her duty towards you. She gave you an education; she placed you on the right road, and secured you a career. You have left it. Now, what can you do? Without money, nothing; as you know by this time. You are not a man who can begin a new career by taking off your coat and going to work in your shirt-sleeves with the tools of an artisan. Besides, your mother loves you, and she would die to see you come to that." Oscar sat down and no longer restrained his tears, which flowed copiously. At last he understood this language, so completely unintelligible to him ever since his first fault. "Men without means ought to be perfect," added Moreau, not suspecting the profundity of that cruel sentence. "My fate will soon be decided," said Oscar. "I draw my number the day after to-morrow. Between now and then I will decide upon my future." Moreau, deeply distressed in spite of his stern bearing, left the household in the rue de la Cerisaie to its despair. Three days later Oscar drew the number twenty-seven. In the interests of the poor lad the former steward of Presles had the courage to go to the Comte de Serizy and ask for his influence to get Oscar into the cavalry. It happened that the count's son, having left the Ecole Polytechnique rather low in his class, was appointed, as a favor, sub-lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry commanded by the Duc de Maufrigneuse. Oscar had, therefore, in his great misfortune, the small luck of being, at the Comte de Serizy's instigation, drafted into that noble regiment, with the promise of promotion to quartermaster within a year. Chance had thus placed the ex-clerk under the command of the son of the Comte de Serizy. Madame Clapart, after languishing for some days, so keenly was she affected by these catastrophes, became a victim to the remorse which seizes upon many a mother whose conduct has been frail in her youth, and who, in her old age, turns to repentance. She now considered herself under a curse. She attributed the sorrows of her second marriage and the misfortunes of her son to a just retribution by which God was compelling her to expiate the errors and pleasures of her youth. This opinion soon became a certainty in her mind. The poor woman went, for the first time in forty years, to confess herself to the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul's, who led her into the practice of devotion. But so ill-used and loving a soul as that of Madame Clapart's could never be anything but simply pious. The Aspasia of the Directory wanted to expiate her sins in order to draw down the blessing of God on the head of her poor Oscar, and she henceforth vowed herself to works and deeds of the purest piety. She believed she had won the attention of heaven when she saved the life of Monsieur Clapart, who, thanks to her devotion, lived on to torture her; but she chose to see, in the tyranny of that imbecile mind, a trial inflicted by the hand of one who loveth while he chasteneth. Oscar, meantime, behaved so well that in 1830 he was first sergeant of the company of the Vicomte de Serizy, which gave him the rank of sub-lieutenant of the line. Oscar Husson was by that time twenty-five years old. As the Royal Guard, to which his regiment was attached, was always in garrison in Paris, or within a circumference of thirty miles around the capital, he came to see his mother from time to time, and tell her his griefs; for he had the sense to see that he could never become an officer as matters then were. At that time the cavalry grades were all being taken up by the younger sons of noble families, and men without the article to their names found promotion difficult. Oscar's sole ambition was to leave the Guards and be appointed sub-lieutenant in a regiment of the cavalry of the line. In the month of February, 1830, Madame Clapart obtained this promotion for her son through the influence of Madame la Dauphine, granted to the Abbe Gaudron, now rector of Saint-Pauls. Although Oscar outwardly professed to be devoted to the Bourbons, in the depths of his heart he was a liberal. Therefore, in the struggle of 1830, he went over to the side of the people. This desertion, which had an importance due to the crisis in which it took place, brought him before the eyes of the public. During the excitement of triumph in the month of August he was promoted lieutenant, received the cross of the Legion of honor, and was attached as aide-de-camp to La Fayette, who gave him the rank of captain in 1832. When the amateur of the best of all possible republics was removed from the command of the National guard, Oscar Husson, whose devotion to the new dynasty amounted to fanaticism, was appointed major of a regiment sent to Africa at the time of the first expedition undertaken by the Prince-royal. The Vicomte de Serizy chanced to be the lieutenant-colonel of this regiment. At the affair of the Makta, where the field had to be abandoned to the Arabs, Monsieur de Serizy was left wounded under a dead horse. Oscar, discovering this, called out to the squadron: "Messieurs, it is going to death, but we cannot abandon our colonel." He dashed upon the enemy, and his electrified soldiers followed him. The Arabs, in their first astonishment at this furious and unlooked-for return, allowed Oscar to seize the viscount, whom he flung across his horse, and carried off at full gallop,--receiving, as he did so, two slashes from yataghans on his left arm. Oscar's conduct on this occasion was rewarded with the officer's cross of the Legion of honor, and by his promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He took the most affectionate care of the Vicomte de Serizy, whose mother came to meet him on the arrival of the regiment at Toulon, where, as we know, the young man died of his wounds. The Comtesse de Serizy had not separated her son from the man who had shown him such devotion. Oscar himself was so seriously wounded that the surgeons whom the countess had brought with her from Paris thought best to amputate his left arm. Thus the Comte de Serizy was led not only to forgive Oscar for his painful remarks on the journey to Presles, but to feel himself his debtor on behalf

lost

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you shall being me luck! See, here are my last hundred francs." And the "marquise" took out from her purse, the rings of which were adorned with diamonds, five gold pieces. Oscar pulled out his hundred in silver five-franc pieces, much ashamed at having to mingle such ignoble coins with gold. In ten throws the actress lost the two hundred francs. "Oh! how stupid!" she cried. "I'm banker now. But we'll play together still, won't we?" Fanny Beaupre rose to take her place as banker, and Oscar, finding himself observed by the whole table, dared not retire on the ground that he had no money. Speech failed him, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. "Lend me five hundred francs," said the actress to the danseuse. Florentine brought the money, which she obtained from Georges, who had just passed eight times at ecarte. "Nathan has won twelve hundred francs," said the actress to Oscar. "Bankers always win; we won't let them fool us, will we?" she whispered in his ear. Persons of nerve, imagination, and dash will understand how it was that poor Oscar opened his pocket-book and took out the note of five hundred francs which Desroches had given him. He looked at Nathan, the distinguished author, who now began, with Florine, to play a heavy game against the bank. "Come, my little man, take 'em up," cried Fanny Beaupre, signing to Oscar to rake in the two hundred francs which Nathan and Florine had punted. The actress did not spare taunts or jests on those who lost. She enlivened the game with jokes which Oscar thought singular; but reflection was stifled by joy; for the first two throws produced a gain of two thousand francs. Oscar then thought of feigning illness and making his escape, leaving his partner behind him; but "honor" kept him there. Three more turns and the gains were lost. Oscar felt a cold sweat running down his back, and he was sobered completely. The next two throws carried off the thousand francs of their mutual stake. Oscar was consumed with thirst, and drank three glasses of iced punch one after the other. The actress now led him into the bed-chamber, where the rest of the company were playing, talking frivolities with an easy air. But by this time the sense of his wrong-doing overcame him; the figure of Desroches appeared to him like a vision. He turned aside to a dark corner and sat down, putting his handkerchief to his eyes, and wept. Florentine noticed the attitude of true grief, which, because it is sincere, is certain to strike the eye of one who acts. She ran to him, took the handkerchief from his hand, and saw his tears; then she led him into a boudoir alone. "What is it, my child?" she said. At the tone and accent of that voice Oscar recognized a motherly kindness which is often found in women of her kind, and he answered openly:-- "I have lost five hundred francs which my employer gave me to obtain a document to-morrow morning; there's nothing for me but to fling myself into the river; I am dishonored." "How silly you are!" she said. "Stay where you are; I'll get you a thousand francs and you can win back what you've lost; but don't risk more than five hundred, so that you may be sure of your master's money. Georges plays a fine game at ecarte; bet on him." Oscar, frightened by his position, accepted the offer of the mistress of the house. "Ah!" he thought, "it is only women of rank who are capable of such kindness. Beautiful, noble, rich! how lucky Georges is!" He received the thousand francs from Florentine and returned to bet on his hoaxer. Georges had just passed for the fourth time when Oscar sat down beside him. The other players saw with satisfaction the arrival of a new better; for all, with the instinct of gamblers, took the side of Giroudeau, the old officer of the Empire. "Messieurs," said Georges, "you'll be punished for deserting me; I feel in the vein. Come, Oscar, we'll make an end of them!" Georges and his partner lost five games running. After losing the thousand francs Oscar was seized with the fury of play and insisted on taking the cards himself. By the result of a chance not at all uncommon with those who play for the first time, he won. But Georges bewildered him with advice; told him when to throw the cards, and even snatched them from his hand; so that this conflict of wills and intuitions injured his vein. By three o'clock in the morning, after various changes of fortune, and still drinking punch, Oscar came down to his last hundred francs. He rose with a heavy head, completely stupefied, took a few steps forward, and fell upon a sofa in the boudoir, his eyes closing in a leaden sleep. "Mariette," said Fanny Beaupre to Godeschal's sister, who had come in about two o'clock, "do you dine here to-morrow? Camusot and Pere Cardot are coming, and we'll have some fun." "What!" cried Florentine, "and my old fellow never told me!" "He said he'd tell you to-morrow morning," remarked Fanny Beaupre. "The devil take him and his orgies!" exclaimed Florentine. "He and Camusot are worse than magistrates or stage-managers. But we have very good dinners here, Mariette," she continued. "Cardot always orders them from Chevet's; bring your Duc de Maufrigneuse and we'll make them dance like Tritons." Hearing the names of Cardot and Camusot, Oscar made an effort to throw off his sleep; but he could only mutter a few words which were not understood, and then he fell back upon the silken cushions. "You'll have to keep him here all night," said Fanny Beaupre, laughing, to Florentine. "Oh! poor boy! he is drunk with punch and despair both. It is the second clerk in your brother's office," she said to Mariette. "He has lost the money his master gave him for some legal affair. He wanted to drown himself; so I lent him a thousand francs, but those brigands Finot and Giroudeau won them from him. Poor innocent!" "But we ought to wake him," said Mariette. "My brother won't make light of it, nor his master either." "Oh, wake him if you can, and carry him off with you!" said Florentine, returning to the salon to receive the adieux of some departing guests. Presently those who remained began what was called "character dancing," and by the time it was broad daylight, Florentine, tired out, went to bed, oblivious to Oscar, who was still in the boudoir sound asleep. CHAPTER X. ANOTHER CATASTROPHE About eleven the next morning, a terrible sound awoke the unfortunate clerk. Recognizing the voice of his uncle Cardot, he thought it wise to feign sleep, and so turned his face into the yellow velvet cushions on which he had passed the night. "Really, my little Florentine," said the old gentleman, "this is neither right nor sensible; you danced last evening in 'Les Ruines,' and you have spent the night in an orgy. That's deliberately going to work to lose your freshness. Besides which, it was ungrateful to inaugurate this beautiful apartment without even letting me know. Who knows what has been going on here?" "Old monster!" cried Florentine, "haven't you a key that lets you in at all hours? My ball lasted till five in the morning, and you have the cruelty to come and wake me up at eleven!" "Half-past eleven, Titine," observed Cardot, humbly. "I came out early to order a dinner fit for an archbishop at Chevet's. Just see how the carpets are stained! What sort of people did you have here?" "You needn't complain, for Fanny Beaupre told me you were coming to dinner with Camusot, and to please you I've invited Tullia, du Bruel, Mariette, the Duc de Maufrigneuse, Florine, and Nathan. So you'll have the four loveliest creatures ever seen behind the foot-lights; we'll dance you a 'pas de Zephire.'" "It is enough to kill you to lead such a life!" cried old Cardot; "and look at the broken glasses! What pillage! The antechamber actually makes me shudder--" At this instant the wrathful old gentleman stopped short as if magnetized, like a bird which a snake is charming. He saw the outline of a form in a black coat through the door of the boudoir. "Ah, Mademoiselle Cabirolle!" he said at last. "Well, what?" she asked. The eyes of the danseuse followed those of the little old man; and when she recognized the presence of the clerk she went off into such fits of laughter that not only was the old gentleman nonplussed, but Oscar was compelled to appear; for Florentine took him by the arm, still pealing with laughter at the conscience-stricken faces of the uncle and nephew. "You here, nephew?" "Nephew! so he's your nephew?" cried Florentine, with another burst of laughter. "You never told me about him. Why didn't Mariette carry you off?" she said to Oscar, who stood there petrified. "What can he do now, poor boy?" "Whatever he pleases!" said Cardot, sharply, marching to the door as if to go away. "One moment, papa Cardot. You will be so good as to get your nephew out of a scrape into which I led him; for he played the money of his master and lost it, and I lend him a thousand francs to win it back, and he lost that too." "Miserable boy! you lost fifteen hundred francs at play at your age?" "Oh, uncle, uncle!" cried poor Oscar, plunged by these words into all the horrors of his position, and falling on his knees before his uncle, with clasped hands, "It is twelve o'clock! I am lost, dishonored! Monsieur Desroches will have no pity! He gave me the money for an important affair, in which his pride was concerned. I was to get a paper at the Palais in the case of Vandernesse versus Vandernesse! What will become of me? Oh, save me for the sake of my father and aunt! Come with me to Monsieur Desroches, and explain it to him; make some excuse,--anything!" These sentences were jerked out through sobs and tears that might have moved the sphinx of Luxor. "Old skinflint!" said the danseuse, who was crying, "will you let your own nephew be dishonored,--the son of the man to whom you owe your fortune?--for his name is Oscar Husson. Save him, or Titine will deny you forever!" "But how did he come here?" asked Cardot. "Don't you see that the reason he forgot to go for those papers was because he was drunk and overslept himself. Georges and his cousin Frederic took all the clerks in his office to a feast at the Rocher de Cancale." Pere Cardot looked at Florentine and hesitated. "Come, come," she said, "you old monkey, shouldn't I have hid him better if there had been anything else in it?" "There, take your five hundred francs, you scamp!" said Cardot to his nephew, "and remember, that's the last penny you'll ever get from me. Go and make it up with your master if you can. I'll return the thousand francs which you borrowed of mademoiselle; but I'll never hear another word about you." Oscar disappeared, not wishing to hear more. Once in the street, however, he knew not where to go. Chance which destroys men and chance which saves them were both making equal efforts for and against Oscar during that fateful morning. But he was doomed to fall before a master who forgave no failure in any affair he had once undertaken. When Mariette reached home that night, she felt alarmed at what might happen to the youth in whom her brother took interest and she wrote a hasty note to Godeschal, telling him what had happened to Oscar and inclosing a bank bill for five hundred francs to repair his loss. The kind-hearted creature went to sleep after charging her maid to carry the little note to Desroches' office before seven o'clock in the morning. Godeschal, on his side, getting up at six and finding that Oscar had not returned, guessed what had happened. He took the five hundred francs from his own little hoard and rushed to the Palais, where he obtained a copy of the judgment and returned in time to lay it before Desroches by eight o'clock. Meantime Desroches, who always rose at four, was in his office by seven. Mariette's maid, not finding the brother of her mistress in his bedroom, came down to the office and there met Desroches, to whom she very naturally offered the note. "Is it about business?" he said; "I am Monsieur Desroches." "You can see, monsieur," replied the maid. Desroches opened the letter and read it. Finding the five-hundred-franc note, he went into his private office furiously angry with his second clerk. About half-past seven he heard Godeschal dictating to the second head-clerk a copy of the document in question, and a few moments later the good fellow entered his master's office with an air of triumph in his heart. "Did Oscar Husson fetch the paper this morning from Simon?" inquired Desroches. "Yes, monsieur." "Who gave him the money?" "Why, you did, Saturday," replied Godeschal. "Then it rains five-hundred-franc notes," cried Desroches. "Look here, Godeschal, you are a fine fellow, but that little Husson does not deserve such generosity. I hate idiots, but I hate still more the men who will go wrong in spite of the fatherly care which watches over them." He gave Godeschal Mariette's letter and the five-hundred-franc note which she had sent. "You must excuse my having opened it," he said, "but your sister's maid told me it was on business. Dismiss Husson." "Poor unhappy boy! what grief he has caused me!" said Godeschal, "that tall ne'er-do-well of a Georges Marest is his evil genius; he ought to flee him like the plague; if not, he'll bring him to some third disgrace." "What do you mean by that?" asked Desroches. Godeschal then related briefly the affair of the journey to Presles. "Ah! yes," said the lawyer, "I remember Joseph Bridau told me that story about the time it happened. It is to that meeting that we owe the favor Monsieur de Serizy has since shown in the matter of Joseph's brother, Philippe Bridau." At this moment Moreau, to whom the case of the Vandernesse estate was of much importance, entered the office. The marquis wished to sell the land in parcels and the count was opposed to such a sale. The land-agent received therefore the first fire of Desroches' wrath against his ex-second clerk and all the threatening prophecies which he fulminated against him. The result was that this most sincere friend and protector of the unhappy youth came to the conclusion that his vanity was incorrigible. "Make him a barrister," said Desroches. "He has only his last examination to pass. In that line, his defects might prove virtues, for self-love and vanity give tongues to half the attorneys." At this time Clapart, who was ill, was being nursed by his wife,--a painful task, a duty without reward. The sick man tormented the poor creature, who was now doomed to learn what venomous and spiteful teasing a half-imbecile man, whom poverty had rendered craftily savage, could be capable of in the weary tete-a-tete of each endless day. Delighted to turn a sharpened arrow in the sensitive heart of the mother, he had, in a measure, studied the fears that Oscar's behavior and defects inspired in the poor woman. When a mother receives from her child a shock like that of the affair at Presles, she continues in a state of constant fear, and, by the manner in which his wife boasted of Oscar every time he obtained the slightest success, Clapart knew the extent of her secret uneasiness, and he took pains to rouse it on every occasion. "Well, Madame," Clapart would say, "Oscar is doing better than I even hoped. That journey to Presles was only a heedlessness of youth. Where can you find young lads who do not commit just such faults? Poor child! he bears his privations heroically! If his father had lived, he would never have had any. God grant he may know how to control his passions!" etc., etc. While all these catastrophes were happening in the rue de Vendome and the rue de Bethisy, Clapart, sitting in the chimney corner, wrapped in an old dressing-gown, watched his wife, who was engaged over the fire in their bedroom in simultaneously making the family broth, Clapart's "tisane," and her own breakfast. "Mon Dieu! I wish I knew how the affair of yesterday ended. Oscar was to breakfast at the Rocher de Cancale and spend the evening with a marquise--" "Don't trouble yourself! Sooner or later you'll find out about your swan," said her husband. "Do you really believe in that marquise? Pooh! A young man who has senses and a taste for extravagance like Oscar can find such ladies as that on every bush--if he pays for them. Some fine morning you'll find yourself with a load of debt on your back." "You are always trying to put me in despair!" cried Madame Clapart. "You complained that my son lived on your salary, and never has he cost you a penny. For two years you haven't had the slightest cause of complaint against him; here he is second clerk, his uncle and Monsieur Moreau pay all expenses, and he earns, himself, a salary of eight hundred francs. If we have bread to eat in our old age we may owe it all to that dear boy. You are really too unjust--" "You call my foresight unjust, do you?" replied the invalid, crossly. Just then the bell rang loudly. Madame Clapart ran to open the door, and remained in the outer room with Moreau, who had come to soften the blow which Oscar's new folly would deal to the heart of his poor mother. "What! he gambled with the money of the office?" she cried, bursting into tears. "Didn't I tell you so, hey?" said Clapart, appearing like a spectre at the door of the salon whither his curiosity had brought him. "Oh! what shall we do with him?" said Madame Clapart, whose grief made her impervious to Clapart's taunt. "If he bore my name," replied Moreau, "I should wait composedly till he draws for the conscription, and if he gets a fatal number I should not provide him with a substitute. This is the second time your son has committed a folly out of sheer vanity. Well, vanity may inspire fine deeds in war and may advance him in the career of a soldier. Besides, six years of military service will put some lead into his head; and as he has only his last legal examination to pass, it won't be much ill-luck for him if he doesn't become a lawyer till he is twenty-six; that is, if he wants to continue in the law after paying, as they say, his tax of blood. By that time, at any rate, he will have been severely punished, he will have learned experience, and contracted habits of subordination. Before making his probation at the bar he will have gone through his probations in life." "If that is your decision for a son," said Madame Clapart, "I see that the heart of a father is not like that of a mother. My poor Oscar a common soldier!--" "Would you rather he flung himself headforemost into the Seine after committing a dishonorable action? He cannot now become a solicitor; do you think him steady and wise enough to be a barrister? No. While his reason is maturing, what will he become? A dissipated fellow. The discipline of the army will, at least, preserve him from that." "Could he not go into some other office? His uncle Cardot has promised to pay for his substitute; Oscar is to dedicate his graduating thesis to him." At this moment carriage-wheels were heard, and a hackney-coach containing Oscar and all his worldly belongings stopped before the door. The luckless young man came up at once. "Ah! here you are, Monsieur Joli-Coeur!" cried Clapart. Oscar kissed his mother, and held out to Moreau a hand which the latter refused to take. To this rebuff Oscar replied by a reproachful look, the boldness of which he had never shown before. Then he turned on Clapart. "Listen to me, monsieur," said the youth, transformed into a man. "You worry my poor mother devilishly, and that's your right, for she is, unfortunately, your wife. But as for me, it is another thing. I shall be of age in a few months; and you have no rights over me even as a minor. I have never asked anything of you. Thanks to Monsieur Moreau, I have never cost you one penny, and I owe you no gratitude. Therefore, I say, let me alone!" Clapart, hearing this apostrophe, slunk back to his sofa in the chimney corner. The reasoning and the inward fury of the young man, who had just received a lecture from his friend Godeschal, silenced the imbecile mind of the sick man. "A momentary temptation, such as you yourself would have yielded to at my age," said Oscar to Moreau, "has made me commit a fault which Desroches thinks serious, though it is only a peccadillo. I am more provoked with myself for taking Florentine of the Gaiete for a marquise than I am for losing fifteen hundred francs after a little debauch in which everybody, even Godeschal, was half-seas over. This time, at any rate, I've hurt no one by myself. I'm cured of such things forever. If you are willing to help me, Monsieur Moreau, I swear to you that the six years I must still stay a clerk before I can get a practice shall be spent without--" "Stop there!" said Moreau. "I have three children, and I can make no promises." "Never mind, never mind," said Madame Clapart to her son, casting a reproachful glance at Moreau. "Your uncle Cardot--" "I have no longer an uncle Cardot," replied Oscar, who related the scene at the rue de Vendome. Madame Clapart, feeling her legs give way under the weight of her body, staggered to a chair in the dining-room, where she fell as if struck by lightning. "All the miseries together!" she said, as she fainted. Moreau took the poor mother in his arms, and carried her to the bed in her chamber. Oscar remained motionless, as if crushed. "There is nothing left for you," said Moreau, coming back to him, "but to make yourself a soldier. That idiot of a Clapart looks to me as though he couldn't live three months, and then your mother will be without a penny. Ought I not, therefore, to reserve for her the little money I am able to give? It was impossible to tell you this before her. As a soldier, you'll eat plain bread and reflect on life such as it is to those who are born into it without fortune." "I may get a lucky number," said Oscar. "Suppose you do, what then? Your mother has well fulfilled her duty towards you. She gave you an education; she placed you on the right road, and secured you a career. You have left it. Now, what can you do? Without money, nothing; as you know by this time. You are not a man who can begin a new career by taking off your coat and going to work in your shirt-sleeves with the tools of an artisan. Besides, your mother loves you, and she would die to see you come to that." Oscar sat down and no longer restrained his tears, which flowed copiously. At last he understood this language, so completely unintelligible to him ever since his first fault. "Men without means ought to be perfect," added Moreau, not suspecting the profundity of that cruel sentence. "My fate will soon be decided," said Oscar. "I draw my number the day after to-morrow. Between now and then I will decide upon my future." Moreau, deeply distressed in spite of his stern bearing, left the household in the rue de la Cerisaie to its despair. Three days later Oscar drew the number twenty-seven. In the interests of the poor lad the former steward of Presles had the courage to go to the Comte de Serizy and ask for his influence to get Oscar into the cavalry. It happened that the count's son, having left the Ecole Polytechnique rather low in his class, was appointed, as a favor, sub-lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry commanded by the Duc de Maufrigneuse. Oscar had, therefore, in his great misfortune, the small luck of being, at the Comte de Serizy's instigation, drafted into that noble regiment, with the promise of promotion to quartermaster within a year. Chance had thus placed the ex-clerk under the command of the son of the Comte de Serizy. Madame Clapart, after languishing for some days, so keenly was she affected by these catastrophes, became a victim to the remorse which seizes upon many a mother whose conduct has been frail in her youth, and who, in her old age, turns to repentance. She now considered herself under a curse. She attributed the sorrows of her second marriage and the misfortunes of her son to a just retribution by which God was compelling her to expiate the errors and pleasures of her youth. This opinion soon became a certainty in her mind. The poor woman went, for the first time in forty years, to confess herself to the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul's, who led her into the practice of devotion. But so ill-used and loving a soul as that of Madame Clapart's could never be anything but simply pious. The Aspasia of the Directory wanted to expiate her sins in order to draw down the blessing of God on the head of her poor Oscar, and she henceforth vowed herself to works and deeds of the purest piety. She believed she had won the attention of heaven when she saved the life of Monsieur Clapart, who, thanks to her devotion, lived on to torture her; but she chose to see, in the tyranny of that imbecile mind, a trial inflicted by the hand of one who loveth while he chasteneth. Oscar, meantime, behaved so well that in 1830 he was first sergeant of the company of the Vicomte de Serizy, which gave him the rank of sub-lieutenant of the line. Oscar Husson was by that time twenty-five years old. As the Royal Guard, to which his regiment was attached, was always in garrison in Paris, or within a circumference of thirty miles around the capital, he came to see his mother from time to time, and tell her his griefs; for he had the sense to see that he could never become an officer as matters then were. At that time the cavalry grades were all being taken up by the younger sons of noble families, and men without the article to their names found promotion difficult. Oscar's sole ambition was to leave the Guards and be appointed sub-lieutenant in a regiment of the cavalry of the line. In the month of February, 1830, Madame Clapart obtained this promotion for her son through the influence of Madame la Dauphine, granted to the Abbe Gaudron, now rector of Saint-Pauls. Although Oscar outwardly professed to be devoted to the Bourbons, in the depths of his heart he was a liberal. Therefore, in the struggle of 1830, he went over to the side of the people. This desertion, which had an importance due to the crisis in which it took place, brought him before the eyes of the public. During the excitement of triumph in the month of August he was promoted lieutenant, received the cross of the Legion of honor, and was attached as aide-de-camp to La Fayette, who gave him the rank of captain in 1832. When the amateur of the best of all possible republics was removed from the command of the National guard, Oscar Husson, whose devotion to the new dynasty amounted to fanaticism, was appointed major of a regiment sent to Africa at the time of the first expedition undertaken by the Prince-royal. The Vicomte de Serizy chanced to be the lieutenant-colonel of this regiment. At the affair of the Makta, where the field had to be abandoned to the Arabs, Monsieur de Serizy was left wounded under a dead horse. Oscar, discovering this, called out to the squadron: "Messieurs, it is going to death, but we cannot abandon our colonel." He dashed upon the enemy, and his electrified soldiers followed him. The Arabs, in their first astonishment at this furious and unlooked-for return, allowed Oscar to seize the viscount, whom he flung across his horse, and carried off at full gallop,--receiving, as he did so, two slashes from yataghans on his left arm. Oscar's conduct on this occasion was rewarded with the officer's cross of the Legion of honor, and by his promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He took the most affectionate care of the Vicomte de Serizy, whose mother came to meet him on the arrival of the regiment at Toulon, where, as we know, the young man died of his wounds. The Comtesse de Serizy had not separated her son from the man who had shown him such devotion. Oscar himself was so seriously wounded that the surgeons whom the countess had brought with her from Paris thought best to amputate his left arm. Thus the Comte de Serizy was led not only to forgive Oscar for his painful remarks on the journey to Presles, but to feel himself his debtor on behalf

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you shall being me luck! See, here are my last hundred francs." And the "marquise" took out from her purse, the rings of which were adorned with diamonds, five gold pieces. Oscar pulled out his hundred in silver five-franc pieces, much ashamed at having to mingle such ignoble coins with gold. In ten throws the actress lost the two hundred francs. "Oh! how stupid!" she cried. "I'm banker now. But we'll play together still, won't we?" Fanny Beaupre rose to take her place as banker, and Oscar, finding himself observed by the whole table, dared not retire on the ground that he had no money. Speech failed him, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. "Lend me five hundred francs," said the actress to the danseuse. Florentine brought the money, which she obtained from Georges, who had just passed eight times at ecarte. "Nathan has won twelve hundred francs," said the actress to Oscar. "Bankers always win; we won't let them fool us, will we?" she whispered in his ear. Persons of nerve, imagination, and dash will understand how it was that poor Oscar opened his pocket-book and took out the note of five hundred francs which Desroches had given him. He looked at Nathan, the distinguished author, who now began, with Florine, to play a heavy game against the bank. "Come, my little man, take 'em up," cried Fanny Beaupre, signing to Oscar to rake in the two hundred francs which Nathan and Florine had punted. The actress did not spare taunts or jests on those who lost. She enlivened the game with jokes which Oscar thought singular; but reflection was stifled by joy; for the first two throws produced a gain of two thousand francs. Oscar then thought of feigning illness and making his escape, leaving his partner behind him; but "honor" kept him there. Three more turns and the gains were lost. Oscar felt a cold sweat running down his back, and he was sobered completely. The next two throws carried off the thousand francs of their mutual stake. Oscar was consumed with thirst, and drank three glasses of iced punch one after the other. The actress now led him into the bed-chamber, where the rest of the company were playing, talking frivolities with an easy air. But by this time the sense of his wrong-doing overcame him; the figure of Desroches appeared to him like a vision. He turned aside to a dark corner and sat down, putting his handkerchief to his eyes, and wept. Florentine noticed the attitude of true grief, which, because it is sincere, is certain to strike the eye of one who acts. She ran to him, took the handkerchief from his hand, and saw his tears; then she led him into a boudoir alone. "What is it, my child?" she said. At the tone and accent of that voice Oscar recognized a motherly kindness which is often found in women of her kind, and he answered openly:-- "I have lost five hundred francs which my employer gave me to obtain a document to-morrow morning; there's nothing for me but to fling myself into the river; I am dishonored." "How silly you are!" she said. "Stay where you are; I'll get you a thousand francs and you can win back what you've lost; but don't risk more than five hundred, so that you may be sure of your master's money. Georges plays a fine game at ecarte; bet on him." Oscar, frightened by his position, accepted the offer of the mistress of the house. "Ah!" he thought, "it is only women of rank who are capable of such kindness. Beautiful, noble, rich! how lucky Georges is!" He received the thousand francs from Florentine and returned to bet on his hoaxer. Georges had just passed for the fourth time when Oscar sat down beside him. The other players saw with satisfaction the arrival of a new better; for all, with the instinct of gamblers, took the side of Giroudeau, the old officer of the Empire. "Messieurs," said Georges, "you'll be punished for deserting me; I feel in the vein. Come, Oscar, we'll make an end of them!" Georges and his partner lost five games running. After losing the thousand francs Oscar was seized with the fury of play and insisted on taking the cards himself. By the result of a chance not at all uncommon with those who play for the first time, he won. But Georges bewildered him with advice; told him when to throw the cards, and even snatched them from his hand; so that this conflict of wills and intuitions injured his vein. By three o'clock in the morning, after various changes of fortune, and still drinking punch, Oscar came down to his last hundred francs. He rose with a heavy head, completely stupefied, took a few steps forward, and fell upon a sofa in the boudoir, his eyes closing in a leaden sleep. "Mariette," said Fanny Beaupre to Godeschal's sister, who had come in about two o'clock, "do you dine here to-morrow? Camusot and Pere Cardot are coming, and we'll have some fun." "What!" cried Florentine, "and my old fellow never told me!" "He said he'd tell you to-morrow morning," remarked Fanny Beaupre. "The devil take him and his orgies!" exclaimed Florentine. "He and Camusot are worse than magistrates or stage-managers. But we have very good dinners here, Mariette," she continued. "Cardot always orders them from Chevet's; bring your Duc de Maufrigneuse and we'll make them dance like Tritons." Hearing the names of Cardot and Camusot, Oscar made an effort to throw off his sleep; but he could only mutter a few words which were not understood, and then he fell back upon the silken cushions. "You'll have to keep him here all night," said Fanny Beaupre, laughing, to Florentine. "Oh! poor boy! he is drunk with punch and despair both. It is the second clerk in your brother's office," she said to Mariette. "He has lost the money his master gave him for some legal affair. He wanted to drown himself; so I lent him a thousand francs, but those brigands Finot and Giroudeau won them from him. Poor innocent!" "But we ought to wake him," said Mariette. "My brother won't make light of it, nor his master either." "Oh, wake him if you can, and carry him off with you!" said Florentine, returning to the salon to receive the adieux of some departing guests. Presently those who remained began what was called "character dancing," and by the time it was broad daylight, Florentine, tired out, went to bed, oblivious to Oscar, who was still in the boudoir sound asleep. CHAPTER X. ANOTHER CATASTROPHE About eleven the next morning, a terrible sound awoke the unfortunate clerk. Recognizing the voice of his uncle Cardot, he thought it wise to feign sleep, and so turned his face into the yellow velvet cushions on which he had passed the night. "Really, my little Florentine," said the old gentleman, "this is neither right nor sensible; you danced last evening in 'Les Ruines,' and you have spent the night in an orgy. That's deliberately going to work to lose your freshness. Besides which, it was ungrateful to inaugurate this beautiful apartment without even letting me know. Who knows what has been going on here?" "Old monster!" cried Florentine, "haven't you a key that lets you in at all hours? My ball lasted till five in the morning, and you have the cruelty to come and wake me up at eleven!" "Half-past eleven, Titine," observed Cardot, humbly. "I came out early to order a dinner fit for an archbishop at Chevet's. Just see how the carpets are stained! What sort of people did you have here?" "You needn't complain, for Fanny Beaupre told me you were coming to dinner with Camusot, and to please you I've invited Tullia, du Bruel, Mariette, the Duc de Maufrigneuse, Florine, and Nathan. So you'll have the four loveliest creatures ever seen behind the foot-lights; we'll dance you a 'pas de Zephire.'" "It is enough to kill you to lead such a life!" cried old Cardot; "and look at the broken glasses! What pillage! The antechamber actually makes me shudder--" At this instant the wrathful old gentleman stopped short as if magnetized, like a bird which a snake is charming. He saw the outline of a form in a black coat through the door of the boudoir. "Ah, Mademoiselle Cabirolle!" he said at last. "Well, what?" she asked. The eyes of the danseuse followed those of the little old man; and when she recognized the presence of the clerk she went off into such fits of laughter that not only was the old gentleman nonplussed, but Oscar was compelled to appear; for Florentine took him by the arm, still pealing with laughter at the conscience-stricken faces of the uncle and nephew. "You here, nephew?" "Nephew! so he's your nephew?" cried Florentine, with another burst of laughter. "You never told me about him. Why didn't Mariette carry you off?" she said to Oscar, who stood there petrified. "What can he do now, poor boy?" "Whatever he pleases!" said Cardot, sharply, marching to the door as if to go away. "One moment, papa Cardot. You will be so good as to get your nephew out of a scrape into which I led him; for he played the money of his master and lost it, and I lend him a thousand francs to win it back, and he lost that too." "Miserable boy! you lost fifteen hundred francs at play at your age?" "Oh, uncle, uncle!" cried poor Oscar, plunged by these words into all the horrors of his position, and falling on his knees before his uncle, with clasped hands, "It is twelve o'clock! I am lost, dishonored! Monsieur Desroches will have no pity! He gave me the money for an important affair, in which his pride was concerned. I was to get a paper at the Palais in the case of Vandernesse versus Vandernesse! What will become of me? Oh, save me for the sake of my father and aunt! Come with me to Monsieur Desroches, and explain it to him; make some excuse,--anything!" These sentences were jerked out through sobs and tears that might have moved the sphinx of Luxor. "Old skinflint!" said the danseuse, who was crying, "will you let your own nephew be dishonored,--the son of the man to whom you owe your fortune?--for his name is Oscar Husson. Save him, or Titine will deny you forever!" "But how did he come here?" asked Cardot. "Don't you see that the reason he forgot to go for those papers was because he was drunk and overslept himself. Georges and his cousin Frederic took all the clerks in his office to a feast at the Rocher de Cancale." Pere Cardot looked at Florentine and hesitated. "Come, come," she said, "you old monkey, shouldn't I have hid him better if there had been anything else in it?" "There, take your five hundred francs, you scamp!" said Cardot to his nephew, "and remember, that's the last penny you'll ever get from me. Go and make it up with your master if you can. I'll return the thousand francs which you borrowed of mademoiselle; but I'll never hear another word about you." Oscar disappeared, not wishing to hear more. Once in the street, however, he knew not where to go. Chance which destroys men and chance which saves them were both making equal efforts for and against Oscar during that fateful morning. But he was doomed to fall before a master who forgave no failure in any affair he had once undertaken. When Mariette reached home that night, she felt alarmed at what might happen to the youth in whom her brother took interest and she wrote a hasty note to Godeschal, telling him what had happened to Oscar and inclosing a bank bill for five hundred francs to repair his loss. The kind-hearted creature went to sleep after charging her maid to carry the little note to Desroches' office before seven o'clock in the morning. Godeschal, on his side, getting up at six and finding that Oscar had not returned, guessed what had happened. He took the five hundred francs from his own little hoard and rushed to the Palais, where he obtained a copy of the judgment and returned in time to lay it before Desroches by eight o'clock. Meantime Desroches, who always rose at four, was in his office by seven. Mariette's maid, not finding the brother of her mistress in his bedroom, came down to the office and there met Desroches, to whom she very naturally offered the note. "Is it about business?" he said; "I am Monsieur Desroches." "You can see, monsieur," replied the maid. Desroches opened the letter and read it. Finding the five-hundred-franc note, he went into his private office furiously angry with his second clerk. About half-past seven he heard Godeschal dictating to the second head-clerk a copy of the document in question, and a few moments later the good fellow entered his master's office with an air of triumph in his heart. "Did Oscar Husson fetch the paper this morning from Simon?" inquired Desroches. "Yes, monsieur." "Who gave him the money?" "Why, you did, Saturday," replied Godeschal. "Then it rains five-hundred-franc notes," cried Desroches. "Look here, Godeschal, you are a fine fellow, but that little Husson does not deserve such generosity. I hate idiots, but I hate still more the men who will go wrong in spite of the fatherly care which watches over them." He gave Godeschal Mariette's letter and the five-hundred-franc note which she had sent. "You must excuse my having opened it," he said, "but your sister's maid told me it was on business. Dismiss Husson." "Poor unhappy boy! what grief he has caused me!" said Godeschal, "that tall ne'er-do-well of a Georges Marest is his evil genius; he ought to flee him like the plague; if not, he'll bring him to some third disgrace." "What do you mean by that?" asked Desroches. Godeschal then related briefly the affair of the journey to Presles. "Ah! yes," said the lawyer, "I remember Joseph Bridau told me that story about the time it happened. It is to that meeting that we owe the favor Monsieur de Serizy has since shown in the matter of Joseph's brother, Philippe Bridau." At this moment Moreau, to whom the case of the Vandernesse estate was of much importance, entered the office. The marquis wished to sell the land in parcels and the count was opposed to such a sale. The land-agent received therefore the first fire of Desroches' wrath against his ex-second clerk and all the threatening prophecies which he fulminated against him. The result was that this most sincere friend and protector of the unhappy youth came to the conclusion that his vanity was incorrigible. "Make him a barrister," said Desroches. "He has only his last examination to pass. In that line, his defects might prove virtues, for self-love and vanity give tongues to half the attorneys." At this time Clapart, who was ill, was being nursed by his wife,--a painful task, a duty without reward. The sick man tormented the poor creature, who was now doomed to learn what venomous and spiteful teasing a half-imbecile man, whom poverty had rendered craftily savage, could be capable of in the weary tete-a-tete of each endless day. Delighted to turn a sharpened arrow in the sensitive heart of the mother, he had, in a measure, studied the fears that Oscar's behavior and defects inspired in the poor woman. When a mother receives from her child a shock like that of the affair at Presles, she continues in a state of constant fear, and, by the manner in which his wife boasted of Oscar every time he obtained the slightest success, Clapart knew the extent of her secret uneasiness, and he took pains to rouse it on every occasion. "Well, Madame," Clapart would say, "Oscar is doing better than I even hoped. That journey to Presles was only a heedlessness of youth. Where can you find young lads who do not commit just such faults? Poor child! he bears his privations heroically! If his father had lived, he would never have had any. God grant he may know how to control his passions!" etc., etc. While all these catastrophes were happening in the rue de Vendome and the rue de Bethisy, Clapart, sitting in the chimney corner, wrapped in an old dressing-gown, watched his wife, who was engaged over the fire in their bedroom in simultaneously making the family broth, Clapart's "tisane," and her own breakfast. "Mon Dieu! I wish I knew how the affair of yesterday ended. Oscar was to breakfast at the Rocher de Cancale and spend the evening with a marquise--" "Don't trouble yourself! Sooner or later you'll find out about your swan," said her husband. "Do you really believe in that marquise? Pooh! A young man who has senses and a taste for extravagance like Oscar can find such ladies as that on every bush--if he pays for them. Some fine morning you'll find yourself with a load of debt on your back." "You are always trying to put me in despair!" cried Madame Clapart. "You complained that my son lived on your salary, and never has he cost you a penny. For two years you haven't had the slightest cause of complaint against him; here he is second clerk, his uncle and Monsieur Moreau pay all expenses, and he earns, himself, a salary of eight hundred francs. If we have bread to eat in our old age we may owe it all to that dear boy. You are really too unjust--" "You call my foresight unjust, do you?" replied the invalid, crossly. Just then the bell rang loudly. Madame Clapart ran to open the door, and remained in the outer room with Moreau, who had come to soften the blow which Oscar's new folly would deal to the heart of his poor mother. "What! he gambled with the money of the office?" she cried, bursting into tears. "Didn't I tell you so, hey?" said Clapart, appearing like a spectre at the door of the salon whither his curiosity had brought him. "Oh! what shall we do with him?" said Madame Clapart, whose grief made her impervious to Clapart's taunt. "If he bore my name," replied Moreau, "I should wait composedly till he draws for the conscription, and if he gets a fatal number I should not provide him with a substitute. This is the second time your son has committed a folly out of sheer vanity. Well, vanity may inspire fine deeds in war and may advance him in the career of a soldier. Besides, six years of military service will put some lead into his head; and as he has only his last legal examination to pass, it won't be much ill-luck for him if he doesn't become a lawyer till he is twenty-six; that is, if he wants to continue in the law after paying, as they say, his tax of blood. By that time, at any rate, he will have been severely punished, he will have learned experience, and contracted habits of subordination. Before making his probation at the bar he will have gone through his probations in life." "If that is your decision for a son," said Madame Clapart, "I see that the heart of a father is not like that of a mother. My poor Oscar a common soldier!--" "Would you rather he flung himself headforemost into the Seine after committing a dishonorable action? He cannot now become a solicitor; do you think him steady and wise enough to be a barrister? No. While his reason is maturing, what will he become? A dissipated fellow. The discipline of the army will, at least, preserve him from that." "Could he not go into some other office? His uncle Cardot has promised to pay for his substitute; Oscar is to dedicate his graduating thesis to him." At this moment carriage-wheels were heard, and a hackney-coach containing Oscar and all his worldly belongings stopped before the door. The luckless young man came up at once. "Ah! here you are, Monsieur Joli-Coeur!" cried Clapart. Oscar kissed his mother, and held out to Moreau a hand which the latter refused to take. To this rebuff Oscar replied by a reproachful look, the boldness of which he had never shown before. Then he turned on Clapart. "Listen to me, monsieur," said the youth, transformed into a man. "You worry my poor mother devilishly, and that's your right, for she is, unfortunately, your wife. But as for me, it is another thing. I shall be of age in a few months; and you have no rights over me even as a minor. I have never asked anything of you. Thanks to Monsieur Moreau, I have never cost you one penny, and I owe you no gratitude. Therefore, I say, let me alone!" Clapart, hearing this apostrophe, slunk back to his sofa in the chimney corner. The reasoning and the inward fury of the young man, who had just received a lecture from his friend Godeschal, silenced the imbecile mind of the sick man. "A momentary temptation, such as you yourself would have yielded to at my age," said Oscar to Moreau, "has made me commit a fault which Desroches thinks serious, though it is only a peccadillo. I am more provoked with myself for taking Florentine of the Gaiete for a marquise than I am for losing fifteen hundred francs after a little debauch in which everybody, even Godeschal, was half-seas over. This time, at any rate, I've hurt no one by myself. I'm cured of such things forever. If you are willing to help me, Monsieur Moreau, I swear to you that the six years I must still stay a clerk before I can get a practice shall be spent without--" "Stop there!" said Moreau. "I have three children, and I can make no promises." "Never mind, never mind," said Madame Clapart to her son, casting a reproachful glance at Moreau. "Your uncle Cardot--" "I have no longer an uncle Cardot," replied Oscar, who related the scene at the rue de Vendome. Madame Clapart, feeling her legs give way under the weight of her body, staggered to a chair in the dining-room, where she fell as if struck by lightning. "All the miseries together!" she said, as she fainted. Moreau took the poor mother in his arms, and carried her to the bed in her chamber. Oscar remained motionless, as if crushed. "There is nothing left for you," said Moreau, coming back to him, "but to make yourself a soldier. That idiot of a Clapart looks to me as though he couldn't live three months, and then your mother will be without a penny. Ought I not, therefore, to reserve for her the little money I am able to give? It was impossible to tell you this before her. As a soldier, you'll eat plain bread and reflect on life such as it is to those who are born into it without fortune." "I may get a lucky number," said Oscar. "Suppose you do, what then? Your mother has well fulfilled her duty towards you. She gave you an education; she placed you on the right road, and secured you a career. You have left it. Now, what can you do? Without money, nothing; as you know by this time. You are not a man who can begin a new career by taking off your coat and going to work in your shirt-sleeves with the tools of an artisan. Besides, your mother loves you, and she would die to see you come to that." Oscar sat down and no longer restrained his tears, which flowed copiously. At last he understood this language, so completely unintelligible to him ever since his first fault. "Men without means ought to be perfect," added Moreau, not suspecting the profundity of that cruel sentence. "My fate will soon be decided," said Oscar. "I draw my number the day after to-morrow. Between now and then I will decide upon my future." Moreau, deeply distressed in spite of his stern bearing, left the household in the rue de la Cerisaie to its despair. Three days later Oscar drew the number twenty-seven. In the interests of the poor lad the former steward of Presles had the courage to go to the Comte de Serizy and ask for his influence to get Oscar into the cavalry. It happened that the count's son, having left the Ecole Polytechnique rather low in his class, was appointed, as a favor, sub-lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry commanded by the Duc de Maufrigneuse. Oscar had, therefore, in his great misfortune, the small luck of being, at the Comte de Serizy's instigation, drafted into that noble regiment, with the promise of promotion to quartermaster within a year. Chance had thus placed the ex-clerk under the command of the son of the Comte de Serizy. Madame Clapart, after languishing for some days, so keenly was she affected by these catastrophes, became a victim to the remorse which seizes upon many a mother whose conduct has been frail in her youth, and who, in her old age, turns to repentance. She now considered herself under a curse. She attributed the sorrows of her second marriage and the misfortunes of her son to a just retribution by which God was compelling her to expiate the errors and pleasures of her youth. This opinion soon became a certainty in her mind. The poor woman went, for the first time in forty years, to confess herself to the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul's, who led her into the practice of devotion. But so ill-used and loving a soul as that of Madame Clapart's could never be anything but simply pious. The Aspasia of the Directory wanted to expiate her sins in order to draw down the blessing of God on the head of her poor Oscar, and she henceforth vowed herself to works and deeds of the purest piety. She believed she had won the attention of heaven when she saved the life of Monsieur Clapart, who, thanks to her devotion, lived on to torture her; but she chose to see, in the tyranny of that imbecile mind, a trial inflicted by the hand of one who loveth while he chasteneth. Oscar, meantime, behaved so well that in 1830 he was first sergeant of the company of the Vicomte de Serizy, which gave him the rank of sub-lieutenant of the line. Oscar Husson was by that time twenty-five years old. As the Royal Guard, to which his regiment was attached, was always in garrison in Paris, or within a circumference of thirty miles around the capital, he came to see his mother from time to time, and tell her his griefs; for he had the sense to see that he could never become an officer as matters then were. At that time the cavalry grades were all being taken up by the younger sons of noble families, and men without the article to their names found promotion difficult. Oscar's sole ambition was to leave the Guards and be appointed sub-lieutenant in a regiment of the cavalry of the line. In the month of February, 1830, Madame Clapart obtained this promotion for her son through the influence of Madame la Dauphine, granted to the Abbe Gaudron, now rector of Saint-Pauls. Although Oscar outwardly professed to be devoted to the Bourbons, in the depths of his heart he was a liberal. Therefore, in the struggle of 1830, he went over to the side of the people. This desertion, which had an importance due to the crisis in which it took place, brought him before the eyes of the public. During the excitement of triumph in the month of August he was promoted lieutenant, received the cross of the Legion of honor, and was attached as aide-de-camp to La Fayette, who gave him the rank of captain in 1832. When the amateur of the best of all possible republics was removed from the command of the National guard, Oscar Husson, whose devotion to the new dynasty amounted to fanaticism, was appointed major of a regiment sent to Africa at the time of the first expedition undertaken by the Prince-royal. The Vicomte de Serizy chanced to be the lieutenant-colonel of this regiment. At the affair of the Makta, where the field had to be abandoned to the Arabs, Monsieur de Serizy was left wounded under a dead horse. Oscar, discovering this, called out to the squadron: "Messieurs, it is going to death, but we cannot abandon our colonel." He dashed upon the enemy, and his electrified soldiers followed him. The Arabs, in their first astonishment at this furious and unlooked-for return, allowed Oscar to seize the viscount, whom he flung across his horse, and carried off at full gallop,--receiving, as he did so, two slashes from yataghans on his left arm. Oscar's conduct on this occasion was rewarded with the officer's cross of the Legion of honor, and by his promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He took the most affectionate care of the Vicomte de Serizy, whose mother came to meet him on the arrival of the regiment at Toulon, where, as we know, the young man died of his wounds. The Comtesse de Serizy had not separated her son from the man who had shown him such devotion. Oscar himself was so seriously wounded that the surgeons whom the countess had brought with her from Paris thought best to amputate his left arm. Thus the Comte de Serizy was led not only to forgive Oscar for his painful remarks on the journey to Presles, but to feel himself his debtor on behalf

try

How many times the word 'try' appears in the text?

you shall being me luck! See, here are my last hundred francs." And the "marquise" took out from her purse, the rings of which were adorned with diamonds, five gold pieces. Oscar pulled out his hundred in silver five-franc pieces, much ashamed at having to mingle such ignoble coins with gold. In ten throws the actress lost the two hundred francs. "Oh! how stupid!" she cried. "I'm banker now. But we'll play together still, won't we?" Fanny Beaupre rose to take her place as banker, and Oscar, finding himself observed by the whole table, dared not retire on the ground that he had no money. Speech failed him, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. "Lend me five hundred francs," said the actress to the danseuse. Florentine brought the money, which she obtained from Georges, who had just passed eight times at ecarte. "Nathan has won twelve hundred francs," said the actress to Oscar. "Bankers always win; we won't let them fool us, will we?" she whispered in his ear. Persons of nerve, imagination, and dash will understand how it was that poor Oscar opened his pocket-book and took out the note of five hundred francs which Desroches had given him. He looked at Nathan, the distinguished author, who now began, with Florine, to play a heavy game against the bank. "Come, my little man, take 'em up," cried Fanny Beaupre, signing to Oscar to rake in the two hundred francs which Nathan and Florine had punted. The actress did not spare taunts or jests on those who lost. She enlivened the game with jokes which Oscar thought singular; but reflection was stifled by joy; for the first two throws produced a gain of two thousand francs. Oscar then thought of feigning illness and making his escape, leaving his partner behind him; but "honor" kept him there. Three more turns and the gains were lost. Oscar felt a cold sweat running down his back, and he was sobered completely. The next two throws carried off the thousand francs of their mutual stake. Oscar was consumed with thirst, and drank three glasses of iced punch one after the other. The actress now led him into the bed-chamber, where the rest of the company were playing, talking frivolities with an easy air. But by this time the sense of his wrong-doing overcame him; the figure of Desroches appeared to him like a vision. He turned aside to a dark corner and sat down, putting his handkerchief to his eyes, and wept. Florentine noticed the attitude of true grief, which, because it is sincere, is certain to strike the eye of one who acts. She ran to him, took the handkerchief from his hand, and saw his tears; then she led him into a boudoir alone. "What is it, my child?" she said. At the tone and accent of that voice Oscar recognized a motherly kindness which is often found in women of her kind, and he answered openly:-- "I have lost five hundred francs which my employer gave me to obtain a document to-morrow morning; there's nothing for me but to fling myself into the river; I am dishonored." "How silly you are!" she said. "Stay where you are; I'll get you a thousand francs and you can win back what you've lost; but don't risk more than five hundred, so that you may be sure of your master's money. Georges plays a fine game at ecarte; bet on him." Oscar, frightened by his position, accepted the offer of the mistress of the house. "Ah!" he thought, "it is only women of rank who are capable of such kindness. Beautiful, noble, rich! how lucky Georges is!" He received the thousand francs from Florentine and returned to bet on his hoaxer. Georges had just passed for the fourth time when Oscar sat down beside him. The other players saw with satisfaction the arrival of a new better; for all, with the instinct of gamblers, took the side of Giroudeau, the old officer of the Empire. "Messieurs," said Georges, "you'll be punished for deserting me; I feel in the vein. Come, Oscar, we'll make an end of them!" Georges and his partner lost five games running. After losing the thousand francs Oscar was seized with the fury of play and insisted on taking the cards himself. By the result of a chance not at all uncommon with those who play for the first time, he won. But Georges bewildered him with advice; told him when to throw the cards, and even snatched them from his hand; so that this conflict of wills and intuitions injured his vein. By three o'clock in the morning, after various changes of fortune, and still drinking punch, Oscar came down to his last hundred francs. He rose with a heavy head, completely stupefied, took a few steps forward, and fell upon a sofa in the boudoir, his eyes closing in a leaden sleep. "Mariette," said Fanny Beaupre to Godeschal's sister, who had come in about two o'clock, "do you dine here to-morrow? Camusot and Pere Cardot are coming, and we'll have some fun." "What!" cried Florentine, "and my old fellow never told me!" "He said he'd tell you to-morrow morning," remarked Fanny Beaupre. "The devil take him and his orgies!" exclaimed Florentine. "He and Camusot are worse than magistrates or stage-managers. But we have very good dinners here, Mariette," she continued. "Cardot always orders them from Chevet's; bring your Duc de Maufrigneuse and we'll make them dance like Tritons." Hearing the names of Cardot and Camusot, Oscar made an effort to throw off his sleep; but he could only mutter a few words which were not understood, and then he fell back upon the silken cushions. "You'll have to keep him here all night," said Fanny Beaupre, laughing, to Florentine. "Oh! poor boy! he is drunk with punch and despair both. It is the second clerk in your brother's office," she said to Mariette. "He has lost the money his master gave him for some legal affair. He wanted to drown himself; so I lent him a thousand francs, but those brigands Finot and Giroudeau won them from him. Poor innocent!" "But we ought to wake him," said Mariette. "My brother won't make light of it, nor his master either." "Oh, wake him if you can, and carry him off with you!" said Florentine, returning to the salon to receive the adieux of some departing guests. Presently those who remained began what was called "character dancing," and by the time it was broad daylight, Florentine, tired out, went to bed, oblivious to Oscar, who was still in the boudoir sound asleep. CHAPTER X. ANOTHER CATASTROPHE About eleven the next morning, a terrible sound awoke the unfortunate clerk. Recognizing the voice of his uncle Cardot, he thought it wise to feign sleep, and so turned his face into the yellow velvet cushions on which he had passed the night. "Really, my little Florentine," said the old gentleman, "this is neither right nor sensible; you danced last evening in 'Les Ruines,' and you have spent the night in an orgy. That's deliberately going to work to lose your freshness. Besides which, it was ungrateful to inaugurate this beautiful apartment without even letting me know. Who knows what has been going on here?" "Old monster!" cried Florentine, "haven't you a key that lets you in at all hours? My ball lasted till five in the morning, and you have the cruelty to come and wake me up at eleven!" "Half-past eleven, Titine," observed Cardot, humbly. "I came out early to order a dinner fit for an archbishop at Chevet's. Just see how the carpets are stained! What sort of people did you have here?" "You needn't complain, for Fanny Beaupre told me you were coming to dinner with Camusot, and to please you I've invited Tullia, du Bruel, Mariette, the Duc de Maufrigneuse, Florine, and Nathan. So you'll have the four loveliest creatures ever seen behind the foot-lights; we'll dance you a 'pas de Zephire.'" "It is enough to kill you to lead such a life!" cried old Cardot; "and look at the broken glasses! What pillage! The antechamber actually makes me shudder--" At this instant the wrathful old gentleman stopped short as if magnetized, like a bird which a snake is charming. He saw the outline of a form in a black coat through the door of the boudoir. "Ah, Mademoiselle Cabirolle!" he said at last. "Well, what?" she asked. The eyes of the danseuse followed those of the little old man; and when she recognized the presence of the clerk she went off into such fits of laughter that not only was the old gentleman nonplussed, but Oscar was compelled to appear; for Florentine took him by the arm, still pealing with laughter at the conscience-stricken faces of the uncle and nephew. "You here, nephew?" "Nephew! so he's your nephew?" cried Florentine, with another burst of laughter. "You never told me about him. Why didn't Mariette carry you off?" she said to Oscar, who stood there petrified. "What can he do now, poor boy?" "Whatever he pleases!" said Cardot, sharply, marching to the door as if to go away. "One moment, papa Cardot. You will be so good as to get your nephew out of a scrape into which I led him; for he played the money of his master and lost it, and I lend him a thousand francs to win it back, and he lost that too." "Miserable boy! you lost fifteen hundred francs at play at your age?" "Oh, uncle, uncle!" cried poor Oscar, plunged by these words into all the horrors of his position, and falling on his knees before his uncle, with clasped hands, "It is twelve o'clock! I am lost, dishonored! Monsieur Desroches will have no pity! He gave me the money for an important affair, in which his pride was concerned. I was to get a paper at the Palais in the case of Vandernesse versus Vandernesse! What will become of me? Oh, save me for the sake of my father and aunt! Come with me to Monsieur Desroches, and explain it to him; make some excuse,--anything!" These sentences were jerked out through sobs and tears that might have moved the sphinx of Luxor. "Old skinflint!" said the danseuse, who was crying, "will you let your own nephew be dishonored,--the son of the man to whom you owe your fortune?--for his name is Oscar Husson. Save him, or Titine will deny you forever!" "But how did he come here?" asked Cardot. "Don't you see that the reason he forgot to go for those papers was because he was drunk and overslept himself. Georges and his cousin Frederic took all the clerks in his office to a feast at the Rocher de Cancale." Pere Cardot looked at Florentine and hesitated. "Come, come," she said, "you old monkey, shouldn't I have hid him better if there had been anything else in it?" "There, take your five hundred francs, you scamp!" said Cardot to his nephew, "and remember, that's the last penny you'll ever get from me. Go and make it up with your master if you can. I'll return the thousand francs which you borrowed of mademoiselle; but I'll never hear another word about you." Oscar disappeared, not wishing to hear more. Once in the street, however, he knew not where to go. Chance which destroys men and chance which saves them were both making equal efforts for and against Oscar during that fateful morning. But he was doomed to fall before a master who forgave no failure in any affair he had once undertaken. When Mariette reached home that night, she felt alarmed at what might happen to the youth in whom her brother took interest and she wrote a hasty note to Godeschal, telling him what had happened to Oscar and inclosing a bank bill for five hundred francs to repair his loss. The kind-hearted creature went to sleep after charging her maid to carry the little note to Desroches' office before seven o'clock in the morning. Godeschal, on his side, getting up at six and finding that Oscar had not returned, guessed what had happened. He took the five hundred francs from his own little hoard and rushed to the Palais, where he obtained a copy of the judgment and returned in time to lay it before Desroches by eight o'clock. Meantime Desroches, who always rose at four, was in his office by seven. Mariette's maid, not finding the brother of her mistress in his bedroom, came down to the office and there met Desroches, to whom she very naturally offered the note. "Is it about business?" he said; "I am Monsieur Desroches." "You can see, monsieur," replied the maid. Desroches opened the letter and read it. Finding the five-hundred-franc note, he went into his private office furiously angry with his second clerk. About half-past seven he heard Godeschal dictating to the second head-clerk a copy of the document in question, and a few moments later the good fellow entered his master's office with an air of triumph in his heart. "Did Oscar Husson fetch the paper this morning from Simon?" inquired Desroches. "Yes, monsieur." "Who gave him the money?" "Why, you did, Saturday," replied Godeschal. "Then it rains five-hundred-franc notes," cried Desroches. "Look here, Godeschal, you are a fine fellow, but that little Husson does not deserve such generosity. I hate idiots, but I hate still more the men who will go wrong in spite of the fatherly care which watches over them." He gave Godeschal Mariette's letter and the five-hundred-franc note which she had sent. "You must excuse my having opened it," he said, "but your sister's maid told me it was on business. Dismiss Husson." "Poor unhappy boy! what grief he has caused me!" said Godeschal, "that tall ne'er-do-well of a Georges Marest is his evil genius; he ought to flee him like the plague; if not, he'll bring him to some third disgrace." "What do you mean by that?" asked Desroches. Godeschal then related briefly the affair of the journey to Presles. "Ah! yes," said the lawyer, "I remember Joseph Bridau told me that story about the time it happened. It is to that meeting that we owe the favor Monsieur de Serizy has since shown in the matter of Joseph's brother, Philippe Bridau." At this moment Moreau, to whom the case of the Vandernesse estate was of much importance, entered the office. The marquis wished to sell the land in parcels and the count was opposed to such a sale. The land-agent received therefore the first fire of Desroches' wrath against his ex-second clerk and all the threatening prophecies which he fulminated against him. The result was that this most sincere friend and protector of the unhappy youth came to the conclusion that his vanity was incorrigible. "Make him a barrister," said Desroches. "He has only his last examination to pass. In that line, his defects might prove virtues, for self-love and vanity give tongues to half the attorneys." At this time Clapart, who was ill, was being nursed by his wife,--a painful task, a duty without reward. The sick man tormented the poor creature, who was now doomed to learn what venomous and spiteful teasing a half-imbecile man, whom poverty had rendered craftily savage, could be capable of in the weary tete-a-tete of each endless day. Delighted to turn a sharpened arrow in the sensitive heart of the mother, he had, in a measure, studied the fears that Oscar's behavior and defects inspired in the poor woman. When a mother receives from her child a shock like that of the affair at Presles, she continues in a state of constant fear, and, by the manner in which his wife boasted of Oscar every time he obtained the slightest success, Clapart knew the extent of her secret uneasiness, and he took pains to rouse it on every occasion. "Well, Madame," Clapart would say, "Oscar is doing better than I even hoped. That journey to Presles was only a heedlessness of youth. Where can you find young lads who do not commit just such faults? Poor child! he bears his privations heroically! If his father had lived, he would never have had any. God grant he may know how to control his passions!" etc., etc. While all these catastrophes were happening in the rue de Vendome and the rue de Bethisy, Clapart, sitting in the chimney corner, wrapped in an old dressing-gown, watched his wife, who was engaged over the fire in their bedroom in simultaneously making the family broth, Clapart's "tisane," and her own breakfast. "Mon Dieu! I wish I knew how the affair of yesterday ended. Oscar was to breakfast at the Rocher de Cancale and spend the evening with a marquise--" "Don't trouble yourself! Sooner or later you'll find out about your swan," said her husband. "Do you really believe in that marquise? Pooh! A young man who has senses and a taste for extravagance like Oscar can find such ladies as that on every bush--if he pays for them. Some fine morning you'll find yourself with a load of debt on your back." "You are always trying to put me in despair!" cried Madame Clapart. "You complained that my son lived on your salary, and never has he cost you a penny. For two years you haven't had the slightest cause of complaint against him; here he is second clerk, his uncle and Monsieur Moreau pay all expenses, and he earns, himself, a salary of eight hundred francs. If we have bread to eat in our old age we may owe it all to that dear boy. You are really too unjust--" "You call my foresight unjust, do you?" replied the invalid, crossly. Just then the bell rang loudly. Madame Clapart ran to open the door, and remained in the outer room with Moreau, who had come to soften the blow which Oscar's new folly would deal to the heart of his poor mother. "What! he gambled with the money of the office?" she cried, bursting into tears. "Didn't I tell you so, hey?" said Clapart, appearing like a spectre at the door of the salon whither his curiosity had brought him. "Oh! what shall we do with him?" said Madame Clapart, whose grief made her impervious to Clapart's taunt. "If he bore my name," replied Moreau, "I should wait composedly till he draws for the conscription, and if he gets a fatal number I should not provide him with a substitute. This is the second time your son has committed a folly out of sheer vanity. Well, vanity may inspire fine deeds in war and may advance him in the career of a soldier. Besides, six years of military service will put some lead into his head; and as he has only his last legal examination to pass, it won't be much ill-luck for him if he doesn't become a lawyer till he is twenty-six; that is, if he wants to continue in the law after paying, as they say, his tax of blood. By that time, at any rate, he will have been severely punished, he will have learned experience, and contracted habits of subordination. Before making his probation at the bar he will have gone through his probations in life." "If that is your decision for a son," said Madame Clapart, "I see that the heart of a father is not like that of a mother. My poor Oscar a common soldier!--" "Would you rather he flung himself headforemost into the Seine after committing a dishonorable action? He cannot now become a solicitor; do you think him steady and wise enough to be a barrister? No. While his reason is maturing, what will he become? A dissipated fellow. The discipline of the army will, at least, preserve him from that." "Could he not go into some other office? His uncle Cardot has promised to pay for his substitute; Oscar is to dedicate his graduating thesis to him." At this moment carriage-wheels were heard, and a hackney-coach containing Oscar and all his worldly belongings stopped before the door. The luckless young man came up at once. "Ah! here you are, Monsieur Joli-Coeur!" cried Clapart. Oscar kissed his mother, and held out to Moreau a hand which the latter refused to take. To this rebuff Oscar replied by a reproachful look, the boldness of which he had never shown before. Then he turned on Clapart. "Listen to me, monsieur," said the youth, transformed into a man. "You worry my poor mother devilishly, and that's your right, for she is, unfortunately, your wife. But as for me, it is another thing. I shall be of age in a few months; and you have no rights over me even as a minor. I have never asked anything of you. Thanks to Monsieur Moreau, I have never cost you one penny, and I owe you no gratitude. Therefore, I say, let me alone!" Clapart, hearing this apostrophe, slunk back to his sofa in the chimney corner. The reasoning and the inward fury of the young man, who had just received a lecture from his friend Godeschal, silenced the imbecile mind of the sick man. "A momentary temptation, such as you yourself would have yielded to at my age," said Oscar to Moreau, "has made me commit a fault which Desroches thinks serious, though it is only a peccadillo. I am more provoked with myself for taking Florentine of the Gaiete for a marquise than I am for losing fifteen hundred francs after a little debauch in which everybody, even Godeschal, was half-seas over. This time, at any rate, I've hurt no one by myself. I'm cured of such things forever. If you are willing to help me, Monsieur Moreau, I swear to you that the six years I must still stay a clerk before I can get a practice shall be spent without--" "Stop there!" said Moreau. "I have three children, and I can make no promises." "Never mind, never mind," said Madame Clapart to her son, casting a reproachful glance at Moreau. "Your uncle Cardot--" "I have no longer an uncle Cardot," replied Oscar, who related the scene at the rue de Vendome. Madame Clapart, feeling her legs give way under the weight of her body, staggered to a chair in the dining-room, where she fell as if struck by lightning. "All the miseries together!" she said, as she fainted. Moreau took the poor mother in his arms, and carried her to the bed in her chamber. Oscar remained motionless, as if crushed. "There is nothing left for you," said Moreau, coming back to him, "but to make yourself a soldier. That idiot of a Clapart looks to me as though he couldn't live three months, and then your mother will be without a penny. Ought I not, therefore, to reserve for her the little money I am able to give? It was impossible to tell you this before her. As a soldier, you'll eat plain bread and reflect on life such as it is to those who are born into it without fortune." "I may get a lucky number," said Oscar. "Suppose you do, what then? Your mother has well fulfilled her duty towards you. She gave you an education; she placed you on the right road, and secured you a career. You have left it. Now, what can you do? Without money, nothing; as you know by this time. You are not a man who can begin a new career by taking off your coat and going to work in your shirt-sleeves with the tools of an artisan. Besides, your mother loves you, and she would die to see you come to that." Oscar sat down and no longer restrained his tears, which flowed copiously. At last he understood this language, so completely unintelligible to him ever since his first fault. "Men without means ought to be perfect," added Moreau, not suspecting the profundity of that cruel sentence. "My fate will soon be decided," said Oscar. "I draw my number the day after to-morrow. Between now and then I will decide upon my future." Moreau, deeply distressed in spite of his stern bearing, left the household in the rue de la Cerisaie to its despair. Three days later Oscar drew the number twenty-seven. In the interests of the poor lad the former steward of Presles had the courage to go to the Comte de Serizy and ask for his influence to get Oscar into the cavalry. It happened that the count's son, having left the Ecole Polytechnique rather low in his class, was appointed, as a favor, sub-lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry commanded by the Duc de Maufrigneuse. Oscar had, therefore, in his great misfortune, the small luck of being, at the Comte de Serizy's instigation, drafted into that noble regiment, with the promise of promotion to quartermaster within a year. Chance had thus placed the ex-clerk under the command of the son of the Comte de Serizy. Madame Clapart, after languishing for some days, so keenly was she affected by these catastrophes, became a victim to the remorse which seizes upon many a mother whose conduct has been frail in her youth, and who, in her old age, turns to repentance. She now considered herself under a curse. She attributed the sorrows of her second marriage and the misfortunes of her son to a just retribution by which God was compelling her to expiate the errors and pleasures of her youth. This opinion soon became a certainty in her mind. The poor woman went, for the first time in forty years, to confess herself to the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul's, who led her into the practice of devotion. But so ill-used and loving a soul as that of Madame Clapart's could never be anything but simply pious. The Aspasia of the Directory wanted to expiate her sins in order to draw down the blessing of God on the head of her poor Oscar, and she henceforth vowed herself to works and deeds of the purest piety. She believed she had won the attention of heaven when she saved the life of Monsieur Clapart, who, thanks to her devotion, lived on to torture her; but she chose to see, in the tyranny of that imbecile mind, a trial inflicted by the hand of one who loveth while he chasteneth. Oscar, meantime, behaved so well that in 1830 he was first sergeant of the company of the Vicomte de Serizy, which gave him the rank of sub-lieutenant of the line. Oscar Husson was by that time twenty-five years old. As the Royal Guard, to which his regiment was attached, was always in garrison in Paris, or within a circumference of thirty miles around the capital, he came to see his mother from time to time, and tell her his griefs; for he had the sense to see that he could never become an officer as matters then were. At that time the cavalry grades were all being taken up by the younger sons of noble families, and men without the article to their names found promotion difficult. Oscar's sole ambition was to leave the Guards and be appointed sub-lieutenant in a regiment of the cavalry of the line. In the month of February, 1830, Madame Clapart obtained this promotion for her son through the influence of Madame la Dauphine, granted to the Abbe Gaudron, now rector of Saint-Pauls. Although Oscar outwardly professed to be devoted to the Bourbons, in the depths of his heart he was a liberal. Therefore, in the struggle of 1830, he went over to the side of the people. This desertion, which had an importance due to the crisis in which it took place, brought him before the eyes of the public. During the excitement of triumph in the month of August he was promoted lieutenant, received the cross of the Legion of honor, and was attached as aide-de-camp to La Fayette, who gave him the rank of captain in 1832. When the amateur of the best of all possible republics was removed from the command of the National guard, Oscar Husson, whose devotion to the new dynasty amounted to fanaticism, was appointed major of a regiment sent to Africa at the time of the first expedition undertaken by the Prince-royal. The Vicomte de Serizy chanced to be the lieutenant-colonel of this regiment. At the affair of the Makta, where the field had to be abandoned to the Arabs, Monsieur de Serizy was left wounded under a dead horse. Oscar, discovering this, called out to the squadron: "Messieurs, it is going to death, but we cannot abandon our colonel." He dashed upon the enemy, and his electrified soldiers followed him. The Arabs, in their first astonishment at this furious and unlooked-for return, allowed Oscar to seize the viscount, whom he flung across his horse, and carried off at full gallop,--receiving, as he did so, two slashes from yataghans on his left arm. Oscar's conduct on this occasion was rewarded with the officer's cross of the Legion of honor, and by his promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He took the most affectionate care of the Vicomte de Serizy, whose mother came to meet him on the arrival of the regiment at Toulon, where, as we know, the young man died of his wounds. The Comtesse de Serizy had not separated her son from the man who had shown him such devotion. Oscar himself was so seriously wounded that the surgeons whom the countess had brought with her from Paris thought best to amputate his left arm. Thus the Comte de Serizy was led not only to forgive Oscar for his painful remarks on the journey to Presles, but to feel himself his debtor on behalf

feigning

How many times the word 'feigning' appears in the text?

you shall being me luck! See, here are my last hundred francs." And the "marquise" took out from her purse, the rings of which were adorned with diamonds, five gold pieces. Oscar pulled out his hundred in silver five-franc pieces, much ashamed at having to mingle such ignoble coins with gold. In ten throws the actress lost the two hundred francs. "Oh! how stupid!" she cried. "I'm banker now. But we'll play together still, won't we?" Fanny Beaupre rose to take her place as banker, and Oscar, finding himself observed by the whole table, dared not retire on the ground that he had no money. Speech failed him, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. "Lend me five hundred francs," said the actress to the danseuse. Florentine brought the money, which she obtained from Georges, who had just passed eight times at ecarte. "Nathan has won twelve hundred francs," said the actress to Oscar. "Bankers always win; we won't let them fool us, will we?" she whispered in his ear. Persons of nerve, imagination, and dash will understand how it was that poor Oscar opened his pocket-book and took out the note of five hundred francs which Desroches had given him. He looked at Nathan, the distinguished author, who now began, with Florine, to play a heavy game against the bank. "Come, my little man, take 'em up," cried Fanny Beaupre, signing to Oscar to rake in the two hundred francs which Nathan and Florine had punted. The actress did not spare taunts or jests on those who lost. She enlivened the game with jokes which Oscar thought singular; but reflection was stifled by joy; for the first two throws produced a gain of two thousand francs. Oscar then thought of feigning illness and making his escape, leaving his partner behind him; but "honor" kept him there. Three more turns and the gains were lost. Oscar felt a cold sweat running down his back, and he was sobered completely. The next two throws carried off the thousand francs of their mutual stake. Oscar was consumed with thirst, and drank three glasses of iced punch one after the other. The actress now led him into the bed-chamber, where the rest of the company were playing, talking frivolities with an easy air. But by this time the sense of his wrong-doing overcame him; the figure of Desroches appeared to him like a vision. He turned aside to a dark corner and sat down, putting his handkerchief to his eyes, and wept. Florentine noticed the attitude of true grief, which, because it is sincere, is certain to strike the eye of one who acts. She ran to him, took the handkerchief from his hand, and saw his tears; then she led him into a boudoir alone. "What is it, my child?" she said. At the tone and accent of that voice Oscar recognized a motherly kindness which is often found in women of her kind, and he answered openly:-- "I have lost five hundred francs which my employer gave me to obtain a document to-morrow morning; there's nothing for me but to fling myself into the river; I am dishonored." "How silly you are!" she said. "Stay where you are; I'll get you a thousand francs and you can win back what you've lost; but don't risk more than five hundred, so that you may be sure of your master's money. Georges plays a fine game at ecarte; bet on him." Oscar, frightened by his position, accepted the offer of the mistress of the house. "Ah!" he thought, "it is only women of rank who are capable of such kindness. Beautiful, noble, rich! how lucky Georges is!" He received the thousand francs from Florentine and returned to bet on his hoaxer. Georges had just passed for the fourth time when Oscar sat down beside him. The other players saw with satisfaction the arrival of a new better; for all, with the instinct of gamblers, took the side of Giroudeau, the old officer of the Empire. "Messieurs," said Georges, "you'll be punished for deserting me; I feel in the vein. Come, Oscar, we'll make an end of them!" Georges and his partner lost five games running. After losing the thousand francs Oscar was seized with the fury of play and insisted on taking the cards himself. By the result of a chance not at all uncommon with those who play for the first time, he won. But Georges bewildered him with advice; told him when to throw the cards, and even snatched them from his hand; so that this conflict of wills and intuitions injured his vein. By three o'clock in the morning, after various changes of fortune, and still drinking punch, Oscar came down to his last hundred francs. He rose with a heavy head, completely stupefied, took a few steps forward, and fell upon a sofa in the boudoir, his eyes closing in a leaden sleep. "Mariette," said Fanny Beaupre to Godeschal's sister, who had come in about two o'clock, "do you dine here to-morrow? Camusot and Pere Cardot are coming, and we'll have some fun." "What!" cried Florentine, "and my old fellow never told me!" "He said he'd tell you to-morrow morning," remarked Fanny Beaupre. "The devil take him and his orgies!" exclaimed Florentine. "He and Camusot are worse than magistrates or stage-managers. But we have very good dinners here, Mariette," she continued. "Cardot always orders them from Chevet's; bring your Duc de Maufrigneuse and we'll make them dance like Tritons." Hearing the names of Cardot and Camusot, Oscar made an effort to throw off his sleep; but he could only mutter a few words which were not understood, and then he fell back upon the silken cushions. "You'll have to keep him here all night," said Fanny Beaupre, laughing, to Florentine. "Oh! poor boy! he is drunk with punch and despair both. It is the second clerk in your brother's office," she said to Mariette. "He has lost the money his master gave him for some legal affair. He wanted to drown himself; so I lent him a thousand francs, but those brigands Finot and Giroudeau won them from him. Poor innocent!" "But we ought to wake him," said Mariette. "My brother won't make light of it, nor his master either." "Oh, wake him if you can, and carry him off with you!" said Florentine, returning to the salon to receive the adieux of some departing guests. Presently those who remained began what was called "character dancing," and by the time it was broad daylight, Florentine, tired out, went to bed, oblivious to Oscar, who was still in the boudoir sound asleep. CHAPTER X. ANOTHER CATASTROPHE About eleven the next morning, a terrible sound awoke the unfortunate clerk. Recognizing the voice of his uncle Cardot, he thought it wise to feign sleep, and so turned his face into the yellow velvet cushions on which he had passed the night. "Really, my little Florentine," said the old gentleman, "this is neither right nor sensible; you danced last evening in 'Les Ruines,' and you have spent the night in an orgy. That's deliberately going to work to lose your freshness. Besides which, it was ungrateful to inaugurate this beautiful apartment without even letting me know. Who knows what has been going on here?" "Old monster!" cried Florentine, "haven't you a key that lets you in at all hours? My ball lasted till five in the morning, and you have the cruelty to come and wake me up at eleven!" "Half-past eleven, Titine," observed Cardot, humbly. "I came out early to order a dinner fit for an archbishop at Chevet's. Just see how the carpets are stained! What sort of people did you have here?" "You needn't complain, for Fanny Beaupre told me you were coming to dinner with Camusot, and to please you I've invited Tullia, du Bruel, Mariette, the Duc de Maufrigneuse, Florine, and Nathan. So you'll have the four loveliest creatures ever seen behind the foot-lights; we'll dance you a 'pas de Zephire.'" "It is enough to kill you to lead such a life!" cried old Cardot; "and look at the broken glasses! What pillage! The antechamber actually makes me shudder--" At this instant the wrathful old gentleman stopped short as if magnetized, like a bird which a snake is charming. He saw the outline of a form in a black coat through the door of the boudoir. "Ah, Mademoiselle Cabirolle!" he said at last. "Well, what?" she asked. The eyes of the danseuse followed those of the little old man; and when she recognized the presence of the clerk she went off into such fits of laughter that not only was the old gentleman nonplussed, but Oscar was compelled to appear; for Florentine took him by the arm, still pealing with laughter at the conscience-stricken faces of the uncle and nephew. "You here, nephew?" "Nephew! so he's your nephew?" cried Florentine, with another burst of laughter. "You never told me about him. Why didn't Mariette carry you off?" she said to Oscar, who stood there petrified. "What can he do now, poor boy?" "Whatever he pleases!" said Cardot, sharply, marching to the door as if to go away. "One moment, papa Cardot. You will be so good as to get your nephew out of a scrape into which I led him; for he played the money of his master and lost it, and I lend him a thousand francs to win it back, and he lost that too." "Miserable boy! you lost fifteen hundred francs at play at your age?" "Oh, uncle, uncle!" cried poor Oscar, plunged by these words into all the horrors of his position, and falling on his knees before his uncle, with clasped hands, "It is twelve o'clock! I am lost, dishonored! Monsieur Desroches will have no pity! He gave me the money for an important affair, in which his pride was concerned. I was to get a paper at the Palais in the case of Vandernesse versus Vandernesse! What will become of me? Oh, save me for the sake of my father and aunt! Come with me to Monsieur Desroches, and explain it to him; make some excuse,--anything!" These sentences were jerked out through sobs and tears that might have moved the sphinx of Luxor. "Old skinflint!" said the danseuse, who was crying, "will you let your own nephew be dishonored,--the son of the man to whom you owe your fortune?--for his name is Oscar Husson. Save him, or Titine will deny you forever!" "But how did he come here?" asked Cardot. "Don't you see that the reason he forgot to go for those papers was because he was drunk and overslept himself. Georges and his cousin Frederic took all the clerks in his office to a feast at the Rocher de Cancale." Pere Cardot looked at Florentine and hesitated. "Come, come," she said, "you old monkey, shouldn't I have hid him better if there had been anything else in it?" "There, take your five hundred francs, you scamp!" said Cardot to his nephew, "and remember, that's the last penny you'll ever get from me. Go and make it up with your master if you can. I'll return the thousand francs which you borrowed of mademoiselle; but I'll never hear another word about you." Oscar disappeared, not wishing to hear more. Once in the street, however, he knew not where to go. Chance which destroys men and chance which saves them were both making equal efforts for and against Oscar during that fateful morning. But he was doomed to fall before a master who forgave no failure in any affair he had once undertaken. When Mariette reached home that night, she felt alarmed at what might happen to the youth in whom her brother took interest and she wrote a hasty note to Godeschal, telling him what had happened to Oscar and inclosing a bank bill for five hundred francs to repair his loss. The kind-hearted creature went to sleep after charging her maid to carry the little note to Desroches' office before seven o'clock in the morning. Godeschal, on his side, getting up at six and finding that Oscar had not returned, guessed what had happened. He took the five hundred francs from his own little hoard and rushed to the Palais, where he obtained a copy of the judgment and returned in time to lay it before Desroches by eight o'clock. Meantime Desroches, who always rose at four, was in his office by seven. Mariette's maid, not finding the brother of her mistress in his bedroom, came down to the office and there met Desroches, to whom she very naturally offered the note. "Is it about business?" he said; "I am Monsieur Desroches." "You can see, monsieur," replied the maid. Desroches opened the letter and read it. Finding the five-hundred-franc note, he went into his private office furiously angry with his second clerk. About half-past seven he heard Godeschal dictating to the second head-clerk a copy of the document in question, and a few moments later the good fellow entered his master's office with an air of triumph in his heart. "Did Oscar Husson fetch the paper this morning from Simon?" inquired Desroches. "Yes, monsieur." "Who gave him the money?" "Why, you did, Saturday," replied Godeschal. "Then it rains five-hundred-franc notes," cried Desroches. "Look here, Godeschal, you are a fine fellow, but that little Husson does not deserve such generosity. I hate idiots, but I hate still more the men who will go wrong in spite of the fatherly care which watches over them." He gave Godeschal Mariette's letter and the five-hundred-franc note which she had sent. "You must excuse my having opened it," he said, "but your sister's maid told me it was on business. Dismiss Husson." "Poor unhappy boy! what grief he has caused me!" said Godeschal, "that tall ne'er-do-well of a Georges Marest is his evil genius; he ought to flee him like the plague; if not, he'll bring him to some third disgrace." "What do you mean by that?" asked Desroches. Godeschal then related briefly the affair of the journey to Presles. "Ah! yes," said the lawyer, "I remember Joseph Bridau told me that story about the time it happened. It is to that meeting that we owe the favor Monsieur de Serizy has since shown in the matter of Joseph's brother, Philippe Bridau." At this moment Moreau, to whom the case of the Vandernesse estate was of much importance, entered the office. The marquis wished to sell the land in parcels and the count was opposed to such a sale. The land-agent received therefore the first fire of Desroches' wrath against his ex-second clerk and all the threatening prophecies which he fulminated against him. The result was that this most sincere friend and protector of the unhappy youth came to the conclusion that his vanity was incorrigible. "Make him a barrister," said Desroches. "He has only his last examination to pass. In that line, his defects might prove virtues, for self-love and vanity give tongues to half the attorneys." At this time Clapart, who was ill, was being nursed by his wife,--a painful task, a duty without reward. The sick man tormented the poor creature, who was now doomed to learn what venomous and spiteful teasing a half-imbecile man, whom poverty had rendered craftily savage, could be capable of in the weary tete-a-tete of each endless day. Delighted to turn a sharpened arrow in the sensitive heart of the mother, he had, in a measure, studied the fears that Oscar's behavior and defects inspired in the poor woman. When a mother receives from her child a shock like that of the affair at Presles, she continues in a state of constant fear, and, by the manner in which his wife boasted of Oscar every time he obtained the slightest success, Clapart knew the extent of her secret uneasiness, and he took pains to rouse it on every occasion. "Well, Madame," Clapart would say, "Oscar is doing better than I even hoped. That journey to Presles was only a heedlessness of youth. Where can you find young lads who do not commit just such faults? Poor child! he bears his privations heroically! If his father had lived, he would never have had any. God grant he may know how to control his passions!" etc., etc. While all these catastrophes were happening in the rue de Vendome and the rue de Bethisy, Clapart, sitting in the chimney corner, wrapped in an old dressing-gown, watched his wife, who was engaged over the fire in their bedroom in simultaneously making the family broth, Clapart's "tisane," and her own breakfast. "Mon Dieu! I wish I knew how the affair of yesterday ended. Oscar was to breakfast at the Rocher de Cancale and spend the evening with a marquise--" "Don't trouble yourself! Sooner or later you'll find out about your swan," said her husband. "Do you really believe in that marquise? Pooh! A young man who has senses and a taste for extravagance like Oscar can find such ladies as that on every bush--if he pays for them. Some fine morning you'll find yourself with a load of debt on your back." "You are always trying to put me in despair!" cried Madame Clapart. "You complained that my son lived on your salary, and never has he cost you a penny. For two years you haven't had the slightest cause of complaint against him; here he is second clerk, his uncle and Monsieur Moreau pay all expenses, and he earns, himself, a salary of eight hundred francs. If we have bread to eat in our old age we may owe it all to that dear boy. You are really too unjust--" "You call my foresight unjust, do you?" replied the invalid, crossly. Just then the bell rang loudly. Madame Clapart ran to open the door, and remained in the outer room with Moreau, who had come to soften the blow which Oscar's new folly would deal to the heart of his poor mother. "What! he gambled with the money of the office?" she cried, bursting into tears. "Didn't I tell you so, hey?" said Clapart, appearing like a spectre at the door of the salon whither his curiosity had brought him. "Oh! what shall we do with him?" said Madame Clapart, whose grief made her impervious to Clapart's taunt. "If he bore my name," replied Moreau, "I should wait composedly till he draws for the conscription, and if he gets a fatal number I should not provide him with a substitute. This is the second time your son has committed a folly out of sheer vanity. Well, vanity may inspire fine deeds in war and may advance him in the career of a soldier. Besides, six years of military service will put some lead into his head; and as he has only his last legal examination to pass, it won't be much ill-luck for him if he doesn't become a lawyer till he is twenty-six; that is, if he wants to continue in the law after paying, as they say, his tax of blood. By that time, at any rate, he will have been severely punished, he will have learned experience, and contracted habits of subordination. Before making his probation at the bar he will have gone through his probations in life." "If that is your decision for a son," said Madame Clapart, "I see that the heart of a father is not like that of a mother. My poor Oscar a common soldier!--" "Would you rather he flung himself headforemost into the Seine after committing a dishonorable action? He cannot now become a solicitor; do you think him steady and wise enough to be a barrister? No. While his reason is maturing, what will he become? A dissipated fellow. The discipline of the army will, at least, preserve him from that." "Could he not go into some other office? His uncle Cardot has promised to pay for his substitute; Oscar is to dedicate his graduating thesis to him." At this moment carriage-wheels were heard, and a hackney-coach containing Oscar and all his worldly belongings stopped before the door. The luckless young man came up at once. "Ah! here you are, Monsieur Joli-Coeur!" cried Clapart. Oscar kissed his mother, and held out to Moreau a hand which the latter refused to take. To this rebuff Oscar replied by a reproachful look, the boldness of which he had never shown before. Then he turned on Clapart. "Listen to me, monsieur," said the youth, transformed into a man. "You worry my poor mother devilishly, and that's your right, for she is, unfortunately, your wife. But as for me, it is another thing. I shall be of age in a few months; and you have no rights over me even as a minor. I have never asked anything of you. Thanks to Monsieur Moreau, I have never cost you one penny, and I owe you no gratitude. Therefore, I say, let me alone!" Clapart, hearing this apostrophe, slunk back to his sofa in the chimney corner. The reasoning and the inward fury of the young man, who had just received a lecture from his friend Godeschal, silenced the imbecile mind of the sick man. "A momentary temptation, such as you yourself would have yielded to at my age," said Oscar to Moreau, "has made me commit a fault which Desroches thinks serious, though it is only a peccadillo. I am more provoked with myself for taking Florentine of the Gaiete for a marquise than I am for losing fifteen hundred francs after a little debauch in which everybody, even Godeschal, was half-seas over. This time, at any rate, I've hurt no one by myself. I'm cured of such things forever. If you are willing to help me, Monsieur Moreau, I swear to you that the six years I must still stay a clerk before I can get a practice shall be spent without--" "Stop there!" said Moreau. "I have three children, and I can make no promises." "Never mind, never mind," said Madame Clapart to her son, casting a reproachful glance at Moreau. "Your uncle Cardot--" "I have no longer an uncle Cardot," replied Oscar, who related the scene at the rue de Vendome. Madame Clapart, feeling her legs give way under the weight of her body, staggered to a chair in the dining-room, where she fell as if struck by lightning. "All the miseries together!" she said, as she fainted. Moreau took the poor mother in his arms, and carried her to the bed in her chamber. Oscar remained motionless, as if crushed. "There is nothing left for you," said Moreau, coming back to him, "but to make yourself a soldier. That idiot of a Clapart looks to me as though he couldn't live three months, and then your mother will be without a penny. Ought I not, therefore, to reserve for her the little money I am able to give? It was impossible to tell you this before her. As a soldier, you'll eat plain bread and reflect on life such as it is to those who are born into it without fortune." "I may get a lucky number," said Oscar. "Suppose you do, what then? Your mother has well fulfilled her duty towards you. She gave you an education; she placed you on the right road, and secured you a career. You have left it. Now, what can you do? Without money, nothing; as you know by this time. You are not a man who can begin a new career by taking off your coat and going to work in your shirt-sleeves with the tools of an artisan. Besides, your mother loves you, and she would die to see you come to that." Oscar sat down and no longer restrained his tears, which flowed copiously. At last he understood this language, so completely unintelligible to him ever since his first fault. "Men without means ought to be perfect," added Moreau, not suspecting the profundity of that cruel sentence. "My fate will soon be decided," said Oscar. "I draw my number the day after to-morrow. Between now and then I will decide upon my future." Moreau, deeply distressed in spite of his stern bearing, left the household in the rue de la Cerisaie to its despair. Three days later Oscar drew the number twenty-seven. In the interests of the poor lad the former steward of Presles had the courage to go to the Comte de Serizy and ask for his influence to get Oscar into the cavalry. It happened that the count's son, having left the Ecole Polytechnique rather low in his class, was appointed, as a favor, sub-lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry commanded by the Duc de Maufrigneuse. Oscar had, therefore, in his great misfortune, the small luck of being, at the Comte de Serizy's instigation, drafted into that noble regiment, with the promise of promotion to quartermaster within a year. Chance had thus placed the ex-clerk under the command of the son of the Comte de Serizy. Madame Clapart, after languishing for some days, so keenly was she affected by these catastrophes, became a victim to the remorse which seizes upon many a mother whose conduct has been frail in her youth, and who, in her old age, turns to repentance. She now considered herself under a curse. She attributed the sorrows of her second marriage and the misfortunes of her son to a just retribution by which God was compelling her to expiate the errors and pleasures of her youth. This opinion soon became a certainty in her mind. The poor woman went, for the first time in forty years, to confess herself to the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul's, who led her into the practice of devotion. But so ill-used and loving a soul as that of Madame Clapart's could never be anything but simply pious. The Aspasia of the Directory wanted to expiate her sins in order to draw down the blessing of God on the head of her poor Oscar, and she henceforth vowed herself to works and deeds of the purest piety. She believed she had won the attention of heaven when she saved the life of Monsieur Clapart, who, thanks to her devotion, lived on to torture her; but she chose to see, in the tyranny of that imbecile mind, a trial inflicted by the hand of one who loveth while he chasteneth. Oscar, meantime, behaved so well that in 1830 he was first sergeant of the company of the Vicomte de Serizy, which gave him the rank of sub-lieutenant of the line. Oscar Husson was by that time twenty-five years old. As the Royal Guard, to which his regiment was attached, was always in garrison in Paris, or within a circumference of thirty miles around the capital, he came to see his mother from time to time, and tell her his griefs; for he had the sense to see that he could never become an officer as matters then were. At that time the cavalry grades were all being taken up by the younger sons of noble families, and men without the article to their names found promotion difficult. Oscar's sole ambition was to leave the Guards and be appointed sub-lieutenant in a regiment of the cavalry of the line. In the month of February, 1830, Madame Clapart obtained this promotion for her son through the influence of Madame la Dauphine, granted to the Abbe Gaudron, now rector of Saint-Pauls. Although Oscar outwardly professed to be devoted to the Bourbons, in the depths of his heart he was a liberal. Therefore, in the struggle of 1830, he went over to the side of the people. This desertion, which had an importance due to the crisis in which it took place, brought him before the eyes of the public. During the excitement of triumph in the month of August he was promoted lieutenant, received the cross of the Legion of honor, and was attached as aide-de-camp to La Fayette, who gave him the rank of captain in 1832. When the amateur of the best of all possible republics was removed from the command of the National guard, Oscar Husson, whose devotion to the new dynasty amounted to fanaticism, was appointed major of a regiment sent to Africa at the time of the first expedition undertaken by the Prince-royal. The Vicomte de Serizy chanced to be the lieutenant-colonel of this regiment. At the affair of the Makta, where the field had to be abandoned to the Arabs, Monsieur de Serizy was left wounded under a dead horse. Oscar, discovering this, called out to the squadron: "Messieurs, it is going to death, but we cannot abandon our colonel." He dashed upon the enemy, and his electrified soldiers followed him. The Arabs, in their first astonishment at this furious and unlooked-for return, allowed Oscar to seize the viscount, whom he flung across his horse, and carried off at full gallop,--receiving, as he did so, two slashes from yataghans on his left arm. Oscar's conduct on this occasion was rewarded with the officer's cross of the Legion of honor, and by his promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He took the most affectionate care of the Vicomte de Serizy, whose mother came to meet him on the arrival of the regiment at Toulon, where, as we know, the young man died of his wounds. The Comtesse de Serizy had not separated her son from the man who had shown him such devotion. Oscar himself was so seriously wounded that the surgeons whom the countess had brought with her from Paris thought best to amputate his left arm. Thus the Comte de Serizy was led not only to forgive Oscar for his painful remarks on the journey to Presles, but to feel himself his debtor on behalf

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you shall being me luck! See, here are my last hundred francs." And the "marquise" took out from her purse, the rings of which were adorned with diamonds, five gold pieces. Oscar pulled out his hundred in silver five-franc pieces, much ashamed at having to mingle such ignoble coins with gold. In ten throws the actress lost the two hundred francs. "Oh! how stupid!" she cried. "I'm banker now. But we'll play together still, won't we?" Fanny Beaupre rose to take her place as banker, and Oscar, finding himself observed by the whole table, dared not retire on the ground that he had no money. Speech failed him, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. "Lend me five hundred francs," said the actress to the danseuse. Florentine brought the money, which she obtained from Georges, who had just passed eight times at ecarte. "Nathan has won twelve hundred francs," said the actress to Oscar. "Bankers always win; we won't let them fool us, will we?" she whispered in his ear. Persons of nerve, imagination, and dash will understand how it was that poor Oscar opened his pocket-book and took out the note of five hundred francs which Desroches had given him. He looked at Nathan, the distinguished author, who now began, with Florine, to play a heavy game against the bank. "Come, my little man, take 'em up," cried Fanny Beaupre, signing to Oscar to rake in the two hundred francs which Nathan and Florine had punted. The actress did not spare taunts or jests on those who lost. She enlivened the game with jokes which Oscar thought singular; but reflection was stifled by joy; for the first two throws produced a gain of two thousand francs. Oscar then thought of feigning illness and making his escape, leaving his partner behind him; but "honor" kept him there. Three more turns and the gains were lost. Oscar felt a cold sweat running down his back, and he was sobered completely. The next two throws carried off the thousand francs of their mutual stake. Oscar was consumed with thirst, and drank three glasses of iced punch one after the other. The actress now led him into the bed-chamber, where the rest of the company were playing, talking frivolities with an easy air. But by this time the sense of his wrong-doing overcame him; the figure of Desroches appeared to him like a vision. He turned aside to a dark corner and sat down, putting his handkerchief to his eyes, and wept. Florentine noticed the attitude of true grief, which, because it is sincere, is certain to strike the eye of one who acts. She ran to him, took the handkerchief from his hand, and saw his tears; then she led him into a boudoir alone. "What is it, my child?" she said. At the tone and accent of that voice Oscar recognized a motherly kindness which is often found in women of her kind, and he answered openly:-- "I have lost five hundred francs which my employer gave me to obtain a document to-morrow morning; there's nothing for me but to fling myself into the river; I am dishonored." "How silly you are!" she said. "Stay where you are; I'll get you a thousand francs and you can win back what you've lost; but don't risk more than five hundred, so that you may be sure of your master's money. Georges plays a fine game at ecarte; bet on him." Oscar, frightened by his position, accepted the offer of the mistress of the house. "Ah!" he thought, "it is only women of rank who are capable of such kindness. Beautiful, noble, rich! how lucky Georges is!" He received the thousand francs from Florentine and returned to bet on his hoaxer. Georges had just passed for the fourth time when Oscar sat down beside him. The other players saw with satisfaction the arrival of a new better; for all, with the instinct of gamblers, took the side of Giroudeau, the old officer of the Empire. "Messieurs," said Georges, "you'll be punished for deserting me; I feel in the vein. Come, Oscar, we'll make an end of them!" Georges and his partner lost five games running. After losing the thousand francs Oscar was seized with the fury of play and insisted on taking the cards himself. By the result of a chance not at all uncommon with those who play for the first time, he won. But Georges bewildered him with advice; told him when to throw the cards, and even snatched them from his hand; so that this conflict of wills and intuitions injured his vein. By three o'clock in the morning, after various changes of fortune, and still drinking punch, Oscar came down to his last hundred francs. He rose with a heavy head, completely stupefied, took a few steps forward, and fell upon a sofa in the boudoir, his eyes closing in a leaden sleep. "Mariette," said Fanny Beaupre to Godeschal's sister, who had come in about two o'clock, "do you dine here to-morrow? Camusot and Pere Cardot are coming, and we'll have some fun." "What!" cried Florentine, "and my old fellow never told me!" "He said he'd tell you to-morrow morning," remarked Fanny Beaupre. "The devil take him and his orgies!" exclaimed Florentine. "He and Camusot are worse than magistrates or stage-managers. But we have very good dinners here, Mariette," she continued. "Cardot always orders them from Chevet's; bring your Duc de Maufrigneuse and we'll make them dance like Tritons." Hearing the names of Cardot and Camusot, Oscar made an effort to throw off his sleep; but he could only mutter a few words which were not understood, and then he fell back upon the silken cushions. "You'll have to keep him here all night," said Fanny Beaupre, laughing, to Florentine. "Oh! poor boy! he is drunk with punch and despair both. It is the second clerk in your brother's office," she said to Mariette. "He has lost the money his master gave him for some legal affair. He wanted to drown himself; so I lent him a thousand francs, but those brigands Finot and Giroudeau won them from him. Poor innocent!" "But we ought to wake him," said Mariette. "My brother won't make light of it, nor his master either." "Oh, wake him if you can, and carry him off with you!" said Florentine, returning to the salon to receive the adieux of some departing guests. Presently those who remained began what was called "character dancing," and by the time it was broad daylight, Florentine, tired out, went to bed, oblivious to Oscar, who was still in the boudoir sound asleep. CHAPTER X. ANOTHER CATASTROPHE About eleven the next morning, a terrible sound awoke the unfortunate clerk. Recognizing the voice of his uncle Cardot, he thought it wise to feign sleep, and so turned his face into the yellow velvet cushions on which he had passed the night. "Really, my little Florentine," said the old gentleman, "this is neither right nor sensible; you danced last evening in 'Les Ruines,' and you have spent the night in an orgy. That's deliberately going to work to lose your freshness. Besides which, it was ungrateful to inaugurate this beautiful apartment without even letting me know. Who knows what has been going on here?" "Old monster!" cried Florentine, "haven't you a key that lets you in at all hours? My ball lasted till five in the morning, and you have the cruelty to come and wake me up at eleven!" "Half-past eleven, Titine," observed Cardot, humbly. "I came out early to order a dinner fit for an archbishop at Chevet's. Just see how the carpets are stained! What sort of people did you have here?" "You needn't complain, for Fanny Beaupre told me you were coming to dinner with Camusot, and to please you I've invited Tullia, du Bruel, Mariette, the Duc de Maufrigneuse, Florine, and Nathan. So you'll have the four loveliest creatures ever seen behind the foot-lights; we'll dance you a 'pas de Zephire.'" "It is enough to kill you to lead such a life!" cried old Cardot; "and look at the broken glasses! What pillage! The antechamber actually makes me shudder--" At this instant the wrathful old gentleman stopped short as if magnetized, like a bird which a snake is charming. He saw the outline of a form in a black coat through the door of the boudoir. "Ah, Mademoiselle Cabirolle!" he said at last. "Well, what?" she asked. The eyes of the danseuse followed those of the little old man; and when she recognized the presence of the clerk she went off into such fits of laughter that not only was the old gentleman nonplussed, but Oscar was compelled to appear; for Florentine took him by the arm, still pealing with laughter at the conscience-stricken faces of the uncle and nephew. "You here, nephew?" "Nephew! so he's your nephew?" cried Florentine, with another burst of laughter. "You never told me about him. Why didn't Mariette carry you off?" she said to Oscar, who stood there petrified. "What can he do now, poor boy?" "Whatever he pleases!" said Cardot, sharply, marching to the door as if to go away. "One moment, papa Cardot. You will be so good as to get your nephew out of a scrape into which I led him; for he played the money of his master and lost it, and I lend him a thousand francs to win it back, and he lost that too." "Miserable boy! you lost fifteen hundred francs at play at your age?" "Oh, uncle, uncle!" cried poor Oscar, plunged by these words into all the horrors of his position, and falling on his knees before his uncle, with clasped hands, "It is twelve o'clock! I am lost, dishonored! Monsieur Desroches will have no pity! He gave me the money for an important affair, in which his pride was concerned. I was to get a paper at the Palais in the case of Vandernesse versus Vandernesse! What will become of me? Oh, save me for the sake of my father and aunt! Come with me to Monsieur Desroches, and explain it to him; make some excuse,--anything!" These sentences were jerked out through sobs and tears that might have moved the sphinx of Luxor. "Old skinflint!" said the danseuse, who was crying, "will you let your own nephew be dishonored,--the son of the man to whom you owe your fortune?--for his name is Oscar Husson. Save him, or Titine will deny you forever!" "But how did he come here?" asked Cardot. "Don't you see that the reason he forgot to go for those papers was because he was drunk and overslept himself. Georges and his cousin Frederic took all the clerks in his office to a feast at the Rocher de Cancale." Pere Cardot looked at Florentine and hesitated. "Come, come," she said, "you old monkey, shouldn't I have hid him better if there had been anything else in it?" "There, take your five hundred francs, you scamp!" said Cardot to his nephew, "and remember, that's the last penny you'll ever get from me. Go and make it up with your master if you can. I'll return the thousand francs which you borrowed of mademoiselle; but I'll never hear another word about you." Oscar disappeared, not wishing to hear more. Once in the street, however, he knew not where to go. Chance which destroys men and chance which saves them were both making equal efforts for and against Oscar during that fateful morning. But he was doomed to fall before a master who forgave no failure in any affair he had once undertaken. When Mariette reached home that night, she felt alarmed at what might happen to the youth in whom her brother took interest and she wrote a hasty note to Godeschal, telling him what had happened to Oscar and inclosing a bank bill for five hundred francs to repair his loss. The kind-hearted creature went to sleep after charging her maid to carry the little note to Desroches' office before seven o'clock in the morning. Godeschal, on his side, getting up at six and finding that Oscar had not returned, guessed what had happened. He took the five hundred francs from his own little hoard and rushed to the Palais, where he obtained a copy of the judgment and returned in time to lay it before Desroches by eight o'clock. Meantime Desroches, who always rose at four, was in his office by seven. Mariette's maid, not finding the brother of her mistress in his bedroom, came down to the office and there met Desroches, to whom she very naturally offered the note. "Is it about business?" he said; "I am Monsieur Desroches." "You can see, monsieur," replied the maid. Desroches opened the letter and read it. Finding the five-hundred-franc note, he went into his private office furiously angry with his second clerk. About half-past seven he heard Godeschal dictating to the second head-clerk a copy of the document in question, and a few moments later the good fellow entered his master's office with an air of triumph in his heart. "Did Oscar Husson fetch the paper this morning from Simon?" inquired Desroches. "Yes, monsieur." "Who gave him the money?" "Why, you did, Saturday," replied Godeschal. "Then it rains five-hundred-franc notes," cried Desroches. "Look here, Godeschal, you are a fine fellow, but that little Husson does not deserve such generosity. I hate idiots, but I hate still more the men who will go wrong in spite of the fatherly care which watches over them." He gave Godeschal Mariette's letter and the five-hundred-franc note which she had sent. "You must excuse my having opened it," he said, "but your sister's maid told me it was on business. Dismiss Husson." "Poor unhappy boy! what grief he has caused me!" said Godeschal, "that tall ne'er-do-well of a Georges Marest is his evil genius; he ought to flee him like the plague; if not, he'll bring him to some third disgrace." "What do you mean by that?" asked Desroches. Godeschal then related briefly the affair of the journey to Presles. "Ah! yes," said the lawyer, "I remember Joseph Bridau told me that story about the time it happened. It is to that meeting that we owe the favor Monsieur de Serizy has since shown in the matter of Joseph's brother, Philippe Bridau." At this moment Moreau, to whom the case of the Vandernesse estate was of much importance, entered the office. The marquis wished to sell the land in parcels and the count was opposed to such a sale. The land-agent received therefore the first fire of Desroches' wrath against his ex-second clerk and all the threatening prophecies which he fulminated against him. The result was that this most sincere friend and protector of the unhappy youth came to the conclusion that his vanity was incorrigible. "Make him a barrister," said Desroches. "He has only his last examination to pass. In that line, his defects might prove virtues, for self-love and vanity give tongues to half the attorneys." At this time Clapart, who was ill, was being nursed by his wife,--a painful task, a duty without reward. The sick man tormented the poor creature, who was now doomed to learn what venomous and spiteful teasing a half-imbecile man, whom poverty had rendered craftily savage, could be capable of in the weary tete-a-tete of each endless day. Delighted to turn a sharpened arrow in the sensitive heart of the mother, he had, in a measure, studied the fears that Oscar's behavior and defects inspired in the poor woman. When a mother receives from her child a shock like that of the affair at Presles, she continues in a state of constant fear, and, by the manner in which his wife boasted of Oscar every time he obtained the slightest success, Clapart knew the extent of her secret uneasiness, and he took pains to rouse it on every occasion. "Well, Madame," Clapart would say, "Oscar is doing better than I even hoped. That journey to Presles was only a heedlessness of youth. Where can you find young lads who do not commit just such faults? Poor child! he bears his privations heroically! If his father had lived, he would never have had any. God grant he may know how to control his passions!" etc., etc. While all these catastrophes were happening in the rue de Vendome and the rue de Bethisy, Clapart, sitting in the chimney corner, wrapped in an old dressing-gown, watched his wife, who was engaged over the fire in their bedroom in simultaneously making the family broth, Clapart's "tisane," and her own breakfast. "Mon Dieu! I wish I knew how the affair of yesterday ended. Oscar was to breakfast at the Rocher de Cancale and spend the evening with a marquise--" "Don't trouble yourself! Sooner or later you'll find out about your swan," said her husband. "Do you really believe in that marquise? Pooh! A young man who has senses and a taste for extravagance like Oscar can find such ladies as that on every bush--if he pays for them. Some fine morning you'll find yourself with a load of debt on your back." "You are always trying to put me in despair!" cried Madame Clapart. "You complained that my son lived on your salary, and never has he cost you a penny. For two years you haven't had the slightest cause of complaint against him; here he is second clerk, his uncle and Monsieur Moreau pay all expenses, and he earns, himself, a salary of eight hundred francs. If we have bread to eat in our old age we may owe it all to that dear boy. You are really too unjust--" "You call my foresight unjust, do you?" replied the invalid, crossly. Just then the bell rang loudly. Madame Clapart ran to open the door, and remained in the outer room with Moreau, who had come to soften the blow which Oscar's new folly would deal to the heart of his poor mother. "What! he gambled with the money of the office?" she cried, bursting into tears. "Didn't I tell you so, hey?" said Clapart, appearing like a spectre at the door of the salon whither his curiosity had brought him. "Oh! what shall we do with him?" said Madame Clapart, whose grief made her impervious to Clapart's taunt. "If he bore my name," replied Moreau, "I should wait composedly till he draws for the conscription, and if he gets a fatal number I should not provide him with a substitute. This is the second time your son has committed a folly out of sheer vanity. Well, vanity may inspire fine deeds in war and may advance him in the career of a soldier. Besides, six years of military service will put some lead into his head; and as he has only his last legal examination to pass, it won't be much ill-luck for him if he doesn't become a lawyer till he is twenty-six; that is, if he wants to continue in the law after paying, as they say, his tax of blood. By that time, at any rate, he will have been severely punished, he will have learned experience, and contracted habits of subordination. Before making his probation at the bar he will have gone through his probations in life." "If that is your decision for a son," said Madame Clapart, "I see that the heart of a father is not like that of a mother. My poor Oscar a common soldier!--" "Would you rather he flung himself headforemost into the Seine after committing a dishonorable action? He cannot now become a solicitor; do you think him steady and wise enough to be a barrister? No. While his reason is maturing, what will he become? A dissipated fellow. The discipline of the army will, at least, preserve him from that." "Could he not go into some other office? His uncle Cardot has promised to pay for his substitute; Oscar is to dedicate his graduating thesis to him." At this moment carriage-wheels were heard, and a hackney-coach containing Oscar and all his worldly belongings stopped before the door. The luckless young man came up at once. "Ah! here you are, Monsieur Joli-Coeur!" cried Clapart. Oscar kissed his mother, and held out to Moreau a hand which the latter refused to take. To this rebuff Oscar replied by a reproachful look, the boldness of which he had never shown before. Then he turned on Clapart. "Listen to me, monsieur," said the youth, transformed into a man. "You worry my poor mother devilishly, and that's your right, for she is, unfortunately, your wife. But as for me, it is another thing. I shall be of age in a few months; and you have no rights over me even as a minor. I have never asked anything of you. Thanks to Monsieur Moreau, I have never cost you one penny, and I owe you no gratitude. Therefore, I say, let me alone!" Clapart, hearing this apostrophe, slunk back to his sofa in the chimney corner. The reasoning and the inward fury of the young man, who had just received a lecture from his friend Godeschal, silenced the imbecile mind of the sick man. "A momentary temptation, such as you yourself would have yielded to at my age," said Oscar to Moreau, "has made me commit a fault which Desroches thinks serious, though it is only a peccadillo. I am more provoked with myself for taking Florentine of the Gaiete for a marquise than I am for losing fifteen hundred francs after a little debauch in which everybody, even Godeschal, was half-seas over. This time, at any rate, I've hurt no one by myself. I'm cured of such things forever. If you are willing to help me, Monsieur Moreau, I swear to you that the six years I must still stay a clerk before I can get a practice shall be spent without--" "Stop there!" said Moreau. "I have three children, and I can make no promises." "Never mind, never mind," said Madame Clapart to her son, casting a reproachful glance at Moreau. "Your uncle Cardot--" "I have no longer an uncle Cardot," replied Oscar, who related the scene at the rue de Vendome. Madame Clapart, feeling her legs give way under the weight of her body, staggered to a chair in the dining-room, where she fell as if struck by lightning. "All the miseries together!" she said, as she fainted. Moreau took the poor mother in his arms, and carried her to the bed in her chamber. Oscar remained motionless, as if crushed. "There is nothing left for you," said Moreau, coming back to him, "but to make yourself a soldier. That idiot of a Clapart looks to me as though he couldn't live three months, and then your mother will be without a penny. Ought I not, therefore, to reserve for her the little money I am able to give? It was impossible to tell you this before her. As a soldier, you'll eat plain bread and reflect on life such as it is to those who are born into it without fortune." "I may get a lucky number," said Oscar. "Suppose you do, what then? Your mother has well fulfilled her duty towards you. She gave you an education; she placed you on the right road, and secured you a career. You have left it. Now, what can you do? Without money, nothing; as you know by this time. You are not a man who can begin a new career by taking off your coat and going to work in your shirt-sleeves with the tools of an artisan. Besides, your mother loves you, and she would die to see you come to that." Oscar sat down and no longer restrained his tears, which flowed copiously. At last he understood this language, so completely unintelligible to him ever since his first fault. "Men without means ought to be perfect," added Moreau, not suspecting the profundity of that cruel sentence. "My fate will soon be decided," said Oscar. "I draw my number the day after to-morrow. Between now and then I will decide upon my future." Moreau, deeply distressed in spite of his stern bearing, left the household in the rue de la Cerisaie to its despair. Three days later Oscar drew the number twenty-seven. In the interests of the poor lad the former steward of Presles had the courage to go to the Comte de Serizy and ask for his influence to get Oscar into the cavalry. It happened that the count's son, having left the Ecole Polytechnique rather low in his class, was appointed, as a favor, sub-lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry commanded by the Duc de Maufrigneuse. Oscar had, therefore, in his great misfortune, the small luck of being, at the Comte de Serizy's instigation, drafted into that noble regiment, with the promise of promotion to quartermaster within a year. Chance had thus placed the ex-clerk under the command of the son of the Comte de Serizy. Madame Clapart, after languishing for some days, so keenly was she affected by these catastrophes, became a victim to the remorse which seizes upon many a mother whose conduct has been frail in her youth, and who, in her old age, turns to repentance. She now considered herself under a curse. She attributed the sorrows of her second marriage and the misfortunes of her son to a just retribution by which God was compelling her to expiate the errors and pleasures of her youth. This opinion soon became a certainty in her mind. The poor woman went, for the first time in forty years, to confess herself to the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul's, who led her into the practice of devotion. But so ill-used and loving a soul as that of Madame Clapart's could never be anything but simply pious. The Aspasia of the Directory wanted to expiate her sins in order to draw down the blessing of God on the head of her poor Oscar, and she henceforth vowed herself to works and deeds of the purest piety. She believed she had won the attention of heaven when she saved the life of Monsieur Clapart, who, thanks to her devotion, lived on to torture her; but she chose to see, in the tyranny of that imbecile mind, a trial inflicted by the hand of one who loveth while he chasteneth. Oscar, meantime, behaved so well that in 1830 he was first sergeant of the company of the Vicomte de Serizy, which gave him the rank of sub-lieutenant of the line. Oscar Husson was by that time twenty-five years old. As the Royal Guard, to which his regiment was attached, was always in garrison in Paris, or within a circumference of thirty miles around the capital, he came to see his mother from time to time, and tell her his griefs; for he had the sense to see that he could never become an officer as matters then were. At that time the cavalry grades were all being taken up by the younger sons of noble families, and men without the article to their names found promotion difficult. Oscar's sole ambition was to leave the Guards and be appointed sub-lieutenant in a regiment of the cavalry of the line. In the month of February, 1830, Madame Clapart obtained this promotion for her son through the influence of Madame la Dauphine, granted to the Abbe Gaudron, now rector of Saint-Pauls. Although Oscar outwardly professed to be devoted to the Bourbons, in the depths of his heart he was a liberal. Therefore, in the struggle of 1830, he went over to the side of the people. This desertion, which had an importance due to the crisis in which it took place, brought him before the eyes of the public. During the excitement of triumph in the month of August he was promoted lieutenant, received the cross of the Legion of honor, and was attached as aide-de-camp to La Fayette, who gave him the rank of captain in 1832. When the amateur of the best of all possible republics was removed from the command of the National guard, Oscar Husson, whose devotion to the new dynasty amounted to fanaticism, was appointed major of a regiment sent to Africa at the time of the first expedition undertaken by the Prince-royal. The Vicomte de Serizy chanced to be the lieutenant-colonel of this regiment. At the affair of the Makta, where the field had to be abandoned to the Arabs, Monsieur de Serizy was left wounded under a dead horse. Oscar, discovering this, called out to the squadron: "Messieurs, it is going to death, but we cannot abandon our colonel." He dashed upon the enemy, and his electrified soldiers followed him. The Arabs, in their first astonishment at this furious and unlooked-for return, allowed Oscar to seize the viscount, whom he flung across his horse, and carried off at full gallop,--receiving, as he did so, two slashes from yataghans on his left arm. Oscar's conduct on this occasion was rewarded with the officer's cross of the Legion of honor, and by his promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He took the most affectionate care of the Vicomte de Serizy, whose mother came to meet him on the arrival of the regiment at Toulon, where, as we know, the young man died of his wounds. The Comtesse de Serizy had not separated her son from the man who had shown him such devotion. Oscar himself was so seriously wounded that the surgeons whom the countess had brought with her from Paris thought best to amputate his left arm. Thus the Comte de Serizy was led not only to forgive Oscar for his painful remarks on the journey to Presles, but to feel himself his debtor on behalf

game

How many times the word 'game' appears in the text?

you shall being me luck! See, here are my last hundred francs." And the "marquise" took out from her purse, the rings of which were adorned with diamonds, five gold pieces. Oscar pulled out his hundred in silver five-franc pieces, much ashamed at having to mingle such ignoble coins with gold. In ten throws the actress lost the two hundred francs. "Oh! how stupid!" she cried. "I'm banker now. But we'll play together still, won't we?" Fanny Beaupre rose to take her place as banker, and Oscar, finding himself observed by the whole table, dared not retire on the ground that he had no money. Speech failed him, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. "Lend me five hundred francs," said the actress to the danseuse. Florentine brought the money, which she obtained from Georges, who had just passed eight times at ecarte. "Nathan has won twelve hundred francs," said the actress to Oscar. "Bankers always win; we won't let them fool us, will we?" she whispered in his ear. Persons of nerve, imagination, and dash will understand how it was that poor Oscar opened his pocket-book and took out the note of five hundred francs which Desroches had given him. He looked at Nathan, the distinguished author, who now began, with Florine, to play a heavy game against the bank. "Come, my little man, take 'em up," cried Fanny Beaupre, signing to Oscar to rake in the two hundred francs which Nathan and Florine had punted. The actress did not spare taunts or jests on those who lost. She enlivened the game with jokes which Oscar thought singular; but reflection was stifled by joy; for the first two throws produced a gain of two thousand francs. Oscar then thought of feigning illness and making his escape, leaving his partner behind him; but "honor" kept him there. Three more turns and the gains were lost. Oscar felt a cold sweat running down his back, and he was sobered completely. The next two throws carried off the thousand francs of their mutual stake. Oscar was consumed with thirst, and drank three glasses of iced punch one after the other. The actress now led him into the bed-chamber, where the rest of the company were playing, talking frivolities with an easy air. But by this time the sense of his wrong-doing overcame him; the figure of Desroches appeared to him like a vision. He turned aside to a dark corner and sat down, putting his handkerchief to his eyes, and wept. Florentine noticed the attitude of true grief, which, because it is sincere, is certain to strike the eye of one who acts. She ran to him, took the handkerchief from his hand, and saw his tears; then she led him into a boudoir alone. "What is it, my child?" she said. At the tone and accent of that voice Oscar recognized a motherly kindness which is often found in women of her kind, and he answered openly:-- "I have lost five hundred francs which my employer gave me to obtain a document to-morrow morning; there's nothing for me but to fling myself into the river; I am dishonored." "How silly you are!" she said. "Stay where you are; I'll get you a thousand francs and you can win back what you've lost; but don't risk more than five hundred, so that you may be sure of your master's money. Georges plays a fine game at ecarte; bet on him." Oscar, frightened by his position, accepted the offer of the mistress of the house. "Ah!" he thought, "it is only women of rank who are capable of such kindness. Beautiful, noble, rich! how lucky Georges is!" He received the thousand francs from Florentine and returned to bet on his hoaxer. Georges had just passed for the fourth time when Oscar sat down beside him. The other players saw with satisfaction the arrival of a new better; for all, with the instinct of gamblers, took the side of Giroudeau, the old officer of the Empire. "Messieurs," said Georges, "you'll be punished for deserting me; I feel in the vein. Come, Oscar, we'll make an end of them!" Georges and his partner lost five games running. After losing the thousand francs Oscar was seized with the fury of play and insisted on taking the cards himself. By the result of a chance not at all uncommon with those who play for the first time, he won. But Georges bewildered him with advice; told him when to throw the cards, and even snatched them from his hand; so that this conflict of wills and intuitions injured his vein. By three o'clock in the morning, after various changes of fortune, and still drinking punch, Oscar came down to his last hundred francs. He rose with a heavy head, completely stupefied, took a few steps forward, and fell upon a sofa in the boudoir, his eyes closing in a leaden sleep. "Mariette," said Fanny Beaupre to Godeschal's sister, who had come in about two o'clock, "do you dine here to-morrow? Camusot and Pere Cardot are coming, and we'll have some fun." "What!" cried Florentine, "and my old fellow never told me!" "He said he'd tell you to-morrow morning," remarked Fanny Beaupre. "The devil take him and his orgies!" exclaimed Florentine. "He and Camusot are worse than magistrates or stage-managers. But we have very good dinners here, Mariette," she continued. "Cardot always orders them from Chevet's; bring your Duc de Maufrigneuse and we'll make them dance like Tritons." Hearing the names of Cardot and Camusot, Oscar made an effort to throw off his sleep; but he could only mutter a few words which were not understood, and then he fell back upon the silken cushions. "You'll have to keep him here all night," said Fanny Beaupre, laughing, to Florentine. "Oh! poor boy! he is drunk with punch and despair both. It is the second clerk in your brother's office," she said to Mariette. "He has lost the money his master gave him for some legal affair. He wanted to drown himself; so I lent him a thousand francs, but those brigands Finot and Giroudeau won them from him. Poor innocent!" "But we ought to wake him," said Mariette. "My brother won't make light of it, nor his master either." "Oh, wake him if you can, and carry him off with you!" said Florentine, returning to the salon to receive the adieux of some departing guests. Presently those who remained began what was called "character dancing," and by the time it was broad daylight, Florentine, tired out, went to bed, oblivious to Oscar, who was still in the boudoir sound asleep. CHAPTER X. ANOTHER CATASTROPHE About eleven the next morning, a terrible sound awoke the unfortunate clerk. Recognizing the voice of his uncle Cardot, he thought it wise to feign sleep, and so turned his face into the yellow velvet cushions on which he had passed the night. "Really, my little Florentine," said the old gentleman, "this is neither right nor sensible; you danced last evening in 'Les Ruines,' and you have spent the night in an orgy. That's deliberately going to work to lose your freshness. Besides which, it was ungrateful to inaugurate this beautiful apartment without even letting me know. Who knows what has been going on here?" "Old monster!" cried Florentine, "haven't you a key that lets you in at all hours? My ball lasted till five in the morning, and you have the cruelty to come and wake me up at eleven!" "Half-past eleven, Titine," observed Cardot, humbly. "I came out early to order a dinner fit for an archbishop at Chevet's. Just see how the carpets are stained! What sort of people did you have here?" "You needn't complain, for Fanny Beaupre told me you were coming to dinner with Camusot, and to please you I've invited Tullia, du Bruel, Mariette, the Duc de Maufrigneuse, Florine, and Nathan. So you'll have the four loveliest creatures ever seen behind the foot-lights; we'll dance you a 'pas de Zephire.'" "It is enough to kill you to lead such a life!" cried old Cardot; "and look at the broken glasses! What pillage! The antechamber actually makes me shudder--" At this instant the wrathful old gentleman stopped short as if magnetized, like a bird which a snake is charming. He saw the outline of a form in a black coat through the door of the boudoir. "Ah, Mademoiselle Cabirolle!" he said at last. "Well, what?" she asked. The eyes of the danseuse followed those of the little old man; and when she recognized the presence of the clerk she went off into such fits of laughter that not only was the old gentleman nonplussed, but Oscar was compelled to appear; for Florentine took him by the arm, still pealing with laughter at the conscience-stricken faces of the uncle and nephew. "You here, nephew?" "Nephew! so he's your nephew?" cried Florentine, with another burst of laughter. "You never told me about him. Why didn't Mariette carry you off?" she said to Oscar, who stood there petrified. "What can he do now, poor boy?" "Whatever he pleases!" said Cardot, sharply, marching to the door as if to go away. "One moment, papa Cardot. You will be so good as to get your nephew out of a scrape into which I led him; for he played the money of his master and lost it, and I lend him a thousand francs to win it back, and he lost that too." "Miserable boy! you lost fifteen hundred francs at play at your age?" "Oh, uncle, uncle!" cried poor Oscar, plunged by these words into all the horrors of his position, and falling on his knees before his uncle, with clasped hands, "It is twelve o'clock! I am lost, dishonored! Monsieur Desroches will have no pity! He gave me the money for an important affair, in which his pride was concerned. I was to get a paper at the Palais in the case of Vandernesse versus Vandernesse! What will become of me? Oh, save me for the sake of my father and aunt! Come with me to Monsieur Desroches, and explain it to him; make some excuse,--anything!" These sentences were jerked out through sobs and tears that might have moved the sphinx of Luxor. "Old skinflint!" said the danseuse, who was crying, "will you let your own nephew be dishonored,--the son of the man to whom you owe your fortune?--for his name is Oscar Husson. Save him, or Titine will deny you forever!" "But how did he come here?" asked Cardot. "Don't you see that the reason he forgot to go for those papers was because he was drunk and overslept himself. Georges and his cousin Frederic took all the clerks in his office to a feast at the Rocher de Cancale." Pere Cardot looked at Florentine and hesitated. "Come, come," she said, "you old monkey, shouldn't I have hid him better if there had been anything else in it?" "There, take your five hundred francs, you scamp!" said Cardot to his nephew, "and remember, that's the last penny you'll ever get from me. Go and make it up with your master if you can. I'll return the thousand francs which you borrowed of mademoiselle; but I'll never hear another word about you." Oscar disappeared, not wishing to hear more. Once in the street, however, he knew not where to go. Chance which destroys men and chance which saves them were both making equal efforts for and against Oscar during that fateful morning. But he was doomed to fall before a master who forgave no failure in any affair he had once undertaken. When Mariette reached home that night, she felt alarmed at what might happen to the youth in whom her brother took interest and she wrote a hasty note to Godeschal, telling him what had happened to Oscar and inclosing a bank bill for five hundred francs to repair his loss. The kind-hearted creature went to sleep after charging her maid to carry the little note to Desroches' office before seven o'clock in the morning. Godeschal, on his side, getting up at six and finding that Oscar had not returned, guessed what had happened. He took the five hundred francs from his own little hoard and rushed to the Palais, where he obtained a copy of the judgment and returned in time to lay it before Desroches by eight o'clock. Meantime Desroches, who always rose at four, was in his office by seven. Mariette's maid, not finding the brother of her mistress in his bedroom, came down to the office and there met Desroches, to whom she very naturally offered the note. "Is it about business?" he said; "I am Monsieur Desroches." "You can see, monsieur," replied the maid. Desroches opened the letter and read it. Finding the five-hundred-franc note, he went into his private office furiously angry with his second clerk. About half-past seven he heard Godeschal dictating to the second head-clerk a copy of the document in question, and a few moments later the good fellow entered his master's office with an air of triumph in his heart. "Did Oscar Husson fetch the paper this morning from Simon?" inquired Desroches. "Yes, monsieur." "Who gave him the money?" "Why, you did, Saturday," replied Godeschal. "Then it rains five-hundred-franc notes," cried Desroches. "Look here, Godeschal, you are a fine fellow, but that little Husson does not deserve such generosity. I hate idiots, but I hate still more the men who will go wrong in spite of the fatherly care which watches over them." He gave Godeschal Mariette's letter and the five-hundred-franc note which she had sent. "You must excuse my having opened it," he said, "but your sister's maid told me it was on business. Dismiss Husson." "Poor unhappy boy! what grief he has caused me!" said Godeschal, "that tall ne'er-do-well of a Georges Marest is his evil genius; he ought to flee him like the plague; if not, he'll bring him to some third disgrace." "What do you mean by that?" asked Desroches. Godeschal then related briefly the affair of the journey to Presles. "Ah! yes," said the lawyer, "I remember Joseph Bridau told me that story about the time it happened. It is to that meeting that we owe the favor Monsieur de Serizy has since shown in the matter of Joseph's brother, Philippe Bridau." At this moment Moreau, to whom the case of the Vandernesse estate was of much importance, entered the office. The marquis wished to sell the land in parcels and the count was opposed to such a sale. The land-agent received therefore the first fire of Desroches' wrath against his ex-second clerk and all the threatening prophecies which he fulminated against him. The result was that this most sincere friend and protector of the unhappy youth came to the conclusion that his vanity was incorrigible. "Make him a barrister," said Desroches. "He has only his last examination to pass. In that line, his defects might prove virtues, for self-love and vanity give tongues to half the attorneys." At this time Clapart, who was ill, was being nursed by his wife,--a painful task, a duty without reward. The sick man tormented the poor creature, who was now doomed to learn what venomous and spiteful teasing a half-imbecile man, whom poverty had rendered craftily savage, could be capable of in the weary tete-a-tete of each endless day. Delighted to turn a sharpened arrow in the sensitive heart of the mother, he had, in a measure, studied the fears that Oscar's behavior and defects inspired in the poor woman. When a mother receives from her child a shock like that of the affair at Presles, she continues in a state of constant fear, and, by the manner in which his wife boasted of Oscar every time he obtained the slightest success, Clapart knew the extent of her secret uneasiness, and he took pains to rouse it on every occasion. "Well, Madame," Clapart would say, "Oscar is doing better than I even hoped. That journey to Presles was only a heedlessness of youth. Where can you find young lads who do not commit just such faults? Poor child! he bears his privations heroically! If his father had lived, he would never have had any. God grant he may know how to control his passions!" etc., etc. While all these catastrophes were happening in the rue de Vendome and the rue de Bethisy, Clapart, sitting in the chimney corner, wrapped in an old dressing-gown, watched his wife, who was engaged over the fire in their bedroom in simultaneously making the family broth, Clapart's "tisane," and her own breakfast. "Mon Dieu! I wish I knew how the affair of yesterday ended. Oscar was to breakfast at the Rocher de Cancale and spend the evening with a marquise--" "Don't trouble yourself! Sooner or later you'll find out about your swan," said her husband. "Do you really believe in that marquise? Pooh! A young man who has senses and a taste for extravagance like Oscar can find such ladies as that on every bush--if he pays for them. Some fine morning you'll find yourself with a load of debt on your back." "You are always trying to put me in despair!" cried Madame Clapart. "You complained that my son lived on your salary, and never has he cost you a penny. For two years you haven't had the slightest cause of complaint against him; here he is second clerk, his uncle and Monsieur Moreau pay all expenses, and he earns, himself, a salary of eight hundred francs. If we have bread to eat in our old age we may owe it all to that dear boy. You are really too unjust--" "You call my foresight unjust, do you?" replied the invalid, crossly. Just then the bell rang loudly. Madame Clapart ran to open the door, and remained in the outer room with Moreau, who had come to soften the blow which Oscar's new folly would deal to the heart of his poor mother. "What! he gambled with the money of the office?" she cried, bursting into tears. "Didn't I tell you so, hey?" said Clapart, appearing like a spectre at the door of the salon whither his curiosity had brought him. "Oh! what shall we do with him?" said Madame Clapart, whose grief made her impervious to Clapart's taunt. "If he bore my name," replied Moreau, "I should wait composedly till he draws for the conscription, and if he gets a fatal number I should not provide him with a substitute. This is the second time your son has committed a folly out of sheer vanity. Well, vanity may inspire fine deeds in war and may advance him in the career of a soldier. Besides, six years of military service will put some lead into his head; and as he has only his last legal examination to pass, it won't be much ill-luck for him if he doesn't become a lawyer till he is twenty-six; that is, if he wants to continue in the law after paying, as they say, his tax of blood. By that time, at any rate, he will have been severely punished, he will have learned experience, and contracted habits of subordination. Before making his probation at the bar he will have gone through his probations in life." "If that is your decision for a son," said Madame Clapart, "I see that the heart of a father is not like that of a mother. My poor Oscar a common soldier!--" "Would you rather he flung himself headforemost into the Seine after committing a dishonorable action? He cannot now become a solicitor; do you think him steady and wise enough to be a barrister? No. While his reason is maturing, what will he become? A dissipated fellow. The discipline of the army will, at least, preserve him from that." "Could he not go into some other office? His uncle Cardot has promised to pay for his substitute; Oscar is to dedicate his graduating thesis to him." At this moment carriage-wheels were heard, and a hackney-coach containing Oscar and all his worldly belongings stopped before the door. The luckless young man came up at once. "Ah! here you are, Monsieur Joli-Coeur!" cried Clapart. Oscar kissed his mother, and held out to Moreau a hand which the latter refused to take. To this rebuff Oscar replied by a reproachful look, the boldness of which he had never shown before. Then he turned on Clapart. "Listen to me, monsieur," said the youth, transformed into a man. "You worry my poor mother devilishly, and that's your right, for she is, unfortunately, your wife. But as for me, it is another thing. I shall be of age in a few months; and you have no rights over me even as a minor. I have never asked anything of you. Thanks to Monsieur Moreau, I have never cost you one penny, and I owe you no gratitude. Therefore, I say, let me alone!" Clapart, hearing this apostrophe, slunk back to his sofa in the chimney corner. The reasoning and the inward fury of the young man, who had just received a lecture from his friend Godeschal, silenced the imbecile mind of the sick man. "A momentary temptation, such as you yourself would have yielded to at my age," said Oscar to Moreau, "has made me commit a fault which Desroches thinks serious, though it is only a peccadillo. I am more provoked with myself for taking Florentine of the Gaiete for a marquise than I am for losing fifteen hundred francs after a little debauch in which everybody, even Godeschal, was half-seas over. This time, at any rate, I've hurt no one by myself. I'm cured of such things forever. If you are willing to help me, Monsieur Moreau, I swear to you that the six years I must still stay a clerk before I can get a practice shall be spent without--" "Stop there!" said Moreau. "I have three children, and I can make no promises." "Never mind, never mind," said Madame Clapart to her son, casting a reproachful glance at Moreau. "Your uncle Cardot--" "I have no longer an uncle Cardot," replied Oscar, who related the scene at the rue de Vendome. Madame Clapart, feeling her legs give way under the weight of her body, staggered to a chair in the dining-room, where she fell as if struck by lightning. "All the miseries together!" she said, as she fainted. Moreau took the poor mother in his arms, and carried her to the bed in her chamber. Oscar remained motionless, as if crushed. "There is nothing left for you," said Moreau, coming back to him, "but to make yourself a soldier. That idiot of a Clapart looks to me as though he couldn't live three months, and then your mother will be without a penny. Ought I not, therefore, to reserve for her the little money I am able to give? It was impossible to tell you this before her. As a soldier, you'll eat plain bread and reflect on life such as it is to those who are born into it without fortune." "I may get a lucky number," said Oscar. "Suppose you do, what then? Your mother has well fulfilled her duty towards you. She gave you an education; she placed you on the right road, and secured you a career. You have left it. Now, what can you do? Without money, nothing; as you know by this time. You are not a man who can begin a new career by taking off your coat and going to work in your shirt-sleeves with the tools of an artisan. Besides, your mother loves you, and she would die to see you come to that." Oscar sat down and no longer restrained his tears, which flowed copiously. At last he understood this language, so completely unintelligible to him ever since his first fault. "Men without means ought to be perfect," added Moreau, not suspecting the profundity of that cruel sentence. "My fate will soon be decided," said Oscar. "I draw my number the day after to-morrow. Between now and then I will decide upon my future." Moreau, deeply distressed in spite of his stern bearing, left the household in the rue de la Cerisaie to its despair. Three days later Oscar drew the number twenty-seven. In the interests of the poor lad the former steward of Presles had the courage to go to the Comte de Serizy and ask for his influence to get Oscar into the cavalry. It happened that the count's son, having left the Ecole Polytechnique rather low in his class, was appointed, as a favor, sub-lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry commanded by the Duc de Maufrigneuse. Oscar had, therefore, in his great misfortune, the small luck of being, at the Comte de Serizy's instigation, drafted into that noble regiment, with the promise of promotion to quartermaster within a year. Chance had thus placed the ex-clerk under the command of the son of the Comte de Serizy. Madame Clapart, after languishing for some days, so keenly was she affected by these catastrophes, became a victim to the remorse which seizes upon many a mother whose conduct has been frail in her youth, and who, in her old age, turns to repentance. She now considered herself under a curse. She attributed the sorrows of her second marriage and the misfortunes of her son to a just retribution by which God was compelling her to expiate the errors and pleasures of her youth. This opinion soon became a certainty in her mind. The poor woman went, for the first time in forty years, to confess herself to the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul's, who led her into the practice of devotion. But so ill-used and loving a soul as that of Madame Clapart's could never be anything but simply pious. The Aspasia of the Directory wanted to expiate her sins in order to draw down the blessing of God on the head of her poor Oscar, and she henceforth vowed herself to works and deeds of the purest piety. She believed she had won the attention of heaven when she saved the life of Monsieur Clapart, who, thanks to her devotion, lived on to torture her; but she chose to see, in the tyranny of that imbecile mind, a trial inflicted by the hand of one who loveth while he chasteneth. Oscar, meantime, behaved so well that in 1830 he was first sergeant of the company of the Vicomte de Serizy, which gave him the rank of sub-lieutenant of the line. Oscar Husson was by that time twenty-five years old. As the Royal Guard, to which his regiment was attached, was always in garrison in Paris, or within a circumference of thirty miles around the capital, he came to see his mother from time to time, and tell her his griefs; for he had the sense to see that he could never become an officer as matters then were. At that time the cavalry grades were all being taken up by the younger sons of noble families, and men without the article to their names found promotion difficult. Oscar's sole ambition was to leave the Guards and be appointed sub-lieutenant in a regiment of the cavalry of the line. In the month of February, 1830, Madame Clapart obtained this promotion for her son through the influence of Madame la Dauphine, granted to the Abbe Gaudron, now rector of Saint-Pauls. Although Oscar outwardly professed to be devoted to the Bourbons, in the depths of his heart he was a liberal. Therefore, in the struggle of 1830, he went over to the side of the people. This desertion, which had an importance due to the crisis in which it took place, brought him before the eyes of the public. During the excitement of triumph in the month of August he was promoted lieutenant, received the cross of the Legion of honor, and was attached as aide-de-camp to La Fayette, who gave him the rank of captain in 1832. When the amateur of the best of all possible republics was removed from the command of the National guard, Oscar Husson, whose devotion to the new dynasty amounted to fanaticism, was appointed major of a regiment sent to Africa at the time of the first expedition undertaken by the Prince-royal. The Vicomte de Serizy chanced to be the lieutenant-colonel of this regiment. At the affair of the Makta, where the field had to be abandoned to the Arabs, Monsieur de Serizy was left wounded under a dead horse. Oscar, discovering this, called out to the squadron: "Messieurs, it is going to death, but we cannot abandon our colonel." He dashed upon the enemy, and his electrified soldiers followed him. The Arabs, in their first astonishment at this furious and unlooked-for return, allowed Oscar to seize the viscount, whom he flung across his horse, and carried off at full gallop,--receiving, as he did so, two slashes from yataghans on his left arm. Oscar's conduct on this occasion was rewarded with the officer's cross of the Legion of honor, and by his promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He took the most affectionate care of the Vicomte de Serizy, whose mother came to meet him on the arrival of the regiment at Toulon, where, as we know, the young man died of his wounds. The Comtesse de Serizy had not separated her son from the man who had shown him such devotion. Oscar himself was so seriously wounded that the surgeons whom the countess had brought with her from Paris thought best to amputate his left arm. Thus the Comte de Serizy was led not only to forgive Oscar for his painful remarks on the journey to Presles, but to feel himself his debtor on behalf

banker

How many times the word 'banker' appears in the text?

you shall being me luck! See, here are my last hundred francs." And the "marquise" took out from her purse, the rings of which were adorned with diamonds, five gold pieces. Oscar pulled out his hundred in silver five-franc pieces, much ashamed at having to mingle such ignoble coins with gold. In ten throws the actress lost the two hundred francs. "Oh! how stupid!" she cried. "I'm banker now. But we'll play together still, won't we?" Fanny Beaupre rose to take her place as banker, and Oscar, finding himself observed by the whole table, dared not retire on the ground that he had no money. Speech failed him, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. "Lend me five hundred francs," said the actress to the danseuse. Florentine brought the money, which she obtained from Georges, who had just passed eight times at ecarte. "Nathan has won twelve hundred francs," said the actress to Oscar. "Bankers always win; we won't let them fool us, will we?" she whispered in his ear. Persons of nerve, imagination, and dash will understand how it was that poor Oscar opened his pocket-book and took out the note of five hundred francs which Desroches had given him. He looked at Nathan, the distinguished author, who now began, with Florine, to play a heavy game against the bank. "Come, my little man, take 'em up," cried Fanny Beaupre, signing to Oscar to rake in the two hundred francs which Nathan and Florine had punted. The actress did not spare taunts or jests on those who lost. She enlivened the game with jokes which Oscar thought singular; but reflection was stifled by joy; for the first two throws produced a gain of two thousand francs. Oscar then thought of feigning illness and making his escape, leaving his partner behind him; but "honor" kept him there. Three more turns and the gains were lost. Oscar felt a cold sweat running down his back, and he was sobered completely. The next two throws carried off the thousand francs of their mutual stake. Oscar was consumed with thirst, and drank three glasses of iced punch one after the other. The actress now led him into the bed-chamber, where the rest of the company were playing, talking frivolities with an easy air. But by this time the sense of his wrong-doing overcame him; the figure of Desroches appeared to him like a vision. He turned aside to a dark corner and sat down, putting his handkerchief to his eyes, and wept. Florentine noticed the attitude of true grief, which, because it is sincere, is certain to strike the eye of one who acts. She ran to him, took the handkerchief from his hand, and saw his tears; then she led him into a boudoir alone. "What is it, my child?" she said. At the tone and accent of that voice Oscar recognized a motherly kindness which is often found in women of her kind, and he answered openly:-- "I have lost five hundred francs which my employer gave me to obtain a document to-morrow morning; there's nothing for me but to fling myself into the river; I am dishonored." "How silly you are!" she said. "Stay where you are; I'll get you a thousand francs and you can win back what you've lost; but don't risk more than five hundred, so that you may be sure of your master's money. Georges plays a fine game at ecarte; bet on him." Oscar, frightened by his position, accepted the offer of the mistress of the house. "Ah!" he thought, "it is only women of rank who are capable of such kindness. Beautiful, noble, rich! how lucky Georges is!" He received the thousand francs from Florentine and returned to bet on his hoaxer. Georges had just passed for the fourth time when Oscar sat down beside him. The other players saw with satisfaction the arrival of a new better; for all, with the instinct of gamblers, took the side of Giroudeau, the old officer of the Empire. "Messieurs," said Georges, "you'll be punished for deserting me; I feel in the vein. Come, Oscar, we'll make an end of them!" Georges and his partner lost five games running. After losing the thousand francs Oscar was seized with the fury of play and insisted on taking the cards himself. By the result of a chance not at all uncommon with those who play for the first time, he won. But Georges bewildered him with advice; told him when to throw the cards, and even snatched them from his hand; so that this conflict of wills and intuitions injured his vein. By three o'clock in the morning, after various changes of fortune, and still drinking punch, Oscar came down to his last hundred francs. He rose with a heavy head, completely stupefied, took a few steps forward, and fell upon a sofa in the boudoir, his eyes closing in a leaden sleep. "Mariette," said Fanny Beaupre to Godeschal's sister, who had come in about two o'clock, "do you dine here to-morrow? Camusot and Pere Cardot are coming, and we'll have some fun." "What!" cried Florentine, "and my old fellow never told me!" "He said he'd tell you to-morrow morning," remarked Fanny Beaupre. "The devil take him and his orgies!" exclaimed Florentine. "He and Camusot are worse than magistrates or stage-managers. But we have very good dinners here, Mariette," she continued. "Cardot always orders them from Chevet's; bring your Duc de Maufrigneuse and we'll make them dance like Tritons." Hearing the names of Cardot and Camusot, Oscar made an effort to throw off his sleep; but he could only mutter a few words which were not understood, and then he fell back upon the silken cushions. "You'll have to keep him here all night," said Fanny Beaupre, laughing, to Florentine. "Oh! poor boy! he is drunk with punch and despair both. It is the second clerk in your brother's office," she said to Mariette. "He has lost the money his master gave him for some legal affair. He wanted to drown himself; so I lent him a thousand francs, but those brigands Finot and Giroudeau won them from him. Poor innocent!" "But we ought to wake him," said Mariette. "My brother won't make light of it, nor his master either." "Oh, wake him if you can, and carry him off with you!" said Florentine, returning to the salon to receive the adieux of some departing guests. Presently those who remained began what was called "character dancing," and by the time it was broad daylight, Florentine, tired out, went to bed, oblivious to Oscar, who was still in the boudoir sound asleep. CHAPTER X. ANOTHER CATASTROPHE About eleven the next morning, a terrible sound awoke the unfortunate clerk. Recognizing the voice of his uncle Cardot, he thought it wise to feign sleep, and so turned his face into the yellow velvet cushions on which he had passed the night. "Really, my little Florentine," said the old gentleman, "this is neither right nor sensible; you danced last evening in 'Les Ruines,' and you have spent the night in an orgy. That's deliberately going to work to lose your freshness. Besides which, it was ungrateful to inaugurate this beautiful apartment without even letting me know. Who knows what has been going on here?" "Old monster!" cried Florentine, "haven't you a key that lets you in at all hours? My ball lasted till five in the morning, and you have the cruelty to come and wake me up at eleven!" "Half-past eleven, Titine," observed Cardot, humbly. "I came out early to order a dinner fit for an archbishop at Chevet's. Just see how the carpets are stained! What sort of people did you have here?" "You needn't complain, for Fanny Beaupre told me you were coming to dinner with Camusot, and to please you I've invited Tullia, du Bruel, Mariette, the Duc de Maufrigneuse, Florine, and Nathan. So you'll have the four loveliest creatures ever seen behind the foot-lights; we'll dance you a 'pas de Zephire.'" "It is enough to kill you to lead such a life!" cried old Cardot; "and look at the broken glasses! What pillage! The antechamber actually makes me shudder--" At this instant the wrathful old gentleman stopped short as if magnetized, like a bird which a snake is charming. He saw the outline of a form in a black coat through the door of the boudoir. "Ah, Mademoiselle Cabirolle!" he said at last. "Well, what?" she asked. The eyes of the danseuse followed those of the little old man; and when she recognized the presence of the clerk she went off into such fits of laughter that not only was the old gentleman nonplussed, but Oscar was compelled to appear; for Florentine took him by the arm, still pealing with laughter at the conscience-stricken faces of the uncle and nephew. "You here, nephew?" "Nephew! so he's your nephew?" cried Florentine, with another burst of laughter. "You never told me about him. Why didn't Mariette carry you off?" she said to Oscar, who stood there petrified. "What can he do now, poor boy?" "Whatever he pleases!" said Cardot, sharply, marching to the door as if to go away. "One moment, papa Cardot. You will be so good as to get your nephew out of a scrape into which I led him; for he played the money of his master and lost it, and I lend him a thousand francs to win it back, and he lost that too." "Miserable boy! you lost fifteen hundred francs at play at your age?" "Oh, uncle, uncle!" cried poor Oscar, plunged by these words into all the horrors of his position, and falling on his knees before his uncle, with clasped hands, "It is twelve o'clock! I am lost, dishonored! Monsieur Desroches will have no pity! He gave me the money for an important affair, in which his pride was concerned. I was to get a paper at the Palais in the case of Vandernesse versus Vandernesse! What will become of me? Oh, save me for the sake of my father and aunt! Come with me to Monsieur Desroches, and explain it to him; make some excuse,--anything!" These sentences were jerked out through sobs and tears that might have moved the sphinx of Luxor. "Old skinflint!" said the danseuse, who was crying, "will you let your own nephew be dishonored,--the son of the man to whom you owe your fortune?--for his name is Oscar Husson. Save him, or Titine will deny you forever!" "But how did he come here?" asked Cardot. "Don't you see that the reason he forgot to go for those papers was because he was drunk and overslept himself. Georges and his cousin Frederic took all the clerks in his office to a feast at the Rocher de Cancale." Pere Cardot looked at Florentine and hesitated. "Come, come," she said, "you old monkey, shouldn't I have hid him better if there had been anything else in it?" "There, take your five hundred francs, you scamp!" said Cardot to his nephew, "and remember, that's the last penny you'll ever get from me. Go and make it up with your master if you can. I'll return the thousand francs which you borrowed of mademoiselle; but I'll never hear another word about you." Oscar disappeared, not wishing to hear more. Once in the street, however, he knew not where to go. Chance which destroys men and chance which saves them were both making equal efforts for and against Oscar during that fateful morning. But he was doomed to fall before a master who forgave no failure in any affair he had once undertaken. When Mariette reached home that night, she felt alarmed at what might happen to the youth in whom her brother took interest and she wrote a hasty note to Godeschal, telling him what had happened to Oscar and inclosing a bank bill for five hundred francs to repair his loss. The kind-hearted creature went to sleep after charging her maid to carry the little note to Desroches' office before seven o'clock in the morning. Godeschal, on his side, getting up at six and finding that Oscar had not returned, guessed what had happened. He took the five hundred francs from his own little hoard and rushed to the Palais, where he obtained a copy of the judgment and returned in time to lay it before Desroches by eight o'clock. Meantime Desroches, who always rose at four, was in his office by seven. Mariette's maid, not finding the brother of her mistress in his bedroom, came down to the office and there met Desroches, to whom she very naturally offered the note. "Is it about business?" he said; "I am Monsieur Desroches." "You can see, monsieur," replied the maid. Desroches opened the letter and read it. Finding the five-hundred-franc note, he went into his private office furiously angry with his second clerk. About half-past seven he heard Godeschal dictating to the second head-clerk a copy of the document in question, and a few moments later the good fellow entered his master's office with an air of triumph in his heart. "Did Oscar Husson fetch the paper this morning from Simon?" inquired Desroches. "Yes, monsieur." "Who gave him the money?" "Why, you did, Saturday," replied Godeschal. "Then it rains five-hundred-franc notes," cried Desroches. "Look here, Godeschal, you are a fine fellow, but that little Husson does not deserve such generosity. I hate idiots, but I hate still more the men who will go wrong in spite of the fatherly care which watches over them." He gave Godeschal Mariette's letter and the five-hundred-franc note which she had sent. "You must excuse my having opened it," he said, "but your sister's maid told me it was on business. Dismiss Husson." "Poor unhappy boy! what grief he has caused me!" said Godeschal, "that tall ne'er-do-well of a Georges Marest is his evil genius; he ought to flee him like the plague; if not, he'll bring him to some third disgrace." "What do you mean by that?" asked Desroches. Godeschal then related briefly the affair of the journey to Presles. "Ah! yes," said the lawyer, "I remember Joseph Bridau told me that story about the time it happened. It is to that meeting that we owe the favor Monsieur de Serizy has since shown in the matter of Joseph's brother, Philippe Bridau." At this moment Moreau, to whom the case of the Vandernesse estate was of much importance, entered the office. The marquis wished to sell the land in parcels and the count was opposed to such a sale. The land-agent received therefore the first fire of Desroches' wrath against his ex-second clerk and all the threatening prophecies which he fulminated against him. The result was that this most sincere friend and protector of the unhappy youth came to the conclusion that his vanity was incorrigible. "Make him a barrister," said Desroches. "He has only his last examination to pass. In that line, his defects might prove virtues, for self-love and vanity give tongues to half the attorneys." At this time Clapart, who was ill, was being nursed by his wife,--a painful task, a duty without reward. The sick man tormented the poor creature, who was now doomed to learn what venomous and spiteful teasing a half-imbecile man, whom poverty had rendered craftily savage, could be capable of in the weary tete-a-tete of each endless day. Delighted to turn a sharpened arrow in the sensitive heart of the mother, he had, in a measure, studied the fears that Oscar's behavior and defects inspired in the poor woman. When a mother receives from her child a shock like that of the affair at Presles, she continues in a state of constant fear, and, by the manner in which his wife boasted of Oscar every time he obtained the slightest success, Clapart knew the extent of her secret uneasiness, and he took pains to rouse it on every occasion. "Well, Madame," Clapart would say, "Oscar is doing better than I even hoped. That journey to Presles was only a heedlessness of youth. Where can you find young lads who do not commit just such faults? Poor child! he bears his privations heroically! If his father had lived, he would never have had any. God grant he may know how to control his passions!" etc., etc. While all these catastrophes were happening in the rue de Vendome and the rue de Bethisy, Clapart, sitting in the chimney corner, wrapped in an old dressing-gown, watched his wife, who was engaged over the fire in their bedroom in simultaneously making the family broth, Clapart's "tisane," and her own breakfast. "Mon Dieu! I wish I knew how the affair of yesterday ended. Oscar was to breakfast at the Rocher de Cancale and spend the evening with a marquise--" "Don't trouble yourself! Sooner or later you'll find out about your swan," said her husband. "Do you really believe in that marquise? Pooh! A young man who has senses and a taste for extravagance like Oscar can find such ladies as that on every bush--if he pays for them. Some fine morning you'll find yourself with a load of debt on your back." "You are always trying to put me in despair!" cried Madame Clapart. "You complained that my son lived on your salary, and never has he cost you a penny. For two years you haven't had the slightest cause of complaint against him; here he is second clerk, his uncle and Monsieur Moreau pay all expenses, and he earns, himself, a salary of eight hundred francs. If we have bread to eat in our old age we may owe it all to that dear boy. You are really too unjust--" "You call my foresight unjust, do you?" replied the invalid, crossly. Just then the bell rang loudly. Madame Clapart ran to open the door, and remained in the outer room with Moreau, who had come to soften the blow which Oscar's new folly would deal to the heart of his poor mother. "What! he gambled with the money of the office?" she cried, bursting into tears. "Didn't I tell you so, hey?" said Clapart, appearing like a spectre at the door of the salon whither his curiosity had brought him. "Oh! what shall we do with him?" said Madame Clapart, whose grief made her impervious to Clapart's taunt. "If he bore my name," replied Moreau, "I should wait composedly till he draws for the conscription, and if he gets a fatal number I should not provide him with a substitute. This is the second time your son has committed a folly out of sheer vanity. Well, vanity may inspire fine deeds in war and may advance him in the career of a soldier. Besides, six years of military service will put some lead into his head; and as he has only his last legal examination to pass, it won't be much ill-luck for him if he doesn't become a lawyer till he is twenty-six; that is, if he wants to continue in the law after paying, as they say, his tax of blood. By that time, at any rate, he will have been severely punished, he will have learned experience, and contracted habits of subordination. Before making his probation at the bar he will have gone through his probations in life." "If that is your decision for a son," said Madame Clapart, "I see that the heart of a father is not like that of a mother. My poor Oscar a common soldier!--" "Would you rather he flung himself headforemost into the Seine after committing a dishonorable action? He cannot now become a solicitor; do you think him steady and wise enough to be a barrister? No. While his reason is maturing, what will he become? A dissipated fellow. The discipline of the army will, at least, preserve him from that." "Could he not go into some other office? His uncle Cardot has promised to pay for his substitute; Oscar is to dedicate his graduating thesis to him." At this moment carriage-wheels were heard, and a hackney-coach containing Oscar and all his worldly belongings stopped before the door. The luckless young man came up at once. "Ah! here you are, Monsieur Joli-Coeur!" cried Clapart. Oscar kissed his mother, and held out to Moreau a hand which the latter refused to take. To this rebuff Oscar replied by a reproachful look, the boldness of which he had never shown before. Then he turned on Clapart. "Listen to me, monsieur," said the youth, transformed into a man. "You worry my poor mother devilishly, and that's your right, for she is, unfortunately, your wife. But as for me, it is another thing. I shall be of age in a few months; and you have no rights over me even as a minor. I have never asked anything of you. Thanks to Monsieur Moreau, I have never cost you one penny, and I owe you no gratitude. Therefore, I say, let me alone!" Clapart, hearing this apostrophe, slunk back to his sofa in the chimney corner. The reasoning and the inward fury of the young man, who had just received a lecture from his friend Godeschal, silenced the imbecile mind of the sick man. "A momentary temptation, such as you yourself would have yielded to at my age," said Oscar to Moreau, "has made me commit a fault which Desroches thinks serious, though it is only a peccadillo. I am more provoked with myself for taking Florentine of the Gaiete for a marquise than I am for losing fifteen hundred francs after a little debauch in which everybody, even Godeschal, was half-seas over. This time, at any rate, I've hurt no one by myself. I'm cured of such things forever. If you are willing to help me, Monsieur Moreau, I swear to you that the six years I must still stay a clerk before I can get a practice shall be spent without--" "Stop there!" said Moreau. "I have three children, and I can make no promises." "Never mind, never mind," said Madame Clapart to her son, casting a reproachful glance at Moreau. "Your uncle Cardot--" "I have no longer an uncle Cardot," replied Oscar, who related the scene at the rue de Vendome. Madame Clapart, feeling her legs give way under the weight of her body, staggered to a chair in the dining-room, where she fell as if struck by lightning. "All the miseries together!" she said, as she fainted. Moreau took the poor mother in his arms, and carried her to the bed in her chamber. Oscar remained motionless, as if crushed. "There is nothing left for you," said Moreau, coming back to him, "but to make yourself a soldier. That idiot of a Clapart looks to me as though he couldn't live three months, and then your mother will be without a penny. Ought I not, therefore, to reserve for her the little money I am able to give? It was impossible to tell you this before her. As a soldier, you'll eat plain bread and reflect on life such as it is to those who are born into it without fortune." "I may get a lucky number," said Oscar. "Suppose you do, what then? Your mother has well fulfilled her duty towards you. She gave you an education; she placed you on the right road, and secured you a career. You have left it. Now, what can you do? Without money, nothing; as you know by this time. You are not a man who can begin a new career by taking off your coat and going to work in your shirt-sleeves with the tools of an artisan. Besides, your mother loves you, and she would die to see you come to that." Oscar sat down and no longer restrained his tears, which flowed copiously. At last he understood this language, so completely unintelligible to him ever since his first fault. "Men without means ought to be perfect," added Moreau, not suspecting the profundity of that cruel sentence. "My fate will soon be decided," said Oscar. "I draw my number the day after to-morrow. Between now and then I will decide upon my future." Moreau, deeply distressed in spite of his stern bearing, left the household in the rue de la Cerisaie to its despair. Three days later Oscar drew the number twenty-seven. In the interests of the poor lad the former steward of Presles had the courage to go to the Comte de Serizy and ask for his influence to get Oscar into the cavalry. It happened that the count's son, having left the Ecole Polytechnique rather low in his class, was appointed, as a favor, sub-lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry commanded by the Duc de Maufrigneuse. Oscar had, therefore, in his great misfortune, the small luck of being, at the Comte de Serizy's instigation, drafted into that noble regiment, with the promise of promotion to quartermaster within a year. Chance had thus placed the ex-clerk under the command of the son of the Comte de Serizy. Madame Clapart, after languishing for some days, so keenly was she affected by these catastrophes, became a victim to the remorse which seizes upon many a mother whose conduct has been frail in her youth, and who, in her old age, turns to repentance. She now considered herself under a curse. She attributed the sorrows of her second marriage and the misfortunes of her son to a just retribution by which God was compelling her to expiate the errors and pleasures of her youth. This opinion soon became a certainty in her mind. The poor woman went, for the first time in forty years, to confess herself to the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul's, who led her into the practice of devotion. But so ill-used and loving a soul as that of Madame Clapart's could never be anything but simply pious. The Aspasia of the Directory wanted to expiate her sins in order to draw down the blessing of God on the head of her poor Oscar, and she henceforth vowed herself to works and deeds of the purest piety. She believed she had won the attention of heaven when she saved the life of Monsieur Clapart, who, thanks to her devotion, lived on to torture her; but she chose to see, in the tyranny of that imbecile mind, a trial inflicted by the hand of one who loveth while he chasteneth. Oscar, meantime, behaved so well that in 1830 he was first sergeant of the company of the Vicomte de Serizy, which gave him the rank of sub-lieutenant of the line. Oscar Husson was by that time twenty-five years old. As the Royal Guard, to which his regiment was attached, was always in garrison in Paris, or within a circumference of thirty miles around the capital, he came to see his mother from time to time, and tell her his griefs; for he had the sense to see that he could never become an officer as matters then were. At that time the cavalry grades were all being taken up by the younger sons of noble families, and men without the article to their names found promotion difficult. Oscar's sole ambition was to leave the Guards and be appointed sub-lieutenant in a regiment of the cavalry of the line. In the month of February, 1830, Madame Clapart obtained this promotion for her son through the influence of Madame la Dauphine, granted to the Abbe Gaudron, now rector of Saint-Pauls. Although Oscar outwardly professed to be devoted to the Bourbons, in the depths of his heart he was a liberal. Therefore, in the struggle of 1830, he went over to the side of the people. This desertion, which had an importance due to the crisis in which it took place, brought him before the eyes of the public. During the excitement of triumph in the month of August he was promoted lieutenant, received the cross of the Legion of honor, and was attached as aide-de-camp to La Fayette, who gave him the rank of captain in 1832. When the amateur of the best of all possible republics was removed from the command of the National guard, Oscar Husson, whose devotion to the new dynasty amounted to fanaticism, was appointed major of a regiment sent to Africa at the time of the first expedition undertaken by the Prince-royal. The Vicomte de Serizy chanced to be the lieutenant-colonel of this regiment. At the affair of the Makta, where the field had to be abandoned to the Arabs, Monsieur de Serizy was left wounded under a dead horse. Oscar, discovering this, called out to the squadron: "Messieurs, it is going to death, but we cannot abandon our colonel." He dashed upon the enemy, and his electrified soldiers followed him. The Arabs, in their first astonishment at this furious and unlooked-for return, allowed Oscar to seize the viscount, whom he flung across his horse, and carried off at full gallop,--receiving, as he did so, two slashes from yataghans on his left arm. Oscar's conduct on this occasion was rewarded with the officer's cross of the Legion of honor, and by his promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He took the most affectionate care of the Vicomte de Serizy, whose mother came to meet him on the arrival of the regiment at Toulon, where, as we know, the young man died of his wounds. The Comtesse de Serizy had not separated her son from the man who had shown him such devotion. Oscar himself was so seriously wounded that the surgeons whom the countess had brought with her from Paris thought best to amputate his left arm. Thus the Comte de Serizy was led not only to forgive Oscar for his painful remarks on the journey to Presles, but to feel himself his debtor on behalf

them

How many times the word 'them' appears in the text?

you shall being me luck! See, here are my last hundred francs." And the "marquise" took out from her purse, the rings of which were adorned with diamonds, five gold pieces. Oscar pulled out his hundred in silver five-franc pieces, much ashamed at having to mingle such ignoble coins with gold. In ten throws the actress lost the two hundred francs. "Oh! how stupid!" she cried. "I'm banker now. But we'll play together still, won't we?" Fanny Beaupre rose to take her place as banker, and Oscar, finding himself observed by the whole table, dared not retire on the ground that he had no money. Speech failed him, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. "Lend me five hundred francs," said the actress to the danseuse. Florentine brought the money, which she obtained from Georges, who had just passed eight times at ecarte. "Nathan has won twelve hundred francs," said the actress to Oscar. "Bankers always win; we won't let them fool us, will we?" she whispered in his ear. Persons of nerve, imagination, and dash will understand how it was that poor Oscar opened his pocket-book and took out the note of five hundred francs which Desroches had given him. He looked at Nathan, the distinguished author, who now began, with Florine, to play a heavy game against the bank. "Come, my little man, take 'em up," cried Fanny Beaupre, signing to Oscar to rake in the two hundred francs which Nathan and Florine had punted. The actress did not spare taunts or jests on those who lost. She enlivened the game with jokes which Oscar thought singular; but reflection was stifled by joy; for the first two throws produced a gain of two thousand francs. Oscar then thought of feigning illness and making his escape, leaving his partner behind him; but "honor" kept him there. Three more turns and the gains were lost. Oscar felt a cold sweat running down his back, and he was sobered completely. The next two throws carried off the thousand francs of their mutual stake. Oscar was consumed with thirst, and drank three glasses of iced punch one after the other. The actress now led him into the bed-chamber, where the rest of the company were playing, talking frivolities with an easy air. But by this time the sense of his wrong-doing overcame him; the figure of Desroches appeared to him like a vision. He turned aside to a dark corner and sat down, putting his handkerchief to his eyes, and wept. Florentine noticed the attitude of true grief, which, because it is sincere, is certain to strike the eye of one who acts. She ran to him, took the handkerchief from his hand, and saw his tears; then she led him into a boudoir alone. "What is it, my child?" she said. At the tone and accent of that voice Oscar recognized a motherly kindness which is often found in women of her kind, and he answered openly:-- "I have lost five hundred francs which my employer gave me to obtain a document to-morrow morning; there's nothing for me but to fling myself into the river; I am dishonored." "How silly you are!" she said. "Stay where you are; I'll get you a thousand francs and you can win back what you've lost; but don't risk more than five hundred, so that you may be sure of your master's money. Georges plays a fine game at ecarte; bet on him." Oscar, frightened by his position, accepted the offer of the mistress of the house. "Ah!" he thought, "it is only women of rank who are capable of such kindness. Beautiful, noble, rich! how lucky Georges is!" He received the thousand francs from Florentine and returned to bet on his hoaxer. Georges had just passed for the fourth time when Oscar sat down beside him. The other players saw with satisfaction the arrival of a new better; for all, with the instinct of gamblers, took the side of Giroudeau, the old officer of the Empire. "Messieurs," said Georges, "you'll be punished for deserting me; I feel in the vein. Come, Oscar, we'll make an end of them!" Georges and his partner lost five games running. After losing the thousand francs Oscar was seized with the fury of play and insisted on taking the cards himself. By the result of a chance not at all uncommon with those who play for the first time, he won. But Georges bewildered him with advice; told him when to throw the cards, and even snatched them from his hand; so that this conflict of wills and intuitions injured his vein. By three o'clock in the morning, after various changes of fortune, and still drinking punch, Oscar came down to his last hundred francs. He rose with a heavy head, completely stupefied, took a few steps forward, and fell upon a sofa in the boudoir, his eyes closing in a leaden sleep. "Mariette," said Fanny Beaupre to Godeschal's sister, who had come in about two o'clock, "do you dine here to-morrow? Camusot and Pere Cardot are coming, and we'll have some fun." "What!" cried Florentine, "and my old fellow never told me!" "He said he'd tell you to-morrow morning," remarked Fanny Beaupre. "The devil take him and his orgies!" exclaimed Florentine. "He and Camusot are worse than magistrates or stage-managers. But we have very good dinners here, Mariette," she continued. "Cardot always orders them from Chevet's; bring your Duc de Maufrigneuse and we'll make them dance like Tritons." Hearing the names of Cardot and Camusot, Oscar made an effort to throw off his sleep; but he could only mutter a few words which were not understood, and then he fell back upon the silken cushions. "You'll have to keep him here all night," said Fanny Beaupre, laughing, to Florentine. "Oh! poor boy! he is drunk with punch and despair both. It is the second clerk in your brother's office," she said to Mariette. "He has lost the money his master gave him for some legal affair. He wanted to drown himself; so I lent him a thousand francs, but those brigands Finot and Giroudeau won them from him. Poor innocent!" "But we ought to wake him," said Mariette. "My brother won't make light of it, nor his master either." "Oh, wake him if you can, and carry him off with you!" said Florentine, returning to the salon to receive the adieux of some departing guests. Presently those who remained began what was called "character dancing," and by the time it was broad daylight, Florentine, tired out, went to bed, oblivious to Oscar, who was still in the boudoir sound asleep. CHAPTER X. ANOTHER CATASTROPHE About eleven the next morning, a terrible sound awoke the unfortunate clerk. Recognizing the voice of his uncle Cardot, he thought it wise to feign sleep, and so turned his face into the yellow velvet cushions on which he had passed the night. "Really, my little Florentine," said the old gentleman, "this is neither right nor sensible; you danced last evening in 'Les Ruines,' and you have spent the night in an orgy. That's deliberately going to work to lose your freshness. Besides which, it was ungrateful to inaugurate this beautiful apartment without even letting me know. Who knows what has been going on here?" "Old monster!" cried Florentine, "haven't you a key that lets you in at all hours? My ball lasted till five in the morning, and you have the cruelty to come and wake me up at eleven!" "Half-past eleven, Titine," observed Cardot, humbly. "I came out early to order a dinner fit for an archbishop at Chevet's. Just see how the carpets are stained! What sort of people did you have here?" "You needn't complain, for Fanny Beaupre told me you were coming to dinner with Camusot, and to please you I've invited Tullia, du Bruel, Mariette, the Duc de Maufrigneuse, Florine, and Nathan. So you'll have the four loveliest creatures ever seen behind the foot-lights; we'll dance you a 'pas de Zephire.'" "It is enough to kill you to lead such a life!" cried old Cardot; "and look at the broken glasses! What pillage! The antechamber actually makes me shudder--" At this instant the wrathful old gentleman stopped short as if magnetized, like a bird which a snake is charming. He saw the outline of a form in a black coat through the door of the boudoir. "Ah, Mademoiselle Cabirolle!" he said at last. "Well, what?" she asked. The eyes of the danseuse followed those of the little old man; and when she recognized the presence of the clerk she went off into such fits of laughter that not only was the old gentleman nonplussed, but Oscar was compelled to appear; for Florentine took him by the arm, still pealing with laughter at the conscience-stricken faces of the uncle and nephew. "You here, nephew?" "Nephew! so he's your nephew?" cried Florentine, with another burst of laughter. "You never told me about him. Why didn't Mariette carry you off?" she said to Oscar, who stood there petrified. "What can he do now, poor boy?" "Whatever he pleases!" said Cardot, sharply, marching to the door as if to go away. "One moment, papa Cardot. You will be so good as to get your nephew out of a scrape into which I led him; for he played the money of his master and lost it, and I lend him a thousand francs to win it back, and he lost that too." "Miserable boy! you lost fifteen hundred francs at play at your age?" "Oh, uncle, uncle!" cried poor Oscar, plunged by these words into all the horrors of his position, and falling on his knees before his uncle, with clasped hands, "It is twelve o'clock! I am lost, dishonored! Monsieur Desroches will have no pity! He gave me the money for an important affair, in which his pride was concerned. I was to get a paper at the Palais in the case of Vandernesse versus Vandernesse! What will become of me? Oh, save me for the sake of my father and aunt! Come with me to Monsieur Desroches, and explain it to him; make some excuse,--anything!" These sentences were jerked out through sobs and tears that might have moved the sphinx of Luxor. "Old skinflint!" said the danseuse, who was crying, "will you let your own nephew be dishonored,--the son of the man to whom you owe your fortune?--for his name is Oscar Husson. Save him, or Titine will deny you forever!" "But how did he come here?" asked Cardot. "Don't you see that the reason he forgot to go for those papers was because he was drunk and overslept himself. Georges and his cousin Frederic took all the clerks in his office to a feast at the Rocher de Cancale." Pere Cardot looked at Florentine and hesitated. "Come, come," she said, "you old monkey, shouldn't I have hid him better if there had been anything else in it?" "There, take your five hundred francs, you scamp!" said Cardot to his nephew, "and remember, that's the last penny you'll ever get from me. Go and make it up with your master if you can. I'll return the thousand francs which you borrowed of mademoiselle; but I'll never hear another word about you." Oscar disappeared, not wishing to hear more. Once in the street, however, he knew not where to go. Chance which destroys men and chance which saves them were both making equal efforts for and against Oscar during that fateful morning. But he was doomed to fall before a master who forgave no failure in any affair he had once undertaken. When Mariette reached home that night, she felt alarmed at what might happen to the youth in whom her brother took interest and she wrote a hasty note to Godeschal, telling him what had happened to Oscar and inclosing a bank bill for five hundred francs to repair his loss. The kind-hearted creature went to sleep after charging her maid to carry the little note to Desroches' office before seven o'clock in the morning. Godeschal, on his side, getting up at six and finding that Oscar had not returned, guessed what had happened. He took the five hundred francs from his own little hoard and rushed to the Palais, where he obtained a copy of the judgment and returned in time to lay it before Desroches by eight o'clock. Meantime Desroches, who always rose at four, was in his office by seven. Mariette's maid, not finding the brother of her mistress in his bedroom, came down to the office and there met Desroches, to whom she very naturally offered the note. "Is it about business?" he said; "I am Monsieur Desroches." "You can see, monsieur," replied the maid. Desroches opened the letter and read it. Finding the five-hundred-franc note, he went into his private office furiously angry with his second clerk. About half-past seven he heard Godeschal dictating to the second head-clerk a copy of the document in question, and a few moments later the good fellow entered his master's office with an air of triumph in his heart. "Did Oscar Husson fetch the paper this morning from Simon?" inquired Desroches. "Yes, monsieur." "Who gave him the money?" "Why, you did, Saturday," replied Godeschal. "Then it rains five-hundred-franc notes," cried Desroches. "Look here, Godeschal, you are a fine fellow, but that little Husson does not deserve such generosity. I hate idiots, but I hate still more the men who will go wrong in spite of the fatherly care which watches over them." He gave Godeschal Mariette's letter and the five-hundred-franc note which she had sent. "You must excuse my having opened it," he said, "but your sister's maid told me it was on business. Dismiss Husson." "Poor unhappy boy! what grief he has caused me!" said Godeschal, "that tall ne'er-do-well of a Georges Marest is his evil genius; he ought to flee him like the plague; if not, he'll bring him to some third disgrace." "What do you mean by that?" asked Desroches. Godeschal then related briefly the affair of the journey to Presles. "Ah! yes," said the lawyer, "I remember Joseph Bridau told me that story about the time it happened. It is to that meeting that we owe the favor Monsieur de Serizy has since shown in the matter of Joseph's brother, Philippe Bridau." At this moment Moreau, to whom the case of the Vandernesse estate was of much importance, entered the office. The marquis wished to sell the land in parcels and the count was opposed to such a sale. The land-agent received therefore the first fire of Desroches' wrath against his ex-second clerk and all the threatening prophecies which he fulminated against him. The result was that this most sincere friend and protector of the unhappy youth came to the conclusion that his vanity was incorrigible. "Make him a barrister," said Desroches. "He has only his last examination to pass. In that line, his defects might prove virtues, for self-love and vanity give tongues to half the attorneys." At this time Clapart, who was ill, was being nursed by his wife,--a painful task, a duty without reward. The sick man tormented the poor creature, who was now doomed to learn what venomous and spiteful teasing a half-imbecile man, whom poverty had rendered craftily savage, could be capable of in the weary tete-a-tete of each endless day. Delighted to turn a sharpened arrow in the sensitive heart of the mother, he had, in a measure, studied the fears that Oscar's behavior and defects inspired in the poor woman. When a mother receives from her child a shock like that of the affair at Presles, she continues in a state of constant fear, and, by the manner in which his wife boasted of Oscar every time he obtained the slightest success, Clapart knew the extent of her secret uneasiness, and he took pains to rouse it on every occasion. "Well, Madame," Clapart would say, "Oscar is doing better than I even hoped. That journey to Presles was only a heedlessness of youth. Where can you find young lads who do not commit just such faults? Poor child! he bears his privations heroically! If his father had lived, he would never have had any. God grant he may know how to control his passions!" etc., etc. While all these catastrophes were happening in the rue de Vendome and the rue de Bethisy, Clapart, sitting in the chimney corner, wrapped in an old dressing-gown, watched his wife, who was engaged over the fire in their bedroom in simultaneously making the family broth, Clapart's "tisane," and her own breakfast. "Mon Dieu! I wish I knew how the affair of yesterday ended. Oscar was to breakfast at the Rocher de Cancale and spend the evening with a marquise--" "Don't trouble yourself! Sooner or later you'll find out about your swan," said her husband. "Do you really believe in that marquise? Pooh! A young man who has senses and a taste for extravagance like Oscar can find such ladies as that on every bush--if he pays for them. Some fine morning you'll find yourself with a load of debt on your back." "You are always trying to put me in despair!" cried Madame Clapart. "You complained that my son lived on your salary, and never has he cost you a penny. For two years you haven't had the slightest cause of complaint against him; here he is second clerk, his uncle and Monsieur Moreau pay all expenses, and he earns, himself, a salary of eight hundred francs. If we have bread to eat in our old age we may owe it all to that dear boy. You are really too unjust--" "You call my foresight unjust, do you?" replied the invalid, crossly. Just then the bell rang loudly. Madame Clapart ran to open the door, and remained in the outer room with Moreau, who had come to soften the blow which Oscar's new folly would deal to the heart of his poor mother. "What! he gambled with the money of the office?" she cried, bursting into tears. "Didn't I tell you so, hey?" said Clapart, appearing like a spectre at the door of the salon whither his curiosity had brought him. "Oh! what shall we do with him?" said Madame Clapart, whose grief made her impervious to Clapart's taunt. "If he bore my name," replied Moreau, "I should wait composedly till he draws for the conscription, and if he gets a fatal number I should not provide him with a substitute. This is the second time your son has committed a folly out of sheer vanity. Well, vanity may inspire fine deeds in war and may advance him in the career of a soldier. Besides, six years of military service will put some lead into his head; and as he has only his last legal examination to pass, it won't be much ill-luck for him if he doesn't become a lawyer till he is twenty-six; that is, if he wants to continue in the law after paying, as they say, his tax of blood. By that time, at any rate, he will have been severely punished, he will have learned experience, and contracted habits of subordination. Before making his probation at the bar he will have gone through his probations in life." "If that is your decision for a son," said Madame Clapart, "I see that the heart of a father is not like that of a mother. My poor Oscar a common soldier!--" "Would you rather he flung himself headforemost into the Seine after committing a dishonorable action? He cannot now become a solicitor; do you think him steady and wise enough to be a barrister? No. While his reason is maturing, what will he become? A dissipated fellow. The discipline of the army will, at least, preserve him from that." "Could he not go into some other office? His uncle Cardot has promised to pay for his substitute; Oscar is to dedicate his graduating thesis to him." At this moment carriage-wheels were heard, and a hackney-coach containing Oscar and all his worldly belongings stopped before the door. The luckless young man came up at once. "Ah! here you are, Monsieur Joli-Coeur!" cried Clapart. Oscar kissed his mother, and held out to Moreau a hand which the latter refused to take. To this rebuff Oscar replied by a reproachful look, the boldness of which he had never shown before. Then he turned on Clapart. "Listen to me, monsieur," said the youth, transformed into a man. "You worry my poor mother devilishly, and that's your right, for she is, unfortunately, your wife. But as for me, it is another thing. I shall be of age in a few months; and you have no rights over me even as a minor. I have never asked anything of you. Thanks to Monsieur Moreau, I have never cost you one penny, and I owe you no gratitude. Therefore, I say, let me alone!" Clapart, hearing this apostrophe, slunk back to his sofa in the chimney corner. The reasoning and the inward fury of the young man, who had just received a lecture from his friend Godeschal, silenced the imbecile mind of the sick man. "A momentary temptation, such as you yourself would have yielded to at my age," said Oscar to Moreau, "has made me commit a fault which Desroches thinks serious, though it is only a peccadillo. I am more provoked with myself for taking Florentine of the Gaiete for a marquise than I am for losing fifteen hundred francs after a little debauch in which everybody, even Godeschal, was half-seas over. This time, at any rate, I've hurt no one by myself. I'm cured of such things forever. If you are willing to help me, Monsieur Moreau, I swear to you that the six years I must still stay a clerk before I can get a practice shall be spent without--" "Stop there!" said Moreau. "I have three children, and I can make no promises." "Never mind, never mind," said Madame Clapart to her son, casting a reproachful glance at Moreau. "Your uncle Cardot--" "I have no longer an uncle Cardot," replied Oscar, who related the scene at the rue de Vendome. Madame Clapart, feeling her legs give way under the weight of her body, staggered to a chair in the dining-room, where she fell as if struck by lightning. "All the miseries together!" she said, as she fainted. Moreau took the poor mother in his arms, and carried her to the bed in her chamber. Oscar remained motionless, as if crushed. "There is nothing left for you," said Moreau, coming back to him, "but to make yourself a soldier. That idiot of a Clapart looks to me as though he couldn't live three months, and then your mother will be without a penny. Ought I not, therefore, to reserve for her the little money I am able to give? It was impossible to tell you this before her. As a soldier, you'll eat plain bread and reflect on life such as it is to those who are born into it without fortune." "I may get a lucky number," said Oscar. "Suppose you do, what then? Your mother has well fulfilled her duty towards you. She gave you an education; she placed you on the right road, and secured you a career. You have left it. Now, what can you do? Without money, nothing; as you know by this time. You are not a man who can begin a new career by taking off your coat and going to work in your shirt-sleeves with the tools of an artisan. Besides, your mother loves you, and she would die to see you come to that." Oscar sat down and no longer restrained his tears, which flowed copiously. At last he understood this language, so completely unintelligible to him ever since his first fault. "Men without means ought to be perfect," added Moreau, not suspecting the profundity of that cruel sentence. "My fate will soon be decided," said Oscar. "I draw my number the day after to-morrow. Between now and then I will decide upon my future." Moreau, deeply distressed in spite of his stern bearing, left the household in the rue de la Cerisaie to its despair. Three days later Oscar drew the number twenty-seven. In the interests of the poor lad the former steward of Presles had the courage to go to the Comte de Serizy and ask for his influence to get Oscar into the cavalry. It happened that the count's son, having left the Ecole Polytechnique rather low in his class, was appointed, as a favor, sub-lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry commanded by the Duc de Maufrigneuse. Oscar had, therefore, in his great misfortune, the small luck of being, at the Comte de Serizy's instigation, drafted into that noble regiment, with the promise of promotion to quartermaster within a year. Chance had thus placed the ex-clerk under the command of the son of the Comte de Serizy. Madame Clapart, after languishing for some days, so keenly was she affected by these catastrophes, became a victim to the remorse which seizes upon many a mother whose conduct has been frail in her youth, and who, in her old age, turns to repentance. She now considered herself under a curse. She attributed the sorrows of her second marriage and the misfortunes of her son to a just retribution by which God was compelling her to expiate the errors and pleasures of her youth. This opinion soon became a certainty in her mind. The poor woman went, for the first time in forty years, to confess herself to the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul's, who led her into the practice of devotion. But so ill-used and loving a soul as that of Madame Clapart's could never be anything but simply pious. The Aspasia of the Directory wanted to expiate her sins in order to draw down the blessing of God on the head of her poor Oscar, and she henceforth vowed herself to works and deeds of the purest piety. She believed she had won the attention of heaven when she saved the life of Monsieur Clapart, who, thanks to her devotion, lived on to torture her; but she chose to see, in the tyranny of that imbecile mind, a trial inflicted by the hand of one who loveth while he chasteneth. Oscar, meantime, behaved so well that in 1830 he was first sergeant of the company of the Vicomte de Serizy, which gave him the rank of sub-lieutenant of the line. Oscar Husson was by that time twenty-five years old. As the Royal Guard, to which his regiment was attached, was always in garrison in Paris, or within a circumference of thirty miles around the capital, he came to see his mother from time to time, and tell her his griefs; for he had the sense to see that he could never become an officer as matters then were. At that time the cavalry grades were all being taken up by the younger sons of noble families, and men without the article to their names found promotion difficult. Oscar's sole ambition was to leave the Guards and be appointed sub-lieutenant in a regiment of the cavalry of the line. In the month of February, 1830, Madame Clapart obtained this promotion for her son through the influence of Madame la Dauphine, granted to the Abbe Gaudron, now rector of Saint-Pauls. Although Oscar outwardly professed to be devoted to the Bourbons, in the depths of his heart he was a liberal. Therefore, in the struggle of 1830, he went over to the side of the people. This desertion, which had an importance due to the crisis in which it took place, brought him before the eyes of the public. During the excitement of triumph in the month of August he was promoted lieutenant, received the cross of the Legion of honor, and was attached as aide-de-camp to La Fayette, who gave him the rank of captain in 1832. When the amateur of the best of all possible republics was removed from the command of the National guard, Oscar Husson, whose devotion to the new dynasty amounted to fanaticism, was appointed major of a regiment sent to Africa at the time of the first expedition undertaken by the Prince-royal. The Vicomte de Serizy chanced to be the lieutenant-colonel of this regiment. At the affair of the Makta, where the field had to be abandoned to the Arabs, Monsieur de Serizy was left wounded under a dead horse. Oscar, discovering this, called out to the squadron: "Messieurs, it is going to death, but we cannot abandon our colonel." He dashed upon the enemy, and his electrified soldiers followed him. The Arabs, in their first astonishment at this furious and unlooked-for return, allowed Oscar to seize the viscount, whom he flung across his horse, and carried off at full gallop,--receiving, as he did so, two slashes from yataghans on his left arm. Oscar's conduct on this occasion was rewarded with the officer's cross of the Legion of honor, and by his promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He took the most affectionate care of the Vicomte de Serizy, whose mother came to meet him on the arrival of the regiment at Toulon, where, as we know, the young man died of his wounds. The Comtesse de Serizy had not separated her son from the man who had shown him such devotion. Oscar himself was so seriously wounded that the surgeons whom the countess had brought with her from Paris thought best to amputate his left arm. Thus the Comte de Serizy was led not only to forgive Oscar for his painful remarks on the journey to Presles, but to feel himself his debtor on behalf

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you shall being me luck! See, here are my last hundred francs." And the "marquise" took out from her purse, the rings of which were adorned with diamonds, five gold pieces. Oscar pulled out his hundred in silver five-franc pieces, much ashamed at having to mingle such ignoble coins with gold. In ten throws the actress lost the two hundred francs. "Oh! how stupid!" she cried. "I'm banker now. But we'll play together still, won't we?" Fanny Beaupre rose to take her place as banker, and Oscar, finding himself observed by the whole table, dared not retire on the ground that he had no money. Speech failed him, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. "Lend me five hundred francs," said the actress to the danseuse. Florentine brought the money, which she obtained from Georges, who had just passed eight times at ecarte. "Nathan has won twelve hundred francs," said the actress to Oscar. "Bankers always win; we won't let them fool us, will we?" she whispered in his ear. Persons of nerve, imagination, and dash will understand how it was that poor Oscar opened his pocket-book and took out the note of five hundred francs which Desroches had given him. He looked at Nathan, the distinguished author, who now began, with Florine, to play a heavy game against the bank. "Come, my little man, take 'em up," cried Fanny Beaupre, signing to Oscar to rake in the two hundred francs which Nathan and Florine had punted. The actress did not spare taunts or jests on those who lost. She enlivened the game with jokes which Oscar thought singular; but reflection was stifled by joy; for the first two throws produced a gain of two thousand francs. Oscar then thought of feigning illness and making his escape, leaving his partner behind him; but "honor" kept him there. Three more turns and the gains were lost. Oscar felt a cold sweat running down his back, and he was sobered completely. The next two throws carried off the thousand francs of their mutual stake. Oscar was consumed with thirst, and drank three glasses of iced punch one after the other. The actress now led him into the bed-chamber, where the rest of the company were playing, talking frivolities with an easy air. But by this time the sense of his wrong-doing overcame him; the figure of Desroches appeared to him like a vision. He turned aside to a dark corner and sat down, putting his handkerchief to his eyes, and wept. Florentine noticed the attitude of true grief, which, because it is sincere, is certain to strike the eye of one who acts. She ran to him, took the handkerchief from his hand, and saw his tears; then she led him into a boudoir alone. "What is it, my child?" she said. At the tone and accent of that voice Oscar recognized a motherly kindness which is often found in women of her kind, and he answered openly:-- "I have lost five hundred francs which my employer gave me to obtain a document to-morrow morning; there's nothing for me but to fling myself into the river; I am dishonored." "How silly you are!" she said. "Stay where you are; I'll get you a thousand francs and you can win back what you've lost; but don't risk more than five hundred, so that you may be sure of your master's money. Georges plays a fine game at ecarte; bet on him." Oscar, frightened by his position, accepted the offer of the mistress of the house. "Ah!" he thought, "it is only women of rank who are capable of such kindness. Beautiful, noble, rich! how lucky Georges is!" He received the thousand francs from Florentine and returned to bet on his hoaxer. Georges had just passed for the fourth time when Oscar sat down beside him. The other players saw with satisfaction the arrival of a new better; for all, with the instinct of gamblers, took the side of Giroudeau, the old officer of the Empire. "Messieurs," said Georges, "you'll be punished for deserting me; I feel in the vein. Come, Oscar, we'll make an end of them!" Georges and his partner lost five games running. After losing the thousand francs Oscar was seized with the fury of play and insisted on taking the cards himself. By the result of a chance not at all uncommon with those who play for the first time, he won. But Georges bewildered him with advice; told him when to throw the cards, and even snatched them from his hand; so that this conflict of wills and intuitions injured his vein. By three o'clock in the morning, after various changes of fortune, and still drinking punch, Oscar came down to his last hundred francs. He rose with a heavy head, completely stupefied, took a few steps forward, and fell upon a sofa in the boudoir, his eyes closing in a leaden sleep. "Mariette," said Fanny Beaupre to Godeschal's sister, who had come in about two o'clock, "do you dine here to-morrow? Camusot and Pere Cardot are coming, and we'll have some fun." "What!" cried Florentine, "and my old fellow never told me!" "He said he'd tell you to-morrow morning," remarked Fanny Beaupre. "The devil take him and his orgies!" exclaimed Florentine. "He and Camusot are worse than magistrates or stage-managers. But we have very good dinners here, Mariette," she continued. "Cardot always orders them from Chevet's; bring your Duc de Maufrigneuse and we'll make them dance like Tritons." Hearing the names of Cardot and Camusot, Oscar made an effort to throw off his sleep; but he could only mutter a few words which were not understood, and then he fell back upon the silken cushions. "You'll have to keep him here all night," said Fanny Beaupre, laughing, to Florentine. "Oh! poor boy! he is drunk with punch and despair both. It is the second clerk in your brother's office," she said to Mariette. "He has lost the money his master gave him for some legal affair. He wanted to drown himself; so I lent him a thousand francs, but those brigands Finot and Giroudeau won them from him. Poor innocent!" "But we ought to wake him," said Mariette. "My brother won't make light of it, nor his master either." "Oh, wake him if you can, and carry him off with you!" said Florentine, returning to the salon to receive the adieux of some departing guests. Presently those who remained began what was called "character dancing," and by the time it was broad daylight, Florentine, tired out, went to bed, oblivious to Oscar, who was still in the boudoir sound asleep. CHAPTER X. ANOTHER CATASTROPHE About eleven the next morning, a terrible sound awoke the unfortunate clerk. Recognizing the voice of his uncle Cardot, he thought it wise to feign sleep, and so turned his face into the yellow velvet cushions on which he had passed the night. "Really, my little Florentine," said the old gentleman, "this is neither right nor sensible; you danced last evening in 'Les Ruines,' and you have spent the night in an orgy. That's deliberately going to work to lose your freshness. Besides which, it was ungrateful to inaugurate this beautiful apartment without even letting me know. Who knows what has been going on here?" "Old monster!" cried Florentine, "haven't you a key that lets you in at all hours? My ball lasted till five in the morning, and you have the cruelty to come and wake me up at eleven!" "Half-past eleven, Titine," observed Cardot, humbly. "I came out early to order a dinner fit for an archbishop at Chevet's. Just see how the carpets are stained! What sort of people did you have here?" "You needn't complain, for Fanny Beaupre told me you were coming to dinner with Camusot, and to please you I've invited Tullia, du Bruel, Mariette, the Duc de Maufrigneuse, Florine, and Nathan. So you'll have the four loveliest creatures ever seen behind the foot-lights; we'll dance you a 'pas de Zephire.'" "It is enough to kill you to lead such a life!" cried old Cardot; "and look at the broken glasses! What pillage! The antechamber actually makes me shudder--" At this instant the wrathful old gentleman stopped short as if magnetized, like a bird which a snake is charming. He saw the outline of a form in a black coat through the door of the boudoir. "Ah, Mademoiselle Cabirolle!" he said at last. "Well, what?" she asked. The eyes of the danseuse followed those of the little old man; and when she recognized the presence of the clerk she went off into such fits of laughter that not only was the old gentleman nonplussed, but Oscar was compelled to appear; for Florentine took him by the arm, still pealing with laughter at the conscience-stricken faces of the uncle and nephew. "You here, nephew?" "Nephew! so he's your nephew?" cried Florentine, with another burst of laughter. "You never told me about him. Why didn't Mariette carry you off?" she said to Oscar, who stood there petrified. "What can he do now, poor boy?" "Whatever he pleases!" said Cardot, sharply, marching to the door as if to go away. "One moment, papa Cardot. You will be so good as to get your nephew out of a scrape into which I led him; for he played the money of his master and lost it, and I lend him a thousand francs to win it back, and he lost that too." "Miserable boy! you lost fifteen hundred francs at play at your age?" "Oh, uncle, uncle!" cried poor Oscar, plunged by these words into all the horrors of his position, and falling on his knees before his uncle, with clasped hands, "It is twelve o'clock! I am lost, dishonored! Monsieur Desroches will have no pity! He gave me the money for an important affair, in which his pride was concerned. I was to get a paper at the Palais in the case of Vandernesse versus Vandernesse! What will become of me? Oh, save me for the sake of my father and aunt! Come with me to Monsieur Desroches, and explain it to him; make some excuse,--anything!" These sentences were jerked out through sobs and tears that might have moved the sphinx of Luxor. "Old skinflint!" said the danseuse, who was crying, "will you let your own nephew be dishonored,--the son of the man to whom you owe your fortune?--for his name is Oscar Husson. Save him, or Titine will deny you forever!" "But how did he come here?" asked Cardot. "Don't you see that the reason he forgot to go for those papers was because he was drunk and overslept himself. Georges and his cousin Frederic took all the clerks in his office to a feast at the Rocher de Cancale." Pere Cardot looked at Florentine and hesitated. "Come, come," she said, "you old monkey, shouldn't I have hid him better if there had been anything else in it?" "There, take your five hundred francs, you scamp!" said Cardot to his nephew, "and remember, that's the last penny you'll ever get from me. Go and make it up with your master if you can. I'll return the thousand francs which you borrowed of mademoiselle; but I'll never hear another word about you." Oscar disappeared, not wishing to hear more. Once in the street, however, he knew not where to go. Chance which destroys men and chance which saves them were both making equal efforts for and against Oscar during that fateful morning. But he was doomed to fall before a master who forgave no failure in any affair he had once undertaken. When Mariette reached home that night, she felt alarmed at what might happen to the youth in whom her brother took interest and she wrote a hasty note to Godeschal, telling him what had happened to Oscar and inclosing a bank bill for five hundred francs to repair his loss. The kind-hearted creature went to sleep after charging her maid to carry the little note to Desroches' office before seven o'clock in the morning. Godeschal, on his side, getting up at six and finding that Oscar had not returned, guessed what had happened. He took the five hundred francs from his own little hoard and rushed to the Palais, where he obtained a copy of the judgment and returned in time to lay it before Desroches by eight o'clock. Meantime Desroches, who always rose at four, was in his office by seven. Mariette's maid, not finding the brother of her mistress in his bedroom, came down to the office and there met Desroches, to whom she very naturally offered the note. "Is it about business?" he said; "I am Monsieur Desroches." "You can see, monsieur," replied the maid. Desroches opened the letter and read it. Finding the five-hundred-franc note, he went into his private office furiously angry with his second clerk. About half-past seven he heard Godeschal dictating to the second head-clerk a copy of the document in question, and a few moments later the good fellow entered his master's office with an air of triumph in his heart. "Did Oscar Husson fetch the paper this morning from Simon?" inquired Desroches. "Yes, monsieur." "Who gave him the money?" "Why, you did, Saturday," replied Godeschal. "Then it rains five-hundred-franc notes," cried Desroches. "Look here, Godeschal, you are a fine fellow, but that little Husson does not deserve such generosity. I hate idiots, but I hate still more the men who will go wrong in spite of the fatherly care which watches over them." He gave Godeschal Mariette's letter and the five-hundred-franc note which she had sent. "You must excuse my having opened it," he said, "but your sister's maid told me it was on business. Dismiss Husson." "Poor unhappy boy! what grief he has caused me!" said Godeschal, "that tall ne'er-do-well of a Georges Marest is his evil genius; he ought to flee him like the plague; if not, he'll bring him to some third disgrace." "What do you mean by that?" asked Desroches. Godeschal then related briefly the affair of the journey to Presles. "Ah! yes," said the lawyer, "I remember Joseph Bridau told me that story about the time it happened. It is to that meeting that we owe the favor Monsieur de Serizy has since shown in the matter of Joseph's brother, Philippe Bridau." At this moment Moreau, to whom the case of the Vandernesse estate was of much importance, entered the office. The marquis wished to sell the land in parcels and the count was opposed to such a sale. The land-agent received therefore the first fire of Desroches' wrath against his ex-second clerk and all the threatening prophecies which he fulminated against him. The result was that this most sincere friend and protector of the unhappy youth came to the conclusion that his vanity was incorrigible. "Make him a barrister," said Desroches. "He has only his last examination to pass. In that line, his defects might prove virtues, for self-love and vanity give tongues to half the attorneys." At this time Clapart, who was ill, was being nursed by his wife,--a painful task, a duty without reward. The sick man tormented the poor creature, who was now doomed to learn what venomous and spiteful teasing a half-imbecile man, whom poverty had rendered craftily savage, could be capable of in the weary tete-a-tete of each endless day. Delighted to turn a sharpened arrow in the sensitive heart of the mother, he had, in a measure, studied the fears that Oscar's behavior and defects inspired in the poor woman. When a mother receives from her child a shock like that of the affair at Presles, she continues in a state of constant fear, and, by the manner in which his wife boasted of Oscar every time he obtained the slightest success, Clapart knew the extent of her secret uneasiness, and he took pains to rouse it on every occasion. "Well, Madame," Clapart would say, "Oscar is doing better than I even hoped. That journey to Presles was only a heedlessness of youth. Where can you find young lads who do not commit just such faults? Poor child! he bears his privations heroically! If his father had lived, he would never have had any. God grant he may know how to control his passions!" etc., etc. While all these catastrophes were happening in the rue de Vendome and the rue de Bethisy, Clapart, sitting in the chimney corner, wrapped in an old dressing-gown, watched his wife, who was engaged over the fire in their bedroom in simultaneously making the family broth, Clapart's "tisane," and her own breakfast. "Mon Dieu! I wish I knew how the affair of yesterday ended. Oscar was to breakfast at the Rocher de Cancale and spend the evening with a marquise--" "Don't trouble yourself! Sooner or later you'll find out about your swan," said her husband. "Do you really believe in that marquise? Pooh! A young man who has senses and a taste for extravagance like Oscar can find such ladies as that on every bush--if he pays for them. Some fine morning you'll find yourself with a load of debt on your back." "You are always trying to put me in despair!" cried Madame Clapart. "You complained that my son lived on your salary, and never has he cost you a penny. For two years you haven't had the slightest cause of complaint against him; here he is second clerk, his uncle and Monsieur Moreau pay all expenses, and he earns, himself, a salary of eight hundred francs. If we have bread to eat in our old age we may owe it all to that dear boy. You are really too unjust--" "You call my foresight unjust, do you?" replied the invalid, crossly. Just then the bell rang loudly. Madame Clapart ran to open the door, and remained in the outer room with Moreau, who had come to soften the blow which Oscar's new folly would deal to the heart of his poor mother. "What! he gambled with the money of the office?" she cried, bursting into tears. "Didn't I tell you so, hey?" said Clapart, appearing like a spectre at the door of the salon whither his curiosity had brought him. "Oh! what shall we do with him?" said Madame Clapart, whose grief made her impervious to Clapart's taunt. "If he bore my name," replied Moreau, "I should wait composedly till he draws for the conscription, and if he gets a fatal number I should not provide him with a substitute. This is the second time your son has committed a folly out of sheer vanity. Well, vanity may inspire fine deeds in war and may advance him in the career of a soldier. Besides, six years of military service will put some lead into his head; and as he has only his last legal examination to pass, it won't be much ill-luck for him if he doesn't become a lawyer till he is twenty-six; that is, if he wants to continue in the law after paying, as they say, his tax of blood. By that time, at any rate, he will have been severely punished, he will have learned experience, and contracted habits of subordination. Before making his probation at the bar he will have gone through his probations in life." "If that is your decision for a son," said Madame Clapart, "I see that the heart of a father is not like that of a mother. My poor Oscar a common soldier!--" "Would you rather he flung himself headforemost into the Seine after committing a dishonorable action? He cannot now become a solicitor; do you think him steady and wise enough to be a barrister? No. While his reason is maturing, what will he become? A dissipated fellow. The discipline of the army will, at least, preserve him from that." "Could he not go into some other office? His uncle Cardot has promised to pay for his substitute; Oscar is to dedicate his graduating thesis to him." At this moment carriage-wheels were heard, and a hackney-coach containing Oscar and all his worldly belongings stopped before the door. The luckless young man came up at once. "Ah! here you are, Monsieur Joli-Coeur!" cried Clapart. Oscar kissed his mother, and held out to Moreau a hand which the latter refused to take. To this rebuff Oscar replied by a reproachful look, the boldness of which he had never shown before. Then he turned on Clapart. "Listen to me, monsieur," said the youth, transformed into a man. "You worry my poor mother devilishly, and that's your right, for she is, unfortunately, your wife. But as for me, it is another thing. I shall be of age in a few months; and you have no rights over me even as a minor. I have never asked anything of you. Thanks to Monsieur Moreau, I have never cost you one penny, and I owe you no gratitude. Therefore, I say, let me alone!" Clapart, hearing this apostrophe, slunk back to his sofa in the chimney corner. The reasoning and the inward fury of the young man, who had just received a lecture from his friend Godeschal, silenced the imbecile mind of the sick man. "A momentary temptation, such as you yourself would have yielded to at my age," said Oscar to Moreau, "has made me commit a fault which Desroches thinks serious, though it is only a peccadillo. I am more provoked with myself for taking Florentine of the Gaiete for a marquise than I am for losing fifteen hundred francs after a little debauch in which everybody, even Godeschal, was half-seas over. This time, at any rate, I've hurt no one by myself. I'm cured of such things forever. If you are willing to help me, Monsieur Moreau, I swear to you that the six years I must still stay a clerk before I can get a practice shall be spent without--" "Stop there!" said Moreau. "I have three children, and I can make no promises." "Never mind, never mind," said Madame Clapart to her son, casting a reproachful glance at Moreau. "Your uncle Cardot--" "I have no longer an uncle Cardot," replied Oscar, who related the scene at the rue de Vendome. Madame Clapart, feeling her legs give way under the weight of her body, staggered to a chair in the dining-room, where she fell as if struck by lightning. "All the miseries together!" she said, as she fainted. Moreau took the poor mother in his arms, and carried her to the bed in her chamber. Oscar remained motionless, as if crushed. "There is nothing left for you," said Moreau, coming back to him, "but to make yourself a soldier. That idiot of a Clapart looks to me as though he couldn't live three months, and then your mother will be without a penny. Ought I not, therefore, to reserve for her the little money I am able to give? It was impossible to tell you this before her. As a soldier, you'll eat plain bread and reflect on life such as it is to those who are born into it without fortune." "I may get a lucky number," said Oscar. "Suppose you do, what then? Your mother has well fulfilled her duty towards you. She gave you an education; she placed you on the right road, and secured you a career. You have left it. Now, what can you do? Without money, nothing; as you know by this time. You are not a man who can begin a new career by taking off your coat and going to work in your shirt-sleeves with the tools of an artisan. Besides, your mother loves you, and she would die to see you come to that." Oscar sat down and no longer restrained his tears, which flowed copiously. At last he understood this language, so completely unintelligible to him ever since his first fault. "Men without means ought to be perfect," added Moreau, not suspecting the profundity of that cruel sentence. "My fate will soon be decided," said Oscar. "I draw my number the day after to-morrow. Between now and then I will decide upon my future." Moreau, deeply distressed in spite of his stern bearing, left the household in the rue de la Cerisaie to its despair. Three days later Oscar drew the number twenty-seven. In the interests of the poor lad the former steward of Presles had the courage to go to the Comte de Serizy and ask for his influence to get Oscar into the cavalry. It happened that the count's son, having left the Ecole Polytechnique rather low in his class, was appointed, as a favor, sub-lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry commanded by the Duc de Maufrigneuse. Oscar had, therefore, in his great misfortune, the small luck of being, at the Comte de Serizy's instigation, drafted into that noble regiment, with the promise of promotion to quartermaster within a year. Chance had thus placed the ex-clerk under the command of the son of the Comte de Serizy. Madame Clapart, after languishing for some days, so keenly was she affected by these catastrophes, became a victim to the remorse which seizes upon many a mother whose conduct has been frail in her youth, and who, in her old age, turns to repentance. She now considered herself under a curse. She attributed the sorrows of her second marriage and the misfortunes of her son to a just retribution by which God was compelling her to expiate the errors and pleasures of her youth. This opinion soon became a certainty in her mind. The poor woman went, for the first time in forty years, to confess herself to the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul's, who led her into the practice of devotion. But so ill-used and loving a soul as that of Madame Clapart's could never be anything but simply pious. The Aspasia of the Directory wanted to expiate her sins in order to draw down the blessing of God on the head of her poor Oscar, and she henceforth vowed herself to works and deeds of the purest piety. She believed she had won the attention of heaven when she saved the life of Monsieur Clapart, who, thanks to her devotion, lived on to torture her; but she chose to see, in the tyranny of that imbecile mind, a trial inflicted by the hand of one who loveth while he chasteneth. Oscar, meantime, behaved so well that in 1830 he was first sergeant of the company of the Vicomte de Serizy, which gave him the rank of sub-lieutenant of the line. Oscar Husson was by that time twenty-five years old. As the Royal Guard, to which his regiment was attached, was always in garrison in Paris, or within a circumference of thirty miles around the capital, he came to see his mother from time to time, and tell her his griefs; for he had the sense to see that he could never become an officer as matters then were. At that time the cavalry grades were all being taken up by the younger sons of noble families, and men without the article to their names found promotion difficult. Oscar's sole ambition was to leave the Guards and be appointed sub-lieutenant in a regiment of the cavalry of the line. In the month of February, 1830, Madame Clapart obtained this promotion for her son through the influence of Madame la Dauphine, granted to the Abbe Gaudron, now rector of Saint-Pauls. Although Oscar outwardly professed to be devoted to the Bourbons, in the depths of his heart he was a liberal. Therefore, in the struggle of 1830, he went over to the side of the people. This desertion, which had an importance due to the crisis in which it took place, brought him before the eyes of the public. During the excitement of triumph in the month of August he was promoted lieutenant, received the cross of the Legion of honor, and was attached as aide-de-camp to La Fayette, who gave him the rank of captain in 1832. When the amateur of the best of all possible republics was removed from the command of the National guard, Oscar Husson, whose devotion to the new dynasty amounted to fanaticism, was appointed major of a regiment sent to Africa at the time of the first expedition undertaken by the Prince-royal. The Vicomte de Serizy chanced to be the lieutenant-colonel of this regiment. At the affair of the Makta, where the field had to be abandoned to the Arabs, Monsieur de Serizy was left wounded under a dead horse. Oscar, discovering this, called out to the squadron: "Messieurs, it is going to death, but we cannot abandon our colonel." He dashed upon the enemy, and his electrified soldiers followed him. The Arabs, in their first astonishment at this furious and unlooked-for return, allowed Oscar to seize the viscount, whom he flung across his horse, and carried off at full gallop,--receiving, as he did so, two slashes from yataghans on his left arm. Oscar's conduct on this occasion was rewarded with the officer's cross of the Legion of honor, and by his promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He took the most affectionate care of the Vicomte de Serizy, whose mother came to meet him on the arrival of the regiment at Toulon, where, as we know, the young man died of his wounds. The Comtesse de Serizy had not separated her son from the man who had shown him such devotion. Oscar himself was so seriously wounded that the surgeons whom the countess had brought with her from Paris thought best to amputate his left arm. Thus the Comte de Serizy was led not only to forgive Oscar for his painful remarks on the journey to Presles, but to feel himself his debtor on behalf

punch

How many times the word 'punch' appears in the text?

you shall being me luck! See, here are my last hundred francs." And the "marquise" took out from her purse, the rings of which were adorned with diamonds, five gold pieces. Oscar pulled out his hundred in silver five-franc pieces, much ashamed at having to mingle such ignoble coins with gold. In ten throws the actress lost the two hundred francs. "Oh! how stupid!" she cried. "I'm banker now. But we'll play together still, won't we?" Fanny Beaupre rose to take her place as banker, and Oscar, finding himself observed by the whole table, dared not retire on the ground that he had no money. Speech failed him, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. "Lend me five hundred francs," said the actress to the danseuse. Florentine brought the money, which she obtained from Georges, who had just passed eight times at ecarte. "Nathan has won twelve hundred francs," said the actress to Oscar. "Bankers always win; we won't let them fool us, will we?" she whispered in his ear. Persons of nerve, imagination, and dash will understand how it was that poor Oscar opened his pocket-book and took out the note of five hundred francs which Desroches had given him. He looked at Nathan, the distinguished author, who now began, with Florine, to play a heavy game against the bank. "Come, my little man, take 'em up," cried Fanny Beaupre, signing to Oscar to rake in the two hundred francs which Nathan and Florine had punted. The actress did not spare taunts or jests on those who lost. She enlivened the game with jokes which Oscar thought singular; but reflection was stifled by joy; for the first two throws produced a gain of two thousand francs. Oscar then thought of feigning illness and making his escape, leaving his partner behind him; but "honor" kept him there. Three more turns and the gains were lost. Oscar felt a cold sweat running down his back, and he was sobered completely. The next two throws carried off the thousand francs of their mutual stake. Oscar was consumed with thirst, and drank three glasses of iced punch one after the other. The actress now led him into the bed-chamber, where the rest of the company were playing, talking frivolities with an easy air. But by this time the sense of his wrong-doing overcame him; the figure of Desroches appeared to him like a vision. He turned aside to a dark corner and sat down, putting his handkerchief to his eyes, and wept. Florentine noticed the attitude of true grief, which, because it is sincere, is certain to strike the eye of one who acts. She ran to him, took the handkerchief from his hand, and saw his tears; then she led him into a boudoir alone. "What is it, my child?" she said. At the tone and accent of that voice Oscar recognized a motherly kindness which is often found in women of her kind, and he answered openly:-- "I have lost five hundred francs which my employer gave me to obtain a document to-morrow morning; there's nothing for me but to fling myself into the river; I am dishonored." "How silly you are!" she said. "Stay where you are; I'll get you a thousand francs and you can win back what you've lost; but don't risk more than five hundred, so that you may be sure of your master's money. Georges plays a fine game at ecarte; bet on him." Oscar, frightened by his position, accepted the offer of the mistress of the house. "Ah!" he thought, "it is only women of rank who are capable of such kindness. Beautiful, noble, rich! how lucky Georges is!" He received the thousand francs from Florentine and returned to bet on his hoaxer. Georges had just passed for the fourth time when Oscar sat down beside him. The other players saw with satisfaction the arrival of a new better; for all, with the instinct of gamblers, took the side of Giroudeau, the old officer of the Empire. "Messieurs," said Georges, "you'll be punished for deserting me; I feel in the vein. Come, Oscar, we'll make an end of them!" Georges and his partner lost five games running. After losing the thousand francs Oscar was seized with the fury of play and insisted on taking the cards himself. By the result of a chance not at all uncommon with those who play for the first time, he won. But Georges bewildered him with advice; told him when to throw the cards, and even snatched them from his hand; so that this conflict of wills and intuitions injured his vein. By three o'clock in the morning, after various changes of fortune, and still drinking punch, Oscar came down to his last hundred francs. He rose with a heavy head, completely stupefied, took a few steps forward, and fell upon a sofa in the boudoir, his eyes closing in a leaden sleep. "Mariette," said Fanny Beaupre to Godeschal's sister, who had come in about two o'clock, "do you dine here to-morrow? Camusot and Pere Cardot are coming, and we'll have some fun." "What!" cried Florentine, "and my old fellow never told me!" "He said he'd tell you to-morrow morning," remarked Fanny Beaupre. "The devil take him and his orgies!" exclaimed Florentine. "He and Camusot are worse than magistrates or stage-managers. But we have very good dinners here, Mariette," she continued. "Cardot always orders them from Chevet's; bring your Duc de Maufrigneuse and we'll make them dance like Tritons." Hearing the names of Cardot and Camusot, Oscar made an effort to throw off his sleep; but he could only mutter a few words which were not understood, and then he fell back upon the silken cushions. "You'll have to keep him here all night," said Fanny Beaupre, laughing, to Florentine. "Oh! poor boy! he is drunk with punch and despair both. It is the second clerk in your brother's office," she said to Mariette. "He has lost the money his master gave him for some legal affair. He wanted to drown himself; so I lent him a thousand francs, but those brigands Finot and Giroudeau won them from him. Poor innocent!" "But we ought to wake him," said Mariette. "My brother won't make light of it, nor his master either." "Oh, wake him if you can, and carry him off with you!" said Florentine, returning to the salon to receive the adieux of some departing guests. Presently those who remained began what was called "character dancing," and by the time it was broad daylight, Florentine, tired out, went to bed, oblivious to Oscar, who was still in the boudoir sound asleep. CHAPTER X. ANOTHER CATASTROPHE About eleven the next morning, a terrible sound awoke the unfortunate clerk. Recognizing the voice of his uncle Cardot, he thought it wise to feign sleep, and so turned his face into the yellow velvet cushions on which he had passed the night. "Really, my little Florentine," said the old gentleman, "this is neither right nor sensible; you danced last evening in 'Les Ruines,' and you have spent the night in an orgy. That's deliberately going to work to lose your freshness. Besides which, it was ungrateful to inaugurate this beautiful apartment without even letting me know. Who knows what has been going on here?" "Old monster!" cried Florentine, "haven't you a key that lets you in at all hours? My ball lasted till five in the morning, and you have the cruelty to come and wake me up at eleven!" "Half-past eleven, Titine," observed Cardot, humbly. "I came out early to order a dinner fit for an archbishop at Chevet's. Just see how the carpets are stained! What sort of people did you have here?" "You needn't complain, for Fanny Beaupre told me you were coming to dinner with Camusot, and to please you I've invited Tullia, du Bruel, Mariette, the Duc de Maufrigneuse, Florine, and Nathan. So you'll have the four loveliest creatures ever seen behind the foot-lights; we'll dance you a 'pas de Zephire.'" "It is enough to kill you to lead such a life!" cried old Cardot; "and look at the broken glasses! What pillage! The antechamber actually makes me shudder--" At this instant the wrathful old gentleman stopped short as if magnetized, like a bird which a snake is charming. He saw the outline of a form in a black coat through the door of the boudoir. "Ah, Mademoiselle Cabirolle!" he said at last. "Well, what?" she asked. The eyes of the danseuse followed those of the little old man; and when she recognized the presence of the clerk she went off into such fits of laughter that not only was the old gentleman nonplussed, but Oscar was compelled to appear; for Florentine took him by the arm, still pealing with laughter at the conscience-stricken faces of the uncle and nephew. "You here, nephew?" "Nephew! so he's your nephew?" cried Florentine, with another burst of laughter. "You never told me about him. Why didn't Mariette carry you off?" she said to Oscar, who stood there petrified. "What can he do now, poor boy?" "Whatever he pleases!" said Cardot, sharply, marching to the door as if to go away. "One moment, papa Cardot. You will be so good as to get your nephew out of a scrape into which I led him; for he played the money of his master and lost it, and I lend him a thousand francs to win it back, and he lost that too." "Miserable boy! you lost fifteen hundred francs at play at your age?" "Oh, uncle, uncle!" cried poor Oscar, plunged by these words into all the horrors of his position, and falling on his knees before his uncle, with clasped hands, "It is twelve o'clock! I am lost, dishonored! Monsieur Desroches will have no pity! He gave me the money for an important affair, in which his pride was concerned. I was to get a paper at the Palais in the case of Vandernesse versus Vandernesse! What will become of me? Oh, save me for the sake of my father and aunt! Come with me to Monsieur Desroches, and explain it to him; make some excuse,--anything!" These sentences were jerked out through sobs and tears that might have moved the sphinx of Luxor. "Old skinflint!" said the danseuse, who was crying, "will you let your own nephew be dishonored,--the son of the man to whom you owe your fortune?--for his name is Oscar Husson. Save him, or Titine will deny you forever!" "But how did he come here?" asked Cardot. "Don't you see that the reason he forgot to go for those papers was because he was drunk and overslept himself. Georges and his cousin Frederic took all the clerks in his office to a feast at the Rocher de Cancale." Pere Cardot looked at Florentine and hesitated. "Come, come," she said, "you old monkey, shouldn't I have hid him better if there had been anything else in it?" "There, take your five hundred francs, you scamp!" said Cardot to his nephew, "and remember, that's the last penny you'll ever get from me. Go and make it up with your master if you can. I'll return the thousand francs which you borrowed of mademoiselle; but I'll never hear another word about you." Oscar disappeared, not wishing to hear more. Once in the street, however, he knew not where to go. Chance which destroys men and chance which saves them were both making equal efforts for and against Oscar during that fateful morning. But he was doomed to fall before a master who forgave no failure in any affair he had once undertaken. When Mariette reached home that night, she felt alarmed at what might happen to the youth in whom her brother took interest and she wrote a hasty note to Godeschal, telling him what had happened to Oscar and inclosing a bank bill for five hundred francs to repair his loss. The kind-hearted creature went to sleep after charging her maid to carry the little note to Desroches' office before seven o'clock in the morning. Godeschal, on his side, getting up at six and finding that Oscar had not returned, guessed what had happened. He took the five hundred francs from his own little hoard and rushed to the Palais, where he obtained a copy of the judgment and returned in time to lay it before Desroches by eight o'clock. Meantime Desroches, who always rose at four, was in his office by seven. Mariette's maid, not finding the brother of her mistress in his bedroom, came down to the office and there met Desroches, to whom she very naturally offered the note. "Is it about business?" he said; "I am Monsieur Desroches." "You can see, monsieur," replied the maid. Desroches opened the letter and read it. Finding the five-hundred-franc note, he went into his private office furiously angry with his second clerk. About half-past seven he heard Godeschal dictating to the second head-clerk a copy of the document in question, and a few moments later the good fellow entered his master's office with an air of triumph in his heart. "Did Oscar Husson fetch the paper this morning from Simon?" inquired Desroches. "Yes, monsieur." "Who gave him the money?" "Why, you did, Saturday," replied Godeschal. "Then it rains five-hundred-franc notes," cried Desroches. "Look here, Godeschal, you are a fine fellow, but that little Husson does not deserve such generosity. I hate idiots, but I hate still more the men who will go wrong in spite of the fatherly care which watches over them." He gave Godeschal Mariette's letter and the five-hundred-franc note which she had sent. "You must excuse my having opened it," he said, "but your sister's maid told me it was on business. Dismiss Husson." "Poor unhappy boy! what grief he has caused me!" said Godeschal, "that tall ne'er-do-well of a Georges Marest is his evil genius; he ought to flee him like the plague; if not, he'll bring him to some third disgrace." "What do you mean by that?" asked Desroches. Godeschal then related briefly the affair of the journey to Presles. "Ah! yes," said the lawyer, "I remember Joseph Bridau told me that story about the time it happened. It is to that meeting that we owe the favor Monsieur de Serizy has since shown in the matter of Joseph's brother, Philippe Bridau." At this moment Moreau, to whom the case of the Vandernesse estate was of much importance, entered the office. The marquis wished to sell the land in parcels and the count was opposed to such a sale. The land-agent received therefore the first fire of Desroches' wrath against his ex-second clerk and all the threatening prophecies which he fulminated against him. The result was that this most sincere friend and protector of the unhappy youth came to the conclusion that his vanity was incorrigible. "Make him a barrister," said Desroches. "He has only his last examination to pass. In that line, his defects might prove virtues, for self-love and vanity give tongues to half the attorneys." At this time Clapart, who was ill, was being nursed by his wife,--a painful task, a duty without reward. The sick man tormented the poor creature, who was now doomed to learn what venomous and spiteful teasing a half-imbecile man, whom poverty had rendered craftily savage, could be capable of in the weary tete-a-tete of each endless day. Delighted to turn a sharpened arrow in the sensitive heart of the mother, he had, in a measure, studied the fears that Oscar's behavior and defects inspired in the poor woman. When a mother receives from her child a shock like that of the affair at Presles, she continues in a state of constant fear, and, by the manner in which his wife boasted of Oscar every time he obtained the slightest success, Clapart knew the extent of her secret uneasiness, and he took pains to rouse it on every occasion. "Well, Madame," Clapart would say, "Oscar is doing better than I even hoped. That journey to Presles was only a heedlessness of youth. Where can you find young lads who do not commit just such faults? Poor child! he bears his privations heroically! If his father had lived, he would never have had any. God grant he may know how to control his passions!" etc., etc. While all these catastrophes were happening in the rue de Vendome and the rue de Bethisy, Clapart, sitting in the chimney corner, wrapped in an old dressing-gown, watched his wife, who was engaged over the fire in their bedroom in simultaneously making the family broth, Clapart's "tisane," and her own breakfast. "Mon Dieu! I wish I knew how the affair of yesterday ended. Oscar was to breakfast at the Rocher de Cancale and spend the evening with a marquise--" "Don't trouble yourself! Sooner or later you'll find out about your swan," said her husband. "Do you really believe in that marquise? Pooh! A young man who has senses and a taste for extravagance like Oscar can find such ladies as that on every bush--if he pays for them. Some fine morning you'll find yourself with a load of debt on your back." "You are always trying to put me in despair!" cried Madame Clapart. "You complained that my son lived on your salary, and never has he cost you a penny. For two years you haven't had the slightest cause of complaint against him; here he is second clerk, his uncle and Monsieur Moreau pay all expenses, and he earns, himself, a salary of eight hundred francs. If we have bread to eat in our old age we may owe it all to that dear boy. You are really too unjust--" "You call my foresight unjust, do you?" replied the invalid, crossly. Just then the bell rang loudly. Madame Clapart ran to open the door, and remained in the outer room with Moreau, who had come to soften the blow which Oscar's new folly would deal to the heart of his poor mother. "What! he gambled with the money of the office?" she cried, bursting into tears. "Didn't I tell you so, hey?" said Clapart, appearing like a spectre at the door of the salon whither his curiosity had brought him. "Oh! what shall we do with him?" said Madame Clapart, whose grief made her impervious to Clapart's taunt. "If he bore my name," replied Moreau, "I should wait composedly till he draws for the conscription, and if he gets a fatal number I should not provide him with a substitute. This is the second time your son has committed a folly out of sheer vanity. Well, vanity may inspire fine deeds in war and may advance him in the career of a soldier. Besides, six years of military service will put some lead into his head; and as he has only his last legal examination to pass, it won't be much ill-luck for him if he doesn't become a lawyer till he is twenty-six; that is, if he wants to continue in the law after paying, as they say, his tax of blood. By that time, at any rate, he will have been severely punished, he will have learned experience, and contracted habits of subordination. Before making his probation at the bar he will have gone through his probations in life." "If that is your decision for a son," said Madame Clapart, "I see that the heart of a father is not like that of a mother. My poor Oscar a common soldier!--" "Would you rather he flung himself headforemost into the Seine after committing a dishonorable action? He cannot now become a solicitor; do you think him steady and wise enough to be a barrister? No. While his reason is maturing, what will he become? A dissipated fellow. The discipline of the army will, at least, preserve him from that." "Could he not go into some other office? His uncle Cardot has promised to pay for his substitute; Oscar is to dedicate his graduating thesis to him." At this moment carriage-wheels were heard, and a hackney-coach containing Oscar and all his worldly belongings stopped before the door. The luckless young man came up at once. "Ah! here you are, Monsieur Joli-Coeur!" cried Clapart. Oscar kissed his mother, and held out to Moreau a hand which the latter refused to take. To this rebuff Oscar replied by a reproachful look, the boldness of which he had never shown before. Then he turned on Clapart. "Listen to me, monsieur," said the youth, transformed into a man. "You worry my poor mother devilishly, and that's your right, for she is, unfortunately, your wife. But as for me, it is another thing. I shall be of age in a few months; and you have no rights over me even as a minor. I have never asked anything of you. Thanks to Monsieur Moreau, I have never cost you one penny, and I owe you no gratitude. Therefore, I say, let me alone!" Clapart, hearing this apostrophe, slunk back to his sofa in the chimney corner. The reasoning and the inward fury of the young man, who had just received a lecture from his friend Godeschal, silenced the imbecile mind of the sick man. "A momentary temptation, such as you yourself would have yielded to at my age," said Oscar to Moreau, "has made me commit a fault which Desroches thinks serious, though it is only a peccadillo. I am more provoked with myself for taking Florentine of the Gaiete for a marquise than I am for losing fifteen hundred francs after a little debauch in which everybody, even Godeschal, was half-seas over. This time, at any rate, I've hurt no one by myself. I'm cured of such things forever. If you are willing to help me, Monsieur Moreau, I swear to you that the six years I must still stay a clerk before I can get a practice shall be spent without--" "Stop there!" said Moreau. "I have three children, and I can make no promises." "Never mind, never mind," said Madame Clapart to her son, casting a reproachful glance at Moreau. "Your uncle Cardot--" "I have no longer an uncle Cardot," replied Oscar, who related the scene at the rue de Vendome. Madame Clapart, feeling her legs give way under the weight of her body, staggered to a chair in the dining-room, where she fell as if struck by lightning. "All the miseries together!" she said, as she fainted. Moreau took the poor mother in his arms, and carried her to the bed in her chamber. Oscar remained motionless, as if crushed. "There is nothing left for you," said Moreau, coming back to him, "but to make yourself a soldier. That idiot of a Clapart looks to me as though he couldn't live three months, and then your mother will be without a penny. Ought I not, therefore, to reserve for her the little money I am able to give? It was impossible to tell you this before her. As a soldier, you'll eat plain bread and reflect on life such as it is to those who are born into it without fortune." "I may get a lucky number," said Oscar. "Suppose you do, what then? Your mother has well fulfilled her duty towards you. She gave you an education; she placed you on the right road, and secured you a career. You have left it. Now, what can you do? Without money, nothing; as you know by this time. You are not a man who can begin a new career by taking off your coat and going to work in your shirt-sleeves with the tools of an artisan. Besides, your mother loves you, and she would die to see you come to that." Oscar sat down and no longer restrained his tears, which flowed copiously. At last he understood this language, so completely unintelligible to him ever since his first fault. "Men without means ought to be perfect," added Moreau, not suspecting the profundity of that cruel sentence. "My fate will soon be decided," said Oscar. "I draw my number the day after to-morrow. Between now and then I will decide upon my future." Moreau, deeply distressed in spite of his stern bearing, left the household in the rue de la Cerisaie to its despair. Three days later Oscar drew the number twenty-seven. In the interests of the poor lad the former steward of Presles had the courage to go to the Comte de Serizy and ask for his influence to get Oscar into the cavalry. It happened that the count's son, having left the Ecole Polytechnique rather low in his class, was appointed, as a favor, sub-lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry commanded by the Duc de Maufrigneuse. Oscar had, therefore, in his great misfortune, the small luck of being, at the Comte de Serizy's instigation, drafted into that noble regiment, with the promise of promotion to quartermaster within a year. Chance had thus placed the ex-clerk under the command of the son of the Comte de Serizy. Madame Clapart, after languishing for some days, so keenly was she affected by these catastrophes, became a victim to the remorse which seizes upon many a mother whose conduct has been frail in her youth, and who, in her old age, turns to repentance. She now considered herself under a curse. She attributed the sorrows of her second marriage and the misfortunes of her son to a just retribution by which God was compelling her to expiate the errors and pleasures of her youth. This opinion soon became a certainty in her mind. The poor woman went, for the first time in forty years, to confess herself to the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul's, who led her into the practice of devotion. But so ill-used and loving a soul as that of Madame Clapart's could never be anything but simply pious. The Aspasia of the Directory wanted to expiate her sins in order to draw down the blessing of God on the head of her poor Oscar, and she henceforth vowed herself to works and deeds of the purest piety. She believed she had won the attention of heaven when she saved the life of Monsieur Clapart, who, thanks to her devotion, lived on to torture her; but she chose to see, in the tyranny of that imbecile mind, a trial inflicted by the hand of one who loveth while he chasteneth. Oscar, meantime, behaved so well that in 1830 he was first sergeant of the company of the Vicomte de Serizy, which gave him the rank of sub-lieutenant of the line. Oscar Husson was by that time twenty-five years old. As the Royal Guard, to which his regiment was attached, was always in garrison in Paris, or within a circumference of thirty miles around the capital, he came to see his mother from time to time, and tell her his griefs; for he had the sense to see that he could never become an officer as matters then were. At that time the cavalry grades were all being taken up by the younger sons of noble families, and men without the article to their names found promotion difficult. Oscar's sole ambition was to leave the Guards and be appointed sub-lieutenant in a regiment of the cavalry of the line. In the month of February, 1830, Madame Clapart obtained this promotion for her son through the influence of Madame la Dauphine, granted to the Abbe Gaudron, now rector of Saint-Pauls. Although Oscar outwardly professed to be devoted to the Bourbons, in the depths of his heart he was a liberal. Therefore, in the struggle of 1830, he went over to the side of the people. This desertion, which had an importance due to the crisis in which it took place, brought him before the eyes of the public. During the excitement of triumph in the month of August he was promoted lieutenant, received the cross of the Legion of honor, and was attached as aide-de-camp to La Fayette, who gave him the rank of captain in 1832. When the amateur of the best of all possible republics was removed from the command of the National guard, Oscar Husson, whose devotion to the new dynasty amounted to fanaticism, was appointed major of a regiment sent to Africa at the time of the first expedition undertaken by the Prince-royal. The Vicomte de Serizy chanced to be the lieutenant-colonel of this regiment. At the affair of the Makta, where the field had to be abandoned to the Arabs, Monsieur de Serizy was left wounded under a dead horse. Oscar, discovering this, called out to the squadron: "Messieurs, it is going to death, but we cannot abandon our colonel." He dashed upon the enemy, and his electrified soldiers followed him. The Arabs, in their first astonishment at this furious and unlooked-for return, allowed Oscar to seize the viscount, whom he flung across his horse, and carried off at full gallop,--receiving, as he did so, two slashes from yataghans on his left arm. Oscar's conduct on this occasion was rewarded with the officer's cross of the Legion of honor, and by his promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He took the most affectionate care of the Vicomte de Serizy, whose mother came to meet him on the arrival of the regiment at Toulon, where, as we know, the young man died of his wounds. The Comtesse de Serizy had not separated her son from the man who had shown him such devotion. Oscar himself was so seriously wounded that the surgeons whom the countess had brought with her from Paris thought best to amputate his left arm. Thus the Comte de Serizy was led not only to forgive Oscar for his painful remarks on the journey to Presles, but to feel himself his debtor on behalf

kindness

How many times the word 'kindness' appears in the text?

you shall being me luck! See, here are my last hundred francs." And the "marquise" took out from her purse, the rings of which were adorned with diamonds, five gold pieces. Oscar pulled out his hundred in silver five-franc pieces, much ashamed at having to mingle such ignoble coins with gold. In ten throws the actress lost the two hundred francs. "Oh! how stupid!" she cried. "I'm banker now. But we'll play together still, won't we?" Fanny Beaupre rose to take her place as banker, and Oscar, finding himself observed by the whole table, dared not retire on the ground that he had no money. Speech failed him, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. "Lend me five hundred francs," said the actress to the danseuse. Florentine brought the money, which she obtained from Georges, who had just passed eight times at ecarte. "Nathan has won twelve hundred francs," said the actress to Oscar. "Bankers always win; we won't let them fool us, will we?" she whispered in his ear. Persons of nerve, imagination, and dash will understand how it was that poor Oscar opened his pocket-book and took out the note of five hundred francs which Desroches had given him. He looked at Nathan, the distinguished author, who now began, with Florine, to play a heavy game against the bank. "Come, my little man, take 'em up," cried Fanny Beaupre, signing to Oscar to rake in the two hundred francs which Nathan and Florine had punted. The actress did not spare taunts or jests on those who lost. She enlivened the game with jokes which Oscar thought singular; but reflection was stifled by joy; for the first two throws produced a gain of two thousand francs. Oscar then thought of feigning illness and making his escape, leaving his partner behind him; but "honor" kept him there. Three more turns and the gains were lost. Oscar felt a cold sweat running down his back, and he was sobered completely. The next two throws carried off the thousand francs of their mutual stake. Oscar was consumed with thirst, and drank three glasses of iced punch one after the other. The actress now led him into the bed-chamber, where the rest of the company were playing, talking frivolities with an easy air. But by this time the sense of his wrong-doing overcame him; the figure of Desroches appeared to him like a vision. He turned aside to a dark corner and sat down, putting his handkerchief to his eyes, and wept. Florentine noticed the attitude of true grief, which, because it is sincere, is certain to strike the eye of one who acts. She ran to him, took the handkerchief from his hand, and saw his tears; then she led him into a boudoir alone. "What is it, my child?" she said. At the tone and accent of that voice Oscar recognized a motherly kindness which is often found in women of her kind, and he answered openly:-- "I have lost five hundred francs which my employer gave me to obtain a document to-morrow morning; there's nothing for me but to fling myself into the river; I am dishonored." "How silly you are!" she said. "Stay where you are; I'll get you a thousand francs and you can win back what you've lost; but don't risk more than five hundred, so that you may be sure of your master's money. Georges plays a fine game at ecarte; bet on him." Oscar, frightened by his position, accepted the offer of the mistress of the house. "Ah!" he thought, "it is only women of rank who are capable of such kindness. Beautiful, noble, rich! how lucky Georges is!" He received the thousand francs from Florentine and returned to bet on his hoaxer. Georges had just passed for the fourth time when Oscar sat down beside him. The other players saw with satisfaction the arrival of a new better; for all, with the instinct of gamblers, took the side of Giroudeau, the old officer of the Empire. "Messieurs," said Georges, "you'll be punished for deserting me; I feel in the vein. Come, Oscar, we'll make an end of them!" Georges and his partner lost five games running. After losing the thousand francs Oscar was seized with the fury of play and insisted on taking the cards himself. By the result of a chance not at all uncommon with those who play for the first time, he won. But Georges bewildered him with advice; told him when to throw the cards, and even snatched them from his hand; so that this conflict of wills and intuitions injured his vein. By three o'clock in the morning, after various changes of fortune, and still drinking punch, Oscar came down to his last hundred francs. He rose with a heavy head, completely stupefied, took a few steps forward, and fell upon a sofa in the boudoir, his eyes closing in a leaden sleep. "Mariette," said Fanny Beaupre to Godeschal's sister, who had come in about two o'clock, "do you dine here to-morrow? Camusot and Pere Cardot are coming, and we'll have some fun." "What!" cried Florentine, "and my old fellow never told me!" "He said he'd tell you to-morrow morning," remarked Fanny Beaupre. "The devil take him and his orgies!" exclaimed Florentine. "He and Camusot are worse than magistrates or stage-managers. But we have very good dinners here, Mariette," she continued. "Cardot always orders them from Chevet's; bring your Duc de Maufrigneuse and we'll make them dance like Tritons." Hearing the names of Cardot and Camusot, Oscar made an effort to throw off his sleep; but he could only mutter a few words which were not understood, and then he fell back upon the silken cushions. "You'll have to keep him here all night," said Fanny Beaupre, laughing, to Florentine. "Oh! poor boy! he is drunk with punch and despair both. It is the second clerk in your brother's office," she said to Mariette. "He has lost the money his master gave him for some legal affair. He wanted to drown himself; so I lent him a thousand francs, but those brigands Finot and Giroudeau won them from him. Poor innocent!" "But we ought to wake him," said Mariette. "My brother won't make light of it, nor his master either." "Oh, wake him if you can, and carry him off with you!" said Florentine, returning to the salon to receive the adieux of some departing guests. Presently those who remained began what was called "character dancing," and by the time it was broad daylight, Florentine, tired out, went to bed, oblivious to Oscar, who was still in the boudoir sound asleep. CHAPTER X. ANOTHER CATASTROPHE About eleven the next morning, a terrible sound awoke the unfortunate clerk. Recognizing the voice of his uncle Cardot, he thought it wise to feign sleep, and so turned his face into the yellow velvet cushions on which he had passed the night. "Really, my little Florentine," said the old gentleman, "this is neither right nor sensible; you danced last evening in 'Les Ruines,' and you have spent the night in an orgy. That's deliberately going to work to lose your freshness. Besides which, it was ungrateful to inaugurate this beautiful apartment without even letting me know. Who knows what has been going on here?" "Old monster!" cried Florentine, "haven't you a key that lets you in at all hours? My ball lasted till five in the morning, and you have the cruelty to come and wake me up at eleven!" "Half-past eleven, Titine," observed Cardot, humbly. "I came out early to order a dinner fit for an archbishop at Chevet's. Just see how the carpets are stained! What sort of people did you have here?" "You needn't complain, for Fanny Beaupre told me you were coming to dinner with Camusot, and to please you I've invited Tullia, du Bruel, Mariette, the Duc de Maufrigneuse, Florine, and Nathan. So you'll have the four loveliest creatures ever seen behind the foot-lights; we'll dance you a 'pas de Zephire.'" "It is enough to kill you to lead such a life!" cried old Cardot; "and look at the broken glasses! What pillage! The antechamber actually makes me shudder--" At this instant the wrathful old gentleman stopped short as if magnetized, like a bird which a snake is charming. He saw the outline of a form in a black coat through the door of the boudoir. "Ah, Mademoiselle Cabirolle!" he said at last. "Well, what?" she asked. The eyes of the danseuse followed those of the little old man; and when she recognized the presence of the clerk she went off into such fits of laughter that not only was the old gentleman nonplussed, but Oscar was compelled to appear; for Florentine took him by the arm, still pealing with laughter at the conscience-stricken faces of the uncle and nephew. "You here, nephew?" "Nephew! so he's your nephew?" cried Florentine, with another burst of laughter. "You never told me about him. Why didn't Mariette carry you off?" she said to Oscar, who stood there petrified. "What can he do now, poor boy?" "Whatever he pleases!" said Cardot, sharply, marching to the door as if to go away. "One moment, papa Cardot. You will be so good as to get your nephew out of a scrape into which I led him; for he played the money of his master and lost it, and I lend him a thousand francs to win it back, and he lost that too." "Miserable boy! you lost fifteen hundred francs at play at your age?" "Oh, uncle, uncle!" cried poor Oscar, plunged by these words into all the horrors of his position, and falling on his knees before his uncle, with clasped hands, "It is twelve o'clock! I am lost, dishonored! Monsieur Desroches will have no pity! He gave me the money for an important affair, in which his pride was concerned. I was to get a paper at the Palais in the case of Vandernesse versus Vandernesse! What will become of me? Oh, save me for the sake of my father and aunt! Come with me to Monsieur Desroches, and explain it to him; make some excuse,--anything!" These sentences were jerked out through sobs and tears that might have moved the sphinx of Luxor. "Old skinflint!" said the danseuse, who was crying, "will you let your own nephew be dishonored,--the son of the man to whom you owe your fortune?--for his name is Oscar Husson. Save him, or Titine will deny you forever!" "But how did he come here?" asked Cardot. "Don't you see that the reason he forgot to go for those papers was because he was drunk and overslept himself. Georges and his cousin Frederic took all the clerks in his office to a feast at the Rocher de Cancale." Pere Cardot looked at Florentine and hesitated. "Come, come," she said, "you old monkey, shouldn't I have hid him better if there had been anything else in it?" "There, take your five hundred francs, you scamp!" said Cardot to his nephew, "and remember, that's the last penny you'll ever get from me. Go and make it up with your master if you can. I'll return the thousand francs which you borrowed of mademoiselle; but I'll never hear another word about you." Oscar disappeared, not wishing to hear more. Once in the street, however, he knew not where to go. Chance which destroys men and chance which saves them were both making equal efforts for and against Oscar during that fateful morning. But he was doomed to fall before a master who forgave no failure in any affair he had once undertaken. When Mariette reached home that night, she felt alarmed at what might happen to the youth in whom her brother took interest and she wrote a hasty note to Godeschal, telling him what had happened to Oscar and inclosing a bank bill for five hundred francs to repair his loss. The kind-hearted creature went to sleep after charging her maid to carry the little note to Desroches' office before seven o'clock in the morning. Godeschal, on his side, getting up at six and finding that Oscar had not returned, guessed what had happened. He took the five hundred francs from his own little hoard and rushed to the Palais, where he obtained a copy of the judgment and returned in time to lay it before Desroches by eight o'clock. Meantime Desroches, who always rose at four, was in his office by seven. Mariette's maid, not finding the brother of her mistress in his bedroom, came down to the office and there met Desroches, to whom she very naturally offered the note. "Is it about business?" he said; "I am Monsieur Desroches." "You can see, monsieur," replied the maid. Desroches opened the letter and read it. Finding the five-hundred-franc note, he went into his private office furiously angry with his second clerk. About half-past seven he heard Godeschal dictating to the second head-clerk a copy of the document in question, and a few moments later the good fellow entered his master's office with an air of triumph in his heart. "Did Oscar Husson fetch the paper this morning from Simon?" inquired Desroches. "Yes, monsieur." "Who gave him the money?" "Why, you did, Saturday," replied Godeschal. "Then it rains five-hundred-franc notes," cried Desroches. "Look here, Godeschal, you are a fine fellow, but that little Husson does not deserve such generosity. I hate idiots, but I hate still more the men who will go wrong in spite of the fatherly care which watches over them." He gave Godeschal Mariette's letter and the five-hundred-franc note which she had sent. "You must excuse my having opened it," he said, "but your sister's maid told me it was on business. Dismiss Husson." "Poor unhappy boy! what grief he has caused me!" said Godeschal, "that tall ne'er-do-well of a Georges Marest is his evil genius; he ought to flee him like the plague; if not, he'll bring him to some third disgrace." "What do you mean by that?" asked Desroches. Godeschal then related briefly the affair of the journey to Presles. "Ah! yes," said the lawyer, "I remember Joseph Bridau told me that story about the time it happened. It is to that meeting that we owe the favor Monsieur de Serizy has since shown in the matter of Joseph's brother, Philippe Bridau." At this moment Moreau, to whom the case of the Vandernesse estate was of much importance, entered the office. The marquis wished to sell the land in parcels and the count was opposed to such a sale. The land-agent received therefore the first fire of Desroches' wrath against his ex-second clerk and all the threatening prophecies which he fulminated against him. The result was that this most sincere friend and protector of the unhappy youth came to the conclusion that his vanity was incorrigible. "Make him a barrister," said Desroches. "He has only his last examination to pass. In that line, his defects might prove virtues, for self-love and vanity give tongues to half the attorneys." At this time Clapart, who was ill, was being nursed by his wife,--a painful task, a duty without reward. The sick man tormented the poor creature, who was now doomed to learn what venomous and spiteful teasing a half-imbecile man, whom poverty had rendered craftily savage, could be capable of in the weary tete-a-tete of each endless day. Delighted to turn a sharpened arrow in the sensitive heart of the mother, he had, in a measure, studied the fears that Oscar's behavior and defects inspired in the poor woman. When a mother receives from her child a shock like that of the affair at Presles, she continues in a state of constant fear, and, by the manner in which his wife boasted of Oscar every time he obtained the slightest success, Clapart knew the extent of her secret uneasiness, and he took pains to rouse it on every occasion. "Well, Madame," Clapart would say, "Oscar is doing better than I even hoped. That journey to Presles was only a heedlessness of youth. Where can you find young lads who do not commit just such faults? Poor child! he bears his privations heroically! If his father had lived, he would never have had any. God grant he may know how to control his passions!" etc., etc. While all these catastrophes were happening in the rue de Vendome and the rue de Bethisy, Clapart, sitting in the chimney corner, wrapped in an old dressing-gown, watched his wife, who was engaged over the fire in their bedroom in simultaneously making the family broth, Clapart's "tisane," and her own breakfast. "Mon Dieu! I wish I knew how the affair of yesterday ended. Oscar was to breakfast at the Rocher de Cancale and spend the evening with a marquise--" "Don't trouble yourself! Sooner or later you'll find out about your swan," said her husband. "Do you really believe in that marquise? Pooh! A young man who has senses and a taste for extravagance like Oscar can find such ladies as that on every bush--if he pays for them. Some fine morning you'll find yourself with a load of debt on your back." "You are always trying to put me in despair!" cried Madame Clapart. "You complained that my son lived on your salary, and never has he cost you a penny. For two years you haven't had the slightest cause of complaint against him; here he is second clerk, his uncle and Monsieur Moreau pay all expenses, and he earns, himself, a salary of eight hundred francs. If we have bread to eat in our old age we may owe it all to that dear boy. You are really too unjust--" "You call my foresight unjust, do you?" replied the invalid, crossly. Just then the bell rang loudly. Madame Clapart ran to open the door, and remained in the outer room with Moreau, who had come to soften the blow which Oscar's new folly would deal to the heart of his poor mother. "What! he gambled with the money of the office?" she cried, bursting into tears. "Didn't I tell you so, hey?" said Clapart, appearing like a spectre at the door of the salon whither his curiosity had brought him. "Oh! what shall we do with him?" said Madame Clapart, whose grief made her impervious to Clapart's taunt. "If he bore my name," replied Moreau, "I should wait composedly till he draws for the conscription, and if he gets a fatal number I should not provide him with a substitute. This is the second time your son has committed a folly out of sheer vanity. Well, vanity may inspire fine deeds in war and may advance him in the career of a soldier. Besides, six years of military service will put some lead into his head; and as he has only his last legal examination to pass, it won't be much ill-luck for him if he doesn't become a lawyer till he is twenty-six; that is, if he wants to continue in the law after paying, as they say, his tax of blood. By that time, at any rate, he will have been severely punished, he will have learned experience, and contracted habits of subordination. Before making his probation at the bar he will have gone through his probations in life." "If that is your decision for a son," said Madame Clapart, "I see that the heart of a father is not like that of a mother. My poor Oscar a common soldier!--" "Would you rather he flung himself headforemost into the Seine after committing a dishonorable action? He cannot now become a solicitor; do you think him steady and wise enough to be a barrister? No. While his reason is maturing, what will he become? A dissipated fellow. The discipline of the army will, at least, preserve him from that." "Could he not go into some other office? His uncle Cardot has promised to pay for his substitute; Oscar is to dedicate his graduating thesis to him." At this moment carriage-wheels were heard, and a hackney-coach containing Oscar and all his worldly belongings stopped before the door. The luckless young man came up at once. "Ah! here you are, Monsieur Joli-Coeur!" cried Clapart. Oscar kissed his mother, and held out to Moreau a hand which the latter refused to take. To this rebuff Oscar replied by a reproachful look, the boldness of which he had never shown before. Then he turned on Clapart. "Listen to me, monsieur," said the youth, transformed into a man. "You worry my poor mother devilishly, and that's your right, for she is, unfortunately, your wife. But as for me, it is another thing. I shall be of age in a few months; and you have no rights over me even as a minor. I have never asked anything of you. Thanks to Monsieur Moreau, I have never cost you one penny, and I owe you no gratitude. Therefore, I say, let me alone!" Clapart, hearing this apostrophe, slunk back to his sofa in the chimney corner. The reasoning and the inward fury of the young man, who had just received a lecture from his friend Godeschal, silenced the imbecile mind of the sick man. "A momentary temptation, such as you yourself would have yielded to at my age," said Oscar to Moreau, "has made me commit a fault which Desroches thinks serious, though it is only a peccadillo. I am more provoked with myself for taking Florentine of the Gaiete for a marquise than I am for losing fifteen hundred francs after a little debauch in which everybody, even Godeschal, was half-seas over. This time, at any rate, I've hurt no one by myself. I'm cured of such things forever. If you are willing to help me, Monsieur Moreau, I swear to you that the six years I must still stay a clerk before I can get a practice shall be spent without--" "Stop there!" said Moreau. "I have three children, and I can make no promises." "Never mind, never mind," said Madame Clapart to her son, casting a reproachful glance at Moreau. "Your uncle Cardot--" "I have no longer an uncle Cardot," replied Oscar, who related the scene at the rue de Vendome. Madame Clapart, feeling her legs give way under the weight of her body, staggered to a chair in the dining-room, where she fell as if struck by lightning. "All the miseries together!" she said, as she fainted. Moreau took the poor mother in his arms, and carried her to the bed in her chamber. Oscar remained motionless, as if crushed. "There is nothing left for you," said Moreau, coming back to him, "but to make yourself a soldier. That idiot of a Clapart looks to me as though he couldn't live three months, and then your mother will be without a penny. Ought I not, therefore, to reserve for her the little money I am able to give? It was impossible to tell you this before her. As a soldier, you'll eat plain bread and reflect on life such as it is to those who are born into it without fortune." "I may get a lucky number," said Oscar. "Suppose you do, what then? Your mother has well fulfilled her duty towards you. She gave you an education; she placed you on the right road, and secured you a career. You have left it. Now, what can you do? Without money, nothing; as you know by this time. You are not a man who can begin a new career by taking off your coat and going to work in your shirt-sleeves with the tools of an artisan. Besides, your mother loves you, and she would die to see you come to that." Oscar sat down and no longer restrained his tears, which flowed copiously. At last he understood this language, so completely unintelligible to him ever since his first fault. "Men without means ought to be perfect," added Moreau, not suspecting the profundity of that cruel sentence. "My fate will soon be decided," said Oscar. "I draw my number the day after to-morrow. Between now and then I will decide upon my future." Moreau, deeply distressed in spite of his stern bearing, left the household in the rue de la Cerisaie to its despair. Three days later Oscar drew the number twenty-seven. In the interests of the poor lad the former steward of Presles had the courage to go to the Comte de Serizy and ask for his influence to get Oscar into the cavalry. It happened that the count's son, having left the Ecole Polytechnique rather low in his class, was appointed, as a favor, sub-lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry commanded by the Duc de Maufrigneuse. Oscar had, therefore, in his great misfortune, the small luck of being, at the Comte de Serizy's instigation, drafted into that noble regiment, with the promise of promotion to quartermaster within a year. Chance had thus placed the ex-clerk under the command of the son of the Comte de Serizy. Madame Clapart, after languishing for some days, so keenly was she affected by these catastrophes, became a victim to the remorse which seizes upon many a mother whose conduct has been frail in her youth, and who, in her old age, turns to repentance. She now considered herself under a curse. She attributed the sorrows of her second marriage and the misfortunes of her son to a just retribution by which God was compelling her to expiate the errors and pleasures of her youth. This opinion soon became a certainty in her mind. The poor woman went, for the first time in forty years, to confess herself to the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul's, who led her into the practice of devotion. But so ill-used and loving a soul as that of Madame Clapart's could never be anything but simply pious. The Aspasia of the Directory wanted to expiate her sins in order to draw down the blessing of God on the head of her poor Oscar, and she henceforth vowed herself to works and deeds of the purest piety. She believed she had won the attention of heaven when she saved the life of Monsieur Clapart, who, thanks to her devotion, lived on to torture her; but she chose to see, in the tyranny of that imbecile mind, a trial inflicted by the hand of one who loveth while he chasteneth. Oscar, meantime, behaved so well that in 1830 he was first sergeant of the company of the Vicomte de Serizy, which gave him the rank of sub-lieutenant of the line. Oscar Husson was by that time twenty-five years old. As the Royal Guard, to which his regiment was attached, was always in garrison in Paris, or within a circumference of thirty miles around the capital, he came to see his mother from time to time, and tell her his griefs; for he had the sense to see that he could never become an officer as matters then were. At that time the cavalry grades were all being taken up by the younger sons of noble families, and men without the article to their names found promotion difficult. Oscar's sole ambition was to leave the Guards and be appointed sub-lieutenant in a regiment of the cavalry of the line. In the month of February, 1830, Madame Clapart obtained this promotion for her son through the influence of Madame la Dauphine, granted to the Abbe Gaudron, now rector of Saint-Pauls. Although Oscar outwardly professed to be devoted to the Bourbons, in the depths of his heart he was a liberal. Therefore, in the struggle of 1830, he went over to the side of the people. This desertion, which had an importance due to the crisis in which it took place, brought him before the eyes of the public. During the excitement of triumph in the month of August he was promoted lieutenant, received the cross of the Legion of honor, and was attached as aide-de-camp to La Fayette, who gave him the rank of captain in 1832. When the amateur of the best of all possible republics was removed from the command of the National guard, Oscar Husson, whose devotion to the new dynasty amounted to fanaticism, was appointed major of a regiment sent to Africa at the time of the first expedition undertaken by the Prince-royal. The Vicomte de Serizy chanced to be the lieutenant-colonel of this regiment. At the affair of the Makta, where the field had to be abandoned to the Arabs, Monsieur de Serizy was left wounded under a dead horse. Oscar, discovering this, called out to the squadron: "Messieurs, it is going to death, but we cannot abandon our colonel." He dashed upon the enemy, and his electrified soldiers followed him. The Arabs, in their first astonishment at this furious and unlooked-for return, allowed Oscar to seize the viscount, whom he flung across his horse, and carried off at full gallop,--receiving, as he did so, two slashes from yataghans on his left arm. Oscar's conduct on this occasion was rewarded with the officer's cross of the Legion of honor, and by his promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He took the most affectionate care of the Vicomte de Serizy, whose mother came to meet him on the arrival of the regiment at Toulon, where, as we know, the young man died of his wounds. The Comtesse de Serizy had not separated her son from the man who had shown him such devotion. Oscar himself was so seriously wounded that the surgeons whom the countess had brought with her from Paris thought best to amputate his left arm. Thus the Comte de Serizy was led not only to forgive Oscar for his painful remarks on the journey to Presles, but to feel himself his debtor on behalf

play

How many times the word 'play' appears in the text?

you shall being me luck! See, here are my last hundred francs." And the "marquise" took out from her purse, the rings of which were adorned with diamonds, five gold pieces. Oscar pulled out his hundred in silver five-franc pieces, much ashamed at having to mingle such ignoble coins with gold. In ten throws the actress lost the two hundred francs. "Oh! how stupid!" she cried. "I'm banker now. But we'll play together still, won't we?" Fanny Beaupre rose to take her place as banker, and Oscar, finding himself observed by the whole table, dared not retire on the ground that he had no money. Speech failed him, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. "Lend me five hundred francs," said the actress to the danseuse. Florentine brought the money, which she obtained from Georges, who had just passed eight times at ecarte. "Nathan has won twelve hundred francs," said the actress to Oscar. "Bankers always win; we won't let them fool us, will we?" she whispered in his ear. Persons of nerve, imagination, and dash will understand how it was that poor Oscar opened his pocket-book and took out the note of five hundred francs which Desroches had given him. He looked at Nathan, the distinguished author, who now began, with Florine, to play a heavy game against the bank. "Come, my little man, take 'em up," cried Fanny Beaupre, signing to Oscar to rake in the two hundred francs which Nathan and Florine had punted. The actress did not spare taunts or jests on those who lost. She enlivened the game with jokes which Oscar thought singular; but reflection was stifled by joy; for the first two throws produced a gain of two thousand francs. Oscar then thought of feigning illness and making his escape, leaving his partner behind him; but "honor" kept him there. Three more turns and the gains were lost. Oscar felt a cold sweat running down his back, and he was sobered completely. The next two throws carried off the thousand francs of their mutual stake. Oscar was consumed with thirst, and drank three glasses of iced punch one after the other. The actress now led him into the bed-chamber, where the rest of the company were playing, talking frivolities with an easy air. But by this time the sense of his wrong-doing overcame him; the figure of Desroches appeared to him like a vision. He turned aside to a dark corner and sat down, putting his handkerchief to his eyes, and wept. Florentine noticed the attitude of true grief, which, because it is sincere, is certain to strike the eye of one who acts. She ran to him, took the handkerchief from his hand, and saw his tears; then she led him into a boudoir alone. "What is it, my child?" she said. At the tone and accent of that voice Oscar recognized a motherly kindness which is often found in women of her kind, and he answered openly:-- "I have lost five hundred francs which my employer gave me to obtain a document to-morrow morning; there's nothing for me but to fling myself into the river; I am dishonored." "How silly you are!" she said. "Stay where you are; I'll get you a thousand francs and you can win back what you've lost; but don't risk more than five hundred, so that you may be sure of your master's money. Georges plays a fine game at ecarte; bet on him." Oscar, frightened by his position, accepted the offer of the mistress of the house. "Ah!" he thought, "it is only women of rank who are capable of such kindness. Beautiful, noble, rich! how lucky Georges is!" He received the thousand francs from Florentine and returned to bet on his hoaxer. Georges had just passed for the fourth time when Oscar sat down beside him. The other players saw with satisfaction the arrival of a new better; for all, with the instinct of gamblers, took the side of Giroudeau, the old officer of the Empire. "Messieurs," said Georges, "you'll be punished for deserting me; I feel in the vein. Come, Oscar, we'll make an end of them!" Georges and his partner lost five games running. After losing the thousand francs Oscar was seized with the fury of play and insisted on taking the cards himself. By the result of a chance not at all uncommon with those who play for the first time, he won. But Georges bewildered him with advice; told him when to throw the cards, and even snatched them from his hand; so that this conflict of wills and intuitions injured his vein. By three o'clock in the morning, after various changes of fortune, and still drinking punch, Oscar came down to his last hundred francs. He rose with a heavy head, completely stupefied, took a few steps forward, and fell upon a sofa in the boudoir, his eyes closing in a leaden sleep. "Mariette," said Fanny Beaupre to Godeschal's sister, who had come in about two o'clock, "do you dine here to-morrow? Camusot and Pere Cardot are coming, and we'll have some fun." "What!" cried Florentine, "and my old fellow never told me!" "He said he'd tell you to-morrow morning," remarked Fanny Beaupre. "The devil take him and his orgies!" exclaimed Florentine. "He and Camusot are worse than magistrates or stage-managers. But we have very good dinners here, Mariette," she continued. "Cardot always orders them from Chevet's; bring your Duc de Maufrigneuse and we'll make them dance like Tritons." Hearing the names of Cardot and Camusot, Oscar made an effort to throw off his sleep; but he could only mutter a few words which were not understood, and then he fell back upon the silken cushions. "You'll have to keep him here all night," said Fanny Beaupre, laughing, to Florentine. "Oh! poor boy! he is drunk with punch and despair both. It is the second clerk in your brother's office," she said to Mariette. "He has lost the money his master gave him for some legal affair. He wanted to drown himself; so I lent him a thousand francs, but those brigands Finot and Giroudeau won them from him. Poor innocent!" "But we ought to wake him," said Mariette. "My brother won't make light of it, nor his master either." "Oh, wake him if you can, and carry him off with you!" said Florentine, returning to the salon to receive the adieux of some departing guests. Presently those who remained began what was called "character dancing," and by the time it was broad daylight, Florentine, tired out, went to bed, oblivious to Oscar, who was still in the boudoir sound asleep. CHAPTER X. ANOTHER CATASTROPHE About eleven the next morning, a terrible sound awoke the unfortunate clerk. Recognizing the voice of his uncle Cardot, he thought it wise to feign sleep, and so turned his face into the yellow velvet cushions on which he had passed the night. "Really, my little Florentine," said the old gentleman, "this is neither right nor sensible; you danced last evening in 'Les Ruines,' and you have spent the night in an orgy. That's deliberately going to work to lose your freshness. Besides which, it was ungrateful to inaugurate this beautiful apartment without even letting me know. Who knows what has been going on here?" "Old monster!" cried Florentine, "haven't you a key that lets you in at all hours? My ball lasted till five in the morning, and you have the cruelty to come and wake me up at eleven!" "Half-past eleven, Titine," observed Cardot, humbly. "I came out early to order a dinner fit for an archbishop at Chevet's. Just see how the carpets are stained! What sort of people did you have here?" "You needn't complain, for Fanny Beaupre told me you were coming to dinner with Camusot, and to please you I've invited Tullia, du Bruel, Mariette, the Duc de Maufrigneuse, Florine, and Nathan. So you'll have the four loveliest creatures ever seen behind the foot-lights; we'll dance you a 'pas de Zephire.'" "It is enough to kill you to lead such a life!" cried old Cardot; "and look at the broken glasses! What pillage! The antechamber actually makes me shudder--" At this instant the wrathful old gentleman stopped short as if magnetized, like a bird which a snake is charming. He saw the outline of a form in a black coat through the door of the boudoir. "Ah, Mademoiselle Cabirolle!" he said at last. "Well, what?" she asked. The eyes of the danseuse followed those of the little old man; and when she recognized the presence of the clerk she went off into such fits of laughter that not only was the old gentleman nonplussed, but Oscar was compelled to appear; for Florentine took him by the arm, still pealing with laughter at the conscience-stricken faces of the uncle and nephew. "You here, nephew?" "Nephew! so he's your nephew?" cried Florentine, with another burst of laughter. "You never told me about him. Why didn't Mariette carry you off?" she said to Oscar, who stood there petrified. "What can he do now, poor boy?" "Whatever he pleases!" said Cardot, sharply, marching to the door as if to go away. "One moment, papa Cardot. You will be so good as to get your nephew out of a scrape into which I led him; for he played the money of his master and lost it, and I lend him a thousand francs to win it back, and he lost that too." "Miserable boy! you lost fifteen hundred francs at play at your age?" "Oh, uncle, uncle!" cried poor Oscar, plunged by these words into all the horrors of his position, and falling on his knees before his uncle, with clasped hands, "It is twelve o'clock! I am lost, dishonored! Monsieur Desroches will have no pity! He gave me the money for an important affair, in which his pride was concerned. I was to get a paper at the Palais in the case of Vandernesse versus Vandernesse! What will become of me? Oh, save me for the sake of my father and aunt! Come with me to Monsieur Desroches, and explain it to him; make some excuse,--anything!" These sentences were jerked out through sobs and tears that might have moved the sphinx of Luxor. "Old skinflint!" said the danseuse, who was crying, "will you let your own nephew be dishonored,--the son of the man to whom you owe your fortune?--for his name is Oscar Husson. Save him, or Titine will deny you forever!" "But how did he come here?" asked Cardot. "Don't you see that the reason he forgot to go for those papers was because he was drunk and overslept himself. Georges and his cousin Frederic took all the clerks in his office to a feast at the Rocher de Cancale." Pere Cardot looked at Florentine and hesitated. "Come, come," she said, "you old monkey, shouldn't I have hid him better if there had been anything else in it?" "There, take your five hundred francs, you scamp!" said Cardot to his nephew, "and remember, that's the last penny you'll ever get from me. Go and make it up with your master if you can. I'll return the thousand francs which you borrowed of mademoiselle; but I'll never hear another word about you." Oscar disappeared, not wishing to hear more. Once in the street, however, he knew not where to go. Chance which destroys men and chance which saves them were both making equal efforts for and against Oscar during that fateful morning. But he was doomed to fall before a master who forgave no failure in any affair he had once undertaken. When Mariette reached home that night, she felt alarmed at what might happen to the youth in whom her brother took interest and she wrote a hasty note to Godeschal, telling him what had happened to Oscar and inclosing a bank bill for five hundred francs to repair his loss. The kind-hearted creature went to sleep after charging her maid to carry the little note to Desroches' office before seven o'clock in the morning. Godeschal, on his side, getting up at six and finding that Oscar had not returned, guessed what had happened. He took the five hundred francs from his own little hoard and rushed to the Palais, where he obtained a copy of the judgment and returned in time to lay it before Desroches by eight o'clock. Meantime Desroches, who always rose at four, was in his office by seven. Mariette's maid, not finding the brother of her mistress in his bedroom, came down to the office and there met Desroches, to whom she very naturally offered the note. "Is it about business?" he said; "I am Monsieur Desroches." "You can see, monsieur," replied the maid. Desroches opened the letter and read it. Finding the five-hundred-franc note, he went into his private office furiously angry with his second clerk. About half-past seven he heard Godeschal dictating to the second head-clerk a copy of the document in question, and a few moments later the good fellow entered his master's office with an air of triumph in his heart. "Did Oscar Husson fetch the paper this morning from Simon?" inquired Desroches. "Yes, monsieur." "Who gave him the money?" "Why, you did, Saturday," replied Godeschal. "Then it rains five-hundred-franc notes," cried Desroches. "Look here, Godeschal, you are a fine fellow, but that little Husson does not deserve such generosity. I hate idiots, but I hate still more the men who will go wrong in spite of the fatherly care which watches over them." He gave Godeschal Mariette's letter and the five-hundred-franc note which she had sent. "You must excuse my having opened it," he said, "but your sister's maid told me it was on business. Dismiss Husson." "Poor unhappy boy! what grief he has caused me!" said Godeschal, "that tall ne'er-do-well of a Georges Marest is his evil genius; he ought to flee him like the plague; if not, he'll bring him to some third disgrace." "What do you mean by that?" asked Desroches. Godeschal then related briefly the affair of the journey to Presles. "Ah! yes," said the lawyer, "I remember Joseph Bridau told me that story about the time it happened. It is to that meeting that we owe the favor Monsieur de Serizy has since shown in the matter of Joseph's brother, Philippe Bridau." At this moment Moreau, to whom the case of the Vandernesse estate was of much importance, entered the office. The marquis wished to sell the land in parcels and the count was opposed to such a sale. The land-agent received therefore the first fire of Desroches' wrath against his ex-second clerk and all the threatening prophecies which he fulminated against him. The result was that this most sincere friend and protector of the unhappy youth came to the conclusion that his vanity was incorrigible. "Make him a barrister," said Desroches. "He has only his last examination to pass. In that line, his defects might prove virtues, for self-love and vanity give tongues to half the attorneys." At this time Clapart, who was ill, was being nursed by his wife,--a painful task, a duty without reward. The sick man tormented the poor creature, who was now doomed to learn what venomous and spiteful teasing a half-imbecile man, whom poverty had rendered craftily savage, could be capable of in the weary tete-a-tete of each endless day. Delighted to turn a sharpened arrow in the sensitive heart of the mother, he had, in a measure, studied the fears that Oscar's behavior and defects inspired in the poor woman. When a mother receives from her child a shock like that of the affair at Presles, she continues in a state of constant fear, and, by the manner in which his wife boasted of Oscar every time he obtained the slightest success, Clapart knew the extent of her secret uneasiness, and he took pains to rouse it on every occasion. "Well, Madame," Clapart would say, "Oscar is doing better than I even hoped. That journey to Presles was only a heedlessness of youth. Where can you find young lads who do not commit just such faults? Poor child! he bears his privations heroically! If his father had lived, he would never have had any. God grant he may know how to control his passions!" etc., etc. While all these catastrophes were happening in the rue de Vendome and the rue de Bethisy, Clapart, sitting in the chimney corner, wrapped in an old dressing-gown, watched his wife, who was engaged over the fire in their bedroom in simultaneously making the family broth, Clapart's "tisane," and her own breakfast. "Mon Dieu! I wish I knew how the affair of yesterday ended. Oscar was to breakfast at the Rocher de Cancale and spend the evening with a marquise--" "Don't trouble yourself! Sooner or later you'll find out about your swan," said her husband. "Do you really believe in that marquise? Pooh! A young man who has senses and a taste for extravagance like Oscar can find such ladies as that on every bush--if he pays for them. Some fine morning you'll find yourself with a load of debt on your back." "You are always trying to put me in despair!" cried Madame Clapart. "You complained that my son lived on your salary, and never has he cost you a penny. For two years you haven't had the slightest cause of complaint against him; here he is second clerk, his uncle and Monsieur Moreau pay all expenses, and he earns, himself, a salary of eight hundred francs. If we have bread to eat in our old age we may owe it all to that dear boy. You are really too unjust--" "You call my foresight unjust, do you?" replied the invalid, crossly. Just then the bell rang loudly. Madame Clapart ran to open the door, and remained in the outer room with Moreau, who had come to soften the blow which Oscar's new folly would deal to the heart of his poor mother. "What! he gambled with the money of the office?" she cried, bursting into tears. "Didn't I tell you so, hey?" said Clapart, appearing like a spectre at the door of the salon whither his curiosity had brought him. "Oh! what shall we do with him?" said Madame Clapart, whose grief made her impervious to Clapart's taunt. "If he bore my name," replied Moreau, "I should wait composedly till he draws for the conscription, and if he gets a fatal number I should not provide him with a substitute. This is the second time your son has committed a folly out of sheer vanity. Well, vanity may inspire fine deeds in war and may advance him in the career of a soldier. Besides, six years of military service will put some lead into his head; and as he has only his last legal examination to pass, it won't be much ill-luck for him if he doesn't become a lawyer till he is twenty-six; that is, if he wants to continue in the law after paying, as they say, his tax of blood. By that time, at any rate, he will have been severely punished, he will have learned experience, and contracted habits of subordination. Before making his probation at the bar he will have gone through his probations in life." "If that is your decision for a son," said Madame Clapart, "I see that the heart of a father is not like that of a mother. My poor Oscar a common soldier!--" "Would you rather he flung himself headforemost into the Seine after committing a dishonorable action? He cannot now become a solicitor; do you think him steady and wise enough to be a barrister? No. While his reason is maturing, what will he become? A dissipated fellow. The discipline of the army will, at least, preserve him from that." "Could he not go into some other office? His uncle Cardot has promised to pay for his substitute; Oscar is to dedicate his graduating thesis to him." At this moment carriage-wheels were heard, and a hackney-coach containing Oscar and all his worldly belongings stopped before the door. The luckless young man came up at once. "Ah! here you are, Monsieur Joli-Coeur!" cried Clapart. Oscar kissed his mother, and held out to Moreau a hand which the latter refused to take. To this rebuff Oscar replied by a reproachful look, the boldness of which he had never shown before. Then he turned on Clapart. "Listen to me, monsieur," said the youth, transformed into a man. "You worry my poor mother devilishly, and that's your right, for she is, unfortunately, your wife. But as for me, it is another thing. I shall be of age in a few months; and you have no rights over me even as a minor. I have never asked anything of you. Thanks to Monsieur Moreau, I have never cost you one penny, and I owe you no gratitude. Therefore, I say, let me alone!" Clapart, hearing this apostrophe, slunk back to his sofa in the chimney corner. The reasoning and the inward fury of the young man, who had just received a lecture from his friend Godeschal, silenced the imbecile mind of the sick man. "A momentary temptation, such as you yourself would have yielded to at my age," said Oscar to Moreau, "has made me commit a fault which Desroches thinks serious, though it is only a peccadillo. I am more provoked with myself for taking Florentine of the Gaiete for a marquise than I am for losing fifteen hundred francs after a little debauch in which everybody, even Godeschal, was half-seas over. This time, at any rate, I've hurt no one by myself. I'm cured of such things forever. If you are willing to help me, Monsieur Moreau, I swear to you that the six years I must still stay a clerk before I can get a practice shall be spent without--" "Stop there!" said Moreau. "I have three children, and I can make no promises." "Never mind, never mind," said Madame Clapart to her son, casting a reproachful glance at Moreau. "Your uncle Cardot--" "I have no longer an uncle Cardot," replied Oscar, who related the scene at the rue de Vendome. Madame Clapart, feeling her legs give way under the weight of her body, staggered to a chair in the dining-room, where she fell as if struck by lightning. "All the miseries together!" she said, as she fainted. Moreau took the poor mother in his arms, and carried her to the bed in her chamber. Oscar remained motionless, as if crushed. "There is nothing left for you," said Moreau, coming back to him, "but to make yourself a soldier. That idiot of a Clapart looks to me as though he couldn't live three months, and then your mother will be without a penny. Ought I not, therefore, to reserve for her the little money I am able to give? It was impossible to tell you this before her. As a soldier, you'll eat plain bread and reflect on life such as it is to those who are born into it without fortune." "I may get a lucky number," said Oscar. "Suppose you do, what then? Your mother has well fulfilled her duty towards you. She gave you an education; she placed you on the right road, and secured you a career. You have left it. Now, what can you do? Without money, nothing; as you know by this time. You are not a man who can begin a new career by taking off your coat and going to work in your shirt-sleeves with the tools of an artisan. Besides, your mother loves you, and she would die to see you come to that." Oscar sat down and no longer restrained his tears, which flowed copiously. At last he understood this language, so completely unintelligible to him ever since his first fault. "Men without means ought to be perfect," added Moreau, not suspecting the profundity of that cruel sentence. "My fate will soon be decided," said Oscar. "I draw my number the day after to-morrow. Between now and then I will decide upon my future." Moreau, deeply distressed in spite of his stern bearing, left the household in the rue de la Cerisaie to its despair. Three days later Oscar drew the number twenty-seven. In the interests of the poor lad the former steward of Presles had the courage to go to the Comte de Serizy and ask for his influence to get Oscar into the cavalry. It happened that the count's son, having left the Ecole Polytechnique rather low in his class, was appointed, as a favor, sub-lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry commanded by the Duc de Maufrigneuse. Oscar had, therefore, in his great misfortune, the small luck of being, at the Comte de Serizy's instigation, drafted into that noble regiment, with the promise of promotion to quartermaster within a year. Chance had thus placed the ex-clerk under the command of the son of the Comte de Serizy. Madame Clapart, after languishing for some days, so keenly was she affected by these catastrophes, became a victim to the remorse which seizes upon many a mother whose conduct has been frail in her youth, and who, in her old age, turns to repentance. She now considered herself under a curse. She attributed the sorrows of her second marriage and the misfortunes of her son to a just retribution by which God was compelling her to expiate the errors and pleasures of her youth. This opinion soon became a certainty in her mind. The poor woman went, for the first time in forty years, to confess herself to the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul's, who led her into the practice of devotion. But so ill-used and loving a soul as that of Madame Clapart's could never be anything but simply pious. The Aspasia of the Directory wanted to expiate her sins in order to draw down the blessing of God on the head of her poor Oscar, and she henceforth vowed herself to works and deeds of the purest piety. She believed she had won the attention of heaven when she saved the life of Monsieur Clapart, who, thanks to her devotion, lived on to torture her; but she chose to see, in the tyranny of that imbecile mind, a trial inflicted by the hand of one who loveth while he chasteneth. Oscar, meantime, behaved so well that in 1830 he was first sergeant of the company of the Vicomte de Serizy, which gave him the rank of sub-lieutenant of the line. Oscar Husson was by that time twenty-five years old. As the Royal Guard, to which his regiment was attached, was always in garrison in Paris, or within a circumference of thirty miles around the capital, he came to see his mother from time to time, and tell her his griefs; for he had the sense to see that he could never become an officer as matters then were. At that time the cavalry grades were all being taken up by the younger sons of noble families, and men without the article to their names found promotion difficult. Oscar's sole ambition was to leave the Guards and be appointed sub-lieutenant in a regiment of the cavalry of the line. In the month of February, 1830, Madame Clapart obtained this promotion for her son through the influence of Madame la Dauphine, granted to the Abbe Gaudron, now rector of Saint-Pauls. Although Oscar outwardly professed to be devoted to the Bourbons, in the depths of his heart he was a liberal. Therefore, in the struggle of 1830, he went over to the side of the people. This desertion, which had an importance due to the crisis in which it took place, brought him before the eyes of the public. During the excitement of triumph in the month of August he was promoted lieutenant, received the cross of the Legion of honor, and was attached as aide-de-camp to La Fayette, who gave him the rank of captain in 1832. When the amateur of the best of all possible republics was removed from the command of the National guard, Oscar Husson, whose devotion to the new dynasty amounted to fanaticism, was appointed major of a regiment sent to Africa at the time of the first expedition undertaken by the Prince-royal. The Vicomte de Serizy chanced to be the lieutenant-colonel of this regiment. At the affair of the Makta, where the field had to be abandoned to the Arabs, Monsieur de Serizy was left wounded under a dead horse. Oscar, discovering this, called out to the squadron: "Messieurs, it is going to death, but we cannot abandon our colonel." He dashed upon the enemy, and his electrified soldiers followed him. The Arabs, in their first astonishment at this furious and unlooked-for return, allowed Oscar to seize the viscount, whom he flung across his horse, and carried off at full gallop,--receiving, as he did so, two slashes from yataghans on his left arm. Oscar's conduct on this occasion was rewarded with the officer's cross of the Legion of honor, and by his promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He took the most affectionate care of the Vicomte de Serizy, whose mother came to meet him on the arrival of the regiment at Toulon, where, as we know, the young man died of his wounds. The Comtesse de Serizy had not separated her son from the man who had shown him such devotion. Oscar himself was so seriously wounded that the surgeons whom the countess had brought with her from Paris thought best to amputate his left arm. Thus the Comte de Serizy was led not only to forgive Oscar for his painful remarks on the journey to Presles, but to feel himself his debtor on behalf

camusot

How many times the word 'camusot' appears in the text?

you shall being me luck! See, here are my last hundred francs." And the "marquise" took out from her purse, the rings of which were adorned with diamonds, five gold pieces. Oscar pulled out his hundred in silver five-franc pieces, much ashamed at having to mingle such ignoble coins with gold. In ten throws the actress lost the two hundred francs. "Oh! how stupid!" she cried. "I'm banker now. But we'll play together still, won't we?" Fanny Beaupre rose to take her place as banker, and Oscar, finding himself observed by the whole table, dared not retire on the ground that he had no money. Speech failed him, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. "Lend me five hundred francs," said the actress to the danseuse. Florentine brought the money, which she obtained from Georges, who had just passed eight times at ecarte. "Nathan has won twelve hundred francs," said the actress to Oscar. "Bankers always win; we won't let them fool us, will we?" she whispered in his ear. Persons of nerve, imagination, and dash will understand how it was that poor Oscar opened his pocket-book and took out the note of five hundred francs which Desroches had given him. He looked at Nathan, the distinguished author, who now began, with Florine, to play a heavy game against the bank. "Come, my little man, take 'em up," cried Fanny Beaupre, signing to Oscar to rake in the two hundred francs which Nathan and Florine had punted. The actress did not spare taunts or jests on those who lost. She enlivened the game with jokes which Oscar thought singular; but reflection was stifled by joy; for the first two throws produced a gain of two thousand francs. Oscar then thought of feigning illness and making his escape, leaving his partner behind him; but "honor" kept him there. Three more turns and the gains were lost. Oscar felt a cold sweat running down his back, and he was sobered completely. The next two throws carried off the thousand francs of their mutual stake. Oscar was consumed with thirst, and drank three glasses of iced punch one after the other. The actress now led him into the bed-chamber, where the rest of the company were playing, talking frivolities with an easy air. But by this time the sense of his wrong-doing overcame him; the figure of Desroches appeared to him like a vision. He turned aside to a dark corner and sat down, putting his handkerchief to his eyes, and wept. Florentine noticed the attitude of true grief, which, because it is sincere, is certain to strike the eye of one who acts. She ran to him, took the handkerchief from his hand, and saw his tears; then she led him into a boudoir alone. "What is it, my child?" she said. At the tone and accent of that voice Oscar recognized a motherly kindness which is often found in women of her kind, and he answered openly:-- "I have lost five hundred francs which my employer gave me to obtain a document to-morrow morning; there's nothing for me but to fling myself into the river; I am dishonored." "How silly you are!" she said. "Stay where you are; I'll get you a thousand francs and you can win back what you've lost; but don't risk more than five hundred, so that you may be sure of your master's money. Georges plays a fine game at ecarte; bet on him." Oscar, frightened by his position, accepted the offer of the mistress of the house. "Ah!" he thought, "it is only women of rank who are capable of such kindness. Beautiful, noble, rich! how lucky Georges is!" He received the thousand francs from Florentine and returned to bet on his hoaxer. Georges had just passed for the fourth time when Oscar sat down beside him. The other players saw with satisfaction the arrival of a new better; for all, with the instinct of gamblers, took the side of Giroudeau, the old officer of the Empire. "Messieurs," said Georges, "you'll be punished for deserting me; I feel in the vein. Come, Oscar, we'll make an end of them!" Georges and his partner lost five games running. After losing the thousand francs Oscar was seized with the fury of play and insisted on taking the cards himself. By the result of a chance not at all uncommon with those who play for the first time, he won. But Georges bewildered him with advice; told him when to throw the cards, and even snatched them from his hand; so that this conflict of wills and intuitions injured his vein. By three o'clock in the morning, after various changes of fortune, and still drinking punch, Oscar came down to his last hundred francs. He rose with a heavy head, completely stupefied, took a few steps forward, and fell upon a sofa in the boudoir, his eyes closing in a leaden sleep. "Mariette," said Fanny Beaupre to Godeschal's sister, who had come in about two o'clock, "do you dine here to-morrow? Camusot and Pere Cardot are coming, and we'll have some fun." "What!" cried Florentine, "and my old fellow never told me!" "He said he'd tell you to-morrow morning," remarked Fanny Beaupre. "The devil take him and his orgies!" exclaimed Florentine. "He and Camusot are worse than magistrates or stage-managers. But we have very good dinners here, Mariette," she continued. "Cardot always orders them from Chevet's; bring your Duc de Maufrigneuse and we'll make them dance like Tritons." Hearing the names of Cardot and Camusot, Oscar made an effort to throw off his sleep; but he could only mutter a few words which were not understood, and then he fell back upon the silken cushions. "You'll have to keep him here all night," said Fanny Beaupre, laughing, to Florentine. "Oh! poor boy! he is drunk with punch and despair both. It is the second clerk in your brother's office," she said to Mariette. "He has lost the money his master gave him for some legal affair. He wanted to drown himself; so I lent him a thousand francs, but those brigands Finot and Giroudeau won them from him. Poor innocent!" "But we ought to wake him," said Mariette. "My brother won't make light of it, nor his master either." "Oh, wake him if you can, and carry him off with you!" said Florentine, returning to the salon to receive the adieux of some departing guests. Presently those who remained began what was called "character dancing," and by the time it was broad daylight, Florentine, tired out, went to bed, oblivious to Oscar, who was still in the boudoir sound asleep. CHAPTER X. ANOTHER CATASTROPHE About eleven the next morning, a terrible sound awoke the unfortunate clerk. Recognizing the voice of his uncle Cardot, he thought it wise to feign sleep, and so turned his face into the yellow velvet cushions on which he had passed the night. "Really, my little Florentine," said the old gentleman, "this is neither right nor sensible; you danced last evening in 'Les Ruines,' and you have spent the night in an orgy. That's deliberately going to work to lose your freshness. Besides which, it was ungrateful to inaugurate this beautiful apartment without even letting me know. Who knows what has been going on here?" "Old monster!" cried Florentine, "haven't you a key that lets you in at all hours? My ball lasted till five in the morning, and you have the cruelty to come and wake me up at eleven!" "Half-past eleven, Titine," observed Cardot, humbly. "I came out early to order a dinner fit for an archbishop at Chevet's. Just see how the carpets are stained! What sort of people did you have here?" "You needn't complain, for Fanny Beaupre told me you were coming to dinner with Camusot, and to please you I've invited Tullia, du Bruel, Mariette, the Duc de Maufrigneuse, Florine, and Nathan. So you'll have the four loveliest creatures ever seen behind the foot-lights; we'll dance you a 'pas de Zephire.'" "It is enough to kill you to lead such a life!" cried old Cardot; "and look at the broken glasses! What pillage! The antechamber actually makes me shudder--" At this instant the wrathful old gentleman stopped short as if magnetized, like a bird which a snake is charming. He saw the outline of a form in a black coat through the door of the boudoir. "Ah, Mademoiselle Cabirolle!" he said at last. "Well, what?" she asked. The eyes of the danseuse followed those of the little old man; and when she recognized the presence of the clerk she went off into such fits of laughter that not only was the old gentleman nonplussed, but Oscar was compelled to appear; for Florentine took him by the arm, still pealing with laughter at the conscience-stricken faces of the uncle and nephew. "You here, nephew?" "Nephew! so he's your nephew?" cried Florentine, with another burst of laughter. "You never told me about him. Why didn't Mariette carry you off?" she said to Oscar, who stood there petrified. "What can he do now, poor boy?" "Whatever he pleases!" said Cardot, sharply, marching to the door as if to go away. "One moment, papa Cardot. You will be so good as to get your nephew out of a scrape into which I led him; for he played the money of his master and lost it, and I lend him a thousand francs to win it back, and he lost that too." "Miserable boy! you lost fifteen hundred francs at play at your age?" "Oh, uncle, uncle!" cried poor Oscar, plunged by these words into all the horrors of his position, and falling on his knees before his uncle, with clasped hands, "It is twelve o'clock! I am lost, dishonored! Monsieur Desroches will have no pity! He gave me the money for an important affair, in which his pride was concerned. I was to get a paper at the Palais in the case of Vandernesse versus Vandernesse! What will become of me? Oh, save me for the sake of my father and aunt! Come with me to Monsieur Desroches, and explain it to him; make some excuse,--anything!" These sentences were jerked out through sobs and tears that might have moved the sphinx of Luxor. "Old skinflint!" said the danseuse, who was crying, "will you let your own nephew be dishonored,--the son of the man to whom you owe your fortune?--for his name is Oscar Husson. Save him, or Titine will deny you forever!" "But how did he come here?" asked Cardot. "Don't you see that the reason he forgot to go for those papers was because he was drunk and overslept himself. Georges and his cousin Frederic took all the clerks in his office to a feast at the Rocher de Cancale." Pere Cardot looked at Florentine and hesitated. "Come, come," she said, "you old monkey, shouldn't I have hid him better if there had been anything else in it?" "There, take your five hundred francs, you scamp!" said Cardot to his nephew, "and remember, that's the last penny you'll ever get from me. Go and make it up with your master if you can. I'll return the thousand francs which you borrowed of mademoiselle; but I'll never hear another word about you." Oscar disappeared, not wishing to hear more. Once in the street, however, he knew not where to go. Chance which destroys men and chance which saves them were both making equal efforts for and against Oscar during that fateful morning. But he was doomed to fall before a master who forgave no failure in any affair he had once undertaken. When Mariette reached home that night, she felt alarmed at what might happen to the youth in whom her brother took interest and she wrote a hasty note to Godeschal, telling him what had happened to Oscar and inclosing a bank bill for five hundred francs to repair his loss. The kind-hearted creature went to sleep after charging her maid to carry the little note to Desroches' office before seven o'clock in the morning. Godeschal, on his side, getting up at six and finding that Oscar had not returned, guessed what had happened. He took the five hundred francs from his own little hoard and rushed to the Palais, where he obtained a copy of the judgment and returned in time to lay it before Desroches by eight o'clock. Meantime Desroches, who always rose at four, was in his office by seven. Mariette's maid, not finding the brother of her mistress in his bedroom, came down to the office and there met Desroches, to whom she very naturally offered the note. "Is it about business?" he said; "I am Monsieur Desroches." "You can see, monsieur," replied the maid. Desroches opened the letter and read it. Finding the five-hundred-franc note, he went into his private office furiously angry with his second clerk. About half-past seven he heard Godeschal dictating to the second head-clerk a copy of the document in question, and a few moments later the good fellow entered his master's office with an air of triumph in his heart. "Did Oscar Husson fetch the paper this morning from Simon?" inquired Desroches. "Yes, monsieur." "Who gave him the money?" "Why, you did, Saturday," replied Godeschal. "Then it rains five-hundred-franc notes," cried Desroches. "Look here, Godeschal, you are a fine fellow, but that little Husson does not deserve such generosity. I hate idiots, but I hate still more the men who will go wrong in spite of the fatherly care which watches over them." He gave Godeschal Mariette's letter and the five-hundred-franc note which she had sent. "You must excuse my having opened it," he said, "but your sister's maid told me it was on business. Dismiss Husson." "Poor unhappy boy! what grief he has caused me!" said Godeschal, "that tall ne'er-do-well of a Georges Marest is his evil genius; he ought to flee him like the plague; if not, he'll bring him to some third disgrace." "What do you mean by that?" asked Desroches. Godeschal then related briefly the affair of the journey to Presles. "Ah! yes," said the lawyer, "I remember Joseph Bridau told me that story about the time it happened. It is to that meeting that we owe the favor Monsieur de Serizy has since shown in the matter of Joseph's brother, Philippe Bridau." At this moment Moreau, to whom the case of the Vandernesse estate was of much importance, entered the office. The marquis wished to sell the land in parcels and the count was opposed to such a sale. The land-agent received therefore the first fire of Desroches' wrath against his ex-second clerk and all the threatening prophecies which he fulminated against him. The result was that this most sincere friend and protector of the unhappy youth came to the conclusion that his vanity was incorrigible. "Make him a barrister," said Desroches. "He has only his last examination to pass. In that line, his defects might prove virtues, for self-love and vanity give tongues to half the attorneys." At this time Clapart, who was ill, was being nursed by his wife,--a painful task, a duty without reward. The sick man tormented the poor creature, who was now doomed to learn what venomous and spiteful teasing a half-imbecile man, whom poverty had rendered craftily savage, could be capable of in the weary tete-a-tete of each endless day. Delighted to turn a sharpened arrow in the sensitive heart of the mother, he had, in a measure, studied the fears that Oscar's behavior and defects inspired in the poor woman. When a mother receives from her child a shock like that of the affair at Presles, she continues in a state of constant fear, and, by the manner in which his wife boasted of Oscar every time he obtained the slightest success, Clapart knew the extent of her secret uneasiness, and he took pains to rouse it on every occasion. "Well, Madame," Clapart would say, "Oscar is doing better than I even hoped. That journey to Presles was only a heedlessness of youth. Where can you find young lads who do not commit just such faults? Poor child! he bears his privations heroically! If his father had lived, he would never have had any. God grant he may know how to control his passions!" etc., etc. While all these catastrophes were happening in the rue de Vendome and the rue de Bethisy, Clapart, sitting in the chimney corner, wrapped in an old dressing-gown, watched his wife, who was engaged over the fire in their bedroom in simultaneously making the family broth, Clapart's "tisane," and her own breakfast. "Mon Dieu! I wish I knew how the affair of yesterday ended. Oscar was to breakfast at the Rocher de Cancale and spend the evening with a marquise--" "Don't trouble yourself! Sooner or later you'll find out about your swan," said her husband. "Do you really believe in that marquise? Pooh! A young man who has senses and a taste for extravagance like Oscar can find such ladies as that on every bush--if he pays for them. Some fine morning you'll find yourself with a load of debt on your back." "You are always trying to put me in despair!" cried Madame Clapart. "You complained that my son lived on your salary, and never has he cost you a penny. For two years you haven't had the slightest cause of complaint against him; here he is second clerk, his uncle and Monsieur Moreau pay all expenses, and he earns, himself, a salary of eight hundred francs. If we have bread to eat in our old age we may owe it all to that dear boy. You are really too unjust--" "You call my foresight unjust, do you?" replied the invalid, crossly. Just then the bell rang loudly. Madame Clapart ran to open the door, and remained in the outer room with Moreau, who had come to soften the blow which Oscar's new folly would deal to the heart of his poor mother. "What! he gambled with the money of the office?" she cried, bursting into tears. "Didn't I tell you so, hey?" said Clapart, appearing like a spectre at the door of the salon whither his curiosity had brought him. "Oh! what shall we do with him?" said Madame Clapart, whose grief made her impervious to Clapart's taunt. "If he bore my name," replied Moreau, "I should wait composedly till he draws for the conscription, and if he gets a fatal number I should not provide him with a substitute. This is the second time your son has committed a folly out of sheer vanity. Well, vanity may inspire fine deeds in war and may advance him in the career of a soldier. Besides, six years of military service will put some lead into his head; and as he has only his last legal examination to pass, it won't be much ill-luck for him if he doesn't become a lawyer till he is twenty-six; that is, if he wants to continue in the law after paying, as they say, his tax of blood. By that time, at any rate, he will have been severely punished, he will have learned experience, and contracted habits of subordination. Before making his probation at the bar he will have gone through his probations in life." "If that is your decision for a son," said Madame Clapart, "I see that the heart of a father is not like that of a mother. My poor Oscar a common soldier!--" "Would you rather he flung himself headforemost into the Seine after committing a dishonorable action? He cannot now become a solicitor; do you think him steady and wise enough to be a barrister? No. While his reason is maturing, what will he become? A dissipated fellow. The discipline of the army will, at least, preserve him from that." "Could he not go into some other office? His uncle Cardot has promised to pay for his substitute; Oscar is to dedicate his graduating thesis to him." At this moment carriage-wheels were heard, and a hackney-coach containing Oscar and all his worldly belongings stopped before the door. The luckless young man came up at once. "Ah! here you are, Monsieur Joli-Coeur!" cried Clapart. Oscar kissed his mother, and held out to Moreau a hand which the latter refused to take. To this rebuff Oscar replied by a reproachful look, the boldness of which he had never shown before. Then he turned on Clapart. "Listen to me, monsieur," said the youth, transformed into a man. "You worry my poor mother devilishly, and that's your right, for she is, unfortunately, your wife. But as for me, it is another thing. I shall be of age in a few months; and you have no rights over me even as a minor. I have never asked anything of you. Thanks to Monsieur Moreau, I have never cost you one penny, and I owe you no gratitude. Therefore, I say, let me alone!" Clapart, hearing this apostrophe, slunk back to his sofa in the chimney corner. The reasoning and the inward fury of the young man, who had just received a lecture from his friend Godeschal, silenced the imbecile mind of the sick man. "A momentary temptation, such as you yourself would have yielded to at my age," said Oscar to Moreau, "has made me commit a fault which Desroches thinks serious, though it is only a peccadillo. I am more provoked with myself for taking Florentine of the Gaiete for a marquise than I am for losing fifteen hundred francs after a little debauch in which everybody, even Godeschal, was half-seas over. This time, at any rate, I've hurt no one by myself. I'm cured of such things forever. If you are willing to help me, Monsieur Moreau, I swear to you that the six years I must still stay a clerk before I can get a practice shall be spent without--" "Stop there!" said Moreau. "I have three children, and I can make no promises." "Never mind, never mind," said Madame Clapart to her son, casting a reproachful glance at Moreau. "Your uncle Cardot--" "I have no longer an uncle Cardot," replied Oscar, who related the scene at the rue de Vendome. Madame Clapart, feeling her legs give way under the weight of her body, staggered to a chair in the dining-room, where she fell as if struck by lightning. "All the miseries together!" she said, as she fainted. Moreau took the poor mother in his arms, and carried her to the bed in her chamber. Oscar remained motionless, as if crushed. "There is nothing left for you," said Moreau, coming back to him, "but to make yourself a soldier. That idiot of a Clapart looks to me as though he couldn't live three months, and then your mother will be without a penny. Ought I not, therefore, to reserve for her the little money I am able to give? It was impossible to tell you this before her. As a soldier, you'll eat plain bread and reflect on life such as it is to those who are born into it without fortune." "I may get a lucky number," said Oscar. "Suppose you do, what then? Your mother has well fulfilled her duty towards you. She gave you an education; she placed you on the right road, and secured you a career. You have left it. Now, what can you do? Without money, nothing; as you know by this time. You are not a man who can begin a new career by taking off your coat and going to work in your shirt-sleeves with the tools of an artisan. Besides, your mother loves you, and she would die to see you come to that." Oscar sat down and no longer restrained his tears, which flowed copiously. At last he understood this language, so completely unintelligible to him ever since his first fault. "Men without means ought to be perfect," added Moreau, not suspecting the profundity of that cruel sentence. "My fate will soon be decided," said Oscar. "I draw my number the day after to-morrow. Between now and then I will decide upon my future." Moreau, deeply distressed in spite of his stern bearing, left the household in the rue de la Cerisaie to its despair. Three days later Oscar drew the number twenty-seven. In the interests of the poor lad the former steward of Presles had the courage to go to the Comte de Serizy and ask for his influence to get Oscar into the cavalry. It happened that the count's son, having left the Ecole Polytechnique rather low in his class, was appointed, as a favor, sub-lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry commanded by the Duc de Maufrigneuse. Oscar had, therefore, in his great misfortune, the small luck of being, at the Comte de Serizy's instigation, drafted into that noble regiment, with the promise of promotion to quartermaster within a year. Chance had thus placed the ex-clerk under the command of the son of the Comte de Serizy. Madame Clapart, after languishing for some days, so keenly was she affected by these catastrophes, became a victim to the remorse which seizes upon many a mother whose conduct has been frail in her youth, and who, in her old age, turns to repentance. She now considered herself under a curse. She attributed the sorrows of her second marriage and the misfortunes of her son to a just retribution by which God was compelling her to expiate the errors and pleasures of her youth. This opinion soon became a certainty in her mind. The poor woman went, for the first time in forty years, to confess herself to the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul's, who led her into the practice of devotion. But so ill-used and loving a soul as that of Madame Clapart's could never be anything but simply pious. The Aspasia of the Directory wanted to expiate her sins in order to draw down the blessing of God on the head of her poor Oscar, and she henceforth vowed herself to works and deeds of the purest piety. She believed she had won the attention of heaven when she saved the life of Monsieur Clapart, who, thanks to her devotion, lived on to torture her; but she chose to see, in the tyranny of that imbecile mind, a trial inflicted by the hand of one who loveth while he chasteneth. Oscar, meantime, behaved so well that in 1830 he was first sergeant of the company of the Vicomte de Serizy, which gave him the rank of sub-lieutenant of the line. Oscar Husson was by that time twenty-five years old. As the Royal Guard, to which his regiment was attached, was always in garrison in Paris, or within a circumference of thirty miles around the capital, he came to see his mother from time to time, and tell her his griefs; for he had the sense to see that he could never become an officer as matters then were. At that time the cavalry grades were all being taken up by the younger sons of noble families, and men without the article to their names found promotion difficult. Oscar's sole ambition was to leave the Guards and be appointed sub-lieutenant in a regiment of the cavalry of the line. In the month of February, 1830, Madame Clapart obtained this promotion for her son through the influence of Madame la Dauphine, granted to the Abbe Gaudron, now rector of Saint-Pauls. Although Oscar outwardly professed to be devoted to the Bourbons, in the depths of his heart he was a liberal. Therefore, in the struggle of 1830, he went over to the side of the people. This desertion, which had an importance due to the crisis in which it took place, brought him before the eyes of the public. During the excitement of triumph in the month of August he was promoted lieutenant, received the cross of the Legion of honor, and was attached as aide-de-camp to La Fayette, who gave him the rank of captain in 1832. When the amateur of the best of all possible republics was removed from the command of the National guard, Oscar Husson, whose devotion to the new dynasty amounted to fanaticism, was appointed major of a regiment sent to Africa at the time of the first expedition undertaken by the Prince-royal. The Vicomte de Serizy chanced to be the lieutenant-colonel of this regiment. At the affair of the Makta, where the field had to be abandoned to the Arabs, Monsieur de Serizy was left wounded under a dead horse. Oscar, discovering this, called out to the squadron: "Messieurs, it is going to death, but we cannot abandon our colonel." He dashed upon the enemy, and his electrified soldiers followed him. The Arabs, in their first astonishment at this furious and unlooked-for return, allowed Oscar to seize the viscount, whom he flung across his horse, and carried off at full gallop,--receiving, as he did so, two slashes from yataghans on his left arm. Oscar's conduct on this occasion was rewarded with the officer's cross of the Legion of honor, and by his promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He took the most affectionate care of the Vicomte de Serizy, whose mother came to meet him on the arrival of the regiment at Toulon, where, as we know, the young man died of his wounds. The Comtesse de Serizy had not separated her son from the man who had shown him such devotion. Oscar himself was so seriously wounded that the surgeons whom the countess had brought with her from Paris thought best to amputate his left arm. Thus the Comte de Serizy was led not only to forgive Oscar for his painful remarks on the journey to Presles, but to feel himself his debtor on behalf

throws

How many times the word 'throws' appears in the text?

you shall being me luck! See, here are my last hundred francs." And the "marquise" took out from her purse, the rings of which were adorned with diamonds, five gold pieces. Oscar pulled out his hundred in silver five-franc pieces, much ashamed at having to mingle such ignoble coins with gold. In ten throws the actress lost the two hundred francs. "Oh! how stupid!" she cried. "I'm banker now. But we'll play together still, won't we?" Fanny Beaupre rose to take her place as banker, and Oscar, finding himself observed by the whole table, dared not retire on the ground that he had no money. Speech failed him, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. "Lend me five hundred francs," said the actress to the danseuse. Florentine brought the money, which she obtained from Georges, who had just passed eight times at ecarte. "Nathan has won twelve hundred francs," said the actress to Oscar. "Bankers always win; we won't let them fool us, will we?" she whispered in his ear. Persons of nerve, imagination, and dash will understand how it was that poor Oscar opened his pocket-book and took out the note of five hundred francs which Desroches had given him. He looked at Nathan, the distinguished author, who now began, with Florine, to play a heavy game against the bank. "Come, my little man, take 'em up," cried Fanny Beaupre, signing to Oscar to rake in the two hundred francs which Nathan and Florine had punted. The actress did not spare taunts or jests on those who lost. She enlivened the game with jokes which Oscar thought singular; but reflection was stifled by joy; for the first two throws produced a gain of two thousand francs. Oscar then thought of feigning illness and making his escape, leaving his partner behind him; but "honor" kept him there. Three more turns and the gains were lost. Oscar felt a cold sweat running down his back, and he was sobered completely. The next two throws carried off the thousand francs of their mutual stake. Oscar was consumed with thirst, and drank three glasses of iced punch one after the other. The actress now led him into the bed-chamber, where the rest of the company were playing, talking frivolities with an easy air. But by this time the sense of his wrong-doing overcame him; the figure of Desroches appeared to him like a vision. He turned aside to a dark corner and sat down, putting his handkerchief to his eyes, and wept. Florentine noticed the attitude of true grief, which, because it is sincere, is certain to strike the eye of one who acts. She ran to him, took the handkerchief from his hand, and saw his tears; then she led him into a boudoir alone. "What is it, my child?" she said. At the tone and accent of that voice Oscar recognized a motherly kindness which is often found in women of her kind, and he answered openly:-- "I have lost five hundred francs which my employer gave me to obtain a document to-morrow morning; there's nothing for me but to fling myself into the river; I am dishonored." "How silly you are!" she said. "Stay where you are; I'll get you a thousand francs and you can win back what you've lost; but don't risk more than five hundred, so that you may be sure of your master's money. Georges plays a fine game at ecarte; bet on him." Oscar, frightened by his position, accepted the offer of the mistress of the house. "Ah!" he thought, "it is only women of rank who are capable of such kindness. Beautiful, noble, rich! how lucky Georges is!" He received the thousand francs from Florentine and returned to bet on his hoaxer. Georges had just passed for the fourth time when Oscar sat down beside him. The other players saw with satisfaction the arrival of a new better; for all, with the instinct of gamblers, took the side of Giroudeau, the old officer of the Empire. "Messieurs," said Georges, "you'll be punished for deserting me; I feel in the vein. Come, Oscar, we'll make an end of them!" Georges and his partner lost five games running. After losing the thousand francs Oscar was seized with the fury of play and insisted on taking the cards himself. By the result of a chance not at all uncommon with those who play for the first time, he won. But Georges bewildered him with advice; told him when to throw the cards, and even snatched them from his hand; so that this conflict of wills and intuitions injured his vein. By three o'clock in the morning, after various changes of fortune, and still drinking punch, Oscar came down to his last hundred francs. He rose with a heavy head, completely stupefied, took a few steps forward, and fell upon a sofa in the boudoir, his eyes closing in a leaden sleep. "Mariette," said Fanny Beaupre to Godeschal's sister, who had come in about two o'clock, "do you dine here to-morrow? Camusot and Pere Cardot are coming, and we'll have some fun." "What!" cried Florentine, "and my old fellow never told me!" "He said he'd tell you to-morrow morning," remarked Fanny Beaupre. "The devil take him and his orgies!" exclaimed Florentine. "He and Camusot are worse than magistrates or stage-managers. But we have very good dinners here, Mariette," she continued. "Cardot always orders them from Chevet's; bring your Duc de Maufrigneuse and we'll make them dance like Tritons." Hearing the names of Cardot and Camusot, Oscar made an effort to throw off his sleep; but he could only mutter a few words which were not understood, and then he fell back upon the silken cushions. "You'll have to keep him here all night," said Fanny Beaupre, laughing, to Florentine. "Oh! poor boy! he is drunk with punch and despair both. It is the second clerk in your brother's office," she said to Mariette. "He has lost the money his master gave him for some legal affair. He wanted to drown himself; so I lent him a thousand francs, but those brigands Finot and Giroudeau won them from him. Poor innocent!" "But we ought to wake him," said Mariette. "My brother won't make light of it, nor his master either." "Oh, wake him if you can, and carry him off with you!" said Florentine, returning to the salon to receive the adieux of some departing guests. Presently those who remained began what was called "character dancing," and by the time it was broad daylight, Florentine, tired out, went to bed, oblivious to Oscar, who was still in the boudoir sound asleep. CHAPTER X. ANOTHER CATASTROPHE About eleven the next morning, a terrible sound awoke the unfortunate clerk. Recognizing the voice of his uncle Cardot, he thought it wise to feign sleep, and so turned his face into the yellow velvet cushions on which he had passed the night. "Really, my little Florentine," said the old gentleman, "this is neither right nor sensible; you danced last evening in 'Les Ruines,' and you have spent the night in an orgy. That's deliberately going to work to lose your freshness. Besides which, it was ungrateful to inaugurate this beautiful apartment without even letting me know. Who knows what has been going on here?" "Old monster!" cried Florentine, "haven't you a key that lets you in at all hours? My ball lasted till five in the morning, and you have the cruelty to come and wake me up at eleven!" "Half-past eleven, Titine," observed Cardot, humbly. "I came out early to order a dinner fit for an archbishop at Chevet's. Just see how the carpets are stained! What sort of people did you have here?" "You needn't complain, for Fanny Beaupre told me you were coming to dinner with Camusot, and to please you I've invited Tullia, du Bruel, Mariette, the Duc de Maufrigneuse, Florine, and Nathan. So you'll have the four loveliest creatures ever seen behind the foot-lights; we'll dance you a 'pas de Zephire.'" "It is enough to kill you to lead such a life!" cried old Cardot; "and look at the broken glasses! What pillage! The antechamber actually makes me shudder--" At this instant the wrathful old gentleman stopped short as if magnetized, like a bird which a snake is charming. He saw the outline of a form in a black coat through the door of the boudoir. "Ah, Mademoiselle Cabirolle!" he said at last. "Well, what?" she asked. The eyes of the danseuse followed those of the little old man; and when she recognized the presence of the clerk she went off into such fits of laughter that not only was the old gentleman nonplussed, but Oscar was compelled to appear; for Florentine took him by the arm, still pealing with laughter at the conscience-stricken faces of the uncle and nephew. "You here, nephew?" "Nephew! so he's your nephew?" cried Florentine, with another burst of laughter. "You never told me about him. Why didn't Mariette carry you off?" she said to Oscar, who stood there petrified. "What can he do now, poor boy?" "Whatever he pleases!" said Cardot, sharply, marching to the door as if to go away. "One moment, papa Cardot. You will be so good as to get your nephew out of a scrape into which I led him; for he played the money of his master and lost it, and I lend him a thousand francs to win it back, and he lost that too." "Miserable boy! you lost fifteen hundred francs at play at your age?" "Oh, uncle, uncle!" cried poor Oscar, plunged by these words into all the horrors of his position, and falling on his knees before his uncle, with clasped hands, "It is twelve o'clock! I am lost, dishonored! Monsieur Desroches will have no pity! He gave me the money for an important affair, in which his pride was concerned. I was to get a paper at the Palais in the case of Vandernesse versus Vandernesse! What will become of me? Oh, save me for the sake of my father and aunt! Come with me to Monsieur Desroches, and explain it to him; make some excuse,--anything!" These sentences were jerked out through sobs and tears that might have moved the sphinx of Luxor. "Old skinflint!" said the danseuse, who was crying, "will you let your own nephew be dishonored,--the son of the man to whom you owe your fortune?--for his name is Oscar Husson. Save him, or Titine will deny you forever!" "But how did he come here?" asked Cardot. "Don't you see that the reason he forgot to go for those papers was because he was drunk and overslept himself. Georges and his cousin Frederic took all the clerks in his office to a feast at the Rocher de Cancale." Pere Cardot looked at Florentine and hesitated. "Come, come," she said, "you old monkey, shouldn't I have hid him better if there had been anything else in it?" "There, take your five hundred francs, you scamp!" said Cardot to his nephew, "and remember, that's the last penny you'll ever get from me. Go and make it up with your master if you can. I'll return the thousand francs which you borrowed of mademoiselle; but I'll never hear another word about you." Oscar disappeared, not wishing to hear more. Once in the street, however, he knew not where to go. Chance which destroys men and chance which saves them were both making equal efforts for and against Oscar during that fateful morning. But he was doomed to fall before a master who forgave no failure in any affair he had once undertaken. When Mariette reached home that night, she felt alarmed at what might happen to the youth in whom her brother took interest and she wrote a hasty note to Godeschal, telling him what had happened to Oscar and inclosing a bank bill for five hundred francs to repair his loss. The kind-hearted creature went to sleep after charging her maid to carry the little note to Desroches' office before seven o'clock in the morning. Godeschal, on his side, getting up at six and finding that Oscar had not returned, guessed what had happened. He took the five hundred francs from his own little hoard and rushed to the Palais, where he obtained a copy of the judgment and returned in time to lay it before Desroches by eight o'clock. Meantime Desroches, who always rose at four, was in his office by seven. Mariette's maid, not finding the brother of her mistress in his bedroom, came down to the office and there met Desroches, to whom she very naturally offered the note. "Is it about business?" he said; "I am Monsieur Desroches." "You can see, monsieur," replied the maid. Desroches opened the letter and read it. Finding the five-hundred-franc note, he went into his private office furiously angry with his second clerk. About half-past seven he heard Godeschal dictating to the second head-clerk a copy of the document in question, and a few moments later the good fellow entered his master's office with an air of triumph in his heart. "Did Oscar Husson fetch the paper this morning from Simon?" inquired Desroches. "Yes, monsieur." "Who gave him the money?" "Why, you did, Saturday," replied Godeschal. "Then it rains five-hundred-franc notes," cried Desroches. "Look here, Godeschal, you are a fine fellow, but that little Husson does not deserve such generosity. I hate idiots, but I hate still more the men who will go wrong in spite of the fatherly care which watches over them." He gave Godeschal Mariette's letter and the five-hundred-franc note which she had sent. "You must excuse my having opened it," he said, "but your sister's maid told me it was on business. Dismiss Husson." "Poor unhappy boy! what grief he has caused me!" said Godeschal, "that tall ne'er-do-well of a Georges Marest is his evil genius; he ought to flee him like the plague; if not, he'll bring him to some third disgrace." "What do you mean by that?" asked Desroches. Godeschal then related briefly the affair of the journey to Presles. "Ah! yes," said the lawyer, "I remember Joseph Bridau told me that story about the time it happened. It is to that meeting that we owe the favor Monsieur de Serizy has since shown in the matter of Joseph's brother, Philippe Bridau." At this moment Moreau, to whom the case of the Vandernesse estate was of much importance, entered the office. The marquis wished to sell the land in parcels and the count was opposed to such a sale. The land-agent received therefore the first fire of Desroches' wrath against his ex-second clerk and all the threatening prophecies which he fulminated against him. The result was that this most sincere friend and protector of the unhappy youth came to the conclusion that his vanity was incorrigible. "Make him a barrister," said Desroches. "He has only his last examination to pass. In that line, his defects might prove virtues, for self-love and vanity give tongues to half the attorneys." At this time Clapart, who was ill, was being nursed by his wife,--a painful task, a duty without reward. The sick man tormented the poor creature, who was now doomed to learn what venomous and spiteful teasing a half-imbecile man, whom poverty had rendered craftily savage, could be capable of in the weary tete-a-tete of each endless day. Delighted to turn a sharpened arrow in the sensitive heart of the mother, he had, in a measure, studied the fears that Oscar's behavior and defects inspired in the poor woman. When a mother receives from her child a shock like that of the affair at Presles, she continues in a state of constant fear, and, by the manner in which his wife boasted of Oscar every time he obtained the slightest success, Clapart knew the extent of her secret uneasiness, and he took pains to rouse it on every occasion. "Well, Madame," Clapart would say, "Oscar is doing better than I even hoped. That journey to Presles was only a heedlessness of youth. Where can you find young lads who do not commit just such faults? Poor child! he bears his privations heroically! If his father had lived, he would never have had any. God grant he may know how to control his passions!" etc., etc. While all these catastrophes were happening in the rue de Vendome and the rue de Bethisy, Clapart, sitting in the chimney corner, wrapped in an old dressing-gown, watched his wife, who was engaged over the fire in their bedroom in simultaneously making the family broth, Clapart's "tisane," and her own breakfast. "Mon Dieu! I wish I knew how the affair of yesterday ended. Oscar was to breakfast at the Rocher de Cancale and spend the evening with a marquise--" "Don't trouble yourself! Sooner or later you'll find out about your swan," said her husband. "Do you really believe in that marquise? Pooh! A young man who has senses and a taste for extravagance like Oscar can find such ladies as that on every bush--if he pays for them. Some fine morning you'll find yourself with a load of debt on your back." "You are always trying to put me in despair!" cried Madame Clapart. "You complained that my son lived on your salary, and never has he cost you a penny. For two years you haven't had the slightest cause of complaint against him; here he is second clerk, his uncle and Monsieur Moreau pay all expenses, and he earns, himself, a salary of eight hundred francs. If we have bread to eat in our old age we may owe it all to that dear boy. You are really too unjust--" "You call my foresight unjust, do you?" replied the invalid, crossly. Just then the bell rang loudly. Madame Clapart ran to open the door, and remained in the outer room with Moreau, who had come to soften the blow which Oscar's new folly would deal to the heart of his poor mother. "What! he gambled with the money of the office?" she cried, bursting into tears. "Didn't I tell you so, hey?" said Clapart, appearing like a spectre at the door of the salon whither his curiosity had brought him. "Oh! what shall we do with him?" said Madame Clapart, whose grief made her impervious to Clapart's taunt. "If he bore my name," replied Moreau, "I should wait composedly till he draws for the conscription, and if he gets a fatal number I should not provide him with a substitute. This is the second time your son has committed a folly out of sheer vanity. Well, vanity may inspire fine deeds in war and may advance him in the career of a soldier. Besides, six years of military service will put some lead into his head; and as he has only his last legal examination to pass, it won't be much ill-luck for him if he doesn't become a lawyer till he is twenty-six; that is, if he wants to continue in the law after paying, as they say, his tax of blood. By that time, at any rate, he will have been severely punished, he will have learned experience, and contracted habits of subordination. Before making his probation at the bar he will have gone through his probations in life." "If that is your decision for a son," said Madame Clapart, "I see that the heart of a father is not like that of a mother. My poor Oscar a common soldier!--" "Would you rather he flung himself headforemost into the Seine after committing a dishonorable action? He cannot now become a solicitor; do you think him steady and wise enough to be a barrister? No. While his reason is maturing, what will he become? A dissipated fellow. The discipline of the army will, at least, preserve him from that." "Could he not go into some other office? His uncle Cardot has promised to pay for his substitute; Oscar is to dedicate his graduating thesis to him." At this moment carriage-wheels were heard, and a hackney-coach containing Oscar and all his worldly belongings stopped before the door. The luckless young man came up at once. "Ah! here you are, Monsieur Joli-Coeur!" cried Clapart. Oscar kissed his mother, and held out to Moreau a hand which the latter refused to take. To this rebuff Oscar replied by a reproachful look, the boldness of which he had never shown before. Then he turned on Clapart. "Listen to me, monsieur," said the youth, transformed into a man. "You worry my poor mother devilishly, and that's your right, for she is, unfortunately, your wife. But as for me, it is another thing. I shall be of age in a few months; and you have no rights over me even as a minor. I have never asked anything of you. Thanks to Monsieur Moreau, I have never cost you one penny, and I owe you no gratitude. Therefore, I say, let me alone!" Clapart, hearing this apostrophe, slunk back to his sofa in the chimney corner. The reasoning and the inward fury of the young man, who had just received a lecture from his friend Godeschal, silenced the imbecile mind of the sick man. "A momentary temptation, such as you yourself would have yielded to at my age," said Oscar to Moreau, "has made me commit a fault which Desroches thinks serious, though it is only a peccadillo. I am more provoked with myself for taking Florentine of the Gaiete for a marquise than I am for losing fifteen hundred francs after a little debauch in which everybody, even Godeschal, was half-seas over. This time, at any rate, I've hurt no one by myself. I'm cured of such things forever. If you are willing to help me, Monsieur Moreau, I swear to you that the six years I must still stay a clerk before I can get a practice shall be spent without--" "Stop there!" said Moreau. "I have three children, and I can make no promises." "Never mind, never mind," said Madame Clapart to her son, casting a reproachful glance at Moreau. "Your uncle Cardot--" "I have no longer an uncle Cardot," replied Oscar, who related the scene at the rue de Vendome. Madame Clapart, feeling her legs give way under the weight of her body, staggered to a chair in the dining-room, where she fell as if struck by lightning. "All the miseries together!" she said, as she fainted. Moreau took the poor mother in his arms, and carried her to the bed in her chamber. Oscar remained motionless, as if crushed. "There is nothing left for you," said Moreau, coming back to him, "but to make yourself a soldier. That idiot of a Clapart looks to me as though he couldn't live three months, and then your mother will be without a penny. Ought I not, therefore, to reserve for her the little money I am able to give? It was impossible to tell you this before her. As a soldier, you'll eat plain bread and reflect on life such as it is to those who are born into it without fortune." "I may get a lucky number," said Oscar. "Suppose you do, what then? Your mother has well fulfilled her duty towards you. She gave you an education; she placed you on the right road, and secured you a career. You have left it. Now, what can you do? Without money, nothing; as you know by this time. You are not a man who can begin a new career by taking off your coat and going to work in your shirt-sleeves with the tools of an artisan. Besides, your mother loves you, and she would die to see you come to that." Oscar sat down and no longer restrained his tears, which flowed copiously. At last he understood this language, so completely unintelligible to him ever since his first fault. "Men without means ought to be perfect," added Moreau, not suspecting the profundity of that cruel sentence. "My fate will soon be decided," said Oscar. "I draw my number the day after to-morrow. Between now and then I will decide upon my future." Moreau, deeply distressed in spite of his stern bearing, left the household in the rue de la Cerisaie to its despair. Three days later Oscar drew the number twenty-seven. In the interests of the poor lad the former steward of Presles had the courage to go to the Comte de Serizy and ask for his influence to get Oscar into the cavalry. It happened that the count's son, having left the Ecole Polytechnique rather low in his class, was appointed, as a favor, sub-lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry commanded by the Duc de Maufrigneuse. Oscar had, therefore, in his great misfortune, the small luck of being, at the Comte de Serizy's instigation, drafted into that noble regiment, with the promise of promotion to quartermaster within a year. Chance had thus placed the ex-clerk under the command of the son of the Comte de Serizy. Madame Clapart, after languishing for some days, so keenly was she affected by these catastrophes, became a victim to the remorse which seizes upon many a mother whose conduct has been frail in her youth, and who, in her old age, turns to repentance. She now considered herself under a curse. She attributed the sorrows of her second marriage and the misfortunes of her son to a just retribution by which God was compelling her to expiate the errors and pleasures of her youth. This opinion soon became a certainty in her mind. The poor woman went, for the first time in forty years, to confess herself to the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul's, who led her into the practice of devotion. But so ill-used and loving a soul as that of Madame Clapart's could never be anything but simply pious. The Aspasia of the Directory wanted to expiate her sins in order to draw down the blessing of God on the head of her poor Oscar, and she henceforth vowed herself to works and deeds of the purest piety. She believed she had won the attention of heaven when she saved the life of Monsieur Clapart, who, thanks to her devotion, lived on to torture her; but she chose to see, in the tyranny of that imbecile mind, a trial inflicted by the hand of one who loveth while he chasteneth. Oscar, meantime, behaved so well that in 1830 he was first sergeant of the company of the Vicomte de Serizy, which gave him the rank of sub-lieutenant of the line. Oscar Husson was by that time twenty-five years old. As the Royal Guard, to which his regiment was attached, was always in garrison in Paris, or within a circumference of thirty miles around the capital, he came to see his mother from time to time, and tell her his griefs; for he had the sense to see that he could never become an officer as matters then were. At that time the cavalry grades were all being taken up by the younger sons of noble families, and men without the article to their names found promotion difficult. Oscar's sole ambition was to leave the Guards and be appointed sub-lieutenant in a regiment of the cavalry of the line. In the month of February, 1830, Madame Clapart obtained this promotion for her son through the influence of Madame la Dauphine, granted to the Abbe Gaudron, now rector of Saint-Pauls. Although Oscar outwardly professed to be devoted to the Bourbons, in the depths of his heart he was a liberal. Therefore, in the struggle of 1830, he went over to the side of the people. This desertion, which had an importance due to the crisis in which it took place, brought him before the eyes of the public. During the excitement of triumph in the month of August he was promoted lieutenant, received the cross of the Legion of honor, and was attached as aide-de-camp to La Fayette, who gave him the rank of captain in 1832. When the amateur of the best of all possible republics was removed from the command of the National guard, Oscar Husson, whose devotion to the new dynasty amounted to fanaticism, was appointed major of a regiment sent to Africa at the time of the first expedition undertaken by the Prince-royal. The Vicomte de Serizy chanced to be the lieutenant-colonel of this regiment. At the affair of the Makta, where the field had to be abandoned to the Arabs, Monsieur de Serizy was left wounded under a dead horse. Oscar, discovering this, called out to the squadron: "Messieurs, it is going to death, but we cannot abandon our colonel." He dashed upon the enemy, and his electrified soldiers followed him. The Arabs, in their first astonishment at this furious and unlooked-for return, allowed Oscar to seize the viscount, whom he flung across his horse, and carried off at full gallop,--receiving, as he did so, two slashes from yataghans on his left arm. Oscar's conduct on this occasion was rewarded with the officer's cross of the Legion of honor, and by his promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He took the most affectionate care of the Vicomte de Serizy, whose mother came to meet him on the arrival of the regiment at Toulon, where, as we know, the young man died of his wounds. The Comtesse de Serizy had not separated her son from the man who had shown him such devotion. Oscar himself was so seriously wounded that the surgeons whom the countess had brought with her from Paris thought best to amputate his left arm. Thus the Comte de Serizy was led not only to forgive Oscar for his painful remarks on the journey to Presles, but to feel himself his debtor on behalf

astonished

How many times the word 'astonished' appears in the text?

you shall being me luck! See, here are my last hundred francs." And the "marquise" took out from her purse, the rings of which were adorned with diamonds, five gold pieces. Oscar pulled out his hundred in silver five-franc pieces, much ashamed at having to mingle such ignoble coins with gold. In ten throws the actress lost the two hundred francs. "Oh! how stupid!" she cried. "I'm banker now. But we'll play together still, won't we?" Fanny Beaupre rose to take her place as banker, and Oscar, finding himself observed by the whole table, dared not retire on the ground that he had no money. Speech failed him, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. "Lend me five hundred francs," said the actress to the danseuse. Florentine brought the money, which she obtained from Georges, who had just passed eight times at ecarte. "Nathan has won twelve hundred francs," said the actress to Oscar. "Bankers always win; we won't let them fool us, will we?" she whispered in his ear. Persons of nerve, imagination, and dash will understand how it was that poor Oscar opened his pocket-book and took out the note of five hundred francs which Desroches had given him. He looked at Nathan, the distinguished author, who now began, with Florine, to play a heavy game against the bank. "Come, my little man, take 'em up," cried Fanny Beaupre, signing to Oscar to rake in the two hundred francs which Nathan and Florine had punted. The actress did not spare taunts or jests on those who lost. She enlivened the game with jokes which Oscar thought singular; but reflection was stifled by joy; for the first two throws produced a gain of two thousand francs. Oscar then thought of feigning illness and making his escape, leaving his partner behind him; but "honor" kept him there. Three more turns and the gains were lost. Oscar felt a cold sweat running down his back, and he was sobered completely. The next two throws carried off the thousand francs of their mutual stake. Oscar was consumed with thirst, and drank three glasses of iced punch one after the other. The actress now led him into the bed-chamber, where the rest of the company were playing, talking frivolities with an easy air. But by this time the sense of his wrong-doing overcame him; the figure of Desroches appeared to him like a vision. He turned aside to a dark corner and sat down, putting his handkerchief to his eyes, and wept. Florentine noticed the attitude of true grief, which, because it is sincere, is certain to strike the eye of one who acts. She ran to him, took the handkerchief from his hand, and saw his tears; then she led him into a boudoir alone. "What is it, my child?" she said. At the tone and accent of that voice Oscar recognized a motherly kindness which is often found in women of her kind, and he answered openly:-- "I have lost five hundred francs which my employer gave me to obtain a document to-morrow morning; there's nothing for me but to fling myself into the river; I am dishonored." "How silly you are!" she said. "Stay where you are; I'll get you a thousand francs and you can win back what you've lost; but don't risk more than five hundred, so that you may be sure of your master's money. Georges plays a fine game at ecarte; bet on him." Oscar, frightened by his position, accepted the offer of the mistress of the house. "Ah!" he thought, "it is only women of rank who are capable of such kindness. Beautiful, noble, rich! how lucky Georges is!" He received the thousand francs from Florentine and returned to bet on his hoaxer. Georges had just passed for the fourth time when Oscar sat down beside him. The other players saw with satisfaction the arrival of a new better; for all, with the instinct of gamblers, took the side of Giroudeau, the old officer of the Empire. "Messieurs," said Georges, "you'll be punished for deserting me; I feel in the vein. Come, Oscar, we'll make an end of them!" Georges and his partner lost five games running. After losing the thousand francs Oscar was seized with the fury of play and insisted on taking the cards himself. By the result of a chance not at all uncommon with those who play for the first time, he won. But Georges bewildered him with advice; told him when to throw the cards, and even snatched them from his hand; so that this conflict of wills and intuitions injured his vein. By three o'clock in the morning, after various changes of fortune, and still drinking punch, Oscar came down to his last hundred francs. He rose with a heavy head, completely stupefied, took a few steps forward, and fell upon a sofa in the boudoir, his eyes closing in a leaden sleep. "Mariette," said Fanny Beaupre to Godeschal's sister, who had come in about two o'clock, "do you dine here to-morrow? Camusot and Pere Cardot are coming, and we'll have some fun." "What!" cried Florentine, "and my old fellow never told me!" "He said he'd tell you to-morrow morning," remarked Fanny Beaupre. "The devil take him and his orgies!" exclaimed Florentine. "He and Camusot are worse than magistrates or stage-managers. But we have very good dinners here, Mariette," she continued. "Cardot always orders them from Chevet's; bring your Duc de Maufrigneuse and we'll make them dance like Tritons." Hearing the names of Cardot and Camusot, Oscar made an effort to throw off his sleep; but he could only mutter a few words which were not understood, and then he fell back upon the silken cushions. "You'll have to keep him here all night," said Fanny Beaupre, laughing, to Florentine. "Oh! poor boy! he is drunk with punch and despair both. It is the second clerk in your brother's office," she said to Mariette. "He has lost the money his master gave him for some legal affair. He wanted to drown himself; so I lent him a thousand francs, but those brigands Finot and Giroudeau won them from him. Poor innocent!" "But we ought to wake him," said Mariette. "My brother won't make light of it, nor his master either." "Oh, wake him if you can, and carry him off with you!" said Florentine, returning to the salon to receive the adieux of some departing guests. Presently those who remained began what was called "character dancing," and by the time it was broad daylight, Florentine, tired out, went to bed, oblivious to Oscar, who was still in the boudoir sound asleep. CHAPTER X. ANOTHER CATASTROPHE About eleven the next morning, a terrible sound awoke the unfortunate clerk. Recognizing the voice of his uncle Cardot, he thought it wise to feign sleep, and so turned his face into the yellow velvet cushions on which he had passed the night. "Really, my little Florentine," said the old gentleman, "this is neither right nor sensible; you danced last evening in 'Les Ruines,' and you have spent the night in an orgy. That's deliberately going to work to lose your freshness. Besides which, it was ungrateful to inaugurate this beautiful apartment without even letting me know. Who knows what has been going on here?" "Old monster!" cried Florentine, "haven't you a key that lets you in at all hours? My ball lasted till five in the morning, and you have the cruelty to come and wake me up at eleven!" "Half-past eleven, Titine," observed Cardot, humbly. "I came out early to order a dinner fit for an archbishop at Chevet's. Just see how the carpets are stained! What sort of people did you have here?" "You needn't complain, for Fanny Beaupre told me you were coming to dinner with Camusot, and to please you I've invited Tullia, du Bruel, Mariette, the Duc de Maufrigneuse, Florine, and Nathan. So you'll have the four loveliest creatures ever seen behind the foot-lights; we'll dance you a 'pas de Zephire.'" "It is enough to kill you to lead such a life!" cried old Cardot; "and look at the broken glasses! What pillage! The antechamber actually makes me shudder--" At this instant the wrathful old gentleman stopped short as if magnetized, like a bird which a snake is charming. He saw the outline of a form in a black coat through the door of the boudoir. "Ah, Mademoiselle Cabirolle!" he said at last. "Well, what?" she asked. The eyes of the danseuse followed those of the little old man; and when she recognized the presence of the clerk she went off into such fits of laughter that not only was the old gentleman nonplussed, but Oscar was compelled to appear; for Florentine took him by the arm, still pealing with laughter at the conscience-stricken faces of the uncle and nephew. "You here, nephew?" "Nephew! so he's your nephew?" cried Florentine, with another burst of laughter. "You never told me about him. Why didn't Mariette carry you off?" she said to Oscar, who stood there petrified. "What can he do now, poor boy?" "Whatever he pleases!" said Cardot, sharply, marching to the door as if to go away. "One moment, papa Cardot. You will be so good as to get your nephew out of a scrape into which I led him; for he played the money of his master and lost it, and I lend him a thousand francs to win it back, and he lost that too." "Miserable boy! you lost fifteen hundred francs at play at your age?" "Oh, uncle, uncle!" cried poor Oscar, plunged by these words into all the horrors of his position, and falling on his knees before his uncle, with clasped hands, "It is twelve o'clock! I am lost, dishonored! Monsieur Desroches will have no pity! He gave me the money for an important affair, in which his pride was concerned. I was to get a paper at the Palais in the case of Vandernesse versus Vandernesse! What will become of me? Oh, save me for the sake of my father and aunt! Come with me to Monsieur Desroches, and explain it to him; make some excuse,--anything!" These sentences were jerked out through sobs and tears that might have moved the sphinx of Luxor. "Old skinflint!" said the danseuse, who was crying, "will you let your own nephew be dishonored,--the son of the man to whom you owe your fortune?--for his name is Oscar Husson. Save him, or Titine will deny you forever!" "But how did he come here?" asked Cardot. "Don't you see that the reason he forgot to go for those papers was because he was drunk and overslept himself. Georges and his cousin Frederic took all the clerks in his office to a feast at the Rocher de Cancale." Pere Cardot looked at Florentine and hesitated. "Come, come," she said, "you old monkey, shouldn't I have hid him better if there had been anything else in it?" "There, take your five hundred francs, you scamp!" said Cardot to his nephew, "and remember, that's the last penny you'll ever get from me. Go and make it up with your master if you can. I'll return the thousand francs which you borrowed of mademoiselle; but I'll never hear another word about you." Oscar disappeared, not wishing to hear more. Once in the street, however, he knew not where to go. Chance which destroys men and chance which saves them were both making equal efforts for and against Oscar during that fateful morning. But he was doomed to fall before a master who forgave no failure in any affair he had once undertaken. When Mariette reached home that night, she felt alarmed at what might happen to the youth in whom her brother took interest and she wrote a hasty note to Godeschal, telling him what had happened to Oscar and inclosing a bank bill for five hundred francs to repair his loss. The kind-hearted creature went to sleep after charging her maid to carry the little note to Desroches' office before seven o'clock in the morning. Godeschal, on his side, getting up at six and finding that Oscar had not returned, guessed what had happened. He took the five hundred francs from his own little hoard and rushed to the Palais, where he obtained a copy of the judgment and returned in time to lay it before Desroches by eight o'clock. Meantime Desroches, who always rose at four, was in his office by seven. Mariette's maid, not finding the brother of her mistress in his bedroom, came down to the office and there met Desroches, to whom she very naturally offered the note. "Is it about business?" he said; "I am Monsieur Desroches." "You can see, monsieur," replied the maid. Desroches opened the letter and read it. Finding the five-hundred-franc note, he went into his private office furiously angry with his second clerk. About half-past seven he heard Godeschal dictating to the second head-clerk a copy of the document in question, and a few moments later the good fellow entered his master's office with an air of triumph in his heart. "Did Oscar Husson fetch the paper this morning from Simon?" inquired Desroches. "Yes, monsieur." "Who gave him the money?" "Why, you did, Saturday," replied Godeschal. "Then it rains five-hundred-franc notes," cried Desroches. "Look here, Godeschal, you are a fine fellow, but that little Husson does not deserve such generosity. I hate idiots, but I hate still more the men who will go wrong in spite of the fatherly care which watches over them." He gave Godeschal Mariette's letter and the five-hundred-franc note which she had sent. "You must excuse my having opened it," he said, "but your sister's maid told me it was on business. Dismiss Husson." "Poor unhappy boy! what grief he has caused me!" said Godeschal, "that tall ne'er-do-well of a Georges Marest is his evil genius; he ought to flee him like the plague; if not, he'll bring him to some third disgrace." "What do you mean by that?" asked Desroches. Godeschal then related briefly the affair of the journey to Presles. "Ah! yes," said the lawyer, "I remember Joseph Bridau told me that story about the time it happened. It is to that meeting that we owe the favor Monsieur de Serizy has since shown in the matter of Joseph's brother, Philippe Bridau." At this moment Moreau, to whom the case of the Vandernesse estate was of much importance, entered the office. The marquis wished to sell the land in parcels and the count was opposed to such a sale. The land-agent received therefore the first fire of Desroches' wrath against his ex-second clerk and all the threatening prophecies which he fulminated against him. The result was that this most sincere friend and protector of the unhappy youth came to the conclusion that his vanity was incorrigible. "Make him a barrister," said Desroches. "He has only his last examination to pass. In that line, his defects might prove virtues, for self-love and vanity give tongues to half the attorneys." At this time Clapart, who was ill, was being nursed by his wife,--a painful task, a duty without reward. The sick man tormented the poor creature, who was now doomed to learn what venomous and spiteful teasing a half-imbecile man, whom poverty had rendered craftily savage, could be capable of in the weary tete-a-tete of each endless day. Delighted to turn a sharpened arrow in the sensitive heart of the mother, he had, in a measure, studied the fears that Oscar's behavior and defects inspired in the poor woman. When a mother receives from her child a shock like that of the affair at Presles, she continues in a state of constant fear, and, by the manner in which his wife boasted of Oscar every time he obtained the slightest success, Clapart knew the extent of her secret uneasiness, and he took pains to rouse it on every occasion. "Well, Madame," Clapart would say, "Oscar is doing better than I even hoped. That journey to Presles was only a heedlessness of youth. Where can you find young lads who do not commit just such faults? Poor child! he bears his privations heroically! If his father had lived, he would never have had any. God grant he may know how to control his passions!" etc., etc. While all these catastrophes were happening in the rue de Vendome and the rue de Bethisy, Clapart, sitting in the chimney corner, wrapped in an old dressing-gown, watched his wife, who was engaged over the fire in their bedroom in simultaneously making the family broth, Clapart's "tisane," and her own breakfast. "Mon Dieu! I wish I knew how the affair of yesterday ended. Oscar was to breakfast at the Rocher de Cancale and spend the evening with a marquise--" "Don't trouble yourself! Sooner or later you'll find out about your swan," said her husband. "Do you really believe in that marquise? Pooh! A young man who has senses and a taste for extravagance like Oscar can find such ladies as that on every bush--if he pays for them. Some fine morning you'll find yourself with a load of debt on your back." "You are always trying to put me in despair!" cried Madame Clapart. "You complained that my son lived on your salary, and never has he cost you a penny. For two years you haven't had the slightest cause of complaint against him; here he is second clerk, his uncle and Monsieur Moreau pay all expenses, and he earns, himself, a salary of eight hundred francs. If we have bread to eat in our old age we may owe it all to that dear boy. You are really too unjust--" "You call my foresight unjust, do you?" replied the invalid, crossly. Just then the bell rang loudly. Madame Clapart ran to open the door, and remained in the outer room with Moreau, who had come to soften the blow which Oscar's new folly would deal to the heart of his poor mother. "What! he gambled with the money of the office?" she cried, bursting into tears. "Didn't I tell you so, hey?" said Clapart, appearing like a spectre at the door of the salon whither his curiosity had brought him. "Oh! what shall we do with him?" said Madame Clapart, whose grief made her impervious to Clapart's taunt. "If he bore my name," replied Moreau, "I should wait composedly till he draws for the conscription, and if he gets a fatal number I should not provide him with a substitute. This is the second time your son has committed a folly out of sheer vanity. Well, vanity may inspire fine deeds in war and may advance him in the career of a soldier. Besides, six years of military service will put some lead into his head; and as he has only his last legal examination to pass, it won't be much ill-luck for him if he doesn't become a lawyer till he is twenty-six; that is, if he wants to continue in the law after paying, as they say, his tax of blood. By that time, at any rate, he will have been severely punished, he will have learned experience, and contracted habits of subordination. Before making his probation at the bar he will have gone through his probations in life." "If that is your decision for a son," said Madame Clapart, "I see that the heart of a father is not like that of a mother. My poor Oscar a common soldier!--" "Would you rather he flung himself headforemost into the Seine after committing a dishonorable action? He cannot now become a solicitor; do you think him steady and wise enough to be a barrister? No. While his reason is maturing, what will he become? A dissipated fellow. The discipline of the army will, at least, preserve him from that." "Could he not go into some other office? His uncle Cardot has promised to pay for his substitute; Oscar is to dedicate his graduating thesis to him." At this moment carriage-wheels were heard, and a hackney-coach containing Oscar and all his worldly belongings stopped before the door. The luckless young man came up at once. "Ah! here you are, Monsieur Joli-Coeur!" cried Clapart. Oscar kissed his mother, and held out to Moreau a hand which the latter refused to take. To this rebuff Oscar replied by a reproachful look, the boldness of which he had never shown before. Then he turned on Clapart. "Listen to me, monsieur," said the youth, transformed into a man. "You worry my poor mother devilishly, and that's your right, for she is, unfortunately, your wife. But as for me, it is another thing. I shall be of age in a few months; and you have no rights over me even as a minor. I have never asked anything of you. Thanks to Monsieur Moreau, I have never cost you one penny, and I owe you no gratitude. Therefore, I say, let me alone!" Clapart, hearing this apostrophe, slunk back to his sofa in the chimney corner. The reasoning and the inward fury of the young man, who had just received a lecture from his friend Godeschal, silenced the imbecile mind of the sick man. "A momentary temptation, such as you yourself would have yielded to at my age," said Oscar to Moreau, "has made me commit a fault which Desroches thinks serious, though it is only a peccadillo. I am more provoked with myself for taking Florentine of the Gaiete for a marquise than I am for losing fifteen hundred francs after a little debauch in which everybody, even Godeschal, was half-seas over. This time, at any rate, I've hurt no one by myself. I'm cured of such things forever. If you are willing to help me, Monsieur Moreau, I swear to you that the six years I must still stay a clerk before I can get a practice shall be spent without--" "Stop there!" said Moreau. "I have three children, and I can make no promises." "Never mind, never mind," said Madame Clapart to her son, casting a reproachful glance at Moreau. "Your uncle Cardot--" "I have no longer an uncle Cardot," replied Oscar, who related the scene at the rue de Vendome. Madame Clapart, feeling her legs give way under the weight of her body, staggered to a chair in the dining-room, where she fell as if struck by lightning. "All the miseries together!" she said, as she fainted. Moreau took the poor mother in his arms, and carried her to the bed in her chamber. Oscar remained motionless, as if crushed. "There is nothing left for you," said Moreau, coming back to him, "but to make yourself a soldier. That idiot of a Clapart looks to me as though he couldn't live three months, and then your mother will be without a penny. Ought I not, therefore, to reserve for her the little money I am able to give? It was impossible to tell you this before her. As a soldier, you'll eat plain bread and reflect on life such as it is to those who are born into it without fortune." "I may get a lucky number," said Oscar. "Suppose you do, what then? Your mother has well fulfilled her duty towards you. She gave you an education; she placed you on the right road, and secured you a career. You have left it. Now, what can you do? Without money, nothing; as you know by this time. You are not a man who can begin a new career by taking off your coat and going to work in your shirt-sleeves with the tools of an artisan. Besides, your mother loves you, and she would die to see you come to that." Oscar sat down and no longer restrained his tears, which flowed copiously. At last he understood this language, so completely unintelligible to him ever since his first fault. "Men without means ought to be perfect," added Moreau, not suspecting the profundity of that cruel sentence. "My fate will soon be decided," said Oscar. "I draw my number the day after to-morrow. Between now and then I will decide upon my future." Moreau, deeply distressed in spite of his stern bearing, left the household in the rue de la Cerisaie to its despair. Three days later Oscar drew the number twenty-seven. In the interests of the poor lad the former steward of Presles had the courage to go to the Comte de Serizy and ask for his influence to get Oscar into the cavalry. It happened that the count's son, having left the Ecole Polytechnique rather low in his class, was appointed, as a favor, sub-lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry commanded by the Duc de Maufrigneuse. Oscar had, therefore, in his great misfortune, the small luck of being, at the Comte de Serizy's instigation, drafted into that noble regiment, with the promise of promotion to quartermaster within a year. Chance had thus placed the ex-clerk under the command of the son of the Comte de Serizy. Madame Clapart, after languishing for some days, so keenly was she affected by these catastrophes, became a victim to the remorse which seizes upon many a mother whose conduct has been frail in her youth, and who, in her old age, turns to repentance. She now considered herself under a curse. She attributed the sorrows of her second marriage and the misfortunes of her son to a just retribution by which God was compelling her to expiate the errors and pleasures of her youth. This opinion soon became a certainty in her mind. The poor woman went, for the first time in forty years, to confess herself to the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul's, who led her into the practice of devotion. But so ill-used and loving a soul as that of Madame Clapart's could never be anything but simply pious. The Aspasia of the Directory wanted to expiate her sins in order to draw down the blessing of God on the head of her poor Oscar, and she henceforth vowed herself to works and deeds of the purest piety. She believed she had won the attention of heaven when she saved the life of Monsieur Clapart, who, thanks to her devotion, lived on to torture her; but she chose to see, in the tyranny of that imbecile mind, a trial inflicted by the hand of one who loveth while he chasteneth. Oscar, meantime, behaved so well that in 1830 he was first sergeant of the company of the Vicomte de Serizy, which gave him the rank of sub-lieutenant of the line. Oscar Husson was by that time twenty-five years old. As the Royal Guard, to which his regiment was attached, was always in garrison in Paris, or within a circumference of thirty miles around the capital, he came to see his mother from time to time, and tell her his griefs; for he had the sense to see that he could never become an officer as matters then were. At that time the cavalry grades were all being taken up by the younger sons of noble families, and men without the article to their names found promotion difficult. Oscar's sole ambition was to leave the Guards and be appointed sub-lieutenant in a regiment of the cavalry of the line. In the month of February, 1830, Madame Clapart obtained this promotion for her son through the influence of Madame la Dauphine, granted to the Abbe Gaudron, now rector of Saint-Pauls. Although Oscar outwardly professed to be devoted to the Bourbons, in the depths of his heart he was a liberal. Therefore, in the struggle of 1830, he went over to the side of the people. This desertion, which had an importance due to the crisis in which it took place, brought him before the eyes of the public. During the excitement of triumph in the month of August he was promoted lieutenant, received the cross of the Legion of honor, and was attached as aide-de-camp to La Fayette, who gave him the rank of captain in 1832. When the amateur of the best of all possible republics was removed from the command of the National guard, Oscar Husson, whose devotion to the new dynasty amounted to fanaticism, was appointed major of a regiment sent to Africa at the time of the first expedition undertaken by the Prince-royal. The Vicomte de Serizy chanced to be the lieutenant-colonel of this regiment. At the affair of the Makta, where the field had to be abandoned to the Arabs, Monsieur de Serizy was left wounded under a dead horse. Oscar, discovering this, called out to the squadron: "Messieurs, it is going to death, but we cannot abandon our colonel." He dashed upon the enemy, and his electrified soldiers followed him. The Arabs, in their first astonishment at this furious and unlooked-for return, allowed Oscar to seize the viscount, whom he flung across his horse, and carried off at full gallop,--receiving, as he did so, two slashes from yataghans on his left arm. Oscar's conduct on this occasion was rewarded with the officer's cross of the Legion of honor, and by his promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He took the most affectionate care of the Vicomte de Serizy, whose mother came to meet him on the arrival of the regiment at Toulon, where, as we know, the young man died of his wounds. The Comtesse de Serizy had not separated her son from the man who had shown him such devotion. Oscar himself was so seriously wounded that the surgeons whom the countess had brought with her from Paris thought best to amputate his left arm. Thus the Comte de Serizy was led not only to forgive Oscar for his painful remarks on the journey to Presles, but to feel himself his debtor on behalf

bet

How many times the word 'bet' appears in the text?

you think about them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of it. It will do them good. Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too. You see, I'd like to see you a socialist before I'm gone. It will give you a sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in the time of disappointment that is coming to you." "I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist," Martin pondered. "You detest the crowd so. Surely there is nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul." He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling. "Socialism doesn't seem to save you." "I'm very sick," was the answer. "With you it is different. You have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life somehow. As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy- nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a- brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a poor chap to do? We can't have the man on horseback, and anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come on, anyway. I'm loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I'll get drunk. And you know the doctor says--damn the doctor! I'll fool him yet." It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class. The speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism. The man's stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time. To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol. He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life. They were the unfit. In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man. Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best. It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race- horses and cucumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos. So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them hell. He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and addressing the chairman. He began in a low voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed. He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's time. They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every word. He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated the biological law of development. "And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of the slave-types can endure. The old law of development still holds. In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation increases. That is development. But you slaves--it is too bad to be slaves, I grant--but you slaves dream of a society where the law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will marry and have progeny--the weak as well as the strong. What will be the result? No longer will the strength and life-value of each generation increase. On the contrary, it will diminish. There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your society of slaves--of, by, and for, slaves--must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces. "Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No state of slaves can stand--" "How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience. "And how about it?" Martin retorted. "The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters--not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you over again--but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed." "But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves can endure, because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of development. No sooner can a slave society be organized than deterioration sets in. It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law of development, but where is the new law of development that will maintain your strength? Formulate it. Is it already formulated? Then state it." Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack. It was a wild night--but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas. Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin. They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws. They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the chairman rapped and pounded for order. It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and glib. He was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class. Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers. Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect reporter who is able to make something--even a great deal--out of nothing. He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary. Words like _revolution_ gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_. He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color--wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenic and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men. CHAPTER XXXIX Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's paper. It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh. "Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and dropped limply into the one chair. "But what do you care?" Brissenden asked. "Surely you don't desire the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?" Martin thought for a while, then said:- "No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit. On the other hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's family a trifle awkward. Her father always contended I was a socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief. Not that I care for his opinion--but what's the odds? I want to read you what I've been doing to- day. It's 'Overdue,' of course, and I'm just about halfway through." He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the oil- burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to Martin. "Sit down," Brissenden said. Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to broach his business. "I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview you," he began. Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh. "A brother socialist?" the reporter asked, with a quick glance at Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying man. "And he wrote that report," Martin said softly. "Why, he is only a boy!" "Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked. "I'd give a thousand dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes." The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and around him and at him. But he had been commended for his brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized menace to society. "You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he said. "I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower. Then we can have the interview afterward." "A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively. "Poke him, Martin! Poke him!" "I guess I'm getting old," was the answer. "I know I ought, but I really haven't the heart. It doesn't seem to matter." "For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged. "It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me. You see, it does take energy to give a fellow a poking. Besides, what does it matter?" "That's right--that's the way to take it," the cub announced airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door. "But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on, confining his attention to Brissenden. "It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the cub ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising. That's what counts. It was a favor to you." "It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden repeated solemnly. "And it was a favor to me--think of that!" was Martin's contribution. "Let me see--where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked, assuming an air of expectant attention. "He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden. "He remembers it all." "That is sufficient for me." The cub was trying not to look worried. "No decent reporter needs to bother with notes." "That was sufficient--for last night." But Brissenden was not a disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly. "Martin, if you don't poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next moment." "How will a spanking do?" Martin asked. Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head. The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub face downward across his knees. "Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your face. It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face." His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and steady rhythm. The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite. Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, "Here, just let me swat him once." "Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted. "It is quite numb." He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed. "I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks. "I'll make you sweat for this. You'll see." "The pretty thing," Martin remarked. "He doesn't realize that he has entered upon the downward path. It is not honest, it is not square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures the way he has done, and he doesn't know it." "He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause. "Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My grocery will undoubtedly refuse me credit now. The worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel." "But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden. "Who knows but what you may prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn't you let me swat him just once? I'd like to have had a hand in it." "I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes," sobbed the erring soul. "No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak." Martin shook his head lugubriously. "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain. The young man cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great." With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still clutched. In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about himself that was new to him. "We are the sworn enemies of society," he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. "No, we are not anarchists but socialists." When the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-shot eyes. He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon. The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around and nosed out Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham's Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front. That gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered to him and who would go to jail yet. Hermann Von Schmidt, Marian's husband, had likewise been interviewed. He had called Martin the black sheep of the family and repudiated him. "He tried to sponge off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt had said to the reporter. "He knows better than to come bumming around here. A man who won't work is no good, take that from me." This time Martin was genuinely angry. Brissenden looked upon the affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth. As for her father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement. How much he would make of it he was soon to realize. The afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth. Martin opened it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when he had received it from the postman. As he read, mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old cigarette days. He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a cigarette. It was not a passionate letter. There were no touches of anger in it. But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment. She had expected better of him. She had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live seriously and decently. And now her father and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement be broken. That they were justified in this she could not but admit. Their relation could never be a happy one. It had been unfortunate from the first. But one regret she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin. "If only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make something of yourself," she wrote. "But it was not to be. Your past life had been too wild and irregular. I can understand that you are not to be blamed. You could act only according to your nature and your early training. So I do not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It was simply a mistake. As father and mother have contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be happy because it was discovered not too late." . . "There is no use trying to see me," she said toward the last. "It would be an unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother. I feel, as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry. I shall have to do much living to atone for it." He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down and replied. He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth. Toward the end of the letter he was God's own lover pleading passionately for love. "Please answer," he said, "and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing. Do you love me? That is all--the answer to that one question." But no answer came the next day, nor the next. "Overdue" lay untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under the table grew larger. For the first time Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights. Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell. Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and, though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his troubles. For Martin's troubles were many. The aftermath of the cub reporter's deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated. The Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him--carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin's account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it. The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against Martin ran high. No one would have anything to do with a socialist traitor. Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained loyal. The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe distances they called him "hobo" and "bum." The Silva tribe, however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day and added to Maria's perplexities and troubles. Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned what he knew could not be otherwise--that Bernard Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house. "Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged. "Go away and get a job somewhere and steady down. Afterwards, when this all blows over, you can come back." Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations. How could he explain? He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,--the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped. He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the pawnbroker. "Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him. "After a few months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job of drivin' delivery-wagon for him. Any time you want me, just send for me an' I'll come. Don't forget." She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait. As he watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter. The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family. And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely at the paradox. A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along--ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister really was. The true noble men were above pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been generated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings. CHAPTER XL "Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera." His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people were once more worrying about the rent. But such things no longer bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was found his life must stand still. After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met Ruth on the street. It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted to wave him aside. "If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman threatened. "She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence is insult." "If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll get your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly. "And now, get out of my way and get the officer if you want to. I'm going to talk with Ruth." "I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her. She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly. "The question I asked in my letter," he prompted. Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift look. She shook her head. "Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded. "It is." She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation. "It is of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you again." "Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved me." A blush drove the pallor from her face. "After what has passed?" she said faintly. "Martin, you do not know what you are saying. I am not common." "You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman blurted out, starting on with her. Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there. It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it. He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an awakened somnambulist. He noticed "Overdue" lying on the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen. There was in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness. Here was something undone. It had been deferred against the completion of something else. Now that something else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until it was finished. What he would do next he did not know. All that he did know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion. He was not curious about the future. He would soon enough find out what it held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter. Nothing seemed to matter. For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing nobody, and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of The Parthenon. A glance told him that "Ephemera" was accepted. "We have submitted the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it for the August number, our July number being already made up. Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by return mail his photograph and biographical data. If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price." Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then, too, there was Brissenden's consent to be gained.

anyway

How many times the word 'anyway' appears in the text?

you think about them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of it. It will do them good. Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too. You see, I'd like to see you a socialist before I'm gone. It will give you a sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in the time of disappointment that is coming to you." "I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist," Martin pondered. "You detest the crowd so. Surely there is nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul." He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling. "Socialism doesn't seem to save you." "I'm very sick," was the answer. "With you it is different. You have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life somehow. As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy- nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a- brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a poor chap to do? We can't have the man on horseback, and anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come on, anyway. I'm loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I'll get drunk. And you know the doctor says--damn the doctor! I'll fool him yet." It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class. The speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism. The man's stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time. To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol. He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life. They were the unfit. In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man. Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best. It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race- horses and cucumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos. So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them hell. He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and addressing the chairman. He began in a low voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed. He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's time. They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every word. He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated the biological law of development. "And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of the slave-types can endure. The old law of development still holds. In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation increases. That is development. But you slaves--it is too bad to be slaves, I grant--but you slaves dream of a society where the law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will marry and have progeny--the weak as well as the strong. What will be the result? No longer will the strength and life-value of each generation increase. On the contrary, it will diminish. There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your society of slaves--of, by, and for, slaves--must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces. "Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No state of slaves can stand--" "How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience. "And how about it?" Martin retorted. "The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters--not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you over again--but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed." "But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves can endure, because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of development. No sooner can a slave society be organized than deterioration sets in. It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law of development, but where is the new law of development that will maintain your strength? Formulate it. Is it already formulated? Then state it." Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack. It was a wild night--but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas. Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin. They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws. They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the chairman rapped and pounded for order. It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and glib. He was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class. Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers. Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect reporter who is able to make something--even a great deal--out of nothing. He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary. Words like _revolution_ gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_. He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color--wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenic and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men. CHAPTER XXXIX Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's paper. It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh. "Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and dropped limply into the one chair. "But what do you care?" Brissenden asked. "Surely you don't desire the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?" Martin thought for a while, then said:- "No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit. On the other hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's family a trifle awkward. Her father always contended I was a socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief. Not that I care for his opinion--but what's the odds? I want to read you what I've been doing to- day. It's 'Overdue,' of course, and I'm just about halfway through." He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the oil- burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to Martin. "Sit down," Brissenden said. Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to broach his business. "I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview you," he began. Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh. "A brother socialist?" the reporter asked, with a quick glance at Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying man. "And he wrote that report," Martin said softly. "Why, he is only a boy!" "Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked. "I'd give a thousand dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes." The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and around him and at him. But he had been commended for his brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized menace to society. "You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he said. "I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower. Then we can have the interview afterward." "A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively. "Poke him, Martin! Poke him!" "I guess I'm getting old," was the answer. "I know I ought, but I really haven't the heart. It doesn't seem to matter." "For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged. "It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me. You see, it does take energy to give a fellow a poking. Besides, what does it matter?" "That's right--that's the way to take it," the cub announced airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door. "But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on, confining his attention to Brissenden. "It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the cub ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising. That's what counts. It was a favor to you." "It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden repeated solemnly. "And it was a favor to me--think of that!" was Martin's contribution. "Let me see--where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked, assuming an air of expectant attention. "He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden. "He remembers it all." "That is sufficient for me." The cub was trying not to look worried. "No decent reporter needs to bother with notes." "That was sufficient--for last night." But Brissenden was not a disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly. "Martin, if you don't poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next moment." "How will a spanking do?" Martin asked. Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head. The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub face downward across his knees. "Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your face. It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face." His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and steady rhythm. The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite. Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, "Here, just let me swat him once." "Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted. "It is quite numb." He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed. "I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks. "I'll make you sweat for this. You'll see." "The pretty thing," Martin remarked. "He doesn't realize that he has entered upon the downward path. It is not honest, it is not square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures the way he has done, and he doesn't know it." "He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause. "Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My grocery will undoubtedly refuse me credit now. The worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel." "But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden. "Who knows but what you may prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn't you let me swat him just once? I'd like to have had a hand in it." "I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes," sobbed the erring soul. "No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak." Martin shook his head lugubriously. "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain. The young man cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great." With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still clutched. In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about himself that was new to him. "We are the sworn enemies of society," he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. "No, we are not anarchists but socialists." When the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-shot eyes. He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon. The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around and nosed out Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham's Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front. That gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered to him and who would go to jail yet. Hermann Von Schmidt, Marian's husband, had likewise been interviewed. He had called Martin the black sheep of the family and repudiated him. "He tried to sponge off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt had said to the reporter. "He knows better than to come bumming around here. A man who won't work is no good, take that from me." This time Martin was genuinely angry. Brissenden looked upon the affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth. As for her father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement. How much he would make of it he was soon to realize. The afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth. Martin opened it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when he had received it from the postman. As he read, mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old cigarette days. He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a cigarette. It was not a passionate letter. There were no touches of anger in it. But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment. She had expected better of him. She had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live seriously and decently. And now her father and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement be broken. That they were justified in this she could not but admit. Their relation could never be a happy one. It had been unfortunate from the first. But one regret she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin. "If only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make something of yourself," she wrote. "But it was not to be. Your past life had been too wild and irregular. I can understand that you are not to be blamed. You could act only according to your nature and your early training. So I do not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It was simply a mistake. As father and mother have contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be happy because it was discovered not too late." . . "There is no use trying to see me," she said toward the last. "It would be an unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother. I feel, as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry. I shall have to do much living to atone for it." He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down and replied. He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth. Toward the end of the letter he was God's own lover pleading passionately for love. "Please answer," he said, "and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing. Do you love me? That is all--the answer to that one question." But no answer came the next day, nor the next. "Overdue" lay untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under the table grew larger. For the first time Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights. Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell. Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and, though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his troubles. For Martin's troubles were many. The aftermath of the cub reporter's deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated. The Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him--carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin's account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it. The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against Martin ran high. No one would have anything to do with a socialist traitor. Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained loyal. The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe distances they called him "hobo" and "bum." The Silva tribe, however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day and added to Maria's perplexities and troubles. Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned what he knew could not be otherwise--that Bernard Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house. "Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged. "Go away and get a job somewhere and steady down. Afterwards, when this all blows over, you can come back." Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations. How could he explain? He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,--the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped. He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the pawnbroker. "Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him. "After a few months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job of drivin' delivery-wagon for him. Any time you want me, just send for me an' I'll come. Don't forget." She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait. As he watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter. The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family. And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely at the paradox. A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along--ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister really was. The true noble men were above pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been generated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings. CHAPTER XL "Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera." His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people were once more worrying about the rent. But such things no longer bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was found his life must stand still. After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met Ruth on the street. It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted to wave him aside. "If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman threatened. "She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence is insult." "If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll get your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly. "And now, get out of my way and get the officer if you want to. I'm going to talk with Ruth." "I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her. She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly. "The question I asked in my letter," he prompted. Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift look. She shook her head. "Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded. "It is." She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation. "It is of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you again." "Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved me." A blush drove the pallor from her face. "After what has passed?" she said faintly. "Martin, you do not know what you are saying. I am not common." "You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman blurted out, starting on with her. Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there. It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it. He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an awakened somnambulist. He noticed "Overdue" lying on the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen. There was in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness. Here was something undone. It had been deferred against the completion of something else. Now that something else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until it was finished. What he would do next he did not know. All that he did know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion. He was not curious about the future. He would soon enough find out what it held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter. Nothing seemed to matter. For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing nobody, and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of The Parthenon. A glance told him that "Ephemera" was accepted. "We have submitted the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it for the August number, our July number being already made up. Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by return mail his photograph and biographical data. If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price." Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then, too, there was Brissenden's consent to be gained.

pieces

How many times the word 'pieces' appears in the text?

you think about them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of it. It will do them good. Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too. You see, I'd like to see you a socialist before I'm gone. It will give you a sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in the time of disappointment that is coming to you." "I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist," Martin pondered. "You detest the crowd so. Surely there is nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul." He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling. "Socialism doesn't seem to save you." "I'm very sick," was the answer. "With you it is different. You have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life somehow. As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy- nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a- brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a poor chap to do? We can't have the man on horseback, and anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come on, anyway. I'm loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I'll get drunk. And you know the doctor says--damn the doctor! I'll fool him yet." It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class. The speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism. The man's stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time. To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol. He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life. They were the unfit. In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man. Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best. It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race- horses and cucumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos. So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them hell. He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and addressing the chairman. He began in a low voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed. He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's time. They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every word. He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated the biological law of development. "And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of the slave-types can endure. The old law of development still holds. In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation increases. That is development. But you slaves--it is too bad to be slaves, I grant--but you slaves dream of a society where the law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will marry and have progeny--the weak as well as the strong. What will be the result? No longer will the strength and life-value of each generation increase. On the contrary, it will diminish. There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your society of slaves--of, by, and for, slaves--must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces. "Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No state of slaves can stand--" "How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience. "And how about it?" Martin retorted. "The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters--not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you over again--but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed." "But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves can endure, because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of development. No sooner can a slave society be organized than deterioration sets in. It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law of development, but where is the new law of development that will maintain your strength? Formulate it. Is it already formulated? Then state it." Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack. It was a wild night--but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas. Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin. They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws. They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the chairman rapped and pounded for order. It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and glib. He was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class. Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers. Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect reporter who is able to make something--even a great deal--out of nothing. He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary. Words like _revolution_ gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_. He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color--wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenic and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men. CHAPTER XXXIX Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's paper. It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh. "Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and dropped limply into the one chair. "But what do you care?" Brissenden asked. "Surely you don't desire the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?" Martin thought for a while, then said:- "No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit. On the other hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's family a trifle awkward. Her father always contended I was a socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief. Not that I care for his opinion--but what's the odds? I want to read you what I've been doing to- day. It's 'Overdue,' of course, and I'm just about halfway through." He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the oil- burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to Martin. "Sit down," Brissenden said. Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to broach his business. "I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview you," he began. Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh. "A brother socialist?" the reporter asked, with a quick glance at Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying man. "And he wrote that report," Martin said softly. "Why, he is only a boy!" "Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked. "I'd give a thousand dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes." The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and around him and at him. But he had been commended for his brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized menace to society. "You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he said. "I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower. Then we can have the interview afterward." "A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively. "Poke him, Martin! Poke him!" "I guess I'm getting old," was the answer. "I know I ought, but I really haven't the heart. It doesn't seem to matter." "For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged. "It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me. You see, it does take energy to give a fellow a poking. Besides, what does it matter?" "That's right--that's the way to take it," the cub announced airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door. "But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on, confining his attention to Brissenden. "It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the cub ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising. That's what counts. It was a favor to you." "It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden repeated solemnly. "And it was a favor to me--think of that!" was Martin's contribution. "Let me see--where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked, assuming an air of expectant attention. "He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden. "He remembers it all." "That is sufficient for me." The cub was trying not to look worried. "No decent reporter needs to bother with notes." "That was sufficient--for last night." But Brissenden was not a disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly. "Martin, if you don't poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next moment." "How will a spanking do?" Martin asked. Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head. The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub face downward across his knees. "Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your face. It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face." His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and steady rhythm. The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite. Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, "Here, just let me swat him once." "Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted. "It is quite numb." He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed. "I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks. "I'll make you sweat for this. You'll see." "The pretty thing," Martin remarked. "He doesn't realize that he has entered upon the downward path. It is not honest, it is not square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures the way he has done, and he doesn't know it." "He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause. "Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My grocery will undoubtedly refuse me credit now. The worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel." "But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden. "Who knows but what you may prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn't you let me swat him just once? I'd like to have had a hand in it." "I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes," sobbed the erring soul. "No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak." Martin shook his head lugubriously. "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain. The young man cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great." With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still clutched. In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about himself that was new to him. "We are the sworn enemies of society," he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. "No, we are not anarchists but socialists." When the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-shot eyes. He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon. The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around and nosed out Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham's Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front. That gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered to him and who would go to jail yet. Hermann Von Schmidt, Marian's husband, had likewise been interviewed. He had called Martin the black sheep of the family and repudiated him. "He tried to sponge off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt had said to the reporter. "He knows better than to come bumming around here. A man who won't work is no good, take that from me." This time Martin was genuinely angry. Brissenden looked upon the affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth. As for her father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement. How much he would make of it he was soon to realize. The afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth. Martin opened it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when he had received it from the postman. As he read, mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old cigarette days. He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a cigarette. It was not a passionate letter. There were no touches of anger in it. But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment. She had expected better of him. She had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live seriously and decently. And now her father and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement be broken. That they were justified in this she could not but admit. Their relation could never be a happy one. It had been unfortunate from the first. But one regret she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin. "If only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make something of yourself," she wrote. "But it was not to be. Your past life had been too wild and irregular. I can understand that you are not to be blamed. You could act only according to your nature and your early training. So I do not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It was simply a mistake. As father and mother have contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be happy because it was discovered not too late." . . "There is no use trying to see me," she said toward the last. "It would be an unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother. I feel, as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry. I shall have to do much living to atone for it." He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down and replied. He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth. Toward the end of the letter he was God's own lover pleading passionately for love. "Please answer," he said, "and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing. Do you love me? That is all--the answer to that one question." But no answer came the next day, nor the next. "Overdue" lay untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under the table grew larger. For the first time Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights. Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell. Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and, though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his troubles. For Martin's troubles were many. The aftermath of the cub reporter's deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated. The Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him--carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin's account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it. The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against Martin ran high. No one would have anything to do with a socialist traitor. Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained loyal. The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe distances they called him "hobo" and "bum." The Silva tribe, however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day and added to Maria's perplexities and troubles. Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned what he knew could not be otherwise--that Bernard Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house. "Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged. "Go away and get a job somewhere and steady down. Afterwards, when this all blows over, you can come back." Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations. How could he explain? He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,--the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped. He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the pawnbroker. "Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him. "After a few months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job of drivin' delivery-wagon for him. Any time you want me, just send for me an' I'll come. Don't forget." She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait. As he watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter. The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family. And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely at the paradox. A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along--ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister really was. The true noble men were above pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been generated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings. CHAPTER XL "Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera." His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people were once more worrying about the rent. But such things no longer bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was found his life must stand still. After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met Ruth on the street. It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted to wave him aside. "If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman threatened. "She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence is insult." "If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll get your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly. "And now, get out of my way and get the officer if you want to. I'm going to talk with Ruth." "I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her. She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly. "The question I asked in my letter," he prompted. Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift look. She shook her head. "Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded. "It is." She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation. "It is of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you again." "Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved me." A blush drove the pallor from her face. "After what has passed?" she said faintly. "Martin, you do not know what you are saying. I am not common." "You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman blurted out, starting on with her. Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there. It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it. He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an awakened somnambulist. He noticed "Overdue" lying on the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen. There was in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness. Here was something undone. It had been deferred against the completion of something else. Now that something else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until it was finished. What he would do next he did not know. All that he did know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion. He was not curious about the future. He would soon enough find out what it held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter. Nothing seemed to matter. For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing nobody, and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of The Parthenon. A glance told him that "Ephemera" was accepted. "We have submitted the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it for the August number, our July number being already made up. Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by return mail his photograph and biographical data. If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price." Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then, too, there was Brissenden's consent to be gained.

bad

How many times the word 'bad' appears in the text?

you think about them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of it. It will do them good. Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too. You see, I'd like to see you a socialist before I'm gone. It will give you a sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in the time of disappointment that is coming to you." "I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist," Martin pondered. "You detest the crowd so. Surely there is nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul." He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling. "Socialism doesn't seem to save you." "I'm very sick," was the answer. "With you it is different. You have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life somehow. As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy- nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a- brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a poor chap to do? We can't have the man on horseback, and anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come on, anyway. I'm loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I'll get drunk. And you know the doctor says--damn the doctor! I'll fool him yet." It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class. The speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism. The man's stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time. To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol. He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life. They were the unfit. In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man. Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best. It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race- horses and cucumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos. So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them hell. He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and addressing the chairman. He began in a low voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed. He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's time. They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every word. He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated the biological law of development. "And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of the slave-types can endure. The old law of development still holds. In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation increases. That is development. But you slaves--it is too bad to be slaves, I grant--but you slaves dream of a society where the law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will marry and have progeny--the weak as well as the strong. What will be the result? No longer will the strength and life-value of each generation increase. On the contrary, it will diminish. There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your society of slaves--of, by, and for, slaves--must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces. "Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No state of slaves can stand--" "How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience. "And how about it?" Martin retorted. "The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters--not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you over again--but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed." "But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves can endure, because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of development. No sooner can a slave society be organized than deterioration sets in. It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law of development, but where is the new law of development that will maintain your strength? Formulate it. Is it already formulated? Then state it." Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack. It was a wild night--but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas. Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin. They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws. They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the chairman rapped and pounded for order. It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and glib. He was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class. Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers. Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect reporter who is able to make something--even a great deal--out of nothing. He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary. Words like _revolution_ gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_. He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color--wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenic and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men. CHAPTER XXXIX Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's paper. It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh. "Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and dropped limply into the one chair. "But what do you care?" Brissenden asked. "Surely you don't desire the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?" Martin thought for a while, then said:- "No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit. On the other hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's family a trifle awkward. Her father always contended I was a socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief. Not that I care for his opinion--but what's the odds? I want to read you what I've been doing to- day. It's 'Overdue,' of course, and I'm just about halfway through." He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the oil- burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to Martin. "Sit down," Brissenden said. Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to broach his business. "I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview you," he began. Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh. "A brother socialist?" the reporter asked, with a quick glance at Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying man. "And he wrote that report," Martin said softly. "Why, he is only a boy!" "Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked. "I'd give a thousand dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes." The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and around him and at him. But he had been commended for his brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized menace to society. "You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he said. "I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower. Then we can have the interview afterward." "A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively. "Poke him, Martin! Poke him!" "I guess I'm getting old," was the answer. "I know I ought, but I really haven't the heart. It doesn't seem to matter." "For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged. "It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me. You see, it does take energy to give a fellow a poking. Besides, what does it matter?" "That's right--that's the way to take it," the cub announced airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door. "But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on, confining his attention to Brissenden. "It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the cub ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising. That's what counts. It was a favor to you." "It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden repeated solemnly. "And it was a favor to me--think of that!" was Martin's contribution. "Let me see--where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked, assuming an air of expectant attention. "He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden. "He remembers it all." "That is sufficient for me." The cub was trying not to look worried. "No decent reporter needs to bother with notes." "That was sufficient--for last night." But Brissenden was not a disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly. "Martin, if you don't poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next moment." "How will a spanking do?" Martin asked. Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head. The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub face downward across his knees. "Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your face. It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face." His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and steady rhythm. The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite. Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, "Here, just let me swat him once." "Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted. "It is quite numb." He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed. "I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks. "I'll make you sweat for this. You'll see." "The pretty thing," Martin remarked. "He doesn't realize that he has entered upon the downward path. It is not honest, it is not square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures the way he has done, and he doesn't know it." "He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause. "Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My grocery will undoubtedly refuse me credit now. The worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel." "But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden. "Who knows but what you may prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn't you let me swat him just once? I'd like to have had a hand in it." "I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes," sobbed the erring soul. "No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak." Martin shook his head lugubriously. "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain. The young man cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great." With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still clutched. In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about himself that was new to him. "We are the sworn enemies of society," he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. "No, we are not anarchists but socialists." When the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-shot eyes. He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon. The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around and nosed out Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham's Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front. That gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered to him and who would go to jail yet. Hermann Von Schmidt, Marian's husband, had likewise been interviewed. He had called Martin the black sheep of the family and repudiated him. "He tried to sponge off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt had said to the reporter. "He knows better than to come bumming around here. A man who won't work is no good, take that from me." This time Martin was genuinely angry. Brissenden looked upon the affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth. As for her father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement. How much he would make of it he was soon to realize. The afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth. Martin opened it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when he had received it from the postman. As he read, mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old cigarette days. He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a cigarette. It was not a passionate letter. There were no touches of anger in it. But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment. She had expected better of him. She had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live seriously and decently. And now her father and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement be broken. That they were justified in this she could not but admit. Their relation could never be a happy one. It had been unfortunate from the first. But one regret she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin. "If only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make something of yourself," she wrote. "But it was not to be. Your past life had been too wild and irregular. I can understand that you are not to be blamed. You could act only according to your nature and your early training. So I do not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It was simply a mistake. As father and mother have contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be happy because it was discovered not too late." . . "There is no use trying to see me," she said toward the last. "It would be an unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother. I feel, as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry. I shall have to do much living to atone for it." He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down and replied. He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth. Toward the end of the letter he was God's own lover pleading passionately for love. "Please answer," he said, "and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing. Do you love me? That is all--the answer to that one question." But no answer came the next day, nor the next. "Overdue" lay untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under the table grew larger. For the first time Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights. Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell. Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and, though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his troubles. For Martin's troubles were many. The aftermath of the cub reporter's deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated. The Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him--carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin's account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it. The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against Martin ran high. No one would have anything to do with a socialist traitor. Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained loyal. The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe distances they called him "hobo" and "bum." The Silva tribe, however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day and added to Maria's perplexities and troubles. Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned what he knew could not be otherwise--that Bernard Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house. "Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged. "Go away and get a job somewhere and steady down. Afterwards, when this all blows over, you can come back." Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations. How could he explain? He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,--the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped. He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the pawnbroker. "Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him. "After a few months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job of drivin' delivery-wagon for him. Any time you want me, just send for me an' I'll come. Don't forget." She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait. As he watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter. The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family. And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely at the paradox. A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along--ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister really was. The true noble men were above pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been generated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings. CHAPTER XL "Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera." His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people were once more worrying about the rent. But such things no longer bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was found his life must stand still. After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met Ruth on the street. It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted to wave him aside. "If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman threatened. "She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence is insult." "If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll get your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly. "And now, get out of my way and get the officer if you want to. I'm going to talk with Ruth." "I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her. She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly. "The question I asked in my letter," he prompted. Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift look. She shook her head. "Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded. "It is." She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation. "It is of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you again." "Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved me." A blush drove the pallor from her face. "After what has passed?" she said faintly. "Martin, you do not know what you are saying. I am not common." "You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman blurted out, starting on with her. Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there. It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it. He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an awakened somnambulist. He noticed "Overdue" lying on the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen. There was in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness. Here was something undone. It had been deferred against the completion of something else. Now that something else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until it was finished. What he would do next he did not know. All that he did know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion. He was not curious about the future. He would soon enough find out what it held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter. Nothing seemed to matter. For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing nobody, and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of The Parthenon. A glance told him that "Ephemera" was accepted. "We have submitted the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it for the August number, our July number being already made up. Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by return mail his photograph and biographical data. If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price." Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then, too, there was Brissenden's consent to be gained.

united

How many times the word 'united' appears in the text?

you think about them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of it. It will do them good. Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too. You see, I'd like to see you a socialist before I'm gone. It will give you a sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in the time of disappointment that is coming to you." "I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist," Martin pondered. "You detest the crowd so. Surely there is nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul." He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling. "Socialism doesn't seem to save you." "I'm very sick," was the answer. "With you it is different. You have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life somehow. As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy- nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a- brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a poor chap to do? We can't have the man on horseback, and anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come on, anyway. I'm loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I'll get drunk. And you know the doctor says--damn the doctor! I'll fool him yet." It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class. The speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism. The man's stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time. To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol. He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life. They were the unfit. In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man. Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best. It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race- horses and cucumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos. So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them hell. He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and addressing the chairman. He began in a low voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed. He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's time. They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every word. He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated the biological law of development. "And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of the slave-types can endure. The old law of development still holds. In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation increases. That is development. But you slaves--it is too bad to be slaves, I grant--but you slaves dream of a society where the law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will marry and have progeny--the weak as well as the strong. What will be the result? No longer will the strength and life-value of each generation increase. On the contrary, it will diminish. There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your society of slaves--of, by, and for, slaves--must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces. "Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No state of slaves can stand--" "How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience. "And how about it?" Martin retorted. "The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters--not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you over again--but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed." "But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves can endure, because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of development. No sooner can a slave society be organized than deterioration sets in. It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law of development, but where is the new law of development that will maintain your strength? Formulate it. Is it already formulated? Then state it." Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack. It was a wild night--but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas. Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin. They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws. They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the chairman rapped and pounded for order. It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and glib. He was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class. Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers. Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect reporter who is able to make something--even a great deal--out of nothing. He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary. Words like _revolution_ gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_. He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color--wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenic and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men. CHAPTER XXXIX Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's paper. It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh. "Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and dropped limply into the one chair. "But what do you care?" Brissenden asked. "Surely you don't desire the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?" Martin thought for a while, then said:- "No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit. On the other hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's family a trifle awkward. Her father always contended I was a socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief. Not that I care for his opinion--but what's the odds? I want to read you what I've been doing to- day. It's 'Overdue,' of course, and I'm just about halfway through." He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the oil- burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to Martin. "Sit down," Brissenden said. Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to broach his business. "I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview you," he began. Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh. "A brother socialist?" the reporter asked, with a quick glance at Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying man. "And he wrote that report," Martin said softly. "Why, he is only a boy!" "Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked. "I'd give a thousand dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes." The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and around him and at him. But he had been commended for his brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized menace to society. "You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he said. "I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower. Then we can have the interview afterward." "A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively. "Poke him, Martin! Poke him!" "I guess I'm getting old," was the answer. "I know I ought, but I really haven't the heart. It doesn't seem to matter." "For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged. "It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me. You see, it does take energy to give a fellow a poking. Besides, what does it matter?" "That's right--that's the way to take it," the cub announced airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door. "But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on, confining his attention to Brissenden. "It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the cub ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising. That's what counts. It was a favor to you." "It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden repeated solemnly. "And it was a favor to me--think of that!" was Martin's contribution. "Let me see--where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked, assuming an air of expectant attention. "He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden. "He remembers it all." "That is sufficient for me." The cub was trying not to look worried. "No decent reporter needs to bother with notes." "That was sufficient--for last night." But Brissenden was not a disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly. "Martin, if you don't poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next moment." "How will a spanking do?" Martin asked. Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head. The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub face downward across his knees. "Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your face. It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face." His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and steady rhythm. The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite. Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, "Here, just let me swat him once." "Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted. "It is quite numb." He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed. "I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks. "I'll make you sweat for this. You'll see." "The pretty thing," Martin remarked. "He doesn't realize that he has entered upon the downward path. It is not honest, it is not square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures the way he has done, and he doesn't know it." "He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause. "Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My grocery will undoubtedly refuse me credit now. The worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel." "But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden. "Who knows but what you may prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn't you let me swat him just once? I'd like to have had a hand in it." "I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes," sobbed the erring soul. "No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak." Martin shook his head lugubriously. "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain. The young man cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great." With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still clutched. In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about himself that was new to him. "We are the sworn enemies of society," he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. "No, we are not anarchists but socialists." When the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-shot eyes. He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon. The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around and nosed out Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham's Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front. That gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered to him and who would go to jail yet. Hermann Von Schmidt, Marian's husband, had likewise been interviewed. He had called Martin the black sheep of the family and repudiated him. "He tried to sponge off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt had said to the reporter. "He knows better than to come bumming around here. A man who won't work is no good, take that from me." This time Martin was genuinely angry. Brissenden looked upon the affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth. As for her father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement. How much he would make of it he was soon to realize. The afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth. Martin opened it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when he had received it from the postman. As he read, mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old cigarette days. He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a cigarette. It was not a passionate letter. There were no touches of anger in it. But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment. She had expected better of him. She had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live seriously and decently. And now her father and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement be broken. That they were justified in this she could not but admit. Their relation could never be a happy one. It had been unfortunate from the first. But one regret she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin. "If only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make something of yourself," she wrote. "But it was not to be. Your past life had been too wild and irregular. I can understand that you are not to be blamed. You could act only according to your nature and your early training. So I do not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It was simply a mistake. As father and mother have contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be happy because it was discovered not too late." . . "There is no use trying to see me," she said toward the last. "It would be an unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother. I feel, as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry. I shall have to do much living to atone for it." He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down and replied. He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth. Toward the end of the letter he was God's own lover pleading passionately for love. "Please answer," he said, "and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing. Do you love me? That is all--the answer to that one question." But no answer came the next day, nor the next. "Overdue" lay untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under the table grew larger. For the first time Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights. Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell. Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and, though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his troubles. For Martin's troubles were many. The aftermath of the cub reporter's deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated. The Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him--carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin's account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it. The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against Martin ran high. No one would have anything to do with a socialist traitor. Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained loyal. The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe distances they called him "hobo" and "bum." The Silva tribe, however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day and added to Maria's perplexities and troubles. Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned what he knew could not be otherwise--that Bernard Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house. "Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged. "Go away and get a job somewhere and steady down. Afterwards, when this all blows over, you can come back." Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations. How could he explain? He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,--the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped. He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the pawnbroker. "Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him. "After a few months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job of drivin' delivery-wagon for him. Any time you want me, just send for me an' I'll come. Don't forget." She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait. As he watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter. The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family. And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely at the paradox. A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along--ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister really was. The true noble men were above pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been generated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings. CHAPTER XL "Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera." His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people were once more worrying about the rent. But such things no longer bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was found his life must stand still. After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met Ruth on the street. It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted to wave him aside. "If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman threatened. "She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence is insult." "If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll get your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly. "And now, get out of my way and get the officer if you want to. I'm going to talk with Ruth." "I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her. She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly. "The question I asked in my letter," he prompted. Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift look. She shook her head. "Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded. "It is." She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation. "It is of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you again." "Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved me." A blush drove the pallor from her face. "After what has passed?" she said faintly. "Martin, you do not know what you are saying. I am not common." "You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman blurted out, starting on with her. Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there. It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it. He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an awakened somnambulist. He noticed "Overdue" lying on the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen. There was in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness. Here was something undone. It had been deferred against the completion of something else. Now that something else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until it was finished. What he would do next he did not know. All that he did know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion. He was not curious about the future. He would soon enough find out what it held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter. Nothing seemed to matter. For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing nobody, and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of The Parthenon. A glance told him that "Ephemera" was accepted. "We have submitted the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it for the August number, our July number being already made up. Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by return mail his photograph and biographical data. If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price." Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then, too, there was Brissenden's consent to be gained.

perished

How many times the word 'perished' appears in the text?

you think about them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of it. It will do them good. Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too. You see, I'd like to see you a socialist before I'm gone. It will give you a sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in the time of disappointment that is coming to you." "I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist," Martin pondered. "You detest the crowd so. Surely there is nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul." He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling. "Socialism doesn't seem to save you." "I'm very sick," was the answer. "With you it is different. You have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life somehow. As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy- nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a- brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a poor chap to do? We can't have the man on horseback, and anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come on, anyway. I'm loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I'll get drunk. And you know the doctor says--damn the doctor! I'll fool him yet." It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class. The speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism. The man's stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time. To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol. He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life. They were the unfit. In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man. Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best. It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race- horses and cucumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos. So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them hell. He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and addressing the chairman. He began in a low voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed. He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's time. They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every word. He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated the biological law of development. "And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of the slave-types can endure. The old law of development still holds. In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation increases. That is development. But you slaves--it is too bad to be slaves, I grant--but you slaves dream of a society where the law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will marry and have progeny--the weak as well as the strong. What will be the result? No longer will the strength and life-value of each generation increase. On the contrary, it will diminish. There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your society of slaves--of, by, and for, slaves--must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces. "Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No state of slaves can stand--" "How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience. "And how about it?" Martin retorted. "The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters--not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you over again--but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed." "But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves can endure, because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of development. No sooner can a slave society be organized than deterioration sets in. It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law of development, but where is the new law of development that will maintain your strength? Formulate it. Is it already formulated? Then state it." Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack. It was a wild night--but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas. Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin. They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws. They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the chairman rapped and pounded for order. It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and glib. He was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class. Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers. Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect reporter who is able to make something--even a great deal--out of nothing. He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary. Words like _revolution_ gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_. He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color--wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenic and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men. CHAPTER XXXIX Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's paper. It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh. "Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and dropped limply into the one chair. "But what do you care?" Brissenden asked. "Surely you don't desire the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?" Martin thought for a while, then said:- "No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit. On the other hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's family a trifle awkward. Her father always contended I was a socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief. Not that I care for his opinion--but what's the odds? I want to read you what I've been doing to- day. It's 'Overdue,' of course, and I'm just about halfway through." He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the oil- burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to Martin. "Sit down," Brissenden said. Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to broach his business. "I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview you," he began. Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh. "A brother socialist?" the reporter asked, with a quick glance at Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying man. "And he wrote that report," Martin said softly. "Why, he is only a boy!" "Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked. "I'd give a thousand dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes." The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and around him and at him. But he had been commended for his brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized menace to society. "You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he said. "I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower. Then we can have the interview afterward." "A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively. "Poke him, Martin! Poke him!" "I guess I'm getting old," was the answer. "I know I ought, but I really haven't the heart. It doesn't seem to matter." "For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged. "It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me. You see, it does take energy to give a fellow a poking. Besides, what does it matter?" "That's right--that's the way to take it," the cub announced airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door. "But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on, confining his attention to Brissenden. "It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the cub ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising. That's what counts. It was a favor to you." "It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden repeated solemnly. "And it was a favor to me--think of that!" was Martin's contribution. "Let me see--where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked, assuming an air of expectant attention. "He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden. "He remembers it all." "That is sufficient for me." The cub was trying not to look worried. "No decent reporter needs to bother with notes." "That was sufficient--for last night." But Brissenden was not a disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly. "Martin, if you don't poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next moment." "How will a spanking do?" Martin asked. Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head. The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub face downward across his knees. "Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your face. It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face." His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and steady rhythm. The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite. Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, "Here, just let me swat him once." "Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted. "It is quite numb." He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed. "I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks. "I'll make you sweat for this. You'll see." "The pretty thing," Martin remarked. "He doesn't realize that he has entered upon the downward path. It is not honest, it is not square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures the way he has done, and he doesn't know it." "He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause. "Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My grocery will undoubtedly refuse me credit now. The worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel." "But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden. "Who knows but what you may prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn't you let me swat him just once? I'd like to have had a hand in it." "I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes," sobbed the erring soul. "No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak." Martin shook his head lugubriously. "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain. The young man cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great." With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still clutched. In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about himself that was new to him. "We are the sworn enemies of society," he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. "No, we are not anarchists but socialists." When the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-shot eyes. He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon. The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around and nosed out Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham's Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front. That gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered to him and who would go to jail yet. Hermann Von Schmidt, Marian's husband, had likewise been interviewed. He had called Martin the black sheep of the family and repudiated him. "He tried to sponge off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt had said to the reporter. "He knows better than to come bumming around here. A man who won't work is no good, take that from me." This time Martin was genuinely angry. Brissenden looked upon the affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth. As for her father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement. How much he would make of it he was soon to realize. The afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth. Martin opened it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when he had received it from the postman. As he read, mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old cigarette days. He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a cigarette. It was not a passionate letter. There were no touches of anger in it. But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment. She had expected better of him. She had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live seriously and decently. And now her father and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement be broken. That they were justified in this she could not but admit. Their relation could never be a happy one. It had been unfortunate from the first. But one regret she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin. "If only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make something of yourself," she wrote. "But it was not to be. Your past life had been too wild and irregular. I can understand that you are not to be blamed. You could act only according to your nature and your early training. So I do not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It was simply a mistake. As father and mother have contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be happy because it was discovered not too late." . . "There is no use trying to see me," she said toward the last. "It would be an unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother. I feel, as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry. I shall have to do much living to atone for it." He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down and replied. He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth. Toward the end of the letter he was God's own lover pleading passionately for love. "Please answer," he said, "and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing. Do you love me? That is all--the answer to that one question." But no answer came the next day, nor the next. "Overdue" lay untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under the table grew larger. For the first time Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights. Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell. Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and, though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his troubles. For Martin's troubles were many. The aftermath of the cub reporter's deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated. The Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him--carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin's account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it. The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against Martin ran high. No one would have anything to do with a socialist traitor. Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained loyal. The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe distances they called him "hobo" and "bum." The Silva tribe, however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day and added to Maria's perplexities and troubles. Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned what he knew could not be otherwise--that Bernard Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house. "Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged. "Go away and get a job somewhere and steady down. Afterwards, when this all blows over, you can come back." Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations. How could he explain? He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,--the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped. He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the pawnbroker. "Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him. "After a few months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job of drivin' delivery-wagon for him. Any time you want me, just send for me an' I'll come. Don't forget." She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait. As he watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter. The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family. And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely at the paradox. A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along--ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister really was. The true noble men were above pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been generated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings. CHAPTER XL "Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera." His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people were once more worrying about the rent. But such things no longer bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was found his life must stand still. After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met Ruth on the street. It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted to wave him aside. "If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman threatened. "She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence is insult." "If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll get your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly. "And now, get out of my way and get the officer if you want to. I'm going to talk with Ruth." "I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her. She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly. "The question I asked in my letter," he prompted. Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift look. She shook her head. "Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded. "It is." She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation. "It is of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you again." "Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved me." A blush drove the pallor from her face. "After what has passed?" she said faintly. "Martin, you do not know what you are saying. I am not common." "You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman blurted out, starting on with her. Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there. It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it. He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an awakened somnambulist. He noticed "Overdue" lying on the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen. There was in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness. Here was something undone. It had been deferred against the completion of something else. Now that something else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until it was finished. What he would do next he did not know. All that he did know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion. He was not curious about the future. He would soon enough find out what it held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter. Nothing seemed to matter. For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing nobody, and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of The Parthenon. A glance told him that "Ephemera" was accepted. "We have submitted the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it for the August number, our July number being already made up. Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by return mail his photograph and biographical data. If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price." Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then, too, there was Brissenden's consent to be gained.

struggle

How many times the word 'struggle' appears in the text?

you think about them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of it. It will do them good. Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too. You see, I'd like to see you a socialist before I'm gone. It will give you a sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in the time of disappointment that is coming to you." "I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist," Martin pondered. "You detest the crowd so. Surely there is nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul." He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling. "Socialism doesn't seem to save you." "I'm very sick," was the answer. "With you it is different. You have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life somehow. As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy- nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a- brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a poor chap to do? We can't have the man on horseback, and anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come on, anyway. I'm loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I'll get drunk. And you know the doctor says--damn the doctor! I'll fool him yet." It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class. The speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism. The man's stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time. To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol. He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life. They were the unfit. In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man. Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best. It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race- horses and cucumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos. So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them hell. He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and addressing the chairman. He began in a low voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed. He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's time. They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every word. He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated the biological law of development. "And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of the slave-types can endure. The old law of development still holds. In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation increases. That is development. But you slaves--it is too bad to be slaves, I grant--but you slaves dream of a society where the law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will marry and have progeny--the weak as well as the strong. What will be the result? No longer will the strength and life-value of each generation increase. On the contrary, it will diminish. There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your society of slaves--of, by, and for, slaves--must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces. "Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No state of slaves can stand--" "How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience. "And how about it?" Martin retorted. "The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters--not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you over again--but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed." "But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves can endure, because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of development. No sooner can a slave society be organized than deterioration sets in. It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law of development, but where is the new law of development that will maintain your strength? Formulate it. Is it already formulated? Then state it." Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack. It was a wild night--but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas. Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin. They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws. They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the chairman rapped and pounded for order. It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and glib. He was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class. Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers. Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect reporter who is able to make something--even a great deal--out of nothing. He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary. Words like _revolution_ gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_. He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color--wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenic and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men. CHAPTER XXXIX Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's paper. It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh. "Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and dropped limply into the one chair. "But what do you care?" Brissenden asked. "Surely you don't desire the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?" Martin thought for a while, then said:- "No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit. On the other hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's family a trifle awkward. Her father always contended I was a socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief. Not that I care for his opinion--but what's the odds? I want to read you what I've been doing to- day. It's 'Overdue,' of course, and I'm just about halfway through." He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the oil- burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to Martin. "Sit down," Brissenden said. Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to broach his business. "I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview you," he began. Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh. "A brother socialist?" the reporter asked, with a quick glance at Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying man. "And he wrote that report," Martin said softly. "Why, he is only a boy!" "Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked. "I'd give a thousand dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes." The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and around him and at him. But he had been commended for his brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized menace to society. "You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he said. "I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower. Then we can have the interview afterward." "A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively. "Poke him, Martin! Poke him!" "I guess I'm getting old," was the answer. "I know I ought, but I really haven't the heart. It doesn't seem to matter." "For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged. "It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me. You see, it does take energy to give a fellow a poking. Besides, what does it matter?" "That's right--that's the way to take it," the cub announced airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door. "But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on, confining his attention to Brissenden. "It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the cub ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising. That's what counts. It was a favor to you." "It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden repeated solemnly. "And it was a favor to me--think of that!" was Martin's contribution. "Let me see--where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked, assuming an air of expectant attention. "He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden. "He remembers it all." "That is sufficient for me." The cub was trying not to look worried. "No decent reporter needs to bother with notes." "That was sufficient--for last night." But Brissenden was not a disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly. "Martin, if you don't poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next moment." "How will a spanking do?" Martin asked. Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head. The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub face downward across his knees. "Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your face. It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face." His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and steady rhythm. The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite. Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, "Here, just let me swat him once." "Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted. "It is quite numb." He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed. "I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks. "I'll make you sweat for this. You'll see." "The pretty thing," Martin remarked. "He doesn't realize that he has entered upon the downward path. It is not honest, it is not square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures the way he has done, and he doesn't know it." "He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause. "Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My grocery will undoubtedly refuse me credit now. The worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel." "But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden. "Who knows but what you may prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn't you let me swat him just once? I'd like to have had a hand in it." "I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes," sobbed the erring soul. "No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak." Martin shook his head lugubriously. "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain. The young man cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great." With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still clutched. In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about himself that was new to him. "We are the sworn enemies of society," he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. "No, we are not anarchists but socialists." When the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-shot eyes. He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon. The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around and nosed out Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham's Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front. That gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered to him and who would go to jail yet. Hermann Von Schmidt, Marian's husband, had likewise been interviewed. He had called Martin the black sheep of the family and repudiated him. "He tried to sponge off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt had said to the reporter. "He knows better than to come bumming around here. A man who won't work is no good, take that from me." This time Martin was genuinely angry. Brissenden looked upon the affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth. As for her father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement. How much he would make of it he was soon to realize. The afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth. Martin opened it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when he had received it from the postman. As he read, mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old cigarette days. He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a cigarette. It was not a passionate letter. There were no touches of anger in it. But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment. She had expected better of him. She had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live seriously and decently. And now her father and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement be broken. That they were justified in this she could not but admit. Their relation could never be a happy one. It had been unfortunate from the first. But one regret she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin. "If only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make something of yourself," she wrote. "But it was not to be. Your past life had been too wild and irregular. I can understand that you are not to be blamed. You could act only according to your nature and your early training. So I do not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It was simply a mistake. As father and mother have contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be happy because it was discovered not too late." . . "There is no use trying to see me," she said toward the last. "It would be an unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother. I feel, as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry. I shall have to do much living to atone for it." He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down and replied. He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth. Toward the end of the letter he was God's own lover pleading passionately for love. "Please answer," he said, "and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing. Do you love me? That is all--the answer to that one question." But no answer came the next day, nor the next. "Overdue" lay untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under the table grew larger. For the first time Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights. Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell. Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and, though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his troubles. For Martin's troubles were many. The aftermath of the cub reporter's deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated. The Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him--carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin's account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it. The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against Martin ran high. No one would have anything to do with a socialist traitor. Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained loyal. The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe distances they called him "hobo" and "bum." The Silva tribe, however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day and added to Maria's perplexities and troubles. Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned what he knew could not be otherwise--that Bernard Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house. "Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged. "Go away and get a job somewhere and steady down. Afterwards, when this all blows over, you can come back." Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations. How could he explain? He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,--the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped. He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the pawnbroker. "Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him. "After a few months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job of drivin' delivery-wagon for him. Any time you want me, just send for me an' I'll come. Don't forget." She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait. As he watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter. The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family. And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely at the paradox. A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along--ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister really was. The true noble men were above pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been generated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings. CHAPTER XL "Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera." His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people were once more worrying about the rent. But such things no longer bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was found his life must stand still. After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met Ruth on the street. It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted to wave him aside. "If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman threatened. "She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence is insult." "If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll get your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly. "And now, get out of my way and get the officer if you want to. I'm going to talk with Ruth." "I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her. She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly. "The question I asked in my letter," he prompted. Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift look. She shook her head. "Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded. "It is." She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation. "It is of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you again." "Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved me." A blush drove the pallor from her face. "After what has passed?" she said faintly. "Martin, you do not know what you are saying. I am not common." "You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman blurted out, starting on with her. Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there. It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it. He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an awakened somnambulist. He noticed "Overdue" lying on the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen. There was in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness. Here was something undone. It had been deferred against the completion of something else. Now that something else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until it was finished. What he would do next he did not know. All that he did know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion. He was not curious about the future. He would soon enough find out what it held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter. Nothing seemed to matter. For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing nobody, and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of The Parthenon. A glance told him that "Ephemera" was accepted. "We have submitted the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it for the August number, our July number being already made up. Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by return mail his photograph and biographical data. If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price." Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then, too, there was Brissenden's consent to be gained.

penalties

How many times the word 'penalties' appears in the text?

you think about them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of it. It will do them good. Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too. You see, I'd like to see you a socialist before I'm gone. It will give you a sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in the time of disappointment that is coming to you." "I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist," Martin pondered. "You detest the crowd so. Surely there is nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul." He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling. "Socialism doesn't seem to save you." "I'm very sick," was the answer. "With you it is different. You have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life somehow. As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy- nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a- brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a poor chap to do? We can't have the man on horseback, and anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come on, anyway. I'm loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I'll get drunk. And you know the doctor says--damn the doctor! I'll fool him yet." It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class. The speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism. The man's stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time. To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol. He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life. They were the unfit. In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man. Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best. It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race- horses and cucumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos. So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them hell. He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and addressing the chairman. He began in a low voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed. He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's time. They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every word. He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated the biological law of development. "And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of the slave-types can endure. The old law of development still holds. In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation increases. That is development. But you slaves--it is too bad to be slaves, I grant--but you slaves dream of a society where the law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will marry and have progeny--the weak as well as the strong. What will be the result? No longer will the strength and life-value of each generation increase. On the contrary, it will diminish. There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your society of slaves--of, by, and for, slaves--must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces. "Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No state of slaves can stand--" "How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience. "And how about it?" Martin retorted. "The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters--not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you over again--but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed." "But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves can endure, because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of development. No sooner can a slave society be organized than deterioration sets in. It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law of development, but where is the new law of development that will maintain your strength? Formulate it. Is it already formulated? Then state it." Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack. It was a wild night--but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas. Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin. They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws. They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the chairman rapped and pounded for order. It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and glib. He was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class. Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers. Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect reporter who is able to make something--even a great deal--out of nothing. He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary. Words like _revolution_ gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_. He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color--wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenic and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men. CHAPTER XXXIX Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's paper. It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh. "Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and dropped limply into the one chair. "But what do you care?" Brissenden asked. "Surely you don't desire the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?" Martin thought for a while, then said:- "No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit. On the other hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's family a trifle awkward. Her father always contended I was a socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief. Not that I care for his opinion--but what's the odds? I want to read you what I've been doing to- day. It's 'Overdue,' of course, and I'm just about halfway through." He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the oil- burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to Martin. "Sit down," Brissenden said. Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to broach his business. "I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview you," he began. Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh. "A brother socialist?" the reporter asked, with a quick glance at Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying man. "And he wrote that report," Martin said softly. "Why, he is only a boy!" "Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked. "I'd give a thousand dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes." The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and around him and at him. But he had been commended for his brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized menace to society. "You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he said. "I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower. Then we can have the interview afterward." "A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively. "Poke him, Martin! Poke him!" "I guess I'm getting old," was the answer. "I know I ought, but I really haven't the heart. It doesn't seem to matter." "For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged. "It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me. You see, it does take energy to give a fellow a poking. Besides, what does it matter?" "That's right--that's the way to take it," the cub announced airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door. "But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on, confining his attention to Brissenden. "It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the cub ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising. That's what counts. It was a favor to you." "It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden repeated solemnly. "And it was a favor to me--think of that!" was Martin's contribution. "Let me see--where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked, assuming an air of expectant attention. "He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden. "He remembers it all." "That is sufficient for me." The cub was trying not to look worried. "No decent reporter needs to bother with notes." "That was sufficient--for last night." But Brissenden was not a disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly. "Martin, if you don't poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next moment." "How will a spanking do?" Martin asked. Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head. The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub face downward across his knees. "Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your face. It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face." His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and steady rhythm. The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite. Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, "Here, just let me swat him once." "Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted. "It is quite numb." He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed. "I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks. "I'll make you sweat for this. You'll see." "The pretty thing," Martin remarked. "He doesn't realize that he has entered upon the downward path. It is not honest, it is not square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures the way he has done, and he doesn't know it." "He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause. "Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My grocery will undoubtedly refuse me credit now. The worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel." "But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden. "Who knows but what you may prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn't you let me swat him just once? I'd like to have had a hand in it." "I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes," sobbed the erring soul. "No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak." Martin shook his head lugubriously. "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain. The young man cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great." With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still clutched. In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about himself that was new to him. "We are the sworn enemies of society," he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. "No, we are not anarchists but socialists." When the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-shot eyes. He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon. The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around and nosed out Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham's Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front. That gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered to him and who would go to jail yet. Hermann Von Schmidt, Marian's husband, had likewise been interviewed. He had called Martin the black sheep of the family and repudiated him. "He tried to sponge off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt had said to the reporter. "He knows better than to come bumming around here. A man who won't work is no good, take that from me." This time Martin was genuinely angry. Brissenden looked upon the affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth. As for her father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement. How much he would make of it he was soon to realize. The afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth. Martin opened it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when he had received it from the postman. As he read, mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old cigarette days. He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a cigarette. It was not a passionate letter. There were no touches of anger in it. But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment. She had expected better of him. She had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live seriously and decently. And now her father and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement be broken. That they were justified in this she could not but admit. Their relation could never be a happy one. It had been unfortunate from the first. But one regret she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin. "If only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make something of yourself," she wrote. "But it was not to be. Your past life had been too wild and irregular. I can understand that you are not to be blamed. You could act only according to your nature and your early training. So I do not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It was simply a mistake. As father and mother have contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be happy because it was discovered not too late." . . "There is no use trying to see me," she said toward the last. "It would be an unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother. I feel, as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry. I shall have to do much living to atone for it." He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down and replied. He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth. Toward the end of the letter he was God's own lover pleading passionately for love. "Please answer," he said, "and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing. Do you love me? That is all--the answer to that one question." But no answer came the next day, nor the next. "Overdue" lay untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under the table grew larger. For the first time Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights. Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell. Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and, though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his troubles. For Martin's troubles were many. The aftermath of the cub reporter's deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated. The Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him--carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin's account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it. The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against Martin ran high. No one would have anything to do with a socialist traitor. Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained loyal. The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe distances they called him "hobo" and "bum." The Silva tribe, however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day and added to Maria's perplexities and troubles. Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned what he knew could not be otherwise--that Bernard Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house. "Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged. "Go away and get a job somewhere and steady down. Afterwards, when this all blows over, you can come back." Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations. How could he explain? He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,--the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped. He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the pawnbroker. "Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him. "After a few months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job of drivin' delivery-wagon for him. Any time you want me, just send for me an' I'll come. Don't forget." She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait. As he watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter. The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family. And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely at the paradox. A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along--ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister really was. The true noble men were above pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been generated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings. CHAPTER XL "Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera." His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people were once more worrying about the rent. But such things no longer bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was found his life must stand still. After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met Ruth on the street. It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted to wave him aside. "If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman threatened. "She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence is insult." "If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll get your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly. "And now, get out of my way and get the officer if you want to. I'm going to talk with Ruth." "I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her. She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly. "The question I asked in my letter," he prompted. Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift look. She shook her head. "Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded. "It is." She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation. "It is of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you again." "Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved me." A blush drove the pallor from her face. "After what has passed?" she said faintly. "Martin, you do not know what you are saying. I am not common." "You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman blurted out, starting on with her. Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there. It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it. He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an awakened somnambulist. He noticed "Overdue" lying on the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen. There was in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness. Here was something undone. It had been deferred against the completion of something else. Now that something else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until it was finished. What he would do next he did not know. All that he did know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion. He was not curious about the future. He would soon enough find out what it held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter. Nothing seemed to matter. For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing nobody, and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of The Parthenon. A glance told him that "Ephemera" was accepted. "We have submitted the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it for the August number, our July number being already made up. Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by return mail his photograph and biographical data. If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price." Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then, too, there was Brissenden's consent to be gained.

frankly

How many times the word 'frankly' appears in the text?

you think about them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of it. It will do them good. Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too. You see, I'd like to see you a socialist before I'm gone. It will give you a sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in the time of disappointment that is coming to you." "I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist," Martin pondered. "You detest the crowd so. Surely there is nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul." He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling. "Socialism doesn't seem to save you." "I'm very sick," was the answer. "With you it is different. You have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life somehow. As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy- nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a- brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a poor chap to do? We can't have the man on horseback, and anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come on, anyway. I'm loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I'll get drunk. And you know the doctor says--damn the doctor! I'll fool him yet." It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class. The speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism. The man's stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time. To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol. He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life. They were the unfit. In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man. Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best. It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race- horses and cucumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos. So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them hell. He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and addressing the chairman. He began in a low voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed. He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's time. They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every word. He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated the biological law of development. "And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of the slave-types can endure. The old law of development still holds. In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation increases. That is development. But you slaves--it is too bad to be slaves, I grant--but you slaves dream of a society where the law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will marry and have progeny--the weak as well as the strong. What will be the result? No longer will the strength and life-value of each generation increase. On the contrary, it will diminish. There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your society of slaves--of, by, and for, slaves--must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces. "Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No state of slaves can stand--" "How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience. "And how about it?" Martin retorted. "The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters--not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you over again--but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed." "But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves can endure, because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of development. No sooner can a slave society be organized than deterioration sets in. It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law of development, but where is the new law of development that will maintain your strength? Formulate it. Is it already formulated? Then state it." Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack. It was a wild night--but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas. Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin. They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws. They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the chairman rapped and pounded for order. It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and glib. He was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class. Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers. Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect reporter who is able to make something--even a great deal--out of nothing. He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary. Words like _revolution_ gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_. He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color--wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenic and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men. CHAPTER XXXIX Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's paper. It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh. "Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and dropped limply into the one chair. "But what do you care?" Brissenden asked. "Surely you don't desire the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?" Martin thought for a while, then said:- "No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit. On the other hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's family a trifle awkward. Her father always contended I was a socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief. Not that I care for his opinion--but what's the odds? I want to read you what I've been doing to- day. It's 'Overdue,' of course, and I'm just about halfway through." He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the oil- burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to Martin. "Sit down," Brissenden said. Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to broach his business. "I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview you," he began. Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh. "A brother socialist?" the reporter asked, with a quick glance at Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying man. "And he wrote that report," Martin said softly. "Why, he is only a boy!" "Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked. "I'd give a thousand dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes." The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and around him and at him. But he had been commended for his brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized menace to society. "You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he said. "I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower. Then we can have the interview afterward." "A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively. "Poke him, Martin! Poke him!" "I guess I'm getting old," was the answer. "I know I ought, but I really haven't the heart. It doesn't seem to matter." "For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged. "It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me. You see, it does take energy to give a fellow a poking. Besides, what does it matter?" "That's right--that's the way to take it," the cub announced airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door. "But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on, confining his attention to Brissenden. "It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the cub ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising. That's what counts. It was a favor to you." "It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden repeated solemnly. "And it was a favor to me--think of that!" was Martin's contribution. "Let me see--where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked, assuming an air of expectant attention. "He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden. "He remembers it all." "That is sufficient for me." The cub was trying not to look worried. "No decent reporter needs to bother with notes." "That was sufficient--for last night." But Brissenden was not a disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly. "Martin, if you don't poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next moment." "How will a spanking do?" Martin asked. Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head. The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub face downward across his knees. "Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your face. It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face." His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and steady rhythm. The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite. Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, "Here, just let me swat him once." "Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted. "It is quite numb." He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed. "I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks. "I'll make you sweat for this. You'll see." "The pretty thing," Martin remarked. "He doesn't realize that he has entered upon the downward path. It is not honest, it is not square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures the way he has done, and he doesn't know it." "He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause. "Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My grocery will undoubtedly refuse me credit now. The worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel." "But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden. "Who knows but what you may prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn't you let me swat him just once? I'd like to have had a hand in it." "I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes," sobbed the erring soul. "No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak." Martin shook his head lugubriously. "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain. The young man cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great." With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still clutched. In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about himself that was new to him. "We are the sworn enemies of society," he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. "No, we are not anarchists but socialists." When the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-shot eyes. He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon. The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around and nosed out Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham's Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front. That gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered to him and who would go to jail yet. Hermann Von Schmidt, Marian's husband, had likewise been interviewed. He had called Martin the black sheep of the family and repudiated him. "He tried to sponge off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt had said to the reporter. "He knows better than to come bumming around here. A man who won't work is no good, take that from me." This time Martin was genuinely angry. Brissenden looked upon the affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth. As for her father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement. How much he would make of it he was soon to realize. The afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth. Martin opened it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when he had received it from the postman. As he read, mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old cigarette days. He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a cigarette. It was not a passionate letter. There were no touches of anger in it. But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment. She had expected better of him. She had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live seriously and decently. And now her father and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement be broken. That they were justified in this she could not but admit. Their relation could never be a happy one. It had been unfortunate from the first. But one regret she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin. "If only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make something of yourself," she wrote. "But it was not to be. Your past life had been too wild and irregular. I can understand that you are not to be blamed. You could act only according to your nature and your early training. So I do not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It was simply a mistake. As father and mother have contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be happy because it was discovered not too late." . . "There is no use trying to see me," she said toward the last. "It would be an unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother. I feel, as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry. I shall have to do much living to atone for it." He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down and replied. He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth. Toward the end of the letter he was God's own lover pleading passionately for love. "Please answer," he said, "and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing. Do you love me? That is all--the answer to that one question." But no answer came the next day, nor the next. "Overdue" lay untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under the table grew larger. For the first time Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights. Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell. Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and, though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his troubles. For Martin's troubles were many. The aftermath of the cub reporter's deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated. The Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him--carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin's account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it. The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against Martin ran high. No one would have anything to do with a socialist traitor. Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained loyal. The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe distances they called him "hobo" and "bum." The Silva tribe, however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day and added to Maria's perplexities and troubles. Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned what he knew could not be otherwise--that Bernard Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house. "Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged. "Go away and get a job somewhere and steady down. Afterwards, when this all blows over, you can come back." Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations. How could he explain? He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,--the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped. He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the pawnbroker. "Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him. "After a few months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job of drivin' delivery-wagon for him. Any time you want me, just send for me an' I'll come. Don't forget." She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait. As he watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter. The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family. And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely at the paradox. A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along--ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister really was. The true noble men were above pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been generated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings. CHAPTER XL "Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera." His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people were once more worrying about the rent. But such things no longer bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was found his life must stand still. After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met Ruth on the street. It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted to wave him aside. "If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman threatened. "She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence is insult." "If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll get your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly. "And now, get out of my way and get the officer if you want to. I'm going to talk with Ruth." "I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her. She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly. "The question I asked in my letter," he prompted. Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift look. She shook her head. "Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded. "It is." She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation. "It is of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you again." "Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved me." A blush drove the pallor from her face. "After what has passed?" she said faintly. "Martin, you do not know what you are saying. I am not common." "You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman blurted out, starting on with her. Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there. It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it. He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an awakened somnambulist. He noticed "Overdue" lying on the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen. There was in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness. Here was something undone. It had been deferred against the completion of something else. Now that something else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until it was finished. What he would do next he did not know. All that he did know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion. He was not curious about the future. He would soon enough find out what it held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter. Nothing seemed to matter. For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing nobody, and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of The Parthenon. A glance told him that "Ephemera" was accepted. "We have submitted the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it for the August number, our July number being already made up. Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by return mail his photograph and biographical data. If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price." Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then, too, there was Brissenden's consent to be gained.

cosmos

How many times the word 'cosmos' appears in the text?

you think about them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of it. It will do them good. Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too. You see, I'd like to see you a socialist before I'm gone. It will give you a sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in the time of disappointment that is coming to you." "I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist," Martin pondered. "You detest the crowd so. Surely there is nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul." He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling. "Socialism doesn't seem to save you." "I'm very sick," was the answer. "With you it is different. You have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life somehow. As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy- nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a- brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a poor chap to do? We can't have the man on horseback, and anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come on, anyway. I'm loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I'll get drunk. And you know the doctor says--damn the doctor! I'll fool him yet." It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class. The speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism. The man's stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time. To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol. He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life. They were the unfit. In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man. Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best. It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race- horses and cucumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos. So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them hell. He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and addressing the chairman. He began in a low voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed. He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's time. They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every word. He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated the biological law of development. "And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of the slave-types can endure. The old law of development still holds. In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation increases. That is development. But you slaves--it is too bad to be slaves, I grant--but you slaves dream of a society where the law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will marry and have progeny--the weak as well as the strong. What will be the result? No longer will the strength and life-value of each generation increase. On the contrary, it will diminish. There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your society of slaves--of, by, and for, slaves--must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces. "Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No state of slaves can stand--" "How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience. "And how about it?" Martin retorted. "The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters--not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you over again--but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed." "But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves can endure, because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of development. No sooner can a slave society be organized than deterioration sets in. It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law of development, but where is the new law of development that will maintain your strength? Formulate it. Is it already formulated? Then state it." Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack. It was a wild night--but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas. Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin. They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws. They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the chairman rapped and pounded for order. It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and glib. He was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class. Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers. Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect reporter who is able to make something--even a great deal--out of nothing. He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary. Words like _revolution_ gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_. He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color--wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenic and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men. CHAPTER XXXIX Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's paper. It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh. "Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and dropped limply into the one chair. "But what do you care?" Brissenden asked. "Surely you don't desire the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?" Martin thought for a while, then said:- "No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit. On the other hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's family a trifle awkward. Her father always contended I was a socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief. Not that I care for his opinion--but what's the odds? I want to read you what I've been doing to- day. It's 'Overdue,' of course, and I'm just about halfway through." He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the oil- burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to Martin. "Sit down," Brissenden said. Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to broach his business. "I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview you," he began. Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh. "A brother socialist?" the reporter asked, with a quick glance at Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying man. "And he wrote that report," Martin said softly. "Why, he is only a boy!" "Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked. "I'd give a thousand dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes." The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and around him and at him. But he had been commended for his brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized menace to society. "You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he said. "I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower. Then we can have the interview afterward." "A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively. "Poke him, Martin! Poke him!" "I guess I'm getting old," was the answer. "I know I ought, but I really haven't the heart. It doesn't seem to matter." "For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged. "It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me. You see, it does take energy to give a fellow a poking. Besides, what does it matter?" "That's right--that's the way to take it," the cub announced airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door. "But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on, confining his attention to Brissenden. "It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the cub ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising. That's what counts. It was a favor to you." "It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden repeated solemnly. "And it was a favor to me--think of that!" was Martin's contribution. "Let me see--where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked, assuming an air of expectant attention. "He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden. "He remembers it all." "That is sufficient for me." The cub was trying not to look worried. "No decent reporter needs to bother with notes." "That was sufficient--for last night." But Brissenden was not a disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly. "Martin, if you don't poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next moment." "How will a spanking do?" Martin asked. Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head. The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub face downward across his knees. "Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your face. It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face." His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and steady rhythm. The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite. Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, "Here, just let me swat him once." "Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted. "It is quite numb." He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed. "I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks. "I'll make you sweat for this. You'll see." "The pretty thing," Martin remarked. "He doesn't realize that he has entered upon the downward path. It is not honest, it is not square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures the way he has done, and he doesn't know it." "He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause. "Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My grocery will undoubtedly refuse me credit now. The worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel." "But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden. "Who knows but what you may prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn't you let me swat him just once? I'd like to have had a hand in it." "I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes," sobbed the erring soul. "No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak." Martin shook his head lugubriously. "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain. The young man cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great." With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still clutched. In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about himself that was new to him. "We are the sworn enemies of society," he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. "No, we are not anarchists but socialists." When the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-shot eyes. He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon. The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around and nosed out Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham's Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front. That gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered to him and who would go to jail yet. Hermann Von Schmidt, Marian's husband, had likewise been interviewed. He had called Martin the black sheep of the family and repudiated him. "He tried to sponge off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt had said to the reporter. "He knows better than to come bumming around here. A man who won't work is no good, take that from me." This time Martin was genuinely angry. Brissenden looked upon the affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth. As for her father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement. How much he would make of it he was soon to realize. The afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth. Martin opened it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when he had received it from the postman. As he read, mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old cigarette days. He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a cigarette. It was not a passionate letter. There were no touches of anger in it. But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment. She had expected better of him. She had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live seriously and decently. And now her father and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement be broken. That they were justified in this she could not but admit. Their relation could never be a happy one. It had been unfortunate from the first. But one regret she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin. "If only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make something of yourself," she wrote. "But it was not to be. Your past life had been too wild and irregular. I can understand that you are not to be blamed. You could act only according to your nature and your early training. So I do not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It was simply a mistake. As father and mother have contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be happy because it was discovered not too late." . . "There is no use trying to see me," she said toward the last. "It would be an unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother. I feel, as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry. I shall have to do much living to atone for it." He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down and replied. He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth. Toward the end of the letter he was God's own lover pleading passionately for love. "Please answer," he said, "and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing. Do you love me? That is all--the answer to that one question." But no answer came the next day, nor the next. "Overdue" lay untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under the table grew larger. For the first time Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights. Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell. Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and, though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his troubles. For Martin's troubles were many. The aftermath of the cub reporter's deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated. The Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him--carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin's account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it. The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against Martin ran high. No one would have anything to do with a socialist traitor. Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained loyal. The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe distances they called him "hobo" and "bum." The Silva tribe, however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day and added to Maria's perplexities and troubles. Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned what he knew could not be otherwise--that Bernard Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house. "Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged. "Go away and get a job somewhere and steady down. Afterwards, when this all blows over, you can come back." Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations. How could he explain? He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,--the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped. He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the pawnbroker. "Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him. "After a few months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job of drivin' delivery-wagon for him. Any time you want me, just send for me an' I'll come. Don't forget." She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait. As he watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter. The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family. And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely at the paradox. A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along--ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister really was. The true noble men were above pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been generated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings. CHAPTER XL "Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera." His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people were once more worrying about the rent. But such things no longer bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was found his life must stand still. After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met Ruth on the street. It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted to wave him aside. "If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman threatened. "She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence is insult." "If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll get your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly. "And now, get out of my way and get the officer if you want to. I'm going to talk with Ruth." "I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her. She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly. "The question I asked in my letter," he prompted. Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift look. She shook her head. "Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded. "It is." She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation. "It is of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you again." "Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved me." A blush drove the pallor from her face. "After what has passed?" she said faintly. "Martin, you do not know what you are saying. I am not common." "You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman blurted out, starting on with her. Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there. It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it. He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an awakened somnambulist. He noticed "Overdue" lying on the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen. There was in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness. Here was something undone. It had been deferred against the completion of something else. Now that something else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until it was finished. What he would do next he did not know. All that he did know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion. He was not curious about the future. He would soon enough find out what it held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter. Nothing seemed to matter. For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing nobody, and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of The Parthenon. A glance told him that "Ephemera" was accepted. "We have submitted the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it for the August number, our July number being already made up. Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by return mail his photograph and biographical data. If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price." Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then, too, there was Brissenden's consent to be gained.

properly

How many times the word 'properly' appears in the text?

you think about them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of it. It will do them good. Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too. You see, I'd like to see you a socialist before I'm gone. It will give you a sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in the time of disappointment that is coming to you." "I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist," Martin pondered. "You detest the crowd so. Surely there is nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul." He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling. "Socialism doesn't seem to save you." "I'm very sick," was the answer. "With you it is different. You have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life somehow. As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy- nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a- brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a poor chap to do? We can't have the man on horseback, and anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come on, anyway. I'm loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I'll get drunk. And you know the doctor says--damn the doctor! I'll fool him yet." It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class. The speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism. The man's stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time. To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol. He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life. They were the unfit. In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man. Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best. It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race- horses and cucumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos. So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them hell. He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and addressing the chairman. He began in a low voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed. He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's time. They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every word. He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated the biological law of development. "And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of the slave-types can endure. The old law of development still holds. In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation increases. That is development. But you slaves--it is too bad to be slaves, I grant--but you slaves dream of a society where the law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will marry and have progeny--the weak as well as the strong. What will be the result? No longer will the strength and life-value of each generation increase. On the contrary, it will diminish. There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your society of slaves--of, by, and for, slaves--must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces. "Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No state of slaves can stand--" "How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience. "And how about it?" Martin retorted. "The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters--not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you over again--but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed." "But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves can endure, because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of development. No sooner can a slave society be organized than deterioration sets in. It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law of development, but where is the new law of development that will maintain your strength? Formulate it. Is it already formulated? Then state it." Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack. It was a wild night--but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas. Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin. They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws. They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the chairman rapped and pounded for order. It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and glib. He was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class. Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers. Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect reporter who is able to make something--even a great deal--out of nothing. He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary. Words like _revolution_ gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_. He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color--wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenic and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men. CHAPTER XXXIX Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's paper. It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh. "Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and dropped limply into the one chair. "But what do you care?" Brissenden asked. "Surely you don't desire the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?" Martin thought for a while, then said:- "No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit. On the other hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's family a trifle awkward. Her father always contended I was a socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief. Not that I care for his opinion--but what's the odds? I want to read you what I've been doing to- day. It's 'Overdue,' of course, and I'm just about halfway through." He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the oil- burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to Martin. "Sit down," Brissenden said. Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to broach his business. "I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview you," he began. Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh. "A brother socialist?" the reporter asked, with a quick glance at Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying man. "And he wrote that report," Martin said softly. "Why, he is only a boy!" "Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked. "I'd give a thousand dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes." The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and around him and at him. But he had been commended for his brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized menace to society. "You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he said. "I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower. Then we can have the interview afterward." "A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively. "Poke him, Martin! Poke him!" "I guess I'm getting old," was the answer. "I know I ought, but I really haven't the heart. It doesn't seem to matter." "For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged. "It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me. You see, it does take energy to give a fellow a poking. Besides, what does it matter?" "That's right--that's the way to take it," the cub announced airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door. "But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on, confining his attention to Brissenden. "It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the cub ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising. That's what counts. It was a favor to you." "It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden repeated solemnly. "And it was a favor to me--think of that!" was Martin's contribution. "Let me see--where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked, assuming an air of expectant attention. "He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden. "He remembers it all." "That is sufficient for me." The cub was trying not to look worried. "No decent reporter needs to bother with notes." "That was sufficient--for last night." But Brissenden was not a disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly. "Martin, if you don't poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next moment." "How will a spanking do?" Martin asked. Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head. The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub face downward across his knees. "Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your face. It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face." His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and steady rhythm. The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite. Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, "Here, just let me swat him once." "Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted. "It is quite numb." He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed. "I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks. "I'll make you sweat for this. You'll see." "The pretty thing," Martin remarked. "He doesn't realize that he has entered upon the downward path. It is not honest, it is not square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures the way he has done, and he doesn't know it." "He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause. "Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My grocery will undoubtedly refuse me credit now. The worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel." "But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden. "Who knows but what you may prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn't you let me swat him just once? I'd like to have had a hand in it." "I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes," sobbed the erring soul. "No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak." Martin shook his head lugubriously. "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain. The young man cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great." With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still clutched. In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about himself that was new to him. "We are the sworn enemies of society," he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. "No, we are not anarchists but socialists." When the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-shot eyes. He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon. The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around and nosed out Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham's Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front. That gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered to him and who would go to jail yet. Hermann Von Schmidt, Marian's husband, had likewise been interviewed. He had called Martin the black sheep of the family and repudiated him. "He tried to sponge off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt had said to the reporter. "He knows better than to come bumming around here. A man who won't work is no good, take that from me." This time Martin was genuinely angry. Brissenden looked upon the affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth. As for her father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement. How much he would make of it he was soon to realize. The afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth. Martin opened it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when he had received it from the postman. As he read, mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old cigarette days. He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a cigarette. It was not a passionate letter. There were no touches of anger in it. But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment. She had expected better of him. She had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live seriously and decently. And now her father and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement be broken. That they were justified in this she could not but admit. Their relation could never be a happy one. It had been unfortunate from the first. But one regret she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin. "If only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make something of yourself," she wrote. "But it was not to be. Your past life had been too wild and irregular. I can understand that you are not to be blamed. You could act only according to your nature and your early training. So I do not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It was simply a mistake. As father and mother have contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be happy because it was discovered not too late." . . "There is no use trying to see me," she said toward the last. "It would be an unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother. I feel, as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry. I shall have to do much living to atone for it." He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down and replied. He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth. Toward the end of the letter he was God's own lover pleading passionately for love. "Please answer," he said, "and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing. Do you love me? That is all--the answer to that one question." But no answer came the next day, nor the next. "Overdue" lay untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under the table grew larger. For the first time Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights. Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell. Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and, though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his troubles. For Martin's troubles were many. The aftermath of the cub reporter's deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated. The Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him--carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin's account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it. The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against Martin ran high. No one would have anything to do with a socialist traitor. Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained loyal. The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe distances they called him "hobo" and "bum." The Silva tribe, however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day and added to Maria's perplexities and troubles. Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned what he knew could not be otherwise--that Bernard Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house. "Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged. "Go away and get a job somewhere and steady down. Afterwards, when this all blows over, you can come back." Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations. How could he explain? He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,--the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped. He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the pawnbroker. "Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him. "After a few months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job of drivin' delivery-wagon for him. Any time you want me, just send for me an' I'll come. Don't forget." She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait. As he watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter. The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family. And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely at the paradox. A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along--ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister really was. The true noble men were above pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been generated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings. CHAPTER XL "Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera." His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people were once more worrying about the rent. But such things no longer bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was found his life must stand still. After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met Ruth on the street. It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted to wave him aside. "If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman threatened. "She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence is insult." "If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll get your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly. "And now, get out of my way and get the officer if you want to. I'm going to talk with Ruth." "I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her. She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly. "The question I asked in my letter," he prompted. Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift look. She shook her head. "Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded. "It is." She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation. "It is of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you again." "Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved me." A blush drove the pallor from her face. "After what has passed?" she said faintly. "Martin, you do not know what you are saying. I am not common." "You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman blurted out, starting on with her. Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there. It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it. He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an awakened somnambulist. He noticed "Overdue" lying on the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen. There was in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness. Here was something undone. It had been deferred against the completion of something else. Now that something else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until it was finished. What he would do next he did not know. All that he did know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion. He was not curious about the future. He would soon enough find out what it held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter. Nothing seemed to matter. For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing nobody, and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of The Parthenon. A glance told him that "Ephemera" was accepted. "We have submitted the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it for the August number, our July number being already made up. Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by return mail his photograph and biographical data. If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price." Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then, too, there was Brissenden's consent to be gained.

platform

How many times the word 'platform' appears in the text?

you think about them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of it. It will do them good. Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too. You see, I'd like to see you a socialist before I'm gone. It will give you a sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in the time of disappointment that is coming to you." "I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist," Martin pondered. "You detest the crowd so. Surely there is nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul." He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling. "Socialism doesn't seem to save you." "I'm very sick," was the answer. "With you it is different. You have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life somehow. As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy- nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a- brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a poor chap to do? We can't have the man on horseback, and anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come on, anyway. I'm loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I'll get drunk. And you know the doctor says--damn the doctor! I'll fool him yet." It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class. The speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism. The man's stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time. To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol. He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life. They were the unfit. In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man. Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best. It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race- horses and cucumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos. So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them hell. He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and addressing the chairman. He began in a low voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed. He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's time. They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every word. He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated the biological law of development. "And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of the slave-types can endure. The old law of development still holds. In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation increases. That is development. But you slaves--it is too bad to be slaves, I grant--but you slaves dream of a society where the law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will marry and have progeny--the weak as well as the strong. What will be the result? No longer will the strength and life-value of each generation increase. On the contrary, it will diminish. There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your society of slaves--of, by, and for, slaves--must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces. "Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No state of slaves can stand--" "How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience. "And how about it?" Martin retorted. "The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters--not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you over again--but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed." "But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves can endure, because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of development. No sooner can a slave society be organized than deterioration sets in. It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law of development, but where is the new law of development that will maintain your strength? Formulate it. Is it already formulated? Then state it." Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack. It was a wild night--but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas. Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin. They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws. They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the chairman rapped and pounded for order. It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and glib. He was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class. Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers. Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect reporter who is able to make something--even a great deal--out of nothing. He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary. Words like _revolution_ gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_. He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color--wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenic and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men. CHAPTER XXXIX Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's paper. It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh. "Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and dropped limply into the one chair. "But what do you care?" Brissenden asked. "Surely you don't desire the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?" Martin thought for a while, then said:- "No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit. On the other hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's family a trifle awkward. Her father always contended I was a socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief. Not that I care for his opinion--but what's the odds? I want to read you what I've been doing to- day. It's 'Overdue,' of course, and I'm just about halfway through." He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the oil- burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to Martin. "Sit down," Brissenden said. Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to broach his business. "I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview you," he began. Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh. "A brother socialist?" the reporter asked, with a quick glance at Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying man. "And he wrote that report," Martin said softly. "Why, he is only a boy!" "Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked. "I'd give a thousand dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes." The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and around him and at him. But he had been commended for his brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized menace to society. "You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he said. "I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower. Then we can have the interview afterward." "A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively. "Poke him, Martin! Poke him!" "I guess I'm getting old," was the answer. "I know I ought, but I really haven't the heart. It doesn't seem to matter." "For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged. "It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me. You see, it does take energy to give a fellow a poking. Besides, what does it matter?" "That's right--that's the way to take it," the cub announced airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door. "But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on, confining his attention to Brissenden. "It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the cub ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising. That's what counts. It was a favor to you." "It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden repeated solemnly. "And it was a favor to me--think of that!" was Martin's contribution. "Let me see--where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked, assuming an air of expectant attention. "He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden. "He remembers it all." "That is sufficient for me." The cub was trying not to look worried. "No decent reporter needs to bother with notes." "That was sufficient--for last night." But Brissenden was not a disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly. "Martin, if you don't poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next moment." "How will a spanking do?" Martin asked. Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head. The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub face downward across his knees. "Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your face. It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face." His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and steady rhythm. The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite. Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, "Here, just let me swat him once." "Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted. "It is quite numb." He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed. "I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks. "I'll make you sweat for this. You'll see." "The pretty thing," Martin remarked. "He doesn't realize that he has entered upon the downward path. It is not honest, it is not square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures the way he has done, and he doesn't know it." "He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause. "Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My grocery will undoubtedly refuse me credit now. The worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel." "But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden. "Who knows but what you may prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn't you let me swat him just once? I'd like to have had a hand in it." "I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes," sobbed the erring soul. "No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak." Martin shook his head lugubriously. "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain. The young man cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great." With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still clutched. In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about himself that was new to him. "We are the sworn enemies of society," he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. "No, we are not anarchists but socialists." When the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-shot eyes. He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon. The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around and nosed out Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham's Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front. That gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered to him and who would go to jail yet. Hermann Von Schmidt, Marian's husband, had likewise been interviewed. He had called Martin the black sheep of the family and repudiated him. "He tried to sponge off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt had said to the reporter. "He knows better than to come bumming around here. A man who won't work is no good, take that from me." This time Martin was genuinely angry. Brissenden looked upon the affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth. As for her father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement. How much he would make of it he was soon to realize. The afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth. Martin opened it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when he had received it from the postman. As he read, mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old cigarette days. He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a cigarette. It was not a passionate letter. There were no touches of anger in it. But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment. She had expected better of him. She had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live seriously and decently. And now her father and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement be broken. That they were justified in this she could not but admit. Their relation could never be a happy one. It had been unfortunate from the first. But one regret she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin. "If only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make something of yourself," she wrote. "But it was not to be. Your past life had been too wild and irregular. I can understand that you are not to be blamed. You could act only according to your nature and your early training. So I do not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It was simply a mistake. As father and mother have contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be happy because it was discovered not too late." . . "There is no use trying to see me," she said toward the last. "It would be an unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother. I feel, as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry. I shall have to do much living to atone for it." He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down and replied. He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth. Toward the end of the letter he was God's own lover pleading passionately for love. "Please answer," he said, "and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing. Do you love me? That is all--the answer to that one question." But no answer came the next day, nor the next. "Overdue" lay untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under the table grew larger. For the first time Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights. Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell. Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and, though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his troubles. For Martin's troubles were many. The aftermath of the cub reporter's deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated. The Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him--carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin's account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it. The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against Martin ran high. No one would have anything to do with a socialist traitor. Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained loyal. The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe distances they called him "hobo" and "bum." The Silva tribe, however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day and added to Maria's perplexities and troubles. Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned what he knew could not be otherwise--that Bernard Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house. "Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged. "Go away and get a job somewhere and steady down. Afterwards, when this all blows over, you can come back." Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations. How could he explain? He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,--the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped. He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the pawnbroker. "Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him. "After a few months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job of drivin' delivery-wagon for him. Any time you want me, just send for me an' I'll come. Don't forget." She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait. As he watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter. The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family. And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely at the paradox. A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along--ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister really was. The true noble men were above pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been generated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings. CHAPTER XL "Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera." His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people were once more worrying about the rent. But such things no longer bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was found his life must stand still. After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met Ruth on the street. It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted to wave him aside. "If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman threatened. "She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence is insult." "If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll get your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly. "And now, get out of my way and get the officer if you want to. I'm going to talk with Ruth." "I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her. She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly. "The question I asked in my letter," he prompted. Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift look. She shook her head. "Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded. "It is." She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation. "It is of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you again." "Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved me." A blush drove the pallor from her face. "After what has passed?" she said faintly. "Martin, you do not know what you are saying. I am not common." "You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman blurted out, starting on with her. Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there. It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it. He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an awakened somnambulist. He noticed "Overdue" lying on the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen. There was in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness. Here was something undone. It had been deferred against the completion of something else. Now that something else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until it was finished. What he would do next he did not know. All that he did know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion. He was not curious about the future. He would soon enough find out what it held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter. Nothing seemed to matter. For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing nobody, and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of The Parthenon. A glance told him that "Ephemera" was accepted. "We have submitted the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it for the August number, our July number being already made up. Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by return mail his photograph and biographical data. If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price." Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then, too, there was Brissenden's consent to be gained.

must

How many times the word 'must' appears in the text?

you think about them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of it. It will do them good. Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too. You see, I'd like to see you a socialist before I'm gone. It will give you a sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in the time of disappointment that is coming to you." "I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist," Martin pondered. "You detest the crowd so. Surely there is nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul." He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling. "Socialism doesn't seem to save you." "I'm very sick," was the answer. "With you it is different. You have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life somehow. As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy- nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a- brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a poor chap to do? We can't have the man on horseback, and anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come on, anyway. I'm loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I'll get drunk. And you know the doctor says--damn the doctor! I'll fool him yet." It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class. The speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism. The man's stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time. To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol. He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life. They were the unfit. In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man. Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best. It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race- horses and cucumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos. So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them hell. He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and addressing the chairman. He began in a low voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed. He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's time. They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every word. He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated the biological law of development. "And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of the slave-types can endure. The old law of development still holds. In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation increases. That is development. But you slaves--it is too bad to be slaves, I grant--but you slaves dream of a society where the law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will marry and have progeny--the weak as well as the strong. What will be the result? No longer will the strength and life-value of each generation increase. On the contrary, it will diminish. There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your society of slaves--of, by, and for, slaves--must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces. "Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No state of slaves can stand--" "How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience. "And how about it?" Martin retorted. "The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters--not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you over again--but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed." "But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves can endure, because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of development. No sooner can a slave society be organized than deterioration sets in. It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law of development, but where is the new law of development that will maintain your strength? Formulate it. Is it already formulated? Then state it." Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack. It was a wild night--but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas. Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin. They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws. They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the chairman rapped and pounded for order. It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and glib. He was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class. Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers. Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect reporter who is able to make something--even a great deal--out of nothing. He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary. Words like _revolution_ gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_. He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color--wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenic and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men. CHAPTER XXXIX Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's paper. It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh. "Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and dropped limply into the one chair. "But what do you care?" Brissenden asked. "Surely you don't desire the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?" Martin thought for a while, then said:- "No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit. On the other hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's family a trifle awkward. Her father always contended I was a socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief. Not that I care for his opinion--but what's the odds? I want to read you what I've been doing to- day. It's 'Overdue,' of course, and I'm just about halfway through." He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the oil- burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to Martin. "Sit down," Brissenden said. Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to broach his business. "I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview you," he began. Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh. "A brother socialist?" the reporter asked, with a quick glance at Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying man. "And he wrote that report," Martin said softly. "Why, he is only a boy!" "Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked. "I'd give a thousand dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes." The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and around him and at him. But he had been commended for his brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized menace to society. "You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he said. "I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower. Then we can have the interview afterward." "A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively. "Poke him, Martin! Poke him!" "I guess I'm getting old," was the answer. "I know I ought, but I really haven't the heart. It doesn't seem to matter." "For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged. "It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me. You see, it does take energy to give a fellow a poking. Besides, what does it matter?" "That's right--that's the way to take it," the cub announced airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door. "But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on, confining his attention to Brissenden. "It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the cub ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising. That's what counts. It was a favor to you." "It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden repeated solemnly. "And it was a favor to me--think of that!" was Martin's contribution. "Let me see--where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked, assuming an air of expectant attention. "He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden. "He remembers it all." "That is sufficient for me." The cub was trying not to look worried. "No decent reporter needs to bother with notes." "That was sufficient--for last night." But Brissenden was not a disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly. "Martin, if you don't poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next moment." "How will a spanking do?" Martin asked. Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head. The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub face downward across his knees. "Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your face. It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face." His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and steady rhythm. The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite. Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, "Here, just let me swat him once." "Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted. "It is quite numb." He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed. "I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks. "I'll make you sweat for this. You'll see." "The pretty thing," Martin remarked. "He doesn't realize that he has entered upon the downward path. It is not honest, it is not square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures the way he has done, and he doesn't know it." "He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause. "Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My grocery will undoubtedly refuse me credit now. The worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel." "But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden. "Who knows but what you may prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn't you let me swat him just once? I'd like to have had a hand in it." "I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes," sobbed the erring soul. "No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak." Martin shook his head lugubriously. "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain. The young man cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great." With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still clutched. In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about himself that was new to him. "We are the sworn enemies of society," he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. "No, we are not anarchists but socialists." When the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-shot eyes. He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon. The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around and nosed out Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham's Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front. That gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered to him and who would go to jail yet. Hermann Von Schmidt, Marian's husband, had likewise been interviewed. He had called Martin the black sheep of the family and repudiated him. "He tried to sponge off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt had said to the reporter. "He knows better than to come bumming around here. A man who won't work is no good, take that from me." This time Martin was genuinely angry. Brissenden looked upon the affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth. As for her father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement. How much he would make of it he was soon to realize. The afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth. Martin opened it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when he had received it from the postman. As he read, mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old cigarette days. He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a cigarette. It was not a passionate letter. There were no touches of anger in it. But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment. She had expected better of him. She had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live seriously and decently. And now her father and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement be broken. That they were justified in this she could not but admit. Their relation could never be a happy one. It had been unfortunate from the first. But one regret she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin. "If only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make something of yourself," she wrote. "But it was not to be. Your past life had been too wild and irregular. I can understand that you are not to be blamed. You could act only according to your nature and your early training. So I do not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It was simply a mistake. As father and mother have contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be happy because it was discovered not too late." . . "There is no use trying to see me," she said toward the last. "It would be an unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother. I feel, as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry. I shall have to do much living to atone for it." He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down and replied. He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth. Toward the end of the letter he was God's own lover pleading passionately for love. "Please answer," he said, "and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing. Do you love me? That is all--the answer to that one question." But no answer came the next day, nor the next. "Overdue" lay untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under the table grew larger. For the first time Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights. Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell. Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and, though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his troubles. For Martin's troubles were many. The aftermath of the cub reporter's deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated. The Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him--carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin's account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it. The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against Martin ran high. No one would have anything to do with a socialist traitor. Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained loyal. The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe distances they called him "hobo" and "bum." The Silva tribe, however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day and added to Maria's perplexities and troubles. Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned what he knew could not be otherwise--that Bernard Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house. "Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged. "Go away and get a job somewhere and steady down. Afterwards, when this all blows over, you can come back." Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations. How could he explain? He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,--the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped. He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the pawnbroker. "Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him. "After a few months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job of drivin' delivery-wagon for him. Any time you want me, just send for me an' I'll come. Don't forget." She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait. As he watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter. The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family. And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely at the paradox. A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along--ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister really was. The true noble men were above pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been generated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings. CHAPTER XL "Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera." His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people were once more worrying about the rent. But such things no longer bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was found his life must stand still. After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met Ruth on the street. It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted to wave him aside. "If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman threatened. "She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence is insult." "If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll get your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly. "And now, get out of my way and get the officer if you want to. I'm going to talk with Ruth." "I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her. She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly. "The question I asked in my letter," he prompted. Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift look. She shook her head. "Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded. "It is." She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation. "It is of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you again." "Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved me." A blush drove the pallor from her face. "After what has passed?" she said faintly. "Martin, you do not know what you are saying. I am not common." "You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman blurted out, starting on with her. Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there. It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it. He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an awakened somnambulist. He noticed "Overdue" lying on the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen. There was in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness. Here was something undone. It had been deferred against the completion of something else. Now that something else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until it was finished. What he would do next he did not know. All that he did know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion. He was not curious about the future. He would soon enough find out what it held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter. Nothing seemed to matter. For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing nobody, and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of The Parthenon. A glance told him that "Ephemera" was accepted. "We have submitted the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it for the August number, our July number being already made up. Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by return mail his photograph and biographical data. If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price." Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then, too, there was Brissenden's consent to be gained.

appreciated

How many times the word 'appreciated' appears in the text?

you think about them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of it. It will do them good. Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too. You see, I'd like to see you a socialist before I'm gone. It will give you a sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in the time of disappointment that is coming to you." "I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist," Martin pondered. "You detest the crowd so. Surely there is nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul." He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling. "Socialism doesn't seem to save you." "I'm very sick," was the answer. "With you it is different. You have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life somehow. As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy- nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a- brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a poor chap to do? We can't have the man on horseback, and anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come on, anyway. I'm loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I'll get drunk. And you know the doctor says--damn the doctor! I'll fool him yet." It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class. The speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism. The man's stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time. To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol. He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life. They were the unfit. In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man. Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best. It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race- horses and cucumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos. So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them hell. He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and addressing the chairman. He began in a low voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed. He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's time. They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every word. He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated the biological law of development. "And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of the slave-types can endure. The old law of development still holds. In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation increases. That is development. But you slaves--it is too bad to be slaves, I grant--but you slaves dream of a society where the law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will marry and have progeny--the weak as well as the strong. What will be the result? No longer will the strength and life-value of each generation increase. On the contrary, it will diminish. There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your society of slaves--of, by, and for, slaves--must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces. "Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No state of slaves can stand--" "How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience. "And how about it?" Martin retorted. "The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters--not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you over again--but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed." "But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves can endure, because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of development. No sooner can a slave society be organized than deterioration sets in. It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law of development, but where is the new law of development that will maintain your strength? Formulate it. Is it already formulated? Then state it." Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack. It was a wild night--but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas. Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin. They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws. They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the chairman rapped and pounded for order. It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and glib. He was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class. Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers. Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect reporter who is able to make something--even a great deal--out of nothing. He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary. Words like _revolution_ gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_. He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color--wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenic and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men. CHAPTER XXXIX Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's paper. It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh. "Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and dropped limply into the one chair. "But what do you care?" Brissenden asked. "Surely you don't desire the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?" Martin thought for a while, then said:- "No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit. On the other hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's family a trifle awkward. Her father always contended I was a socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief. Not that I care for his opinion--but what's the odds? I want to read you what I've been doing to- day. It's 'Overdue,' of course, and I'm just about halfway through." He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the oil- burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to Martin. "Sit down," Brissenden said. Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to broach his business. "I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview you," he began. Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh. "A brother socialist?" the reporter asked, with a quick glance at Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying man. "And he wrote that report," Martin said softly. "Why, he is only a boy!" "Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked. "I'd give a thousand dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes." The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and around him and at him. But he had been commended for his brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized menace to society. "You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he said. "I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower. Then we can have the interview afterward." "A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively. "Poke him, Martin! Poke him!" "I guess I'm getting old," was the answer. "I know I ought, but I really haven't the heart. It doesn't seem to matter." "For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged. "It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me. You see, it does take energy to give a fellow a poking. Besides, what does it matter?" "That's right--that's the way to take it," the cub announced airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door. "But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on, confining his attention to Brissenden. "It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the cub ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising. That's what counts. It was a favor to you." "It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden repeated solemnly. "And it was a favor to me--think of that!" was Martin's contribution. "Let me see--where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked, assuming an air of expectant attention. "He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden. "He remembers it all." "That is sufficient for me." The cub was trying not to look worried. "No decent reporter needs to bother with notes." "That was sufficient--for last night." But Brissenden was not a disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly. "Martin, if you don't poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next moment." "How will a spanking do?" Martin asked. Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head. The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub face downward across his knees. "Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your face. It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face." His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and steady rhythm. The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite. Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, "Here, just let me swat him once." "Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted. "It is quite numb." He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed. "I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks. "I'll make you sweat for this. You'll see." "The pretty thing," Martin remarked. "He doesn't realize that he has entered upon the downward path. It is not honest, it is not square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures the way he has done, and he doesn't know it." "He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause. "Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My grocery will undoubtedly refuse me credit now. The worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel." "But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden. "Who knows but what you may prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn't you let me swat him just once? I'd like to have had a hand in it." "I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes," sobbed the erring soul. "No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak." Martin shook his head lugubriously. "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain. The young man cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great." With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still clutched. In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about himself that was new to him. "We are the sworn enemies of society," he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. "No, we are not anarchists but socialists." When the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-shot eyes. He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon. The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around and nosed out Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham's Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front. That gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered to him and who would go to jail yet. Hermann Von Schmidt, Marian's husband, had likewise been interviewed. He had called Martin the black sheep of the family and repudiated him. "He tried to sponge off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt had said to the reporter. "He knows better than to come bumming around here. A man who won't work is no good, take that from me." This time Martin was genuinely angry. Brissenden looked upon the affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth. As for her father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement. How much he would make of it he was soon to realize. The afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth. Martin opened it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when he had received it from the postman. As he read, mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old cigarette days. He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a cigarette. It was not a passionate letter. There were no touches of anger in it. But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment. She had expected better of him. She had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live seriously and decently. And now her father and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement be broken. That they were justified in this she could not but admit. Their relation could never be a happy one. It had been unfortunate from the first. But one regret she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin. "If only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make something of yourself," she wrote. "But it was not to be. Your past life had been too wild and irregular. I can understand that you are not to be blamed. You could act only according to your nature and your early training. So I do not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It was simply a mistake. As father and mother have contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be happy because it was discovered not too late." . . "There is no use trying to see me," she said toward the last. "It would be an unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother. I feel, as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry. I shall have to do much living to atone for it." He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down and replied. He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth. Toward the end of the letter he was God's own lover pleading passionately for love. "Please answer," he said, "and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing. Do you love me? That is all--the answer to that one question." But no answer came the next day, nor the next. "Overdue" lay untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under the table grew larger. For the first time Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights. Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell. Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and, though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his troubles. For Martin's troubles were many. The aftermath of the cub reporter's deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated. The Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him--carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin's account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it. The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against Martin ran high. No one would have anything to do with a socialist traitor. Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained loyal. The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe distances they called him "hobo" and "bum." The Silva tribe, however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day and added to Maria's perplexities and troubles. Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned what he knew could not be otherwise--that Bernard Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house. "Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged. "Go away and get a job somewhere and steady down. Afterwards, when this all blows over, you can come back." Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations. How could he explain? He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,--the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped. He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the pawnbroker. "Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him. "After a few months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job of drivin' delivery-wagon for him. Any time you want me, just send for me an' I'll come. Don't forget." She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait. As he watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter. The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family. And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely at the paradox. A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along--ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister really was. The true noble men were above pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been generated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings. CHAPTER XL "Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera." His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people were once more worrying about the rent. But such things no longer bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was found his life must stand still. After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met Ruth on the street. It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted to wave him aside. "If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman threatened. "She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence is insult." "If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll get your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly. "And now, get out of my way and get the officer if you want to. I'm going to talk with Ruth." "I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her. She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly. "The question I asked in my letter," he prompted. Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift look. She shook her head. "Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded. "It is." She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation. "It is of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you again." "Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved me." A blush drove the pallor from her face. "After what has passed?" she said faintly. "Martin, you do not know what you are saying. I am not common." "You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman blurted out, starting on with her. Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there. It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it. He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an awakened somnambulist. He noticed "Overdue" lying on the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen. There was in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness. Here was something undone. It had been deferred against the completion of something else. Now that something else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until it was finished. What he would do next he did not know. All that he did know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion. He was not curious about the future. He would soon enough find out what it held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter. Nothing seemed to matter. For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing nobody, and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of The Parthenon. A glance told him that "Ephemera" was accepted. "We have submitted the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it for the August number, our July number being already made up. Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by return mail his photograph and biographical data. If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price." Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then, too, there was Brissenden's consent to be gained.

crowd

How many times the word 'crowd' appears in the text?

you think about them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of it. It will do them good. Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too. You see, I'd like to see you a socialist before I'm gone. It will give you a sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in the time of disappointment that is coming to you." "I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist," Martin pondered. "You detest the crowd so. Surely there is nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul." He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling. "Socialism doesn't seem to save you." "I'm very sick," was the answer. "With you it is different. You have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life somehow. As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy- nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a- brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a poor chap to do? We can't have the man on horseback, and anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come on, anyway. I'm loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I'll get drunk. And you know the doctor says--damn the doctor! I'll fool him yet." It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class. The speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism. The man's stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time. To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol. He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life. They were the unfit. In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man. Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best. It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race- horses and cucumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos. So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them hell. He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and addressing the chairman. He began in a low voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed. He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's time. They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every word. He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated the biological law of development. "And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of the slave-types can endure. The old law of development still holds. In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation increases. That is development. But you slaves--it is too bad to be slaves, I grant--but you slaves dream of a society where the law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will marry and have progeny--the weak as well as the strong. What will be the result? No longer will the strength and life-value of each generation increase. On the contrary, it will diminish. There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your society of slaves--of, by, and for, slaves--must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces. "Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No state of slaves can stand--" "How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience. "And how about it?" Martin retorted. "The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters--not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you over again--but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed." "But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves can endure, because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of development. No sooner can a slave society be organized than deterioration sets in. It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law of development, but where is the new law of development that will maintain your strength? Formulate it. Is it already formulated? Then state it." Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack. It was a wild night--but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas. Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin. They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws. They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the chairman rapped and pounded for order. It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and glib. He was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class. Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers. Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect reporter who is able to make something--even a great deal--out of nothing. He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary. Words like _revolution_ gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_. He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color--wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenic and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men. CHAPTER XXXIX Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's paper. It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh. "Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and dropped limply into the one chair. "But what do you care?" Brissenden asked. "Surely you don't desire the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?" Martin thought for a while, then said:- "No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit. On the other hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's family a trifle awkward. Her father always contended I was a socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief. Not that I care for his opinion--but what's the odds? I want to read you what I've been doing to- day. It's 'Overdue,' of course, and I'm just about halfway through." He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the oil- burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to Martin. "Sit down," Brissenden said. Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to broach his business. "I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview you," he began. Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh. "A brother socialist?" the reporter asked, with a quick glance at Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying man. "And he wrote that report," Martin said softly. "Why, he is only a boy!" "Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked. "I'd give a thousand dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes." The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and around him and at him. But he had been commended for his brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized menace to society. "You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he said. "I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower. Then we can have the interview afterward." "A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively. "Poke him, Martin! Poke him!" "I guess I'm getting old," was the answer. "I know I ought, but I really haven't the heart. It doesn't seem to matter." "For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged. "It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me. You see, it does take energy to give a fellow a poking. Besides, what does it matter?" "That's right--that's the way to take it," the cub announced airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door. "But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on, confining his attention to Brissenden. "It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the cub ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising. That's what counts. It was a favor to you." "It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden repeated solemnly. "And it was a favor to me--think of that!" was Martin's contribution. "Let me see--where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked, assuming an air of expectant attention. "He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden. "He remembers it all." "That is sufficient for me." The cub was trying not to look worried. "No decent reporter needs to bother with notes." "That was sufficient--for last night." But Brissenden was not a disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly. "Martin, if you don't poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next moment." "How will a spanking do?" Martin asked. Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head. The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub face downward across his knees. "Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your face. It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face." His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and steady rhythm. The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite. Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, "Here, just let me swat him once." "Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted. "It is quite numb." He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed. "I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks. "I'll make you sweat for this. You'll see." "The pretty thing," Martin remarked. "He doesn't realize that he has entered upon the downward path. It is not honest, it is not square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures the way he has done, and he doesn't know it." "He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause. "Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My grocery will undoubtedly refuse me credit now. The worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel." "But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden. "Who knows but what you may prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn't you let me swat him just once? I'd like to have had a hand in it." "I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes," sobbed the erring soul. "No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak." Martin shook his head lugubriously. "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain. The young man cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great." With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still clutched. In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about himself that was new to him. "We are the sworn enemies of society," he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. "No, we are not anarchists but socialists." When the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-shot eyes. He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon. The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around and nosed out Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham's Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front. That gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered to him and who would go to jail yet. Hermann Von Schmidt, Marian's husband, had likewise been interviewed. He had called Martin the black sheep of the family and repudiated him. "He tried to sponge off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt had said to the reporter. "He knows better than to come bumming around here. A man who won't work is no good, take that from me." This time Martin was genuinely angry. Brissenden looked upon the affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth. As for her father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement. How much he would make of it he was soon to realize. The afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth. Martin opened it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when he had received it from the postman. As he read, mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old cigarette days. He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a cigarette. It was not a passionate letter. There were no touches of anger in it. But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment. She had expected better of him. She had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live seriously and decently. And now her father and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement be broken. That they were justified in this she could not but admit. Their relation could never be a happy one. It had been unfortunate from the first. But one regret she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin. "If only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make something of yourself," she wrote. "But it was not to be. Your past life had been too wild and irregular. I can understand that you are not to be blamed. You could act only according to your nature and your early training. So I do not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It was simply a mistake. As father and mother have contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be happy because it was discovered not too late." . . "There is no use trying to see me," she said toward the last. "It would be an unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother. I feel, as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry. I shall have to do much living to atone for it." He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down and replied. He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth. Toward the end of the letter he was God's own lover pleading passionately for love. "Please answer," he said, "and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing. Do you love me? That is all--the answer to that one question." But no answer came the next day, nor the next. "Overdue" lay untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under the table grew larger. For the first time Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights. Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell. Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and, though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his troubles. For Martin's troubles were many. The aftermath of the cub reporter's deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated. The Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him--carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin's account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it. The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against Martin ran high. No one would have anything to do with a socialist traitor. Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained loyal. The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe distances they called him "hobo" and "bum." The Silva tribe, however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day and added to Maria's perplexities and troubles. Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned what he knew could not be otherwise--that Bernard Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house. "Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged. "Go away and get a job somewhere and steady down. Afterwards, when this all blows over, you can come back." Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations. How could he explain? He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,--the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped. He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the pawnbroker. "Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him. "After a few months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job of drivin' delivery-wagon for him. Any time you want me, just send for me an' I'll come. Don't forget." She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait. As he watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter. The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family. And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely at the paradox. A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along--ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister really was. The true noble men were above pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been generated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings. CHAPTER XL "Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera." His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people were once more worrying about the rent. But such things no longer bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was found his life must stand still. After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met Ruth on the street. It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted to wave him aside. "If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman threatened. "She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence is insult." "If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll get your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly. "And now, get out of my way and get the officer if you want to. I'm going to talk with Ruth." "I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her. She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly. "The question I asked in my letter," he prompted. Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift look. She shook her head. "Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded. "It is." She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation. "It is of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you again." "Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved me." A blush drove the pallor from her face. "After what has passed?" she said faintly. "Martin, you do not know what you are saying. I am not common." "You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman blurted out, starting on with her. Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there. It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it. He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an awakened somnambulist. He noticed "Overdue" lying on the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen. There was in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness. Here was something undone. It had been deferred against the completion of something else. Now that something else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until it was finished. What he would do next he did not know. All that he did know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion. He was not curious about the future. He would soon enough find out what it held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter. Nothing seemed to matter. For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing nobody, and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of The Parthenon. A glance told him that "Ephemera" was accepted. "We have submitted the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it for the August number, our July number being already made up. Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by return mail his photograph and biographical data. If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price." Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then, too, there was Brissenden's consent to be gained.

slave

How many times the word 'slave' appears in the text?

you think about them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of it. It will do them good. Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too. You see, I'd like to see you a socialist before I'm gone. It will give you a sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in the time of disappointment that is coming to you." "I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist," Martin pondered. "You detest the crowd so. Surely there is nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul." He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling. "Socialism doesn't seem to save you." "I'm very sick," was the answer. "With you it is different. You have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life somehow. As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy- nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a- brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a poor chap to do? We can't have the man on horseback, and anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come on, anyway. I'm loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I'll get drunk. And you know the doctor says--damn the doctor! I'll fool him yet." It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class. The speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism. The man's stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time. To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol. He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life. They were the unfit. In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man. Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best. It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race- horses and cucumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos. So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them hell. He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and addressing the chairman. He began in a low voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed. He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's time. They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every word. He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated the biological law of development. "And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of the slave-types can endure. The old law of development still holds. In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation increases. That is development. But you slaves--it is too bad to be slaves, I grant--but you slaves dream of a society where the law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will marry and have progeny--the weak as well as the strong. What will be the result? No longer will the strength and life-value of each generation increase. On the contrary, it will diminish. There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your society of slaves--of, by, and for, slaves--must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces. "Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No state of slaves can stand--" "How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience. "And how about it?" Martin retorted. "The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters--not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you over again--but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed." "But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves can endure, because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of development. No sooner can a slave society be organized than deterioration sets in. It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law of development, but where is the new law of development that will maintain your strength? Formulate it. Is it already formulated? Then state it." Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack. It was a wild night--but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas. Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin. They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws. They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the chairman rapped and pounded for order. It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and glib. He was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class. Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers. Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect reporter who is able to make something--even a great deal--out of nothing. He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary. Words like _revolution_ gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_. He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color--wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenic and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men. CHAPTER XXXIX Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's paper. It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh. "Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and dropped limply into the one chair. "But what do you care?" Brissenden asked. "Surely you don't desire the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?" Martin thought for a while, then said:- "No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit. On the other hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's family a trifle awkward. Her father always contended I was a socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief. Not that I care for his opinion--but what's the odds? I want to read you what I've been doing to- day. It's 'Overdue,' of course, and I'm just about halfway through." He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the oil- burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to Martin. "Sit down," Brissenden said. Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to broach his business. "I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview you," he began. Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh. "A brother socialist?" the reporter asked, with a quick glance at Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying man. "And he wrote that report," Martin said softly. "Why, he is only a boy!" "Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked. "I'd give a thousand dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes." The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and around him and at him. But he had been commended for his brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized menace to society. "You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he said. "I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower. Then we can have the interview afterward." "A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively. "Poke him, Martin! Poke him!" "I guess I'm getting old," was the answer. "I know I ought, but I really haven't the heart. It doesn't seem to matter." "For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged. "It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me. You see, it does take energy to give a fellow a poking. Besides, what does it matter?" "That's right--that's the way to take it," the cub announced airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door. "But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on, confining his attention to Brissenden. "It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the cub ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising. That's what counts. It was a favor to you." "It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden repeated solemnly. "And it was a favor to me--think of that!" was Martin's contribution. "Let me see--where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked, assuming an air of expectant attention. "He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden. "He remembers it all." "That is sufficient for me." The cub was trying not to look worried. "No decent reporter needs to bother with notes." "That was sufficient--for last night." But Brissenden was not a disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly. "Martin, if you don't poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next moment." "How will a spanking do?" Martin asked. Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head. The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub face downward across his knees. "Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your face. It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face." His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and steady rhythm. The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite. Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, "Here, just let me swat him once." "Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted. "It is quite numb." He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed. "I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks. "I'll make you sweat for this. You'll see." "The pretty thing," Martin remarked. "He doesn't realize that he has entered upon the downward path. It is not honest, it is not square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures the way he has done, and he doesn't know it." "He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause. "Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My grocery will undoubtedly refuse me credit now. The worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel." "But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden. "Who knows but what you may prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn't you let me swat him just once? I'd like to have had a hand in it." "I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes," sobbed the erring soul. "No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak." Martin shook his head lugubriously. "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain. The young man cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great." With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still clutched. In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about himself that was new to him. "We are the sworn enemies of society," he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. "No, we are not anarchists but socialists." When the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-shot eyes. He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon. The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around and nosed out Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham's Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front. That gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered to him and who would go to jail yet. Hermann Von Schmidt, Marian's husband, had likewise been interviewed. He had called Martin the black sheep of the family and repudiated him. "He tried to sponge off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt had said to the reporter. "He knows better than to come bumming around here. A man who won't work is no good, take that from me." This time Martin was genuinely angry. Brissenden looked upon the affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth. As for her father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement. How much he would make of it he was soon to realize. The afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth. Martin opened it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when he had received it from the postman. As he read, mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old cigarette days. He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a cigarette. It was not a passionate letter. There were no touches of anger in it. But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment. She had expected better of him. She had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live seriously and decently. And now her father and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement be broken. That they were justified in this she could not but admit. Their relation could never be a happy one. It had been unfortunate from the first. But one regret she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin. "If only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make something of yourself," she wrote. "But it was not to be. Your past life had been too wild and irregular. I can understand that you are not to be blamed. You could act only according to your nature and your early training. So I do not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It was simply a mistake. As father and mother have contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be happy because it was discovered not too late." . . "There is no use trying to see me," she said toward the last. "It would be an unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother. I feel, as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry. I shall have to do much living to atone for it." He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down and replied. He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth. Toward the end of the letter he was God's own lover pleading passionately for love. "Please answer," he said, "and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing. Do you love me? That is all--the answer to that one question." But no answer came the next day, nor the next. "Overdue" lay untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under the table grew larger. For the first time Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights. Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell. Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and, though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his troubles. For Martin's troubles were many. The aftermath of the cub reporter's deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated. The Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him--carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin's account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it. The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against Martin ran high. No one would have anything to do with a socialist traitor. Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained loyal. The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe distances they called him "hobo" and "bum." The Silva tribe, however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day and added to Maria's perplexities and troubles. Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned what he knew could not be otherwise--that Bernard Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house. "Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged. "Go away and get a job somewhere and steady down. Afterwards, when this all blows over, you can come back." Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations. How could he explain? He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,--the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped. He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the pawnbroker. "Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him. "After a few months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job of drivin' delivery-wagon for him. Any time you want me, just send for me an' I'll come. Don't forget." She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait. As he watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter. The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family. And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely at the paradox. A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along--ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister really was. The true noble men were above pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been generated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings. CHAPTER XL "Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera." His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people were once more worrying about the rent. But such things no longer bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was found his life must stand still. After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met Ruth on the street. It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted to wave him aside. "If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman threatened. "She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence is insult." "If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll get your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly. "And now, get out of my way and get the officer if you want to. I'm going to talk with Ruth." "I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her. She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly. "The question I asked in my letter," he prompted. Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift look. She shook her head. "Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded. "It is." She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation. "It is of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you again." "Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved me." A blush drove the pallor from her face. "After what has passed?" she said faintly. "Martin, you do not know what you are saying. I am not common." "You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman blurted out, starting on with her. Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there. It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it. He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an awakened somnambulist. He noticed "Overdue" lying on the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen. There was in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness. Here was something undone. It had been deferred against the completion of something else. Now that something else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until it was finished. What he would do next he did not know. All that he did know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion. He was not curious about the future. He would soon enough find out what it held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter. Nothing seemed to matter. For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing nobody, and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of The Parthenon. A glance told him that "Ephemera" was accepted. "We have submitted the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it for the August number, our July number being already made up. Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by return mail his photograph and biographical data. If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price." Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then, too, there was Brissenden's consent to be gained.

generation

How many times the word 'generation' appears in the text?

you think about them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of it. It will do them good. Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too. You see, I'd like to see you a socialist before I'm gone. It will give you a sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in the time of disappointment that is coming to you." "I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist," Martin pondered. "You detest the crowd so. Surely there is nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul." He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling. "Socialism doesn't seem to save you." "I'm very sick," was the answer. "With you it is different. You have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life somehow. As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy- nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a- brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a poor chap to do? We can't have the man on horseback, and anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come on, anyway. I'm loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I'll get drunk. And you know the doctor says--damn the doctor! I'll fool him yet." It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class. The speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism. The man's stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time. To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol. He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life. They were the unfit. In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man. Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best. It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race- horses and cucumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos. So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them hell. He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and addressing the chairman. He began in a low voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed. He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's time. They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every word. He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated the biological law of development. "And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of the slave-types can endure. The old law of development still holds. In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation increases. That is development. But you slaves--it is too bad to be slaves, I grant--but you slaves dream of a society where the law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will marry and have progeny--the weak as well as the strong. What will be the result? No longer will the strength and life-value of each generation increase. On the contrary, it will diminish. There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your society of slaves--of, by, and for, slaves--must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces. "Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No state of slaves can stand--" "How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience. "And how about it?" Martin retorted. "The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters--not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you over again--but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed." "But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves can endure, because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of development. No sooner can a slave society be organized than deterioration sets in. It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law of development, but where is the new law of development that will maintain your strength? Formulate it. Is it already formulated? Then state it." Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack. It was a wild night--but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas. Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin. They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws. They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the chairman rapped and pounded for order. It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and glib. He was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class. Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers. Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect reporter who is able to make something--even a great deal--out of nothing. He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary. Words like _revolution_ gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_. He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color--wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenic and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men. CHAPTER XXXIX Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's paper. It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh. "Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and dropped limply into the one chair. "But what do you care?" Brissenden asked. "Surely you don't desire the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?" Martin thought for a while, then said:- "No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit. On the other hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's family a trifle awkward. Her father always contended I was a socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief. Not that I care for his opinion--but what's the odds? I want to read you what I've been doing to- day. It's 'Overdue,' of course, and I'm just about halfway through." He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the oil- burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to Martin. "Sit down," Brissenden said. Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to broach his business. "I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview you," he began. Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh. "A brother socialist?" the reporter asked, with a quick glance at Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying man. "And he wrote that report," Martin said softly. "Why, he is only a boy!" "Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked. "I'd give a thousand dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes." The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and around him and at him. But he had been commended for his brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized menace to society. "You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he said. "I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower. Then we can have the interview afterward." "A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively. "Poke him, Martin! Poke him!" "I guess I'm getting old," was the answer. "I know I ought, but I really haven't the heart. It doesn't seem to matter." "For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged. "It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me. You see, it does take energy to give a fellow a poking. Besides, what does it matter?" "That's right--that's the way to take it," the cub announced airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door. "But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on, confining his attention to Brissenden. "It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the cub ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising. That's what counts. It was a favor to you." "It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden repeated solemnly. "And it was a favor to me--think of that!" was Martin's contribution. "Let me see--where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked, assuming an air of expectant attention. "He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden. "He remembers it all." "That is sufficient for me." The cub was trying not to look worried. "No decent reporter needs to bother with notes." "That was sufficient--for last night." But Brissenden was not a disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly. "Martin, if you don't poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next moment." "How will a spanking do?" Martin asked. Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head. The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub face downward across his knees. "Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your face. It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face." His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and steady rhythm. The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite. Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, "Here, just let me swat him once." "Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted. "It is quite numb." He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed. "I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks. "I'll make you sweat for this. You'll see." "The pretty thing," Martin remarked. "He doesn't realize that he has entered upon the downward path. It is not honest, it is not square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures the way he has done, and he doesn't know it." "He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause. "Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My grocery will undoubtedly refuse me credit now. The worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel." "But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden. "Who knows but what you may prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn't you let me swat him just once? I'd like to have had a hand in it." "I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes," sobbed the erring soul. "No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak." Martin shook his head lugubriously. "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain. The young man cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great." With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still clutched. In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about himself that was new to him. "We are the sworn enemies of society," he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. "No, we are not anarchists but socialists." When the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-shot eyes. He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon. The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around and nosed out Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham's Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front. That gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered to him and who would go to jail yet. Hermann Von Schmidt, Marian's husband, had likewise been interviewed. He had called Martin the black sheep of the family and repudiated him. "He tried to sponge off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt had said to the reporter. "He knows better than to come bumming around here. A man who won't work is no good, take that from me." This time Martin was genuinely angry. Brissenden looked upon the affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth. As for her father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement. How much he would make of it he was soon to realize. The afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth. Martin opened it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when he had received it from the postman. As he read, mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old cigarette days. He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a cigarette. It was not a passionate letter. There were no touches of anger in it. But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment. She had expected better of him. She had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live seriously and decently. And now her father and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement be broken. That they were justified in this she could not but admit. Their relation could never be a happy one. It had been unfortunate from the first. But one regret she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin. "If only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make something of yourself," she wrote. "But it was not to be. Your past life had been too wild and irregular. I can understand that you are not to be blamed. You could act only according to your nature and your early training. So I do not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It was simply a mistake. As father and mother have contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be happy because it was discovered not too late." . . "There is no use trying to see me," she said toward the last. "It would be an unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother. I feel, as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry. I shall have to do much living to atone for it." He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down and replied. He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth. Toward the end of the letter he was God's own lover pleading passionately for love. "Please answer," he said, "and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing. Do you love me? That is all--the answer to that one question." But no answer came the next day, nor the next. "Overdue" lay untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under the table grew larger. For the first time Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights. Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell. Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and, though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his troubles. For Martin's troubles were many. The aftermath of the cub reporter's deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated. The Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him--carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin's account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it. The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against Martin ran high. No one would have anything to do with a socialist traitor. Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained loyal. The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe distances they called him "hobo" and "bum." The Silva tribe, however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day and added to Maria's perplexities and troubles. Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned what he knew could not be otherwise--that Bernard Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house. "Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged. "Go away and get a job somewhere and steady down. Afterwards, when this all blows over, you can come back." Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations. How could he explain? He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,--the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped. He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the pawnbroker. "Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him. "After a few months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job of drivin' delivery-wagon for him. Any time you want me, just send for me an' I'll come. Don't forget." She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait. As he watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter. The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family. And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely at the paradox. A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along--ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister really was. The true noble men were above pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been generated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings. CHAPTER XL "Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera." His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people were once more worrying about the rent. But such things no longer bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was found his life must stand still. After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met Ruth on the street. It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted to wave him aside. "If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman threatened. "She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence is insult." "If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll get your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly. "And now, get out of my way and get the officer if you want to. I'm going to talk with Ruth." "I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her. She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly. "The question I asked in my letter," he prompted. Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift look. She shook her head. "Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded. "It is." She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation. "It is of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you again." "Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved me." A blush drove the pallor from her face. "After what has passed?" she said faintly. "Martin, you do not know what you are saying. I am not common." "You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman blurted out, starting on with her. Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there. It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it. He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an awakened somnambulist. He noticed "Overdue" lying on the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen. There was in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness. Here was something undone. It had been deferred against the completion of something else. Now that something else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until it was finished. What he would do next he did not know. All that he did know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion. He was not curious about the future. He would soon enough find out what it held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter. Nothing seemed to matter. For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing nobody, and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of The Parthenon. A glance told him that "Ephemera" was accepted. "We have submitted the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it for the August number, our July number being already made up. Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by return mail his photograph and biographical data. If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price." Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then, too, there was Brissenden's consent to be gained.

because

How many times the word 'because' appears in the text?

you think about them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of it. It will do them good. Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too. You see, I'd like to see you a socialist before I'm gone. It will give you a sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in the time of disappointment that is coming to you." "I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist," Martin pondered. "You detest the crowd so. Surely there is nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul." He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling. "Socialism doesn't seem to save you." "I'm very sick," was the answer. "With you it is different. You have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life somehow. As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy- nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a- brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a poor chap to do? We can't have the man on horseback, and anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come on, anyway. I'm loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I'll get drunk. And you know the doctor says--damn the doctor! I'll fool him yet." It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class. The speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism. The man's stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time. To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol. He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life. They were the unfit. In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man. Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best. It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race- horses and cucumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos. So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them hell. He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and addressing the chairman. He began in a low voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed. He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's time. They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every word. He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated the biological law of development. "And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of the slave-types can endure. The old law of development still holds. In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation increases. That is development. But you slaves--it is too bad to be slaves, I grant--but you slaves dream of a society where the law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will marry and have progeny--the weak as well as the strong. What will be the result? No longer will the strength and life-value of each generation increase. On the contrary, it will diminish. There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your society of slaves--of, by, and for, slaves--must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces. "Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No state of slaves can stand--" "How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience. "And how about it?" Martin retorted. "The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters--not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you over again--but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed." "But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves can endure, because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of development. No sooner can a slave society be organized than deterioration sets in. It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law of development, but where is the new law of development that will maintain your strength? Formulate it. Is it already formulated? Then state it." Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack. It was a wild night--but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas. Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin. They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws. They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the chairman rapped and pounded for order. It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and glib. He was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class. Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers. Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect reporter who is able to make something--even a great deal--out of nothing. He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary. Words like _revolution_ gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_. He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color--wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenic and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men. CHAPTER XXXIX Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's paper. It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh. "Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and dropped limply into the one chair. "But what do you care?" Brissenden asked. "Surely you don't desire the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?" Martin thought for a while, then said:- "No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit. On the other hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's family a trifle awkward. Her father always contended I was a socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief. Not that I care for his opinion--but what's the odds? I want to read you what I've been doing to- day. It's 'Overdue,' of course, and I'm just about halfway through." He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the oil- burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to Martin. "Sit down," Brissenden said. Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to broach his business. "I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview you," he began. Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh. "A brother socialist?" the reporter asked, with a quick glance at Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying man. "And he wrote that report," Martin said softly. "Why, he is only a boy!" "Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked. "I'd give a thousand dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes." The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and around him and at him. But he had been commended for his brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized menace to society. "You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he said. "I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower. Then we can have the interview afterward." "A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively. "Poke him, Martin! Poke him!" "I guess I'm getting old," was the answer. "I know I ought, but I really haven't the heart. It doesn't seem to matter." "For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged. "It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me. You see, it does take energy to give a fellow a poking. Besides, what does it matter?" "That's right--that's the way to take it," the cub announced airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door. "But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on, confining his attention to Brissenden. "It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the cub ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising. That's what counts. It was a favor to you." "It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden repeated solemnly. "And it was a favor to me--think of that!" was Martin's contribution. "Let me see--where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked, assuming an air of expectant attention. "He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden. "He remembers it all." "That is sufficient for me." The cub was trying not to look worried. "No decent reporter needs to bother with notes." "That was sufficient--for last night." But Brissenden was not a disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly. "Martin, if you don't poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next moment." "How will a spanking do?" Martin asked. Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head. The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub face downward across his knees. "Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your face. It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face." His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and steady rhythm. The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite. Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, "Here, just let me swat him once." "Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted. "It is quite numb." He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed. "I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks. "I'll make you sweat for this. You'll see." "The pretty thing," Martin remarked. "He doesn't realize that he has entered upon the downward path. It is not honest, it is not square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures the way he has done, and he doesn't know it." "He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause. "Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My grocery will undoubtedly refuse me credit now. The worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel." "But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden. "Who knows but what you may prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn't you let me swat him just once? I'd like to have had a hand in it." "I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes," sobbed the erring soul. "No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak." Martin shook his head lugubriously. "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain. The young man cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great." With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still clutched. In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about himself that was new to him. "We are the sworn enemies of society," he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. "No, we are not anarchists but socialists." When the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-shot eyes. He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon. The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around and nosed out Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham's Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front. That gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered to him and who would go to jail yet. Hermann Von Schmidt, Marian's husband, had likewise been interviewed. He had called Martin the black sheep of the family and repudiated him. "He tried to sponge off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt had said to the reporter. "He knows better than to come bumming around here. A man who won't work is no good, take that from me." This time Martin was genuinely angry. Brissenden looked upon the affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth. As for her father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement. How much he would make of it he was soon to realize. The afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth. Martin opened it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when he had received it from the postman. As he read, mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old cigarette days. He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a cigarette. It was not a passionate letter. There were no touches of anger in it. But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment. She had expected better of him. She had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live seriously and decently. And now her father and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement be broken. That they were justified in this she could not but admit. Their relation could never be a happy one. It had been unfortunate from the first. But one regret she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin. "If only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make something of yourself," she wrote. "But it was not to be. Your past life had been too wild and irregular. I can understand that you are not to be blamed. You could act only according to your nature and your early training. So I do not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It was simply a mistake. As father and mother have contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be happy because it was discovered not too late." . . "There is no use trying to see me," she said toward the last. "It would be an unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother. I feel, as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry. I shall have to do much living to atone for it." He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down and replied. He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth. Toward the end of the letter he was God's own lover pleading passionately for love. "Please answer," he said, "and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing. Do you love me? That is all--the answer to that one question." But no answer came the next day, nor the next. "Overdue" lay untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under the table grew larger. For the first time Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights. Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell. Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and, though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his troubles. For Martin's troubles were many. The aftermath of the cub reporter's deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated. The Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him--carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin's account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it. The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against Martin ran high. No one would have anything to do with a socialist traitor. Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained loyal. The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe distances they called him "hobo" and "bum." The Silva tribe, however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day and added to Maria's perplexities and troubles. Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned what he knew could not be otherwise--that Bernard Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house. "Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged. "Go away and get a job somewhere and steady down. Afterwards, when this all blows over, you can come back." Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations. How could he explain? He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,--the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped. He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the pawnbroker. "Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him. "After a few months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job of drivin' delivery-wagon for him. Any time you want me, just send for me an' I'll come. Don't forget." She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait. As he watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter. The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family. And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely at the paradox. A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along--ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister really was. The true noble men were above pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been generated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings. CHAPTER XL "Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera." His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people were once more worrying about the rent. But such things no longer bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was found his life must stand still. After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met Ruth on the street. It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted to wave him aside. "If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman threatened. "She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence is insult." "If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll get your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly. "And now, get out of my way and get the officer if you want to. I'm going to talk with Ruth." "I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her. She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly. "The question I asked in my letter," he prompted. Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift look. She shook her head. "Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded. "It is." She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation. "It is of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you again." "Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved me." A blush drove the pallor from her face. "After what has passed?" she said faintly. "Martin, you do not know what you are saying. I am not common." "You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman blurted out, starting on with her. Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there. It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it. He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an awakened somnambulist. He noticed "Overdue" lying on the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen. There was in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness. Here was something undone. It had been deferred against the completion of something else. Now that something else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until it was finished. What he would do next he did not know. All that he did know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion. He was not curious about the future. He would soon enough find out what it held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter. Nothing seemed to matter. For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing nobody, and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of The Parthenon. A glance told him that "Ephemera" was accepted. "We have submitted the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it for the August number, our July number being already made up. Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by return mail his photograph and biographical data. If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price." Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then, too, there was Brissenden's consent to be gained.

counselled

How many times the word 'counselled' appears in the text?

you think about them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of it. It will do them good. Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too. You see, I'd like to see you a socialist before I'm gone. It will give you a sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in the time of disappointment that is coming to you." "I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist," Martin pondered. "You detest the crowd so. Surely there is nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul." He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling. "Socialism doesn't seem to save you." "I'm very sick," was the answer. "With you it is different. You have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life somehow. As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy- nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a- brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a poor chap to do? We can't have the man on horseback, and anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come on, anyway. I'm loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I'll get drunk. And you know the doctor says--damn the doctor! I'll fool him yet." It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class. The speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism. The man's stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time. To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol. He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life. They were the unfit. In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man. Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best. It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race- horses and cucumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos. So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them hell. He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and addressing the chairman. He began in a low voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed. He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's time. They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every word. He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated the biological law of development. "And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of the slave-types can endure. The old law of development still holds. In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation increases. That is development. But you slaves--it is too bad to be slaves, I grant--but you slaves dream of a society where the law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will marry and have progeny--the weak as well as the strong. What will be the result? No longer will the strength and life-value of each generation increase. On the contrary, it will diminish. There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your society of slaves--of, by, and for, slaves--must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces. "Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No state of slaves can stand--" "How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience. "And how about it?" Martin retorted. "The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters--not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you over again--but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed." "But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves can endure, because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of development. No sooner can a slave society be organized than deterioration sets in. It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law of development, but where is the new law of development that will maintain your strength? Formulate it. Is it already formulated? Then state it." Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack. It was a wild night--but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas. Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin. They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws. They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the chairman rapped and pounded for order. It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and glib. He was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class. Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers. Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect reporter who is able to make something--even a great deal--out of nothing. He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary. Words like _revolution_ gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_. He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color--wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenic and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men. CHAPTER XXXIX Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's paper. It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh. "Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and dropped limply into the one chair. "But what do you care?" Brissenden asked. "Surely you don't desire the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?" Martin thought for a while, then said:- "No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit. On the other hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's family a trifle awkward. Her father always contended I was a socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief. Not that I care for his opinion--but what's the odds? I want to read you what I've been doing to- day. It's 'Overdue,' of course, and I'm just about halfway through." He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the oil- burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to Martin. "Sit down," Brissenden said. Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to broach his business. "I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview you," he began. Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh. "A brother socialist?" the reporter asked, with a quick glance at Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying man. "And he wrote that report," Martin said softly. "Why, he is only a boy!" "Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked. "I'd give a thousand dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes." The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and around him and at him. But he had been commended for his brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized menace to society. "You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he said. "I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower. Then we can have the interview afterward." "A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively. "Poke him, Martin! Poke him!" "I guess I'm getting old," was the answer. "I know I ought, but I really haven't the heart. It doesn't seem to matter." "For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged. "It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me. You see, it does take energy to give a fellow a poking. Besides, what does it matter?" "That's right--that's the way to take it," the cub announced airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door. "But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on, confining his attention to Brissenden. "It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the cub ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising. That's what counts. It was a favor to you." "It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden repeated solemnly. "And it was a favor to me--think of that!" was Martin's contribution. "Let me see--where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked, assuming an air of expectant attention. "He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden. "He remembers it all." "That is sufficient for me." The cub was trying not to look worried. "No decent reporter needs to bother with notes." "That was sufficient--for last night." But Brissenden was not a disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly. "Martin, if you don't poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next moment." "How will a spanking do?" Martin asked. Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head. The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub face downward across his knees. "Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your face. It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face." His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and steady rhythm. The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite. Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, "Here, just let me swat him once." "Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted. "It is quite numb." He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed. "I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks. "I'll make you sweat for this. You'll see." "The pretty thing," Martin remarked. "He doesn't realize that he has entered upon the downward path. It is not honest, it is not square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures the way he has done, and he doesn't know it." "He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause. "Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My grocery will undoubtedly refuse me credit now. The worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel." "But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden. "Who knows but what you may prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn't you let me swat him just once? I'd like to have had a hand in it." "I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes," sobbed the erring soul. "No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak." Martin shook his head lugubriously. "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain. The young man cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great." With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still clutched. In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about himself that was new to him. "We are the sworn enemies of society," he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. "No, we are not anarchists but socialists." When the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-shot eyes. He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon. The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around and nosed out Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham's Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front. That gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered to him and who would go to jail yet. Hermann Von Schmidt, Marian's husband, had likewise been interviewed. He had called Martin the black sheep of the family and repudiated him. "He tried to sponge off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt had said to the reporter. "He knows better than to come bumming around here. A man who won't work is no good, take that from me." This time Martin was genuinely angry. Brissenden looked upon the affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth. As for her father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement. How much he would make of it he was soon to realize. The afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth. Martin opened it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when he had received it from the postman. As he read, mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old cigarette days. He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a cigarette. It was not a passionate letter. There were no touches of anger in it. But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment. She had expected better of him. She had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live seriously and decently. And now her father and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement be broken. That they were justified in this she could not but admit. Their relation could never be a happy one. It had been unfortunate from the first. But one regret she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin. "If only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make something of yourself," she wrote. "But it was not to be. Your past life had been too wild and irregular. I can understand that you are not to be blamed. You could act only according to your nature and your early training. So I do not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It was simply a mistake. As father and mother have contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be happy because it was discovered not too late." . . "There is no use trying to see me," she said toward the last. "It would be an unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother. I feel, as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry. I shall have to do much living to atone for it." He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down and replied. He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth. Toward the end of the letter he was God's own lover pleading passionately for love. "Please answer," he said, "and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing. Do you love me? That is all--the answer to that one question." But no answer came the next day, nor the next. "Overdue" lay untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under the table grew larger. For the first time Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights. Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell. Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and, though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his troubles. For Martin's troubles were many. The aftermath of the cub reporter's deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated. The Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him--carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin's account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it. The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against Martin ran high. No one would have anything to do with a socialist traitor. Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained loyal. The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe distances they called him "hobo" and "bum." The Silva tribe, however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day and added to Maria's perplexities and troubles. Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned what he knew could not be otherwise--that Bernard Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house. "Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged. "Go away and get a job somewhere and steady down. Afterwards, when this all blows over, you can come back." Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations. How could he explain? He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,--the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped. He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the pawnbroker. "Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him. "After a few months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job of drivin' delivery-wagon for him. Any time you want me, just send for me an' I'll come. Don't forget." She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait. As he watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter. The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family. And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely at the paradox. A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along--ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister really was. The true noble men were above pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been generated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings. CHAPTER XL "Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera." His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people were once more worrying about the rent. But such things no longer bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was found his life must stand still. After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met Ruth on the street. It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted to wave him aside. "If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman threatened. "She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence is insult." "If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll get your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly. "And now, get out of my way and get the officer if you want to. I'm going to talk with Ruth." "I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her. She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly. "The question I asked in my letter," he prompted. Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift look. She shook her head. "Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded. "It is." She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation. "It is of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you again." "Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved me." A blush drove the pallor from her face. "After what has passed?" she said faintly. "Martin, you do not know what you are saying. I am not common." "You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman blurted out, starting on with her. Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there. It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it. He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an awakened somnambulist. He noticed "Overdue" lying on the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen. There was in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness. Here was something undone. It had been deferred against the completion of something else. Now that something else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until it was finished. What he would do next he did not know. All that he did know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion. He was not curious about the future. He would soon enough find out what it held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter. Nothing seemed to matter. For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing nobody, and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of The Parthenon. A glance told him that "Ephemera" was accepted. "We have submitted the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it for the August number, our July number being already made up. Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by return mail his photograph and biographical data. If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price." Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then, too, there was Brissenden's consent to be gained.

packed

How many times the word 'packed' appears in the text?

you think about them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of it. It will do them good. Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too. You see, I'd like to see you a socialist before I'm gone. It will give you a sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in the time of disappointment that is coming to you." "I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist," Martin pondered. "You detest the crowd so. Surely there is nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul." He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling. "Socialism doesn't seem to save you." "I'm very sick," was the answer. "With you it is different. You have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life somehow. As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy- nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a- brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a poor chap to do? We can't have the man on horseback, and anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come on, anyway. I'm loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I'll get drunk. And you know the doctor says--damn the doctor! I'll fool him yet." It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class. The speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism. The man's stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time. To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol. He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life. They were the unfit. In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man. Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best. It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race- horses and cucumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos. So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them hell. He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and addressing the chairman. He began in a low voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed. He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's time. They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every word. He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated the biological law of development. "And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of the slave-types can endure. The old law of development still holds. In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation increases. That is development. But you slaves--it is too bad to be slaves, I grant--but you slaves dream of a society where the law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will marry and have progeny--the weak as well as the strong. What will be the result? No longer will the strength and life-value of each generation increase. On the contrary, it will diminish. There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your society of slaves--of, by, and for, slaves--must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces. "Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No state of slaves can stand--" "How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience. "And how about it?" Martin retorted. "The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters--not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you over again--but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed." "But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves can endure, because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of development. No sooner can a slave society be organized than deterioration sets in. It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law of development, but where is the new law of development that will maintain your strength? Formulate it. Is it already formulated? Then state it." Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack. It was a wild night--but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas. Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin. They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws. They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the chairman rapped and pounded for order. It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and glib. He was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class. Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers. Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect reporter who is able to make something--even a great deal--out of nothing. He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary. Words like _revolution_ gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_. He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color--wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenic and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men. CHAPTER XXXIX Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's paper. It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh. "Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and dropped limply into the one chair. "But what do you care?" Brissenden asked. "Surely you don't desire the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?" Martin thought for a while, then said:- "No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit. On the other hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's family a trifle awkward. Her father always contended I was a socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief. Not that I care for his opinion--but what's the odds? I want to read you what I've been doing to- day. It's 'Overdue,' of course, and I'm just about halfway through." He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the oil- burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to Martin. "Sit down," Brissenden said. Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to broach his business. "I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview you," he began. Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh. "A brother socialist?" the reporter asked, with a quick glance at Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying man. "And he wrote that report," Martin said softly. "Why, he is only a boy!" "Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked. "I'd give a thousand dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes." The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and around him and at him. But he had been commended for his brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized menace to society. "You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he said. "I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower. Then we can have the interview afterward." "A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively. "Poke him, Martin! Poke him!" "I guess I'm getting old," was the answer. "I know I ought, but I really haven't the heart. It doesn't seem to matter." "For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged. "It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me. You see, it does take energy to give a fellow a poking. Besides, what does it matter?" "That's right--that's the way to take it," the cub announced airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door. "But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on, confining his attention to Brissenden. "It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the cub ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising. That's what counts. It was a favor to you." "It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden repeated solemnly. "And it was a favor to me--think of that!" was Martin's contribution. "Let me see--where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked, assuming an air of expectant attention. "He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden. "He remembers it all." "That is sufficient for me." The cub was trying not to look worried. "No decent reporter needs to bother with notes." "That was sufficient--for last night." But Brissenden was not a disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly. "Martin, if you don't poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next moment." "How will a spanking do?" Martin asked. Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head. The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub face downward across his knees. "Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your face. It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face." His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and steady rhythm. The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite. Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, "Here, just let me swat him once." "Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted. "It is quite numb." He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed. "I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks. "I'll make you sweat for this. You'll see." "The pretty thing," Martin remarked. "He doesn't realize that he has entered upon the downward path. It is not honest, it is not square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures the way he has done, and he doesn't know it." "He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause. "Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My grocery will undoubtedly refuse me credit now. The worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel." "But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden. "Who knows but what you may prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn't you let me swat him just once? I'd like to have had a hand in it." "I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes," sobbed the erring soul. "No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak." Martin shook his head lugubriously. "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain. The young man cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great." With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still clutched. In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about himself that was new to him. "We are the sworn enemies of society," he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. "No, we are not anarchists but socialists." When the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-shot eyes. He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon. The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around and nosed out Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham's Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front. That gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered to him and who would go to jail yet. Hermann Von Schmidt, Marian's husband, had likewise been interviewed. He had called Martin the black sheep of the family and repudiated him. "He tried to sponge off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt had said to the reporter. "He knows better than to come bumming around here. A man who won't work is no good, take that from me." This time Martin was genuinely angry. Brissenden looked upon the affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth. As for her father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement. How much he would make of it he was soon to realize. The afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth. Martin opened it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when he had received it from the postman. As he read, mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old cigarette days. He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a cigarette. It was not a passionate letter. There were no touches of anger in it. But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment. She had expected better of him. She had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live seriously and decently. And now her father and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement be broken. That they were justified in this she could not but admit. Their relation could never be a happy one. It had been unfortunate from the first. But one regret she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin. "If only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make something of yourself," she wrote. "But it was not to be. Your past life had been too wild and irregular. I can understand that you are not to be blamed. You could act only according to your nature and your early training. So I do not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It was simply a mistake. As father and mother have contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be happy because it was discovered not too late." . . "There is no use trying to see me," she said toward the last. "It would be an unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother. I feel, as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry. I shall have to do much living to atone for it." He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down and replied. He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth. Toward the end of the letter he was God's own lover pleading passionately for love. "Please answer," he said, "and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing. Do you love me? That is all--the answer to that one question." But no answer came the next day, nor the next. "Overdue" lay untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under the table grew larger. For the first time Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights. Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell. Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and, though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his troubles. For Martin's troubles were many. The aftermath of the cub reporter's deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated. The Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him--carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin's account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it. The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against Martin ran high. No one would have anything to do with a socialist traitor. Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained loyal. The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe distances they called him "hobo" and "bum." The Silva tribe, however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day and added to Maria's perplexities and troubles. Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned what he knew could not be otherwise--that Bernard Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house. "Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged. "Go away and get a job somewhere and steady down. Afterwards, when this all blows over, you can come back." Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations. How could he explain? He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,--the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped. He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the pawnbroker. "Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him. "After a few months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job of drivin' delivery-wagon for him. Any time you want me, just send for me an' I'll come. Don't forget." She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait. As he watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter. The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family. And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely at the paradox. A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along--ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister really was. The true noble men were above pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been generated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings. CHAPTER XL "Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera." His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people were once more worrying about the rent. But such things no longer bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was found his life must stand still. After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met Ruth on the street. It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted to wave him aside. "If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman threatened. "She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence is insult." "If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll get your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly. "And now, get out of my way and get the officer if you want to. I'm going to talk with Ruth." "I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her. She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly. "The question I asked in my letter," he prompted. Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift look. She shook her head. "Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded. "It is." She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation. "It is of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you again." "Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved me." A blush drove the pallor from her face. "After what has passed?" she said faintly. "Martin, you do not know what you are saying. I am not common." "You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman blurted out, starting on with her. Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there. It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it. He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an awakened somnambulist. He noticed "Overdue" lying on the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen. There was in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness. Here was something undone. It had been deferred against the completion of something else. Now that something else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until it was finished. What he would do next he did not know. All that he did know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion. He was not curious about the future. He would soon enough find out what it held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter. Nothing seemed to matter. For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing nobody, and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of The Parthenon. A glance told him that "Ephemera" was accepted. "We have submitted the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it for the August number, our July number being already made up. Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by return mail his photograph and biographical data. If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price." Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then, too, there was Brissenden's consent to be gained.

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How many times the word 'as' appears in the text?

you, Walter. Get out of here before I throw my desk at you. NEFF I love you, too. He walks out, still grinning. A-35 EXT. OFFICES - TWELFTH FLOOR Neff comes out of Keys' office and walks back along the balcony. Activity of secretaries going in and out of doors, etc. Neff enters his own office. NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) I really did, too, you old crab, always yelling your fat head off, always sore at everyone. But behind the cigar ashes on your vest I kind of knew you had a heart as big as a house... Back in my office there was a phone message from Mrs. Dietrichson about the renewals. She didn't want me to come tomorrow evening. She wanted me to come Thursday afternoon at three-thirty instead. I had a lot of stuff lined up for that Thursday afternoon, including a trip down to Santa Monica to see a couple of live prospects about some group insurance. But I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson and the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg. A-36 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE Anderson, a salesman, sits at one of the desks, filling out a report. Neff enters, goes to his own desk. He looks down at some mail. On top there is a typewritten note. He reads it, sits down and leafs through his desk calendar. A-37 INSERT - CLOSEUP - CALENDAR PAGE Showing date: THURSDAY 23 May and five or six appointments penciled in tightly on the page. DISSOLVE TO: A-38 DIETRICHSON HOME - ENTRANCE HALL - (DAY) THE CAMERA PANS with Phyllis Dietrichson's feet and ankles as she comes down the stairs, her high heels clicking on the tiles. The anklet glistens on her leg as she moves. THE CAMERA PANS ON. Phyllis has reached the entrance hall, and as she walks toward the front door her whole body becomes visible. She wears a gay print dress with a wide sash over her hips. She opens the door. Outside is Neff, wearing a sport coat, flannel slacks. He takes his hat off. PHYLLIS Hello, Mr. Neff. He stands there with a little smile. PHYLLIS Aren't you coming in? NEFF I'm considering it. He comes in. PHYLLIS I hope you didn't mind my changing the appointment. Last night wasn't so convenient. NEFF That's okay. I was working on my stamp collection. She leads him toward living room. A-39 DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff come through archway. She heads toward a low tea table which stands in front of the davenport, with tall glasses, ice cubes, lemon, a pot of tea, etc. PHYLLIS I was just fixing some iced tea. Would you like a glass? NEFF Unless you have a bottle of beer that's not working. PHYLLIS There might be some. I never know what's in the ice box. (Calls) Nettie!... She pours herself a glass of tea. PHYLLIS About those renewals, Mr. Neff. I talked to my husband about it. NEFF You did? PHYLLIS Yes. He'll renew with you he told me. In fact, I thought he'd be here this afternoon. NEFF But he's not? PHYLLIS No. NEFF That's terrible. PHYLLIS (Calls again, impatiently) Nettie!... Nettie!... Oh, I forgot, it's the maid's day off. NEFF Don't bother, Mrs. Dietrichson. I'd like some iced tea very much. PHYLLIS Lemon? Sugar? NEFF Fix it your way. She fixes him a glass of tea while he is looking around. He slowly sits down. NEFF Seeing it's the maid's day off maybe there's something I can do for you. She hands him the tea. NEFF Like running the vacuum cleaner. PHYLLIS Fresh. NEFF I used to peddle vacuum cleaners. Not much money but you learn a lot about life. PHYLLIS I didn't think you'd learned it from a correspondence course. NEFF Where did you pick up this tea drinking? You're not English, are you? PHYLLIS No. Californian. Born right here in Los Angeles. NEFF They say native Californians all come from Iowa. PHYLLIS I wanted to ask you something, Mr. Neff. NEFF Make it Walter. PHYLLIS Walter. NEFF Right. PHYLLIS Tell me, Walter, on this insurance -- how much commission do you make? NEFF Twenty percent. Why? PHYLLIS I thought maybe I could throw a little more business your way. NEFF I can always use it. PHYLLIS I was thinking about my husband. I worry a lot about him, down in those oil fields. It's very dangerous. NEFF Not for an executive, is it? PHYLLIS He doesn't just sit behind a desk. He's right down there with the drilling crews. It's got me worried sick. NEFF You mean a crown block might fall on him some rainy night? PHYLLIS Please don't talk like that. NEFF But that's the idea. PHYLLIS The other day a casing line snapped and caught the foreman. He's in the hospital with a broken back. NEFF Bad. PHYLLIS It's got me jittery just thinking about it. Suppose something like that happened to my husband? NEFF It could. PHYLLIS Don't you think he ought to have accident insurance? NEFF Uh huh. PHYLLIS What kind of insurance could he have? NEFF Enough to cover doctors' and hospital bills. Say a hundred and twenty-five a week cash benefit. And he'd rate around fifty thousand capital sum. PHYLLIS Capital sum? What's that? NEFF That's if he got killed. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. PHYLLIS I suppose you have to think of everything in your business. NEFF Mr. Dietrichson would understand. I'm sure I could sell him on the idea of some accident protection. Why don't I talk to him about it. PHYLLIS You could try. But he's pretty tough going. NEFF They're all tough at first. PHYLLIS He's got a lot on his mind. He doesn't want to listen to anything except maybe a baseball game on the radio. Sometimes we sit all evening without saying a word to each other. NEFF Sounds pretty dull. Phyllis shrugs. PHYLLIS So I just sit and knit. NEFF Is that what you married him for? PHYLLIS Maybe I like the way his thumbs hold up the wool. NEFF Anytime his thumbs get tired -- PHYLLIS I want to ask you something, Mr. Neff. Could I get an accident policy for him -- without bothering him at all? NEFF How's that again. PHYLLIS That would make it easier for you, too. You wouldn't even have to talk to him. I have a little allowance of my own. I could pay for it and he needn't know anything about it. NEFF Wait a minute. Why shouldn't he know? PHYLLIS Because I know he doesn't want accident insurance. He's superstitious about it. NEFF A lot of people are. Funny, isn't it? PHYLLIS If there was a way to get it like that, all the worry would be over. You see what I mean, Walter? NEFF Sure. I've got good eyesight. You want him to have the policy without him knowing it. And that means without the insurance company knowing that he doesn't know. That's the set-up, isn't it? PHYLLIS Is there anything wrong with it? NEFF I think it's lovely. And then, some dark wet night, if that crown block fell on him -- PHYLLIS What crown block? NEFF Only sometimes they have to have a little help. They can't quite make it on their own. PHYLLIS I don't know what you're talking about. NEFF Of course, it doesn't have to be a crown block. It can be a car backing over him, or he can fall out of an upstairs window. Any little thing like that, as long as it's a morgue job. PHYLLIS Are you crazy? NEFF Not that crazy. Goodbye, Mrs. Dietrichson. He picks up his hat. PHYLLIS What's the matter? NEFF Look, baby, you can't get away with it. PHYLLIS Get away with what? NEFF You want to knock him off, don't you, baby. PHYLLIS That's a horrible thing to say! NEFF Who'd you think I was, anyway? A guy that walks into a good-looking dame's front parlor and says "Good afternoon, I sell accident insurance on husbands. You got one that's been around too long? Somebody you'd like to turn into a little hard cash? Just give me a smile and I'll help you collect." Boy, what a dope I must look to you! PHYLLIS I think you're rotten. NEFF I think you're swell. So long as I'm not your husband. PHYLLIS Get out of here. NEFF You bet I will. You bet I'll get out of here, baby. But quick. He goes out. She looks after him. A-40 EXT. DIETRICHSON HOME - (DAY) Neff bangs the front door shut, walks quickly to his car and drives away. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) So I let her have it, straight between the eyes. She didn't fool me for a minute, not this time. I knew I had hold of a redhot poker and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off. I stopped at a drive-in for a bottle of beer, the one I had wanted all along, only I wanted it worse now, to get rid of the sour taste of her iced tea, and everything that went with it. I didn't want to go back to the office, so I dropped by a bowling alley at Third and Western and rolled a few lines to get my mind thinking about something else for a while. A-41 DRIVE-IN RESTAURANT - (DAY) Shooting past Neff sitting behind the wheel of his car The car hop hangs a tray on the door and serves him a bottle of beer. DISSOLVE TO: A-42 INT. BOWLING ALLEY Neff bowling. He rolls the ball with an effort at concentration, but his mind is not really on the game. DISSOLVE TO: A-43 EXT. APARTMENT HOUSE - (DUSK) It is late afternoon. The apartment house is called the LOS OLIVOS APARTMENTS. It is a six-story building in the Normandie- Wilshire district, with a basement garage. THE CAMERA PANS UP the front of the building to the top floor windows, as a little rain starts to fall. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) I didn't feel like eating dinner when I left, and I didn't feel like a show, so I drove home, put the car away and went up to my apartment. A-44 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT - LIVING ROOM - (DUSK) It is a double apartment of conventional design, with kitchen, dinette, and bathroom, squarecut overstuffed borax furniture. Gas logs are lit in the imitation fireplace. Neff stands by the window with his coat off and his tie loose. Raindrops strike against the glass. He turns away impatiently, paces up and down past a caddy bag with golf clubs in it, pulls one out at random, makes a couple of short swings, throws the club on the couch, paces again. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) It had begun to rain outside and I watched it get dark and didn't even turn on the light. That didn't help me either. I was all twisted up inside, and I was still holding on to that red-hot poker. And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all, that the hook was too strong, that this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning. The doorbell rings. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) So at eight o'clock the bell would ring and I would know who it was without even having to think, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Neff goes to the door and opens it. PHYLLIS Hello. Neff just looks at her. PHYLLIS You forgot your hat this afternoon. She has nothing in her hands but her bag. NEFF Did I? He looks down at her hands. PHYLLIS Don't you want me to bring it in? NEFF Sure. Put it on the chair. She comes in. He closes the door. NEFF How did you know where I live? PHYLLIS It's in the phone book. Neff switches on the standing lamp. PHYLLIS It's raining. NEFF So it is. Peel off your coat and sit down. She starts to take off her coat. NEFF Your husband out? PHYLLIS Long Beach. They're spudding in a new well. He phoned he'd be late. About nine-thirty. He takes her coat and lays it across the back of a chair. PHYLLIS It's about time you said you're glad to see me. NEFF I knew you wouldn't leave it like that. PHYLLIS Like what? NEFF Like it was this afternoon. PHYLLIS I must have said something that gave you a terribly wrong impression. You must surely see that. You must never think anything like that about me, Walter. NEFF Okay. PHYLLIS It's not okay. Not if you don't believe me. NEFF What do you want me to do? PHYLLIS I want you to be nice to me. Like the first time you came to the house. NEFF It can't be like the first time. Something has happened. PHYLLIS I know it has. It's happened to us. NEFF That's what I mean. Phyllis has moved over to the window. She stares out through the wet window-pane. NEFF What's the matter now? PHYLLIS I feel as if he was watching me. Not that he cares about me. Not any more. But he keeps me on a leash. So tight I can't breathe. I'm scared. NEFF What of? He's in Long Beach, isn't he? PHYLLIS I oughtn't to have come. NEFF Maybe you oughtn't. PHYLLIS You want me to go? NEFF If you want to. PHYLLIS Right now? NEFF Sure. Right now. By this time, he has hold of her wrist. He draws her to him slowly and kisses her. Her arms tighten around him. After a moment he pulls his head back, still holding her close. NEFF How were you going to do it? PHYLLIS Do what? NEFF Kill him. PHYLLIS Walter, for the last time -- She tries to jerk away but he holds her and kisses her again. NEFF I'm crazy about you, baby. PHYLLIS I'm crazy about you, Walter. NEFF That perfume on your hair. What's the name of it? PHYLLIS Something French. I bought it down at Ensenada. NEFF We ought to have some of that pink wine to go with it. The kind that bubbles. But all I have is bourbon. PHYLLIS Bourbon is fine, Walter. He lets her go and moves toward the dinette. A-45 THE DINETTE AND KITCHEN It contains a small table and some chairs. A low glass-and- china cabinet is built between the dinette and kitchen, leaving a space like a doorway. The kitchen is the usual apartment house kitchen, with stove, ice-box, sink, etc. It is quite small. Neff goes to the ice-box and Phyllis drifts in after him. NEFF Soda? PHYLLIS Plain water, please. NEFF Get a couple of glasses, will you. He points at the china closet. He has taken a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator and is holding it under the hot- water faucet. NEFF You know, about six months ago a guy slipped on the soap in his bathtub and knocked himself cold and drowned. Only he had accident insurance. So they had an autopsy and she didn't get away with it. Phyllis has the glasses now. She hands them to him. He dumps some ice cubes into the glasses. PHYLLIS Who didn't? NEFF His wife. He reaches for the whiskey bottle on top of the china closet. NEFF And there was another case where a guy was found shot and his wife said he was cleaning a gun and his stomach got in the way. All she collected was a three-to-ten stretch in Tehachapi. PHYLLIS Perhaps it was worth it to her. Neff hands her a glass. NEFF See if you can carry this as far as the living room. They move back toward the living room. A-46 LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff go toward the davenport. She is sipping her drink and looking around. PHYLLIS It's nice here, Walter. Who takes care of it for you? NEFF A colored woman comes in twice a week. PHYLLIS You get your own breakfast? NEFF Once in a while I squeeze a grapefruit. The rest I get at the corner drugstore. They sit on the davenport, fairly close together. PHYLLIS It sounds wonderful. Just strangers beside you. You don't know them. You don't hate them. You don't have to sit across the table and smile at him and that daughter of his every morning of your life. NEFF What daughter? Oh, that little girl on the piano. PHYLLIS Yes. Lola. She lives with us. He thinks a lot more of her than he does of me. NEFF Ever think of a divorce? PHYLLIS He wouldn't give me a divorce. NEFF I suppose because it would cost him money. PHYLLIS He hasn't got any money. Not since he went into the oil business. NEFF But he had when you married him? PHYLLIS Yes, he had. And I wanted a home. Why not? But that wasn't the only reason. I was his wife's nurse. She was sick for a long time. When she died, he was all broken up. I pitied him so. NEFF And now you hate him. PHYLLIS Yes, Walter. He's so mean to me. Every-time I buy a dress or a pair of shoes he yells his head off. He won't let me go anywhere. He keeps me shut up. He's always been mean to me. Even his life insurance all goes to that daughter of his. That Lola. NEFF Nothing for you at all, huh? PHYLLIS No. And nothing is just what I'm worth to him. NEFF So you lie awake in the dark and listen to him snore and get ideas. PHYLLIS Walter, I don't want to kill him. I never did. Not even when he gets drunk and slaps my face. NEFF Only sometimes you wish he was dead. PHYLLIS Perhaps I do. NEFF And you wish it was an accident, and you had that policy. For fifty thousand dollars. Is that it? PHYLLIS Perhaps that too. She takes a long drink. PHYLLIS The other night we drove home from a party. He was drunk again. When we got into the garage he just sat there with his head on the steering wheel and the motor still running. And I thought what it would be like if I didn't switch it off, just closed the garage door and left him there. NEFF I'll tell you what it would be like, if you had that accident policy, and tried to pull a monoxide job. We have a guy in our office named Keyes. For him a set-up like that would be just like a slice of rare roast beef. In three minutes he'd know it wasn't an accident. In ten minutes you'd be sitting under the hot lights. In half an hour you'd be signing your name to a confession. PHYLLIS But Walter, I didn't do it. I'm not going to do it. NEFF Not if there's an insurance company in the picture, baby. So long as you're honest they'll pay you with a smile, but you just try to pull something like that and you'll find out. They know more tricks than a carload of monkeys. And if there's a death mixed up in it, you haven't got a prayer. They'll hang you as sure as ten dimes will buy a dollar, baby. She begins to cry. He puts his arms around her and kisses her. NEFF Just stop thinking about it, will you. He holds her tight. Their heads touch, side by side, THE CAMERA SLOWLY STARTS TO RECEDE as we DISSOLVE TO: A-47 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits in the swivel chair, talking into the dictaphone. He has hooked the wastebasket under his feet to sit more comfortably. As he talks, a little cough shakes him now and then. NEFF So we just sat there, and she kept on crying softly, like the rain on the window, and we didn't say anything. Maybe she had stopped thinking about it, but I hadn't. I couldn't. Because it all tied up with something I had been thinking about for years, since long before I ever ran into Phyllis Dietrichson. Because, in this business you can't sleep for trying to figure out the tricks they could pull on you. You're like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don't crook the house. And then one night, you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself. And do it smart. Because you've got that wheel right under your hands. And you know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out in front, a shill to put down the bet. And suddenly the doorbell rings and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you... Look, Keyes, I'm not trying to whitewash myself. I fought it, only maybe I didn't fight it hard enough. The stakes were fifty thousand dollars, but they were the life of a man, too, a man who'd never done me any dirt. Except he was married to a woman he didn't care anything about, and I did... DISSOLVE TO: A-48 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT LIVING ROOM CAMERA MOVES SLOWLY towards the davenport again. Neff sits in one corner with his feet on the low table. He is smoking his cigarette and staring at the ceiling. Phyllis has been sitting fairly close to him. She gets up slowly and crosses to her rain coat, lying over a chair. PHYLLIS I've got to go now, Walter. Neff does not answer. He keeps on staring at the ceiling. She starts to put the rain coat on. PHYLLIS Will you call me, Walter? Neff still does not answer. PHYLLIS Walter! He looks at her slowly, almost absently. PHYLLIS I hate him. I loathe going back to him. You believe me, don't you, Walter? NEFF Sure I believe you. PHYLLIS I can't stand it anymore. What if they did hang me? NEFF You're not going to hang, baby. PHYLLIS It's better than going on this way. NEFF -- you're not going to hang, baby. Not ever. Because you're going to do it the smart way. Because I'm going to help you. PHYLLIS You! NEFF Me. PHYLLIS Do you know what you're saying? NEFF Sure I know what I'm saying. He gets up and grips her arm. NEFF We're going to do it together. We're going to do it right. And I'm the guy that knows how. There is fierce determination in his voice. His fingers dig into her arm. PHYLLIS Walter, you're hurting me. NEFF There isn't going to be any slip up. Nothing sloppy. Nothing weak. It's got to be perfect. He kisses her. NEFF You go now. He leads her towards the door. NEFF Call me tomorrow. But not from your house. From a booth. And watch your step. Every single minute. It's got to be perfect, understand. Straight down the line. They have now reached the door. Neff opens it. Phyllis stands in the doorway, her lips white. PHYLLIS Straight down the line. She goes quietly. He watches her down the corridor. Slowly he closes the door and goes back into the room. He moves across the window and opens it wide. He stands there, looking down into the dark street. From below comes the sound of a car starting and driving off. The rain drifts in against his face. He just stands there motionless. His mind is going a hundred miles a minute. FADE OUT: END OF SEQUENCE "A" SEQUENCE "B" FADE IN: B-1 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits slumped in his chair before the dictaphone. On the desk next to him stands a used record. The cylinder on the dictaphone is not turning. He is smoking a cigarette. He kills it then lifts the needle and slides off the record which is on the machine and stands it on end on the desk beside the other used record. He reaches down painfully to take another record from the rack beneath the dictaphone, looks at it against the light to make sure it has not been used, then slides it into place on the machine and resets the needle. He lifts the horn and resumes his dictation. NEFF The first thing we had to do was fix him up with that accident policy. I knew he wouldn't buy, but all I wanted was his signature on an application. So I had to make him sign without his knowing what he was signing. And I wanted a witness other than Phyllis to hear me give him a sales talk. I was trying to think with your brains, Keyes. I wanted all the answers ready for all the questions you were going to spring as soon as Dietrichson was dead. Neff takes a last drag on his cigarette and kills it by running it under the ledge of the dictaphone stand. He drops the stub on the floor and resumes. NEFF A couple of nights later I went to the house. Everything looked fine, except I didn't like the witness Phyllis had brought in. It was Dietrichson's daughter Lola, and it made me feel a little queer in the belly to have her right there in the room, playing Chinese checkers, as if nothing was going to happen. DISSOLVE: B-2 A BOARD OF CHINESE CHECKERS CAMERA WITHDRAWS AND GRADUALLY REVEALS THE DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM - NIGHT The checker-board is on the davenport between Phyllis and Lola. Mr. Dietrichson sits in a big easy chair. His coat and tie are over the back of the chair, and the evening paper is lying tumbled on the floor beside him. He is smoking a cigar with the band on it. He has a drink in front of him and several more inside him. In another chair sits Neff, his briefcase on the floor, leaning against his chair. He holds his rate book partly open, with a finger in it for a marker. He is going full swing. NEFF I suppose you realize, Mr. Dietrichson, that, not being an employee, you are not covered by the State Compensation Insurance Act. The only way you can protect yourself is by having a personal policy of your own. DIETRICHSON I know all about that. The next thing you'll tell me I need earthquake insurance and lightning insurance and hail insurance. Phyllis looks up from the checker-board and cuts in on the dialogue. Lola listens without much interest. PHYLLIS (To Dietrichson) If we bought all the insurance they can think up, we'd stay broke paying for it, wouldn't we, honey? DIETRICHSON What keeps us broke is you going out and buying five hats at a crack. Who needs a hat in California? NEFF I always say insurance is a lot like a hot water bottle. It looks kind of useless and silly hanging on the hook, but when you get that stomach ache in the middle of the night, it comes in mighty handy. DIETRICHSON Now you want to sell me a hot water bottle. NEFF Dollar for dollar, accident insurance is the cheapest coverage you can buy, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Maybe some other time, Mr. Neff. I had a tough day. NEFF Just as you say, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Suppose we just settle that automobile insurance tonight. NEFF Sure. All we need on that is for you to sign an application for renewal. Phyllis throws a quick glance at Neff. As she looks back she sees that Lola is staring down at her wrist watch. LOLA Phyllis, do you mind if we don't finish this game? It bores me stiff. PHYLLIS Got some thing better to do? LOLA Yes, I have. She gets up. LOLA (To Dietrichson) Father, is it all right if I run along now? DIETRICHSON Run along where? Who with? LOLA Just Anne. We're going roller skating. DIETRICHSON Anne who? LOLA Anne Matthews. PHYLLIS It's not that Nino Zachetti again? DIETRICHSON It better not be that Zachetti guy. If I ever catch you with that --- LOLA It's Anne Matthews, I told you. I also told you we're going roller skating. I'm meeting her at the corner of Vermont and Franklin -- the north- west corner, in case you're interested. And I'm late already. I hope that is all clear. Good night, Father. Good night, Phyllis. She starts to go. NEFF Good night, Miss Dietrichson. LOLA Oh, I'm sorry. Good night, Mr. -- NEFF Neff. LOLA Good night, Mr. Neff. PHYLLIS Now you're not going to take my car again. LOLA No thanks. I'd rather be dead. She goes out through the archway. DIETRICHSON A great little fighter for her weight. Dietrichson sucks down a big swallow of his drink. Neff has taken two blank forms from his briefcase. He puts the briefcase on Mr. Dietrichson's lap and lays the forms on top. Phyllis is watching closely. NEFF This is where you sign, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Sign what? NEFF The applications for your auto renewals. So you'll be protected until the new policies are issued. DIETRICHSON When will that be? NEFF In about a week. DIETRICHSON Just so I'm covered when I drive up North. Neff takes out his fountain pen. NEFF San Francisco, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Palo Alto. PHYLLIS He was a Stanford man, Mr. Neff. And he still goes to his class reunion every year. DIETRICHSON What's wrong with that? Can't I have a little fun even once a year? NEFF Great football school, Stanford. Did you play football, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Left guard. Almost made the varsity, too. Neff has unscrewed his fountain pen. He hands it to Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson puts on his glasses. NEFF On that bottom line, Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson signs. Neff's and Phyllis' eyes meet for a split second. NEFF

thursday

How many times the word 'thursday' appears in the text?

you, Walter. Get out of here before I throw my desk at you. NEFF I love you, too. He walks out, still grinning. A-35 EXT. OFFICES - TWELFTH FLOOR Neff comes out of Keys' office and walks back along the balcony. Activity of secretaries going in and out of doors, etc. Neff enters his own office. NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) I really did, too, you old crab, always yelling your fat head off, always sore at everyone. But behind the cigar ashes on your vest I kind of knew you had a heart as big as a house... Back in my office there was a phone message from Mrs. Dietrichson about the renewals. She didn't want me to come tomorrow evening. She wanted me to come Thursday afternoon at three-thirty instead. I had a lot of stuff lined up for that Thursday afternoon, including a trip down to Santa Monica to see a couple of live prospects about some group insurance. But I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson and the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg. A-36 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE Anderson, a salesman, sits at one of the desks, filling out a report. Neff enters, goes to his own desk. He looks down at some mail. On top there is a typewritten note. He reads it, sits down and leafs through his desk calendar. A-37 INSERT - CLOSEUP - CALENDAR PAGE Showing date: THURSDAY 23 May and five or six appointments penciled in tightly on the page. DISSOLVE TO: A-38 DIETRICHSON HOME - ENTRANCE HALL - (DAY) THE CAMERA PANS with Phyllis Dietrichson's feet and ankles as she comes down the stairs, her high heels clicking on the tiles. The anklet glistens on her leg as she moves. THE CAMERA PANS ON. Phyllis has reached the entrance hall, and as she walks toward the front door her whole body becomes visible. She wears a gay print dress with a wide sash over her hips. She opens the door. Outside is Neff, wearing a sport coat, flannel slacks. He takes his hat off. PHYLLIS Hello, Mr. Neff. He stands there with a little smile. PHYLLIS Aren't you coming in? NEFF I'm considering it. He comes in. PHYLLIS I hope you didn't mind my changing the appointment. Last night wasn't so convenient. NEFF That's okay. I was working on my stamp collection. She leads him toward living room. A-39 DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff come through archway. She heads toward a low tea table which stands in front of the davenport, with tall glasses, ice cubes, lemon, a pot of tea, etc. PHYLLIS I was just fixing some iced tea. Would you like a glass? NEFF Unless you have a bottle of beer that's not working. PHYLLIS There might be some. I never know what's in the ice box. (Calls) Nettie!... She pours herself a glass of tea. PHYLLIS About those renewals, Mr. Neff. I talked to my husband about it. NEFF You did? PHYLLIS Yes. He'll renew with you he told me. In fact, I thought he'd be here this afternoon. NEFF But he's not? PHYLLIS No. NEFF That's terrible. PHYLLIS (Calls again, impatiently) Nettie!... Nettie!... Oh, I forgot, it's the maid's day off. NEFF Don't bother, Mrs. Dietrichson. I'd like some iced tea very much. PHYLLIS Lemon? Sugar? NEFF Fix it your way. She fixes him a glass of tea while he is looking around. He slowly sits down. NEFF Seeing it's the maid's day off maybe there's something I can do for you. She hands him the tea. NEFF Like running the vacuum cleaner. PHYLLIS Fresh. NEFF I used to peddle vacuum cleaners. Not much money but you learn a lot about life. PHYLLIS I didn't think you'd learned it from a correspondence course. NEFF Where did you pick up this tea drinking? You're not English, are you? PHYLLIS No. Californian. Born right here in Los Angeles. NEFF They say native Californians all come from Iowa. PHYLLIS I wanted to ask you something, Mr. Neff. NEFF Make it Walter. PHYLLIS Walter. NEFF Right. PHYLLIS Tell me, Walter, on this insurance -- how much commission do you make? NEFF Twenty percent. Why? PHYLLIS I thought maybe I could throw a little more business your way. NEFF I can always use it. PHYLLIS I was thinking about my husband. I worry a lot about him, down in those oil fields. It's very dangerous. NEFF Not for an executive, is it? PHYLLIS He doesn't just sit behind a desk. He's right down there with the drilling crews. It's got me worried sick. NEFF You mean a crown block might fall on him some rainy night? PHYLLIS Please don't talk like that. NEFF But that's the idea. PHYLLIS The other day a casing line snapped and caught the foreman. He's in the hospital with a broken back. NEFF Bad. PHYLLIS It's got me jittery just thinking about it. Suppose something like that happened to my husband? NEFF It could. PHYLLIS Don't you think he ought to have accident insurance? NEFF Uh huh. PHYLLIS What kind of insurance could he have? NEFF Enough to cover doctors' and hospital bills. Say a hundred and twenty-five a week cash benefit. And he'd rate around fifty thousand capital sum. PHYLLIS Capital sum? What's that? NEFF That's if he got killed. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. PHYLLIS I suppose you have to think of everything in your business. NEFF Mr. Dietrichson would understand. I'm sure I could sell him on the idea of some accident protection. Why don't I talk to him about it. PHYLLIS You could try. But he's pretty tough going. NEFF They're all tough at first. PHYLLIS He's got a lot on his mind. He doesn't want to listen to anything except maybe a baseball game on the radio. Sometimes we sit all evening without saying a word to each other. NEFF Sounds pretty dull. Phyllis shrugs. PHYLLIS So I just sit and knit. NEFF Is that what you married him for? PHYLLIS Maybe I like the way his thumbs hold up the wool. NEFF Anytime his thumbs get tired -- PHYLLIS I want to ask you something, Mr. Neff. Could I get an accident policy for him -- without bothering him at all? NEFF How's that again. PHYLLIS That would make it easier for you, too. You wouldn't even have to talk to him. I have a little allowance of my own. I could pay for it and he needn't know anything about it. NEFF Wait a minute. Why shouldn't he know? PHYLLIS Because I know he doesn't want accident insurance. He's superstitious about it. NEFF A lot of people are. Funny, isn't it? PHYLLIS If there was a way to get it like that, all the worry would be over. You see what I mean, Walter? NEFF Sure. I've got good eyesight. You want him to have the policy without him knowing it. And that means without the insurance company knowing that he doesn't know. That's the set-up, isn't it? PHYLLIS Is there anything wrong with it? NEFF I think it's lovely. And then, some dark wet night, if that crown block fell on him -- PHYLLIS What crown block? NEFF Only sometimes they have to have a little help. They can't quite make it on their own. PHYLLIS I don't know what you're talking about. NEFF Of course, it doesn't have to be a crown block. It can be a car backing over him, or he can fall out of an upstairs window. Any little thing like that, as long as it's a morgue job. PHYLLIS Are you crazy? NEFF Not that crazy. Goodbye, Mrs. Dietrichson. He picks up his hat. PHYLLIS What's the matter? NEFF Look, baby, you can't get away with it. PHYLLIS Get away with what? NEFF You want to knock him off, don't you, baby. PHYLLIS That's a horrible thing to say! NEFF Who'd you think I was, anyway? A guy that walks into a good-looking dame's front parlor and says "Good afternoon, I sell accident insurance on husbands. You got one that's been around too long? Somebody you'd like to turn into a little hard cash? Just give me a smile and I'll help you collect." Boy, what a dope I must look to you! PHYLLIS I think you're rotten. NEFF I think you're swell. So long as I'm not your husband. PHYLLIS Get out of here. NEFF You bet I will. You bet I'll get out of here, baby. But quick. He goes out. She looks after him. A-40 EXT. DIETRICHSON HOME - (DAY) Neff bangs the front door shut, walks quickly to his car and drives away. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) So I let her have it, straight between the eyes. She didn't fool me for a minute, not this time. I knew I had hold of a redhot poker and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off. I stopped at a drive-in for a bottle of beer, the one I had wanted all along, only I wanted it worse now, to get rid of the sour taste of her iced tea, and everything that went with it. I didn't want to go back to the office, so I dropped by a bowling alley at Third and Western and rolled a few lines to get my mind thinking about something else for a while. A-41 DRIVE-IN RESTAURANT - (DAY) Shooting past Neff sitting behind the wheel of his car The car hop hangs a tray on the door and serves him a bottle of beer. DISSOLVE TO: A-42 INT. BOWLING ALLEY Neff bowling. He rolls the ball with an effort at concentration, but his mind is not really on the game. DISSOLVE TO: A-43 EXT. APARTMENT HOUSE - (DUSK) It is late afternoon. The apartment house is called the LOS OLIVOS APARTMENTS. It is a six-story building in the Normandie- Wilshire district, with a basement garage. THE CAMERA PANS UP the front of the building to the top floor windows, as a little rain starts to fall. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) I didn't feel like eating dinner when I left, and I didn't feel like a show, so I drove home, put the car away and went up to my apartment. A-44 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT - LIVING ROOM - (DUSK) It is a double apartment of conventional design, with kitchen, dinette, and bathroom, squarecut overstuffed borax furniture. Gas logs are lit in the imitation fireplace. Neff stands by the window with his coat off and his tie loose. Raindrops strike against the glass. He turns away impatiently, paces up and down past a caddy bag with golf clubs in it, pulls one out at random, makes a couple of short swings, throws the club on the couch, paces again. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) It had begun to rain outside and I watched it get dark and didn't even turn on the light. That didn't help me either. I was all twisted up inside, and I was still holding on to that red-hot poker. And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all, that the hook was too strong, that this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning. The doorbell rings. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) So at eight o'clock the bell would ring and I would know who it was without even having to think, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Neff goes to the door and opens it. PHYLLIS Hello. Neff just looks at her. PHYLLIS You forgot your hat this afternoon. She has nothing in her hands but her bag. NEFF Did I? He looks down at her hands. PHYLLIS Don't you want me to bring it in? NEFF Sure. Put it on the chair. She comes in. He closes the door. NEFF How did you know where I live? PHYLLIS It's in the phone book. Neff switches on the standing lamp. PHYLLIS It's raining. NEFF So it is. Peel off your coat and sit down. She starts to take off her coat. NEFF Your husband out? PHYLLIS Long Beach. They're spudding in a new well. He phoned he'd be late. About nine-thirty. He takes her coat and lays it across the back of a chair. PHYLLIS It's about time you said you're glad to see me. NEFF I knew you wouldn't leave it like that. PHYLLIS Like what? NEFF Like it was this afternoon. PHYLLIS I must have said something that gave you a terribly wrong impression. You must surely see that. You must never think anything like that about me, Walter. NEFF Okay. PHYLLIS It's not okay. Not if you don't believe me. NEFF What do you want me to do? PHYLLIS I want you to be nice to me. Like the first time you came to the house. NEFF It can't be like the first time. Something has happened. PHYLLIS I know it has. It's happened to us. NEFF That's what I mean. Phyllis has moved over to the window. She stares out through the wet window-pane. NEFF What's the matter now? PHYLLIS I feel as if he was watching me. Not that he cares about me. Not any more. But he keeps me on a leash. So tight I can't breathe. I'm scared. NEFF What of? He's in Long Beach, isn't he? PHYLLIS I oughtn't to have come. NEFF Maybe you oughtn't. PHYLLIS You want me to go? NEFF If you want to. PHYLLIS Right now? NEFF Sure. Right now. By this time, he has hold of her wrist. He draws her to him slowly and kisses her. Her arms tighten around him. After a moment he pulls his head back, still holding her close. NEFF How were you going to do it? PHYLLIS Do what? NEFF Kill him. PHYLLIS Walter, for the last time -- She tries to jerk away but he holds her and kisses her again. NEFF I'm crazy about you, baby. PHYLLIS I'm crazy about you, Walter. NEFF That perfume on your hair. What's the name of it? PHYLLIS Something French. I bought it down at Ensenada. NEFF We ought to have some of that pink wine to go with it. The kind that bubbles. But all I have is bourbon. PHYLLIS Bourbon is fine, Walter. He lets her go and moves toward the dinette. A-45 THE DINETTE AND KITCHEN It contains a small table and some chairs. A low glass-and- china cabinet is built between the dinette and kitchen, leaving a space like a doorway. The kitchen is the usual apartment house kitchen, with stove, ice-box, sink, etc. It is quite small. Neff goes to the ice-box and Phyllis drifts in after him. NEFF Soda? PHYLLIS Plain water, please. NEFF Get a couple of glasses, will you. He points at the china closet. He has taken a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator and is holding it under the hot- water faucet. NEFF You know, about six months ago a guy slipped on the soap in his bathtub and knocked himself cold and drowned. Only he had accident insurance. So they had an autopsy and she didn't get away with it. Phyllis has the glasses now. She hands them to him. He dumps some ice cubes into the glasses. PHYLLIS Who didn't? NEFF His wife. He reaches for the whiskey bottle on top of the china closet. NEFF And there was another case where a guy was found shot and his wife said he was cleaning a gun and his stomach got in the way. All she collected was a three-to-ten stretch in Tehachapi. PHYLLIS Perhaps it was worth it to her. Neff hands her a glass. NEFF See if you can carry this as far as the living room. They move back toward the living room. A-46 LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff go toward the davenport. She is sipping her drink and looking around. PHYLLIS It's nice here, Walter. Who takes care of it for you? NEFF A colored woman comes in twice a week. PHYLLIS You get your own breakfast? NEFF Once in a while I squeeze a grapefruit. The rest I get at the corner drugstore. They sit on the davenport, fairly close together. PHYLLIS It sounds wonderful. Just strangers beside you. You don't know them. You don't hate them. You don't have to sit across the table and smile at him and that daughter of his every morning of your life. NEFF What daughter? Oh, that little girl on the piano. PHYLLIS Yes. Lola. She lives with us. He thinks a lot more of her than he does of me. NEFF Ever think of a divorce? PHYLLIS He wouldn't give me a divorce. NEFF I suppose because it would cost him money. PHYLLIS He hasn't got any money. Not since he went into the oil business. NEFF But he had when you married him? PHYLLIS Yes, he had. And I wanted a home. Why not? But that wasn't the only reason. I was his wife's nurse. She was sick for a long time. When she died, he was all broken up. I pitied him so. NEFF And now you hate him. PHYLLIS Yes, Walter. He's so mean to me. Every-time I buy a dress or a pair of shoes he yells his head off. He won't let me go anywhere. He keeps me shut up. He's always been mean to me. Even his life insurance all goes to that daughter of his. That Lola. NEFF Nothing for you at all, huh? PHYLLIS No. And nothing is just what I'm worth to him. NEFF So you lie awake in the dark and listen to him snore and get ideas. PHYLLIS Walter, I don't want to kill him. I never did. Not even when he gets drunk and slaps my face. NEFF Only sometimes you wish he was dead. PHYLLIS Perhaps I do. NEFF And you wish it was an accident, and you had that policy. For fifty thousand dollars. Is that it? PHYLLIS Perhaps that too. She takes a long drink. PHYLLIS The other night we drove home from a party. He was drunk again. When we got into the garage he just sat there with his head on the steering wheel and the motor still running. And I thought what it would be like if I didn't switch it off, just closed the garage door and left him there. NEFF I'll tell you what it would be like, if you had that accident policy, and tried to pull a monoxide job. We have a guy in our office named Keyes. For him a set-up like that would be just like a slice of rare roast beef. In three minutes he'd know it wasn't an accident. In ten minutes you'd be sitting under the hot lights. In half an hour you'd be signing your name to a confession. PHYLLIS But Walter, I didn't do it. I'm not going to do it. NEFF Not if there's an insurance company in the picture, baby. So long as you're honest they'll pay you with a smile, but you just try to pull something like that and you'll find out. They know more tricks than a carload of monkeys. And if there's a death mixed up in it, you haven't got a prayer. They'll hang you as sure as ten dimes will buy a dollar, baby. She begins to cry. He puts his arms around her and kisses her. NEFF Just stop thinking about it, will you. He holds her tight. Their heads touch, side by side, THE CAMERA SLOWLY STARTS TO RECEDE as we DISSOLVE TO: A-47 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits in the swivel chair, talking into the dictaphone. He has hooked the wastebasket under his feet to sit more comfortably. As he talks, a little cough shakes him now and then. NEFF So we just sat there, and she kept on crying softly, like the rain on the window, and we didn't say anything. Maybe she had stopped thinking about it, but I hadn't. I couldn't. Because it all tied up with something I had been thinking about for years, since long before I ever ran into Phyllis Dietrichson. Because, in this business you can't sleep for trying to figure out the tricks they could pull on you. You're like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don't crook the house. And then one night, you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself. And do it smart. Because you've got that wheel right under your hands. And you know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out in front, a shill to put down the bet. And suddenly the doorbell rings and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you... Look, Keyes, I'm not trying to whitewash myself. I fought it, only maybe I didn't fight it hard enough. The stakes were fifty thousand dollars, but they were the life of a man, too, a man who'd never done me any dirt. Except he was married to a woman he didn't care anything about, and I did... DISSOLVE TO: A-48 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT LIVING ROOM CAMERA MOVES SLOWLY towards the davenport again. Neff sits in one corner with his feet on the low table. He is smoking his cigarette and staring at the ceiling. Phyllis has been sitting fairly close to him. She gets up slowly and crosses to her rain coat, lying over a chair. PHYLLIS I've got to go now, Walter. Neff does not answer. He keeps on staring at the ceiling. She starts to put the rain coat on. PHYLLIS Will you call me, Walter? Neff still does not answer. PHYLLIS Walter! He looks at her slowly, almost absently. PHYLLIS I hate him. I loathe going back to him. You believe me, don't you, Walter? NEFF Sure I believe you. PHYLLIS I can't stand it anymore. What if they did hang me? NEFF You're not going to hang, baby. PHYLLIS It's better than going on this way. NEFF -- you're not going to hang, baby. Not ever. Because you're going to do it the smart way. Because I'm going to help you. PHYLLIS You! NEFF Me. PHYLLIS Do you know what you're saying? NEFF Sure I know what I'm saying. He gets up and grips her arm. NEFF We're going to do it together. We're going to do it right. And I'm the guy that knows how. There is fierce determination in his voice. His fingers dig into her arm. PHYLLIS Walter, you're hurting me. NEFF There isn't going to be any slip up. Nothing sloppy. Nothing weak. It's got to be perfect. He kisses her. NEFF You go now. He leads her towards the door. NEFF Call me tomorrow. But not from your house. From a booth. And watch your step. Every single minute. It's got to be perfect, understand. Straight down the line. They have now reached the door. Neff opens it. Phyllis stands in the doorway, her lips white. PHYLLIS Straight down the line. She goes quietly. He watches her down the corridor. Slowly he closes the door and goes back into the room. He moves across the window and opens it wide. He stands there, looking down into the dark street. From below comes the sound of a car starting and driving off. The rain drifts in against his face. He just stands there motionless. His mind is going a hundred miles a minute. FADE OUT: END OF SEQUENCE "A" SEQUENCE "B" FADE IN: B-1 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits slumped in his chair before the dictaphone. On the desk next to him stands a used record. The cylinder on the dictaphone is not turning. He is smoking a cigarette. He kills it then lifts the needle and slides off the record which is on the machine and stands it on end on the desk beside the other used record. He reaches down painfully to take another record from the rack beneath the dictaphone, looks at it against the light to make sure it has not been used, then slides it into place on the machine and resets the needle. He lifts the horn and resumes his dictation. NEFF The first thing we had to do was fix him up with that accident policy. I knew he wouldn't buy, but all I wanted was his signature on an application. So I had to make him sign without his knowing what he was signing. And I wanted a witness other than Phyllis to hear me give him a sales talk. I was trying to think with your brains, Keyes. I wanted all the answers ready for all the questions you were going to spring as soon as Dietrichson was dead. Neff takes a last drag on his cigarette and kills it by running it under the ledge of the dictaphone stand. He drops the stub on the floor and resumes. NEFF A couple of nights later I went to the house. Everything looked fine, except I didn't like the witness Phyllis had brought in. It was Dietrichson's daughter Lola, and it made me feel a little queer in the belly to have her right there in the room, playing Chinese checkers, as if nothing was going to happen. DISSOLVE: B-2 A BOARD OF CHINESE CHECKERS CAMERA WITHDRAWS AND GRADUALLY REVEALS THE DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM - NIGHT The checker-board is on the davenport between Phyllis and Lola. Mr. Dietrichson sits in a big easy chair. His coat and tie are over the back of the chair, and the evening paper is lying tumbled on the floor beside him. He is smoking a cigar with the band on it. He has a drink in front of him and several more inside him. In another chair sits Neff, his briefcase on the floor, leaning against his chair. He holds his rate book partly open, with a finger in it for a marker. He is going full swing. NEFF I suppose you realize, Mr. Dietrichson, that, not being an employee, you are not covered by the State Compensation Insurance Act. The only way you can protect yourself is by having a personal policy of your own. DIETRICHSON I know all about that. The next thing you'll tell me I need earthquake insurance and lightning insurance and hail insurance. Phyllis looks up from the checker-board and cuts in on the dialogue. Lola listens without much interest. PHYLLIS (To Dietrichson) If we bought all the insurance they can think up, we'd stay broke paying for it, wouldn't we, honey? DIETRICHSON What keeps us broke is you going out and buying five hats at a crack. Who needs a hat in California? NEFF I always say insurance is a lot like a hot water bottle. It looks kind of useless and silly hanging on the hook, but when you get that stomach ache in the middle of the night, it comes in mighty handy. DIETRICHSON Now you want to sell me a hot water bottle. NEFF Dollar for dollar, accident insurance is the cheapest coverage you can buy, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Maybe some other time, Mr. Neff. I had a tough day. NEFF Just as you say, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Suppose we just settle that automobile insurance tonight. NEFF Sure. All we need on that is for you to sign an application for renewal. Phyllis throws a quick glance at Neff. As she looks back she sees that Lola is staring down at her wrist watch. LOLA Phyllis, do you mind if we don't finish this game? It bores me stiff. PHYLLIS Got some thing better to do? LOLA Yes, I have. She gets up. LOLA (To Dietrichson) Father, is it all right if I run along now? DIETRICHSON Run along where? Who with? LOLA Just Anne. We're going roller skating. DIETRICHSON Anne who? LOLA Anne Matthews. PHYLLIS It's not that Nino Zachetti again? DIETRICHSON It better not be that Zachetti guy. If I ever catch you with that --- LOLA It's Anne Matthews, I told you. I also told you we're going roller skating. I'm meeting her at the corner of Vermont and Franklin -- the north- west corner, in case you're interested. And I'm late already. I hope that is all clear. Good night, Father. Good night, Phyllis. She starts to go. NEFF Good night, Miss Dietrichson. LOLA Oh, I'm sorry. Good night, Mr. -- NEFF Neff. LOLA Good night, Mr. Neff. PHYLLIS Now you're not going to take my car again. LOLA No thanks. I'd rather be dead. She goes out through the archway. DIETRICHSON A great little fighter for her weight. Dietrichson sucks down a big swallow of his drink. Neff has taken two blank forms from his briefcase. He puts the briefcase on Mr. Dietrichson's lap and lays the forms on top. Phyllis is watching closely. NEFF This is where you sign, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Sign what? NEFF The applications for your auto renewals. So you'll be protected until the new policies are issued. DIETRICHSON When will that be? NEFF In about a week. DIETRICHSON Just so I'm covered when I drive up North. Neff takes out his fountain pen. NEFF San Francisco, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Palo Alto. PHYLLIS He was a Stanford man, Mr. Neff. And he still goes to his class reunion every year. DIETRICHSON What's wrong with that? Can't I have a little fun even once a year? NEFF Great football school, Stanford. Did you play football, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Left guard. Almost made the varsity, too. Neff has unscrewed his fountain pen. He hands it to Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson puts on his glasses. NEFF On that bottom line, Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson signs. Neff's and Phyllis' eyes meet for a split second. NEFF

d'entendre

How many times the word 'd'entendre' appears in the text?

you, Walter. Get out of here before I throw my desk at you. NEFF I love you, too. He walks out, still grinning. A-35 EXT. OFFICES - TWELFTH FLOOR Neff comes out of Keys' office and walks back along the balcony. Activity of secretaries going in and out of doors, etc. Neff enters his own office. NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) I really did, too, you old crab, always yelling your fat head off, always sore at everyone. But behind the cigar ashes on your vest I kind of knew you had a heart as big as a house... Back in my office there was a phone message from Mrs. Dietrichson about the renewals. She didn't want me to come tomorrow evening. She wanted me to come Thursday afternoon at three-thirty instead. I had a lot of stuff lined up for that Thursday afternoon, including a trip down to Santa Monica to see a couple of live prospects about some group insurance. But I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson and the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg. A-36 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE Anderson, a salesman, sits at one of the desks, filling out a report. Neff enters, goes to his own desk. He looks down at some mail. On top there is a typewritten note. He reads it, sits down and leafs through his desk calendar. A-37 INSERT - CLOSEUP - CALENDAR PAGE Showing date: THURSDAY 23 May and five or six appointments penciled in tightly on the page. DISSOLVE TO: A-38 DIETRICHSON HOME - ENTRANCE HALL - (DAY) THE CAMERA PANS with Phyllis Dietrichson's feet and ankles as she comes down the stairs, her high heels clicking on the tiles. The anklet glistens on her leg as she moves. THE CAMERA PANS ON. Phyllis has reached the entrance hall, and as she walks toward the front door her whole body becomes visible. She wears a gay print dress with a wide sash over her hips. She opens the door. Outside is Neff, wearing a sport coat, flannel slacks. He takes his hat off. PHYLLIS Hello, Mr. Neff. He stands there with a little smile. PHYLLIS Aren't you coming in? NEFF I'm considering it. He comes in. PHYLLIS I hope you didn't mind my changing the appointment. Last night wasn't so convenient. NEFF That's okay. I was working on my stamp collection. She leads him toward living room. A-39 DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff come through archway. She heads toward a low tea table which stands in front of the davenport, with tall glasses, ice cubes, lemon, a pot of tea, etc. PHYLLIS I was just fixing some iced tea. Would you like a glass? NEFF Unless you have a bottle of beer that's not working. PHYLLIS There might be some. I never know what's in the ice box. (Calls) Nettie!... She pours herself a glass of tea. PHYLLIS About those renewals, Mr. Neff. I talked to my husband about it. NEFF You did? PHYLLIS Yes. He'll renew with you he told me. In fact, I thought he'd be here this afternoon. NEFF But he's not? PHYLLIS No. NEFF That's terrible. PHYLLIS (Calls again, impatiently) Nettie!... Nettie!... Oh, I forgot, it's the maid's day off. NEFF Don't bother, Mrs. Dietrichson. I'd like some iced tea very much. PHYLLIS Lemon? Sugar? NEFF Fix it your way. She fixes him a glass of tea while he is looking around. He slowly sits down. NEFF Seeing it's the maid's day off maybe there's something I can do for you. She hands him the tea. NEFF Like running the vacuum cleaner. PHYLLIS Fresh. NEFF I used to peddle vacuum cleaners. Not much money but you learn a lot about life. PHYLLIS I didn't think you'd learned it from a correspondence course. NEFF Where did you pick up this tea drinking? You're not English, are you? PHYLLIS No. Californian. Born right here in Los Angeles. NEFF They say native Californians all come from Iowa. PHYLLIS I wanted to ask you something, Mr. Neff. NEFF Make it Walter. PHYLLIS Walter. NEFF Right. PHYLLIS Tell me, Walter, on this insurance -- how much commission do you make? NEFF Twenty percent. Why? PHYLLIS I thought maybe I could throw a little more business your way. NEFF I can always use it. PHYLLIS I was thinking about my husband. I worry a lot about him, down in those oil fields. It's very dangerous. NEFF Not for an executive, is it? PHYLLIS He doesn't just sit behind a desk. He's right down there with the drilling crews. It's got me worried sick. NEFF You mean a crown block might fall on him some rainy night? PHYLLIS Please don't talk like that. NEFF But that's the idea. PHYLLIS The other day a casing line snapped and caught the foreman. He's in the hospital with a broken back. NEFF Bad. PHYLLIS It's got me jittery just thinking about it. Suppose something like that happened to my husband? NEFF It could. PHYLLIS Don't you think he ought to have accident insurance? NEFF Uh huh. PHYLLIS What kind of insurance could he have? NEFF Enough to cover doctors' and hospital bills. Say a hundred and twenty-five a week cash benefit. And he'd rate around fifty thousand capital sum. PHYLLIS Capital sum? What's that? NEFF That's if he got killed. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. PHYLLIS I suppose you have to think of everything in your business. NEFF Mr. Dietrichson would understand. I'm sure I could sell him on the idea of some accident protection. Why don't I talk to him about it. PHYLLIS You could try. But he's pretty tough going. NEFF They're all tough at first. PHYLLIS He's got a lot on his mind. He doesn't want to listen to anything except maybe a baseball game on the radio. Sometimes we sit all evening without saying a word to each other. NEFF Sounds pretty dull. Phyllis shrugs. PHYLLIS So I just sit and knit. NEFF Is that what you married him for? PHYLLIS Maybe I like the way his thumbs hold up the wool. NEFF Anytime his thumbs get tired -- PHYLLIS I want to ask you something, Mr. Neff. Could I get an accident policy for him -- without bothering him at all? NEFF How's that again. PHYLLIS That would make it easier for you, too. You wouldn't even have to talk to him. I have a little allowance of my own. I could pay for it and he needn't know anything about it. NEFF Wait a minute. Why shouldn't he know? PHYLLIS Because I know he doesn't want accident insurance. He's superstitious about it. NEFF A lot of people are. Funny, isn't it? PHYLLIS If there was a way to get it like that, all the worry would be over. You see what I mean, Walter? NEFF Sure. I've got good eyesight. You want him to have the policy without him knowing it. And that means without the insurance company knowing that he doesn't know. That's the set-up, isn't it? PHYLLIS Is there anything wrong with it? NEFF I think it's lovely. And then, some dark wet night, if that crown block fell on him -- PHYLLIS What crown block? NEFF Only sometimes they have to have a little help. They can't quite make it on their own. PHYLLIS I don't know what you're talking about. NEFF Of course, it doesn't have to be a crown block. It can be a car backing over him, or he can fall out of an upstairs window. Any little thing like that, as long as it's a morgue job. PHYLLIS Are you crazy? NEFF Not that crazy. Goodbye, Mrs. Dietrichson. He picks up his hat. PHYLLIS What's the matter? NEFF Look, baby, you can't get away with it. PHYLLIS Get away with what? NEFF You want to knock him off, don't you, baby. PHYLLIS That's a horrible thing to say! NEFF Who'd you think I was, anyway? A guy that walks into a good-looking dame's front parlor and says "Good afternoon, I sell accident insurance on husbands. You got one that's been around too long? Somebody you'd like to turn into a little hard cash? Just give me a smile and I'll help you collect." Boy, what a dope I must look to you! PHYLLIS I think you're rotten. NEFF I think you're swell. So long as I'm not your husband. PHYLLIS Get out of here. NEFF You bet I will. You bet I'll get out of here, baby. But quick. He goes out. She looks after him. A-40 EXT. DIETRICHSON HOME - (DAY) Neff bangs the front door shut, walks quickly to his car and drives away. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) So I let her have it, straight between the eyes. She didn't fool me for a minute, not this time. I knew I had hold of a redhot poker and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off. I stopped at a drive-in for a bottle of beer, the one I had wanted all along, only I wanted it worse now, to get rid of the sour taste of her iced tea, and everything that went with it. I didn't want to go back to the office, so I dropped by a bowling alley at Third and Western and rolled a few lines to get my mind thinking about something else for a while. A-41 DRIVE-IN RESTAURANT - (DAY) Shooting past Neff sitting behind the wheel of his car The car hop hangs a tray on the door and serves him a bottle of beer. DISSOLVE TO: A-42 INT. BOWLING ALLEY Neff bowling. He rolls the ball with an effort at concentration, but his mind is not really on the game. DISSOLVE TO: A-43 EXT. APARTMENT HOUSE - (DUSK) It is late afternoon. The apartment house is called the LOS OLIVOS APARTMENTS. It is a six-story building in the Normandie- Wilshire district, with a basement garage. THE CAMERA PANS UP the front of the building to the top floor windows, as a little rain starts to fall. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) I didn't feel like eating dinner when I left, and I didn't feel like a show, so I drove home, put the car away and went up to my apartment. A-44 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT - LIVING ROOM - (DUSK) It is a double apartment of conventional design, with kitchen, dinette, and bathroom, squarecut overstuffed borax furniture. Gas logs are lit in the imitation fireplace. Neff stands by the window with his coat off and his tie loose. Raindrops strike against the glass. He turns away impatiently, paces up and down past a caddy bag with golf clubs in it, pulls one out at random, makes a couple of short swings, throws the club on the couch, paces again. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) It had begun to rain outside and I watched it get dark and didn't even turn on the light. That didn't help me either. I was all twisted up inside, and I was still holding on to that red-hot poker. And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all, that the hook was too strong, that this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning. The doorbell rings. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) So at eight o'clock the bell would ring and I would know who it was without even having to think, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Neff goes to the door and opens it. PHYLLIS Hello. Neff just looks at her. PHYLLIS You forgot your hat this afternoon. She has nothing in her hands but her bag. NEFF Did I? He looks down at her hands. PHYLLIS Don't you want me to bring it in? NEFF Sure. Put it on the chair. She comes in. He closes the door. NEFF How did you know where I live? PHYLLIS It's in the phone book. Neff switches on the standing lamp. PHYLLIS It's raining. NEFF So it is. Peel off your coat and sit down. She starts to take off her coat. NEFF Your husband out? PHYLLIS Long Beach. They're spudding in a new well. He phoned he'd be late. About nine-thirty. He takes her coat and lays it across the back of a chair. PHYLLIS It's about time you said you're glad to see me. NEFF I knew you wouldn't leave it like that. PHYLLIS Like what? NEFF Like it was this afternoon. PHYLLIS I must have said something that gave you a terribly wrong impression. You must surely see that. You must never think anything like that about me, Walter. NEFF Okay. PHYLLIS It's not okay. Not if you don't believe me. NEFF What do you want me to do? PHYLLIS I want you to be nice to me. Like the first time you came to the house. NEFF It can't be like the first time. Something has happened. PHYLLIS I know it has. It's happened to us. NEFF That's what I mean. Phyllis has moved over to the window. She stares out through the wet window-pane. NEFF What's the matter now? PHYLLIS I feel as if he was watching me. Not that he cares about me. Not any more. But he keeps me on a leash. So tight I can't breathe. I'm scared. NEFF What of? He's in Long Beach, isn't he? PHYLLIS I oughtn't to have come. NEFF Maybe you oughtn't. PHYLLIS You want me to go? NEFF If you want to. PHYLLIS Right now? NEFF Sure. Right now. By this time, he has hold of her wrist. He draws her to him slowly and kisses her. Her arms tighten around him. After a moment he pulls his head back, still holding her close. NEFF How were you going to do it? PHYLLIS Do what? NEFF Kill him. PHYLLIS Walter, for the last time -- She tries to jerk away but he holds her and kisses her again. NEFF I'm crazy about you, baby. PHYLLIS I'm crazy about you, Walter. NEFF That perfume on your hair. What's the name of it? PHYLLIS Something French. I bought it down at Ensenada. NEFF We ought to have some of that pink wine to go with it. The kind that bubbles. But all I have is bourbon. PHYLLIS Bourbon is fine, Walter. He lets her go and moves toward the dinette. A-45 THE DINETTE AND KITCHEN It contains a small table and some chairs. A low glass-and- china cabinet is built between the dinette and kitchen, leaving a space like a doorway. The kitchen is the usual apartment house kitchen, with stove, ice-box, sink, etc. It is quite small. Neff goes to the ice-box and Phyllis drifts in after him. NEFF Soda? PHYLLIS Plain water, please. NEFF Get a couple of glasses, will you. He points at the china closet. He has taken a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator and is holding it under the hot- water faucet. NEFF You know, about six months ago a guy slipped on the soap in his bathtub and knocked himself cold and drowned. Only he had accident insurance. So they had an autopsy and she didn't get away with it. Phyllis has the glasses now. She hands them to him. He dumps some ice cubes into the glasses. PHYLLIS Who didn't? NEFF His wife. He reaches for the whiskey bottle on top of the china closet. NEFF And there was another case where a guy was found shot and his wife said he was cleaning a gun and his stomach got in the way. All she collected was a three-to-ten stretch in Tehachapi. PHYLLIS Perhaps it was worth it to her. Neff hands her a glass. NEFF See if you can carry this as far as the living room. They move back toward the living room. A-46 LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff go toward the davenport. She is sipping her drink and looking around. PHYLLIS It's nice here, Walter. Who takes care of it for you? NEFF A colored woman comes in twice a week. PHYLLIS You get your own breakfast? NEFF Once in a while I squeeze a grapefruit. The rest I get at the corner drugstore. They sit on the davenport, fairly close together. PHYLLIS It sounds wonderful. Just strangers beside you. You don't know them. You don't hate them. You don't have to sit across the table and smile at him and that daughter of his every morning of your life. NEFF What daughter? Oh, that little girl on the piano. PHYLLIS Yes. Lola. She lives with us. He thinks a lot more of her than he does of me. NEFF Ever think of a divorce? PHYLLIS He wouldn't give me a divorce. NEFF I suppose because it would cost him money. PHYLLIS He hasn't got any money. Not since he went into the oil business. NEFF But he had when you married him? PHYLLIS Yes, he had. And I wanted a home. Why not? But that wasn't the only reason. I was his wife's nurse. She was sick for a long time. When she died, he was all broken up. I pitied him so. NEFF And now you hate him. PHYLLIS Yes, Walter. He's so mean to me. Every-time I buy a dress or a pair of shoes he yells his head off. He won't let me go anywhere. He keeps me shut up. He's always been mean to me. Even his life insurance all goes to that daughter of his. That Lola. NEFF Nothing for you at all, huh? PHYLLIS No. And nothing is just what I'm worth to him. NEFF So you lie awake in the dark and listen to him snore and get ideas. PHYLLIS Walter, I don't want to kill him. I never did. Not even when he gets drunk and slaps my face. NEFF Only sometimes you wish he was dead. PHYLLIS Perhaps I do. NEFF And you wish it was an accident, and you had that policy. For fifty thousand dollars. Is that it? PHYLLIS Perhaps that too. She takes a long drink. PHYLLIS The other night we drove home from a party. He was drunk again. When we got into the garage he just sat there with his head on the steering wheel and the motor still running. And I thought what it would be like if I didn't switch it off, just closed the garage door and left him there. NEFF I'll tell you what it would be like, if you had that accident policy, and tried to pull a monoxide job. We have a guy in our office named Keyes. For him a set-up like that would be just like a slice of rare roast beef. In three minutes he'd know it wasn't an accident. In ten minutes you'd be sitting under the hot lights. In half an hour you'd be signing your name to a confession. PHYLLIS But Walter, I didn't do it. I'm not going to do it. NEFF Not if there's an insurance company in the picture, baby. So long as you're honest they'll pay you with a smile, but you just try to pull something like that and you'll find out. They know more tricks than a carload of monkeys. And if there's a death mixed up in it, you haven't got a prayer. They'll hang you as sure as ten dimes will buy a dollar, baby. She begins to cry. He puts his arms around her and kisses her. NEFF Just stop thinking about it, will you. He holds her tight. Their heads touch, side by side, THE CAMERA SLOWLY STARTS TO RECEDE as we DISSOLVE TO: A-47 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits in the swivel chair, talking into the dictaphone. He has hooked the wastebasket under his feet to sit more comfortably. As he talks, a little cough shakes him now and then. NEFF So we just sat there, and she kept on crying softly, like the rain on the window, and we didn't say anything. Maybe she had stopped thinking about it, but I hadn't. I couldn't. Because it all tied up with something I had been thinking about for years, since long before I ever ran into Phyllis Dietrichson. Because, in this business you can't sleep for trying to figure out the tricks they could pull on you. You're like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don't crook the house. And then one night, you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself. And do it smart. Because you've got that wheel right under your hands. And you know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out in front, a shill to put down the bet. And suddenly the doorbell rings and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you... Look, Keyes, I'm not trying to whitewash myself. I fought it, only maybe I didn't fight it hard enough. The stakes were fifty thousand dollars, but they were the life of a man, too, a man who'd never done me any dirt. Except he was married to a woman he didn't care anything about, and I did... DISSOLVE TO: A-48 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT LIVING ROOM CAMERA MOVES SLOWLY towards the davenport again. Neff sits in one corner with his feet on the low table. He is smoking his cigarette and staring at the ceiling. Phyllis has been sitting fairly close to him. She gets up slowly and crosses to her rain coat, lying over a chair. PHYLLIS I've got to go now, Walter. Neff does not answer. He keeps on staring at the ceiling. She starts to put the rain coat on. PHYLLIS Will you call me, Walter? Neff still does not answer. PHYLLIS Walter! He looks at her slowly, almost absently. PHYLLIS I hate him. I loathe going back to him. You believe me, don't you, Walter? NEFF Sure I believe you. PHYLLIS I can't stand it anymore. What if they did hang me? NEFF You're not going to hang, baby. PHYLLIS It's better than going on this way. NEFF -- you're not going to hang, baby. Not ever. Because you're going to do it the smart way. Because I'm going to help you. PHYLLIS You! NEFF Me. PHYLLIS Do you know what you're saying? NEFF Sure I know what I'm saying. He gets up and grips her arm. NEFF We're going to do it together. We're going to do it right. And I'm the guy that knows how. There is fierce determination in his voice. His fingers dig into her arm. PHYLLIS Walter, you're hurting me. NEFF There isn't going to be any slip up. Nothing sloppy. Nothing weak. It's got to be perfect. He kisses her. NEFF You go now. He leads her towards the door. NEFF Call me tomorrow. But not from your house. From a booth. And watch your step. Every single minute. It's got to be perfect, understand. Straight down the line. They have now reached the door. Neff opens it. Phyllis stands in the doorway, her lips white. PHYLLIS Straight down the line. She goes quietly. He watches her down the corridor. Slowly he closes the door and goes back into the room. He moves across the window and opens it wide. He stands there, looking down into the dark street. From below comes the sound of a car starting and driving off. The rain drifts in against his face. He just stands there motionless. His mind is going a hundred miles a minute. FADE OUT: END OF SEQUENCE "A" SEQUENCE "B" FADE IN: B-1 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits slumped in his chair before the dictaphone. On the desk next to him stands a used record. The cylinder on the dictaphone is not turning. He is smoking a cigarette. He kills it then lifts the needle and slides off the record which is on the machine and stands it on end on the desk beside the other used record. He reaches down painfully to take another record from the rack beneath the dictaphone, looks at it against the light to make sure it has not been used, then slides it into place on the machine and resets the needle. He lifts the horn and resumes his dictation. NEFF The first thing we had to do was fix him up with that accident policy. I knew he wouldn't buy, but all I wanted was his signature on an application. So I had to make him sign without his knowing what he was signing. And I wanted a witness other than Phyllis to hear me give him a sales talk. I was trying to think with your brains, Keyes. I wanted all the answers ready for all the questions you were going to spring as soon as Dietrichson was dead. Neff takes a last drag on his cigarette and kills it by running it under the ledge of the dictaphone stand. He drops the stub on the floor and resumes. NEFF A couple of nights later I went to the house. Everything looked fine, except I didn't like the witness Phyllis had brought in. It was Dietrichson's daughter Lola, and it made me feel a little queer in the belly to have her right there in the room, playing Chinese checkers, as if nothing was going to happen. DISSOLVE: B-2 A BOARD OF CHINESE CHECKERS CAMERA WITHDRAWS AND GRADUALLY REVEALS THE DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM - NIGHT The checker-board is on the davenport between Phyllis and Lola. Mr. Dietrichson sits in a big easy chair. His coat and tie are over the back of the chair, and the evening paper is lying tumbled on the floor beside him. He is smoking a cigar with the band on it. He has a drink in front of him and several more inside him. In another chair sits Neff, his briefcase on the floor, leaning against his chair. He holds his rate book partly open, with a finger in it for a marker. He is going full swing. NEFF I suppose you realize, Mr. Dietrichson, that, not being an employee, you are not covered by the State Compensation Insurance Act. The only way you can protect yourself is by having a personal policy of your own. DIETRICHSON I know all about that. The next thing you'll tell me I need earthquake insurance and lightning insurance and hail insurance. Phyllis looks up from the checker-board and cuts in on the dialogue. Lola listens without much interest. PHYLLIS (To Dietrichson) If we bought all the insurance they can think up, we'd stay broke paying for it, wouldn't we, honey? DIETRICHSON What keeps us broke is you going out and buying five hats at a crack. Who needs a hat in California? NEFF I always say insurance is a lot like a hot water bottle. It looks kind of useless and silly hanging on the hook, but when you get that stomach ache in the middle of the night, it comes in mighty handy. DIETRICHSON Now you want to sell me a hot water bottle. NEFF Dollar for dollar, accident insurance is the cheapest coverage you can buy, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Maybe some other time, Mr. Neff. I had a tough day. NEFF Just as you say, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Suppose we just settle that automobile insurance tonight. NEFF Sure. All we need on that is for you to sign an application for renewal. Phyllis throws a quick glance at Neff. As she looks back she sees that Lola is staring down at her wrist watch. LOLA Phyllis, do you mind if we don't finish this game? It bores me stiff. PHYLLIS Got some thing better to do? LOLA Yes, I have. She gets up. LOLA (To Dietrichson) Father, is it all right if I run along now? DIETRICHSON Run along where? Who with? LOLA Just Anne. We're going roller skating. DIETRICHSON Anne who? LOLA Anne Matthews. PHYLLIS It's not that Nino Zachetti again? DIETRICHSON It better not be that Zachetti guy. If I ever catch you with that --- LOLA It's Anne Matthews, I told you. I also told you we're going roller skating. I'm meeting her at the corner of Vermont and Franklin -- the north- west corner, in case you're interested. And I'm late already. I hope that is all clear. Good night, Father. Good night, Phyllis. She starts to go. NEFF Good night, Miss Dietrichson. LOLA Oh, I'm sorry. Good night, Mr. -- NEFF Neff. LOLA Good night, Mr. Neff. PHYLLIS Now you're not going to take my car again. LOLA No thanks. I'd rather be dead. She goes out through the archway. DIETRICHSON A great little fighter for her weight. Dietrichson sucks down a big swallow of his drink. Neff has taken two blank forms from his briefcase. He puts the briefcase on Mr. Dietrichson's lap and lays the forms on top. Phyllis is watching closely. NEFF This is where you sign, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Sign what? NEFF The applications for your auto renewals. So you'll be protected until the new policies are issued. DIETRICHSON When will that be? NEFF In about a week. DIETRICHSON Just so I'm covered when I drive up North. Neff takes out his fountain pen. NEFF San Francisco, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Palo Alto. PHYLLIS He was a Stanford man, Mr. Neff. And he still goes to his class reunion every year. DIETRICHSON What's wrong with that? Can't I have a little fun even once a year? NEFF Great football school, Stanford. Did you play football, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Left guard. Almost made the varsity, too. Neff has unscrewed his fountain pen. He hands it to Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson puts on his glasses. NEFF On that bottom line, Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson signs. Neff's and Phyllis' eyes meet for a split second. NEFF

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you, Walter. Get out of here before I throw my desk at you. NEFF I love you, too. He walks out, still grinning. A-35 EXT. OFFICES - TWELFTH FLOOR Neff comes out of Keys' office and walks back along the balcony. Activity of secretaries going in and out of doors, etc. Neff enters his own office. NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) I really did, too, you old crab, always yelling your fat head off, always sore at everyone. But behind the cigar ashes on your vest I kind of knew you had a heart as big as a house... Back in my office there was a phone message from Mrs. Dietrichson about the renewals. She didn't want me to come tomorrow evening. She wanted me to come Thursday afternoon at three-thirty instead. I had a lot of stuff lined up for that Thursday afternoon, including a trip down to Santa Monica to see a couple of live prospects about some group insurance. But I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson and the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg. A-36 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE Anderson, a salesman, sits at one of the desks, filling out a report. Neff enters, goes to his own desk. He looks down at some mail. On top there is a typewritten note. He reads it, sits down and leafs through his desk calendar. A-37 INSERT - CLOSEUP - CALENDAR PAGE Showing date: THURSDAY 23 May and five or six appointments penciled in tightly on the page. DISSOLVE TO: A-38 DIETRICHSON HOME - ENTRANCE HALL - (DAY) THE CAMERA PANS with Phyllis Dietrichson's feet and ankles as she comes down the stairs, her high heels clicking on the tiles. The anklet glistens on her leg as she moves. THE CAMERA PANS ON. Phyllis has reached the entrance hall, and as she walks toward the front door her whole body becomes visible. She wears a gay print dress with a wide sash over her hips. She opens the door. Outside is Neff, wearing a sport coat, flannel slacks. He takes his hat off. PHYLLIS Hello, Mr. Neff. He stands there with a little smile. PHYLLIS Aren't you coming in? NEFF I'm considering it. He comes in. PHYLLIS I hope you didn't mind my changing the appointment. Last night wasn't so convenient. NEFF That's okay. I was working on my stamp collection. She leads him toward living room. A-39 DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff come through archway. She heads toward a low tea table which stands in front of the davenport, with tall glasses, ice cubes, lemon, a pot of tea, etc. PHYLLIS I was just fixing some iced tea. Would you like a glass? NEFF Unless you have a bottle of beer that's not working. PHYLLIS There might be some. I never know what's in the ice box. (Calls) Nettie!... She pours herself a glass of tea. PHYLLIS About those renewals, Mr. Neff. I talked to my husband about it. NEFF You did? PHYLLIS Yes. He'll renew with you he told me. In fact, I thought he'd be here this afternoon. NEFF But he's not? PHYLLIS No. NEFF That's terrible. PHYLLIS (Calls again, impatiently) Nettie!... Nettie!... Oh, I forgot, it's the maid's day off. NEFF Don't bother, Mrs. Dietrichson. I'd like some iced tea very much. PHYLLIS Lemon? Sugar? NEFF Fix it your way. She fixes him a glass of tea while he is looking around. He slowly sits down. NEFF Seeing it's the maid's day off maybe there's something I can do for you. She hands him the tea. NEFF Like running the vacuum cleaner. PHYLLIS Fresh. NEFF I used to peddle vacuum cleaners. Not much money but you learn a lot about life. PHYLLIS I didn't think you'd learned it from a correspondence course. NEFF Where did you pick up this tea drinking? You're not English, are you? PHYLLIS No. Californian. Born right here in Los Angeles. NEFF They say native Californians all come from Iowa. PHYLLIS I wanted to ask you something, Mr. Neff. NEFF Make it Walter. PHYLLIS Walter. NEFF Right. PHYLLIS Tell me, Walter, on this insurance -- how much commission do you make? NEFF Twenty percent. Why? PHYLLIS I thought maybe I could throw a little more business your way. NEFF I can always use it. PHYLLIS I was thinking about my husband. I worry a lot about him, down in those oil fields. It's very dangerous. NEFF Not for an executive, is it? PHYLLIS He doesn't just sit behind a desk. He's right down there with the drilling crews. It's got me worried sick. NEFF You mean a crown block might fall on him some rainy night? PHYLLIS Please don't talk like that. NEFF But that's the idea. PHYLLIS The other day a casing line snapped and caught the foreman. He's in the hospital with a broken back. NEFF Bad. PHYLLIS It's got me jittery just thinking about it. Suppose something like that happened to my husband? NEFF It could. PHYLLIS Don't you think he ought to have accident insurance? NEFF Uh huh. PHYLLIS What kind of insurance could he have? NEFF Enough to cover doctors' and hospital bills. Say a hundred and twenty-five a week cash benefit. And he'd rate around fifty thousand capital sum. PHYLLIS Capital sum? What's that? NEFF That's if he got killed. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. PHYLLIS I suppose you have to think of everything in your business. NEFF Mr. Dietrichson would understand. I'm sure I could sell him on the idea of some accident protection. Why don't I talk to him about it. PHYLLIS You could try. But he's pretty tough going. NEFF They're all tough at first. PHYLLIS He's got a lot on his mind. He doesn't want to listen to anything except maybe a baseball game on the radio. Sometimes we sit all evening without saying a word to each other. NEFF Sounds pretty dull. Phyllis shrugs. PHYLLIS So I just sit and knit. NEFF Is that what you married him for? PHYLLIS Maybe I like the way his thumbs hold up the wool. NEFF Anytime his thumbs get tired -- PHYLLIS I want to ask you something, Mr. Neff. Could I get an accident policy for him -- without bothering him at all? NEFF How's that again. PHYLLIS That would make it easier for you, too. You wouldn't even have to talk to him. I have a little allowance of my own. I could pay for it and he needn't know anything about it. NEFF Wait a minute. Why shouldn't he know? PHYLLIS Because I know he doesn't want accident insurance. He's superstitious about it. NEFF A lot of people are. Funny, isn't it? PHYLLIS If there was a way to get it like that, all the worry would be over. You see what I mean, Walter? NEFF Sure. I've got good eyesight. You want him to have the policy without him knowing it. And that means without the insurance company knowing that he doesn't know. That's the set-up, isn't it? PHYLLIS Is there anything wrong with it? NEFF I think it's lovely. And then, some dark wet night, if that crown block fell on him -- PHYLLIS What crown block? NEFF Only sometimes they have to have a little help. They can't quite make it on their own. PHYLLIS I don't know what you're talking about. NEFF Of course, it doesn't have to be a crown block. It can be a car backing over him, or he can fall out of an upstairs window. Any little thing like that, as long as it's a morgue job. PHYLLIS Are you crazy? NEFF Not that crazy. Goodbye, Mrs. Dietrichson. He picks up his hat. PHYLLIS What's the matter? NEFF Look, baby, you can't get away with it. PHYLLIS Get away with what? NEFF You want to knock him off, don't you, baby. PHYLLIS That's a horrible thing to say! NEFF Who'd you think I was, anyway? A guy that walks into a good-looking dame's front parlor and says "Good afternoon, I sell accident insurance on husbands. You got one that's been around too long? Somebody you'd like to turn into a little hard cash? Just give me a smile and I'll help you collect." Boy, what a dope I must look to you! PHYLLIS I think you're rotten. NEFF I think you're swell. So long as I'm not your husband. PHYLLIS Get out of here. NEFF You bet I will. You bet I'll get out of here, baby. But quick. He goes out. She looks after him. A-40 EXT. DIETRICHSON HOME - (DAY) Neff bangs the front door shut, walks quickly to his car and drives away. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) So I let her have it, straight between the eyes. She didn't fool me for a minute, not this time. I knew I had hold of a redhot poker and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off. I stopped at a drive-in for a bottle of beer, the one I had wanted all along, only I wanted it worse now, to get rid of the sour taste of her iced tea, and everything that went with it. I didn't want to go back to the office, so I dropped by a bowling alley at Third and Western and rolled a few lines to get my mind thinking about something else for a while. A-41 DRIVE-IN RESTAURANT - (DAY) Shooting past Neff sitting behind the wheel of his car The car hop hangs a tray on the door and serves him a bottle of beer. DISSOLVE TO: A-42 INT. BOWLING ALLEY Neff bowling. He rolls the ball with an effort at concentration, but his mind is not really on the game. DISSOLVE TO: A-43 EXT. APARTMENT HOUSE - (DUSK) It is late afternoon. The apartment house is called the LOS OLIVOS APARTMENTS. It is a six-story building in the Normandie- Wilshire district, with a basement garage. THE CAMERA PANS UP the front of the building to the top floor windows, as a little rain starts to fall. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) I didn't feel like eating dinner when I left, and I didn't feel like a show, so I drove home, put the car away and went up to my apartment. A-44 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT - LIVING ROOM - (DUSK) It is a double apartment of conventional design, with kitchen, dinette, and bathroom, squarecut overstuffed borax furniture. Gas logs are lit in the imitation fireplace. Neff stands by the window with his coat off and his tie loose. Raindrops strike against the glass. He turns away impatiently, paces up and down past a caddy bag with golf clubs in it, pulls one out at random, makes a couple of short swings, throws the club on the couch, paces again. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) It had begun to rain outside and I watched it get dark and didn't even turn on the light. That didn't help me either. I was all twisted up inside, and I was still holding on to that red-hot poker. And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all, that the hook was too strong, that this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning. The doorbell rings. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) So at eight o'clock the bell would ring and I would know who it was without even having to think, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Neff goes to the door and opens it. PHYLLIS Hello. Neff just looks at her. PHYLLIS You forgot your hat this afternoon. She has nothing in her hands but her bag. NEFF Did I? He looks down at her hands. PHYLLIS Don't you want me to bring it in? NEFF Sure. Put it on the chair. She comes in. He closes the door. NEFF How did you know where I live? PHYLLIS It's in the phone book. Neff switches on the standing lamp. PHYLLIS It's raining. NEFF So it is. Peel off your coat and sit down. She starts to take off her coat. NEFF Your husband out? PHYLLIS Long Beach. They're spudding in a new well. He phoned he'd be late. About nine-thirty. He takes her coat and lays it across the back of a chair. PHYLLIS It's about time you said you're glad to see me. NEFF I knew you wouldn't leave it like that. PHYLLIS Like what? NEFF Like it was this afternoon. PHYLLIS I must have said something that gave you a terribly wrong impression. You must surely see that. You must never think anything like that about me, Walter. NEFF Okay. PHYLLIS It's not okay. Not if you don't believe me. NEFF What do you want me to do? PHYLLIS I want you to be nice to me. Like the first time you came to the house. NEFF It can't be like the first time. Something has happened. PHYLLIS I know it has. It's happened to us. NEFF That's what I mean. Phyllis has moved over to the window. She stares out through the wet window-pane. NEFF What's the matter now? PHYLLIS I feel as if he was watching me. Not that he cares about me. Not any more. But he keeps me on a leash. So tight I can't breathe. I'm scared. NEFF What of? He's in Long Beach, isn't he? PHYLLIS I oughtn't to have come. NEFF Maybe you oughtn't. PHYLLIS You want me to go? NEFF If you want to. PHYLLIS Right now? NEFF Sure. Right now. By this time, he has hold of her wrist. He draws her to him slowly and kisses her. Her arms tighten around him. After a moment he pulls his head back, still holding her close. NEFF How were you going to do it? PHYLLIS Do what? NEFF Kill him. PHYLLIS Walter, for the last time -- She tries to jerk away but he holds her and kisses her again. NEFF I'm crazy about you, baby. PHYLLIS I'm crazy about you, Walter. NEFF That perfume on your hair. What's the name of it? PHYLLIS Something French. I bought it down at Ensenada. NEFF We ought to have some of that pink wine to go with it. The kind that bubbles. But all I have is bourbon. PHYLLIS Bourbon is fine, Walter. He lets her go and moves toward the dinette. A-45 THE DINETTE AND KITCHEN It contains a small table and some chairs. A low glass-and- china cabinet is built between the dinette and kitchen, leaving a space like a doorway. The kitchen is the usual apartment house kitchen, with stove, ice-box, sink, etc. It is quite small. Neff goes to the ice-box and Phyllis drifts in after him. NEFF Soda? PHYLLIS Plain water, please. NEFF Get a couple of glasses, will you. He points at the china closet. He has taken a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator and is holding it under the hot- water faucet. NEFF You know, about six months ago a guy slipped on the soap in his bathtub and knocked himself cold and drowned. Only he had accident insurance. So they had an autopsy and she didn't get away with it. Phyllis has the glasses now. She hands them to him. He dumps some ice cubes into the glasses. PHYLLIS Who didn't? NEFF His wife. He reaches for the whiskey bottle on top of the china closet. NEFF And there was another case where a guy was found shot and his wife said he was cleaning a gun and his stomach got in the way. All she collected was a three-to-ten stretch in Tehachapi. PHYLLIS Perhaps it was worth it to her. Neff hands her a glass. NEFF See if you can carry this as far as the living room. They move back toward the living room. A-46 LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff go toward the davenport. She is sipping her drink and looking around. PHYLLIS It's nice here, Walter. Who takes care of it for you? NEFF A colored woman comes in twice a week. PHYLLIS You get your own breakfast? NEFF Once in a while I squeeze a grapefruit. The rest I get at the corner drugstore. They sit on the davenport, fairly close together. PHYLLIS It sounds wonderful. Just strangers beside you. You don't know them. You don't hate them. You don't have to sit across the table and smile at him and that daughter of his every morning of your life. NEFF What daughter? Oh, that little girl on the piano. PHYLLIS Yes. Lola. She lives with us. He thinks a lot more of her than he does of me. NEFF Ever think of a divorce? PHYLLIS He wouldn't give me a divorce. NEFF I suppose because it would cost him money. PHYLLIS He hasn't got any money. Not since he went into the oil business. NEFF But he had when you married him? PHYLLIS Yes, he had. And I wanted a home. Why not? But that wasn't the only reason. I was his wife's nurse. She was sick for a long time. When she died, he was all broken up. I pitied him so. NEFF And now you hate him. PHYLLIS Yes, Walter. He's so mean to me. Every-time I buy a dress or a pair of shoes he yells his head off. He won't let me go anywhere. He keeps me shut up. He's always been mean to me. Even his life insurance all goes to that daughter of his. That Lola. NEFF Nothing for you at all, huh? PHYLLIS No. And nothing is just what I'm worth to him. NEFF So you lie awake in the dark and listen to him snore and get ideas. PHYLLIS Walter, I don't want to kill him. I never did. Not even when he gets drunk and slaps my face. NEFF Only sometimes you wish he was dead. PHYLLIS Perhaps I do. NEFF And you wish it was an accident, and you had that policy. For fifty thousand dollars. Is that it? PHYLLIS Perhaps that too. She takes a long drink. PHYLLIS The other night we drove home from a party. He was drunk again. When we got into the garage he just sat there with his head on the steering wheel and the motor still running. And I thought what it would be like if I didn't switch it off, just closed the garage door and left him there. NEFF I'll tell you what it would be like, if you had that accident policy, and tried to pull a monoxide job. We have a guy in our office named Keyes. For him a set-up like that would be just like a slice of rare roast beef. In three minutes he'd know it wasn't an accident. In ten minutes you'd be sitting under the hot lights. In half an hour you'd be signing your name to a confession. PHYLLIS But Walter, I didn't do it. I'm not going to do it. NEFF Not if there's an insurance company in the picture, baby. So long as you're honest they'll pay you with a smile, but you just try to pull something like that and you'll find out. They know more tricks than a carload of monkeys. And if there's a death mixed up in it, you haven't got a prayer. They'll hang you as sure as ten dimes will buy a dollar, baby. She begins to cry. He puts his arms around her and kisses her. NEFF Just stop thinking about it, will you. He holds her tight. Their heads touch, side by side, THE CAMERA SLOWLY STARTS TO RECEDE as we DISSOLVE TO: A-47 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits in the swivel chair, talking into the dictaphone. He has hooked the wastebasket under his feet to sit more comfortably. As he talks, a little cough shakes him now and then. NEFF So we just sat there, and she kept on crying softly, like the rain on the window, and we didn't say anything. Maybe she had stopped thinking about it, but I hadn't. I couldn't. Because it all tied up with something I had been thinking about for years, since long before I ever ran into Phyllis Dietrichson. Because, in this business you can't sleep for trying to figure out the tricks they could pull on you. You're like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don't crook the house. And then one night, you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself. And do it smart. Because you've got that wheel right under your hands. And you know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out in front, a shill to put down the bet. And suddenly the doorbell rings and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you... Look, Keyes, I'm not trying to whitewash myself. I fought it, only maybe I didn't fight it hard enough. The stakes were fifty thousand dollars, but they were the life of a man, too, a man who'd never done me any dirt. Except he was married to a woman he didn't care anything about, and I did... DISSOLVE TO: A-48 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT LIVING ROOM CAMERA MOVES SLOWLY towards the davenport again. Neff sits in one corner with his feet on the low table. He is smoking his cigarette and staring at the ceiling. Phyllis has been sitting fairly close to him. She gets up slowly and crosses to her rain coat, lying over a chair. PHYLLIS I've got to go now, Walter. Neff does not answer. He keeps on staring at the ceiling. She starts to put the rain coat on. PHYLLIS Will you call me, Walter? Neff still does not answer. PHYLLIS Walter! He looks at her slowly, almost absently. PHYLLIS I hate him. I loathe going back to him. You believe me, don't you, Walter? NEFF Sure I believe you. PHYLLIS I can't stand it anymore. What if they did hang me? NEFF You're not going to hang, baby. PHYLLIS It's better than going on this way. NEFF -- you're not going to hang, baby. Not ever. Because you're going to do it the smart way. Because I'm going to help you. PHYLLIS You! NEFF Me. PHYLLIS Do you know what you're saying? NEFF Sure I know what I'm saying. He gets up and grips her arm. NEFF We're going to do it together. We're going to do it right. And I'm the guy that knows how. There is fierce determination in his voice. His fingers dig into her arm. PHYLLIS Walter, you're hurting me. NEFF There isn't going to be any slip up. Nothing sloppy. Nothing weak. It's got to be perfect. He kisses her. NEFF You go now. He leads her towards the door. NEFF Call me tomorrow. But not from your house. From a booth. And watch your step. Every single minute. It's got to be perfect, understand. Straight down the line. They have now reached the door. Neff opens it. Phyllis stands in the doorway, her lips white. PHYLLIS Straight down the line. She goes quietly. He watches her down the corridor. Slowly he closes the door and goes back into the room. He moves across the window and opens it wide. He stands there, looking down into the dark street. From below comes the sound of a car starting and driving off. The rain drifts in against his face. He just stands there motionless. His mind is going a hundred miles a minute. FADE OUT: END OF SEQUENCE "A" SEQUENCE "B" FADE IN: B-1 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits slumped in his chair before the dictaphone. On the desk next to him stands a used record. The cylinder on the dictaphone is not turning. He is smoking a cigarette. He kills it then lifts the needle and slides off the record which is on the machine and stands it on end on the desk beside the other used record. He reaches down painfully to take another record from the rack beneath the dictaphone, looks at it against the light to make sure it has not been used, then slides it into place on the machine and resets the needle. He lifts the horn and resumes his dictation. NEFF The first thing we had to do was fix him up with that accident policy. I knew he wouldn't buy, but all I wanted was his signature on an application. So I had to make him sign without his knowing what he was signing. And I wanted a witness other than Phyllis to hear me give him a sales talk. I was trying to think with your brains, Keyes. I wanted all the answers ready for all the questions you were going to spring as soon as Dietrichson was dead. Neff takes a last drag on his cigarette and kills it by running it under the ledge of the dictaphone stand. He drops the stub on the floor and resumes. NEFF A couple of nights later I went to the house. Everything looked fine, except I didn't like the witness Phyllis had brought in. It was Dietrichson's daughter Lola, and it made me feel a little queer in the belly to have her right there in the room, playing Chinese checkers, as if nothing was going to happen. DISSOLVE: B-2 A BOARD OF CHINESE CHECKERS CAMERA WITHDRAWS AND GRADUALLY REVEALS THE DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM - NIGHT The checker-board is on the davenport between Phyllis and Lola. Mr. Dietrichson sits in a big easy chair. His coat and tie are over the back of the chair, and the evening paper is lying tumbled on the floor beside him. He is smoking a cigar with the band on it. He has a drink in front of him and several more inside him. In another chair sits Neff, his briefcase on the floor, leaning against his chair. He holds his rate book partly open, with a finger in it for a marker. He is going full swing. NEFF I suppose you realize, Mr. Dietrichson, that, not being an employee, you are not covered by the State Compensation Insurance Act. The only way you can protect yourself is by having a personal policy of your own. DIETRICHSON I know all about that. The next thing you'll tell me I need earthquake insurance and lightning insurance and hail insurance. Phyllis looks up from the checker-board and cuts in on the dialogue. Lola listens without much interest. PHYLLIS (To Dietrichson) If we bought all the insurance they can think up, we'd stay broke paying for it, wouldn't we, honey? DIETRICHSON What keeps us broke is you going out and buying five hats at a crack. Who needs a hat in California? NEFF I always say insurance is a lot like a hot water bottle. It looks kind of useless and silly hanging on the hook, but when you get that stomach ache in the middle of the night, it comes in mighty handy. DIETRICHSON Now you want to sell me a hot water bottle. NEFF Dollar for dollar, accident insurance is the cheapest coverage you can buy, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Maybe some other time, Mr. Neff. I had a tough day. NEFF Just as you say, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Suppose we just settle that automobile insurance tonight. NEFF Sure. All we need on that is for you to sign an application for renewal. Phyllis throws a quick glance at Neff. As she looks back she sees that Lola is staring down at her wrist watch. LOLA Phyllis, do you mind if we don't finish this game? It bores me stiff. PHYLLIS Got some thing better to do? LOLA Yes, I have. She gets up. LOLA (To Dietrichson) Father, is it all right if I run along now? DIETRICHSON Run along where? Who with? LOLA Just Anne. We're going roller skating. DIETRICHSON Anne who? LOLA Anne Matthews. PHYLLIS It's not that Nino Zachetti again? DIETRICHSON It better not be that Zachetti guy. If I ever catch you with that --- LOLA It's Anne Matthews, I told you. I also told you we're going roller skating. I'm meeting her at the corner of Vermont and Franklin -- the north- west corner, in case you're interested. And I'm late already. I hope that is all clear. Good night, Father. Good night, Phyllis. She starts to go. NEFF Good night, Miss Dietrichson. LOLA Oh, I'm sorry. Good night, Mr. -- NEFF Neff. LOLA Good night, Mr. Neff. PHYLLIS Now you're not going to take my car again. LOLA No thanks. I'd rather be dead. She goes out through the archway. DIETRICHSON A great little fighter for her weight. Dietrichson sucks down a big swallow of his drink. Neff has taken two blank forms from his briefcase. He puts the briefcase on Mr. Dietrichson's lap and lays the forms on top. Phyllis is watching closely. NEFF This is where you sign, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Sign what? NEFF The applications for your auto renewals. So you'll be protected until the new policies are issued. DIETRICHSON When will that be? NEFF In about a week. DIETRICHSON Just so I'm covered when I drive up North. Neff takes out his fountain pen. NEFF San Francisco, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Palo Alto. PHYLLIS He was a Stanford man, Mr. Neff. And he still goes to his class reunion every year. DIETRICHSON What's wrong with that? Can't I have a little fun even once a year? NEFF Great football school, Stanford. Did you play football, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Left guard. Almost made the varsity, too. Neff has unscrewed his fountain pen. He hands it to Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson puts on his glasses. NEFF On that bottom line, Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson signs. Neff's and Phyllis' eyes meet for a split second. NEFF

nettie

How many times the word 'nettie' appears in the text?

you, Walter. Get out of here before I throw my desk at you. NEFF I love you, too. He walks out, still grinning. A-35 EXT. OFFICES - TWELFTH FLOOR Neff comes out of Keys' office and walks back along the balcony. Activity of secretaries going in and out of doors, etc. Neff enters his own office. NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) I really did, too, you old crab, always yelling your fat head off, always sore at everyone. But behind the cigar ashes on your vest I kind of knew you had a heart as big as a house... Back in my office there was a phone message from Mrs. Dietrichson about the renewals. She didn't want me to come tomorrow evening. She wanted me to come Thursday afternoon at three-thirty instead. I had a lot of stuff lined up for that Thursday afternoon, including a trip down to Santa Monica to see a couple of live prospects about some group insurance. But I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson and the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg. A-36 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE Anderson, a salesman, sits at one of the desks, filling out a report. Neff enters, goes to his own desk. He looks down at some mail. On top there is a typewritten note. He reads it, sits down and leafs through his desk calendar. A-37 INSERT - CLOSEUP - CALENDAR PAGE Showing date: THURSDAY 23 May and five or six appointments penciled in tightly on the page. DISSOLVE TO: A-38 DIETRICHSON HOME - ENTRANCE HALL - (DAY) THE CAMERA PANS with Phyllis Dietrichson's feet and ankles as she comes down the stairs, her high heels clicking on the tiles. The anklet glistens on her leg as she moves. THE CAMERA PANS ON. Phyllis has reached the entrance hall, and as she walks toward the front door her whole body becomes visible. She wears a gay print dress with a wide sash over her hips. She opens the door. Outside is Neff, wearing a sport coat, flannel slacks. He takes his hat off. PHYLLIS Hello, Mr. Neff. He stands there with a little smile. PHYLLIS Aren't you coming in? NEFF I'm considering it. He comes in. PHYLLIS I hope you didn't mind my changing the appointment. Last night wasn't so convenient. NEFF That's okay. I was working on my stamp collection. She leads him toward living room. A-39 DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff come through archway. She heads toward a low tea table which stands in front of the davenport, with tall glasses, ice cubes, lemon, a pot of tea, etc. PHYLLIS I was just fixing some iced tea. Would you like a glass? NEFF Unless you have a bottle of beer that's not working. PHYLLIS There might be some. I never know what's in the ice box. (Calls) Nettie!... She pours herself a glass of tea. PHYLLIS About those renewals, Mr. Neff. I talked to my husband about it. NEFF You did? PHYLLIS Yes. He'll renew with you he told me. In fact, I thought he'd be here this afternoon. NEFF But he's not? PHYLLIS No. NEFF That's terrible. PHYLLIS (Calls again, impatiently) Nettie!... Nettie!... Oh, I forgot, it's the maid's day off. NEFF Don't bother, Mrs. Dietrichson. I'd like some iced tea very much. PHYLLIS Lemon? Sugar? NEFF Fix it your way. She fixes him a glass of tea while he is looking around. He slowly sits down. NEFF Seeing it's the maid's day off maybe there's something I can do for you. She hands him the tea. NEFF Like running the vacuum cleaner. PHYLLIS Fresh. NEFF I used to peddle vacuum cleaners. Not much money but you learn a lot about life. PHYLLIS I didn't think you'd learned it from a correspondence course. NEFF Where did you pick up this tea drinking? You're not English, are you? PHYLLIS No. Californian. Born right here in Los Angeles. NEFF They say native Californians all come from Iowa. PHYLLIS I wanted to ask you something, Mr. Neff. NEFF Make it Walter. PHYLLIS Walter. NEFF Right. PHYLLIS Tell me, Walter, on this insurance -- how much commission do you make? NEFF Twenty percent. Why? PHYLLIS I thought maybe I could throw a little more business your way. NEFF I can always use it. PHYLLIS I was thinking about my husband. I worry a lot about him, down in those oil fields. It's very dangerous. NEFF Not for an executive, is it? PHYLLIS He doesn't just sit behind a desk. He's right down there with the drilling crews. It's got me worried sick. NEFF You mean a crown block might fall on him some rainy night? PHYLLIS Please don't talk like that. NEFF But that's the idea. PHYLLIS The other day a casing line snapped and caught the foreman. He's in the hospital with a broken back. NEFF Bad. PHYLLIS It's got me jittery just thinking about it. Suppose something like that happened to my husband? NEFF It could. PHYLLIS Don't you think he ought to have accident insurance? NEFF Uh huh. PHYLLIS What kind of insurance could he have? NEFF Enough to cover doctors' and hospital bills. Say a hundred and twenty-five a week cash benefit. And he'd rate around fifty thousand capital sum. PHYLLIS Capital sum? What's that? NEFF That's if he got killed. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. PHYLLIS I suppose you have to think of everything in your business. NEFF Mr. Dietrichson would understand. I'm sure I could sell him on the idea of some accident protection. Why don't I talk to him about it. PHYLLIS You could try. But he's pretty tough going. NEFF They're all tough at first. PHYLLIS He's got a lot on his mind. He doesn't want to listen to anything except maybe a baseball game on the radio. Sometimes we sit all evening without saying a word to each other. NEFF Sounds pretty dull. Phyllis shrugs. PHYLLIS So I just sit and knit. NEFF Is that what you married him for? PHYLLIS Maybe I like the way his thumbs hold up the wool. NEFF Anytime his thumbs get tired -- PHYLLIS I want to ask you something, Mr. Neff. Could I get an accident policy for him -- without bothering him at all? NEFF How's that again. PHYLLIS That would make it easier for you, too. You wouldn't even have to talk to him. I have a little allowance of my own. I could pay for it and he needn't know anything about it. NEFF Wait a minute. Why shouldn't he know? PHYLLIS Because I know he doesn't want accident insurance. He's superstitious about it. NEFF A lot of people are. Funny, isn't it? PHYLLIS If there was a way to get it like that, all the worry would be over. You see what I mean, Walter? NEFF Sure. I've got good eyesight. You want him to have the policy without him knowing it. And that means without the insurance company knowing that he doesn't know. That's the set-up, isn't it? PHYLLIS Is there anything wrong with it? NEFF I think it's lovely. And then, some dark wet night, if that crown block fell on him -- PHYLLIS What crown block? NEFF Only sometimes they have to have a little help. They can't quite make it on their own. PHYLLIS I don't know what you're talking about. NEFF Of course, it doesn't have to be a crown block. It can be a car backing over him, or he can fall out of an upstairs window. Any little thing like that, as long as it's a morgue job. PHYLLIS Are you crazy? NEFF Not that crazy. Goodbye, Mrs. Dietrichson. He picks up his hat. PHYLLIS What's the matter? NEFF Look, baby, you can't get away with it. PHYLLIS Get away with what? NEFF You want to knock him off, don't you, baby. PHYLLIS That's a horrible thing to say! NEFF Who'd you think I was, anyway? A guy that walks into a good-looking dame's front parlor and says "Good afternoon, I sell accident insurance on husbands. You got one that's been around too long? Somebody you'd like to turn into a little hard cash? Just give me a smile and I'll help you collect." Boy, what a dope I must look to you! PHYLLIS I think you're rotten. NEFF I think you're swell. So long as I'm not your husband. PHYLLIS Get out of here. NEFF You bet I will. You bet I'll get out of here, baby. But quick. He goes out. She looks after him. A-40 EXT. DIETRICHSON HOME - (DAY) Neff bangs the front door shut, walks quickly to his car and drives away. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) So I let her have it, straight between the eyes. She didn't fool me for a minute, not this time. I knew I had hold of a redhot poker and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off. I stopped at a drive-in for a bottle of beer, the one I had wanted all along, only I wanted it worse now, to get rid of the sour taste of her iced tea, and everything that went with it. I didn't want to go back to the office, so I dropped by a bowling alley at Third and Western and rolled a few lines to get my mind thinking about something else for a while. A-41 DRIVE-IN RESTAURANT - (DAY) Shooting past Neff sitting behind the wheel of his car The car hop hangs a tray on the door and serves him a bottle of beer. DISSOLVE TO: A-42 INT. BOWLING ALLEY Neff bowling. He rolls the ball with an effort at concentration, but his mind is not really on the game. DISSOLVE TO: A-43 EXT. APARTMENT HOUSE - (DUSK) It is late afternoon. The apartment house is called the LOS OLIVOS APARTMENTS. It is a six-story building in the Normandie- Wilshire district, with a basement garage. THE CAMERA PANS UP the front of the building to the top floor windows, as a little rain starts to fall. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) I didn't feel like eating dinner when I left, and I didn't feel like a show, so I drove home, put the car away and went up to my apartment. A-44 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT - LIVING ROOM - (DUSK) It is a double apartment of conventional design, with kitchen, dinette, and bathroom, squarecut overstuffed borax furniture. Gas logs are lit in the imitation fireplace. Neff stands by the window with his coat off and his tie loose. Raindrops strike against the glass. He turns away impatiently, paces up and down past a caddy bag with golf clubs in it, pulls one out at random, makes a couple of short swings, throws the club on the couch, paces again. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) It had begun to rain outside and I watched it get dark and didn't even turn on the light. That didn't help me either. I was all twisted up inside, and I was still holding on to that red-hot poker. And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all, that the hook was too strong, that this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning. The doorbell rings. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) So at eight o'clock the bell would ring and I would know who it was without even having to think, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Neff goes to the door and opens it. PHYLLIS Hello. Neff just looks at her. PHYLLIS You forgot your hat this afternoon. She has nothing in her hands but her bag. NEFF Did I? He looks down at her hands. PHYLLIS Don't you want me to bring it in? NEFF Sure. Put it on the chair. She comes in. He closes the door. NEFF How did you know where I live? PHYLLIS It's in the phone book. Neff switches on the standing lamp. PHYLLIS It's raining. NEFF So it is. Peel off your coat and sit down. She starts to take off her coat. NEFF Your husband out? PHYLLIS Long Beach. They're spudding in a new well. He phoned he'd be late. About nine-thirty. He takes her coat and lays it across the back of a chair. PHYLLIS It's about time you said you're glad to see me. NEFF I knew you wouldn't leave it like that. PHYLLIS Like what? NEFF Like it was this afternoon. PHYLLIS I must have said something that gave you a terribly wrong impression. You must surely see that. You must never think anything like that about me, Walter. NEFF Okay. PHYLLIS It's not okay. Not if you don't believe me. NEFF What do you want me to do? PHYLLIS I want you to be nice to me. Like the first time you came to the house. NEFF It can't be like the first time. Something has happened. PHYLLIS I know it has. It's happened to us. NEFF That's what I mean. Phyllis has moved over to the window. She stares out through the wet window-pane. NEFF What's the matter now? PHYLLIS I feel as if he was watching me. Not that he cares about me. Not any more. But he keeps me on a leash. So tight I can't breathe. I'm scared. NEFF What of? He's in Long Beach, isn't he? PHYLLIS I oughtn't to have come. NEFF Maybe you oughtn't. PHYLLIS You want me to go? NEFF If you want to. PHYLLIS Right now? NEFF Sure. Right now. By this time, he has hold of her wrist. He draws her to him slowly and kisses her. Her arms tighten around him. After a moment he pulls his head back, still holding her close. NEFF How were you going to do it? PHYLLIS Do what? NEFF Kill him. PHYLLIS Walter, for the last time -- She tries to jerk away but he holds her and kisses her again. NEFF I'm crazy about you, baby. PHYLLIS I'm crazy about you, Walter. NEFF That perfume on your hair. What's the name of it? PHYLLIS Something French. I bought it down at Ensenada. NEFF We ought to have some of that pink wine to go with it. The kind that bubbles. But all I have is bourbon. PHYLLIS Bourbon is fine, Walter. He lets her go and moves toward the dinette. A-45 THE DINETTE AND KITCHEN It contains a small table and some chairs. A low glass-and- china cabinet is built between the dinette and kitchen, leaving a space like a doorway. The kitchen is the usual apartment house kitchen, with stove, ice-box, sink, etc. It is quite small. Neff goes to the ice-box and Phyllis drifts in after him. NEFF Soda? PHYLLIS Plain water, please. NEFF Get a couple of glasses, will you. He points at the china closet. He has taken a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator and is holding it under the hot- water faucet. NEFF You know, about six months ago a guy slipped on the soap in his bathtub and knocked himself cold and drowned. Only he had accident insurance. So they had an autopsy and she didn't get away with it. Phyllis has the glasses now. She hands them to him. He dumps some ice cubes into the glasses. PHYLLIS Who didn't? NEFF His wife. He reaches for the whiskey bottle on top of the china closet. NEFF And there was another case where a guy was found shot and his wife said he was cleaning a gun and his stomach got in the way. All she collected was a three-to-ten stretch in Tehachapi. PHYLLIS Perhaps it was worth it to her. Neff hands her a glass. NEFF See if you can carry this as far as the living room. They move back toward the living room. A-46 LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff go toward the davenport. She is sipping her drink and looking around. PHYLLIS It's nice here, Walter. Who takes care of it for you? NEFF A colored woman comes in twice a week. PHYLLIS You get your own breakfast? NEFF Once in a while I squeeze a grapefruit. The rest I get at the corner drugstore. They sit on the davenport, fairly close together. PHYLLIS It sounds wonderful. Just strangers beside you. You don't know them. You don't hate them. You don't have to sit across the table and smile at him and that daughter of his every morning of your life. NEFF What daughter? Oh, that little girl on the piano. PHYLLIS Yes. Lola. She lives with us. He thinks a lot more of her than he does of me. NEFF Ever think of a divorce? PHYLLIS He wouldn't give me a divorce. NEFF I suppose because it would cost him money. PHYLLIS He hasn't got any money. Not since he went into the oil business. NEFF But he had when you married him? PHYLLIS Yes, he had. And I wanted a home. Why not? But that wasn't the only reason. I was his wife's nurse. She was sick for a long time. When she died, he was all broken up. I pitied him so. NEFF And now you hate him. PHYLLIS Yes, Walter. He's so mean to me. Every-time I buy a dress or a pair of shoes he yells his head off. He won't let me go anywhere. He keeps me shut up. He's always been mean to me. Even his life insurance all goes to that daughter of his. That Lola. NEFF Nothing for you at all, huh? PHYLLIS No. And nothing is just what I'm worth to him. NEFF So you lie awake in the dark and listen to him snore and get ideas. PHYLLIS Walter, I don't want to kill him. I never did. Not even when he gets drunk and slaps my face. NEFF Only sometimes you wish he was dead. PHYLLIS Perhaps I do. NEFF And you wish it was an accident, and you had that policy. For fifty thousand dollars. Is that it? PHYLLIS Perhaps that too. She takes a long drink. PHYLLIS The other night we drove home from a party. He was drunk again. When we got into the garage he just sat there with his head on the steering wheel and the motor still running. And I thought what it would be like if I didn't switch it off, just closed the garage door and left him there. NEFF I'll tell you what it would be like, if you had that accident policy, and tried to pull a monoxide job. We have a guy in our office named Keyes. For him a set-up like that would be just like a slice of rare roast beef. In three minutes he'd know it wasn't an accident. In ten minutes you'd be sitting under the hot lights. In half an hour you'd be signing your name to a confession. PHYLLIS But Walter, I didn't do it. I'm not going to do it. NEFF Not if there's an insurance company in the picture, baby. So long as you're honest they'll pay you with a smile, but you just try to pull something like that and you'll find out. They know more tricks than a carload of monkeys. And if there's a death mixed up in it, you haven't got a prayer. They'll hang you as sure as ten dimes will buy a dollar, baby. She begins to cry. He puts his arms around her and kisses her. NEFF Just stop thinking about it, will you. He holds her tight. Their heads touch, side by side, THE CAMERA SLOWLY STARTS TO RECEDE as we DISSOLVE TO: A-47 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits in the swivel chair, talking into the dictaphone. He has hooked the wastebasket under his feet to sit more comfortably. As he talks, a little cough shakes him now and then. NEFF So we just sat there, and she kept on crying softly, like the rain on the window, and we didn't say anything. Maybe she had stopped thinking about it, but I hadn't. I couldn't. Because it all tied up with something I had been thinking about for years, since long before I ever ran into Phyllis Dietrichson. Because, in this business you can't sleep for trying to figure out the tricks they could pull on you. You're like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don't crook the house. And then one night, you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself. And do it smart. Because you've got that wheel right under your hands. And you know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out in front, a shill to put down the bet. And suddenly the doorbell rings and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you... Look, Keyes, I'm not trying to whitewash myself. I fought it, only maybe I didn't fight it hard enough. The stakes were fifty thousand dollars, but they were the life of a man, too, a man who'd never done me any dirt. Except he was married to a woman he didn't care anything about, and I did... DISSOLVE TO: A-48 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT LIVING ROOM CAMERA MOVES SLOWLY towards the davenport again. Neff sits in one corner with his feet on the low table. He is smoking his cigarette and staring at the ceiling. Phyllis has been sitting fairly close to him. She gets up slowly and crosses to her rain coat, lying over a chair. PHYLLIS I've got to go now, Walter. Neff does not answer. He keeps on staring at the ceiling. She starts to put the rain coat on. PHYLLIS Will you call me, Walter? Neff still does not answer. PHYLLIS Walter! He looks at her slowly, almost absently. PHYLLIS I hate him. I loathe going back to him. You believe me, don't you, Walter? NEFF Sure I believe you. PHYLLIS I can't stand it anymore. What if they did hang me? NEFF You're not going to hang, baby. PHYLLIS It's better than going on this way. NEFF -- you're not going to hang, baby. Not ever. Because you're going to do it the smart way. Because I'm going to help you. PHYLLIS You! NEFF Me. PHYLLIS Do you know what you're saying? NEFF Sure I know what I'm saying. He gets up and grips her arm. NEFF We're going to do it together. We're going to do it right. And I'm the guy that knows how. There is fierce determination in his voice. His fingers dig into her arm. PHYLLIS Walter, you're hurting me. NEFF There isn't going to be any slip up. Nothing sloppy. Nothing weak. It's got to be perfect. He kisses her. NEFF You go now. He leads her towards the door. NEFF Call me tomorrow. But not from your house. From a booth. And watch your step. Every single minute. It's got to be perfect, understand. Straight down the line. They have now reached the door. Neff opens it. Phyllis stands in the doorway, her lips white. PHYLLIS Straight down the line. She goes quietly. He watches her down the corridor. Slowly he closes the door and goes back into the room. He moves across the window and opens it wide. He stands there, looking down into the dark street. From below comes the sound of a car starting and driving off. The rain drifts in against his face. He just stands there motionless. His mind is going a hundred miles a minute. FADE OUT: END OF SEQUENCE "A" SEQUENCE "B" FADE IN: B-1 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits slumped in his chair before the dictaphone. On the desk next to him stands a used record. The cylinder on the dictaphone is not turning. He is smoking a cigarette. He kills it then lifts the needle and slides off the record which is on the machine and stands it on end on the desk beside the other used record. He reaches down painfully to take another record from the rack beneath the dictaphone, looks at it against the light to make sure it has not been used, then slides it into place on the machine and resets the needle. He lifts the horn and resumes his dictation. NEFF The first thing we had to do was fix him up with that accident policy. I knew he wouldn't buy, but all I wanted was his signature on an application. So I had to make him sign without his knowing what he was signing. And I wanted a witness other than Phyllis to hear me give him a sales talk. I was trying to think with your brains, Keyes. I wanted all the answers ready for all the questions you were going to spring as soon as Dietrichson was dead. Neff takes a last drag on his cigarette and kills it by running it under the ledge of the dictaphone stand. He drops the stub on the floor and resumes. NEFF A couple of nights later I went to the house. Everything looked fine, except I didn't like the witness Phyllis had brought in. It was Dietrichson's daughter Lola, and it made me feel a little queer in the belly to have her right there in the room, playing Chinese checkers, as if nothing was going to happen. DISSOLVE: B-2 A BOARD OF CHINESE CHECKERS CAMERA WITHDRAWS AND GRADUALLY REVEALS THE DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM - NIGHT The checker-board is on the davenport between Phyllis and Lola. Mr. Dietrichson sits in a big easy chair. His coat and tie are over the back of the chair, and the evening paper is lying tumbled on the floor beside him. He is smoking a cigar with the band on it. He has a drink in front of him and several more inside him. In another chair sits Neff, his briefcase on the floor, leaning against his chair. He holds his rate book partly open, with a finger in it for a marker. He is going full swing. NEFF I suppose you realize, Mr. Dietrichson, that, not being an employee, you are not covered by the State Compensation Insurance Act. The only way you can protect yourself is by having a personal policy of your own. DIETRICHSON I know all about that. The next thing you'll tell me I need earthquake insurance and lightning insurance and hail insurance. Phyllis looks up from the checker-board and cuts in on the dialogue. Lola listens without much interest. PHYLLIS (To Dietrichson) If we bought all the insurance they can think up, we'd stay broke paying for it, wouldn't we, honey? DIETRICHSON What keeps us broke is you going out and buying five hats at a crack. Who needs a hat in California? NEFF I always say insurance is a lot like a hot water bottle. It looks kind of useless and silly hanging on the hook, but when you get that stomach ache in the middle of the night, it comes in mighty handy. DIETRICHSON Now you want to sell me a hot water bottle. NEFF Dollar for dollar, accident insurance is the cheapest coverage you can buy, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Maybe some other time, Mr. Neff. I had a tough day. NEFF Just as you say, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Suppose we just settle that automobile insurance tonight. NEFF Sure. All we need on that is for you to sign an application for renewal. Phyllis throws a quick glance at Neff. As she looks back she sees that Lola is staring down at her wrist watch. LOLA Phyllis, do you mind if we don't finish this game? It bores me stiff. PHYLLIS Got some thing better to do? LOLA Yes, I have. She gets up. LOLA (To Dietrichson) Father, is it all right if I run along now? DIETRICHSON Run along where? Who with? LOLA Just Anne. We're going roller skating. DIETRICHSON Anne who? LOLA Anne Matthews. PHYLLIS It's not that Nino Zachetti again? DIETRICHSON It better not be that Zachetti guy. If I ever catch you with that --- LOLA It's Anne Matthews, I told you. I also told you we're going roller skating. I'm meeting her at the corner of Vermont and Franklin -- the north- west corner, in case you're interested. And I'm late already. I hope that is all clear. Good night, Father. Good night, Phyllis. She starts to go. NEFF Good night, Miss Dietrichson. LOLA Oh, I'm sorry. Good night, Mr. -- NEFF Neff. LOLA Good night, Mr. Neff. PHYLLIS Now you're not going to take my car again. LOLA No thanks. I'd rather be dead. She goes out through the archway. DIETRICHSON A great little fighter for her weight. Dietrichson sucks down a big swallow of his drink. Neff has taken two blank forms from his briefcase. He puts the briefcase on Mr. Dietrichson's lap and lays the forms on top. Phyllis is watching closely. NEFF This is where you sign, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Sign what? NEFF The applications for your auto renewals. So you'll be protected until the new policies are issued. DIETRICHSON When will that be? NEFF In about a week. DIETRICHSON Just so I'm covered when I drive up North. Neff takes out his fountain pen. NEFF San Francisco, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Palo Alto. PHYLLIS He was a Stanford man, Mr. Neff. And he still goes to his class reunion every year. DIETRICHSON What's wrong with that? Can't I have a little fun even once a year? NEFF Great football school, Stanford. Did you play football, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Left guard. Almost made the varsity, too. Neff has unscrewed his fountain pen. He hands it to Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson puts on his glasses. NEFF On that bottom line, Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson signs. Neff's and Phyllis' eyes meet for a split second. NEFF

crab

How many times the word 'crab' appears in the text?

you, Walter. Get out of here before I throw my desk at you. NEFF I love you, too. He walks out, still grinning. A-35 EXT. OFFICES - TWELFTH FLOOR Neff comes out of Keys' office and walks back along the balcony. Activity of secretaries going in and out of doors, etc. Neff enters his own office. NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) I really did, too, you old crab, always yelling your fat head off, always sore at everyone. But behind the cigar ashes on your vest I kind of knew you had a heart as big as a house... Back in my office there was a phone message from Mrs. Dietrichson about the renewals. She didn't want me to come tomorrow evening. She wanted me to come Thursday afternoon at three-thirty instead. I had a lot of stuff lined up for that Thursday afternoon, including a trip down to Santa Monica to see a couple of live prospects about some group insurance. But I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson and the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg. A-36 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE Anderson, a salesman, sits at one of the desks, filling out a report. Neff enters, goes to his own desk. He looks down at some mail. On top there is a typewritten note. He reads it, sits down and leafs through his desk calendar. A-37 INSERT - CLOSEUP - CALENDAR PAGE Showing date: THURSDAY 23 May and five or six appointments penciled in tightly on the page. DISSOLVE TO: A-38 DIETRICHSON HOME - ENTRANCE HALL - (DAY) THE CAMERA PANS with Phyllis Dietrichson's feet and ankles as she comes down the stairs, her high heels clicking on the tiles. The anklet glistens on her leg as she moves. THE CAMERA PANS ON. Phyllis has reached the entrance hall, and as she walks toward the front door her whole body becomes visible. She wears a gay print dress with a wide sash over her hips. She opens the door. Outside is Neff, wearing a sport coat, flannel slacks. He takes his hat off. PHYLLIS Hello, Mr. Neff. He stands there with a little smile. PHYLLIS Aren't you coming in? NEFF I'm considering it. He comes in. PHYLLIS I hope you didn't mind my changing the appointment. Last night wasn't so convenient. NEFF That's okay. I was working on my stamp collection. She leads him toward living room. A-39 DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff come through archway. She heads toward a low tea table which stands in front of the davenport, with tall glasses, ice cubes, lemon, a pot of tea, etc. PHYLLIS I was just fixing some iced tea. Would you like a glass? NEFF Unless you have a bottle of beer that's not working. PHYLLIS There might be some. I never know what's in the ice box. (Calls) Nettie!... She pours herself a glass of tea. PHYLLIS About those renewals, Mr. Neff. I talked to my husband about it. NEFF You did? PHYLLIS Yes. He'll renew with you he told me. In fact, I thought he'd be here this afternoon. NEFF But he's not? PHYLLIS No. NEFF That's terrible. PHYLLIS (Calls again, impatiently) Nettie!... Nettie!... Oh, I forgot, it's the maid's day off. NEFF Don't bother, Mrs. Dietrichson. I'd like some iced tea very much. PHYLLIS Lemon? Sugar? NEFF Fix it your way. She fixes him a glass of tea while he is looking around. He slowly sits down. NEFF Seeing it's the maid's day off maybe there's something I can do for you. She hands him the tea. NEFF Like running the vacuum cleaner. PHYLLIS Fresh. NEFF I used to peddle vacuum cleaners. Not much money but you learn a lot about life. PHYLLIS I didn't think you'd learned it from a correspondence course. NEFF Where did you pick up this tea drinking? You're not English, are you? PHYLLIS No. Californian. Born right here in Los Angeles. NEFF They say native Californians all come from Iowa. PHYLLIS I wanted to ask you something, Mr. Neff. NEFF Make it Walter. PHYLLIS Walter. NEFF Right. PHYLLIS Tell me, Walter, on this insurance -- how much commission do you make? NEFF Twenty percent. Why? PHYLLIS I thought maybe I could throw a little more business your way. NEFF I can always use it. PHYLLIS I was thinking about my husband. I worry a lot about him, down in those oil fields. It's very dangerous. NEFF Not for an executive, is it? PHYLLIS He doesn't just sit behind a desk. He's right down there with the drilling crews. It's got me worried sick. NEFF You mean a crown block might fall on him some rainy night? PHYLLIS Please don't talk like that. NEFF But that's the idea. PHYLLIS The other day a casing line snapped and caught the foreman. He's in the hospital with a broken back. NEFF Bad. PHYLLIS It's got me jittery just thinking about it. Suppose something like that happened to my husband? NEFF It could. PHYLLIS Don't you think he ought to have accident insurance? NEFF Uh huh. PHYLLIS What kind of insurance could he have? NEFF Enough to cover doctors' and hospital bills. Say a hundred and twenty-five a week cash benefit. And he'd rate around fifty thousand capital sum. PHYLLIS Capital sum? What's that? NEFF That's if he got killed. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. PHYLLIS I suppose you have to think of everything in your business. NEFF Mr. Dietrichson would understand. I'm sure I could sell him on the idea of some accident protection. Why don't I talk to him about it. PHYLLIS You could try. But he's pretty tough going. NEFF They're all tough at first. PHYLLIS He's got a lot on his mind. He doesn't want to listen to anything except maybe a baseball game on the radio. Sometimes we sit all evening without saying a word to each other. NEFF Sounds pretty dull. Phyllis shrugs. PHYLLIS So I just sit and knit. NEFF Is that what you married him for? PHYLLIS Maybe I like the way his thumbs hold up the wool. NEFF Anytime his thumbs get tired -- PHYLLIS I want to ask you something, Mr. Neff. Could I get an accident policy for him -- without bothering him at all? NEFF How's that again. PHYLLIS That would make it easier for you, too. You wouldn't even have to talk to him. I have a little allowance of my own. I could pay for it and he needn't know anything about it. NEFF Wait a minute. Why shouldn't he know? PHYLLIS Because I know he doesn't want accident insurance. He's superstitious about it. NEFF A lot of people are. Funny, isn't it? PHYLLIS If there was a way to get it like that, all the worry would be over. You see what I mean, Walter? NEFF Sure. I've got good eyesight. You want him to have the policy without him knowing it. And that means without the insurance company knowing that he doesn't know. That's the set-up, isn't it? PHYLLIS Is there anything wrong with it? NEFF I think it's lovely. And then, some dark wet night, if that crown block fell on him -- PHYLLIS What crown block? NEFF Only sometimes they have to have a little help. They can't quite make it on their own. PHYLLIS I don't know what you're talking about. NEFF Of course, it doesn't have to be a crown block. It can be a car backing over him, or he can fall out of an upstairs window. Any little thing like that, as long as it's a morgue job. PHYLLIS Are you crazy? NEFF Not that crazy. Goodbye, Mrs. Dietrichson. He picks up his hat. PHYLLIS What's the matter? NEFF Look, baby, you can't get away with it. PHYLLIS Get away with what? NEFF You want to knock him off, don't you, baby. PHYLLIS That's a horrible thing to say! NEFF Who'd you think I was, anyway? A guy that walks into a good-looking dame's front parlor and says "Good afternoon, I sell accident insurance on husbands. You got one that's been around too long? Somebody you'd like to turn into a little hard cash? Just give me a smile and I'll help you collect." Boy, what a dope I must look to you! PHYLLIS I think you're rotten. NEFF I think you're swell. So long as I'm not your husband. PHYLLIS Get out of here. NEFF You bet I will. You bet I'll get out of here, baby. But quick. He goes out. She looks after him. A-40 EXT. DIETRICHSON HOME - (DAY) Neff bangs the front door shut, walks quickly to his car and drives away. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) So I let her have it, straight between the eyes. She didn't fool me for a minute, not this time. I knew I had hold of a redhot poker and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off. I stopped at a drive-in for a bottle of beer, the one I had wanted all along, only I wanted it worse now, to get rid of the sour taste of her iced tea, and everything that went with it. I didn't want to go back to the office, so I dropped by a bowling alley at Third and Western and rolled a few lines to get my mind thinking about something else for a while. A-41 DRIVE-IN RESTAURANT - (DAY) Shooting past Neff sitting behind the wheel of his car The car hop hangs a tray on the door and serves him a bottle of beer. DISSOLVE TO: A-42 INT. BOWLING ALLEY Neff bowling. He rolls the ball with an effort at concentration, but his mind is not really on the game. DISSOLVE TO: A-43 EXT. APARTMENT HOUSE - (DUSK) It is late afternoon. The apartment house is called the LOS OLIVOS APARTMENTS. It is a six-story building in the Normandie- Wilshire district, with a basement garage. THE CAMERA PANS UP the front of the building to the top floor windows, as a little rain starts to fall. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) I didn't feel like eating dinner when I left, and I didn't feel like a show, so I drove home, put the car away and went up to my apartment. A-44 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT - LIVING ROOM - (DUSK) It is a double apartment of conventional design, with kitchen, dinette, and bathroom, squarecut overstuffed borax furniture. Gas logs are lit in the imitation fireplace. Neff stands by the window with his coat off and his tie loose. Raindrops strike against the glass. He turns away impatiently, paces up and down past a caddy bag with golf clubs in it, pulls one out at random, makes a couple of short swings, throws the club on the couch, paces again. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) It had begun to rain outside and I watched it get dark and didn't even turn on the light. That didn't help me either. I was all twisted up inside, and I was still holding on to that red-hot poker. And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all, that the hook was too strong, that this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning. The doorbell rings. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) So at eight o'clock the bell would ring and I would know who it was without even having to think, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Neff goes to the door and opens it. PHYLLIS Hello. Neff just looks at her. PHYLLIS You forgot your hat this afternoon. She has nothing in her hands but her bag. NEFF Did I? He looks down at her hands. PHYLLIS Don't you want me to bring it in? NEFF Sure. Put it on the chair. She comes in. He closes the door. NEFF How did you know where I live? PHYLLIS It's in the phone book. Neff switches on the standing lamp. PHYLLIS It's raining. NEFF So it is. Peel off your coat and sit down. She starts to take off her coat. NEFF Your husband out? PHYLLIS Long Beach. They're spudding in a new well. He phoned he'd be late. About nine-thirty. He takes her coat and lays it across the back of a chair. PHYLLIS It's about time you said you're glad to see me. NEFF I knew you wouldn't leave it like that. PHYLLIS Like what? NEFF Like it was this afternoon. PHYLLIS I must have said something that gave you a terribly wrong impression. You must surely see that. You must never think anything like that about me, Walter. NEFF Okay. PHYLLIS It's not okay. Not if you don't believe me. NEFF What do you want me to do? PHYLLIS I want you to be nice to me. Like the first time you came to the house. NEFF It can't be like the first time. Something has happened. PHYLLIS I know it has. It's happened to us. NEFF That's what I mean. Phyllis has moved over to the window. She stares out through the wet window-pane. NEFF What's the matter now? PHYLLIS I feel as if he was watching me. Not that he cares about me. Not any more. But he keeps me on a leash. So tight I can't breathe. I'm scared. NEFF What of? He's in Long Beach, isn't he? PHYLLIS I oughtn't to have come. NEFF Maybe you oughtn't. PHYLLIS You want me to go? NEFF If you want to. PHYLLIS Right now? NEFF Sure. Right now. By this time, he has hold of her wrist. He draws her to him slowly and kisses her. Her arms tighten around him. After a moment he pulls his head back, still holding her close. NEFF How were you going to do it? PHYLLIS Do what? NEFF Kill him. PHYLLIS Walter, for the last time -- She tries to jerk away but he holds her and kisses her again. NEFF I'm crazy about you, baby. PHYLLIS I'm crazy about you, Walter. NEFF That perfume on your hair. What's the name of it? PHYLLIS Something French. I bought it down at Ensenada. NEFF We ought to have some of that pink wine to go with it. The kind that bubbles. But all I have is bourbon. PHYLLIS Bourbon is fine, Walter. He lets her go and moves toward the dinette. A-45 THE DINETTE AND KITCHEN It contains a small table and some chairs. A low glass-and- china cabinet is built between the dinette and kitchen, leaving a space like a doorway. The kitchen is the usual apartment house kitchen, with stove, ice-box, sink, etc. It is quite small. Neff goes to the ice-box and Phyllis drifts in after him. NEFF Soda? PHYLLIS Plain water, please. NEFF Get a couple of glasses, will you. He points at the china closet. He has taken a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator and is holding it under the hot- water faucet. NEFF You know, about six months ago a guy slipped on the soap in his bathtub and knocked himself cold and drowned. Only he had accident insurance. So they had an autopsy and she didn't get away with it. Phyllis has the glasses now. She hands them to him. He dumps some ice cubes into the glasses. PHYLLIS Who didn't? NEFF His wife. He reaches for the whiskey bottle on top of the china closet. NEFF And there was another case where a guy was found shot and his wife said he was cleaning a gun and his stomach got in the way. All she collected was a three-to-ten stretch in Tehachapi. PHYLLIS Perhaps it was worth it to her. Neff hands her a glass. NEFF See if you can carry this as far as the living room. They move back toward the living room. A-46 LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff go toward the davenport. She is sipping her drink and looking around. PHYLLIS It's nice here, Walter. Who takes care of it for you? NEFF A colored woman comes in twice a week. PHYLLIS You get your own breakfast? NEFF Once in a while I squeeze a grapefruit. The rest I get at the corner drugstore. They sit on the davenport, fairly close together. PHYLLIS It sounds wonderful. Just strangers beside you. You don't know them. You don't hate them. You don't have to sit across the table and smile at him and that daughter of his every morning of your life. NEFF What daughter? Oh, that little girl on the piano. PHYLLIS Yes. Lola. She lives with us. He thinks a lot more of her than he does of me. NEFF Ever think of a divorce? PHYLLIS He wouldn't give me a divorce. NEFF I suppose because it would cost him money. PHYLLIS He hasn't got any money. Not since he went into the oil business. NEFF But he had when you married him? PHYLLIS Yes, he had. And I wanted a home. Why not? But that wasn't the only reason. I was his wife's nurse. She was sick for a long time. When she died, he was all broken up. I pitied him so. NEFF And now you hate him. PHYLLIS Yes, Walter. He's so mean to me. Every-time I buy a dress or a pair of shoes he yells his head off. He won't let me go anywhere. He keeps me shut up. He's always been mean to me. Even his life insurance all goes to that daughter of his. That Lola. NEFF Nothing for you at all, huh? PHYLLIS No. And nothing is just what I'm worth to him. NEFF So you lie awake in the dark and listen to him snore and get ideas. PHYLLIS Walter, I don't want to kill him. I never did. Not even when he gets drunk and slaps my face. NEFF Only sometimes you wish he was dead. PHYLLIS Perhaps I do. NEFF And you wish it was an accident, and you had that policy. For fifty thousand dollars. Is that it? PHYLLIS Perhaps that too. She takes a long drink. PHYLLIS The other night we drove home from a party. He was drunk again. When we got into the garage he just sat there with his head on the steering wheel and the motor still running. And I thought what it would be like if I didn't switch it off, just closed the garage door and left him there. NEFF I'll tell you what it would be like, if you had that accident policy, and tried to pull a monoxide job. We have a guy in our office named Keyes. For him a set-up like that would be just like a slice of rare roast beef. In three minutes he'd know it wasn't an accident. In ten minutes you'd be sitting under the hot lights. In half an hour you'd be signing your name to a confession. PHYLLIS But Walter, I didn't do it. I'm not going to do it. NEFF Not if there's an insurance company in the picture, baby. So long as you're honest they'll pay you with a smile, but you just try to pull something like that and you'll find out. They know more tricks than a carload of monkeys. And if there's a death mixed up in it, you haven't got a prayer. They'll hang you as sure as ten dimes will buy a dollar, baby. She begins to cry. He puts his arms around her and kisses her. NEFF Just stop thinking about it, will you. He holds her tight. Their heads touch, side by side, THE CAMERA SLOWLY STARTS TO RECEDE as we DISSOLVE TO: A-47 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits in the swivel chair, talking into the dictaphone. He has hooked the wastebasket under his feet to sit more comfortably. As he talks, a little cough shakes him now and then. NEFF So we just sat there, and she kept on crying softly, like the rain on the window, and we didn't say anything. Maybe she had stopped thinking about it, but I hadn't. I couldn't. Because it all tied up with something I had been thinking about for years, since long before I ever ran into Phyllis Dietrichson. Because, in this business you can't sleep for trying to figure out the tricks they could pull on you. You're like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don't crook the house. And then one night, you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself. And do it smart. Because you've got that wheel right under your hands. And you know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out in front, a shill to put down the bet. And suddenly the doorbell rings and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you... Look, Keyes, I'm not trying to whitewash myself. I fought it, only maybe I didn't fight it hard enough. The stakes were fifty thousand dollars, but they were the life of a man, too, a man who'd never done me any dirt. Except he was married to a woman he didn't care anything about, and I did... DISSOLVE TO: A-48 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT LIVING ROOM CAMERA MOVES SLOWLY towards the davenport again. Neff sits in one corner with his feet on the low table. He is smoking his cigarette and staring at the ceiling. Phyllis has been sitting fairly close to him. She gets up slowly and crosses to her rain coat, lying over a chair. PHYLLIS I've got to go now, Walter. Neff does not answer. He keeps on staring at the ceiling. She starts to put the rain coat on. PHYLLIS Will you call me, Walter? Neff still does not answer. PHYLLIS Walter! He looks at her slowly, almost absently. PHYLLIS I hate him. I loathe going back to him. You believe me, don't you, Walter? NEFF Sure I believe you. PHYLLIS I can't stand it anymore. What if they did hang me? NEFF You're not going to hang, baby. PHYLLIS It's better than going on this way. NEFF -- you're not going to hang, baby. Not ever. Because you're going to do it the smart way. Because I'm going to help you. PHYLLIS You! NEFF Me. PHYLLIS Do you know what you're saying? NEFF Sure I know what I'm saying. He gets up and grips her arm. NEFF We're going to do it together. We're going to do it right. And I'm the guy that knows how. There is fierce determination in his voice. His fingers dig into her arm. PHYLLIS Walter, you're hurting me. NEFF There isn't going to be any slip up. Nothing sloppy. Nothing weak. It's got to be perfect. He kisses her. NEFF You go now. He leads her towards the door. NEFF Call me tomorrow. But not from your house. From a booth. And watch your step. Every single minute. It's got to be perfect, understand. Straight down the line. They have now reached the door. Neff opens it. Phyllis stands in the doorway, her lips white. PHYLLIS Straight down the line. She goes quietly. He watches her down the corridor. Slowly he closes the door and goes back into the room. He moves across the window and opens it wide. He stands there, looking down into the dark street. From below comes the sound of a car starting and driving off. The rain drifts in against his face. He just stands there motionless. His mind is going a hundred miles a minute. FADE OUT: END OF SEQUENCE "A" SEQUENCE "B" FADE IN: B-1 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits slumped in his chair before the dictaphone. On the desk next to him stands a used record. The cylinder on the dictaphone is not turning. He is smoking a cigarette. He kills it then lifts the needle and slides off the record which is on the machine and stands it on end on the desk beside the other used record. He reaches down painfully to take another record from the rack beneath the dictaphone, looks at it against the light to make sure it has not been used, then slides it into place on the machine and resets the needle. He lifts the horn and resumes his dictation. NEFF The first thing we had to do was fix him up with that accident policy. I knew he wouldn't buy, but all I wanted was his signature on an application. So I had to make him sign without his knowing what he was signing. And I wanted a witness other than Phyllis to hear me give him a sales talk. I was trying to think with your brains, Keyes. I wanted all the answers ready for all the questions you were going to spring as soon as Dietrichson was dead. Neff takes a last drag on his cigarette and kills it by running it under the ledge of the dictaphone stand. He drops the stub on the floor and resumes. NEFF A couple of nights later I went to the house. Everything looked fine, except I didn't like the witness Phyllis had brought in. It was Dietrichson's daughter Lola, and it made me feel a little queer in the belly to have her right there in the room, playing Chinese checkers, as if nothing was going to happen. DISSOLVE: B-2 A BOARD OF CHINESE CHECKERS CAMERA WITHDRAWS AND GRADUALLY REVEALS THE DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM - NIGHT The checker-board is on the davenport between Phyllis and Lola. Mr. Dietrichson sits in a big easy chair. His coat and tie are over the back of the chair, and the evening paper is lying tumbled on the floor beside him. He is smoking a cigar with the band on it. He has a drink in front of him and several more inside him. In another chair sits Neff, his briefcase on the floor, leaning against his chair. He holds his rate book partly open, with a finger in it for a marker. He is going full swing. NEFF I suppose you realize, Mr. Dietrichson, that, not being an employee, you are not covered by the State Compensation Insurance Act. The only way you can protect yourself is by having a personal policy of your own. DIETRICHSON I know all about that. The next thing you'll tell me I need earthquake insurance and lightning insurance and hail insurance. Phyllis looks up from the checker-board and cuts in on the dialogue. Lola listens without much interest. PHYLLIS (To Dietrichson) If we bought all the insurance they can think up, we'd stay broke paying for it, wouldn't we, honey? DIETRICHSON What keeps us broke is you going out and buying five hats at a crack. Who needs a hat in California? NEFF I always say insurance is a lot like a hot water bottle. It looks kind of useless and silly hanging on the hook, but when you get that stomach ache in the middle of the night, it comes in mighty handy. DIETRICHSON Now you want to sell me a hot water bottle. NEFF Dollar for dollar, accident insurance is the cheapest coverage you can buy, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Maybe some other time, Mr. Neff. I had a tough day. NEFF Just as you say, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Suppose we just settle that automobile insurance tonight. NEFF Sure. All we need on that is for you to sign an application for renewal. Phyllis throws a quick glance at Neff. As she looks back she sees that Lola is staring down at her wrist watch. LOLA Phyllis, do you mind if we don't finish this game? It bores me stiff. PHYLLIS Got some thing better to do? LOLA Yes, I have. She gets up. LOLA (To Dietrichson) Father, is it all right if I run along now? DIETRICHSON Run along where? Who with? LOLA Just Anne. We're going roller skating. DIETRICHSON Anne who? LOLA Anne Matthews. PHYLLIS It's not that Nino Zachetti again? DIETRICHSON It better not be that Zachetti guy. If I ever catch you with that --- LOLA It's Anne Matthews, I told you. I also told you we're going roller skating. I'm meeting her at the corner of Vermont and Franklin -- the north- west corner, in case you're interested. And I'm late already. I hope that is all clear. Good night, Father. Good night, Phyllis. She starts to go. NEFF Good night, Miss Dietrichson. LOLA Oh, I'm sorry. Good night, Mr. -- NEFF Neff. LOLA Good night, Mr. Neff. PHYLLIS Now you're not going to take my car again. LOLA No thanks. I'd rather be dead. She goes out through the archway. DIETRICHSON A great little fighter for her weight. Dietrichson sucks down a big swallow of his drink. Neff has taken two blank forms from his briefcase. He puts the briefcase on Mr. Dietrichson's lap and lays the forms on top. Phyllis is watching closely. NEFF This is where you sign, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Sign what? NEFF The applications for your auto renewals. So you'll be protected until the new policies are issued. DIETRICHSON When will that be? NEFF In about a week. DIETRICHSON Just so I'm covered when I drive up North. Neff takes out his fountain pen. NEFF San Francisco, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Palo Alto. PHYLLIS He was a Stanford man, Mr. Neff. And he still goes to his class reunion every year. DIETRICHSON What's wrong with that? Can't I have a little fun even once a year? NEFF Great football school, Stanford. Did you play football, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Left guard. Almost made the varsity, too. Neff has unscrewed his fountain pen. He hands it to Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson puts on his glasses. NEFF On that bottom line, Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson signs. Neff's and Phyllis' eyes meet for a split second. NEFF

bills

How many times the word 'bills' appears in the text?

you, Walter. Get out of here before I throw my desk at you. NEFF I love you, too. He walks out, still grinning. A-35 EXT. OFFICES - TWELFTH FLOOR Neff comes out of Keys' office and walks back along the balcony. Activity of secretaries going in and out of doors, etc. Neff enters his own office. NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) I really did, too, you old crab, always yelling your fat head off, always sore at everyone. But behind the cigar ashes on your vest I kind of knew you had a heart as big as a house... Back in my office there was a phone message from Mrs. Dietrichson about the renewals. She didn't want me to come tomorrow evening. She wanted me to come Thursday afternoon at three-thirty instead. I had a lot of stuff lined up for that Thursday afternoon, including a trip down to Santa Monica to see a couple of live prospects about some group insurance. But I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson and the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg. A-36 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE Anderson, a salesman, sits at one of the desks, filling out a report. Neff enters, goes to his own desk. He looks down at some mail. On top there is a typewritten note. He reads it, sits down and leafs through his desk calendar. A-37 INSERT - CLOSEUP - CALENDAR PAGE Showing date: THURSDAY 23 May and five or six appointments penciled in tightly on the page. DISSOLVE TO: A-38 DIETRICHSON HOME - ENTRANCE HALL - (DAY) THE CAMERA PANS with Phyllis Dietrichson's feet and ankles as she comes down the stairs, her high heels clicking on the tiles. The anklet glistens on her leg as she moves. THE CAMERA PANS ON. Phyllis has reached the entrance hall, and as she walks toward the front door her whole body becomes visible. She wears a gay print dress with a wide sash over her hips. She opens the door. Outside is Neff, wearing a sport coat, flannel slacks. He takes his hat off. PHYLLIS Hello, Mr. Neff. He stands there with a little smile. PHYLLIS Aren't you coming in? NEFF I'm considering it. He comes in. PHYLLIS I hope you didn't mind my changing the appointment. Last night wasn't so convenient. NEFF That's okay. I was working on my stamp collection. She leads him toward living room. A-39 DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff come through archway. She heads toward a low tea table which stands in front of the davenport, with tall glasses, ice cubes, lemon, a pot of tea, etc. PHYLLIS I was just fixing some iced tea. Would you like a glass? NEFF Unless you have a bottle of beer that's not working. PHYLLIS There might be some. I never know what's in the ice box. (Calls) Nettie!... She pours herself a glass of tea. PHYLLIS About those renewals, Mr. Neff. I talked to my husband about it. NEFF You did? PHYLLIS Yes. He'll renew with you he told me. In fact, I thought he'd be here this afternoon. NEFF But he's not? PHYLLIS No. NEFF That's terrible. PHYLLIS (Calls again, impatiently) Nettie!... Nettie!... Oh, I forgot, it's the maid's day off. NEFF Don't bother, Mrs. Dietrichson. I'd like some iced tea very much. PHYLLIS Lemon? Sugar? NEFF Fix it your way. She fixes him a glass of tea while he is looking around. He slowly sits down. NEFF Seeing it's the maid's day off maybe there's something I can do for you. She hands him the tea. NEFF Like running the vacuum cleaner. PHYLLIS Fresh. NEFF I used to peddle vacuum cleaners. Not much money but you learn a lot about life. PHYLLIS I didn't think you'd learned it from a correspondence course. NEFF Where did you pick up this tea drinking? You're not English, are you? PHYLLIS No. Californian. Born right here in Los Angeles. NEFF They say native Californians all come from Iowa. PHYLLIS I wanted to ask you something, Mr. Neff. NEFF Make it Walter. PHYLLIS Walter. NEFF Right. PHYLLIS Tell me, Walter, on this insurance -- how much commission do you make? NEFF Twenty percent. Why? PHYLLIS I thought maybe I could throw a little more business your way. NEFF I can always use it. PHYLLIS I was thinking about my husband. I worry a lot about him, down in those oil fields. It's very dangerous. NEFF Not for an executive, is it? PHYLLIS He doesn't just sit behind a desk. He's right down there with the drilling crews. It's got me worried sick. NEFF You mean a crown block might fall on him some rainy night? PHYLLIS Please don't talk like that. NEFF But that's the idea. PHYLLIS The other day a casing line snapped and caught the foreman. He's in the hospital with a broken back. NEFF Bad. PHYLLIS It's got me jittery just thinking about it. Suppose something like that happened to my husband? NEFF It could. PHYLLIS Don't you think he ought to have accident insurance? NEFF Uh huh. PHYLLIS What kind of insurance could he have? NEFF Enough to cover doctors' and hospital bills. Say a hundred and twenty-five a week cash benefit. And he'd rate around fifty thousand capital sum. PHYLLIS Capital sum? What's that? NEFF That's if he got killed. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. PHYLLIS I suppose you have to think of everything in your business. NEFF Mr. Dietrichson would understand. I'm sure I could sell him on the idea of some accident protection. Why don't I talk to him about it. PHYLLIS You could try. But he's pretty tough going. NEFF They're all tough at first. PHYLLIS He's got a lot on his mind. He doesn't want to listen to anything except maybe a baseball game on the radio. Sometimes we sit all evening without saying a word to each other. NEFF Sounds pretty dull. Phyllis shrugs. PHYLLIS So I just sit and knit. NEFF Is that what you married him for? PHYLLIS Maybe I like the way his thumbs hold up the wool. NEFF Anytime his thumbs get tired -- PHYLLIS I want to ask you something, Mr. Neff. Could I get an accident policy for him -- without bothering him at all? NEFF How's that again. PHYLLIS That would make it easier for you, too. You wouldn't even have to talk to him. I have a little allowance of my own. I could pay for it and he needn't know anything about it. NEFF Wait a minute. Why shouldn't he know? PHYLLIS Because I know he doesn't want accident insurance. He's superstitious about it. NEFF A lot of people are. Funny, isn't it? PHYLLIS If there was a way to get it like that, all the worry would be over. You see what I mean, Walter? NEFF Sure. I've got good eyesight. You want him to have the policy without him knowing it. And that means without the insurance company knowing that he doesn't know. That's the set-up, isn't it? PHYLLIS Is there anything wrong with it? NEFF I think it's lovely. And then, some dark wet night, if that crown block fell on him -- PHYLLIS What crown block? NEFF Only sometimes they have to have a little help. They can't quite make it on their own. PHYLLIS I don't know what you're talking about. NEFF Of course, it doesn't have to be a crown block. It can be a car backing over him, or he can fall out of an upstairs window. Any little thing like that, as long as it's a morgue job. PHYLLIS Are you crazy? NEFF Not that crazy. Goodbye, Mrs. Dietrichson. He picks up his hat. PHYLLIS What's the matter? NEFF Look, baby, you can't get away with it. PHYLLIS Get away with what? NEFF You want to knock him off, don't you, baby. PHYLLIS That's a horrible thing to say! NEFF Who'd you think I was, anyway? A guy that walks into a good-looking dame's front parlor and says "Good afternoon, I sell accident insurance on husbands. You got one that's been around too long? Somebody you'd like to turn into a little hard cash? Just give me a smile and I'll help you collect." Boy, what a dope I must look to you! PHYLLIS I think you're rotten. NEFF I think you're swell. So long as I'm not your husband. PHYLLIS Get out of here. NEFF You bet I will. You bet I'll get out of here, baby. But quick. He goes out. She looks after him. A-40 EXT. DIETRICHSON HOME - (DAY) Neff bangs the front door shut, walks quickly to his car and drives away. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) So I let her have it, straight between the eyes. She didn't fool me for a minute, not this time. I knew I had hold of a redhot poker and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off. I stopped at a drive-in for a bottle of beer, the one I had wanted all along, only I wanted it worse now, to get rid of the sour taste of her iced tea, and everything that went with it. I didn't want to go back to the office, so I dropped by a bowling alley at Third and Western and rolled a few lines to get my mind thinking about something else for a while. A-41 DRIVE-IN RESTAURANT - (DAY) Shooting past Neff sitting behind the wheel of his car The car hop hangs a tray on the door and serves him a bottle of beer. DISSOLVE TO: A-42 INT. BOWLING ALLEY Neff bowling. He rolls the ball with an effort at concentration, but his mind is not really on the game. DISSOLVE TO: A-43 EXT. APARTMENT HOUSE - (DUSK) It is late afternoon. The apartment house is called the LOS OLIVOS APARTMENTS. It is a six-story building in the Normandie- Wilshire district, with a basement garage. THE CAMERA PANS UP the front of the building to the top floor windows, as a little rain starts to fall. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) I didn't feel like eating dinner when I left, and I didn't feel like a show, so I drove home, put the car away and went up to my apartment. A-44 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT - LIVING ROOM - (DUSK) It is a double apartment of conventional design, with kitchen, dinette, and bathroom, squarecut overstuffed borax furniture. Gas logs are lit in the imitation fireplace. Neff stands by the window with his coat off and his tie loose. Raindrops strike against the glass. He turns away impatiently, paces up and down past a caddy bag with golf clubs in it, pulls one out at random, makes a couple of short swings, throws the club on the couch, paces again. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) It had begun to rain outside and I watched it get dark and didn't even turn on the light. That didn't help me either. I was all twisted up inside, and I was still holding on to that red-hot poker. And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all, that the hook was too strong, that this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning. The doorbell rings. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) So at eight o'clock the bell would ring and I would know who it was without even having to think, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Neff goes to the door and opens it. PHYLLIS Hello. Neff just looks at her. PHYLLIS You forgot your hat this afternoon. She has nothing in her hands but her bag. NEFF Did I? He looks down at her hands. PHYLLIS Don't you want me to bring it in? NEFF Sure. Put it on the chair. She comes in. He closes the door. NEFF How did you know where I live? PHYLLIS It's in the phone book. Neff switches on the standing lamp. PHYLLIS It's raining. NEFF So it is. Peel off your coat and sit down. She starts to take off her coat. NEFF Your husband out? PHYLLIS Long Beach. They're spudding in a new well. He phoned he'd be late. About nine-thirty. He takes her coat and lays it across the back of a chair. PHYLLIS It's about time you said you're glad to see me. NEFF I knew you wouldn't leave it like that. PHYLLIS Like what? NEFF Like it was this afternoon. PHYLLIS I must have said something that gave you a terribly wrong impression. You must surely see that. You must never think anything like that about me, Walter. NEFF Okay. PHYLLIS It's not okay. Not if you don't believe me. NEFF What do you want me to do? PHYLLIS I want you to be nice to me. Like the first time you came to the house. NEFF It can't be like the first time. Something has happened. PHYLLIS I know it has. It's happened to us. NEFF That's what I mean. Phyllis has moved over to the window. She stares out through the wet window-pane. NEFF What's the matter now? PHYLLIS I feel as if he was watching me. Not that he cares about me. Not any more. But he keeps me on a leash. So tight I can't breathe. I'm scared. NEFF What of? He's in Long Beach, isn't he? PHYLLIS I oughtn't to have come. NEFF Maybe you oughtn't. PHYLLIS You want me to go? NEFF If you want to. PHYLLIS Right now? NEFF Sure. Right now. By this time, he has hold of her wrist. He draws her to him slowly and kisses her. Her arms tighten around him. After a moment he pulls his head back, still holding her close. NEFF How were you going to do it? PHYLLIS Do what? NEFF Kill him. PHYLLIS Walter, for the last time -- She tries to jerk away but he holds her and kisses her again. NEFF I'm crazy about you, baby. PHYLLIS I'm crazy about you, Walter. NEFF That perfume on your hair. What's the name of it? PHYLLIS Something French. I bought it down at Ensenada. NEFF We ought to have some of that pink wine to go with it. The kind that bubbles. But all I have is bourbon. PHYLLIS Bourbon is fine, Walter. He lets her go and moves toward the dinette. A-45 THE DINETTE AND KITCHEN It contains a small table and some chairs. A low glass-and- china cabinet is built between the dinette and kitchen, leaving a space like a doorway. The kitchen is the usual apartment house kitchen, with stove, ice-box, sink, etc. It is quite small. Neff goes to the ice-box and Phyllis drifts in after him. NEFF Soda? PHYLLIS Plain water, please. NEFF Get a couple of glasses, will you. He points at the china closet. He has taken a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator and is holding it under the hot- water faucet. NEFF You know, about six months ago a guy slipped on the soap in his bathtub and knocked himself cold and drowned. Only he had accident insurance. So they had an autopsy and she didn't get away with it. Phyllis has the glasses now. She hands them to him. He dumps some ice cubes into the glasses. PHYLLIS Who didn't? NEFF His wife. He reaches for the whiskey bottle on top of the china closet. NEFF And there was another case where a guy was found shot and his wife said he was cleaning a gun and his stomach got in the way. All she collected was a three-to-ten stretch in Tehachapi. PHYLLIS Perhaps it was worth it to her. Neff hands her a glass. NEFF See if you can carry this as far as the living room. They move back toward the living room. A-46 LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff go toward the davenport. She is sipping her drink and looking around. PHYLLIS It's nice here, Walter. Who takes care of it for you? NEFF A colored woman comes in twice a week. PHYLLIS You get your own breakfast? NEFF Once in a while I squeeze a grapefruit. The rest I get at the corner drugstore. They sit on the davenport, fairly close together. PHYLLIS It sounds wonderful. Just strangers beside you. You don't know them. You don't hate them. You don't have to sit across the table and smile at him and that daughter of his every morning of your life. NEFF What daughter? Oh, that little girl on the piano. PHYLLIS Yes. Lola. She lives with us. He thinks a lot more of her than he does of me. NEFF Ever think of a divorce? PHYLLIS He wouldn't give me a divorce. NEFF I suppose because it would cost him money. PHYLLIS He hasn't got any money. Not since he went into the oil business. NEFF But he had when you married him? PHYLLIS Yes, he had. And I wanted a home. Why not? But that wasn't the only reason. I was his wife's nurse. She was sick for a long time. When she died, he was all broken up. I pitied him so. NEFF And now you hate him. PHYLLIS Yes, Walter. He's so mean to me. Every-time I buy a dress or a pair of shoes he yells his head off. He won't let me go anywhere. He keeps me shut up. He's always been mean to me. Even his life insurance all goes to that daughter of his. That Lola. NEFF Nothing for you at all, huh? PHYLLIS No. And nothing is just what I'm worth to him. NEFF So you lie awake in the dark and listen to him snore and get ideas. PHYLLIS Walter, I don't want to kill him. I never did. Not even when he gets drunk and slaps my face. NEFF Only sometimes you wish he was dead. PHYLLIS Perhaps I do. NEFF And you wish it was an accident, and you had that policy. For fifty thousand dollars. Is that it? PHYLLIS Perhaps that too. She takes a long drink. PHYLLIS The other night we drove home from a party. He was drunk again. When we got into the garage he just sat there with his head on the steering wheel and the motor still running. And I thought what it would be like if I didn't switch it off, just closed the garage door and left him there. NEFF I'll tell you what it would be like, if you had that accident policy, and tried to pull a monoxide job. We have a guy in our office named Keyes. For him a set-up like that would be just like a slice of rare roast beef. In three minutes he'd know it wasn't an accident. In ten minutes you'd be sitting under the hot lights. In half an hour you'd be signing your name to a confession. PHYLLIS But Walter, I didn't do it. I'm not going to do it. NEFF Not if there's an insurance company in the picture, baby. So long as you're honest they'll pay you with a smile, but you just try to pull something like that and you'll find out. They know more tricks than a carload of monkeys. And if there's a death mixed up in it, you haven't got a prayer. They'll hang you as sure as ten dimes will buy a dollar, baby. She begins to cry. He puts his arms around her and kisses her. NEFF Just stop thinking about it, will you. He holds her tight. Their heads touch, side by side, THE CAMERA SLOWLY STARTS TO RECEDE as we DISSOLVE TO: A-47 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits in the swivel chair, talking into the dictaphone. He has hooked the wastebasket under his feet to sit more comfortably. As he talks, a little cough shakes him now and then. NEFF So we just sat there, and she kept on crying softly, like the rain on the window, and we didn't say anything. Maybe she had stopped thinking about it, but I hadn't. I couldn't. Because it all tied up with something I had been thinking about for years, since long before I ever ran into Phyllis Dietrichson. Because, in this business you can't sleep for trying to figure out the tricks they could pull on you. You're like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don't crook the house. And then one night, you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself. And do it smart. Because you've got that wheel right under your hands. And you know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out in front, a shill to put down the bet. And suddenly the doorbell rings and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you... Look, Keyes, I'm not trying to whitewash myself. I fought it, only maybe I didn't fight it hard enough. The stakes were fifty thousand dollars, but they were the life of a man, too, a man who'd never done me any dirt. Except he was married to a woman he didn't care anything about, and I did... DISSOLVE TO: A-48 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT LIVING ROOM CAMERA MOVES SLOWLY towards the davenport again. Neff sits in one corner with his feet on the low table. He is smoking his cigarette and staring at the ceiling. Phyllis has been sitting fairly close to him. She gets up slowly and crosses to her rain coat, lying over a chair. PHYLLIS I've got to go now, Walter. Neff does not answer. He keeps on staring at the ceiling. She starts to put the rain coat on. PHYLLIS Will you call me, Walter? Neff still does not answer. PHYLLIS Walter! He looks at her slowly, almost absently. PHYLLIS I hate him. I loathe going back to him. You believe me, don't you, Walter? NEFF Sure I believe you. PHYLLIS I can't stand it anymore. What if they did hang me? NEFF You're not going to hang, baby. PHYLLIS It's better than going on this way. NEFF -- you're not going to hang, baby. Not ever. Because you're going to do it the smart way. Because I'm going to help you. PHYLLIS You! NEFF Me. PHYLLIS Do you know what you're saying? NEFF Sure I know what I'm saying. He gets up and grips her arm. NEFF We're going to do it together. We're going to do it right. And I'm the guy that knows how. There is fierce determination in his voice. His fingers dig into her arm. PHYLLIS Walter, you're hurting me. NEFF There isn't going to be any slip up. Nothing sloppy. Nothing weak. It's got to be perfect. He kisses her. NEFF You go now. He leads her towards the door. NEFF Call me tomorrow. But not from your house. From a booth. And watch your step. Every single minute. It's got to be perfect, understand. Straight down the line. They have now reached the door. Neff opens it. Phyllis stands in the doorway, her lips white. PHYLLIS Straight down the line. She goes quietly. He watches her down the corridor. Slowly he closes the door and goes back into the room. He moves across the window and opens it wide. He stands there, looking down into the dark street. From below comes the sound of a car starting and driving off. The rain drifts in against his face. He just stands there motionless. His mind is going a hundred miles a minute. FADE OUT: END OF SEQUENCE "A" SEQUENCE "B" FADE IN: B-1 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits slumped in his chair before the dictaphone. On the desk next to him stands a used record. The cylinder on the dictaphone is not turning. He is smoking a cigarette. He kills it then lifts the needle and slides off the record which is on the machine and stands it on end on the desk beside the other used record. He reaches down painfully to take another record from the rack beneath the dictaphone, looks at it against the light to make sure it has not been used, then slides it into place on the machine and resets the needle. He lifts the horn and resumes his dictation. NEFF The first thing we had to do was fix him up with that accident policy. I knew he wouldn't buy, but all I wanted was his signature on an application. So I had to make him sign without his knowing what he was signing. And I wanted a witness other than Phyllis to hear me give him a sales talk. I was trying to think with your brains, Keyes. I wanted all the answers ready for all the questions you were going to spring as soon as Dietrichson was dead. Neff takes a last drag on his cigarette and kills it by running it under the ledge of the dictaphone stand. He drops the stub on the floor and resumes. NEFF A couple of nights later I went to the house. Everything looked fine, except I didn't like the witness Phyllis had brought in. It was Dietrichson's daughter Lola, and it made me feel a little queer in the belly to have her right there in the room, playing Chinese checkers, as if nothing was going to happen. DISSOLVE: B-2 A BOARD OF CHINESE CHECKERS CAMERA WITHDRAWS AND GRADUALLY REVEALS THE DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM - NIGHT The checker-board is on the davenport between Phyllis and Lola. Mr. Dietrichson sits in a big easy chair. His coat and tie are over the back of the chair, and the evening paper is lying tumbled on the floor beside him. He is smoking a cigar with the band on it. He has a drink in front of him and several more inside him. In another chair sits Neff, his briefcase on the floor, leaning against his chair. He holds his rate book partly open, with a finger in it for a marker. He is going full swing. NEFF I suppose you realize, Mr. Dietrichson, that, not being an employee, you are not covered by the State Compensation Insurance Act. The only way you can protect yourself is by having a personal policy of your own. DIETRICHSON I know all about that. The next thing you'll tell me I need earthquake insurance and lightning insurance and hail insurance. Phyllis looks up from the checker-board and cuts in on the dialogue. Lola listens without much interest. PHYLLIS (To Dietrichson) If we bought all the insurance they can think up, we'd stay broke paying for it, wouldn't we, honey? DIETRICHSON What keeps us broke is you going out and buying five hats at a crack. Who needs a hat in California? NEFF I always say insurance is a lot like a hot water bottle. It looks kind of useless and silly hanging on the hook, but when you get that stomach ache in the middle of the night, it comes in mighty handy. DIETRICHSON Now you want to sell me a hot water bottle. NEFF Dollar for dollar, accident insurance is the cheapest coverage you can buy, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Maybe some other time, Mr. Neff. I had a tough day. NEFF Just as you say, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Suppose we just settle that automobile insurance tonight. NEFF Sure. All we need on that is for you to sign an application for renewal. Phyllis throws a quick glance at Neff. As she looks back she sees that Lola is staring down at her wrist watch. LOLA Phyllis, do you mind if we don't finish this game? It bores me stiff. PHYLLIS Got some thing better to do? LOLA Yes, I have. She gets up. LOLA (To Dietrichson) Father, is it all right if I run along now? DIETRICHSON Run along where? Who with? LOLA Just Anne. We're going roller skating. DIETRICHSON Anne who? LOLA Anne Matthews. PHYLLIS It's not that Nino Zachetti again? DIETRICHSON It better not be that Zachetti guy. If I ever catch you with that --- LOLA It's Anne Matthews, I told you. I also told you we're going roller skating. I'm meeting her at the corner of Vermont and Franklin -- the north- west corner, in case you're interested. And I'm late already. I hope that is all clear. Good night, Father. Good night, Phyllis. She starts to go. NEFF Good night, Miss Dietrichson. LOLA Oh, I'm sorry. Good night, Mr. -- NEFF Neff. LOLA Good night, Mr. Neff. PHYLLIS Now you're not going to take my car again. LOLA No thanks. I'd rather be dead. She goes out through the archway. DIETRICHSON A great little fighter for her weight. Dietrichson sucks down a big swallow of his drink. Neff has taken two blank forms from his briefcase. He puts the briefcase on Mr. Dietrichson's lap and lays the forms on top. Phyllis is watching closely. NEFF This is where you sign, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Sign what? NEFF The applications for your auto renewals. So you'll be protected until the new policies are issued. DIETRICHSON When will that be? NEFF In about a week. DIETRICHSON Just so I'm covered when I drive up North. Neff takes out his fountain pen. NEFF San Francisco, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Palo Alto. PHYLLIS He was a Stanford man, Mr. Neff. And he still goes to his class reunion every year. DIETRICHSON What's wrong with that? Can't I have a little fun even once a year? NEFF Great football school, Stanford. Did you play football, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Left guard. Almost made the varsity, too. Neff has unscrewed his fountain pen. He hands it to Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson puts on his glasses. NEFF On that bottom line, Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson signs. Neff's and Phyllis' eyes meet for a split second. NEFF

come

How many times the word 'come' appears in the text?

you, Walter. Get out of here before I throw my desk at you. NEFF I love you, too. He walks out, still grinning. A-35 EXT. OFFICES - TWELFTH FLOOR Neff comes out of Keys' office and walks back along the balcony. Activity of secretaries going in and out of doors, etc. Neff enters his own office. NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) I really did, too, you old crab, always yelling your fat head off, always sore at everyone. But behind the cigar ashes on your vest I kind of knew you had a heart as big as a house... Back in my office there was a phone message from Mrs. Dietrichson about the renewals. She didn't want me to come tomorrow evening. She wanted me to come Thursday afternoon at three-thirty instead. I had a lot of stuff lined up for that Thursday afternoon, including a trip down to Santa Monica to see a couple of live prospects about some group insurance. But I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson and the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg. A-36 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE Anderson, a salesman, sits at one of the desks, filling out a report. Neff enters, goes to his own desk. He looks down at some mail. On top there is a typewritten note. He reads it, sits down and leafs through his desk calendar. A-37 INSERT - CLOSEUP - CALENDAR PAGE Showing date: THURSDAY 23 May and five or six appointments penciled in tightly on the page. DISSOLVE TO: A-38 DIETRICHSON HOME - ENTRANCE HALL - (DAY) THE CAMERA PANS with Phyllis Dietrichson's feet and ankles as she comes down the stairs, her high heels clicking on the tiles. The anklet glistens on her leg as she moves. THE CAMERA PANS ON. Phyllis has reached the entrance hall, and as she walks toward the front door her whole body becomes visible. She wears a gay print dress with a wide sash over her hips. She opens the door. Outside is Neff, wearing a sport coat, flannel slacks. He takes his hat off. PHYLLIS Hello, Mr. Neff. He stands there with a little smile. PHYLLIS Aren't you coming in? NEFF I'm considering it. He comes in. PHYLLIS I hope you didn't mind my changing the appointment. Last night wasn't so convenient. NEFF That's okay. I was working on my stamp collection. She leads him toward living room. A-39 DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff come through archway. She heads toward a low tea table which stands in front of the davenport, with tall glasses, ice cubes, lemon, a pot of tea, etc. PHYLLIS I was just fixing some iced tea. Would you like a glass? NEFF Unless you have a bottle of beer that's not working. PHYLLIS There might be some. I never know what's in the ice box. (Calls) Nettie!... She pours herself a glass of tea. PHYLLIS About those renewals, Mr. Neff. I talked to my husband about it. NEFF You did? PHYLLIS Yes. He'll renew with you he told me. In fact, I thought he'd be here this afternoon. NEFF But he's not? PHYLLIS No. NEFF That's terrible. PHYLLIS (Calls again, impatiently) Nettie!... Nettie!... Oh, I forgot, it's the maid's day off. NEFF Don't bother, Mrs. Dietrichson. I'd like some iced tea very much. PHYLLIS Lemon? Sugar? NEFF Fix it your way. She fixes him a glass of tea while he is looking around. He slowly sits down. NEFF Seeing it's the maid's day off maybe there's something I can do for you. She hands him the tea. NEFF Like running the vacuum cleaner. PHYLLIS Fresh. NEFF I used to peddle vacuum cleaners. Not much money but you learn a lot about life. PHYLLIS I didn't think you'd learned it from a correspondence course. NEFF Where did you pick up this tea drinking? You're not English, are you? PHYLLIS No. Californian. Born right here in Los Angeles. NEFF They say native Californians all come from Iowa. PHYLLIS I wanted to ask you something, Mr. Neff. NEFF Make it Walter. PHYLLIS Walter. NEFF Right. PHYLLIS Tell me, Walter, on this insurance -- how much commission do you make? NEFF Twenty percent. Why? PHYLLIS I thought maybe I could throw a little more business your way. NEFF I can always use it. PHYLLIS I was thinking about my husband. I worry a lot about him, down in those oil fields. It's very dangerous. NEFF Not for an executive, is it? PHYLLIS He doesn't just sit behind a desk. He's right down there with the drilling crews. It's got me worried sick. NEFF You mean a crown block might fall on him some rainy night? PHYLLIS Please don't talk like that. NEFF But that's the idea. PHYLLIS The other day a casing line snapped and caught the foreman. He's in the hospital with a broken back. NEFF Bad. PHYLLIS It's got me jittery just thinking about it. Suppose something like that happened to my husband? NEFF It could. PHYLLIS Don't you think he ought to have accident insurance? NEFF Uh huh. PHYLLIS What kind of insurance could he have? NEFF Enough to cover doctors' and hospital bills. Say a hundred and twenty-five a week cash benefit. And he'd rate around fifty thousand capital sum. PHYLLIS Capital sum? What's that? NEFF That's if he got killed. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. PHYLLIS I suppose you have to think of everything in your business. NEFF Mr. Dietrichson would understand. I'm sure I could sell him on the idea of some accident protection. Why don't I talk to him about it. PHYLLIS You could try. But he's pretty tough going. NEFF They're all tough at first. PHYLLIS He's got a lot on his mind. He doesn't want to listen to anything except maybe a baseball game on the radio. Sometimes we sit all evening without saying a word to each other. NEFF Sounds pretty dull. Phyllis shrugs. PHYLLIS So I just sit and knit. NEFF Is that what you married him for? PHYLLIS Maybe I like the way his thumbs hold up the wool. NEFF Anytime his thumbs get tired -- PHYLLIS I want to ask you something, Mr. Neff. Could I get an accident policy for him -- without bothering him at all? NEFF How's that again. PHYLLIS That would make it easier for you, too. You wouldn't even have to talk to him. I have a little allowance of my own. I could pay for it and he needn't know anything about it. NEFF Wait a minute. Why shouldn't he know? PHYLLIS Because I know he doesn't want accident insurance. He's superstitious about it. NEFF A lot of people are. Funny, isn't it? PHYLLIS If there was a way to get it like that, all the worry would be over. You see what I mean, Walter? NEFF Sure. I've got good eyesight. You want him to have the policy without him knowing it. And that means without the insurance company knowing that he doesn't know. That's the set-up, isn't it? PHYLLIS Is there anything wrong with it? NEFF I think it's lovely. And then, some dark wet night, if that crown block fell on him -- PHYLLIS What crown block? NEFF Only sometimes they have to have a little help. They can't quite make it on their own. PHYLLIS I don't know what you're talking about. NEFF Of course, it doesn't have to be a crown block. It can be a car backing over him, or he can fall out of an upstairs window. Any little thing like that, as long as it's a morgue job. PHYLLIS Are you crazy? NEFF Not that crazy. Goodbye, Mrs. Dietrichson. He picks up his hat. PHYLLIS What's the matter? NEFF Look, baby, you can't get away with it. PHYLLIS Get away with what? NEFF You want to knock him off, don't you, baby. PHYLLIS That's a horrible thing to say! NEFF Who'd you think I was, anyway? A guy that walks into a good-looking dame's front parlor and says "Good afternoon, I sell accident insurance on husbands. You got one that's been around too long? Somebody you'd like to turn into a little hard cash? Just give me a smile and I'll help you collect." Boy, what a dope I must look to you! PHYLLIS I think you're rotten. NEFF I think you're swell. So long as I'm not your husband. PHYLLIS Get out of here. NEFF You bet I will. You bet I'll get out of here, baby. But quick. He goes out. She looks after him. A-40 EXT. DIETRICHSON HOME - (DAY) Neff bangs the front door shut, walks quickly to his car and drives away. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) So I let her have it, straight between the eyes. She didn't fool me for a minute, not this time. I knew I had hold of a redhot poker and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off. I stopped at a drive-in for a bottle of beer, the one I had wanted all along, only I wanted it worse now, to get rid of the sour taste of her iced tea, and everything that went with it. I didn't want to go back to the office, so I dropped by a bowling alley at Third and Western and rolled a few lines to get my mind thinking about something else for a while. A-41 DRIVE-IN RESTAURANT - (DAY) Shooting past Neff sitting behind the wheel of his car The car hop hangs a tray on the door and serves him a bottle of beer. DISSOLVE TO: A-42 INT. BOWLING ALLEY Neff bowling. He rolls the ball with an effort at concentration, but his mind is not really on the game. DISSOLVE TO: A-43 EXT. APARTMENT HOUSE - (DUSK) It is late afternoon. The apartment house is called the LOS OLIVOS APARTMENTS. It is a six-story building in the Normandie- Wilshire district, with a basement garage. THE CAMERA PANS UP the front of the building to the top floor windows, as a little rain starts to fall. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) I didn't feel like eating dinner when I left, and I didn't feel like a show, so I drove home, put the car away and went up to my apartment. A-44 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT - LIVING ROOM - (DUSK) It is a double apartment of conventional design, with kitchen, dinette, and bathroom, squarecut overstuffed borax furniture. Gas logs are lit in the imitation fireplace. Neff stands by the window with his coat off and his tie loose. Raindrops strike against the glass. He turns away impatiently, paces up and down past a caddy bag with golf clubs in it, pulls one out at random, makes a couple of short swings, throws the club on the couch, paces again. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) It had begun to rain outside and I watched it get dark and didn't even turn on the light. That didn't help me either. I was all twisted up inside, and I was still holding on to that red-hot poker. And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all, that the hook was too strong, that this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning. The doorbell rings. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) So at eight o'clock the bell would ring and I would know who it was without even having to think, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Neff goes to the door and opens it. PHYLLIS Hello. Neff just looks at her. PHYLLIS You forgot your hat this afternoon. She has nothing in her hands but her bag. NEFF Did I? He looks down at her hands. PHYLLIS Don't you want me to bring it in? NEFF Sure. Put it on the chair. She comes in. He closes the door. NEFF How did you know where I live? PHYLLIS It's in the phone book. Neff switches on the standing lamp. PHYLLIS It's raining. NEFF So it is. Peel off your coat and sit down. She starts to take off her coat. NEFF Your husband out? PHYLLIS Long Beach. They're spudding in a new well. He phoned he'd be late. About nine-thirty. He takes her coat and lays it across the back of a chair. PHYLLIS It's about time you said you're glad to see me. NEFF I knew you wouldn't leave it like that. PHYLLIS Like what? NEFF Like it was this afternoon. PHYLLIS I must have said something that gave you a terribly wrong impression. You must surely see that. You must never think anything like that about me, Walter. NEFF Okay. PHYLLIS It's not okay. Not if you don't believe me. NEFF What do you want me to do? PHYLLIS I want you to be nice to me. Like the first time you came to the house. NEFF It can't be like the first time. Something has happened. PHYLLIS I know it has. It's happened to us. NEFF That's what I mean. Phyllis has moved over to the window. She stares out through the wet window-pane. NEFF What's the matter now? PHYLLIS I feel as if he was watching me. Not that he cares about me. Not any more. But he keeps me on a leash. So tight I can't breathe. I'm scared. NEFF What of? He's in Long Beach, isn't he? PHYLLIS I oughtn't to have come. NEFF Maybe you oughtn't. PHYLLIS You want me to go? NEFF If you want to. PHYLLIS Right now? NEFF Sure. Right now. By this time, he has hold of her wrist. He draws her to him slowly and kisses her. Her arms tighten around him. After a moment he pulls his head back, still holding her close. NEFF How were you going to do it? PHYLLIS Do what? NEFF Kill him. PHYLLIS Walter, for the last time -- She tries to jerk away but he holds her and kisses her again. NEFF I'm crazy about you, baby. PHYLLIS I'm crazy about you, Walter. NEFF That perfume on your hair. What's the name of it? PHYLLIS Something French. I bought it down at Ensenada. NEFF We ought to have some of that pink wine to go with it. The kind that bubbles. But all I have is bourbon. PHYLLIS Bourbon is fine, Walter. He lets her go and moves toward the dinette. A-45 THE DINETTE AND KITCHEN It contains a small table and some chairs. A low glass-and- china cabinet is built between the dinette and kitchen, leaving a space like a doorway. The kitchen is the usual apartment house kitchen, with stove, ice-box, sink, etc. It is quite small. Neff goes to the ice-box and Phyllis drifts in after him. NEFF Soda? PHYLLIS Plain water, please. NEFF Get a couple of glasses, will you. He points at the china closet. He has taken a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator and is holding it under the hot- water faucet. NEFF You know, about six months ago a guy slipped on the soap in his bathtub and knocked himself cold and drowned. Only he had accident insurance. So they had an autopsy and she didn't get away with it. Phyllis has the glasses now. She hands them to him. He dumps some ice cubes into the glasses. PHYLLIS Who didn't? NEFF His wife. He reaches for the whiskey bottle on top of the china closet. NEFF And there was another case where a guy was found shot and his wife said he was cleaning a gun and his stomach got in the way. All she collected was a three-to-ten stretch in Tehachapi. PHYLLIS Perhaps it was worth it to her. Neff hands her a glass. NEFF See if you can carry this as far as the living room. They move back toward the living room. A-46 LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff go toward the davenport. She is sipping her drink and looking around. PHYLLIS It's nice here, Walter. Who takes care of it for you? NEFF A colored woman comes in twice a week. PHYLLIS You get your own breakfast? NEFF Once in a while I squeeze a grapefruit. The rest I get at the corner drugstore. They sit on the davenport, fairly close together. PHYLLIS It sounds wonderful. Just strangers beside you. You don't know them. You don't hate them. You don't have to sit across the table and smile at him and that daughter of his every morning of your life. NEFF What daughter? Oh, that little girl on the piano. PHYLLIS Yes. Lola. She lives with us. He thinks a lot more of her than he does of me. NEFF Ever think of a divorce? PHYLLIS He wouldn't give me a divorce. NEFF I suppose because it would cost him money. PHYLLIS He hasn't got any money. Not since he went into the oil business. NEFF But he had when you married him? PHYLLIS Yes, he had. And I wanted a home. Why not? But that wasn't the only reason. I was his wife's nurse. She was sick for a long time. When she died, he was all broken up. I pitied him so. NEFF And now you hate him. PHYLLIS Yes, Walter. He's so mean to me. Every-time I buy a dress or a pair of shoes he yells his head off. He won't let me go anywhere. He keeps me shut up. He's always been mean to me. Even his life insurance all goes to that daughter of his. That Lola. NEFF Nothing for you at all, huh? PHYLLIS No. And nothing is just what I'm worth to him. NEFF So you lie awake in the dark and listen to him snore and get ideas. PHYLLIS Walter, I don't want to kill him. I never did. Not even when he gets drunk and slaps my face. NEFF Only sometimes you wish he was dead. PHYLLIS Perhaps I do. NEFF And you wish it was an accident, and you had that policy. For fifty thousand dollars. Is that it? PHYLLIS Perhaps that too. She takes a long drink. PHYLLIS The other night we drove home from a party. He was drunk again. When we got into the garage he just sat there with his head on the steering wheel and the motor still running. And I thought what it would be like if I didn't switch it off, just closed the garage door and left him there. NEFF I'll tell you what it would be like, if you had that accident policy, and tried to pull a monoxide job. We have a guy in our office named Keyes. For him a set-up like that would be just like a slice of rare roast beef. In three minutes he'd know it wasn't an accident. In ten minutes you'd be sitting under the hot lights. In half an hour you'd be signing your name to a confession. PHYLLIS But Walter, I didn't do it. I'm not going to do it. NEFF Not if there's an insurance company in the picture, baby. So long as you're honest they'll pay you with a smile, but you just try to pull something like that and you'll find out. They know more tricks than a carload of monkeys. And if there's a death mixed up in it, you haven't got a prayer. They'll hang you as sure as ten dimes will buy a dollar, baby. She begins to cry. He puts his arms around her and kisses her. NEFF Just stop thinking about it, will you. He holds her tight. Their heads touch, side by side, THE CAMERA SLOWLY STARTS TO RECEDE as we DISSOLVE TO: A-47 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits in the swivel chair, talking into the dictaphone. He has hooked the wastebasket under his feet to sit more comfortably. As he talks, a little cough shakes him now and then. NEFF So we just sat there, and she kept on crying softly, like the rain on the window, and we didn't say anything. Maybe she had stopped thinking about it, but I hadn't. I couldn't. Because it all tied up with something I had been thinking about for years, since long before I ever ran into Phyllis Dietrichson. Because, in this business you can't sleep for trying to figure out the tricks they could pull on you. You're like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don't crook the house. And then one night, you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself. And do it smart. Because you've got that wheel right under your hands. And you know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out in front, a shill to put down the bet. And suddenly the doorbell rings and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you... Look, Keyes, I'm not trying to whitewash myself. I fought it, only maybe I didn't fight it hard enough. The stakes were fifty thousand dollars, but they were the life of a man, too, a man who'd never done me any dirt. Except he was married to a woman he didn't care anything about, and I did... DISSOLVE TO: A-48 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT LIVING ROOM CAMERA MOVES SLOWLY towards the davenport again. Neff sits in one corner with his feet on the low table. He is smoking his cigarette and staring at the ceiling. Phyllis has been sitting fairly close to him. She gets up slowly and crosses to her rain coat, lying over a chair. PHYLLIS I've got to go now, Walter. Neff does not answer. He keeps on staring at the ceiling. She starts to put the rain coat on. PHYLLIS Will you call me, Walter? Neff still does not answer. PHYLLIS Walter! He looks at her slowly, almost absently. PHYLLIS I hate him. I loathe going back to him. You believe me, don't you, Walter? NEFF Sure I believe you. PHYLLIS I can't stand it anymore. What if they did hang me? NEFF You're not going to hang, baby. PHYLLIS It's better than going on this way. NEFF -- you're not going to hang, baby. Not ever. Because you're going to do it the smart way. Because I'm going to help you. PHYLLIS You! NEFF Me. PHYLLIS Do you know what you're saying? NEFF Sure I know what I'm saying. He gets up and grips her arm. NEFF We're going to do it together. We're going to do it right. And I'm the guy that knows how. There is fierce determination in his voice. His fingers dig into her arm. PHYLLIS Walter, you're hurting me. NEFF There isn't going to be any slip up. Nothing sloppy. Nothing weak. It's got to be perfect. He kisses her. NEFF You go now. He leads her towards the door. NEFF Call me tomorrow. But not from your house. From a booth. And watch your step. Every single minute. It's got to be perfect, understand. Straight down the line. They have now reached the door. Neff opens it. Phyllis stands in the doorway, her lips white. PHYLLIS Straight down the line. She goes quietly. He watches her down the corridor. Slowly he closes the door and goes back into the room. He moves across the window and opens it wide. He stands there, looking down into the dark street. From below comes the sound of a car starting and driving off. The rain drifts in against his face. He just stands there motionless. His mind is going a hundred miles a minute. FADE OUT: END OF SEQUENCE "A" SEQUENCE "B" FADE IN: B-1 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits slumped in his chair before the dictaphone. On the desk next to him stands a used record. The cylinder on the dictaphone is not turning. He is smoking a cigarette. He kills it then lifts the needle and slides off the record which is on the machine and stands it on end on the desk beside the other used record. He reaches down painfully to take another record from the rack beneath the dictaphone, looks at it against the light to make sure it has not been used, then slides it into place on the machine and resets the needle. He lifts the horn and resumes his dictation. NEFF The first thing we had to do was fix him up with that accident policy. I knew he wouldn't buy, but all I wanted was his signature on an application. So I had to make him sign without his knowing what he was signing. And I wanted a witness other than Phyllis to hear me give him a sales talk. I was trying to think with your brains, Keyes. I wanted all the answers ready for all the questions you were going to spring as soon as Dietrichson was dead. Neff takes a last drag on his cigarette and kills it by running it under the ledge of the dictaphone stand. He drops the stub on the floor and resumes. NEFF A couple of nights later I went to the house. Everything looked fine, except I didn't like the witness Phyllis had brought in. It was Dietrichson's daughter Lola, and it made me feel a little queer in the belly to have her right there in the room, playing Chinese checkers, as if nothing was going to happen. DISSOLVE: B-2 A BOARD OF CHINESE CHECKERS CAMERA WITHDRAWS AND GRADUALLY REVEALS THE DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM - NIGHT The checker-board is on the davenport between Phyllis and Lola. Mr. Dietrichson sits in a big easy chair. His coat and tie are over the back of the chair, and the evening paper is lying tumbled on the floor beside him. He is smoking a cigar with the band on it. He has a drink in front of him and several more inside him. In another chair sits Neff, his briefcase on the floor, leaning against his chair. He holds his rate book partly open, with a finger in it for a marker. He is going full swing. NEFF I suppose you realize, Mr. Dietrichson, that, not being an employee, you are not covered by the State Compensation Insurance Act. The only way you can protect yourself is by having a personal policy of your own. DIETRICHSON I know all about that. The next thing you'll tell me I need earthquake insurance and lightning insurance and hail insurance. Phyllis looks up from the checker-board and cuts in on the dialogue. Lola listens without much interest. PHYLLIS (To Dietrichson) If we bought all the insurance they can think up, we'd stay broke paying for it, wouldn't we, honey? DIETRICHSON What keeps us broke is you going out and buying five hats at a crack. Who needs a hat in California? NEFF I always say insurance is a lot like a hot water bottle. It looks kind of useless and silly hanging on the hook, but when you get that stomach ache in the middle of the night, it comes in mighty handy. DIETRICHSON Now you want to sell me a hot water bottle. NEFF Dollar for dollar, accident insurance is the cheapest coverage you can buy, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Maybe some other time, Mr. Neff. I had a tough day. NEFF Just as you say, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Suppose we just settle that automobile insurance tonight. NEFF Sure. All we need on that is for you to sign an application for renewal. Phyllis throws a quick glance at Neff. As she looks back she sees that Lola is staring down at her wrist watch. LOLA Phyllis, do you mind if we don't finish this game? It bores me stiff. PHYLLIS Got some thing better to do? LOLA Yes, I have. She gets up. LOLA (To Dietrichson) Father, is it all right if I run along now? DIETRICHSON Run along where? Who with? LOLA Just Anne. We're going roller skating. DIETRICHSON Anne who? LOLA Anne Matthews. PHYLLIS It's not that Nino Zachetti again? DIETRICHSON It better not be that Zachetti guy. If I ever catch you with that --- LOLA It's Anne Matthews, I told you. I also told you we're going roller skating. I'm meeting her at the corner of Vermont and Franklin -- the north- west corner, in case you're interested. And I'm late already. I hope that is all clear. Good night, Father. Good night, Phyllis. She starts to go. NEFF Good night, Miss Dietrichson. LOLA Oh, I'm sorry. Good night, Mr. -- NEFF Neff. LOLA Good night, Mr. Neff. PHYLLIS Now you're not going to take my car again. LOLA No thanks. I'd rather be dead. She goes out through the archway. DIETRICHSON A great little fighter for her weight. Dietrichson sucks down a big swallow of his drink. Neff has taken two blank forms from his briefcase. He puts the briefcase on Mr. Dietrichson's lap and lays the forms on top. Phyllis is watching closely. NEFF This is where you sign, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Sign what? NEFF The applications for your auto renewals. So you'll be protected until the new policies are issued. DIETRICHSON When will that be? NEFF In about a week. DIETRICHSON Just so I'm covered when I drive up North. Neff takes out his fountain pen. NEFF San Francisco, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Palo Alto. PHYLLIS He was a Stanford man, Mr. Neff. And he still goes to his class reunion every year. DIETRICHSON What's wrong with that? Can't I have a little fun even once a year? NEFF Great football school, Stanford. Did you play football, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Left guard. Almost made the varsity, too. Neff has unscrewed his fountain pen. He hands it to Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson puts on his glasses. NEFF On that bottom line, Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson signs. Neff's and Phyllis' eyes meet for a split second. NEFF

working

How many times the word 'working' appears in the text?

you, Walter. Get out of here before I throw my desk at you. NEFF I love you, too. He walks out, still grinning. A-35 EXT. OFFICES - TWELFTH FLOOR Neff comes out of Keys' office and walks back along the balcony. Activity of secretaries going in and out of doors, etc. Neff enters his own office. NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) I really did, too, you old crab, always yelling your fat head off, always sore at everyone. But behind the cigar ashes on your vest I kind of knew you had a heart as big as a house... Back in my office there was a phone message from Mrs. Dietrichson about the renewals. She didn't want me to come tomorrow evening. She wanted me to come Thursday afternoon at three-thirty instead. I had a lot of stuff lined up for that Thursday afternoon, including a trip down to Santa Monica to see a couple of live prospects about some group insurance. But I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson and the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg. A-36 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE Anderson, a salesman, sits at one of the desks, filling out a report. Neff enters, goes to his own desk. He looks down at some mail. On top there is a typewritten note. He reads it, sits down and leafs through his desk calendar. A-37 INSERT - CLOSEUP - CALENDAR PAGE Showing date: THURSDAY 23 May and five or six appointments penciled in tightly on the page. DISSOLVE TO: A-38 DIETRICHSON HOME - ENTRANCE HALL - (DAY) THE CAMERA PANS with Phyllis Dietrichson's feet and ankles as she comes down the stairs, her high heels clicking on the tiles. The anklet glistens on her leg as she moves. THE CAMERA PANS ON. Phyllis has reached the entrance hall, and as she walks toward the front door her whole body becomes visible. She wears a gay print dress with a wide sash over her hips. She opens the door. Outside is Neff, wearing a sport coat, flannel slacks. He takes his hat off. PHYLLIS Hello, Mr. Neff. He stands there with a little smile. PHYLLIS Aren't you coming in? NEFF I'm considering it. He comes in. PHYLLIS I hope you didn't mind my changing the appointment. Last night wasn't so convenient. NEFF That's okay. I was working on my stamp collection. She leads him toward living room. A-39 DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff come through archway. She heads toward a low tea table which stands in front of the davenport, with tall glasses, ice cubes, lemon, a pot of tea, etc. PHYLLIS I was just fixing some iced tea. Would you like a glass? NEFF Unless you have a bottle of beer that's not working. PHYLLIS There might be some. I never know what's in the ice box. (Calls) Nettie!... She pours herself a glass of tea. PHYLLIS About those renewals, Mr. Neff. I talked to my husband about it. NEFF You did? PHYLLIS Yes. He'll renew with you he told me. In fact, I thought he'd be here this afternoon. NEFF But he's not? PHYLLIS No. NEFF That's terrible. PHYLLIS (Calls again, impatiently) Nettie!... Nettie!... Oh, I forgot, it's the maid's day off. NEFF Don't bother, Mrs. Dietrichson. I'd like some iced tea very much. PHYLLIS Lemon? Sugar? NEFF Fix it your way. She fixes him a glass of tea while he is looking around. He slowly sits down. NEFF Seeing it's the maid's day off maybe there's something I can do for you. She hands him the tea. NEFF Like running the vacuum cleaner. PHYLLIS Fresh. NEFF I used to peddle vacuum cleaners. Not much money but you learn a lot about life. PHYLLIS I didn't think you'd learned it from a correspondence course. NEFF Where did you pick up this tea drinking? You're not English, are you? PHYLLIS No. Californian. Born right here in Los Angeles. NEFF They say native Californians all come from Iowa. PHYLLIS I wanted to ask you something, Mr. Neff. NEFF Make it Walter. PHYLLIS Walter. NEFF Right. PHYLLIS Tell me, Walter, on this insurance -- how much commission do you make? NEFF Twenty percent. Why? PHYLLIS I thought maybe I could throw a little more business your way. NEFF I can always use it. PHYLLIS I was thinking about my husband. I worry a lot about him, down in those oil fields. It's very dangerous. NEFF Not for an executive, is it? PHYLLIS He doesn't just sit behind a desk. He's right down there with the drilling crews. It's got me worried sick. NEFF You mean a crown block might fall on him some rainy night? PHYLLIS Please don't talk like that. NEFF But that's the idea. PHYLLIS The other day a casing line snapped and caught the foreman. He's in the hospital with a broken back. NEFF Bad. PHYLLIS It's got me jittery just thinking about it. Suppose something like that happened to my husband? NEFF It could. PHYLLIS Don't you think he ought to have accident insurance? NEFF Uh huh. PHYLLIS What kind of insurance could he have? NEFF Enough to cover doctors' and hospital bills. Say a hundred and twenty-five a week cash benefit. And he'd rate around fifty thousand capital sum. PHYLLIS Capital sum? What's that? NEFF That's if he got killed. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. PHYLLIS I suppose you have to think of everything in your business. NEFF Mr. Dietrichson would understand. I'm sure I could sell him on the idea of some accident protection. Why don't I talk to him about it. PHYLLIS You could try. But he's pretty tough going. NEFF They're all tough at first. PHYLLIS He's got a lot on his mind. He doesn't want to listen to anything except maybe a baseball game on the radio. Sometimes we sit all evening without saying a word to each other. NEFF Sounds pretty dull. Phyllis shrugs. PHYLLIS So I just sit and knit. NEFF Is that what you married him for? PHYLLIS Maybe I like the way his thumbs hold up the wool. NEFF Anytime his thumbs get tired -- PHYLLIS I want to ask you something, Mr. Neff. Could I get an accident policy for him -- without bothering him at all? NEFF How's that again. PHYLLIS That would make it easier for you, too. You wouldn't even have to talk to him. I have a little allowance of my own. I could pay for it and he needn't know anything about it. NEFF Wait a minute. Why shouldn't he know? PHYLLIS Because I know he doesn't want accident insurance. He's superstitious about it. NEFF A lot of people are. Funny, isn't it? PHYLLIS If there was a way to get it like that, all the worry would be over. You see what I mean, Walter? NEFF Sure. I've got good eyesight. You want him to have the policy without him knowing it. And that means without the insurance company knowing that he doesn't know. That's the set-up, isn't it? PHYLLIS Is there anything wrong with it? NEFF I think it's lovely. And then, some dark wet night, if that crown block fell on him -- PHYLLIS What crown block? NEFF Only sometimes they have to have a little help. They can't quite make it on their own. PHYLLIS I don't know what you're talking about. NEFF Of course, it doesn't have to be a crown block. It can be a car backing over him, or he can fall out of an upstairs window. Any little thing like that, as long as it's a morgue job. PHYLLIS Are you crazy? NEFF Not that crazy. Goodbye, Mrs. Dietrichson. He picks up his hat. PHYLLIS What's the matter? NEFF Look, baby, you can't get away with it. PHYLLIS Get away with what? NEFF You want to knock him off, don't you, baby. PHYLLIS That's a horrible thing to say! NEFF Who'd you think I was, anyway? A guy that walks into a good-looking dame's front parlor and says "Good afternoon, I sell accident insurance on husbands. You got one that's been around too long? Somebody you'd like to turn into a little hard cash? Just give me a smile and I'll help you collect." Boy, what a dope I must look to you! PHYLLIS I think you're rotten. NEFF I think you're swell. So long as I'm not your husband. PHYLLIS Get out of here. NEFF You bet I will. You bet I'll get out of here, baby. But quick. He goes out. She looks after him. A-40 EXT. DIETRICHSON HOME - (DAY) Neff bangs the front door shut, walks quickly to his car and drives away. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) So I let her have it, straight between the eyes. She didn't fool me for a minute, not this time. I knew I had hold of a redhot poker and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off. I stopped at a drive-in for a bottle of beer, the one I had wanted all along, only I wanted it worse now, to get rid of the sour taste of her iced tea, and everything that went with it. I didn't want to go back to the office, so I dropped by a bowling alley at Third and Western and rolled a few lines to get my mind thinking about something else for a while. A-41 DRIVE-IN RESTAURANT - (DAY) Shooting past Neff sitting behind the wheel of his car The car hop hangs a tray on the door and serves him a bottle of beer. DISSOLVE TO: A-42 INT. BOWLING ALLEY Neff bowling. He rolls the ball with an effort at concentration, but his mind is not really on the game. DISSOLVE TO: A-43 EXT. APARTMENT HOUSE - (DUSK) It is late afternoon. The apartment house is called the LOS OLIVOS APARTMENTS. It is a six-story building in the Normandie- Wilshire district, with a basement garage. THE CAMERA PANS UP the front of the building to the top floor windows, as a little rain starts to fall. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) I didn't feel like eating dinner when I left, and I didn't feel like a show, so I drove home, put the car away and went up to my apartment. A-44 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT - LIVING ROOM - (DUSK) It is a double apartment of conventional design, with kitchen, dinette, and bathroom, squarecut overstuffed borax furniture. Gas logs are lit in the imitation fireplace. Neff stands by the window with his coat off and his tie loose. Raindrops strike against the glass. He turns away impatiently, paces up and down past a caddy bag with golf clubs in it, pulls one out at random, makes a couple of short swings, throws the club on the couch, paces again. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) It had begun to rain outside and I watched it get dark and didn't even turn on the light. That didn't help me either. I was all twisted up inside, and I was still holding on to that red-hot poker. And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all, that the hook was too strong, that this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning. The doorbell rings. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) So at eight o'clock the bell would ring and I would know who it was without even having to think, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Neff goes to the door and opens it. PHYLLIS Hello. Neff just looks at her. PHYLLIS You forgot your hat this afternoon. She has nothing in her hands but her bag. NEFF Did I? He looks down at her hands. PHYLLIS Don't you want me to bring it in? NEFF Sure. Put it on the chair. She comes in. He closes the door. NEFF How did you know where I live? PHYLLIS It's in the phone book. Neff switches on the standing lamp. PHYLLIS It's raining. NEFF So it is. Peel off your coat and sit down. She starts to take off her coat. NEFF Your husband out? PHYLLIS Long Beach. They're spudding in a new well. He phoned he'd be late. About nine-thirty. He takes her coat and lays it across the back of a chair. PHYLLIS It's about time you said you're glad to see me. NEFF I knew you wouldn't leave it like that. PHYLLIS Like what? NEFF Like it was this afternoon. PHYLLIS I must have said something that gave you a terribly wrong impression. You must surely see that. You must never think anything like that about me, Walter. NEFF Okay. PHYLLIS It's not okay. Not if you don't believe me. NEFF What do you want me to do? PHYLLIS I want you to be nice to me. Like the first time you came to the house. NEFF It can't be like the first time. Something has happened. PHYLLIS I know it has. It's happened to us. NEFF That's what I mean. Phyllis has moved over to the window. She stares out through the wet window-pane. NEFF What's the matter now? PHYLLIS I feel as if he was watching me. Not that he cares about me. Not any more. But he keeps me on a leash. So tight I can't breathe. I'm scared. NEFF What of? He's in Long Beach, isn't he? PHYLLIS I oughtn't to have come. NEFF Maybe you oughtn't. PHYLLIS You want me to go? NEFF If you want to. PHYLLIS Right now? NEFF Sure. Right now. By this time, he has hold of her wrist. He draws her to him slowly and kisses her. Her arms tighten around him. After a moment he pulls his head back, still holding her close. NEFF How were you going to do it? PHYLLIS Do what? NEFF Kill him. PHYLLIS Walter, for the last time -- She tries to jerk away but he holds her and kisses her again. NEFF I'm crazy about you, baby. PHYLLIS I'm crazy about you, Walter. NEFF That perfume on your hair. What's the name of it? PHYLLIS Something French. I bought it down at Ensenada. NEFF We ought to have some of that pink wine to go with it. The kind that bubbles. But all I have is bourbon. PHYLLIS Bourbon is fine, Walter. He lets her go and moves toward the dinette. A-45 THE DINETTE AND KITCHEN It contains a small table and some chairs. A low glass-and- china cabinet is built between the dinette and kitchen, leaving a space like a doorway. The kitchen is the usual apartment house kitchen, with stove, ice-box, sink, etc. It is quite small. Neff goes to the ice-box and Phyllis drifts in after him. NEFF Soda? PHYLLIS Plain water, please. NEFF Get a couple of glasses, will you. He points at the china closet. He has taken a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator and is holding it under the hot- water faucet. NEFF You know, about six months ago a guy slipped on the soap in his bathtub and knocked himself cold and drowned. Only he had accident insurance. So they had an autopsy and she didn't get away with it. Phyllis has the glasses now. She hands them to him. He dumps some ice cubes into the glasses. PHYLLIS Who didn't? NEFF His wife. He reaches for the whiskey bottle on top of the china closet. NEFF And there was another case where a guy was found shot and his wife said he was cleaning a gun and his stomach got in the way. All she collected was a three-to-ten stretch in Tehachapi. PHYLLIS Perhaps it was worth it to her. Neff hands her a glass. NEFF See if you can carry this as far as the living room. They move back toward the living room. A-46 LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff go toward the davenport. She is sipping her drink and looking around. PHYLLIS It's nice here, Walter. Who takes care of it for you? NEFF A colored woman comes in twice a week. PHYLLIS You get your own breakfast? NEFF Once in a while I squeeze a grapefruit. The rest I get at the corner drugstore. They sit on the davenport, fairly close together. PHYLLIS It sounds wonderful. Just strangers beside you. You don't know them. You don't hate them. You don't have to sit across the table and smile at him and that daughter of his every morning of your life. NEFF What daughter? Oh, that little girl on the piano. PHYLLIS Yes. Lola. She lives with us. He thinks a lot more of her than he does of me. NEFF Ever think of a divorce? PHYLLIS He wouldn't give me a divorce. NEFF I suppose because it would cost him money. PHYLLIS He hasn't got any money. Not since he went into the oil business. NEFF But he had when you married him? PHYLLIS Yes, he had. And I wanted a home. Why not? But that wasn't the only reason. I was his wife's nurse. She was sick for a long time. When she died, he was all broken up. I pitied him so. NEFF And now you hate him. PHYLLIS Yes, Walter. He's so mean to me. Every-time I buy a dress or a pair of shoes he yells his head off. He won't let me go anywhere. He keeps me shut up. He's always been mean to me. Even his life insurance all goes to that daughter of his. That Lola. NEFF Nothing for you at all, huh? PHYLLIS No. And nothing is just what I'm worth to him. NEFF So you lie awake in the dark and listen to him snore and get ideas. PHYLLIS Walter, I don't want to kill him. I never did. Not even when he gets drunk and slaps my face. NEFF Only sometimes you wish he was dead. PHYLLIS Perhaps I do. NEFF And you wish it was an accident, and you had that policy. For fifty thousand dollars. Is that it? PHYLLIS Perhaps that too. She takes a long drink. PHYLLIS The other night we drove home from a party. He was drunk again. When we got into the garage he just sat there with his head on the steering wheel and the motor still running. And I thought what it would be like if I didn't switch it off, just closed the garage door and left him there. NEFF I'll tell you what it would be like, if you had that accident policy, and tried to pull a monoxide job. We have a guy in our office named Keyes. For him a set-up like that would be just like a slice of rare roast beef. In three minutes he'd know it wasn't an accident. In ten minutes you'd be sitting under the hot lights. In half an hour you'd be signing your name to a confession. PHYLLIS But Walter, I didn't do it. I'm not going to do it. NEFF Not if there's an insurance company in the picture, baby. So long as you're honest they'll pay you with a smile, but you just try to pull something like that and you'll find out. They know more tricks than a carload of monkeys. And if there's a death mixed up in it, you haven't got a prayer. They'll hang you as sure as ten dimes will buy a dollar, baby. She begins to cry. He puts his arms around her and kisses her. NEFF Just stop thinking about it, will you. He holds her tight. Their heads touch, side by side, THE CAMERA SLOWLY STARTS TO RECEDE as we DISSOLVE TO: A-47 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits in the swivel chair, talking into the dictaphone. He has hooked the wastebasket under his feet to sit more comfortably. As he talks, a little cough shakes him now and then. NEFF So we just sat there, and she kept on crying softly, like the rain on the window, and we didn't say anything. Maybe she had stopped thinking about it, but I hadn't. I couldn't. Because it all tied up with something I had been thinking about for years, since long before I ever ran into Phyllis Dietrichson. Because, in this business you can't sleep for trying to figure out the tricks they could pull on you. You're like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don't crook the house. And then one night, you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself. And do it smart. Because you've got that wheel right under your hands. And you know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out in front, a shill to put down the bet. And suddenly the doorbell rings and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you... Look, Keyes, I'm not trying to whitewash myself. I fought it, only maybe I didn't fight it hard enough. The stakes were fifty thousand dollars, but they were the life of a man, too, a man who'd never done me any dirt. Except he was married to a woman he didn't care anything about, and I did... DISSOLVE TO: A-48 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT LIVING ROOM CAMERA MOVES SLOWLY towards the davenport again. Neff sits in one corner with his feet on the low table. He is smoking his cigarette and staring at the ceiling. Phyllis has been sitting fairly close to him. She gets up slowly and crosses to her rain coat, lying over a chair. PHYLLIS I've got to go now, Walter. Neff does not answer. He keeps on staring at the ceiling. She starts to put the rain coat on. PHYLLIS Will you call me, Walter? Neff still does not answer. PHYLLIS Walter! He looks at her slowly, almost absently. PHYLLIS I hate him. I loathe going back to him. You believe me, don't you, Walter? NEFF Sure I believe you. PHYLLIS I can't stand it anymore. What if they did hang me? NEFF You're not going to hang, baby. PHYLLIS It's better than going on this way. NEFF -- you're not going to hang, baby. Not ever. Because you're going to do it the smart way. Because I'm going to help you. PHYLLIS You! NEFF Me. PHYLLIS Do you know what you're saying? NEFF Sure I know what I'm saying. He gets up and grips her arm. NEFF We're going to do it together. We're going to do it right. And I'm the guy that knows how. There is fierce determination in his voice. His fingers dig into her arm. PHYLLIS Walter, you're hurting me. NEFF There isn't going to be any slip up. Nothing sloppy. Nothing weak. It's got to be perfect. He kisses her. NEFF You go now. He leads her towards the door. NEFF Call me tomorrow. But not from your house. From a booth. And watch your step. Every single minute. It's got to be perfect, understand. Straight down the line. They have now reached the door. Neff opens it. Phyllis stands in the doorway, her lips white. PHYLLIS Straight down the line. She goes quietly. He watches her down the corridor. Slowly he closes the door and goes back into the room. He moves across the window and opens it wide. He stands there, looking down into the dark street. From below comes the sound of a car starting and driving off. The rain drifts in against his face. He just stands there motionless. His mind is going a hundred miles a minute. FADE OUT: END OF SEQUENCE "A" SEQUENCE "B" FADE IN: B-1 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits slumped in his chair before the dictaphone. On the desk next to him stands a used record. The cylinder on the dictaphone is not turning. He is smoking a cigarette. He kills it then lifts the needle and slides off the record which is on the machine and stands it on end on the desk beside the other used record. He reaches down painfully to take another record from the rack beneath the dictaphone, looks at it against the light to make sure it has not been used, then slides it into place on the machine and resets the needle. He lifts the horn and resumes his dictation. NEFF The first thing we had to do was fix him up with that accident policy. I knew he wouldn't buy, but all I wanted was his signature on an application. So I had to make him sign without his knowing what he was signing. And I wanted a witness other than Phyllis to hear me give him a sales talk. I was trying to think with your brains, Keyes. I wanted all the answers ready for all the questions you were going to spring as soon as Dietrichson was dead. Neff takes a last drag on his cigarette and kills it by running it under the ledge of the dictaphone stand. He drops the stub on the floor and resumes. NEFF A couple of nights later I went to the house. Everything looked fine, except I didn't like the witness Phyllis had brought in. It was Dietrichson's daughter Lola, and it made me feel a little queer in the belly to have her right there in the room, playing Chinese checkers, as if nothing was going to happen. DISSOLVE: B-2 A BOARD OF CHINESE CHECKERS CAMERA WITHDRAWS AND GRADUALLY REVEALS THE DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM - NIGHT The checker-board is on the davenport between Phyllis and Lola. Mr. Dietrichson sits in a big easy chair. His coat and tie are over the back of the chair, and the evening paper is lying tumbled on the floor beside him. He is smoking a cigar with the band on it. He has a drink in front of him and several more inside him. In another chair sits Neff, his briefcase on the floor, leaning against his chair. He holds his rate book partly open, with a finger in it for a marker. He is going full swing. NEFF I suppose you realize, Mr. Dietrichson, that, not being an employee, you are not covered by the State Compensation Insurance Act. The only way you can protect yourself is by having a personal policy of your own. DIETRICHSON I know all about that. The next thing you'll tell me I need earthquake insurance and lightning insurance and hail insurance. Phyllis looks up from the checker-board and cuts in on the dialogue. Lola listens without much interest. PHYLLIS (To Dietrichson) If we bought all the insurance they can think up, we'd stay broke paying for it, wouldn't we, honey? DIETRICHSON What keeps us broke is you going out and buying five hats at a crack. Who needs a hat in California? NEFF I always say insurance is a lot like a hot water bottle. It looks kind of useless and silly hanging on the hook, but when you get that stomach ache in the middle of the night, it comes in mighty handy. DIETRICHSON Now you want to sell me a hot water bottle. NEFF Dollar for dollar, accident insurance is the cheapest coverage you can buy, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Maybe some other time, Mr. Neff. I had a tough day. NEFF Just as you say, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Suppose we just settle that automobile insurance tonight. NEFF Sure. All we need on that is for you to sign an application for renewal. Phyllis throws a quick glance at Neff. As she looks back she sees that Lola is staring down at her wrist watch. LOLA Phyllis, do you mind if we don't finish this game? It bores me stiff. PHYLLIS Got some thing better to do? LOLA Yes, I have. She gets up. LOLA (To Dietrichson) Father, is it all right if I run along now? DIETRICHSON Run along where? Who with? LOLA Just Anne. We're going roller skating. DIETRICHSON Anne who? LOLA Anne Matthews. PHYLLIS It's not that Nino Zachetti again? DIETRICHSON It better not be that Zachetti guy. If I ever catch you with that --- LOLA It's Anne Matthews, I told you. I also told you we're going roller skating. I'm meeting her at the corner of Vermont and Franklin -- the north- west corner, in case you're interested. And I'm late already. I hope that is all clear. Good night, Father. Good night, Phyllis. She starts to go. NEFF Good night, Miss Dietrichson. LOLA Oh, I'm sorry. Good night, Mr. -- NEFF Neff. LOLA Good night, Mr. Neff. PHYLLIS Now you're not going to take my car again. LOLA No thanks. I'd rather be dead. She goes out through the archway. DIETRICHSON A great little fighter for her weight. Dietrichson sucks down a big swallow of his drink. Neff has taken two blank forms from his briefcase. He puts the briefcase on Mr. Dietrichson's lap and lays the forms on top. Phyllis is watching closely. NEFF This is where you sign, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Sign what? NEFF The applications for your auto renewals. So you'll be protected until the new policies are issued. DIETRICHSON When will that be? NEFF In about a week. DIETRICHSON Just so I'm covered when I drive up North. Neff takes out his fountain pen. NEFF San Francisco, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Palo Alto. PHYLLIS He was a Stanford man, Mr. Neff. And he still goes to his class reunion every year. DIETRICHSON What's wrong with that? Can't I have a little fun even once a year? NEFF Great football school, Stanford. Did you play football, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Left guard. Almost made the varsity, too. Neff has unscrewed his fountain pen. He hands it to Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson puts on his glasses. NEFF On that bottom line, Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson signs. Neff's and Phyllis' eyes meet for a split second. NEFF

pretty

How many times the word 'pretty' appears in the text?

you, Walter. Get out of here before I throw my desk at you. NEFF I love you, too. He walks out, still grinning. A-35 EXT. OFFICES - TWELFTH FLOOR Neff comes out of Keys' office and walks back along the balcony. Activity of secretaries going in and out of doors, etc. Neff enters his own office. NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) I really did, too, you old crab, always yelling your fat head off, always sore at everyone. But behind the cigar ashes on your vest I kind of knew you had a heart as big as a house... Back in my office there was a phone message from Mrs. Dietrichson about the renewals. She didn't want me to come tomorrow evening. She wanted me to come Thursday afternoon at three-thirty instead. I had a lot of stuff lined up for that Thursday afternoon, including a trip down to Santa Monica to see a couple of live prospects about some group insurance. But I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson and the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg. A-36 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE Anderson, a salesman, sits at one of the desks, filling out a report. Neff enters, goes to his own desk. He looks down at some mail. On top there is a typewritten note. He reads it, sits down and leafs through his desk calendar. A-37 INSERT - CLOSEUP - CALENDAR PAGE Showing date: THURSDAY 23 May and five or six appointments penciled in tightly on the page. DISSOLVE TO: A-38 DIETRICHSON HOME - ENTRANCE HALL - (DAY) THE CAMERA PANS with Phyllis Dietrichson's feet and ankles as she comes down the stairs, her high heels clicking on the tiles. The anklet glistens on her leg as she moves. THE CAMERA PANS ON. Phyllis has reached the entrance hall, and as she walks toward the front door her whole body becomes visible. She wears a gay print dress with a wide sash over her hips. She opens the door. Outside is Neff, wearing a sport coat, flannel slacks. He takes his hat off. PHYLLIS Hello, Mr. Neff. He stands there with a little smile. PHYLLIS Aren't you coming in? NEFF I'm considering it. He comes in. PHYLLIS I hope you didn't mind my changing the appointment. Last night wasn't so convenient. NEFF That's okay. I was working on my stamp collection. She leads him toward living room. A-39 DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff come through archway. She heads toward a low tea table which stands in front of the davenport, with tall glasses, ice cubes, lemon, a pot of tea, etc. PHYLLIS I was just fixing some iced tea. Would you like a glass? NEFF Unless you have a bottle of beer that's not working. PHYLLIS There might be some. I never know what's in the ice box. (Calls) Nettie!... She pours herself a glass of tea. PHYLLIS About those renewals, Mr. Neff. I talked to my husband about it. NEFF You did? PHYLLIS Yes. He'll renew with you he told me. In fact, I thought he'd be here this afternoon. NEFF But he's not? PHYLLIS No. NEFF That's terrible. PHYLLIS (Calls again, impatiently) Nettie!... Nettie!... Oh, I forgot, it's the maid's day off. NEFF Don't bother, Mrs. Dietrichson. I'd like some iced tea very much. PHYLLIS Lemon? Sugar? NEFF Fix it your way. She fixes him a glass of tea while he is looking around. He slowly sits down. NEFF Seeing it's the maid's day off maybe there's something I can do for you. She hands him the tea. NEFF Like running the vacuum cleaner. PHYLLIS Fresh. NEFF I used to peddle vacuum cleaners. Not much money but you learn a lot about life. PHYLLIS I didn't think you'd learned it from a correspondence course. NEFF Where did you pick up this tea drinking? You're not English, are you? PHYLLIS No. Californian. Born right here in Los Angeles. NEFF They say native Californians all come from Iowa. PHYLLIS I wanted to ask you something, Mr. Neff. NEFF Make it Walter. PHYLLIS Walter. NEFF Right. PHYLLIS Tell me, Walter, on this insurance -- how much commission do you make? NEFF Twenty percent. Why? PHYLLIS I thought maybe I could throw a little more business your way. NEFF I can always use it. PHYLLIS I was thinking about my husband. I worry a lot about him, down in those oil fields. It's very dangerous. NEFF Not for an executive, is it? PHYLLIS He doesn't just sit behind a desk. He's right down there with the drilling crews. It's got me worried sick. NEFF You mean a crown block might fall on him some rainy night? PHYLLIS Please don't talk like that. NEFF But that's the idea. PHYLLIS The other day a casing line snapped and caught the foreman. He's in the hospital with a broken back. NEFF Bad. PHYLLIS It's got me jittery just thinking about it. Suppose something like that happened to my husband? NEFF It could. PHYLLIS Don't you think he ought to have accident insurance? NEFF Uh huh. PHYLLIS What kind of insurance could he have? NEFF Enough to cover doctors' and hospital bills. Say a hundred and twenty-five a week cash benefit. And he'd rate around fifty thousand capital sum. PHYLLIS Capital sum? What's that? NEFF That's if he got killed. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. PHYLLIS I suppose you have to think of everything in your business. NEFF Mr. Dietrichson would understand. I'm sure I could sell him on the idea of some accident protection. Why don't I talk to him about it. PHYLLIS You could try. But he's pretty tough going. NEFF They're all tough at first. PHYLLIS He's got a lot on his mind. He doesn't want to listen to anything except maybe a baseball game on the radio. Sometimes we sit all evening without saying a word to each other. NEFF Sounds pretty dull. Phyllis shrugs. PHYLLIS So I just sit and knit. NEFF Is that what you married him for? PHYLLIS Maybe I like the way his thumbs hold up the wool. NEFF Anytime his thumbs get tired -- PHYLLIS I want to ask you something, Mr. Neff. Could I get an accident policy for him -- without bothering him at all? NEFF How's that again. PHYLLIS That would make it easier for you, too. You wouldn't even have to talk to him. I have a little allowance of my own. I could pay for it and he needn't know anything about it. NEFF Wait a minute. Why shouldn't he know? PHYLLIS Because I know he doesn't want accident insurance. He's superstitious about it. NEFF A lot of people are. Funny, isn't it? PHYLLIS If there was a way to get it like that, all the worry would be over. You see what I mean, Walter? NEFF Sure. I've got good eyesight. You want him to have the policy without him knowing it. And that means without the insurance company knowing that he doesn't know. That's the set-up, isn't it? PHYLLIS Is there anything wrong with it? NEFF I think it's lovely. And then, some dark wet night, if that crown block fell on him -- PHYLLIS What crown block? NEFF Only sometimes they have to have a little help. They can't quite make it on their own. PHYLLIS I don't know what you're talking about. NEFF Of course, it doesn't have to be a crown block. It can be a car backing over him, or he can fall out of an upstairs window. Any little thing like that, as long as it's a morgue job. PHYLLIS Are you crazy? NEFF Not that crazy. Goodbye, Mrs. Dietrichson. He picks up his hat. PHYLLIS What's the matter? NEFF Look, baby, you can't get away with it. PHYLLIS Get away with what? NEFF You want to knock him off, don't you, baby. PHYLLIS That's a horrible thing to say! NEFF Who'd you think I was, anyway? A guy that walks into a good-looking dame's front parlor and says "Good afternoon, I sell accident insurance on husbands. You got one that's been around too long? Somebody you'd like to turn into a little hard cash? Just give me a smile and I'll help you collect." Boy, what a dope I must look to you! PHYLLIS I think you're rotten. NEFF I think you're swell. So long as I'm not your husband. PHYLLIS Get out of here. NEFF You bet I will. You bet I'll get out of here, baby. But quick. He goes out. She looks after him. A-40 EXT. DIETRICHSON HOME - (DAY) Neff bangs the front door shut, walks quickly to his car and drives away. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) So I let her have it, straight between the eyes. She didn't fool me for a minute, not this time. I knew I had hold of a redhot poker and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off. I stopped at a drive-in for a bottle of beer, the one I had wanted all along, only I wanted it worse now, to get rid of the sour taste of her iced tea, and everything that went with it. I didn't want to go back to the office, so I dropped by a bowling alley at Third and Western and rolled a few lines to get my mind thinking about something else for a while. A-41 DRIVE-IN RESTAURANT - (DAY) Shooting past Neff sitting behind the wheel of his car The car hop hangs a tray on the door and serves him a bottle of beer. DISSOLVE TO: A-42 INT. BOWLING ALLEY Neff bowling. He rolls the ball with an effort at concentration, but his mind is not really on the game. DISSOLVE TO: A-43 EXT. APARTMENT HOUSE - (DUSK) It is late afternoon. The apartment house is called the LOS OLIVOS APARTMENTS. It is a six-story building in the Normandie- Wilshire district, with a basement garage. THE CAMERA PANS UP the front of the building to the top floor windows, as a little rain starts to fall. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) I didn't feel like eating dinner when I left, and I didn't feel like a show, so I drove home, put the car away and went up to my apartment. A-44 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT - LIVING ROOM - (DUSK) It is a double apartment of conventional design, with kitchen, dinette, and bathroom, squarecut overstuffed borax furniture. Gas logs are lit in the imitation fireplace. Neff stands by the window with his coat off and his tie loose. Raindrops strike against the glass. He turns away impatiently, paces up and down past a caddy bag with golf clubs in it, pulls one out at random, makes a couple of short swings, throws the club on the couch, paces again. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) It had begun to rain outside and I watched it get dark and didn't even turn on the light. That didn't help me either. I was all twisted up inside, and I was still holding on to that red-hot poker. And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all, that the hook was too strong, that this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning. The doorbell rings. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) So at eight o'clock the bell would ring and I would know who it was without even having to think, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Neff goes to the door and opens it. PHYLLIS Hello. Neff just looks at her. PHYLLIS You forgot your hat this afternoon. She has nothing in her hands but her bag. NEFF Did I? He looks down at her hands. PHYLLIS Don't you want me to bring it in? NEFF Sure. Put it on the chair. She comes in. He closes the door. NEFF How did you know where I live? PHYLLIS It's in the phone book. Neff switches on the standing lamp. PHYLLIS It's raining. NEFF So it is. Peel off your coat and sit down. She starts to take off her coat. NEFF Your husband out? PHYLLIS Long Beach. They're spudding in a new well. He phoned he'd be late. About nine-thirty. He takes her coat and lays it across the back of a chair. PHYLLIS It's about time you said you're glad to see me. NEFF I knew you wouldn't leave it like that. PHYLLIS Like what? NEFF Like it was this afternoon. PHYLLIS I must have said something that gave you a terribly wrong impression. You must surely see that. You must never think anything like that about me, Walter. NEFF Okay. PHYLLIS It's not okay. Not if you don't believe me. NEFF What do you want me to do? PHYLLIS I want you to be nice to me. Like the first time you came to the house. NEFF It can't be like the first time. Something has happened. PHYLLIS I know it has. It's happened to us. NEFF That's what I mean. Phyllis has moved over to the window. She stares out through the wet window-pane. NEFF What's the matter now? PHYLLIS I feel as if he was watching me. Not that he cares about me. Not any more. But he keeps me on a leash. So tight I can't breathe. I'm scared. NEFF What of? He's in Long Beach, isn't he? PHYLLIS I oughtn't to have come. NEFF Maybe you oughtn't. PHYLLIS You want me to go? NEFF If you want to. PHYLLIS Right now? NEFF Sure. Right now. By this time, he has hold of her wrist. He draws her to him slowly and kisses her. Her arms tighten around him. After a moment he pulls his head back, still holding her close. NEFF How were you going to do it? PHYLLIS Do what? NEFF Kill him. PHYLLIS Walter, for the last time -- She tries to jerk away but he holds her and kisses her again. NEFF I'm crazy about you, baby. PHYLLIS I'm crazy about you, Walter. NEFF That perfume on your hair. What's the name of it? PHYLLIS Something French. I bought it down at Ensenada. NEFF We ought to have some of that pink wine to go with it. The kind that bubbles. But all I have is bourbon. PHYLLIS Bourbon is fine, Walter. He lets her go and moves toward the dinette. A-45 THE DINETTE AND KITCHEN It contains a small table and some chairs. A low glass-and- china cabinet is built between the dinette and kitchen, leaving a space like a doorway. The kitchen is the usual apartment house kitchen, with stove, ice-box, sink, etc. It is quite small. Neff goes to the ice-box and Phyllis drifts in after him. NEFF Soda? PHYLLIS Plain water, please. NEFF Get a couple of glasses, will you. He points at the china closet. He has taken a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator and is holding it under the hot- water faucet. NEFF You know, about six months ago a guy slipped on the soap in his bathtub and knocked himself cold and drowned. Only he had accident insurance. So they had an autopsy and she didn't get away with it. Phyllis has the glasses now. She hands them to him. He dumps some ice cubes into the glasses. PHYLLIS Who didn't? NEFF His wife. He reaches for the whiskey bottle on top of the china closet. NEFF And there was another case where a guy was found shot and his wife said he was cleaning a gun and his stomach got in the way. All she collected was a three-to-ten stretch in Tehachapi. PHYLLIS Perhaps it was worth it to her. Neff hands her a glass. NEFF See if you can carry this as far as the living room. They move back toward the living room. A-46 LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff go toward the davenport. She is sipping her drink and looking around. PHYLLIS It's nice here, Walter. Who takes care of it for you? NEFF A colored woman comes in twice a week. PHYLLIS You get your own breakfast? NEFF Once in a while I squeeze a grapefruit. The rest I get at the corner drugstore. They sit on the davenport, fairly close together. PHYLLIS It sounds wonderful. Just strangers beside you. You don't know them. You don't hate them. You don't have to sit across the table and smile at him and that daughter of his every morning of your life. NEFF What daughter? Oh, that little girl on the piano. PHYLLIS Yes. Lola. She lives with us. He thinks a lot more of her than he does of me. NEFF Ever think of a divorce? PHYLLIS He wouldn't give me a divorce. NEFF I suppose because it would cost him money. PHYLLIS He hasn't got any money. Not since he went into the oil business. NEFF But he had when you married him? PHYLLIS Yes, he had. And I wanted a home. Why not? But that wasn't the only reason. I was his wife's nurse. She was sick for a long time. When she died, he was all broken up. I pitied him so. NEFF And now you hate him. PHYLLIS Yes, Walter. He's so mean to me. Every-time I buy a dress or a pair of shoes he yells his head off. He won't let me go anywhere. He keeps me shut up. He's always been mean to me. Even his life insurance all goes to that daughter of his. That Lola. NEFF Nothing for you at all, huh? PHYLLIS No. And nothing is just what I'm worth to him. NEFF So you lie awake in the dark and listen to him snore and get ideas. PHYLLIS Walter, I don't want to kill him. I never did. Not even when he gets drunk and slaps my face. NEFF Only sometimes you wish he was dead. PHYLLIS Perhaps I do. NEFF And you wish it was an accident, and you had that policy. For fifty thousand dollars. Is that it? PHYLLIS Perhaps that too. She takes a long drink. PHYLLIS The other night we drove home from a party. He was drunk again. When we got into the garage he just sat there with his head on the steering wheel and the motor still running. And I thought what it would be like if I didn't switch it off, just closed the garage door and left him there. NEFF I'll tell you what it would be like, if you had that accident policy, and tried to pull a monoxide job. We have a guy in our office named Keyes. For him a set-up like that would be just like a slice of rare roast beef. In three minutes he'd know it wasn't an accident. In ten minutes you'd be sitting under the hot lights. In half an hour you'd be signing your name to a confession. PHYLLIS But Walter, I didn't do it. I'm not going to do it. NEFF Not if there's an insurance company in the picture, baby. So long as you're honest they'll pay you with a smile, but you just try to pull something like that and you'll find out. They know more tricks than a carload of monkeys. And if there's a death mixed up in it, you haven't got a prayer. They'll hang you as sure as ten dimes will buy a dollar, baby. She begins to cry. He puts his arms around her and kisses her. NEFF Just stop thinking about it, will you. He holds her tight. Their heads touch, side by side, THE CAMERA SLOWLY STARTS TO RECEDE as we DISSOLVE TO: A-47 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits in the swivel chair, talking into the dictaphone. He has hooked the wastebasket under his feet to sit more comfortably. As he talks, a little cough shakes him now and then. NEFF So we just sat there, and she kept on crying softly, like the rain on the window, and we didn't say anything. Maybe she had stopped thinking about it, but I hadn't. I couldn't. Because it all tied up with something I had been thinking about for years, since long before I ever ran into Phyllis Dietrichson. Because, in this business you can't sleep for trying to figure out the tricks they could pull on you. You're like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don't crook the house. And then one night, you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself. And do it smart. Because you've got that wheel right under your hands. And you know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out in front, a shill to put down the bet. And suddenly the doorbell rings and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you... Look, Keyes, I'm not trying to whitewash myself. I fought it, only maybe I didn't fight it hard enough. The stakes were fifty thousand dollars, but they were the life of a man, too, a man who'd never done me any dirt. Except he was married to a woman he didn't care anything about, and I did... DISSOLVE TO: A-48 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT LIVING ROOM CAMERA MOVES SLOWLY towards the davenport again. Neff sits in one corner with his feet on the low table. He is smoking his cigarette and staring at the ceiling. Phyllis has been sitting fairly close to him. She gets up slowly and crosses to her rain coat, lying over a chair. PHYLLIS I've got to go now, Walter. Neff does not answer. He keeps on staring at the ceiling. She starts to put the rain coat on. PHYLLIS Will you call me, Walter? Neff still does not answer. PHYLLIS Walter! He looks at her slowly, almost absently. PHYLLIS I hate him. I loathe going back to him. You believe me, don't you, Walter? NEFF Sure I believe you. PHYLLIS I can't stand it anymore. What if they did hang me? NEFF You're not going to hang, baby. PHYLLIS It's better than going on this way. NEFF -- you're not going to hang, baby. Not ever. Because you're going to do it the smart way. Because I'm going to help you. PHYLLIS You! NEFF Me. PHYLLIS Do you know what you're saying? NEFF Sure I know what I'm saying. He gets up and grips her arm. NEFF We're going to do it together. We're going to do it right. And I'm the guy that knows how. There is fierce determination in his voice. His fingers dig into her arm. PHYLLIS Walter, you're hurting me. NEFF There isn't going to be any slip up. Nothing sloppy. Nothing weak. It's got to be perfect. He kisses her. NEFF You go now. He leads her towards the door. NEFF Call me tomorrow. But not from your house. From a booth. And watch your step. Every single minute. It's got to be perfect, understand. Straight down the line. They have now reached the door. Neff opens it. Phyllis stands in the doorway, her lips white. PHYLLIS Straight down the line. She goes quietly. He watches her down the corridor. Slowly he closes the door and goes back into the room. He moves across the window and opens it wide. He stands there, looking down into the dark street. From below comes the sound of a car starting and driving off. The rain drifts in against his face. He just stands there motionless. His mind is going a hundred miles a minute. FADE OUT: END OF SEQUENCE "A" SEQUENCE "B" FADE IN: B-1 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits slumped in his chair before the dictaphone. On the desk next to him stands a used record. The cylinder on the dictaphone is not turning. He is smoking a cigarette. He kills it then lifts the needle and slides off the record which is on the machine and stands it on end on the desk beside the other used record. He reaches down painfully to take another record from the rack beneath the dictaphone, looks at it against the light to make sure it has not been used, then slides it into place on the machine and resets the needle. He lifts the horn and resumes his dictation. NEFF The first thing we had to do was fix him up with that accident policy. I knew he wouldn't buy, but all I wanted was his signature on an application. So I had to make him sign without his knowing what he was signing. And I wanted a witness other than Phyllis to hear me give him a sales talk. I was trying to think with your brains, Keyes. I wanted all the answers ready for all the questions you were going to spring as soon as Dietrichson was dead. Neff takes a last drag on his cigarette and kills it by running it under the ledge of the dictaphone stand. He drops the stub on the floor and resumes. NEFF A couple of nights later I went to the house. Everything looked fine, except I didn't like the witness Phyllis had brought in. It was Dietrichson's daughter Lola, and it made me feel a little queer in the belly to have her right there in the room, playing Chinese checkers, as if nothing was going to happen. DISSOLVE: B-2 A BOARD OF CHINESE CHECKERS CAMERA WITHDRAWS AND GRADUALLY REVEALS THE DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM - NIGHT The checker-board is on the davenport between Phyllis and Lola. Mr. Dietrichson sits in a big easy chair. His coat and tie are over the back of the chair, and the evening paper is lying tumbled on the floor beside him. He is smoking a cigar with the band on it. He has a drink in front of him and several more inside him. In another chair sits Neff, his briefcase on the floor, leaning against his chair. He holds his rate book partly open, with a finger in it for a marker. He is going full swing. NEFF I suppose you realize, Mr. Dietrichson, that, not being an employee, you are not covered by the State Compensation Insurance Act. The only way you can protect yourself is by having a personal policy of your own. DIETRICHSON I know all about that. The next thing you'll tell me I need earthquake insurance and lightning insurance and hail insurance. Phyllis looks up from the checker-board and cuts in on the dialogue. Lola listens without much interest. PHYLLIS (To Dietrichson) If we bought all the insurance they can think up, we'd stay broke paying for it, wouldn't we, honey? DIETRICHSON What keeps us broke is you going out and buying five hats at a crack. Who needs a hat in California? NEFF I always say insurance is a lot like a hot water bottle. It looks kind of useless and silly hanging on the hook, but when you get that stomach ache in the middle of the night, it comes in mighty handy. DIETRICHSON Now you want to sell me a hot water bottle. NEFF Dollar for dollar, accident insurance is the cheapest coverage you can buy, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Maybe some other time, Mr. Neff. I had a tough day. NEFF Just as you say, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Suppose we just settle that automobile insurance tonight. NEFF Sure. All we need on that is for you to sign an application for renewal. Phyllis throws a quick glance at Neff. As she looks back she sees that Lola is staring down at her wrist watch. LOLA Phyllis, do you mind if we don't finish this game? It bores me stiff. PHYLLIS Got some thing better to do? LOLA Yes, I have. She gets up. LOLA (To Dietrichson) Father, is it all right if I run along now? DIETRICHSON Run along where? Who with? LOLA Just Anne. We're going roller skating. DIETRICHSON Anne who? LOLA Anne Matthews. PHYLLIS It's not that Nino Zachetti again? DIETRICHSON It better not be that Zachetti guy. If I ever catch you with that --- LOLA It's Anne Matthews, I told you. I also told you we're going roller skating. I'm meeting her at the corner of Vermont and Franklin -- the north- west corner, in case you're interested. And I'm late already. I hope that is all clear. Good night, Father. Good night, Phyllis. She starts to go. NEFF Good night, Miss Dietrichson. LOLA Oh, I'm sorry. Good night, Mr. -- NEFF Neff. LOLA Good night, Mr. Neff. PHYLLIS Now you're not going to take my car again. LOLA No thanks. I'd rather be dead. She goes out through the archway. DIETRICHSON A great little fighter for her weight. Dietrichson sucks down a big swallow of his drink. Neff has taken two blank forms from his briefcase. He puts the briefcase on Mr. Dietrichson's lap and lays the forms on top. Phyllis is watching closely. NEFF This is where you sign, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Sign what? NEFF The applications for your auto renewals. So you'll be protected until the new policies are issued. DIETRICHSON When will that be? NEFF In about a week. DIETRICHSON Just so I'm covered when I drive up North. Neff takes out his fountain pen. NEFF San Francisco, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Palo Alto. PHYLLIS He was a Stanford man, Mr. Neff. And he still goes to his class reunion every year. DIETRICHSON What's wrong with that? Can't I have a little fun even once a year? NEFF Great football school, Stanford. Did you play football, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Left guard. Almost made the varsity, too. Neff has unscrewed his fountain pen. He hands it to Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson puts on his glasses. NEFF On that bottom line, Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson signs. Neff's and Phyllis' eyes meet for a split second. NEFF

soul

How many times the word 'soul' appears in the text?

you, Walter. Get out of here before I throw my desk at you. NEFF I love you, too. He walks out, still grinning. A-35 EXT. OFFICES - TWELFTH FLOOR Neff comes out of Keys' office and walks back along the balcony. Activity of secretaries going in and out of doors, etc. Neff enters his own office. NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) I really did, too, you old crab, always yelling your fat head off, always sore at everyone. But behind the cigar ashes on your vest I kind of knew you had a heart as big as a house... Back in my office there was a phone message from Mrs. Dietrichson about the renewals. She didn't want me to come tomorrow evening. She wanted me to come Thursday afternoon at three-thirty instead. I had a lot of stuff lined up for that Thursday afternoon, including a trip down to Santa Monica to see a couple of live prospects about some group insurance. But I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson and the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg. A-36 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE Anderson, a salesman, sits at one of the desks, filling out a report. Neff enters, goes to his own desk. He looks down at some mail. On top there is a typewritten note. He reads it, sits down and leafs through his desk calendar. A-37 INSERT - CLOSEUP - CALENDAR PAGE Showing date: THURSDAY 23 May and five or six appointments penciled in tightly on the page. DISSOLVE TO: A-38 DIETRICHSON HOME - ENTRANCE HALL - (DAY) THE CAMERA PANS with Phyllis Dietrichson's feet and ankles as she comes down the stairs, her high heels clicking on the tiles. The anklet glistens on her leg as she moves. THE CAMERA PANS ON. Phyllis has reached the entrance hall, and as she walks toward the front door her whole body becomes visible. She wears a gay print dress with a wide sash over her hips. She opens the door. Outside is Neff, wearing a sport coat, flannel slacks. He takes his hat off. PHYLLIS Hello, Mr. Neff. He stands there with a little smile. PHYLLIS Aren't you coming in? NEFF I'm considering it. He comes in. PHYLLIS I hope you didn't mind my changing the appointment. Last night wasn't so convenient. NEFF That's okay. I was working on my stamp collection. She leads him toward living room. A-39 DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff come through archway. She heads toward a low tea table which stands in front of the davenport, with tall glasses, ice cubes, lemon, a pot of tea, etc. PHYLLIS I was just fixing some iced tea. Would you like a glass? NEFF Unless you have a bottle of beer that's not working. PHYLLIS There might be some. I never know what's in the ice box. (Calls) Nettie!... She pours herself a glass of tea. PHYLLIS About those renewals, Mr. Neff. I talked to my husband about it. NEFF You did? PHYLLIS Yes. He'll renew with you he told me. In fact, I thought he'd be here this afternoon. NEFF But he's not? PHYLLIS No. NEFF That's terrible. PHYLLIS (Calls again, impatiently) Nettie!... Nettie!... Oh, I forgot, it's the maid's day off. NEFF Don't bother, Mrs. Dietrichson. I'd like some iced tea very much. PHYLLIS Lemon? Sugar? NEFF Fix it your way. She fixes him a glass of tea while he is looking around. He slowly sits down. NEFF Seeing it's the maid's day off maybe there's something I can do for you. She hands him the tea. NEFF Like running the vacuum cleaner. PHYLLIS Fresh. NEFF I used to peddle vacuum cleaners. Not much money but you learn a lot about life. PHYLLIS I didn't think you'd learned it from a correspondence course. NEFF Where did you pick up this tea drinking? You're not English, are you? PHYLLIS No. Californian. Born right here in Los Angeles. NEFF They say native Californians all come from Iowa. PHYLLIS I wanted to ask you something, Mr. Neff. NEFF Make it Walter. PHYLLIS Walter. NEFF Right. PHYLLIS Tell me, Walter, on this insurance -- how much commission do you make? NEFF Twenty percent. Why? PHYLLIS I thought maybe I could throw a little more business your way. NEFF I can always use it. PHYLLIS I was thinking about my husband. I worry a lot about him, down in those oil fields. It's very dangerous. NEFF Not for an executive, is it? PHYLLIS He doesn't just sit behind a desk. He's right down there with the drilling crews. It's got me worried sick. NEFF You mean a crown block might fall on him some rainy night? PHYLLIS Please don't talk like that. NEFF But that's the idea. PHYLLIS The other day a casing line snapped and caught the foreman. He's in the hospital with a broken back. NEFF Bad. PHYLLIS It's got me jittery just thinking about it. Suppose something like that happened to my husband? NEFF It could. PHYLLIS Don't you think he ought to have accident insurance? NEFF Uh huh. PHYLLIS What kind of insurance could he have? NEFF Enough to cover doctors' and hospital bills. Say a hundred and twenty-five a week cash benefit. And he'd rate around fifty thousand capital sum. PHYLLIS Capital sum? What's that? NEFF That's if he got killed. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. PHYLLIS I suppose you have to think of everything in your business. NEFF Mr. Dietrichson would understand. I'm sure I could sell him on the idea of some accident protection. Why don't I talk to him about it. PHYLLIS You could try. But he's pretty tough going. NEFF They're all tough at first. PHYLLIS He's got a lot on his mind. He doesn't want to listen to anything except maybe a baseball game on the radio. Sometimes we sit all evening without saying a word to each other. NEFF Sounds pretty dull. Phyllis shrugs. PHYLLIS So I just sit and knit. NEFF Is that what you married him for? PHYLLIS Maybe I like the way his thumbs hold up the wool. NEFF Anytime his thumbs get tired -- PHYLLIS I want to ask you something, Mr. Neff. Could I get an accident policy for him -- without bothering him at all? NEFF How's that again. PHYLLIS That would make it easier for you, too. You wouldn't even have to talk to him. I have a little allowance of my own. I could pay for it and he needn't know anything about it. NEFF Wait a minute. Why shouldn't he know? PHYLLIS Because I know he doesn't want accident insurance. He's superstitious about it. NEFF A lot of people are. Funny, isn't it? PHYLLIS If there was a way to get it like that, all the worry would be over. You see what I mean, Walter? NEFF Sure. I've got good eyesight. You want him to have the policy without him knowing it. And that means without the insurance company knowing that he doesn't know. That's the set-up, isn't it? PHYLLIS Is there anything wrong with it? NEFF I think it's lovely. And then, some dark wet night, if that crown block fell on him -- PHYLLIS What crown block? NEFF Only sometimes they have to have a little help. They can't quite make it on their own. PHYLLIS I don't know what you're talking about. NEFF Of course, it doesn't have to be a crown block. It can be a car backing over him, or he can fall out of an upstairs window. Any little thing like that, as long as it's a morgue job. PHYLLIS Are you crazy? NEFF Not that crazy. Goodbye, Mrs. Dietrichson. He picks up his hat. PHYLLIS What's the matter? NEFF Look, baby, you can't get away with it. PHYLLIS Get away with what? NEFF You want to knock him off, don't you, baby. PHYLLIS That's a horrible thing to say! NEFF Who'd you think I was, anyway? A guy that walks into a good-looking dame's front parlor and says "Good afternoon, I sell accident insurance on husbands. You got one that's been around too long? Somebody you'd like to turn into a little hard cash? Just give me a smile and I'll help you collect." Boy, what a dope I must look to you! PHYLLIS I think you're rotten. NEFF I think you're swell. So long as I'm not your husband. PHYLLIS Get out of here. NEFF You bet I will. You bet I'll get out of here, baby. But quick. He goes out. She looks after him. A-40 EXT. DIETRICHSON HOME - (DAY) Neff bangs the front door shut, walks quickly to his car and drives away. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) So I let her have it, straight between the eyes. She didn't fool me for a minute, not this time. I knew I had hold of a redhot poker and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off. I stopped at a drive-in for a bottle of beer, the one I had wanted all along, only I wanted it worse now, to get rid of the sour taste of her iced tea, and everything that went with it. I didn't want to go back to the office, so I dropped by a bowling alley at Third and Western and rolled a few lines to get my mind thinking about something else for a while. A-41 DRIVE-IN RESTAURANT - (DAY) Shooting past Neff sitting behind the wheel of his car The car hop hangs a tray on the door and serves him a bottle of beer. DISSOLVE TO: A-42 INT. BOWLING ALLEY Neff bowling. He rolls the ball with an effort at concentration, but his mind is not really on the game. DISSOLVE TO: A-43 EXT. APARTMENT HOUSE - (DUSK) It is late afternoon. The apartment house is called the LOS OLIVOS APARTMENTS. It is a six-story building in the Normandie- Wilshire district, with a basement garage. THE CAMERA PANS UP the front of the building to the top floor windows, as a little rain starts to fall. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) I didn't feel like eating dinner when I left, and I didn't feel like a show, so I drove home, put the car away and went up to my apartment. A-44 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT - LIVING ROOM - (DUSK) It is a double apartment of conventional design, with kitchen, dinette, and bathroom, squarecut overstuffed borax furniture. Gas logs are lit in the imitation fireplace. Neff stands by the window with his coat off and his tie loose. Raindrops strike against the glass. He turns away impatiently, paces up and down past a caddy bag with golf clubs in it, pulls one out at random, makes a couple of short swings, throws the club on the couch, paces again. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) It had begun to rain outside and I watched it get dark and didn't even turn on the light. That didn't help me either. I was all twisted up inside, and I was still holding on to that red-hot poker. And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all, that the hook was too strong, that this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning. The doorbell rings. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) So at eight o'clock the bell would ring and I would know who it was without even having to think, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Neff goes to the door and opens it. PHYLLIS Hello. Neff just looks at her. PHYLLIS You forgot your hat this afternoon. She has nothing in her hands but her bag. NEFF Did I? He looks down at her hands. PHYLLIS Don't you want me to bring it in? NEFF Sure. Put it on the chair. She comes in. He closes the door. NEFF How did you know where I live? PHYLLIS It's in the phone book. Neff switches on the standing lamp. PHYLLIS It's raining. NEFF So it is. Peel off your coat and sit down. She starts to take off her coat. NEFF Your husband out? PHYLLIS Long Beach. They're spudding in a new well. He phoned he'd be late. About nine-thirty. He takes her coat and lays it across the back of a chair. PHYLLIS It's about time you said you're glad to see me. NEFF I knew you wouldn't leave it like that. PHYLLIS Like what? NEFF Like it was this afternoon. PHYLLIS I must have said something that gave you a terribly wrong impression. You must surely see that. You must never think anything like that about me, Walter. NEFF Okay. PHYLLIS It's not okay. Not if you don't believe me. NEFF What do you want me to do? PHYLLIS I want you to be nice to me. Like the first time you came to the house. NEFF It can't be like the first time. Something has happened. PHYLLIS I know it has. It's happened to us. NEFF That's what I mean. Phyllis has moved over to the window. She stares out through the wet window-pane. NEFF What's the matter now? PHYLLIS I feel as if he was watching me. Not that he cares about me. Not any more. But he keeps me on a leash. So tight I can't breathe. I'm scared. NEFF What of? He's in Long Beach, isn't he? PHYLLIS I oughtn't to have come. NEFF Maybe you oughtn't. PHYLLIS You want me to go? NEFF If you want to. PHYLLIS Right now? NEFF Sure. Right now. By this time, he has hold of her wrist. He draws her to him slowly and kisses her. Her arms tighten around him. After a moment he pulls his head back, still holding her close. NEFF How were you going to do it? PHYLLIS Do what? NEFF Kill him. PHYLLIS Walter, for the last time -- She tries to jerk away but he holds her and kisses her again. NEFF I'm crazy about you, baby. PHYLLIS I'm crazy about you, Walter. NEFF That perfume on your hair. What's the name of it? PHYLLIS Something French. I bought it down at Ensenada. NEFF We ought to have some of that pink wine to go with it. The kind that bubbles. But all I have is bourbon. PHYLLIS Bourbon is fine, Walter. He lets her go and moves toward the dinette. A-45 THE DINETTE AND KITCHEN It contains a small table and some chairs. A low glass-and- china cabinet is built between the dinette and kitchen, leaving a space like a doorway. The kitchen is the usual apartment house kitchen, with stove, ice-box, sink, etc. It is quite small. Neff goes to the ice-box and Phyllis drifts in after him. NEFF Soda? PHYLLIS Plain water, please. NEFF Get a couple of glasses, will you. He points at the china closet. He has taken a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator and is holding it under the hot- water faucet. NEFF You know, about six months ago a guy slipped on the soap in his bathtub and knocked himself cold and drowned. Only he had accident insurance. So they had an autopsy and she didn't get away with it. Phyllis has the glasses now. She hands them to him. He dumps some ice cubes into the glasses. PHYLLIS Who didn't? NEFF His wife. He reaches for the whiskey bottle on top of the china closet. NEFF And there was another case where a guy was found shot and his wife said he was cleaning a gun and his stomach got in the way. All she collected was a three-to-ten stretch in Tehachapi. PHYLLIS Perhaps it was worth it to her. Neff hands her a glass. NEFF See if you can carry this as far as the living room. They move back toward the living room. A-46 LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff go toward the davenport. She is sipping her drink and looking around. PHYLLIS It's nice here, Walter. Who takes care of it for you? NEFF A colored woman comes in twice a week. PHYLLIS You get your own breakfast? NEFF Once in a while I squeeze a grapefruit. The rest I get at the corner drugstore. They sit on the davenport, fairly close together. PHYLLIS It sounds wonderful. Just strangers beside you. You don't know them. You don't hate them. You don't have to sit across the table and smile at him and that daughter of his every morning of your life. NEFF What daughter? Oh, that little girl on the piano. PHYLLIS Yes. Lola. She lives with us. He thinks a lot more of her than he does of me. NEFF Ever think of a divorce? PHYLLIS He wouldn't give me a divorce. NEFF I suppose because it would cost him money. PHYLLIS He hasn't got any money. Not since he went into the oil business. NEFF But he had when you married him? PHYLLIS Yes, he had. And I wanted a home. Why not? But that wasn't the only reason. I was his wife's nurse. She was sick for a long time. When she died, he was all broken up. I pitied him so. NEFF And now you hate him. PHYLLIS Yes, Walter. He's so mean to me. Every-time I buy a dress or a pair of shoes he yells his head off. He won't let me go anywhere. He keeps me shut up. He's always been mean to me. Even his life insurance all goes to that daughter of his. That Lola. NEFF Nothing for you at all, huh? PHYLLIS No. And nothing is just what I'm worth to him. NEFF So you lie awake in the dark and listen to him snore and get ideas. PHYLLIS Walter, I don't want to kill him. I never did. Not even when he gets drunk and slaps my face. NEFF Only sometimes you wish he was dead. PHYLLIS Perhaps I do. NEFF And you wish it was an accident, and you had that policy. For fifty thousand dollars. Is that it? PHYLLIS Perhaps that too. She takes a long drink. PHYLLIS The other night we drove home from a party. He was drunk again. When we got into the garage he just sat there with his head on the steering wheel and the motor still running. And I thought what it would be like if I didn't switch it off, just closed the garage door and left him there. NEFF I'll tell you what it would be like, if you had that accident policy, and tried to pull a monoxide job. We have a guy in our office named Keyes. For him a set-up like that would be just like a slice of rare roast beef. In three minutes he'd know it wasn't an accident. In ten minutes you'd be sitting under the hot lights. In half an hour you'd be signing your name to a confession. PHYLLIS But Walter, I didn't do it. I'm not going to do it. NEFF Not if there's an insurance company in the picture, baby. So long as you're honest they'll pay you with a smile, but you just try to pull something like that and you'll find out. They know more tricks than a carload of monkeys. And if there's a death mixed up in it, you haven't got a prayer. They'll hang you as sure as ten dimes will buy a dollar, baby. She begins to cry. He puts his arms around her and kisses her. NEFF Just stop thinking about it, will you. He holds her tight. Their heads touch, side by side, THE CAMERA SLOWLY STARTS TO RECEDE as we DISSOLVE TO: A-47 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits in the swivel chair, talking into the dictaphone. He has hooked the wastebasket under his feet to sit more comfortably. As he talks, a little cough shakes him now and then. NEFF So we just sat there, and she kept on crying softly, like the rain on the window, and we didn't say anything. Maybe she had stopped thinking about it, but I hadn't. I couldn't. Because it all tied up with something I had been thinking about for years, since long before I ever ran into Phyllis Dietrichson. Because, in this business you can't sleep for trying to figure out the tricks they could pull on you. You're like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don't crook the house. And then one night, you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself. And do it smart. Because you've got that wheel right under your hands. And you know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out in front, a shill to put down the bet. And suddenly the doorbell rings and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you... Look, Keyes, I'm not trying to whitewash myself. I fought it, only maybe I didn't fight it hard enough. The stakes were fifty thousand dollars, but they were the life of a man, too, a man who'd never done me any dirt. Except he was married to a woman he didn't care anything about, and I did... DISSOLVE TO: A-48 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT LIVING ROOM CAMERA MOVES SLOWLY towards the davenport again. Neff sits in one corner with his feet on the low table. He is smoking his cigarette and staring at the ceiling. Phyllis has been sitting fairly close to him. She gets up slowly and crosses to her rain coat, lying over a chair. PHYLLIS I've got to go now, Walter. Neff does not answer. He keeps on staring at the ceiling. She starts to put the rain coat on. PHYLLIS Will you call me, Walter? Neff still does not answer. PHYLLIS Walter! He looks at her slowly, almost absently. PHYLLIS I hate him. I loathe going back to him. You believe me, don't you, Walter? NEFF Sure I believe you. PHYLLIS I can't stand it anymore. What if they did hang me? NEFF You're not going to hang, baby. PHYLLIS It's better than going on this way. NEFF -- you're not going to hang, baby. Not ever. Because you're going to do it the smart way. Because I'm going to help you. PHYLLIS You! NEFF Me. PHYLLIS Do you know what you're saying? NEFF Sure I know what I'm saying. He gets up and grips her arm. NEFF We're going to do it together. We're going to do it right. And I'm the guy that knows how. There is fierce determination in his voice. His fingers dig into her arm. PHYLLIS Walter, you're hurting me. NEFF There isn't going to be any slip up. Nothing sloppy. Nothing weak. It's got to be perfect. He kisses her. NEFF You go now. He leads her towards the door. NEFF Call me tomorrow. But not from your house. From a booth. And watch your step. Every single minute. It's got to be perfect, understand. Straight down the line. They have now reached the door. Neff opens it. Phyllis stands in the doorway, her lips white. PHYLLIS Straight down the line. She goes quietly. He watches her down the corridor. Slowly he closes the door and goes back into the room. He moves across the window and opens it wide. He stands there, looking down into the dark street. From below comes the sound of a car starting and driving off. The rain drifts in against his face. He just stands there motionless. His mind is going a hundred miles a minute. FADE OUT: END OF SEQUENCE "A" SEQUENCE "B" FADE IN: B-1 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits slumped in his chair before the dictaphone. On the desk next to him stands a used record. The cylinder on the dictaphone is not turning. He is smoking a cigarette. He kills it then lifts the needle and slides off the record which is on the machine and stands it on end on the desk beside the other used record. He reaches down painfully to take another record from the rack beneath the dictaphone, looks at it against the light to make sure it has not been used, then slides it into place on the machine and resets the needle. He lifts the horn and resumes his dictation. NEFF The first thing we had to do was fix him up with that accident policy. I knew he wouldn't buy, but all I wanted was his signature on an application. So I had to make him sign without his knowing what he was signing. And I wanted a witness other than Phyllis to hear me give him a sales talk. I was trying to think with your brains, Keyes. I wanted all the answers ready for all the questions you were going to spring as soon as Dietrichson was dead. Neff takes a last drag on his cigarette and kills it by running it under the ledge of the dictaphone stand. He drops the stub on the floor and resumes. NEFF A couple of nights later I went to the house. Everything looked fine, except I didn't like the witness Phyllis had brought in. It was Dietrichson's daughter Lola, and it made me feel a little queer in the belly to have her right there in the room, playing Chinese checkers, as if nothing was going to happen. DISSOLVE: B-2 A BOARD OF CHINESE CHECKERS CAMERA WITHDRAWS AND GRADUALLY REVEALS THE DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM - NIGHT The checker-board is on the davenport between Phyllis and Lola. Mr. Dietrichson sits in a big easy chair. His coat and tie are over the back of the chair, and the evening paper is lying tumbled on the floor beside him. He is smoking a cigar with the band on it. He has a drink in front of him and several more inside him. In another chair sits Neff, his briefcase on the floor, leaning against his chair. He holds his rate book partly open, with a finger in it for a marker. He is going full swing. NEFF I suppose you realize, Mr. Dietrichson, that, not being an employee, you are not covered by the State Compensation Insurance Act. The only way you can protect yourself is by having a personal policy of your own. DIETRICHSON I know all about that. The next thing you'll tell me I need earthquake insurance and lightning insurance and hail insurance. Phyllis looks up from the checker-board and cuts in on the dialogue. Lola listens without much interest. PHYLLIS (To Dietrichson) If we bought all the insurance they can think up, we'd stay broke paying for it, wouldn't we, honey? DIETRICHSON What keeps us broke is you going out and buying five hats at a crack. Who needs a hat in California? NEFF I always say insurance is a lot like a hot water bottle. It looks kind of useless and silly hanging on the hook, but when you get that stomach ache in the middle of the night, it comes in mighty handy. DIETRICHSON Now you want to sell me a hot water bottle. NEFF Dollar for dollar, accident insurance is the cheapest coverage you can buy, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Maybe some other time, Mr. Neff. I had a tough day. NEFF Just as you say, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Suppose we just settle that automobile insurance tonight. NEFF Sure. All we need on that is for you to sign an application for renewal. Phyllis throws a quick glance at Neff. As she looks back she sees that Lola is staring down at her wrist watch. LOLA Phyllis, do you mind if we don't finish this game? It bores me stiff. PHYLLIS Got some thing better to do? LOLA Yes, I have. She gets up. LOLA (To Dietrichson) Father, is it all right if I run along now? DIETRICHSON Run along where? Who with? LOLA Just Anne. We're going roller skating. DIETRICHSON Anne who? LOLA Anne Matthews. PHYLLIS It's not that Nino Zachetti again? DIETRICHSON It better not be that Zachetti guy. If I ever catch you with that --- LOLA It's Anne Matthews, I told you. I also told you we're going roller skating. I'm meeting her at the corner of Vermont and Franklin -- the north- west corner, in case you're interested. And I'm late already. I hope that is all clear. Good night, Father. Good night, Phyllis. She starts to go. NEFF Good night, Miss Dietrichson. LOLA Oh, I'm sorry. Good night, Mr. -- NEFF Neff. LOLA Good night, Mr. Neff. PHYLLIS Now you're not going to take my car again. LOLA No thanks. I'd rather be dead. She goes out through the archway. DIETRICHSON A great little fighter for her weight. Dietrichson sucks down a big swallow of his drink. Neff has taken two blank forms from his briefcase. He puts the briefcase on Mr. Dietrichson's lap and lays the forms on top. Phyllis is watching closely. NEFF This is where you sign, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Sign what? NEFF The applications for your auto renewals. So you'll be protected until the new policies are issued. DIETRICHSON When will that be? NEFF In about a week. DIETRICHSON Just so I'm covered when I drive up North. Neff takes out his fountain pen. NEFF San Francisco, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Palo Alto. PHYLLIS He was a Stanford man, Mr. Neff. And he still goes to his class reunion every year. DIETRICHSON What's wrong with that? Can't I have a little fun even once a year? NEFF Great football school, Stanford. Did you play football, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Left guard. Almost made the varsity, too. Neff has unscrewed his fountain pen. He hands it to Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson puts on his glasses. NEFF On that bottom line, Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson signs. Neff's and Phyllis' eyes meet for a split second. NEFF

calls

How many times the word 'calls' appears in the text?

you, Walter. Get out of here before I throw my desk at you. NEFF I love you, too. He walks out, still grinning. A-35 EXT. OFFICES - TWELFTH FLOOR Neff comes out of Keys' office and walks back along the balcony. Activity of secretaries going in and out of doors, etc. Neff enters his own office. NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) I really did, too, you old crab, always yelling your fat head off, always sore at everyone. But behind the cigar ashes on your vest I kind of knew you had a heart as big as a house... Back in my office there was a phone message from Mrs. Dietrichson about the renewals. She didn't want me to come tomorrow evening. She wanted me to come Thursday afternoon at three-thirty instead. I had a lot of stuff lined up for that Thursday afternoon, including a trip down to Santa Monica to see a couple of live prospects about some group insurance. But I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson and the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg. A-36 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE Anderson, a salesman, sits at one of the desks, filling out a report. Neff enters, goes to his own desk. He looks down at some mail. On top there is a typewritten note. He reads it, sits down and leafs through his desk calendar. A-37 INSERT - CLOSEUP - CALENDAR PAGE Showing date: THURSDAY 23 May and five or six appointments penciled in tightly on the page. DISSOLVE TO: A-38 DIETRICHSON HOME - ENTRANCE HALL - (DAY) THE CAMERA PANS with Phyllis Dietrichson's feet and ankles as she comes down the stairs, her high heels clicking on the tiles. The anklet glistens on her leg as she moves. THE CAMERA PANS ON. Phyllis has reached the entrance hall, and as she walks toward the front door her whole body becomes visible. She wears a gay print dress with a wide sash over her hips. She opens the door. Outside is Neff, wearing a sport coat, flannel slacks. He takes his hat off. PHYLLIS Hello, Mr. Neff. He stands there with a little smile. PHYLLIS Aren't you coming in? NEFF I'm considering it. He comes in. PHYLLIS I hope you didn't mind my changing the appointment. Last night wasn't so convenient. NEFF That's okay. I was working on my stamp collection. She leads him toward living room. A-39 DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff come through archway. She heads toward a low tea table which stands in front of the davenport, with tall glasses, ice cubes, lemon, a pot of tea, etc. PHYLLIS I was just fixing some iced tea. Would you like a glass? NEFF Unless you have a bottle of beer that's not working. PHYLLIS There might be some. I never know what's in the ice box. (Calls) Nettie!... She pours herself a glass of tea. PHYLLIS About those renewals, Mr. Neff. I talked to my husband about it. NEFF You did? PHYLLIS Yes. He'll renew with you he told me. In fact, I thought he'd be here this afternoon. NEFF But he's not? PHYLLIS No. NEFF That's terrible. PHYLLIS (Calls again, impatiently) Nettie!... Nettie!... Oh, I forgot, it's the maid's day off. NEFF Don't bother, Mrs. Dietrichson. I'd like some iced tea very much. PHYLLIS Lemon? Sugar? NEFF Fix it your way. She fixes him a glass of tea while he is looking around. He slowly sits down. NEFF Seeing it's the maid's day off maybe there's something I can do for you. She hands him the tea. NEFF Like running the vacuum cleaner. PHYLLIS Fresh. NEFF I used to peddle vacuum cleaners. Not much money but you learn a lot about life. PHYLLIS I didn't think you'd learned it from a correspondence course. NEFF Where did you pick up this tea drinking? You're not English, are you? PHYLLIS No. Californian. Born right here in Los Angeles. NEFF They say native Californians all come from Iowa. PHYLLIS I wanted to ask you something, Mr. Neff. NEFF Make it Walter. PHYLLIS Walter. NEFF Right. PHYLLIS Tell me, Walter, on this insurance -- how much commission do you make? NEFF Twenty percent. Why? PHYLLIS I thought maybe I could throw a little more business your way. NEFF I can always use it. PHYLLIS I was thinking about my husband. I worry a lot about him, down in those oil fields. It's very dangerous. NEFF Not for an executive, is it? PHYLLIS He doesn't just sit behind a desk. He's right down there with the drilling crews. It's got me worried sick. NEFF You mean a crown block might fall on him some rainy night? PHYLLIS Please don't talk like that. NEFF But that's the idea. PHYLLIS The other day a casing line snapped and caught the foreman. He's in the hospital with a broken back. NEFF Bad. PHYLLIS It's got me jittery just thinking about it. Suppose something like that happened to my husband? NEFF It could. PHYLLIS Don't you think he ought to have accident insurance? NEFF Uh huh. PHYLLIS What kind of insurance could he have? NEFF Enough to cover doctors' and hospital bills. Say a hundred and twenty-five a week cash benefit. And he'd rate around fifty thousand capital sum. PHYLLIS Capital sum? What's that? NEFF That's if he got killed. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. PHYLLIS I suppose you have to think of everything in your business. NEFF Mr. Dietrichson would understand. I'm sure I could sell him on the idea of some accident protection. Why don't I talk to him about it. PHYLLIS You could try. But he's pretty tough going. NEFF They're all tough at first. PHYLLIS He's got a lot on his mind. He doesn't want to listen to anything except maybe a baseball game on the radio. Sometimes we sit all evening without saying a word to each other. NEFF Sounds pretty dull. Phyllis shrugs. PHYLLIS So I just sit and knit. NEFF Is that what you married him for? PHYLLIS Maybe I like the way his thumbs hold up the wool. NEFF Anytime his thumbs get tired -- PHYLLIS I want to ask you something, Mr. Neff. Could I get an accident policy for him -- without bothering him at all? NEFF How's that again. PHYLLIS That would make it easier for you, too. You wouldn't even have to talk to him. I have a little allowance of my own. I could pay for it and he needn't know anything about it. NEFF Wait a minute. Why shouldn't he know? PHYLLIS Because I know he doesn't want accident insurance. He's superstitious about it. NEFF A lot of people are. Funny, isn't it? PHYLLIS If there was a way to get it like that, all the worry would be over. You see what I mean, Walter? NEFF Sure. I've got good eyesight. You want him to have the policy without him knowing it. And that means without the insurance company knowing that he doesn't know. That's the set-up, isn't it? PHYLLIS Is there anything wrong with it? NEFF I think it's lovely. And then, some dark wet night, if that crown block fell on him -- PHYLLIS What crown block? NEFF Only sometimes they have to have a little help. They can't quite make it on their own. PHYLLIS I don't know what you're talking about. NEFF Of course, it doesn't have to be a crown block. It can be a car backing over him, or he can fall out of an upstairs window. Any little thing like that, as long as it's a morgue job. PHYLLIS Are you crazy? NEFF Not that crazy. Goodbye, Mrs. Dietrichson. He picks up his hat. PHYLLIS What's the matter? NEFF Look, baby, you can't get away with it. PHYLLIS Get away with what? NEFF You want to knock him off, don't you, baby. PHYLLIS That's a horrible thing to say! NEFF Who'd you think I was, anyway? A guy that walks into a good-looking dame's front parlor and says "Good afternoon, I sell accident insurance on husbands. You got one that's been around too long? Somebody you'd like to turn into a little hard cash? Just give me a smile and I'll help you collect." Boy, what a dope I must look to you! PHYLLIS I think you're rotten. NEFF I think you're swell. So long as I'm not your husband. PHYLLIS Get out of here. NEFF You bet I will. You bet I'll get out of here, baby. But quick. He goes out. She looks after him. A-40 EXT. DIETRICHSON HOME - (DAY) Neff bangs the front door shut, walks quickly to his car and drives away. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) So I let her have it, straight between the eyes. She didn't fool me for a minute, not this time. I knew I had hold of a redhot poker and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off. I stopped at a drive-in for a bottle of beer, the one I had wanted all along, only I wanted it worse now, to get rid of the sour taste of her iced tea, and everything that went with it. I didn't want to go back to the office, so I dropped by a bowling alley at Third and Western and rolled a few lines to get my mind thinking about something else for a while. A-41 DRIVE-IN RESTAURANT - (DAY) Shooting past Neff sitting behind the wheel of his car The car hop hangs a tray on the door and serves him a bottle of beer. DISSOLVE TO: A-42 INT. BOWLING ALLEY Neff bowling. He rolls the ball with an effort at concentration, but his mind is not really on the game. DISSOLVE TO: A-43 EXT. APARTMENT HOUSE - (DUSK) It is late afternoon. The apartment house is called the LOS OLIVOS APARTMENTS. It is a six-story building in the Normandie- Wilshire district, with a basement garage. THE CAMERA PANS UP the front of the building to the top floor windows, as a little rain starts to fall. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) I didn't feel like eating dinner when I left, and I didn't feel like a show, so I drove home, put the car away and went up to my apartment. A-44 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT - LIVING ROOM - (DUSK) It is a double apartment of conventional design, with kitchen, dinette, and bathroom, squarecut overstuffed borax furniture. Gas logs are lit in the imitation fireplace. Neff stands by the window with his coat off and his tie loose. Raindrops strike against the glass. He turns away impatiently, paces up and down past a caddy bag with golf clubs in it, pulls one out at random, makes a couple of short swings, throws the club on the couch, paces again. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) It had begun to rain outside and I watched it get dark and didn't even turn on the light. That didn't help me either. I was all twisted up inside, and I was still holding on to that red-hot poker. And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all, that the hook was too strong, that this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning. The doorbell rings. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) So at eight o'clock the bell would ring and I would know who it was without even having to think, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Neff goes to the door and opens it. PHYLLIS Hello. Neff just looks at her. PHYLLIS You forgot your hat this afternoon. She has nothing in her hands but her bag. NEFF Did I? He looks down at her hands. PHYLLIS Don't you want me to bring it in? NEFF Sure. Put it on the chair. She comes in. He closes the door. NEFF How did you know where I live? PHYLLIS It's in the phone book. Neff switches on the standing lamp. PHYLLIS It's raining. NEFF So it is. Peel off your coat and sit down. She starts to take off her coat. NEFF Your husband out? PHYLLIS Long Beach. They're spudding in a new well. He phoned he'd be late. About nine-thirty. He takes her coat and lays it across the back of a chair. PHYLLIS It's about time you said you're glad to see me. NEFF I knew you wouldn't leave it like that. PHYLLIS Like what? NEFF Like it was this afternoon. PHYLLIS I must have said something that gave you a terribly wrong impression. You must surely see that. You must never think anything like that about me, Walter. NEFF Okay. PHYLLIS It's not okay. Not if you don't believe me. NEFF What do you want me to do? PHYLLIS I want you to be nice to me. Like the first time you came to the house. NEFF It can't be like the first time. Something has happened. PHYLLIS I know it has. It's happened to us. NEFF That's what I mean. Phyllis has moved over to the window. She stares out through the wet window-pane. NEFF What's the matter now? PHYLLIS I feel as if he was watching me. Not that he cares about me. Not any more. But he keeps me on a leash. So tight I can't breathe. I'm scared. NEFF What of? He's in Long Beach, isn't he? PHYLLIS I oughtn't to have come. NEFF Maybe you oughtn't. PHYLLIS You want me to go? NEFF If you want to. PHYLLIS Right now? NEFF Sure. Right now. By this time, he has hold of her wrist. He draws her to him slowly and kisses her. Her arms tighten around him. After a moment he pulls his head back, still holding her close. NEFF How were you going to do it? PHYLLIS Do what? NEFF Kill him. PHYLLIS Walter, for the last time -- She tries to jerk away but he holds her and kisses her again. NEFF I'm crazy about you, baby. PHYLLIS I'm crazy about you, Walter. NEFF That perfume on your hair. What's the name of it? PHYLLIS Something French. I bought it down at Ensenada. NEFF We ought to have some of that pink wine to go with it. The kind that bubbles. But all I have is bourbon. PHYLLIS Bourbon is fine, Walter. He lets her go and moves toward the dinette. A-45 THE DINETTE AND KITCHEN It contains a small table and some chairs. A low glass-and- china cabinet is built between the dinette and kitchen, leaving a space like a doorway. The kitchen is the usual apartment house kitchen, with stove, ice-box, sink, etc. It is quite small. Neff goes to the ice-box and Phyllis drifts in after him. NEFF Soda? PHYLLIS Plain water, please. NEFF Get a couple of glasses, will you. He points at the china closet. He has taken a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator and is holding it under the hot- water faucet. NEFF You know, about six months ago a guy slipped on the soap in his bathtub and knocked himself cold and drowned. Only he had accident insurance. So they had an autopsy and she didn't get away with it. Phyllis has the glasses now. She hands them to him. He dumps some ice cubes into the glasses. PHYLLIS Who didn't? NEFF His wife. He reaches for the whiskey bottle on top of the china closet. NEFF And there was another case where a guy was found shot and his wife said he was cleaning a gun and his stomach got in the way. All she collected was a three-to-ten stretch in Tehachapi. PHYLLIS Perhaps it was worth it to her. Neff hands her a glass. NEFF See if you can carry this as far as the living room. They move back toward the living room. A-46 LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff go toward the davenport. She is sipping her drink and looking around. PHYLLIS It's nice here, Walter. Who takes care of it for you? NEFF A colored woman comes in twice a week. PHYLLIS You get your own breakfast? NEFF Once in a while I squeeze a grapefruit. The rest I get at the corner drugstore. They sit on the davenport, fairly close together. PHYLLIS It sounds wonderful. Just strangers beside you. You don't know them. You don't hate them. You don't have to sit across the table and smile at him and that daughter of his every morning of your life. NEFF What daughter? Oh, that little girl on the piano. PHYLLIS Yes. Lola. She lives with us. He thinks a lot more of her than he does of me. NEFF Ever think of a divorce? PHYLLIS He wouldn't give me a divorce. NEFF I suppose because it would cost him money. PHYLLIS He hasn't got any money. Not since he went into the oil business. NEFF But he had when you married him? PHYLLIS Yes, he had. And I wanted a home. Why not? But that wasn't the only reason. I was his wife's nurse. She was sick for a long time. When she died, he was all broken up. I pitied him so. NEFF And now you hate him. PHYLLIS Yes, Walter. He's so mean to me. Every-time I buy a dress or a pair of shoes he yells his head off. He won't let me go anywhere. He keeps me shut up. He's always been mean to me. Even his life insurance all goes to that daughter of his. That Lola. NEFF Nothing for you at all, huh? PHYLLIS No. And nothing is just what I'm worth to him. NEFF So you lie awake in the dark and listen to him snore and get ideas. PHYLLIS Walter, I don't want to kill him. I never did. Not even when he gets drunk and slaps my face. NEFF Only sometimes you wish he was dead. PHYLLIS Perhaps I do. NEFF And you wish it was an accident, and you had that policy. For fifty thousand dollars. Is that it? PHYLLIS Perhaps that too. She takes a long drink. PHYLLIS The other night we drove home from a party. He was drunk again. When we got into the garage he just sat there with his head on the steering wheel and the motor still running. And I thought what it would be like if I didn't switch it off, just closed the garage door and left him there. NEFF I'll tell you what it would be like, if you had that accident policy, and tried to pull a monoxide job. We have a guy in our office named Keyes. For him a set-up like that would be just like a slice of rare roast beef. In three minutes he'd know it wasn't an accident. In ten minutes you'd be sitting under the hot lights. In half an hour you'd be signing your name to a confession. PHYLLIS But Walter, I didn't do it. I'm not going to do it. NEFF Not if there's an insurance company in the picture, baby. So long as you're honest they'll pay you with a smile, but you just try to pull something like that and you'll find out. They know more tricks than a carload of monkeys. And if there's a death mixed up in it, you haven't got a prayer. They'll hang you as sure as ten dimes will buy a dollar, baby. She begins to cry. He puts his arms around her and kisses her. NEFF Just stop thinking about it, will you. He holds her tight. Their heads touch, side by side, THE CAMERA SLOWLY STARTS TO RECEDE as we DISSOLVE TO: A-47 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits in the swivel chair, talking into the dictaphone. He has hooked the wastebasket under his feet to sit more comfortably. As he talks, a little cough shakes him now and then. NEFF So we just sat there, and she kept on crying softly, like the rain on the window, and we didn't say anything. Maybe she had stopped thinking about it, but I hadn't. I couldn't. Because it all tied up with something I had been thinking about for years, since long before I ever ran into Phyllis Dietrichson. Because, in this business you can't sleep for trying to figure out the tricks they could pull on you. You're like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don't crook the house. And then one night, you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself. And do it smart. Because you've got that wheel right under your hands. And you know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out in front, a shill to put down the bet. And suddenly the doorbell rings and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you... Look, Keyes, I'm not trying to whitewash myself. I fought it, only maybe I didn't fight it hard enough. The stakes were fifty thousand dollars, but they were the life of a man, too, a man who'd never done me any dirt. Except he was married to a woman he didn't care anything about, and I did... DISSOLVE TO: A-48 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT LIVING ROOM CAMERA MOVES SLOWLY towards the davenport again. Neff sits in one corner with his feet on the low table. He is smoking his cigarette and staring at the ceiling. Phyllis has been sitting fairly close to him. She gets up slowly and crosses to her rain coat, lying over a chair. PHYLLIS I've got to go now, Walter. Neff does not answer. He keeps on staring at the ceiling. She starts to put the rain coat on. PHYLLIS Will you call me, Walter? Neff still does not answer. PHYLLIS Walter! He looks at her slowly, almost absently. PHYLLIS I hate him. I loathe going back to him. You believe me, don't you, Walter? NEFF Sure I believe you. PHYLLIS I can't stand it anymore. What if they did hang me? NEFF You're not going to hang, baby. PHYLLIS It's better than going on this way. NEFF -- you're not going to hang, baby. Not ever. Because you're going to do it the smart way. Because I'm going to help you. PHYLLIS You! NEFF Me. PHYLLIS Do you know what you're saying? NEFF Sure I know what I'm saying. He gets up and grips her arm. NEFF We're going to do it together. We're going to do it right. And I'm the guy that knows how. There is fierce determination in his voice. His fingers dig into her arm. PHYLLIS Walter, you're hurting me. NEFF There isn't going to be any slip up. Nothing sloppy. Nothing weak. It's got to be perfect. He kisses her. NEFF You go now. He leads her towards the door. NEFF Call me tomorrow. But not from your house. From a booth. And watch your step. Every single minute. It's got to be perfect, understand. Straight down the line. They have now reached the door. Neff opens it. Phyllis stands in the doorway, her lips white. PHYLLIS Straight down the line. She goes quietly. He watches her down the corridor. Slowly he closes the door and goes back into the room. He moves across the window and opens it wide. He stands there, looking down into the dark street. From below comes the sound of a car starting and driving off. The rain drifts in against his face. He just stands there motionless. His mind is going a hundred miles a minute. FADE OUT: END OF SEQUENCE "A" SEQUENCE "B" FADE IN: B-1 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits slumped in his chair before the dictaphone. On the desk next to him stands a used record. The cylinder on the dictaphone is not turning. He is smoking a cigarette. He kills it then lifts the needle and slides off the record which is on the machine and stands it on end on the desk beside the other used record. He reaches down painfully to take another record from the rack beneath the dictaphone, looks at it against the light to make sure it has not been used, then slides it into place on the machine and resets the needle. He lifts the horn and resumes his dictation. NEFF The first thing we had to do was fix him up with that accident policy. I knew he wouldn't buy, but all I wanted was his signature on an application. So I had to make him sign without his knowing what he was signing. And I wanted a witness other than Phyllis to hear me give him a sales talk. I was trying to think with your brains, Keyes. I wanted all the answers ready for all the questions you were going to spring as soon as Dietrichson was dead. Neff takes a last drag on his cigarette and kills it by running it under the ledge of the dictaphone stand. He drops the stub on the floor and resumes. NEFF A couple of nights later I went to the house. Everything looked fine, except I didn't like the witness Phyllis had brought in. It was Dietrichson's daughter Lola, and it made me feel a little queer in the belly to have her right there in the room, playing Chinese checkers, as if nothing was going to happen. DISSOLVE: B-2 A BOARD OF CHINESE CHECKERS CAMERA WITHDRAWS AND GRADUALLY REVEALS THE DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM - NIGHT The checker-board is on the davenport between Phyllis and Lola. Mr. Dietrichson sits in a big easy chair. His coat and tie are over the back of the chair, and the evening paper is lying tumbled on the floor beside him. He is smoking a cigar with the band on it. He has a drink in front of him and several more inside him. In another chair sits Neff, his briefcase on the floor, leaning against his chair. He holds his rate book partly open, with a finger in it for a marker. He is going full swing. NEFF I suppose you realize, Mr. Dietrichson, that, not being an employee, you are not covered by the State Compensation Insurance Act. The only way you can protect yourself is by having a personal policy of your own. DIETRICHSON I know all about that. The next thing you'll tell me I need earthquake insurance and lightning insurance and hail insurance. Phyllis looks up from the checker-board and cuts in on the dialogue. Lola listens without much interest. PHYLLIS (To Dietrichson) If we bought all the insurance they can think up, we'd stay broke paying for it, wouldn't we, honey? DIETRICHSON What keeps us broke is you going out and buying five hats at a crack. Who needs a hat in California? NEFF I always say insurance is a lot like a hot water bottle. It looks kind of useless and silly hanging on the hook, but when you get that stomach ache in the middle of the night, it comes in mighty handy. DIETRICHSON Now you want to sell me a hot water bottle. NEFF Dollar for dollar, accident insurance is the cheapest coverage you can buy, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Maybe some other time, Mr. Neff. I had a tough day. NEFF Just as you say, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Suppose we just settle that automobile insurance tonight. NEFF Sure. All we need on that is for you to sign an application for renewal. Phyllis throws a quick glance at Neff. As she looks back she sees that Lola is staring down at her wrist watch. LOLA Phyllis, do you mind if we don't finish this game? It bores me stiff. PHYLLIS Got some thing better to do? LOLA Yes, I have. She gets up. LOLA (To Dietrichson) Father, is it all right if I run along now? DIETRICHSON Run along where? Who with? LOLA Just Anne. We're going roller skating. DIETRICHSON Anne who? LOLA Anne Matthews. PHYLLIS It's not that Nino Zachetti again? DIETRICHSON It better not be that Zachetti guy. If I ever catch you with that --- LOLA It's Anne Matthews, I told you. I also told you we're going roller skating. I'm meeting her at the corner of Vermont and Franklin -- the north- west corner, in case you're interested. And I'm late already. I hope that is all clear. Good night, Father. Good night, Phyllis. She starts to go. NEFF Good night, Miss Dietrichson. LOLA Oh, I'm sorry. Good night, Mr. -- NEFF Neff. LOLA Good night, Mr. Neff. PHYLLIS Now you're not going to take my car again. LOLA No thanks. I'd rather be dead. She goes out through the archway. DIETRICHSON A great little fighter for her weight. Dietrichson sucks down a big swallow of his drink. Neff has taken two blank forms from his briefcase. He puts the briefcase on Mr. Dietrichson's lap and lays the forms on top. Phyllis is watching closely. NEFF This is where you sign, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Sign what? NEFF The applications for your auto renewals. So you'll be protected until the new policies are issued. DIETRICHSON When will that be? NEFF In about a week. DIETRICHSON Just so I'm covered when I drive up North. Neff takes out his fountain pen. NEFF San Francisco, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Palo Alto. PHYLLIS He was a Stanford man, Mr. Neff. And he still goes to his class reunion every year. DIETRICHSON What's wrong with that? Can't I have a little fun even once a year? NEFF Great football school, Stanford. Did you play football, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Left guard. Almost made the varsity, too. Neff has unscrewed his fountain pen. He hands it to Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson puts on his glasses. NEFF On that bottom line, Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson signs. Neff's and Phyllis' eyes meet for a split second. NEFF

hall

How many times the word 'hall' appears in the text?

you, Walter. Get out of here before I throw my desk at you. NEFF I love you, too. He walks out, still grinning. A-35 EXT. OFFICES - TWELFTH FLOOR Neff comes out of Keys' office and walks back along the balcony. Activity of secretaries going in and out of doors, etc. Neff enters his own office. NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) I really did, too, you old crab, always yelling your fat head off, always sore at everyone. But behind the cigar ashes on your vest I kind of knew you had a heart as big as a house... Back in my office there was a phone message from Mrs. Dietrichson about the renewals. She didn't want me to come tomorrow evening. She wanted me to come Thursday afternoon at three-thirty instead. I had a lot of stuff lined up for that Thursday afternoon, including a trip down to Santa Monica to see a couple of live prospects about some group insurance. But I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson and the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg. A-36 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE Anderson, a salesman, sits at one of the desks, filling out a report. Neff enters, goes to his own desk. He looks down at some mail. On top there is a typewritten note. He reads it, sits down and leafs through his desk calendar. A-37 INSERT - CLOSEUP - CALENDAR PAGE Showing date: THURSDAY 23 May and five or six appointments penciled in tightly on the page. DISSOLVE TO: A-38 DIETRICHSON HOME - ENTRANCE HALL - (DAY) THE CAMERA PANS with Phyllis Dietrichson's feet and ankles as she comes down the stairs, her high heels clicking on the tiles. The anklet glistens on her leg as she moves. THE CAMERA PANS ON. Phyllis has reached the entrance hall, and as she walks toward the front door her whole body becomes visible. She wears a gay print dress with a wide sash over her hips. She opens the door. Outside is Neff, wearing a sport coat, flannel slacks. He takes his hat off. PHYLLIS Hello, Mr. Neff. He stands there with a little smile. PHYLLIS Aren't you coming in? NEFF I'm considering it. He comes in. PHYLLIS I hope you didn't mind my changing the appointment. Last night wasn't so convenient. NEFF That's okay. I was working on my stamp collection. She leads him toward living room. A-39 DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff come through archway. She heads toward a low tea table which stands in front of the davenport, with tall glasses, ice cubes, lemon, a pot of tea, etc. PHYLLIS I was just fixing some iced tea. Would you like a glass? NEFF Unless you have a bottle of beer that's not working. PHYLLIS There might be some. I never know what's in the ice box. (Calls) Nettie!... She pours herself a glass of tea. PHYLLIS About those renewals, Mr. Neff. I talked to my husband about it. NEFF You did? PHYLLIS Yes. He'll renew with you he told me. In fact, I thought he'd be here this afternoon. NEFF But he's not? PHYLLIS No. NEFF That's terrible. PHYLLIS (Calls again, impatiently) Nettie!... Nettie!... Oh, I forgot, it's the maid's day off. NEFF Don't bother, Mrs. Dietrichson. I'd like some iced tea very much. PHYLLIS Lemon? Sugar? NEFF Fix it your way. She fixes him a glass of tea while he is looking around. He slowly sits down. NEFF Seeing it's the maid's day off maybe there's something I can do for you. She hands him the tea. NEFF Like running the vacuum cleaner. PHYLLIS Fresh. NEFF I used to peddle vacuum cleaners. Not much money but you learn a lot about life. PHYLLIS I didn't think you'd learned it from a correspondence course. NEFF Where did you pick up this tea drinking? You're not English, are you? PHYLLIS No. Californian. Born right here in Los Angeles. NEFF They say native Californians all come from Iowa. PHYLLIS I wanted to ask you something, Mr. Neff. NEFF Make it Walter. PHYLLIS Walter. NEFF Right. PHYLLIS Tell me, Walter, on this insurance -- how much commission do you make? NEFF Twenty percent. Why? PHYLLIS I thought maybe I could throw a little more business your way. NEFF I can always use it. PHYLLIS I was thinking about my husband. I worry a lot about him, down in those oil fields. It's very dangerous. NEFF Not for an executive, is it? PHYLLIS He doesn't just sit behind a desk. He's right down there with the drilling crews. It's got me worried sick. NEFF You mean a crown block might fall on him some rainy night? PHYLLIS Please don't talk like that. NEFF But that's the idea. PHYLLIS The other day a casing line snapped and caught the foreman. He's in the hospital with a broken back. NEFF Bad. PHYLLIS It's got me jittery just thinking about it. Suppose something like that happened to my husband? NEFF It could. PHYLLIS Don't you think he ought to have accident insurance? NEFF Uh huh. PHYLLIS What kind of insurance could he have? NEFF Enough to cover doctors' and hospital bills. Say a hundred and twenty-five a week cash benefit. And he'd rate around fifty thousand capital sum. PHYLLIS Capital sum? What's that? NEFF That's if he got killed. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. PHYLLIS I suppose you have to think of everything in your business. NEFF Mr. Dietrichson would understand. I'm sure I could sell him on the idea of some accident protection. Why don't I talk to him about it. PHYLLIS You could try. But he's pretty tough going. NEFF They're all tough at first. PHYLLIS He's got a lot on his mind. He doesn't want to listen to anything except maybe a baseball game on the radio. Sometimes we sit all evening without saying a word to each other. NEFF Sounds pretty dull. Phyllis shrugs. PHYLLIS So I just sit and knit. NEFF Is that what you married him for? PHYLLIS Maybe I like the way his thumbs hold up the wool. NEFF Anytime his thumbs get tired -- PHYLLIS I want to ask you something, Mr. Neff. Could I get an accident policy for him -- without bothering him at all? NEFF How's that again. PHYLLIS That would make it easier for you, too. You wouldn't even have to talk to him. I have a little allowance of my own. I could pay for it and he needn't know anything about it. NEFF Wait a minute. Why shouldn't he know? PHYLLIS Because I know he doesn't want accident insurance. He's superstitious about it. NEFF A lot of people are. Funny, isn't it? PHYLLIS If there was a way to get it like that, all the worry would be over. You see what I mean, Walter? NEFF Sure. I've got good eyesight. You want him to have the policy without him knowing it. And that means without the insurance company knowing that he doesn't know. That's the set-up, isn't it? PHYLLIS Is there anything wrong with it? NEFF I think it's lovely. And then, some dark wet night, if that crown block fell on him -- PHYLLIS What crown block? NEFF Only sometimes they have to have a little help. They can't quite make it on their own. PHYLLIS I don't know what you're talking about. NEFF Of course, it doesn't have to be a crown block. It can be a car backing over him, or he can fall out of an upstairs window. Any little thing like that, as long as it's a morgue job. PHYLLIS Are you crazy? NEFF Not that crazy. Goodbye, Mrs. Dietrichson. He picks up his hat. PHYLLIS What's the matter? NEFF Look, baby, you can't get away with it. PHYLLIS Get away with what? NEFF You want to knock him off, don't you, baby. PHYLLIS That's a horrible thing to say! NEFF Who'd you think I was, anyway? A guy that walks into a good-looking dame's front parlor and says "Good afternoon, I sell accident insurance on husbands. You got one that's been around too long? Somebody you'd like to turn into a little hard cash? Just give me a smile and I'll help you collect." Boy, what a dope I must look to you! PHYLLIS I think you're rotten. NEFF I think you're swell. So long as I'm not your husband. PHYLLIS Get out of here. NEFF You bet I will. You bet I'll get out of here, baby. But quick. He goes out. She looks after him. A-40 EXT. DIETRICHSON HOME - (DAY) Neff bangs the front door shut, walks quickly to his car and drives away. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) So I let her have it, straight between the eyes. She didn't fool me for a minute, not this time. I knew I had hold of a redhot poker and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off. I stopped at a drive-in for a bottle of beer, the one I had wanted all along, only I wanted it worse now, to get rid of the sour taste of her iced tea, and everything that went with it. I didn't want to go back to the office, so I dropped by a bowling alley at Third and Western and rolled a few lines to get my mind thinking about something else for a while. A-41 DRIVE-IN RESTAURANT - (DAY) Shooting past Neff sitting behind the wheel of his car The car hop hangs a tray on the door and serves him a bottle of beer. DISSOLVE TO: A-42 INT. BOWLING ALLEY Neff bowling. He rolls the ball with an effort at concentration, but his mind is not really on the game. DISSOLVE TO: A-43 EXT. APARTMENT HOUSE - (DUSK) It is late afternoon. The apartment house is called the LOS OLIVOS APARTMENTS. It is a six-story building in the Normandie- Wilshire district, with a basement garage. THE CAMERA PANS UP the front of the building to the top floor windows, as a little rain starts to fall. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) I didn't feel like eating dinner when I left, and I didn't feel like a show, so I drove home, put the car away and went up to my apartment. A-44 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT - LIVING ROOM - (DUSK) It is a double apartment of conventional design, with kitchen, dinette, and bathroom, squarecut overstuffed borax furniture. Gas logs are lit in the imitation fireplace. Neff stands by the window with his coat off and his tie loose. Raindrops strike against the glass. He turns away impatiently, paces up and down past a caddy bag with golf clubs in it, pulls one out at random, makes a couple of short swings, throws the club on the couch, paces again. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) It had begun to rain outside and I watched it get dark and didn't even turn on the light. That didn't help me either. I was all twisted up inside, and I was still holding on to that red-hot poker. And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all, that the hook was too strong, that this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning. The doorbell rings. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) So at eight o'clock the bell would ring and I would know who it was without even having to think, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Neff goes to the door and opens it. PHYLLIS Hello. Neff just looks at her. PHYLLIS You forgot your hat this afternoon. She has nothing in her hands but her bag. NEFF Did I? He looks down at her hands. PHYLLIS Don't you want me to bring it in? NEFF Sure. Put it on the chair. She comes in. He closes the door. NEFF How did you know where I live? PHYLLIS It's in the phone book. Neff switches on the standing lamp. PHYLLIS It's raining. NEFF So it is. Peel off your coat and sit down. She starts to take off her coat. NEFF Your husband out? PHYLLIS Long Beach. They're spudding in a new well. He phoned he'd be late. About nine-thirty. He takes her coat and lays it across the back of a chair. PHYLLIS It's about time you said you're glad to see me. NEFF I knew you wouldn't leave it like that. PHYLLIS Like what? NEFF Like it was this afternoon. PHYLLIS I must have said something that gave you a terribly wrong impression. You must surely see that. You must never think anything like that about me, Walter. NEFF Okay. PHYLLIS It's not okay. Not if you don't believe me. NEFF What do you want me to do? PHYLLIS I want you to be nice to me. Like the first time you came to the house. NEFF It can't be like the first time. Something has happened. PHYLLIS I know it has. It's happened to us. NEFF That's what I mean. Phyllis has moved over to the window. She stares out through the wet window-pane. NEFF What's the matter now? PHYLLIS I feel as if he was watching me. Not that he cares about me. Not any more. But he keeps me on a leash. So tight I can't breathe. I'm scared. NEFF What of? He's in Long Beach, isn't he? PHYLLIS I oughtn't to have come. NEFF Maybe you oughtn't. PHYLLIS You want me to go? NEFF If you want to. PHYLLIS Right now? NEFF Sure. Right now. By this time, he has hold of her wrist. He draws her to him slowly and kisses her. Her arms tighten around him. After a moment he pulls his head back, still holding her close. NEFF How were you going to do it? PHYLLIS Do what? NEFF Kill him. PHYLLIS Walter, for the last time -- She tries to jerk away but he holds her and kisses her again. NEFF I'm crazy about you, baby. PHYLLIS I'm crazy about you, Walter. NEFF That perfume on your hair. What's the name of it? PHYLLIS Something French. I bought it down at Ensenada. NEFF We ought to have some of that pink wine to go with it. The kind that bubbles. But all I have is bourbon. PHYLLIS Bourbon is fine, Walter. He lets her go and moves toward the dinette. A-45 THE DINETTE AND KITCHEN It contains a small table and some chairs. A low glass-and- china cabinet is built between the dinette and kitchen, leaving a space like a doorway. The kitchen is the usual apartment house kitchen, with stove, ice-box, sink, etc. It is quite small. Neff goes to the ice-box and Phyllis drifts in after him. NEFF Soda? PHYLLIS Plain water, please. NEFF Get a couple of glasses, will you. He points at the china closet. He has taken a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator and is holding it under the hot- water faucet. NEFF You know, about six months ago a guy slipped on the soap in his bathtub and knocked himself cold and drowned. Only he had accident insurance. So they had an autopsy and she didn't get away with it. Phyllis has the glasses now. She hands them to him. He dumps some ice cubes into the glasses. PHYLLIS Who didn't? NEFF His wife. He reaches for the whiskey bottle on top of the china closet. NEFF And there was another case where a guy was found shot and his wife said he was cleaning a gun and his stomach got in the way. All she collected was a three-to-ten stretch in Tehachapi. PHYLLIS Perhaps it was worth it to her. Neff hands her a glass. NEFF See if you can carry this as far as the living room. They move back toward the living room. A-46 LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff go toward the davenport. She is sipping her drink and looking around. PHYLLIS It's nice here, Walter. Who takes care of it for you? NEFF A colored woman comes in twice a week. PHYLLIS You get your own breakfast? NEFF Once in a while I squeeze a grapefruit. The rest I get at the corner drugstore. They sit on the davenport, fairly close together. PHYLLIS It sounds wonderful. Just strangers beside you. You don't know them. You don't hate them. You don't have to sit across the table and smile at him and that daughter of his every morning of your life. NEFF What daughter? Oh, that little girl on the piano. PHYLLIS Yes. Lola. She lives with us. He thinks a lot more of her than he does of me. NEFF Ever think of a divorce? PHYLLIS He wouldn't give me a divorce. NEFF I suppose because it would cost him money. PHYLLIS He hasn't got any money. Not since he went into the oil business. NEFF But he had when you married him? PHYLLIS Yes, he had. And I wanted a home. Why not? But that wasn't the only reason. I was his wife's nurse. She was sick for a long time. When she died, he was all broken up. I pitied him so. NEFF And now you hate him. PHYLLIS Yes, Walter. He's so mean to me. Every-time I buy a dress or a pair of shoes he yells his head off. He won't let me go anywhere. He keeps me shut up. He's always been mean to me. Even his life insurance all goes to that daughter of his. That Lola. NEFF Nothing for you at all, huh? PHYLLIS No. And nothing is just what I'm worth to him. NEFF So you lie awake in the dark and listen to him snore and get ideas. PHYLLIS Walter, I don't want to kill him. I never did. Not even when he gets drunk and slaps my face. NEFF Only sometimes you wish he was dead. PHYLLIS Perhaps I do. NEFF And you wish it was an accident, and you had that policy. For fifty thousand dollars. Is that it? PHYLLIS Perhaps that too. She takes a long drink. PHYLLIS The other night we drove home from a party. He was drunk again. When we got into the garage he just sat there with his head on the steering wheel and the motor still running. And I thought what it would be like if I didn't switch it off, just closed the garage door and left him there. NEFF I'll tell you what it would be like, if you had that accident policy, and tried to pull a monoxide job. We have a guy in our office named Keyes. For him a set-up like that would be just like a slice of rare roast beef. In three minutes he'd know it wasn't an accident. In ten minutes you'd be sitting under the hot lights. In half an hour you'd be signing your name to a confession. PHYLLIS But Walter, I didn't do it. I'm not going to do it. NEFF Not if there's an insurance company in the picture, baby. So long as you're honest they'll pay you with a smile, but you just try to pull something like that and you'll find out. They know more tricks than a carload of monkeys. And if there's a death mixed up in it, you haven't got a prayer. They'll hang you as sure as ten dimes will buy a dollar, baby. She begins to cry. He puts his arms around her and kisses her. NEFF Just stop thinking about it, will you. He holds her tight. Their heads touch, side by side, THE CAMERA SLOWLY STARTS TO RECEDE as we DISSOLVE TO: A-47 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits in the swivel chair, talking into the dictaphone. He has hooked the wastebasket under his feet to sit more comfortably. As he talks, a little cough shakes him now and then. NEFF So we just sat there, and she kept on crying softly, like the rain on the window, and we didn't say anything. Maybe she had stopped thinking about it, but I hadn't. I couldn't. Because it all tied up with something I had been thinking about for years, since long before I ever ran into Phyllis Dietrichson. Because, in this business you can't sleep for trying to figure out the tricks they could pull on you. You're like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don't crook the house. And then one night, you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself. And do it smart. Because you've got that wheel right under your hands. And you know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out in front, a shill to put down the bet. And suddenly the doorbell rings and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you... Look, Keyes, I'm not trying to whitewash myself. I fought it, only maybe I didn't fight it hard enough. The stakes were fifty thousand dollars, but they were the life of a man, too, a man who'd never done me any dirt. Except he was married to a woman he didn't care anything about, and I did... DISSOLVE TO: A-48 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT LIVING ROOM CAMERA MOVES SLOWLY towards the davenport again. Neff sits in one corner with his feet on the low table. He is smoking his cigarette and staring at the ceiling. Phyllis has been sitting fairly close to him. She gets up slowly and crosses to her rain coat, lying over a chair. PHYLLIS I've got to go now, Walter. Neff does not answer. He keeps on staring at the ceiling. She starts to put the rain coat on. PHYLLIS Will you call me, Walter? Neff still does not answer. PHYLLIS Walter! He looks at her slowly, almost absently. PHYLLIS I hate him. I loathe going back to him. You believe me, don't you, Walter? NEFF Sure I believe you. PHYLLIS I can't stand it anymore. What if they did hang me? NEFF You're not going to hang, baby. PHYLLIS It's better than going on this way. NEFF -- you're not going to hang, baby. Not ever. Because you're going to do it the smart way. Because I'm going to help you. PHYLLIS You! NEFF Me. PHYLLIS Do you know what you're saying? NEFF Sure I know what I'm saying. He gets up and grips her arm. NEFF We're going to do it together. We're going to do it right. And I'm the guy that knows how. There is fierce determination in his voice. His fingers dig into her arm. PHYLLIS Walter, you're hurting me. NEFF There isn't going to be any slip up. Nothing sloppy. Nothing weak. It's got to be perfect. He kisses her. NEFF You go now. He leads her towards the door. NEFF Call me tomorrow. But not from your house. From a booth. And watch your step. Every single minute. It's got to be perfect, understand. Straight down the line. They have now reached the door. Neff opens it. Phyllis stands in the doorway, her lips white. PHYLLIS Straight down the line. She goes quietly. He watches her down the corridor. Slowly he closes the door and goes back into the room. He moves across the window and opens it wide. He stands there, looking down into the dark street. From below comes the sound of a car starting and driving off. The rain drifts in against his face. He just stands there motionless. His mind is going a hundred miles a minute. FADE OUT: END OF SEQUENCE "A" SEQUENCE "B" FADE IN: B-1 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits slumped in his chair before the dictaphone. On the desk next to him stands a used record. The cylinder on the dictaphone is not turning. He is smoking a cigarette. He kills it then lifts the needle and slides off the record which is on the machine and stands it on end on the desk beside the other used record. He reaches down painfully to take another record from the rack beneath the dictaphone, looks at it against the light to make sure it has not been used, then slides it into place on the machine and resets the needle. He lifts the horn and resumes his dictation. NEFF The first thing we had to do was fix him up with that accident policy. I knew he wouldn't buy, but all I wanted was his signature on an application. So I had to make him sign without his knowing what he was signing. And I wanted a witness other than Phyllis to hear me give him a sales talk. I was trying to think with your brains, Keyes. I wanted all the answers ready for all the questions you were going to spring as soon as Dietrichson was dead. Neff takes a last drag on his cigarette and kills it by running it under the ledge of the dictaphone stand. He drops the stub on the floor and resumes. NEFF A couple of nights later I went to the house. Everything looked fine, except I didn't like the witness Phyllis had brought in. It was Dietrichson's daughter Lola, and it made me feel a little queer in the belly to have her right there in the room, playing Chinese checkers, as if nothing was going to happen. DISSOLVE: B-2 A BOARD OF CHINESE CHECKERS CAMERA WITHDRAWS AND GRADUALLY REVEALS THE DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM - NIGHT The checker-board is on the davenport between Phyllis and Lola. Mr. Dietrichson sits in a big easy chair. His coat and tie are over the back of the chair, and the evening paper is lying tumbled on the floor beside him. He is smoking a cigar with the band on it. He has a drink in front of him and several more inside him. In another chair sits Neff, his briefcase on the floor, leaning against his chair. He holds his rate book partly open, with a finger in it for a marker. He is going full swing. NEFF I suppose you realize, Mr. Dietrichson, that, not being an employee, you are not covered by the State Compensation Insurance Act. The only way you can protect yourself is by having a personal policy of your own. DIETRICHSON I know all about that. The next thing you'll tell me I need earthquake insurance and lightning insurance and hail insurance. Phyllis looks up from the checker-board and cuts in on the dialogue. Lola listens without much interest. PHYLLIS (To Dietrichson) If we bought all the insurance they can think up, we'd stay broke paying for it, wouldn't we, honey? DIETRICHSON What keeps us broke is you going out and buying five hats at a crack. Who needs a hat in California? NEFF I always say insurance is a lot like a hot water bottle. It looks kind of useless and silly hanging on the hook, but when you get that stomach ache in the middle of the night, it comes in mighty handy. DIETRICHSON Now you want to sell me a hot water bottle. NEFF Dollar for dollar, accident insurance is the cheapest coverage you can buy, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Maybe some other time, Mr. Neff. I had a tough day. NEFF Just as you say, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Suppose we just settle that automobile insurance tonight. NEFF Sure. All we need on that is for you to sign an application for renewal. Phyllis throws a quick glance at Neff. As she looks back she sees that Lola is staring down at her wrist watch. LOLA Phyllis, do you mind if we don't finish this game? It bores me stiff. PHYLLIS Got some thing better to do? LOLA Yes, I have. She gets up. LOLA (To Dietrichson) Father, is it all right if I run along now? DIETRICHSON Run along where? Who with? LOLA Just Anne. We're going roller skating. DIETRICHSON Anne who? LOLA Anne Matthews. PHYLLIS It's not that Nino Zachetti again? DIETRICHSON It better not be that Zachetti guy. If I ever catch you with that --- LOLA It's Anne Matthews, I told you. I also told you we're going roller skating. I'm meeting her at the corner of Vermont and Franklin -- the north- west corner, in case you're interested. And I'm late already. I hope that is all clear. Good night, Father. Good night, Phyllis. She starts to go. NEFF Good night, Miss Dietrichson. LOLA Oh, I'm sorry. Good night, Mr. -- NEFF Neff. LOLA Good night, Mr. Neff. PHYLLIS Now you're not going to take my car again. LOLA No thanks. I'd rather be dead. She goes out through the archway. DIETRICHSON A great little fighter for her weight. Dietrichson sucks down a big swallow of his drink. Neff has taken two blank forms from his briefcase. He puts the briefcase on Mr. Dietrichson's lap and lays the forms on top. Phyllis is watching closely. NEFF This is where you sign, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Sign what? NEFF The applications for your auto renewals. So you'll be protected until the new policies are issued. DIETRICHSON When will that be? NEFF In about a week. DIETRICHSON Just so I'm covered when I drive up North. Neff takes out his fountain pen. NEFF San Francisco, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Palo Alto. PHYLLIS He was a Stanford man, Mr. Neff. And he still goes to his class reunion every year. DIETRICHSON What's wrong with that? Can't I have a little fun even once a year? NEFF Great football school, Stanford. Did you play football, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Left guard. Almost made the varsity, too. Neff has unscrewed his fountain pen. He hands it to Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson puts on his glasses. NEFF On that bottom line, Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson signs. Neff's and Phyllis' eyes meet for a split second. NEFF

executive

How many times the word 'executive' appears in the text?

you, Walter. Get out of here before I throw my desk at you. NEFF I love you, too. He walks out, still grinning. A-35 EXT. OFFICES - TWELFTH FLOOR Neff comes out of Keys' office and walks back along the balcony. Activity of secretaries going in and out of doors, etc. Neff enters his own office. NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) I really did, too, you old crab, always yelling your fat head off, always sore at everyone. But behind the cigar ashes on your vest I kind of knew you had a heart as big as a house... Back in my office there was a phone message from Mrs. Dietrichson about the renewals. She didn't want me to come tomorrow evening. She wanted me to come Thursday afternoon at three-thirty instead. I had a lot of stuff lined up for that Thursday afternoon, including a trip down to Santa Monica to see a couple of live prospects about some group insurance. But I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson and the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg. A-36 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE Anderson, a salesman, sits at one of the desks, filling out a report. Neff enters, goes to his own desk. He looks down at some mail. On top there is a typewritten note. He reads it, sits down and leafs through his desk calendar. A-37 INSERT - CLOSEUP - CALENDAR PAGE Showing date: THURSDAY 23 May and five or six appointments penciled in tightly on the page. DISSOLVE TO: A-38 DIETRICHSON HOME - ENTRANCE HALL - (DAY) THE CAMERA PANS with Phyllis Dietrichson's feet and ankles as she comes down the stairs, her high heels clicking on the tiles. The anklet glistens on her leg as she moves. THE CAMERA PANS ON. Phyllis has reached the entrance hall, and as she walks toward the front door her whole body becomes visible. She wears a gay print dress with a wide sash over her hips. She opens the door. Outside is Neff, wearing a sport coat, flannel slacks. He takes his hat off. PHYLLIS Hello, Mr. Neff. He stands there with a little smile. PHYLLIS Aren't you coming in? NEFF I'm considering it. He comes in. PHYLLIS I hope you didn't mind my changing the appointment. Last night wasn't so convenient. NEFF That's okay. I was working on my stamp collection. She leads him toward living room. A-39 DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff come through archway. She heads toward a low tea table which stands in front of the davenport, with tall glasses, ice cubes, lemon, a pot of tea, etc. PHYLLIS I was just fixing some iced tea. Would you like a glass? NEFF Unless you have a bottle of beer that's not working. PHYLLIS There might be some. I never know what's in the ice box. (Calls) Nettie!... She pours herself a glass of tea. PHYLLIS About those renewals, Mr. Neff. I talked to my husband about it. NEFF You did? PHYLLIS Yes. He'll renew with you he told me. In fact, I thought he'd be here this afternoon. NEFF But he's not? PHYLLIS No. NEFF That's terrible. PHYLLIS (Calls again, impatiently) Nettie!... Nettie!... Oh, I forgot, it's the maid's day off. NEFF Don't bother, Mrs. Dietrichson. I'd like some iced tea very much. PHYLLIS Lemon? Sugar? NEFF Fix it your way. She fixes him a glass of tea while he is looking around. He slowly sits down. NEFF Seeing it's the maid's day off maybe there's something I can do for you. She hands him the tea. NEFF Like running the vacuum cleaner. PHYLLIS Fresh. NEFF I used to peddle vacuum cleaners. Not much money but you learn a lot about life. PHYLLIS I didn't think you'd learned it from a correspondence course. NEFF Where did you pick up this tea drinking? You're not English, are you? PHYLLIS No. Californian. Born right here in Los Angeles. NEFF They say native Californians all come from Iowa. PHYLLIS I wanted to ask you something, Mr. Neff. NEFF Make it Walter. PHYLLIS Walter. NEFF Right. PHYLLIS Tell me, Walter, on this insurance -- how much commission do you make? NEFF Twenty percent. Why? PHYLLIS I thought maybe I could throw a little more business your way. NEFF I can always use it. PHYLLIS I was thinking about my husband. I worry a lot about him, down in those oil fields. It's very dangerous. NEFF Not for an executive, is it? PHYLLIS He doesn't just sit behind a desk. He's right down there with the drilling crews. It's got me worried sick. NEFF You mean a crown block might fall on him some rainy night? PHYLLIS Please don't talk like that. NEFF But that's the idea. PHYLLIS The other day a casing line snapped and caught the foreman. He's in the hospital with a broken back. NEFF Bad. PHYLLIS It's got me jittery just thinking about it. Suppose something like that happened to my husband? NEFF It could. PHYLLIS Don't you think he ought to have accident insurance? NEFF Uh huh. PHYLLIS What kind of insurance could he have? NEFF Enough to cover doctors' and hospital bills. Say a hundred and twenty-five a week cash benefit. And he'd rate around fifty thousand capital sum. PHYLLIS Capital sum? What's that? NEFF That's if he got killed. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. PHYLLIS I suppose you have to think of everything in your business. NEFF Mr. Dietrichson would understand. I'm sure I could sell him on the idea of some accident protection. Why don't I talk to him about it. PHYLLIS You could try. But he's pretty tough going. NEFF They're all tough at first. PHYLLIS He's got a lot on his mind. He doesn't want to listen to anything except maybe a baseball game on the radio. Sometimes we sit all evening without saying a word to each other. NEFF Sounds pretty dull. Phyllis shrugs. PHYLLIS So I just sit and knit. NEFF Is that what you married him for? PHYLLIS Maybe I like the way his thumbs hold up the wool. NEFF Anytime his thumbs get tired -- PHYLLIS I want to ask you something, Mr. Neff. Could I get an accident policy for him -- without bothering him at all? NEFF How's that again. PHYLLIS That would make it easier for you, too. You wouldn't even have to talk to him. I have a little allowance of my own. I could pay for it and he needn't know anything about it. NEFF Wait a minute. Why shouldn't he know? PHYLLIS Because I know he doesn't want accident insurance. He's superstitious about it. NEFF A lot of people are. Funny, isn't it? PHYLLIS If there was a way to get it like that, all the worry would be over. You see what I mean, Walter? NEFF Sure. I've got good eyesight. You want him to have the policy without him knowing it. And that means without the insurance company knowing that he doesn't know. That's the set-up, isn't it? PHYLLIS Is there anything wrong with it? NEFF I think it's lovely. And then, some dark wet night, if that crown block fell on him -- PHYLLIS What crown block? NEFF Only sometimes they have to have a little help. They can't quite make it on their own. PHYLLIS I don't know what you're talking about. NEFF Of course, it doesn't have to be a crown block. It can be a car backing over him, or he can fall out of an upstairs window. Any little thing like that, as long as it's a morgue job. PHYLLIS Are you crazy? NEFF Not that crazy. Goodbye, Mrs. Dietrichson. He picks up his hat. PHYLLIS What's the matter? NEFF Look, baby, you can't get away with it. PHYLLIS Get away with what? NEFF You want to knock him off, don't you, baby. PHYLLIS That's a horrible thing to say! NEFF Who'd you think I was, anyway? A guy that walks into a good-looking dame's front parlor and says "Good afternoon, I sell accident insurance on husbands. You got one that's been around too long? Somebody you'd like to turn into a little hard cash? Just give me a smile and I'll help you collect." Boy, what a dope I must look to you! PHYLLIS I think you're rotten. NEFF I think you're swell. So long as I'm not your husband. PHYLLIS Get out of here. NEFF You bet I will. You bet I'll get out of here, baby. But quick. He goes out. She looks after him. A-40 EXT. DIETRICHSON HOME - (DAY) Neff bangs the front door shut, walks quickly to his car and drives away. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) So I let her have it, straight between the eyes. She didn't fool me for a minute, not this time. I knew I had hold of a redhot poker and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off. I stopped at a drive-in for a bottle of beer, the one I had wanted all along, only I wanted it worse now, to get rid of the sour taste of her iced tea, and everything that went with it. I didn't want to go back to the office, so I dropped by a bowling alley at Third and Western and rolled a few lines to get my mind thinking about something else for a while. A-41 DRIVE-IN RESTAURANT - (DAY) Shooting past Neff sitting behind the wheel of his car The car hop hangs a tray on the door and serves him a bottle of beer. DISSOLVE TO: A-42 INT. BOWLING ALLEY Neff bowling. He rolls the ball with an effort at concentration, but his mind is not really on the game. DISSOLVE TO: A-43 EXT. APARTMENT HOUSE - (DUSK) It is late afternoon. The apartment house is called the LOS OLIVOS APARTMENTS. It is a six-story building in the Normandie- Wilshire district, with a basement garage. THE CAMERA PANS UP the front of the building to the top floor windows, as a little rain starts to fall. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) I didn't feel like eating dinner when I left, and I didn't feel like a show, so I drove home, put the car away and went up to my apartment. A-44 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT - LIVING ROOM - (DUSK) It is a double apartment of conventional design, with kitchen, dinette, and bathroom, squarecut overstuffed borax furniture. Gas logs are lit in the imitation fireplace. Neff stands by the window with his coat off and his tie loose. Raindrops strike against the glass. He turns away impatiently, paces up and down past a caddy bag with golf clubs in it, pulls one out at random, makes a couple of short swings, throws the club on the couch, paces again. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) It had begun to rain outside and I watched it get dark and didn't even turn on the light. That didn't help me either. I was all twisted up inside, and I was still holding on to that red-hot poker. And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all, that the hook was too strong, that this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning. The doorbell rings. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) So at eight o'clock the bell would ring and I would know who it was without even having to think, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Neff goes to the door and opens it. PHYLLIS Hello. Neff just looks at her. PHYLLIS You forgot your hat this afternoon. She has nothing in her hands but her bag. NEFF Did I? He looks down at her hands. PHYLLIS Don't you want me to bring it in? NEFF Sure. Put it on the chair. She comes in. He closes the door. NEFF How did you know where I live? PHYLLIS It's in the phone book. Neff switches on the standing lamp. PHYLLIS It's raining. NEFF So it is. Peel off your coat and sit down. She starts to take off her coat. NEFF Your husband out? PHYLLIS Long Beach. They're spudding in a new well. He phoned he'd be late. About nine-thirty. He takes her coat and lays it across the back of a chair. PHYLLIS It's about time you said you're glad to see me. NEFF I knew you wouldn't leave it like that. PHYLLIS Like what? NEFF Like it was this afternoon. PHYLLIS I must have said something that gave you a terribly wrong impression. You must surely see that. You must never think anything like that about me, Walter. NEFF Okay. PHYLLIS It's not okay. Not if you don't believe me. NEFF What do you want me to do? PHYLLIS I want you to be nice to me. Like the first time you came to the house. NEFF It can't be like the first time. Something has happened. PHYLLIS I know it has. It's happened to us. NEFF That's what I mean. Phyllis has moved over to the window. She stares out through the wet window-pane. NEFF What's the matter now? PHYLLIS I feel as if he was watching me. Not that he cares about me. Not any more. But he keeps me on a leash. So tight I can't breathe. I'm scared. NEFF What of? He's in Long Beach, isn't he? PHYLLIS I oughtn't to have come. NEFF Maybe you oughtn't. PHYLLIS You want me to go? NEFF If you want to. PHYLLIS Right now? NEFF Sure. Right now. By this time, he has hold of her wrist. He draws her to him slowly and kisses her. Her arms tighten around him. After a moment he pulls his head back, still holding her close. NEFF How were you going to do it? PHYLLIS Do what? NEFF Kill him. PHYLLIS Walter, for the last time -- She tries to jerk away but he holds her and kisses her again. NEFF I'm crazy about you, baby. PHYLLIS I'm crazy about you, Walter. NEFF That perfume on your hair. What's the name of it? PHYLLIS Something French. I bought it down at Ensenada. NEFF We ought to have some of that pink wine to go with it. The kind that bubbles. But all I have is bourbon. PHYLLIS Bourbon is fine, Walter. He lets her go and moves toward the dinette. A-45 THE DINETTE AND KITCHEN It contains a small table and some chairs. A low glass-and- china cabinet is built between the dinette and kitchen, leaving a space like a doorway. The kitchen is the usual apartment house kitchen, with stove, ice-box, sink, etc. It is quite small. Neff goes to the ice-box and Phyllis drifts in after him. NEFF Soda? PHYLLIS Plain water, please. NEFF Get a couple of glasses, will you. He points at the china closet. He has taken a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator and is holding it under the hot- water faucet. NEFF You know, about six months ago a guy slipped on the soap in his bathtub and knocked himself cold and drowned. Only he had accident insurance. So they had an autopsy and she didn't get away with it. Phyllis has the glasses now. She hands them to him. He dumps some ice cubes into the glasses. PHYLLIS Who didn't? NEFF His wife. He reaches for the whiskey bottle on top of the china closet. NEFF And there was another case where a guy was found shot and his wife said he was cleaning a gun and his stomach got in the way. All she collected was a three-to-ten stretch in Tehachapi. PHYLLIS Perhaps it was worth it to her. Neff hands her a glass. NEFF See if you can carry this as far as the living room. They move back toward the living room. A-46 LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff go toward the davenport. She is sipping her drink and looking around. PHYLLIS It's nice here, Walter. Who takes care of it for you? NEFF A colored woman comes in twice a week. PHYLLIS You get your own breakfast? NEFF Once in a while I squeeze a grapefruit. The rest I get at the corner drugstore. They sit on the davenport, fairly close together. PHYLLIS It sounds wonderful. Just strangers beside you. You don't know them. You don't hate them. You don't have to sit across the table and smile at him and that daughter of his every morning of your life. NEFF What daughter? Oh, that little girl on the piano. PHYLLIS Yes. Lola. She lives with us. He thinks a lot more of her than he does of me. NEFF Ever think of a divorce? PHYLLIS He wouldn't give me a divorce. NEFF I suppose because it would cost him money. PHYLLIS He hasn't got any money. Not since he went into the oil business. NEFF But he had when you married him? PHYLLIS Yes, he had. And I wanted a home. Why not? But that wasn't the only reason. I was his wife's nurse. She was sick for a long time. When she died, he was all broken up. I pitied him so. NEFF And now you hate him. PHYLLIS Yes, Walter. He's so mean to me. Every-time I buy a dress or a pair of shoes he yells his head off. He won't let me go anywhere. He keeps me shut up. He's always been mean to me. Even his life insurance all goes to that daughter of his. That Lola. NEFF Nothing for you at all, huh? PHYLLIS No. And nothing is just what I'm worth to him. NEFF So you lie awake in the dark and listen to him snore and get ideas. PHYLLIS Walter, I don't want to kill him. I never did. Not even when he gets drunk and slaps my face. NEFF Only sometimes you wish he was dead. PHYLLIS Perhaps I do. NEFF And you wish it was an accident, and you had that policy. For fifty thousand dollars. Is that it? PHYLLIS Perhaps that too. She takes a long drink. PHYLLIS The other night we drove home from a party. He was drunk again. When we got into the garage he just sat there with his head on the steering wheel and the motor still running. And I thought what it would be like if I didn't switch it off, just closed the garage door and left him there. NEFF I'll tell you what it would be like, if you had that accident policy, and tried to pull a monoxide job. We have a guy in our office named Keyes. For him a set-up like that would be just like a slice of rare roast beef. In three minutes he'd know it wasn't an accident. In ten minutes you'd be sitting under the hot lights. In half an hour you'd be signing your name to a confession. PHYLLIS But Walter, I didn't do it. I'm not going to do it. NEFF Not if there's an insurance company in the picture, baby. So long as you're honest they'll pay you with a smile, but you just try to pull something like that and you'll find out. They know more tricks than a carload of monkeys. And if there's a death mixed up in it, you haven't got a prayer. They'll hang you as sure as ten dimes will buy a dollar, baby. She begins to cry. He puts his arms around her and kisses her. NEFF Just stop thinking about it, will you. He holds her tight. Their heads touch, side by side, THE CAMERA SLOWLY STARTS TO RECEDE as we DISSOLVE TO: A-47 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits in the swivel chair, talking into the dictaphone. He has hooked the wastebasket under his feet to sit more comfortably. As he talks, a little cough shakes him now and then. NEFF So we just sat there, and she kept on crying softly, like the rain on the window, and we didn't say anything. Maybe she had stopped thinking about it, but I hadn't. I couldn't. Because it all tied up with something I had been thinking about for years, since long before I ever ran into Phyllis Dietrichson. Because, in this business you can't sleep for trying to figure out the tricks they could pull on you. You're like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don't crook the house. And then one night, you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself. And do it smart. Because you've got that wheel right under your hands. And you know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out in front, a shill to put down the bet. And suddenly the doorbell rings and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you... Look, Keyes, I'm not trying to whitewash myself. I fought it, only maybe I didn't fight it hard enough. The stakes were fifty thousand dollars, but they were the life of a man, too, a man who'd never done me any dirt. Except he was married to a woman he didn't care anything about, and I did... DISSOLVE TO: A-48 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT LIVING ROOM CAMERA MOVES SLOWLY towards the davenport again. Neff sits in one corner with his feet on the low table. He is smoking his cigarette and staring at the ceiling. Phyllis has been sitting fairly close to him. She gets up slowly and crosses to her rain coat, lying over a chair. PHYLLIS I've got to go now, Walter. Neff does not answer. He keeps on staring at the ceiling. She starts to put the rain coat on. PHYLLIS Will you call me, Walter? Neff still does not answer. PHYLLIS Walter! He looks at her slowly, almost absently. PHYLLIS I hate him. I loathe going back to him. You believe me, don't you, Walter? NEFF Sure I believe you. PHYLLIS I can't stand it anymore. What if they did hang me? NEFF You're not going to hang, baby. PHYLLIS It's better than going on this way. NEFF -- you're not going to hang, baby. Not ever. Because you're going to do it the smart way. Because I'm going to help you. PHYLLIS You! NEFF Me. PHYLLIS Do you know what you're saying? NEFF Sure I know what I'm saying. He gets up and grips her arm. NEFF We're going to do it together. We're going to do it right. And I'm the guy that knows how. There is fierce determination in his voice. His fingers dig into her arm. PHYLLIS Walter, you're hurting me. NEFF There isn't going to be any slip up. Nothing sloppy. Nothing weak. It's got to be perfect. He kisses her. NEFF You go now. He leads her towards the door. NEFF Call me tomorrow. But not from your house. From a booth. And watch your step. Every single minute. It's got to be perfect, understand. Straight down the line. They have now reached the door. Neff opens it. Phyllis stands in the doorway, her lips white. PHYLLIS Straight down the line. She goes quietly. He watches her down the corridor. Slowly he closes the door and goes back into the room. He moves across the window and opens it wide. He stands there, looking down into the dark street. From below comes the sound of a car starting and driving off. The rain drifts in against his face. He just stands there motionless. His mind is going a hundred miles a minute. FADE OUT: END OF SEQUENCE "A" SEQUENCE "B" FADE IN: B-1 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits slumped in his chair before the dictaphone. On the desk next to him stands a used record. The cylinder on the dictaphone is not turning. He is smoking a cigarette. He kills it then lifts the needle and slides off the record which is on the machine and stands it on end on the desk beside the other used record. He reaches down painfully to take another record from the rack beneath the dictaphone, looks at it against the light to make sure it has not been used, then slides it into place on the machine and resets the needle. He lifts the horn and resumes his dictation. NEFF The first thing we had to do was fix him up with that accident policy. I knew he wouldn't buy, but all I wanted was his signature on an application. So I had to make him sign without his knowing what he was signing. And I wanted a witness other than Phyllis to hear me give him a sales talk. I was trying to think with your brains, Keyes. I wanted all the answers ready for all the questions you were going to spring as soon as Dietrichson was dead. Neff takes a last drag on his cigarette and kills it by running it under the ledge of the dictaphone stand. He drops the stub on the floor and resumes. NEFF A couple of nights later I went to the house. Everything looked fine, except I didn't like the witness Phyllis had brought in. It was Dietrichson's daughter Lola, and it made me feel a little queer in the belly to have her right there in the room, playing Chinese checkers, as if nothing was going to happen. DISSOLVE: B-2 A BOARD OF CHINESE CHECKERS CAMERA WITHDRAWS AND GRADUALLY REVEALS THE DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM - NIGHT The checker-board is on the davenport between Phyllis and Lola. Mr. Dietrichson sits in a big easy chair. His coat and tie are over the back of the chair, and the evening paper is lying tumbled on the floor beside him. He is smoking a cigar with the band on it. He has a drink in front of him and several more inside him. In another chair sits Neff, his briefcase on the floor, leaning against his chair. He holds his rate book partly open, with a finger in it for a marker. He is going full swing. NEFF I suppose you realize, Mr. Dietrichson, that, not being an employee, you are not covered by the State Compensation Insurance Act. The only way you can protect yourself is by having a personal policy of your own. DIETRICHSON I know all about that. The next thing you'll tell me I need earthquake insurance and lightning insurance and hail insurance. Phyllis looks up from the checker-board and cuts in on the dialogue. Lola listens without much interest. PHYLLIS (To Dietrichson) If we bought all the insurance they can think up, we'd stay broke paying for it, wouldn't we, honey? DIETRICHSON What keeps us broke is you going out and buying five hats at a crack. Who needs a hat in California? NEFF I always say insurance is a lot like a hot water bottle. It looks kind of useless and silly hanging on the hook, but when you get that stomach ache in the middle of the night, it comes in mighty handy. DIETRICHSON Now you want to sell me a hot water bottle. NEFF Dollar for dollar, accident insurance is the cheapest coverage you can buy, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Maybe some other time, Mr. Neff. I had a tough day. NEFF Just as you say, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Suppose we just settle that automobile insurance tonight. NEFF Sure. All we need on that is for you to sign an application for renewal. Phyllis throws a quick glance at Neff. As she looks back she sees that Lola is staring down at her wrist watch. LOLA Phyllis, do you mind if we don't finish this game? It bores me stiff. PHYLLIS Got some thing better to do? LOLA Yes, I have. She gets up. LOLA (To Dietrichson) Father, is it all right if I run along now? DIETRICHSON Run along where? Who with? LOLA Just Anne. We're going roller skating. DIETRICHSON Anne who? LOLA Anne Matthews. PHYLLIS It's not that Nino Zachetti again? DIETRICHSON It better not be that Zachetti guy. If I ever catch you with that --- LOLA It's Anne Matthews, I told you. I also told you we're going roller skating. I'm meeting her at the corner of Vermont and Franklin -- the north- west corner, in case you're interested. And I'm late already. I hope that is all clear. Good night, Father. Good night, Phyllis. She starts to go. NEFF Good night, Miss Dietrichson. LOLA Oh, I'm sorry. Good night, Mr. -- NEFF Neff. LOLA Good night, Mr. Neff. PHYLLIS Now you're not going to take my car again. LOLA No thanks. I'd rather be dead. She goes out through the archway. DIETRICHSON A great little fighter for her weight. Dietrichson sucks down a big swallow of his drink. Neff has taken two blank forms from his briefcase. He puts the briefcase on Mr. Dietrichson's lap and lays the forms on top. Phyllis is watching closely. NEFF This is where you sign, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Sign what? NEFF The applications for your auto renewals. So you'll be protected until the new policies are issued. DIETRICHSON When will that be? NEFF In about a week. DIETRICHSON Just so I'm covered when I drive up North. Neff takes out his fountain pen. NEFF San Francisco, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Palo Alto. PHYLLIS He was a Stanford man, Mr. Neff. And he still goes to his class reunion every year. DIETRICHSON What's wrong with that? Can't I have a little fun even once a year? NEFF Great football school, Stanford. Did you play football, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Left guard. Almost made the varsity, too. Neff has unscrewed his fountain pen. He hands it to Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson puts on his glasses. NEFF On that bottom line, Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson signs. Neff's and Phyllis' eyes meet for a split second. NEFF

ceci

How many times the word 'ceci' appears in the text?

you, Walter. Get out of here before I throw my desk at you. NEFF I love you, too. He walks out, still grinning. A-35 EXT. OFFICES - TWELFTH FLOOR Neff comes out of Keys' office and walks back along the balcony. Activity of secretaries going in and out of doors, etc. Neff enters his own office. NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) I really did, too, you old crab, always yelling your fat head off, always sore at everyone. But behind the cigar ashes on your vest I kind of knew you had a heart as big as a house... Back in my office there was a phone message from Mrs. Dietrichson about the renewals. She didn't want me to come tomorrow evening. She wanted me to come Thursday afternoon at three-thirty instead. I had a lot of stuff lined up for that Thursday afternoon, including a trip down to Santa Monica to see a couple of live prospects about some group insurance. But I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson and the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg. A-36 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE Anderson, a salesman, sits at one of the desks, filling out a report. Neff enters, goes to his own desk. He looks down at some mail. On top there is a typewritten note. He reads it, sits down and leafs through his desk calendar. A-37 INSERT - CLOSEUP - CALENDAR PAGE Showing date: THURSDAY 23 May and five or six appointments penciled in tightly on the page. DISSOLVE TO: A-38 DIETRICHSON HOME - ENTRANCE HALL - (DAY) THE CAMERA PANS with Phyllis Dietrichson's feet and ankles as she comes down the stairs, her high heels clicking on the tiles. The anklet glistens on her leg as she moves. THE CAMERA PANS ON. Phyllis has reached the entrance hall, and as she walks toward the front door her whole body becomes visible. She wears a gay print dress with a wide sash over her hips. She opens the door. Outside is Neff, wearing a sport coat, flannel slacks. He takes his hat off. PHYLLIS Hello, Mr. Neff. He stands there with a little smile. PHYLLIS Aren't you coming in? NEFF I'm considering it. He comes in. PHYLLIS I hope you didn't mind my changing the appointment. Last night wasn't so convenient. NEFF That's okay. I was working on my stamp collection. She leads him toward living room. A-39 DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff come through archway. She heads toward a low tea table which stands in front of the davenport, with tall glasses, ice cubes, lemon, a pot of tea, etc. PHYLLIS I was just fixing some iced tea. Would you like a glass? NEFF Unless you have a bottle of beer that's not working. PHYLLIS There might be some. I never know what's in the ice box. (Calls) Nettie!... She pours herself a glass of tea. PHYLLIS About those renewals, Mr. Neff. I talked to my husband about it. NEFF You did? PHYLLIS Yes. He'll renew with you he told me. In fact, I thought he'd be here this afternoon. NEFF But he's not? PHYLLIS No. NEFF That's terrible. PHYLLIS (Calls again, impatiently) Nettie!... Nettie!... Oh, I forgot, it's the maid's day off. NEFF Don't bother, Mrs. Dietrichson. I'd like some iced tea very much. PHYLLIS Lemon? Sugar? NEFF Fix it your way. She fixes him a glass of tea while he is looking around. He slowly sits down. NEFF Seeing it's the maid's day off maybe there's something I can do for you. She hands him the tea. NEFF Like running the vacuum cleaner. PHYLLIS Fresh. NEFF I used to peddle vacuum cleaners. Not much money but you learn a lot about life. PHYLLIS I didn't think you'd learned it from a correspondence course. NEFF Where did you pick up this tea drinking? You're not English, are you? PHYLLIS No. Californian. Born right here in Los Angeles. NEFF They say native Californians all come from Iowa. PHYLLIS I wanted to ask you something, Mr. Neff. NEFF Make it Walter. PHYLLIS Walter. NEFF Right. PHYLLIS Tell me, Walter, on this insurance -- how much commission do you make? NEFF Twenty percent. Why? PHYLLIS I thought maybe I could throw a little more business your way. NEFF I can always use it. PHYLLIS I was thinking about my husband. I worry a lot about him, down in those oil fields. It's very dangerous. NEFF Not for an executive, is it? PHYLLIS He doesn't just sit behind a desk. He's right down there with the drilling crews. It's got me worried sick. NEFF You mean a crown block might fall on him some rainy night? PHYLLIS Please don't talk like that. NEFF But that's the idea. PHYLLIS The other day a casing line snapped and caught the foreman. He's in the hospital with a broken back. NEFF Bad. PHYLLIS It's got me jittery just thinking about it. Suppose something like that happened to my husband? NEFF It could. PHYLLIS Don't you think he ought to have accident insurance? NEFF Uh huh. PHYLLIS What kind of insurance could he have? NEFF Enough to cover doctors' and hospital bills. Say a hundred and twenty-five a week cash benefit. And he'd rate around fifty thousand capital sum. PHYLLIS Capital sum? What's that? NEFF That's if he got killed. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. PHYLLIS I suppose you have to think of everything in your business. NEFF Mr. Dietrichson would understand. I'm sure I could sell him on the idea of some accident protection. Why don't I talk to him about it. PHYLLIS You could try. But he's pretty tough going. NEFF They're all tough at first. PHYLLIS He's got a lot on his mind. He doesn't want to listen to anything except maybe a baseball game on the radio. Sometimes we sit all evening without saying a word to each other. NEFF Sounds pretty dull. Phyllis shrugs. PHYLLIS So I just sit and knit. NEFF Is that what you married him for? PHYLLIS Maybe I like the way his thumbs hold up the wool. NEFF Anytime his thumbs get tired -- PHYLLIS I want to ask you something, Mr. Neff. Could I get an accident policy for him -- without bothering him at all? NEFF How's that again. PHYLLIS That would make it easier for you, too. You wouldn't even have to talk to him. I have a little allowance of my own. I could pay for it and he needn't know anything about it. NEFF Wait a minute. Why shouldn't he know? PHYLLIS Because I know he doesn't want accident insurance. He's superstitious about it. NEFF A lot of people are. Funny, isn't it? PHYLLIS If there was a way to get it like that, all the worry would be over. You see what I mean, Walter? NEFF Sure. I've got good eyesight. You want him to have the policy without him knowing it. And that means without the insurance company knowing that he doesn't know. That's the set-up, isn't it? PHYLLIS Is there anything wrong with it? NEFF I think it's lovely. And then, some dark wet night, if that crown block fell on him -- PHYLLIS What crown block? NEFF Only sometimes they have to have a little help. They can't quite make it on their own. PHYLLIS I don't know what you're talking about. NEFF Of course, it doesn't have to be a crown block. It can be a car backing over him, or he can fall out of an upstairs window. Any little thing like that, as long as it's a morgue job. PHYLLIS Are you crazy? NEFF Not that crazy. Goodbye, Mrs. Dietrichson. He picks up his hat. PHYLLIS What's the matter? NEFF Look, baby, you can't get away with it. PHYLLIS Get away with what? NEFF You want to knock him off, don't you, baby. PHYLLIS That's a horrible thing to say! NEFF Who'd you think I was, anyway? A guy that walks into a good-looking dame's front parlor and says "Good afternoon, I sell accident insurance on husbands. You got one that's been around too long? Somebody you'd like to turn into a little hard cash? Just give me a smile and I'll help you collect." Boy, what a dope I must look to you! PHYLLIS I think you're rotten. NEFF I think you're swell. So long as I'm not your husband. PHYLLIS Get out of here. NEFF You bet I will. You bet I'll get out of here, baby. But quick. He goes out. She looks after him. A-40 EXT. DIETRICHSON HOME - (DAY) Neff bangs the front door shut, walks quickly to his car and drives away. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) So I let her have it, straight between the eyes. She didn't fool me for a minute, not this time. I knew I had hold of a redhot poker and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off. I stopped at a drive-in for a bottle of beer, the one I had wanted all along, only I wanted it worse now, to get rid of the sour taste of her iced tea, and everything that went with it. I didn't want to go back to the office, so I dropped by a bowling alley at Third and Western and rolled a few lines to get my mind thinking about something else for a while. A-41 DRIVE-IN RESTAURANT - (DAY) Shooting past Neff sitting behind the wheel of his car The car hop hangs a tray on the door and serves him a bottle of beer. DISSOLVE TO: A-42 INT. BOWLING ALLEY Neff bowling. He rolls the ball with an effort at concentration, but his mind is not really on the game. DISSOLVE TO: A-43 EXT. APARTMENT HOUSE - (DUSK) It is late afternoon. The apartment house is called the LOS OLIVOS APARTMENTS. It is a six-story building in the Normandie- Wilshire district, with a basement garage. THE CAMERA PANS UP the front of the building to the top floor windows, as a little rain starts to fall. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) I didn't feel like eating dinner when I left, and I didn't feel like a show, so I drove home, put the car away and went up to my apartment. A-44 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT - LIVING ROOM - (DUSK) It is a double apartment of conventional design, with kitchen, dinette, and bathroom, squarecut overstuffed borax furniture. Gas logs are lit in the imitation fireplace. Neff stands by the window with his coat off and his tie loose. Raindrops strike against the glass. He turns away impatiently, paces up and down past a caddy bag with golf clubs in it, pulls one out at random, makes a couple of short swings, throws the club on the couch, paces again. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) It had begun to rain outside and I watched it get dark and didn't even turn on the light. That didn't help me either. I was all twisted up inside, and I was still holding on to that red-hot poker. And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all, that the hook was too strong, that this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning. The doorbell rings. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) So at eight o'clock the bell would ring and I would know who it was without even having to think, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Neff goes to the door and opens it. PHYLLIS Hello. Neff just looks at her. PHYLLIS You forgot your hat this afternoon. She has nothing in her hands but her bag. NEFF Did I? He looks down at her hands. PHYLLIS Don't you want me to bring it in? NEFF Sure. Put it on the chair. She comes in. He closes the door. NEFF How did you know where I live? PHYLLIS It's in the phone book. Neff switches on the standing lamp. PHYLLIS It's raining. NEFF So it is. Peel off your coat and sit down. She starts to take off her coat. NEFF Your husband out? PHYLLIS Long Beach. They're spudding in a new well. He phoned he'd be late. About nine-thirty. He takes her coat and lays it across the back of a chair. PHYLLIS It's about time you said you're glad to see me. NEFF I knew you wouldn't leave it like that. PHYLLIS Like what? NEFF Like it was this afternoon. PHYLLIS I must have said something that gave you a terribly wrong impression. You must surely see that. You must never think anything like that about me, Walter. NEFF Okay. PHYLLIS It's not okay. Not if you don't believe me. NEFF What do you want me to do? PHYLLIS I want you to be nice to me. Like the first time you came to the house. NEFF It can't be like the first time. Something has happened. PHYLLIS I know it has. It's happened to us. NEFF That's what I mean. Phyllis has moved over to the window. She stares out through the wet window-pane. NEFF What's the matter now? PHYLLIS I feel as if he was watching me. Not that he cares about me. Not any more. But he keeps me on a leash. So tight I can't breathe. I'm scared. NEFF What of? He's in Long Beach, isn't he? PHYLLIS I oughtn't to have come. NEFF Maybe you oughtn't. PHYLLIS You want me to go? NEFF If you want to. PHYLLIS Right now? NEFF Sure. Right now. By this time, he has hold of her wrist. He draws her to him slowly and kisses her. Her arms tighten around him. After a moment he pulls his head back, still holding her close. NEFF How were you going to do it? PHYLLIS Do what? NEFF Kill him. PHYLLIS Walter, for the last time -- She tries to jerk away but he holds her and kisses her again. NEFF I'm crazy about you, baby. PHYLLIS I'm crazy about you, Walter. NEFF That perfume on your hair. What's the name of it? PHYLLIS Something French. I bought it down at Ensenada. NEFF We ought to have some of that pink wine to go with it. The kind that bubbles. But all I have is bourbon. PHYLLIS Bourbon is fine, Walter. He lets her go and moves toward the dinette. A-45 THE DINETTE AND KITCHEN It contains a small table and some chairs. A low glass-and- china cabinet is built between the dinette and kitchen, leaving a space like a doorway. The kitchen is the usual apartment house kitchen, with stove, ice-box, sink, etc. It is quite small. Neff goes to the ice-box and Phyllis drifts in after him. NEFF Soda? PHYLLIS Plain water, please. NEFF Get a couple of glasses, will you. He points at the china closet. He has taken a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator and is holding it under the hot- water faucet. NEFF You know, about six months ago a guy slipped on the soap in his bathtub and knocked himself cold and drowned. Only he had accident insurance. So they had an autopsy and she didn't get away with it. Phyllis has the glasses now. She hands them to him. He dumps some ice cubes into the glasses. PHYLLIS Who didn't? NEFF His wife. He reaches for the whiskey bottle on top of the china closet. NEFF And there was another case where a guy was found shot and his wife said he was cleaning a gun and his stomach got in the way. All she collected was a three-to-ten stretch in Tehachapi. PHYLLIS Perhaps it was worth it to her. Neff hands her a glass. NEFF See if you can carry this as far as the living room. They move back toward the living room. A-46 LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff go toward the davenport. She is sipping her drink and looking around. PHYLLIS It's nice here, Walter. Who takes care of it for you? NEFF A colored woman comes in twice a week. PHYLLIS You get your own breakfast? NEFF Once in a while I squeeze a grapefruit. The rest I get at the corner drugstore. They sit on the davenport, fairly close together. PHYLLIS It sounds wonderful. Just strangers beside you. You don't know them. You don't hate them. You don't have to sit across the table and smile at him and that daughter of his every morning of your life. NEFF What daughter? Oh, that little girl on the piano. PHYLLIS Yes. Lola. She lives with us. He thinks a lot more of her than he does of me. NEFF Ever think of a divorce? PHYLLIS He wouldn't give me a divorce. NEFF I suppose because it would cost him money. PHYLLIS He hasn't got any money. Not since he went into the oil business. NEFF But he had when you married him? PHYLLIS Yes, he had. And I wanted a home. Why not? But that wasn't the only reason. I was his wife's nurse. She was sick for a long time. When she died, he was all broken up. I pitied him so. NEFF And now you hate him. PHYLLIS Yes, Walter. He's so mean to me. Every-time I buy a dress or a pair of shoes he yells his head off. He won't let me go anywhere. He keeps me shut up. He's always been mean to me. Even his life insurance all goes to that daughter of his. That Lola. NEFF Nothing for you at all, huh? PHYLLIS No. And nothing is just what I'm worth to him. NEFF So you lie awake in the dark and listen to him snore and get ideas. PHYLLIS Walter, I don't want to kill him. I never did. Not even when he gets drunk and slaps my face. NEFF Only sometimes you wish he was dead. PHYLLIS Perhaps I do. NEFF And you wish it was an accident, and you had that policy. For fifty thousand dollars. Is that it? PHYLLIS Perhaps that too. She takes a long drink. PHYLLIS The other night we drove home from a party. He was drunk again. When we got into the garage he just sat there with his head on the steering wheel and the motor still running. And I thought what it would be like if I didn't switch it off, just closed the garage door and left him there. NEFF I'll tell you what it would be like, if you had that accident policy, and tried to pull a monoxide job. We have a guy in our office named Keyes. For him a set-up like that would be just like a slice of rare roast beef. In three minutes he'd know it wasn't an accident. In ten minutes you'd be sitting under the hot lights. In half an hour you'd be signing your name to a confession. PHYLLIS But Walter, I didn't do it. I'm not going to do it. NEFF Not if there's an insurance company in the picture, baby. So long as you're honest they'll pay you with a smile, but you just try to pull something like that and you'll find out. They know more tricks than a carload of monkeys. And if there's a death mixed up in it, you haven't got a prayer. They'll hang you as sure as ten dimes will buy a dollar, baby. She begins to cry. He puts his arms around her and kisses her. NEFF Just stop thinking about it, will you. He holds her tight. Their heads touch, side by side, THE CAMERA SLOWLY STARTS TO RECEDE as we DISSOLVE TO: A-47 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits in the swivel chair, talking into the dictaphone. He has hooked the wastebasket under his feet to sit more comfortably. As he talks, a little cough shakes him now and then. NEFF So we just sat there, and she kept on crying softly, like the rain on the window, and we didn't say anything. Maybe she had stopped thinking about it, but I hadn't. I couldn't. Because it all tied up with something I had been thinking about for years, since long before I ever ran into Phyllis Dietrichson. Because, in this business you can't sleep for trying to figure out the tricks they could pull on you. You're like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don't crook the house. And then one night, you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself. And do it smart. Because you've got that wheel right under your hands. And you know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out in front, a shill to put down the bet. And suddenly the doorbell rings and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you... Look, Keyes, I'm not trying to whitewash myself. I fought it, only maybe I didn't fight it hard enough. The stakes were fifty thousand dollars, but they were the life of a man, too, a man who'd never done me any dirt. Except he was married to a woman he didn't care anything about, and I did... DISSOLVE TO: A-48 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT LIVING ROOM CAMERA MOVES SLOWLY towards the davenport again. Neff sits in one corner with his feet on the low table. He is smoking his cigarette and staring at the ceiling. Phyllis has been sitting fairly close to him. She gets up slowly and crosses to her rain coat, lying over a chair. PHYLLIS I've got to go now, Walter. Neff does not answer. He keeps on staring at the ceiling. She starts to put the rain coat on. PHYLLIS Will you call me, Walter? Neff still does not answer. PHYLLIS Walter! He looks at her slowly, almost absently. PHYLLIS I hate him. I loathe going back to him. You believe me, don't you, Walter? NEFF Sure I believe you. PHYLLIS I can't stand it anymore. What if they did hang me? NEFF You're not going to hang, baby. PHYLLIS It's better than going on this way. NEFF -- you're not going to hang, baby. Not ever. Because you're going to do it the smart way. Because I'm going to help you. PHYLLIS You! NEFF Me. PHYLLIS Do you know what you're saying? NEFF Sure I know what I'm saying. He gets up and grips her arm. NEFF We're going to do it together. We're going to do it right. And I'm the guy that knows how. There is fierce determination in his voice. His fingers dig into her arm. PHYLLIS Walter, you're hurting me. NEFF There isn't going to be any slip up. Nothing sloppy. Nothing weak. It's got to be perfect. He kisses her. NEFF You go now. He leads her towards the door. NEFF Call me tomorrow. But not from your house. From a booth. And watch your step. Every single minute. It's got to be perfect, understand. Straight down the line. They have now reached the door. Neff opens it. Phyllis stands in the doorway, her lips white. PHYLLIS Straight down the line. She goes quietly. He watches her down the corridor. Slowly he closes the door and goes back into the room. He moves across the window and opens it wide. He stands there, looking down into the dark street. From below comes the sound of a car starting and driving off. The rain drifts in against his face. He just stands there motionless. His mind is going a hundred miles a minute. FADE OUT: END OF SEQUENCE "A" SEQUENCE "B" FADE IN: B-1 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits slumped in his chair before the dictaphone. On the desk next to him stands a used record. The cylinder on the dictaphone is not turning. He is smoking a cigarette. He kills it then lifts the needle and slides off the record which is on the machine and stands it on end on the desk beside the other used record. He reaches down painfully to take another record from the rack beneath the dictaphone, looks at it against the light to make sure it has not been used, then slides it into place on the machine and resets the needle. He lifts the horn and resumes his dictation. NEFF The first thing we had to do was fix him up with that accident policy. I knew he wouldn't buy, but all I wanted was his signature on an application. So I had to make him sign without his knowing what he was signing. And I wanted a witness other than Phyllis to hear me give him a sales talk. I was trying to think with your brains, Keyes. I wanted all the answers ready for all the questions you were going to spring as soon as Dietrichson was dead. Neff takes a last drag on his cigarette and kills it by running it under the ledge of the dictaphone stand. He drops the stub on the floor and resumes. NEFF A couple of nights later I went to the house. Everything looked fine, except I didn't like the witness Phyllis had brought in. It was Dietrichson's daughter Lola, and it made me feel a little queer in the belly to have her right there in the room, playing Chinese checkers, as if nothing was going to happen. DISSOLVE: B-2 A BOARD OF CHINESE CHECKERS CAMERA WITHDRAWS AND GRADUALLY REVEALS THE DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM - NIGHT The checker-board is on the davenport between Phyllis and Lola. Mr. Dietrichson sits in a big easy chair. His coat and tie are over the back of the chair, and the evening paper is lying tumbled on the floor beside him. He is smoking a cigar with the band on it. He has a drink in front of him and several more inside him. In another chair sits Neff, his briefcase on the floor, leaning against his chair. He holds his rate book partly open, with a finger in it for a marker. He is going full swing. NEFF I suppose you realize, Mr. Dietrichson, that, not being an employee, you are not covered by the State Compensation Insurance Act. The only way you can protect yourself is by having a personal policy of your own. DIETRICHSON I know all about that. The next thing you'll tell me I need earthquake insurance and lightning insurance and hail insurance. Phyllis looks up from the checker-board and cuts in on the dialogue. Lola listens without much interest. PHYLLIS (To Dietrichson) If we bought all the insurance they can think up, we'd stay broke paying for it, wouldn't we, honey? DIETRICHSON What keeps us broke is you going out and buying five hats at a crack. Who needs a hat in California? NEFF I always say insurance is a lot like a hot water bottle. It looks kind of useless and silly hanging on the hook, but when you get that stomach ache in the middle of the night, it comes in mighty handy. DIETRICHSON Now you want to sell me a hot water bottle. NEFF Dollar for dollar, accident insurance is the cheapest coverage you can buy, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Maybe some other time, Mr. Neff. I had a tough day. NEFF Just as you say, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Suppose we just settle that automobile insurance tonight. NEFF Sure. All we need on that is for you to sign an application for renewal. Phyllis throws a quick glance at Neff. As she looks back she sees that Lola is staring down at her wrist watch. LOLA Phyllis, do you mind if we don't finish this game? It bores me stiff. PHYLLIS Got some thing better to do? LOLA Yes, I have. She gets up. LOLA (To Dietrichson) Father, is it all right if I run along now? DIETRICHSON Run along where? Who with? LOLA Just Anne. We're going roller skating. DIETRICHSON Anne who? LOLA Anne Matthews. PHYLLIS It's not that Nino Zachetti again? DIETRICHSON It better not be that Zachetti guy. If I ever catch you with that --- LOLA It's Anne Matthews, I told you. I also told you we're going roller skating. I'm meeting her at the corner of Vermont and Franklin -- the north- west corner, in case you're interested. And I'm late already. I hope that is all clear. Good night, Father. Good night, Phyllis. She starts to go. NEFF Good night, Miss Dietrichson. LOLA Oh, I'm sorry. Good night, Mr. -- NEFF Neff. LOLA Good night, Mr. Neff. PHYLLIS Now you're not going to take my car again. LOLA No thanks. I'd rather be dead. She goes out through the archway. DIETRICHSON A great little fighter for her weight. Dietrichson sucks down a big swallow of his drink. Neff has taken two blank forms from his briefcase. He puts the briefcase on Mr. Dietrichson's lap and lays the forms on top. Phyllis is watching closely. NEFF This is where you sign, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Sign what? NEFF The applications for your auto renewals. So you'll be protected until the new policies are issued. DIETRICHSON When will that be? NEFF In about a week. DIETRICHSON Just so I'm covered when I drive up North. Neff takes out his fountain pen. NEFF San Francisco, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Palo Alto. PHYLLIS He was a Stanford man, Mr. Neff. And he still goes to his class reunion every year. DIETRICHSON What's wrong with that? Can't I have a little fun even once a year? NEFF Great football school, Stanford. Did you play football, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Left guard. Almost made the varsity, too. Neff has unscrewed his fountain pen. He hands it to Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson puts on his glasses. NEFF On that bottom line, Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson signs. Neff's and Phyllis' eyes meet for a split second. NEFF

enters

How many times the word 'enters' appears in the text?

you, Walter. Get out of here before I throw my desk at you. NEFF I love you, too. He walks out, still grinning. A-35 EXT. OFFICES - TWELFTH FLOOR Neff comes out of Keys' office and walks back along the balcony. Activity of secretaries going in and out of doors, etc. Neff enters his own office. NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) I really did, too, you old crab, always yelling your fat head off, always sore at everyone. But behind the cigar ashes on your vest I kind of knew you had a heart as big as a house... Back in my office there was a phone message from Mrs. Dietrichson about the renewals. She didn't want me to come tomorrow evening. She wanted me to come Thursday afternoon at three-thirty instead. I had a lot of stuff lined up for that Thursday afternoon, including a trip down to Santa Monica to see a couple of live prospects about some group insurance. But I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson and the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg. A-36 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE Anderson, a salesman, sits at one of the desks, filling out a report. Neff enters, goes to his own desk. He looks down at some mail. On top there is a typewritten note. He reads it, sits down and leafs through his desk calendar. A-37 INSERT - CLOSEUP - CALENDAR PAGE Showing date: THURSDAY 23 May and five or six appointments penciled in tightly on the page. DISSOLVE TO: A-38 DIETRICHSON HOME - ENTRANCE HALL - (DAY) THE CAMERA PANS with Phyllis Dietrichson's feet and ankles as she comes down the stairs, her high heels clicking on the tiles. The anklet glistens on her leg as she moves. THE CAMERA PANS ON. Phyllis has reached the entrance hall, and as she walks toward the front door her whole body becomes visible. She wears a gay print dress with a wide sash over her hips. She opens the door. Outside is Neff, wearing a sport coat, flannel slacks. He takes his hat off. PHYLLIS Hello, Mr. Neff. He stands there with a little smile. PHYLLIS Aren't you coming in? NEFF I'm considering it. He comes in. PHYLLIS I hope you didn't mind my changing the appointment. Last night wasn't so convenient. NEFF That's okay. I was working on my stamp collection. She leads him toward living room. A-39 DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff come through archway. She heads toward a low tea table which stands in front of the davenport, with tall glasses, ice cubes, lemon, a pot of tea, etc. PHYLLIS I was just fixing some iced tea. Would you like a glass? NEFF Unless you have a bottle of beer that's not working. PHYLLIS There might be some. I never know what's in the ice box. (Calls) Nettie!... She pours herself a glass of tea. PHYLLIS About those renewals, Mr. Neff. I talked to my husband about it. NEFF You did? PHYLLIS Yes. He'll renew with you he told me. In fact, I thought he'd be here this afternoon. NEFF But he's not? PHYLLIS No. NEFF That's terrible. PHYLLIS (Calls again, impatiently) Nettie!... Nettie!... Oh, I forgot, it's the maid's day off. NEFF Don't bother, Mrs. Dietrichson. I'd like some iced tea very much. PHYLLIS Lemon? Sugar? NEFF Fix it your way. She fixes him a glass of tea while he is looking around. He slowly sits down. NEFF Seeing it's the maid's day off maybe there's something I can do for you. She hands him the tea. NEFF Like running the vacuum cleaner. PHYLLIS Fresh. NEFF I used to peddle vacuum cleaners. Not much money but you learn a lot about life. PHYLLIS I didn't think you'd learned it from a correspondence course. NEFF Where did you pick up this tea drinking? You're not English, are you? PHYLLIS No. Californian. Born right here in Los Angeles. NEFF They say native Californians all come from Iowa. PHYLLIS I wanted to ask you something, Mr. Neff. NEFF Make it Walter. PHYLLIS Walter. NEFF Right. PHYLLIS Tell me, Walter, on this insurance -- how much commission do you make? NEFF Twenty percent. Why? PHYLLIS I thought maybe I could throw a little more business your way. NEFF I can always use it. PHYLLIS I was thinking about my husband. I worry a lot about him, down in those oil fields. It's very dangerous. NEFF Not for an executive, is it? PHYLLIS He doesn't just sit behind a desk. He's right down there with the drilling crews. It's got me worried sick. NEFF You mean a crown block might fall on him some rainy night? PHYLLIS Please don't talk like that. NEFF But that's the idea. PHYLLIS The other day a casing line snapped and caught the foreman. He's in the hospital with a broken back. NEFF Bad. PHYLLIS It's got me jittery just thinking about it. Suppose something like that happened to my husband? NEFF It could. PHYLLIS Don't you think he ought to have accident insurance? NEFF Uh huh. PHYLLIS What kind of insurance could he have? NEFF Enough to cover doctors' and hospital bills. Say a hundred and twenty-five a week cash benefit. And he'd rate around fifty thousand capital sum. PHYLLIS Capital sum? What's that? NEFF That's if he got killed. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. PHYLLIS I suppose you have to think of everything in your business. NEFF Mr. Dietrichson would understand. I'm sure I could sell him on the idea of some accident protection. Why don't I talk to him about it. PHYLLIS You could try. But he's pretty tough going. NEFF They're all tough at first. PHYLLIS He's got a lot on his mind. He doesn't want to listen to anything except maybe a baseball game on the radio. Sometimes we sit all evening without saying a word to each other. NEFF Sounds pretty dull. Phyllis shrugs. PHYLLIS So I just sit and knit. NEFF Is that what you married him for? PHYLLIS Maybe I like the way his thumbs hold up the wool. NEFF Anytime his thumbs get tired -- PHYLLIS I want to ask you something, Mr. Neff. Could I get an accident policy for him -- without bothering him at all? NEFF How's that again. PHYLLIS That would make it easier for you, too. You wouldn't even have to talk to him. I have a little allowance of my own. I could pay for it and he needn't know anything about it. NEFF Wait a minute. Why shouldn't he know? PHYLLIS Because I know he doesn't want accident insurance. He's superstitious about it. NEFF A lot of people are. Funny, isn't it? PHYLLIS If there was a way to get it like that, all the worry would be over. You see what I mean, Walter? NEFF Sure. I've got good eyesight. You want him to have the policy without him knowing it. And that means without the insurance company knowing that he doesn't know. That's the set-up, isn't it? PHYLLIS Is there anything wrong with it? NEFF I think it's lovely. And then, some dark wet night, if that crown block fell on him -- PHYLLIS What crown block? NEFF Only sometimes they have to have a little help. They can't quite make it on their own. PHYLLIS I don't know what you're talking about. NEFF Of course, it doesn't have to be a crown block. It can be a car backing over him, or he can fall out of an upstairs window. Any little thing like that, as long as it's a morgue job. PHYLLIS Are you crazy? NEFF Not that crazy. Goodbye, Mrs. Dietrichson. He picks up his hat. PHYLLIS What's the matter? NEFF Look, baby, you can't get away with it. PHYLLIS Get away with what? NEFF You want to knock him off, don't you, baby. PHYLLIS That's a horrible thing to say! NEFF Who'd you think I was, anyway? A guy that walks into a good-looking dame's front parlor and says "Good afternoon, I sell accident insurance on husbands. You got one that's been around too long? Somebody you'd like to turn into a little hard cash? Just give me a smile and I'll help you collect." Boy, what a dope I must look to you! PHYLLIS I think you're rotten. NEFF I think you're swell. So long as I'm not your husband. PHYLLIS Get out of here. NEFF You bet I will. You bet I'll get out of here, baby. But quick. He goes out. She looks after him. A-40 EXT. DIETRICHSON HOME - (DAY) Neff bangs the front door shut, walks quickly to his car and drives away. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) So I let her have it, straight between the eyes. She didn't fool me for a minute, not this time. I knew I had hold of a redhot poker and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off. I stopped at a drive-in for a bottle of beer, the one I had wanted all along, only I wanted it worse now, to get rid of the sour taste of her iced tea, and everything that went with it. I didn't want to go back to the office, so I dropped by a bowling alley at Third and Western and rolled a few lines to get my mind thinking about something else for a while. A-41 DRIVE-IN RESTAURANT - (DAY) Shooting past Neff sitting behind the wheel of his car The car hop hangs a tray on the door and serves him a bottle of beer. DISSOLVE TO: A-42 INT. BOWLING ALLEY Neff bowling. He rolls the ball with an effort at concentration, but his mind is not really on the game. DISSOLVE TO: A-43 EXT. APARTMENT HOUSE - (DUSK) It is late afternoon. The apartment house is called the LOS OLIVOS APARTMENTS. It is a six-story building in the Normandie- Wilshire district, with a basement garage. THE CAMERA PANS UP the front of the building to the top floor windows, as a little rain starts to fall. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) I didn't feel like eating dinner when I left, and I didn't feel like a show, so I drove home, put the car away and went up to my apartment. A-44 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT - LIVING ROOM - (DUSK) It is a double apartment of conventional design, with kitchen, dinette, and bathroom, squarecut overstuffed borax furniture. Gas logs are lit in the imitation fireplace. Neff stands by the window with his coat off and his tie loose. Raindrops strike against the glass. He turns away impatiently, paces up and down past a caddy bag with golf clubs in it, pulls one out at random, makes a couple of short swings, throws the club on the couch, paces again. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) It had begun to rain outside and I watched it get dark and didn't even turn on the light. That didn't help me either. I was all twisted up inside, and I was still holding on to that red-hot poker. And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all, that the hook was too strong, that this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning. The doorbell rings. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) So at eight o'clock the bell would ring and I would know who it was without even having to think, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Neff goes to the door and opens it. PHYLLIS Hello. Neff just looks at her. PHYLLIS You forgot your hat this afternoon. She has nothing in her hands but her bag. NEFF Did I? He looks down at her hands. PHYLLIS Don't you want me to bring it in? NEFF Sure. Put it on the chair. She comes in. He closes the door. NEFF How did you know where I live? PHYLLIS It's in the phone book. Neff switches on the standing lamp. PHYLLIS It's raining. NEFF So it is. Peel off your coat and sit down. She starts to take off her coat. NEFF Your husband out? PHYLLIS Long Beach. They're spudding in a new well. He phoned he'd be late. About nine-thirty. He takes her coat and lays it across the back of a chair. PHYLLIS It's about time you said you're glad to see me. NEFF I knew you wouldn't leave it like that. PHYLLIS Like what? NEFF Like it was this afternoon. PHYLLIS I must have said something that gave you a terribly wrong impression. You must surely see that. You must never think anything like that about me, Walter. NEFF Okay. PHYLLIS It's not okay. Not if you don't believe me. NEFF What do you want me to do? PHYLLIS I want you to be nice to me. Like the first time you came to the house. NEFF It can't be like the first time. Something has happened. PHYLLIS I know it has. It's happened to us. NEFF That's what I mean. Phyllis has moved over to the window. She stares out through the wet window-pane. NEFF What's the matter now? PHYLLIS I feel as if he was watching me. Not that he cares about me. Not any more. But he keeps me on a leash. So tight I can't breathe. I'm scared. NEFF What of? He's in Long Beach, isn't he? PHYLLIS I oughtn't to have come. NEFF Maybe you oughtn't. PHYLLIS You want me to go? NEFF If you want to. PHYLLIS Right now? NEFF Sure. Right now. By this time, he has hold of her wrist. He draws her to him slowly and kisses her. Her arms tighten around him. After a moment he pulls his head back, still holding her close. NEFF How were you going to do it? PHYLLIS Do what? NEFF Kill him. PHYLLIS Walter, for the last time -- She tries to jerk away but he holds her and kisses her again. NEFF I'm crazy about you, baby. PHYLLIS I'm crazy about you, Walter. NEFF That perfume on your hair. What's the name of it? PHYLLIS Something French. I bought it down at Ensenada. NEFF We ought to have some of that pink wine to go with it. The kind that bubbles. But all I have is bourbon. PHYLLIS Bourbon is fine, Walter. He lets her go and moves toward the dinette. A-45 THE DINETTE AND KITCHEN It contains a small table and some chairs. A low glass-and- china cabinet is built between the dinette and kitchen, leaving a space like a doorway. The kitchen is the usual apartment house kitchen, with stove, ice-box, sink, etc. It is quite small. Neff goes to the ice-box and Phyllis drifts in after him. NEFF Soda? PHYLLIS Plain water, please. NEFF Get a couple of glasses, will you. He points at the china closet. He has taken a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator and is holding it under the hot- water faucet. NEFF You know, about six months ago a guy slipped on the soap in his bathtub and knocked himself cold and drowned. Only he had accident insurance. So they had an autopsy and she didn't get away with it. Phyllis has the glasses now. She hands them to him. He dumps some ice cubes into the glasses. PHYLLIS Who didn't? NEFF His wife. He reaches for the whiskey bottle on top of the china closet. NEFF And there was another case where a guy was found shot and his wife said he was cleaning a gun and his stomach got in the way. All she collected was a three-to-ten stretch in Tehachapi. PHYLLIS Perhaps it was worth it to her. Neff hands her a glass. NEFF See if you can carry this as far as the living room. They move back toward the living room. A-46 LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff go toward the davenport. She is sipping her drink and looking around. PHYLLIS It's nice here, Walter. Who takes care of it for you? NEFF A colored woman comes in twice a week. PHYLLIS You get your own breakfast? NEFF Once in a while I squeeze a grapefruit. The rest I get at the corner drugstore. They sit on the davenport, fairly close together. PHYLLIS It sounds wonderful. Just strangers beside you. You don't know them. You don't hate them. You don't have to sit across the table and smile at him and that daughter of his every morning of your life. NEFF What daughter? Oh, that little girl on the piano. PHYLLIS Yes. Lola. She lives with us. He thinks a lot more of her than he does of me. NEFF Ever think of a divorce? PHYLLIS He wouldn't give me a divorce. NEFF I suppose because it would cost him money. PHYLLIS He hasn't got any money. Not since he went into the oil business. NEFF But he had when you married him? PHYLLIS Yes, he had. And I wanted a home. Why not? But that wasn't the only reason. I was his wife's nurse. She was sick for a long time. When she died, he was all broken up. I pitied him so. NEFF And now you hate him. PHYLLIS Yes, Walter. He's so mean to me. Every-time I buy a dress or a pair of shoes he yells his head off. He won't let me go anywhere. He keeps me shut up. He's always been mean to me. Even his life insurance all goes to that daughter of his. That Lola. NEFF Nothing for you at all, huh? PHYLLIS No. And nothing is just what I'm worth to him. NEFF So you lie awake in the dark and listen to him snore and get ideas. PHYLLIS Walter, I don't want to kill him. I never did. Not even when he gets drunk and slaps my face. NEFF Only sometimes you wish he was dead. PHYLLIS Perhaps I do. NEFF And you wish it was an accident, and you had that policy. For fifty thousand dollars. Is that it? PHYLLIS Perhaps that too. She takes a long drink. PHYLLIS The other night we drove home from a party. He was drunk again. When we got into the garage he just sat there with his head on the steering wheel and the motor still running. And I thought what it would be like if I didn't switch it off, just closed the garage door and left him there. NEFF I'll tell you what it would be like, if you had that accident policy, and tried to pull a monoxide job. We have a guy in our office named Keyes. For him a set-up like that would be just like a slice of rare roast beef. In three minutes he'd know it wasn't an accident. In ten minutes you'd be sitting under the hot lights. In half an hour you'd be signing your name to a confession. PHYLLIS But Walter, I didn't do it. I'm not going to do it. NEFF Not if there's an insurance company in the picture, baby. So long as you're honest they'll pay you with a smile, but you just try to pull something like that and you'll find out. They know more tricks than a carload of monkeys. And if there's a death mixed up in it, you haven't got a prayer. They'll hang you as sure as ten dimes will buy a dollar, baby. She begins to cry. He puts his arms around her and kisses her. NEFF Just stop thinking about it, will you. He holds her tight. Their heads touch, side by side, THE CAMERA SLOWLY STARTS TO RECEDE as we DISSOLVE TO: A-47 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits in the swivel chair, talking into the dictaphone. He has hooked the wastebasket under his feet to sit more comfortably. As he talks, a little cough shakes him now and then. NEFF So we just sat there, and she kept on crying softly, like the rain on the window, and we didn't say anything. Maybe she had stopped thinking about it, but I hadn't. I couldn't. Because it all tied up with something I had been thinking about for years, since long before I ever ran into Phyllis Dietrichson. Because, in this business you can't sleep for trying to figure out the tricks they could pull on you. You're like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don't crook the house. And then one night, you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself. And do it smart. Because you've got that wheel right under your hands. And you know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out in front, a shill to put down the bet. And suddenly the doorbell rings and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you... Look, Keyes, I'm not trying to whitewash myself. I fought it, only maybe I didn't fight it hard enough. The stakes were fifty thousand dollars, but they were the life of a man, too, a man who'd never done me any dirt. Except he was married to a woman he didn't care anything about, and I did... DISSOLVE TO: A-48 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT LIVING ROOM CAMERA MOVES SLOWLY towards the davenport again. Neff sits in one corner with his feet on the low table. He is smoking his cigarette and staring at the ceiling. Phyllis has been sitting fairly close to him. She gets up slowly and crosses to her rain coat, lying over a chair. PHYLLIS I've got to go now, Walter. Neff does not answer. He keeps on staring at the ceiling. She starts to put the rain coat on. PHYLLIS Will you call me, Walter? Neff still does not answer. PHYLLIS Walter! He looks at her slowly, almost absently. PHYLLIS I hate him. I loathe going back to him. You believe me, don't you, Walter? NEFF Sure I believe you. PHYLLIS I can't stand it anymore. What if they did hang me? NEFF You're not going to hang, baby. PHYLLIS It's better than going on this way. NEFF -- you're not going to hang, baby. Not ever. Because you're going to do it the smart way. Because I'm going to help you. PHYLLIS You! NEFF Me. PHYLLIS Do you know what you're saying? NEFF Sure I know what I'm saying. He gets up and grips her arm. NEFF We're going to do it together. We're going to do it right. And I'm the guy that knows how. There is fierce determination in his voice. His fingers dig into her arm. PHYLLIS Walter, you're hurting me. NEFF There isn't going to be any slip up. Nothing sloppy. Nothing weak. It's got to be perfect. He kisses her. NEFF You go now. He leads her towards the door. NEFF Call me tomorrow. But not from your house. From a booth. And watch your step. Every single minute. It's got to be perfect, understand. Straight down the line. They have now reached the door. Neff opens it. Phyllis stands in the doorway, her lips white. PHYLLIS Straight down the line. She goes quietly. He watches her down the corridor. Slowly he closes the door and goes back into the room. He moves across the window and opens it wide. He stands there, looking down into the dark street. From below comes the sound of a car starting and driving off. The rain drifts in against his face. He just stands there motionless. His mind is going a hundred miles a minute. FADE OUT: END OF SEQUENCE "A" SEQUENCE "B" FADE IN: B-1 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits slumped in his chair before the dictaphone. On the desk next to him stands a used record. The cylinder on the dictaphone is not turning. He is smoking a cigarette. He kills it then lifts the needle and slides off the record which is on the machine and stands it on end on the desk beside the other used record. He reaches down painfully to take another record from the rack beneath the dictaphone, looks at it against the light to make sure it has not been used, then slides it into place on the machine and resets the needle. He lifts the horn and resumes his dictation. NEFF The first thing we had to do was fix him up with that accident policy. I knew he wouldn't buy, but all I wanted was his signature on an application. So I had to make him sign without his knowing what he was signing. And I wanted a witness other than Phyllis to hear me give him a sales talk. I was trying to think with your brains, Keyes. I wanted all the answers ready for all the questions you were going to spring as soon as Dietrichson was dead. Neff takes a last drag on his cigarette and kills it by running it under the ledge of the dictaphone stand. He drops the stub on the floor and resumes. NEFF A couple of nights later I went to the house. Everything looked fine, except I didn't like the witness Phyllis had brought in. It was Dietrichson's daughter Lola, and it made me feel a little queer in the belly to have her right there in the room, playing Chinese checkers, as if nothing was going to happen. DISSOLVE: B-2 A BOARD OF CHINESE CHECKERS CAMERA WITHDRAWS AND GRADUALLY REVEALS THE DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM - NIGHT The checker-board is on the davenport between Phyllis and Lola. Mr. Dietrichson sits in a big easy chair. His coat and tie are over the back of the chair, and the evening paper is lying tumbled on the floor beside him. He is smoking a cigar with the band on it. He has a drink in front of him and several more inside him. In another chair sits Neff, his briefcase on the floor, leaning against his chair. He holds his rate book partly open, with a finger in it for a marker. He is going full swing. NEFF I suppose you realize, Mr. Dietrichson, that, not being an employee, you are not covered by the State Compensation Insurance Act. The only way you can protect yourself is by having a personal policy of your own. DIETRICHSON I know all about that. The next thing you'll tell me I need earthquake insurance and lightning insurance and hail insurance. Phyllis looks up from the checker-board and cuts in on the dialogue. Lola listens without much interest. PHYLLIS (To Dietrichson) If we bought all the insurance they can think up, we'd stay broke paying for it, wouldn't we, honey? DIETRICHSON What keeps us broke is you going out and buying five hats at a crack. Who needs a hat in California? NEFF I always say insurance is a lot like a hot water bottle. It looks kind of useless and silly hanging on the hook, but when you get that stomach ache in the middle of the night, it comes in mighty handy. DIETRICHSON Now you want to sell me a hot water bottle. NEFF Dollar for dollar, accident insurance is the cheapest coverage you can buy, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Maybe some other time, Mr. Neff. I had a tough day. NEFF Just as you say, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Suppose we just settle that automobile insurance tonight. NEFF Sure. All we need on that is for you to sign an application for renewal. Phyllis throws a quick glance at Neff. As she looks back she sees that Lola is staring down at her wrist watch. LOLA Phyllis, do you mind if we don't finish this game? It bores me stiff. PHYLLIS Got some thing better to do? LOLA Yes, I have. She gets up. LOLA (To Dietrichson) Father, is it all right if I run along now? DIETRICHSON Run along where? Who with? LOLA Just Anne. We're going roller skating. DIETRICHSON Anne who? LOLA Anne Matthews. PHYLLIS It's not that Nino Zachetti again? DIETRICHSON It better not be that Zachetti guy. If I ever catch you with that --- LOLA It's Anne Matthews, I told you. I also told you we're going roller skating. I'm meeting her at the corner of Vermont and Franklin -- the north- west corner, in case you're interested. And I'm late already. I hope that is all clear. Good night, Father. Good night, Phyllis. She starts to go. NEFF Good night, Miss Dietrichson. LOLA Oh, I'm sorry. Good night, Mr. -- NEFF Neff. LOLA Good night, Mr. Neff. PHYLLIS Now you're not going to take my car again. LOLA No thanks. I'd rather be dead. She goes out through the archway. DIETRICHSON A great little fighter for her weight. Dietrichson sucks down a big swallow of his drink. Neff has taken two blank forms from his briefcase. He puts the briefcase on Mr. Dietrichson's lap and lays the forms on top. Phyllis is watching closely. NEFF This is where you sign, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Sign what? NEFF The applications for your auto renewals. So you'll be protected until the new policies are issued. DIETRICHSON When will that be? NEFF In about a week. DIETRICHSON Just so I'm covered when I drive up North. Neff takes out his fountain pen. NEFF San Francisco, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Palo Alto. PHYLLIS He was a Stanford man, Mr. Neff. And he still goes to his class reunion every year. DIETRICHSON What's wrong with that? Can't I have a little fun even once a year? NEFF Great football school, Stanford. Did you play football, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Left guard. Almost made the varsity, too. Neff has unscrewed his fountain pen. He hands it to Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson puts on his glasses. NEFF On that bottom line, Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson signs. Neff's and Phyllis' eyes meet for a split second. NEFF

maid

How many times the word 'maid' appears in the text?

you, Walter. Get out of here before I throw my desk at you. NEFF I love you, too. He walks out, still grinning. A-35 EXT. OFFICES - TWELFTH FLOOR Neff comes out of Keys' office and walks back along the balcony. Activity of secretaries going in and out of doors, etc. Neff enters his own office. NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) I really did, too, you old crab, always yelling your fat head off, always sore at everyone. But behind the cigar ashes on your vest I kind of knew you had a heart as big as a house... Back in my office there was a phone message from Mrs. Dietrichson about the renewals. She didn't want me to come tomorrow evening. She wanted me to come Thursday afternoon at three-thirty instead. I had a lot of stuff lined up for that Thursday afternoon, including a trip down to Santa Monica to see a couple of live prospects about some group insurance. But I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson and the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg. A-36 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE Anderson, a salesman, sits at one of the desks, filling out a report. Neff enters, goes to his own desk. He looks down at some mail. On top there is a typewritten note. He reads it, sits down and leafs through his desk calendar. A-37 INSERT - CLOSEUP - CALENDAR PAGE Showing date: THURSDAY 23 May and five or six appointments penciled in tightly on the page. DISSOLVE TO: A-38 DIETRICHSON HOME - ENTRANCE HALL - (DAY) THE CAMERA PANS with Phyllis Dietrichson's feet and ankles as she comes down the stairs, her high heels clicking on the tiles. The anklet glistens on her leg as she moves. THE CAMERA PANS ON. Phyllis has reached the entrance hall, and as she walks toward the front door her whole body becomes visible. She wears a gay print dress with a wide sash over her hips. She opens the door. Outside is Neff, wearing a sport coat, flannel slacks. He takes his hat off. PHYLLIS Hello, Mr. Neff. He stands there with a little smile. PHYLLIS Aren't you coming in? NEFF I'm considering it. He comes in. PHYLLIS I hope you didn't mind my changing the appointment. Last night wasn't so convenient. NEFF That's okay. I was working on my stamp collection. She leads him toward living room. A-39 DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff come through archway. She heads toward a low tea table which stands in front of the davenport, with tall glasses, ice cubes, lemon, a pot of tea, etc. PHYLLIS I was just fixing some iced tea. Would you like a glass? NEFF Unless you have a bottle of beer that's not working. PHYLLIS There might be some. I never know what's in the ice box. (Calls) Nettie!... She pours herself a glass of tea. PHYLLIS About those renewals, Mr. Neff. I talked to my husband about it. NEFF You did? PHYLLIS Yes. He'll renew with you he told me. In fact, I thought he'd be here this afternoon. NEFF But he's not? PHYLLIS No. NEFF That's terrible. PHYLLIS (Calls again, impatiently) Nettie!... Nettie!... Oh, I forgot, it's the maid's day off. NEFF Don't bother, Mrs. Dietrichson. I'd like some iced tea very much. PHYLLIS Lemon? Sugar? NEFF Fix it your way. She fixes him a glass of tea while he is looking around. He slowly sits down. NEFF Seeing it's the maid's day off maybe there's something I can do for you. She hands him the tea. NEFF Like running the vacuum cleaner. PHYLLIS Fresh. NEFF I used to peddle vacuum cleaners. Not much money but you learn a lot about life. PHYLLIS I didn't think you'd learned it from a correspondence course. NEFF Where did you pick up this tea drinking? You're not English, are you? PHYLLIS No. Californian. Born right here in Los Angeles. NEFF They say native Californians all come from Iowa. PHYLLIS I wanted to ask you something, Mr. Neff. NEFF Make it Walter. PHYLLIS Walter. NEFF Right. PHYLLIS Tell me, Walter, on this insurance -- how much commission do you make? NEFF Twenty percent. Why? PHYLLIS I thought maybe I could throw a little more business your way. NEFF I can always use it. PHYLLIS I was thinking about my husband. I worry a lot about him, down in those oil fields. It's very dangerous. NEFF Not for an executive, is it? PHYLLIS He doesn't just sit behind a desk. He's right down there with the drilling crews. It's got me worried sick. NEFF You mean a crown block might fall on him some rainy night? PHYLLIS Please don't talk like that. NEFF But that's the idea. PHYLLIS The other day a casing line snapped and caught the foreman. He's in the hospital with a broken back. NEFF Bad. PHYLLIS It's got me jittery just thinking about it. Suppose something like that happened to my husband? NEFF It could. PHYLLIS Don't you think he ought to have accident insurance? NEFF Uh huh. PHYLLIS What kind of insurance could he have? NEFF Enough to cover doctors' and hospital bills. Say a hundred and twenty-five a week cash benefit. And he'd rate around fifty thousand capital sum. PHYLLIS Capital sum? What's that? NEFF That's if he got killed. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. PHYLLIS I suppose you have to think of everything in your business. NEFF Mr. Dietrichson would understand. I'm sure I could sell him on the idea of some accident protection. Why don't I talk to him about it. PHYLLIS You could try. But he's pretty tough going. NEFF They're all tough at first. PHYLLIS He's got a lot on his mind. He doesn't want to listen to anything except maybe a baseball game on the radio. Sometimes we sit all evening without saying a word to each other. NEFF Sounds pretty dull. Phyllis shrugs. PHYLLIS So I just sit and knit. NEFF Is that what you married him for? PHYLLIS Maybe I like the way his thumbs hold up the wool. NEFF Anytime his thumbs get tired -- PHYLLIS I want to ask you something, Mr. Neff. Could I get an accident policy for him -- without bothering him at all? NEFF How's that again. PHYLLIS That would make it easier for you, too. You wouldn't even have to talk to him. I have a little allowance of my own. I could pay for it and he needn't know anything about it. NEFF Wait a minute. Why shouldn't he know? PHYLLIS Because I know he doesn't want accident insurance. He's superstitious about it. NEFF A lot of people are. Funny, isn't it? PHYLLIS If there was a way to get it like that, all the worry would be over. You see what I mean, Walter? NEFF Sure. I've got good eyesight. You want him to have the policy without him knowing it. And that means without the insurance company knowing that he doesn't know. That's the set-up, isn't it? PHYLLIS Is there anything wrong with it? NEFF I think it's lovely. And then, some dark wet night, if that crown block fell on him -- PHYLLIS What crown block? NEFF Only sometimes they have to have a little help. They can't quite make it on their own. PHYLLIS I don't know what you're talking about. NEFF Of course, it doesn't have to be a crown block. It can be a car backing over him, or he can fall out of an upstairs window. Any little thing like that, as long as it's a morgue job. PHYLLIS Are you crazy? NEFF Not that crazy. Goodbye, Mrs. Dietrichson. He picks up his hat. PHYLLIS What's the matter? NEFF Look, baby, you can't get away with it. PHYLLIS Get away with what? NEFF You want to knock him off, don't you, baby. PHYLLIS That's a horrible thing to say! NEFF Who'd you think I was, anyway? A guy that walks into a good-looking dame's front parlor and says "Good afternoon, I sell accident insurance on husbands. You got one that's been around too long? Somebody you'd like to turn into a little hard cash? Just give me a smile and I'll help you collect." Boy, what a dope I must look to you! PHYLLIS I think you're rotten. NEFF I think you're swell. So long as I'm not your husband. PHYLLIS Get out of here. NEFF You bet I will. You bet I'll get out of here, baby. But quick. He goes out. She looks after him. A-40 EXT. DIETRICHSON HOME - (DAY) Neff bangs the front door shut, walks quickly to his car and drives away. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) So I let her have it, straight between the eyes. She didn't fool me for a minute, not this time. I knew I had hold of a redhot poker and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off. I stopped at a drive-in for a bottle of beer, the one I had wanted all along, only I wanted it worse now, to get rid of the sour taste of her iced tea, and everything that went with it. I didn't want to go back to the office, so I dropped by a bowling alley at Third and Western and rolled a few lines to get my mind thinking about something else for a while. A-41 DRIVE-IN RESTAURANT - (DAY) Shooting past Neff sitting behind the wheel of his car The car hop hangs a tray on the door and serves him a bottle of beer. DISSOLVE TO: A-42 INT. BOWLING ALLEY Neff bowling. He rolls the ball with an effort at concentration, but his mind is not really on the game. DISSOLVE TO: A-43 EXT. APARTMENT HOUSE - (DUSK) It is late afternoon. The apartment house is called the LOS OLIVOS APARTMENTS. It is a six-story building in the Normandie- Wilshire district, with a basement garage. THE CAMERA PANS UP the front of the building to the top floor windows, as a little rain starts to fall. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) I didn't feel like eating dinner when I left, and I didn't feel like a show, so I drove home, put the car away and went up to my apartment. A-44 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT - LIVING ROOM - (DUSK) It is a double apartment of conventional design, with kitchen, dinette, and bathroom, squarecut overstuffed borax furniture. Gas logs are lit in the imitation fireplace. Neff stands by the window with his coat off and his tie loose. Raindrops strike against the glass. He turns away impatiently, paces up and down past a caddy bag with golf clubs in it, pulls one out at random, makes a couple of short swings, throws the club on the couch, paces again. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) It had begun to rain outside and I watched it get dark and didn't even turn on the light. That didn't help me either. I was all twisted up inside, and I was still holding on to that red-hot poker. And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all, that the hook was too strong, that this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning. The doorbell rings. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) So at eight o'clock the bell would ring and I would know who it was without even having to think, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Neff goes to the door and opens it. PHYLLIS Hello. Neff just looks at her. PHYLLIS You forgot your hat this afternoon. She has nothing in her hands but her bag. NEFF Did I? He looks down at her hands. PHYLLIS Don't you want me to bring it in? NEFF Sure. Put it on the chair. She comes in. He closes the door. NEFF How did you know where I live? PHYLLIS It's in the phone book. Neff switches on the standing lamp. PHYLLIS It's raining. NEFF So it is. Peel off your coat and sit down. She starts to take off her coat. NEFF Your husband out? PHYLLIS Long Beach. They're spudding in a new well. He phoned he'd be late. About nine-thirty. He takes her coat and lays it across the back of a chair. PHYLLIS It's about time you said you're glad to see me. NEFF I knew you wouldn't leave it like that. PHYLLIS Like what? NEFF Like it was this afternoon. PHYLLIS I must have said something that gave you a terribly wrong impression. You must surely see that. You must never think anything like that about me, Walter. NEFF Okay. PHYLLIS It's not okay. Not if you don't believe me. NEFF What do you want me to do? PHYLLIS I want you to be nice to me. Like the first time you came to the house. NEFF It can't be like the first time. Something has happened. PHYLLIS I know it has. It's happened to us. NEFF That's what I mean. Phyllis has moved over to the window. She stares out through the wet window-pane. NEFF What's the matter now? PHYLLIS I feel as if he was watching me. Not that he cares about me. Not any more. But he keeps me on a leash. So tight I can't breathe. I'm scared. NEFF What of? He's in Long Beach, isn't he? PHYLLIS I oughtn't to have come. NEFF Maybe you oughtn't. PHYLLIS You want me to go? NEFF If you want to. PHYLLIS Right now? NEFF Sure. Right now. By this time, he has hold of her wrist. He draws her to him slowly and kisses her. Her arms tighten around him. After a moment he pulls his head back, still holding her close. NEFF How were you going to do it? PHYLLIS Do what? NEFF Kill him. PHYLLIS Walter, for the last time -- She tries to jerk away but he holds her and kisses her again. NEFF I'm crazy about you, baby. PHYLLIS I'm crazy about you, Walter. NEFF That perfume on your hair. What's the name of it? PHYLLIS Something French. I bought it down at Ensenada. NEFF We ought to have some of that pink wine to go with it. The kind that bubbles. But all I have is bourbon. PHYLLIS Bourbon is fine, Walter. He lets her go and moves toward the dinette. A-45 THE DINETTE AND KITCHEN It contains a small table and some chairs. A low glass-and- china cabinet is built between the dinette and kitchen, leaving a space like a doorway. The kitchen is the usual apartment house kitchen, with stove, ice-box, sink, etc. It is quite small. Neff goes to the ice-box and Phyllis drifts in after him. NEFF Soda? PHYLLIS Plain water, please. NEFF Get a couple of glasses, will you. He points at the china closet. He has taken a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator and is holding it under the hot- water faucet. NEFF You know, about six months ago a guy slipped on the soap in his bathtub and knocked himself cold and drowned. Only he had accident insurance. So they had an autopsy and she didn't get away with it. Phyllis has the glasses now. She hands them to him. He dumps some ice cubes into the glasses. PHYLLIS Who didn't? NEFF His wife. He reaches for the whiskey bottle on top of the china closet. NEFF And there was another case where a guy was found shot and his wife said he was cleaning a gun and his stomach got in the way. All she collected was a three-to-ten stretch in Tehachapi. PHYLLIS Perhaps it was worth it to her. Neff hands her a glass. NEFF See if you can carry this as far as the living room. They move back toward the living room. A-46 LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff go toward the davenport. She is sipping her drink and looking around. PHYLLIS It's nice here, Walter. Who takes care of it for you? NEFF A colored woman comes in twice a week. PHYLLIS You get your own breakfast? NEFF Once in a while I squeeze a grapefruit. The rest I get at the corner drugstore. They sit on the davenport, fairly close together. PHYLLIS It sounds wonderful. Just strangers beside you. You don't know them. You don't hate them. You don't have to sit across the table and smile at him and that daughter of his every morning of your life. NEFF What daughter? Oh, that little girl on the piano. PHYLLIS Yes. Lola. She lives with us. He thinks a lot more of her than he does of me. NEFF Ever think of a divorce? PHYLLIS He wouldn't give me a divorce. NEFF I suppose because it would cost him money. PHYLLIS He hasn't got any money. Not since he went into the oil business. NEFF But he had when you married him? PHYLLIS Yes, he had. And I wanted a home. Why not? But that wasn't the only reason. I was his wife's nurse. She was sick for a long time. When she died, he was all broken up. I pitied him so. NEFF And now you hate him. PHYLLIS Yes, Walter. He's so mean to me. Every-time I buy a dress or a pair of shoes he yells his head off. He won't let me go anywhere. He keeps me shut up. He's always been mean to me. Even his life insurance all goes to that daughter of his. That Lola. NEFF Nothing for you at all, huh? PHYLLIS No. And nothing is just what I'm worth to him. NEFF So you lie awake in the dark and listen to him snore and get ideas. PHYLLIS Walter, I don't want to kill him. I never did. Not even when he gets drunk and slaps my face. NEFF Only sometimes you wish he was dead. PHYLLIS Perhaps I do. NEFF And you wish it was an accident, and you had that policy. For fifty thousand dollars. Is that it? PHYLLIS Perhaps that too. She takes a long drink. PHYLLIS The other night we drove home from a party. He was drunk again. When we got into the garage he just sat there with his head on the steering wheel and the motor still running. And I thought what it would be like if I didn't switch it off, just closed the garage door and left him there. NEFF I'll tell you what it would be like, if you had that accident policy, and tried to pull a monoxide job. We have a guy in our office named Keyes. For him a set-up like that would be just like a slice of rare roast beef. In three minutes he'd know it wasn't an accident. In ten minutes you'd be sitting under the hot lights. In half an hour you'd be signing your name to a confession. PHYLLIS But Walter, I didn't do it. I'm not going to do it. NEFF Not if there's an insurance company in the picture, baby. So long as you're honest they'll pay you with a smile, but you just try to pull something like that and you'll find out. They know more tricks than a carload of monkeys. And if there's a death mixed up in it, you haven't got a prayer. They'll hang you as sure as ten dimes will buy a dollar, baby. She begins to cry. He puts his arms around her and kisses her. NEFF Just stop thinking about it, will you. He holds her tight. Their heads touch, side by side, THE CAMERA SLOWLY STARTS TO RECEDE as we DISSOLVE TO: A-47 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits in the swivel chair, talking into the dictaphone. He has hooked the wastebasket under his feet to sit more comfortably. As he talks, a little cough shakes him now and then. NEFF So we just sat there, and she kept on crying softly, like the rain on the window, and we didn't say anything. Maybe she had stopped thinking about it, but I hadn't. I couldn't. Because it all tied up with something I had been thinking about for years, since long before I ever ran into Phyllis Dietrichson. Because, in this business you can't sleep for trying to figure out the tricks they could pull on you. You're like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don't crook the house. And then one night, you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself. And do it smart. Because you've got that wheel right under your hands. And you know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out in front, a shill to put down the bet. And suddenly the doorbell rings and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you... Look, Keyes, I'm not trying to whitewash myself. I fought it, only maybe I didn't fight it hard enough. The stakes were fifty thousand dollars, but they were the life of a man, too, a man who'd never done me any dirt. Except he was married to a woman he didn't care anything about, and I did... DISSOLVE TO: A-48 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT LIVING ROOM CAMERA MOVES SLOWLY towards the davenport again. Neff sits in one corner with his feet on the low table. He is smoking his cigarette and staring at the ceiling. Phyllis has been sitting fairly close to him. She gets up slowly and crosses to her rain coat, lying over a chair. PHYLLIS I've got to go now, Walter. Neff does not answer. He keeps on staring at the ceiling. She starts to put the rain coat on. PHYLLIS Will you call me, Walter? Neff still does not answer. PHYLLIS Walter! He looks at her slowly, almost absently. PHYLLIS I hate him. I loathe going back to him. You believe me, don't you, Walter? NEFF Sure I believe you. PHYLLIS I can't stand it anymore. What if they did hang me? NEFF You're not going to hang, baby. PHYLLIS It's better than going on this way. NEFF -- you're not going to hang, baby. Not ever. Because you're going to do it the smart way. Because I'm going to help you. PHYLLIS You! NEFF Me. PHYLLIS Do you know what you're saying? NEFF Sure I know what I'm saying. He gets up and grips her arm. NEFF We're going to do it together. We're going to do it right. And I'm the guy that knows how. There is fierce determination in his voice. His fingers dig into her arm. PHYLLIS Walter, you're hurting me. NEFF There isn't going to be any slip up. Nothing sloppy. Nothing weak. It's got to be perfect. He kisses her. NEFF You go now. He leads her towards the door. NEFF Call me tomorrow. But not from your house. From a booth. And watch your step. Every single minute. It's got to be perfect, understand. Straight down the line. They have now reached the door. Neff opens it. Phyllis stands in the doorway, her lips white. PHYLLIS Straight down the line. She goes quietly. He watches her down the corridor. Slowly he closes the door and goes back into the room. He moves across the window and opens it wide. He stands there, looking down into the dark street. From below comes the sound of a car starting and driving off. The rain drifts in against his face. He just stands there motionless. His mind is going a hundred miles a minute. FADE OUT: END OF SEQUENCE "A" SEQUENCE "B" FADE IN: B-1 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits slumped in his chair before the dictaphone. On the desk next to him stands a used record. The cylinder on the dictaphone is not turning. He is smoking a cigarette. He kills it then lifts the needle and slides off the record which is on the machine and stands it on end on the desk beside the other used record. He reaches down painfully to take another record from the rack beneath the dictaphone, looks at it against the light to make sure it has not been used, then slides it into place on the machine and resets the needle. He lifts the horn and resumes his dictation. NEFF The first thing we had to do was fix him up with that accident policy. I knew he wouldn't buy, but all I wanted was his signature on an application. So I had to make him sign without his knowing what he was signing. And I wanted a witness other than Phyllis to hear me give him a sales talk. I was trying to think with your brains, Keyes. I wanted all the answers ready for all the questions you were going to spring as soon as Dietrichson was dead. Neff takes a last drag on his cigarette and kills it by running it under the ledge of the dictaphone stand. He drops the stub on the floor and resumes. NEFF A couple of nights later I went to the house. Everything looked fine, except I didn't like the witness Phyllis had brought in. It was Dietrichson's daughter Lola, and it made me feel a little queer in the belly to have her right there in the room, playing Chinese checkers, as if nothing was going to happen. DISSOLVE: B-2 A BOARD OF CHINESE CHECKERS CAMERA WITHDRAWS AND GRADUALLY REVEALS THE DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM - NIGHT The checker-board is on the davenport between Phyllis and Lola. Mr. Dietrichson sits in a big easy chair. His coat and tie are over the back of the chair, and the evening paper is lying tumbled on the floor beside him. He is smoking a cigar with the band on it. He has a drink in front of him and several more inside him. In another chair sits Neff, his briefcase on the floor, leaning against his chair. He holds his rate book partly open, with a finger in it for a marker. He is going full swing. NEFF I suppose you realize, Mr. Dietrichson, that, not being an employee, you are not covered by the State Compensation Insurance Act. The only way you can protect yourself is by having a personal policy of your own. DIETRICHSON I know all about that. The next thing you'll tell me I need earthquake insurance and lightning insurance and hail insurance. Phyllis looks up from the checker-board and cuts in on the dialogue. Lola listens without much interest. PHYLLIS (To Dietrichson) If we bought all the insurance they can think up, we'd stay broke paying for it, wouldn't we, honey? DIETRICHSON What keeps us broke is you going out and buying five hats at a crack. Who needs a hat in California? NEFF I always say insurance is a lot like a hot water bottle. It looks kind of useless and silly hanging on the hook, but when you get that stomach ache in the middle of the night, it comes in mighty handy. DIETRICHSON Now you want to sell me a hot water bottle. NEFF Dollar for dollar, accident insurance is the cheapest coverage you can buy, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Maybe some other time, Mr. Neff. I had a tough day. NEFF Just as you say, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Suppose we just settle that automobile insurance tonight. NEFF Sure. All we need on that is for you to sign an application for renewal. Phyllis throws a quick glance at Neff. As she looks back she sees that Lola is staring down at her wrist watch. LOLA Phyllis, do you mind if we don't finish this game? It bores me stiff. PHYLLIS Got some thing better to do? LOLA Yes, I have. She gets up. LOLA (To Dietrichson) Father, is it all right if I run along now? DIETRICHSON Run along where? Who with? LOLA Just Anne. We're going roller skating. DIETRICHSON Anne who? LOLA Anne Matthews. PHYLLIS It's not that Nino Zachetti again? DIETRICHSON It better not be that Zachetti guy. If I ever catch you with that --- LOLA It's Anne Matthews, I told you. I also told you we're going roller skating. I'm meeting her at the corner of Vermont and Franklin -- the north- west corner, in case you're interested. And I'm late already. I hope that is all clear. Good night, Father. Good night, Phyllis. She starts to go. NEFF Good night, Miss Dietrichson. LOLA Oh, I'm sorry. Good night, Mr. -- NEFF Neff. LOLA Good night, Mr. Neff. PHYLLIS Now you're not going to take my car again. LOLA No thanks. I'd rather be dead. She goes out through the archway. DIETRICHSON A great little fighter for her weight. Dietrichson sucks down a big swallow of his drink. Neff has taken two blank forms from his briefcase. He puts the briefcase on Mr. Dietrichson's lap and lays the forms on top. Phyllis is watching closely. NEFF This is where you sign, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Sign what? NEFF The applications for your auto renewals. So you'll be protected until the new policies are issued. DIETRICHSON When will that be? NEFF In about a week. DIETRICHSON Just so I'm covered when I drive up North. Neff takes out his fountain pen. NEFF San Francisco, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Palo Alto. PHYLLIS He was a Stanford man, Mr. Neff. And he still goes to his class reunion every year. DIETRICHSON What's wrong with that? Can't I have a little fun even once a year? NEFF Great football school, Stanford. Did you play football, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Left guard. Almost made the varsity, too. Neff has unscrewed his fountain pen. He hands it to Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson puts on his glasses. NEFF On that bottom line, Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson signs. Neff's and Phyllis' eyes meet for a split second. NEFF

aussi

How many times the word 'aussi' appears in the text?

you, Walter. Get out of here before I throw my desk at you. NEFF I love you, too. He walks out, still grinning. A-35 EXT. OFFICES - TWELFTH FLOOR Neff comes out of Keys' office and walks back along the balcony. Activity of secretaries going in and out of doors, etc. Neff enters his own office. NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) I really did, too, you old crab, always yelling your fat head off, always sore at everyone. But behind the cigar ashes on your vest I kind of knew you had a heart as big as a house... Back in my office there was a phone message from Mrs. Dietrichson about the renewals. She didn't want me to come tomorrow evening. She wanted me to come Thursday afternoon at three-thirty instead. I had a lot of stuff lined up for that Thursday afternoon, including a trip down to Santa Monica to see a couple of live prospects about some group insurance. But I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson and the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg. A-36 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE Anderson, a salesman, sits at one of the desks, filling out a report. Neff enters, goes to his own desk. He looks down at some mail. On top there is a typewritten note. He reads it, sits down and leafs through his desk calendar. A-37 INSERT - CLOSEUP - CALENDAR PAGE Showing date: THURSDAY 23 May and five or six appointments penciled in tightly on the page. DISSOLVE TO: A-38 DIETRICHSON HOME - ENTRANCE HALL - (DAY) THE CAMERA PANS with Phyllis Dietrichson's feet and ankles as she comes down the stairs, her high heels clicking on the tiles. The anklet glistens on her leg as she moves. THE CAMERA PANS ON. Phyllis has reached the entrance hall, and as she walks toward the front door her whole body becomes visible. She wears a gay print dress with a wide sash over her hips. She opens the door. Outside is Neff, wearing a sport coat, flannel slacks. He takes his hat off. PHYLLIS Hello, Mr. Neff. He stands there with a little smile. PHYLLIS Aren't you coming in? NEFF I'm considering it. He comes in. PHYLLIS I hope you didn't mind my changing the appointment. Last night wasn't so convenient. NEFF That's okay. I was working on my stamp collection. She leads him toward living room. A-39 DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff come through archway. She heads toward a low tea table which stands in front of the davenport, with tall glasses, ice cubes, lemon, a pot of tea, etc. PHYLLIS I was just fixing some iced tea. Would you like a glass? NEFF Unless you have a bottle of beer that's not working. PHYLLIS There might be some. I never know what's in the ice box. (Calls) Nettie!... She pours herself a glass of tea. PHYLLIS About those renewals, Mr. Neff. I talked to my husband about it. NEFF You did? PHYLLIS Yes. He'll renew with you he told me. In fact, I thought he'd be here this afternoon. NEFF But he's not? PHYLLIS No. NEFF That's terrible. PHYLLIS (Calls again, impatiently) Nettie!... Nettie!... Oh, I forgot, it's the maid's day off. NEFF Don't bother, Mrs. Dietrichson. I'd like some iced tea very much. PHYLLIS Lemon? Sugar? NEFF Fix it your way. She fixes him a glass of tea while he is looking around. He slowly sits down. NEFF Seeing it's the maid's day off maybe there's something I can do for you. She hands him the tea. NEFF Like running the vacuum cleaner. PHYLLIS Fresh. NEFF I used to peddle vacuum cleaners. Not much money but you learn a lot about life. PHYLLIS I didn't think you'd learned it from a correspondence course. NEFF Where did you pick up this tea drinking? You're not English, are you? PHYLLIS No. Californian. Born right here in Los Angeles. NEFF They say native Californians all come from Iowa. PHYLLIS I wanted to ask you something, Mr. Neff. NEFF Make it Walter. PHYLLIS Walter. NEFF Right. PHYLLIS Tell me, Walter, on this insurance -- how much commission do you make? NEFF Twenty percent. Why? PHYLLIS I thought maybe I could throw a little more business your way. NEFF I can always use it. PHYLLIS I was thinking about my husband. I worry a lot about him, down in those oil fields. It's very dangerous. NEFF Not for an executive, is it? PHYLLIS He doesn't just sit behind a desk. He's right down there with the drilling crews. It's got me worried sick. NEFF You mean a crown block might fall on him some rainy night? PHYLLIS Please don't talk like that. NEFF But that's the idea. PHYLLIS The other day a casing line snapped and caught the foreman. He's in the hospital with a broken back. NEFF Bad. PHYLLIS It's got me jittery just thinking about it. Suppose something like that happened to my husband? NEFF It could. PHYLLIS Don't you think he ought to have accident insurance? NEFF Uh huh. PHYLLIS What kind of insurance could he have? NEFF Enough to cover doctors' and hospital bills. Say a hundred and twenty-five a week cash benefit. And he'd rate around fifty thousand capital sum. PHYLLIS Capital sum? What's that? NEFF That's if he got killed. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. PHYLLIS I suppose you have to think of everything in your business. NEFF Mr. Dietrichson would understand. I'm sure I could sell him on the idea of some accident protection. Why don't I talk to him about it. PHYLLIS You could try. But he's pretty tough going. NEFF They're all tough at first. PHYLLIS He's got a lot on his mind. He doesn't want to listen to anything except maybe a baseball game on the radio. Sometimes we sit all evening without saying a word to each other. NEFF Sounds pretty dull. Phyllis shrugs. PHYLLIS So I just sit and knit. NEFF Is that what you married him for? PHYLLIS Maybe I like the way his thumbs hold up the wool. NEFF Anytime his thumbs get tired -- PHYLLIS I want to ask you something, Mr. Neff. Could I get an accident policy for him -- without bothering him at all? NEFF How's that again. PHYLLIS That would make it easier for you, too. You wouldn't even have to talk to him. I have a little allowance of my own. I could pay for it and he needn't know anything about it. NEFF Wait a minute. Why shouldn't he know? PHYLLIS Because I know he doesn't want accident insurance. He's superstitious about it. NEFF A lot of people are. Funny, isn't it? PHYLLIS If there was a way to get it like that, all the worry would be over. You see what I mean, Walter? NEFF Sure. I've got good eyesight. You want him to have the policy without him knowing it. And that means without the insurance company knowing that he doesn't know. That's the set-up, isn't it? PHYLLIS Is there anything wrong with it? NEFF I think it's lovely. And then, some dark wet night, if that crown block fell on him -- PHYLLIS What crown block? NEFF Only sometimes they have to have a little help. They can't quite make it on their own. PHYLLIS I don't know what you're talking about. NEFF Of course, it doesn't have to be a crown block. It can be a car backing over him, or he can fall out of an upstairs window. Any little thing like that, as long as it's a morgue job. PHYLLIS Are you crazy? NEFF Not that crazy. Goodbye, Mrs. Dietrichson. He picks up his hat. PHYLLIS What's the matter? NEFF Look, baby, you can't get away with it. PHYLLIS Get away with what? NEFF You want to knock him off, don't you, baby. PHYLLIS That's a horrible thing to say! NEFF Who'd you think I was, anyway? A guy that walks into a good-looking dame's front parlor and says "Good afternoon, I sell accident insurance on husbands. You got one that's been around too long? Somebody you'd like to turn into a little hard cash? Just give me a smile and I'll help you collect." Boy, what a dope I must look to you! PHYLLIS I think you're rotten. NEFF I think you're swell. So long as I'm not your husband. PHYLLIS Get out of here. NEFF You bet I will. You bet I'll get out of here, baby. But quick. He goes out. She looks after him. A-40 EXT. DIETRICHSON HOME - (DAY) Neff bangs the front door shut, walks quickly to his car and drives away. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) So I let her have it, straight between the eyes. She didn't fool me for a minute, not this time. I knew I had hold of a redhot poker and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off. I stopped at a drive-in for a bottle of beer, the one I had wanted all along, only I wanted it worse now, to get rid of the sour taste of her iced tea, and everything that went with it. I didn't want to go back to the office, so I dropped by a bowling alley at Third and Western and rolled a few lines to get my mind thinking about something else for a while. A-41 DRIVE-IN RESTAURANT - (DAY) Shooting past Neff sitting behind the wheel of his car The car hop hangs a tray on the door and serves him a bottle of beer. DISSOLVE TO: A-42 INT. BOWLING ALLEY Neff bowling. He rolls the ball with an effort at concentration, but his mind is not really on the game. DISSOLVE TO: A-43 EXT. APARTMENT HOUSE - (DUSK) It is late afternoon. The apartment house is called the LOS OLIVOS APARTMENTS. It is a six-story building in the Normandie- Wilshire district, with a basement garage. THE CAMERA PANS UP the front of the building to the top floor windows, as a little rain starts to fall. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) I didn't feel like eating dinner when I left, and I didn't feel like a show, so I drove home, put the car away and went up to my apartment. A-44 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT - LIVING ROOM - (DUSK) It is a double apartment of conventional design, with kitchen, dinette, and bathroom, squarecut overstuffed borax furniture. Gas logs are lit in the imitation fireplace. Neff stands by the window with his coat off and his tie loose. Raindrops strike against the glass. He turns away impatiently, paces up and down past a caddy bag with golf clubs in it, pulls one out at random, makes a couple of short swings, throws the club on the couch, paces again. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) It had begun to rain outside and I watched it get dark and didn't even turn on the light. That didn't help me either. I was all twisted up inside, and I was still holding on to that red-hot poker. And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all, that the hook was too strong, that this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning. The doorbell rings. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) So at eight o'clock the bell would ring and I would know who it was without even having to think, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Neff goes to the door and opens it. PHYLLIS Hello. Neff just looks at her. PHYLLIS You forgot your hat this afternoon. She has nothing in her hands but her bag. NEFF Did I? He looks down at her hands. PHYLLIS Don't you want me to bring it in? NEFF Sure. Put it on the chair. She comes in. He closes the door. NEFF How did you know where I live? PHYLLIS It's in the phone book. Neff switches on the standing lamp. PHYLLIS It's raining. NEFF So it is. Peel off your coat and sit down. She starts to take off her coat. NEFF Your husband out? PHYLLIS Long Beach. They're spudding in a new well. He phoned he'd be late. About nine-thirty. He takes her coat and lays it across the back of a chair. PHYLLIS It's about time you said you're glad to see me. NEFF I knew you wouldn't leave it like that. PHYLLIS Like what? NEFF Like it was this afternoon. PHYLLIS I must have said something that gave you a terribly wrong impression. You must surely see that. You must never think anything like that about me, Walter. NEFF Okay. PHYLLIS It's not okay. Not if you don't believe me. NEFF What do you want me to do? PHYLLIS I want you to be nice to me. Like the first time you came to the house. NEFF It can't be like the first time. Something has happened. PHYLLIS I know it has. It's happened to us. NEFF That's what I mean. Phyllis has moved over to the window. She stares out through the wet window-pane. NEFF What's the matter now? PHYLLIS I feel as if he was watching me. Not that he cares about me. Not any more. But he keeps me on a leash. So tight I can't breathe. I'm scared. NEFF What of? He's in Long Beach, isn't he? PHYLLIS I oughtn't to have come. NEFF Maybe you oughtn't. PHYLLIS You want me to go? NEFF If you want to. PHYLLIS Right now? NEFF Sure. Right now. By this time, he has hold of her wrist. He draws her to him slowly and kisses her. Her arms tighten around him. After a moment he pulls his head back, still holding her close. NEFF How were you going to do it? PHYLLIS Do what? NEFF Kill him. PHYLLIS Walter, for the last time -- She tries to jerk away but he holds her and kisses her again. NEFF I'm crazy about you, baby. PHYLLIS I'm crazy about you, Walter. NEFF That perfume on your hair. What's the name of it? PHYLLIS Something French. I bought it down at Ensenada. NEFF We ought to have some of that pink wine to go with it. The kind that bubbles. But all I have is bourbon. PHYLLIS Bourbon is fine, Walter. He lets her go and moves toward the dinette. A-45 THE DINETTE AND KITCHEN It contains a small table and some chairs. A low glass-and- china cabinet is built between the dinette and kitchen, leaving a space like a doorway. The kitchen is the usual apartment house kitchen, with stove, ice-box, sink, etc. It is quite small. Neff goes to the ice-box and Phyllis drifts in after him. NEFF Soda? PHYLLIS Plain water, please. NEFF Get a couple of glasses, will you. He points at the china closet. He has taken a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator and is holding it under the hot- water faucet. NEFF You know, about six months ago a guy slipped on the soap in his bathtub and knocked himself cold and drowned. Only he had accident insurance. So they had an autopsy and she didn't get away with it. Phyllis has the glasses now. She hands them to him. He dumps some ice cubes into the glasses. PHYLLIS Who didn't? NEFF His wife. He reaches for the whiskey bottle on top of the china closet. NEFF And there was another case where a guy was found shot and his wife said he was cleaning a gun and his stomach got in the way. All she collected was a three-to-ten stretch in Tehachapi. PHYLLIS Perhaps it was worth it to her. Neff hands her a glass. NEFF See if you can carry this as far as the living room. They move back toward the living room. A-46 LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff go toward the davenport. She is sipping her drink and looking around. PHYLLIS It's nice here, Walter. Who takes care of it for you? NEFF A colored woman comes in twice a week. PHYLLIS You get your own breakfast? NEFF Once in a while I squeeze a grapefruit. The rest I get at the corner drugstore. They sit on the davenport, fairly close together. PHYLLIS It sounds wonderful. Just strangers beside you. You don't know them. You don't hate them. You don't have to sit across the table and smile at him and that daughter of his every morning of your life. NEFF What daughter? Oh, that little girl on the piano. PHYLLIS Yes. Lola. She lives with us. He thinks a lot more of her than he does of me. NEFF Ever think of a divorce? PHYLLIS He wouldn't give me a divorce. NEFF I suppose because it would cost him money. PHYLLIS He hasn't got any money. Not since he went into the oil business. NEFF But he had when you married him? PHYLLIS Yes, he had. And I wanted a home. Why not? But that wasn't the only reason. I was his wife's nurse. She was sick for a long time. When she died, he was all broken up. I pitied him so. NEFF And now you hate him. PHYLLIS Yes, Walter. He's so mean to me. Every-time I buy a dress or a pair of shoes he yells his head off. He won't let me go anywhere. He keeps me shut up. He's always been mean to me. Even his life insurance all goes to that daughter of his. That Lola. NEFF Nothing for you at all, huh? PHYLLIS No. And nothing is just what I'm worth to him. NEFF So you lie awake in the dark and listen to him snore and get ideas. PHYLLIS Walter, I don't want to kill him. I never did. Not even when he gets drunk and slaps my face. NEFF Only sometimes you wish he was dead. PHYLLIS Perhaps I do. NEFF And you wish it was an accident, and you had that policy. For fifty thousand dollars. Is that it? PHYLLIS Perhaps that too. She takes a long drink. PHYLLIS The other night we drove home from a party. He was drunk again. When we got into the garage he just sat there with his head on the steering wheel and the motor still running. And I thought what it would be like if I didn't switch it off, just closed the garage door and left him there. NEFF I'll tell you what it would be like, if you had that accident policy, and tried to pull a monoxide job. We have a guy in our office named Keyes. For him a set-up like that would be just like a slice of rare roast beef. In three minutes he'd know it wasn't an accident. In ten minutes you'd be sitting under the hot lights. In half an hour you'd be signing your name to a confession. PHYLLIS But Walter, I didn't do it. I'm not going to do it. NEFF Not if there's an insurance company in the picture, baby. So long as you're honest they'll pay you with a smile, but you just try to pull something like that and you'll find out. They know more tricks than a carload of monkeys. And if there's a death mixed up in it, you haven't got a prayer. They'll hang you as sure as ten dimes will buy a dollar, baby. She begins to cry. He puts his arms around her and kisses her. NEFF Just stop thinking about it, will you. He holds her tight. Their heads touch, side by side, THE CAMERA SLOWLY STARTS TO RECEDE as we DISSOLVE TO: A-47 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits in the swivel chair, talking into the dictaphone. He has hooked the wastebasket under his feet to sit more comfortably. As he talks, a little cough shakes him now and then. NEFF So we just sat there, and she kept on crying softly, like the rain on the window, and we didn't say anything. Maybe she had stopped thinking about it, but I hadn't. I couldn't. Because it all tied up with something I had been thinking about for years, since long before I ever ran into Phyllis Dietrichson. Because, in this business you can't sleep for trying to figure out the tricks they could pull on you. You're like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don't crook the house. And then one night, you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself. And do it smart. Because you've got that wheel right under your hands. And you know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out in front, a shill to put down the bet. And suddenly the doorbell rings and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you... Look, Keyes, I'm not trying to whitewash myself. I fought it, only maybe I didn't fight it hard enough. The stakes were fifty thousand dollars, but they were the life of a man, too, a man who'd never done me any dirt. Except he was married to a woman he didn't care anything about, and I did... DISSOLVE TO: A-48 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT LIVING ROOM CAMERA MOVES SLOWLY towards the davenport again. Neff sits in one corner with his feet on the low table. He is smoking his cigarette and staring at the ceiling. Phyllis has been sitting fairly close to him. She gets up slowly and crosses to her rain coat, lying over a chair. PHYLLIS I've got to go now, Walter. Neff does not answer. He keeps on staring at the ceiling. She starts to put the rain coat on. PHYLLIS Will you call me, Walter? Neff still does not answer. PHYLLIS Walter! He looks at her slowly, almost absently. PHYLLIS I hate him. I loathe going back to him. You believe me, don't you, Walter? NEFF Sure I believe you. PHYLLIS I can't stand it anymore. What if they did hang me? NEFF You're not going to hang, baby. PHYLLIS It's better than going on this way. NEFF -- you're not going to hang, baby. Not ever. Because you're going to do it the smart way. Because I'm going to help you. PHYLLIS You! NEFF Me. PHYLLIS Do you know what you're saying? NEFF Sure I know what I'm saying. He gets up and grips her arm. NEFF We're going to do it together. We're going to do it right. And I'm the guy that knows how. There is fierce determination in his voice. His fingers dig into her arm. PHYLLIS Walter, you're hurting me. NEFF There isn't going to be any slip up. Nothing sloppy. Nothing weak. It's got to be perfect. He kisses her. NEFF You go now. He leads her towards the door. NEFF Call me tomorrow. But not from your house. From a booth. And watch your step. Every single minute. It's got to be perfect, understand. Straight down the line. They have now reached the door. Neff opens it. Phyllis stands in the doorway, her lips white. PHYLLIS Straight down the line. She goes quietly. He watches her down the corridor. Slowly he closes the door and goes back into the room. He moves across the window and opens it wide. He stands there, looking down into the dark street. From below comes the sound of a car starting and driving off. The rain drifts in against his face. He just stands there motionless. His mind is going a hundred miles a minute. FADE OUT: END OF SEQUENCE "A" SEQUENCE "B" FADE IN: B-1 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits slumped in his chair before the dictaphone. On the desk next to him stands a used record. The cylinder on the dictaphone is not turning. He is smoking a cigarette. He kills it then lifts the needle and slides off the record which is on the machine and stands it on end on the desk beside the other used record. He reaches down painfully to take another record from the rack beneath the dictaphone, looks at it against the light to make sure it has not been used, then slides it into place on the machine and resets the needle. He lifts the horn and resumes his dictation. NEFF The first thing we had to do was fix him up with that accident policy. I knew he wouldn't buy, but all I wanted was his signature on an application. So I had to make him sign without his knowing what he was signing. And I wanted a witness other than Phyllis to hear me give him a sales talk. I was trying to think with your brains, Keyes. I wanted all the answers ready for all the questions you were going to spring as soon as Dietrichson was dead. Neff takes a last drag on his cigarette and kills it by running it under the ledge of the dictaphone stand. He drops the stub on the floor and resumes. NEFF A couple of nights later I went to the house. Everything looked fine, except I didn't like the witness Phyllis had brought in. It was Dietrichson's daughter Lola, and it made me feel a little queer in the belly to have her right there in the room, playing Chinese checkers, as if nothing was going to happen. DISSOLVE: B-2 A BOARD OF CHINESE CHECKERS CAMERA WITHDRAWS AND GRADUALLY REVEALS THE DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM - NIGHT The checker-board is on the davenport between Phyllis and Lola. Mr. Dietrichson sits in a big easy chair. His coat and tie are over the back of the chair, and the evening paper is lying tumbled on the floor beside him. He is smoking a cigar with the band on it. He has a drink in front of him and several more inside him. In another chair sits Neff, his briefcase on the floor, leaning against his chair. He holds his rate book partly open, with a finger in it for a marker. He is going full swing. NEFF I suppose you realize, Mr. Dietrichson, that, not being an employee, you are not covered by the State Compensation Insurance Act. The only way you can protect yourself is by having a personal policy of your own. DIETRICHSON I know all about that. The next thing you'll tell me I need earthquake insurance and lightning insurance and hail insurance. Phyllis looks up from the checker-board and cuts in on the dialogue. Lola listens without much interest. PHYLLIS (To Dietrichson) If we bought all the insurance they can think up, we'd stay broke paying for it, wouldn't we, honey? DIETRICHSON What keeps us broke is you going out and buying five hats at a crack. Who needs a hat in California? NEFF I always say insurance is a lot like a hot water bottle. It looks kind of useless and silly hanging on the hook, but when you get that stomach ache in the middle of the night, it comes in mighty handy. DIETRICHSON Now you want to sell me a hot water bottle. NEFF Dollar for dollar, accident insurance is the cheapest coverage you can buy, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Maybe some other time, Mr. Neff. I had a tough day. NEFF Just as you say, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Suppose we just settle that automobile insurance tonight. NEFF Sure. All we need on that is for you to sign an application for renewal. Phyllis throws a quick glance at Neff. As she looks back she sees that Lola is staring down at her wrist watch. LOLA Phyllis, do you mind if we don't finish this game? It bores me stiff. PHYLLIS Got some thing better to do? LOLA Yes, I have. She gets up. LOLA (To Dietrichson) Father, is it all right if I run along now? DIETRICHSON Run along where? Who with? LOLA Just Anne. We're going roller skating. DIETRICHSON Anne who? LOLA Anne Matthews. PHYLLIS It's not that Nino Zachetti again? DIETRICHSON It better not be that Zachetti guy. If I ever catch you with that --- LOLA It's Anne Matthews, I told you. I also told you we're going roller skating. I'm meeting her at the corner of Vermont and Franklin -- the north- west corner, in case you're interested. And I'm late already. I hope that is all clear. Good night, Father. Good night, Phyllis. She starts to go. NEFF Good night, Miss Dietrichson. LOLA Oh, I'm sorry. Good night, Mr. -- NEFF Neff. LOLA Good night, Mr. Neff. PHYLLIS Now you're not going to take my car again. LOLA No thanks. I'd rather be dead. She goes out through the archway. DIETRICHSON A great little fighter for her weight. Dietrichson sucks down a big swallow of his drink. Neff has taken two blank forms from his briefcase. He puts the briefcase on Mr. Dietrichson's lap and lays the forms on top. Phyllis is watching closely. NEFF This is where you sign, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Sign what? NEFF The applications for your auto renewals. So you'll be protected until the new policies are issued. DIETRICHSON When will that be? NEFF In about a week. DIETRICHSON Just so I'm covered when I drive up North. Neff takes out his fountain pen. NEFF San Francisco, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Palo Alto. PHYLLIS He was a Stanford man, Mr. Neff. And he still goes to his class reunion every year. DIETRICHSON What's wrong with that? Can't I have a little fun even once a year? NEFF Great football school, Stanford. Did you play football, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Left guard. Almost made the varsity, too. Neff has unscrewed his fountain pen. He hands it to Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson puts on his glasses. NEFF On that bottom line, Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson signs. Neff's and Phyllis' eyes meet for a split second. NEFF

monica

How many times the word 'monica' appears in the text?

you, Walter. Get out of here before I throw my desk at you. NEFF I love you, too. He walks out, still grinning. A-35 EXT. OFFICES - TWELFTH FLOOR Neff comes out of Keys' office and walks back along the balcony. Activity of secretaries going in and out of doors, etc. Neff enters his own office. NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) I really did, too, you old crab, always yelling your fat head off, always sore at everyone. But behind the cigar ashes on your vest I kind of knew you had a heart as big as a house... Back in my office there was a phone message from Mrs. Dietrichson about the renewals. She didn't want me to come tomorrow evening. She wanted me to come Thursday afternoon at three-thirty instead. I had a lot of stuff lined up for that Thursday afternoon, including a trip down to Santa Monica to see a couple of live prospects about some group insurance. But I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson and the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg. A-36 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE Anderson, a salesman, sits at one of the desks, filling out a report. Neff enters, goes to his own desk. He looks down at some mail. On top there is a typewritten note. He reads it, sits down and leafs through his desk calendar. A-37 INSERT - CLOSEUP - CALENDAR PAGE Showing date: THURSDAY 23 May and five or six appointments penciled in tightly on the page. DISSOLVE TO: A-38 DIETRICHSON HOME - ENTRANCE HALL - (DAY) THE CAMERA PANS with Phyllis Dietrichson's feet and ankles as she comes down the stairs, her high heels clicking on the tiles. The anklet glistens on her leg as she moves. THE CAMERA PANS ON. Phyllis has reached the entrance hall, and as she walks toward the front door her whole body becomes visible. She wears a gay print dress with a wide sash over her hips. She opens the door. Outside is Neff, wearing a sport coat, flannel slacks. He takes his hat off. PHYLLIS Hello, Mr. Neff. He stands there with a little smile. PHYLLIS Aren't you coming in? NEFF I'm considering it. He comes in. PHYLLIS I hope you didn't mind my changing the appointment. Last night wasn't so convenient. NEFF That's okay. I was working on my stamp collection. She leads him toward living room. A-39 DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff come through archway. She heads toward a low tea table which stands in front of the davenport, with tall glasses, ice cubes, lemon, a pot of tea, etc. PHYLLIS I was just fixing some iced tea. Would you like a glass? NEFF Unless you have a bottle of beer that's not working. PHYLLIS There might be some. I never know what's in the ice box. (Calls) Nettie!... She pours herself a glass of tea. PHYLLIS About those renewals, Mr. Neff. I talked to my husband about it. NEFF You did? PHYLLIS Yes. He'll renew with you he told me. In fact, I thought he'd be here this afternoon. NEFF But he's not? PHYLLIS No. NEFF That's terrible. PHYLLIS (Calls again, impatiently) Nettie!... Nettie!... Oh, I forgot, it's the maid's day off. NEFF Don't bother, Mrs. Dietrichson. I'd like some iced tea very much. PHYLLIS Lemon? Sugar? NEFF Fix it your way. She fixes him a glass of tea while he is looking around. He slowly sits down. NEFF Seeing it's the maid's day off maybe there's something I can do for you. She hands him the tea. NEFF Like running the vacuum cleaner. PHYLLIS Fresh. NEFF I used to peddle vacuum cleaners. Not much money but you learn a lot about life. PHYLLIS I didn't think you'd learned it from a correspondence course. NEFF Where did you pick up this tea drinking? You're not English, are you? PHYLLIS No. Californian. Born right here in Los Angeles. NEFF They say native Californians all come from Iowa. PHYLLIS I wanted to ask you something, Mr. Neff. NEFF Make it Walter. PHYLLIS Walter. NEFF Right. PHYLLIS Tell me, Walter, on this insurance -- how much commission do you make? NEFF Twenty percent. Why? PHYLLIS I thought maybe I could throw a little more business your way. NEFF I can always use it. PHYLLIS I was thinking about my husband. I worry a lot about him, down in those oil fields. It's very dangerous. NEFF Not for an executive, is it? PHYLLIS He doesn't just sit behind a desk. He's right down there with the drilling crews. It's got me worried sick. NEFF You mean a crown block might fall on him some rainy night? PHYLLIS Please don't talk like that. NEFF But that's the idea. PHYLLIS The other day a casing line snapped and caught the foreman. He's in the hospital with a broken back. NEFF Bad. PHYLLIS It's got me jittery just thinking about it. Suppose something like that happened to my husband? NEFF It could. PHYLLIS Don't you think he ought to have accident insurance? NEFF Uh huh. PHYLLIS What kind of insurance could he have? NEFF Enough to cover doctors' and hospital bills. Say a hundred and twenty-five a week cash benefit. And he'd rate around fifty thousand capital sum. PHYLLIS Capital sum? What's that? NEFF That's if he got killed. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. PHYLLIS I suppose you have to think of everything in your business. NEFF Mr. Dietrichson would understand. I'm sure I could sell him on the idea of some accident protection. Why don't I talk to him about it. PHYLLIS You could try. But he's pretty tough going. NEFF They're all tough at first. PHYLLIS He's got a lot on his mind. He doesn't want to listen to anything except maybe a baseball game on the radio. Sometimes we sit all evening without saying a word to each other. NEFF Sounds pretty dull. Phyllis shrugs. PHYLLIS So I just sit and knit. NEFF Is that what you married him for? PHYLLIS Maybe I like the way his thumbs hold up the wool. NEFF Anytime his thumbs get tired -- PHYLLIS I want to ask you something, Mr. Neff. Could I get an accident policy for him -- without bothering him at all? NEFF How's that again. PHYLLIS That would make it easier for you, too. You wouldn't even have to talk to him. I have a little allowance of my own. I could pay for it and he needn't know anything about it. NEFF Wait a minute. Why shouldn't he know? PHYLLIS Because I know he doesn't want accident insurance. He's superstitious about it. NEFF A lot of people are. Funny, isn't it? PHYLLIS If there was a way to get it like that, all the worry would be over. You see what I mean, Walter? NEFF Sure. I've got good eyesight. You want him to have the policy without him knowing it. And that means without the insurance company knowing that he doesn't know. That's the set-up, isn't it? PHYLLIS Is there anything wrong with it? NEFF I think it's lovely. And then, some dark wet night, if that crown block fell on him -- PHYLLIS What crown block? NEFF Only sometimes they have to have a little help. They can't quite make it on their own. PHYLLIS I don't know what you're talking about. NEFF Of course, it doesn't have to be a crown block. It can be a car backing over him, or he can fall out of an upstairs window. Any little thing like that, as long as it's a morgue job. PHYLLIS Are you crazy? NEFF Not that crazy. Goodbye, Mrs. Dietrichson. He picks up his hat. PHYLLIS What's the matter? NEFF Look, baby, you can't get away with it. PHYLLIS Get away with what? NEFF You want to knock him off, don't you, baby. PHYLLIS That's a horrible thing to say! NEFF Who'd you think I was, anyway? A guy that walks into a good-looking dame's front parlor and says "Good afternoon, I sell accident insurance on husbands. You got one that's been around too long? Somebody you'd like to turn into a little hard cash? Just give me a smile and I'll help you collect." Boy, what a dope I must look to you! PHYLLIS I think you're rotten. NEFF I think you're swell. So long as I'm not your husband. PHYLLIS Get out of here. NEFF You bet I will. You bet I'll get out of here, baby. But quick. He goes out. She looks after him. A-40 EXT. DIETRICHSON HOME - (DAY) Neff bangs the front door shut, walks quickly to his car and drives away. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) So I let her have it, straight between the eyes. She didn't fool me for a minute, not this time. I knew I had hold of a redhot poker and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off. I stopped at a drive-in for a bottle of beer, the one I had wanted all along, only I wanted it worse now, to get rid of the sour taste of her iced tea, and everything that went with it. I didn't want to go back to the office, so I dropped by a bowling alley at Third and Western and rolled a few lines to get my mind thinking about something else for a while. A-41 DRIVE-IN RESTAURANT - (DAY) Shooting past Neff sitting behind the wheel of his car The car hop hangs a tray on the door and serves him a bottle of beer. DISSOLVE TO: A-42 INT. BOWLING ALLEY Neff bowling. He rolls the ball with an effort at concentration, but his mind is not really on the game. DISSOLVE TO: A-43 EXT. APARTMENT HOUSE - (DUSK) It is late afternoon. The apartment house is called the LOS OLIVOS APARTMENTS. It is a six-story building in the Normandie- Wilshire district, with a basement garage. THE CAMERA PANS UP the front of the building to the top floor windows, as a little rain starts to fall. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) I didn't feel like eating dinner when I left, and I didn't feel like a show, so I drove home, put the car away and went up to my apartment. A-44 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT - LIVING ROOM - (DUSK) It is a double apartment of conventional design, with kitchen, dinette, and bathroom, squarecut overstuffed borax furniture. Gas logs are lit in the imitation fireplace. Neff stands by the window with his coat off and his tie loose. Raindrops strike against the glass. He turns away impatiently, paces up and down past a caddy bag with golf clubs in it, pulls one out at random, makes a couple of short swings, throws the club on the couch, paces again. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) It had begun to rain outside and I watched it get dark and didn't even turn on the light. That didn't help me either. I was all twisted up inside, and I was still holding on to that red-hot poker. And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all, that the hook was too strong, that this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning. The doorbell rings. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) So at eight o'clock the bell would ring and I would know who it was without even having to think, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Neff goes to the door and opens it. PHYLLIS Hello. Neff just looks at her. PHYLLIS You forgot your hat this afternoon. She has nothing in her hands but her bag. NEFF Did I? He looks down at her hands. PHYLLIS Don't you want me to bring it in? NEFF Sure. Put it on the chair. She comes in. He closes the door. NEFF How did you know where I live? PHYLLIS It's in the phone book. Neff switches on the standing lamp. PHYLLIS It's raining. NEFF So it is. Peel off your coat and sit down. She starts to take off her coat. NEFF Your husband out? PHYLLIS Long Beach. They're spudding in a new well. He phoned he'd be late. About nine-thirty. He takes her coat and lays it across the back of a chair. PHYLLIS It's about time you said you're glad to see me. NEFF I knew you wouldn't leave it like that. PHYLLIS Like what? NEFF Like it was this afternoon. PHYLLIS I must have said something that gave you a terribly wrong impression. You must surely see that. You must never think anything like that about me, Walter. NEFF Okay. PHYLLIS It's not okay. Not if you don't believe me. NEFF What do you want me to do? PHYLLIS I want you to be nice to me. Like the first time you came to the house. NEFF It can't be like the first time. Something has happened. PHYLLIS I know it has. It's happened to us. NEFF That's what I mean. Phyllis has moved over to the window. She stares out through the wet window-pane. NEFF What's the matter now? PHYLLIS I feel as if he was watching me. Not that he cares about me. Not any more. But he keeps me on a leash. So tight I can't breathe. I'm scared. NEFF What of? He's in Long Beach, isn't he? PHYLLIS I oughtn't to have come. NEFF Maybe you oughtn't. PHYLLIS You want me to go? NEFF If you want to. PHYLLIS Right now? NEFF Sure. Right now. By this time, he has hold of her wrist. He draws her to him slowly and kisses her. Her arms tighten around him. After a moment he pulls his head back, still holding her close. NEFF How were you going to do it? PHYLLIS Do what? NEFF Kill him. PHYLLIS Walter, for the last time -- She tries to jerk away but he holds her and kisses her again. NEFF I'm crazy about you, baby. PHYLLIS I'm crazy about you, Walter. NEFF That perfume on your hair. What's the name of it? PHYLLIS Something French. I bought it down at Ensenada. NEFF We ought to have some of that pink wine to go with it. The kind that bubbles. But all I have is bourbon. PHYLLIS Bourbon is fine, Walter. He lets her go and moves toward the dinette. A-45 THE DINETTE AND KITCHEN It contains a small table and some chairs. A low glass-and- china cabinet is built between the dinette and kitchen, leaving a space like a doorway. The kitchen is the usual apartment house kitchen, with stove, ice-box, sink, etc. It is quite small. Neff goes to the ice-box and Phyllis drifts in after him. NEFF Soda? PHYLLIS Plain water, please. NEFF Get a couple of glasses, will you. He points at the china closet. He has taken a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator and is holding it under the hot- water faucet. NEFF You know, about six months ago a guy slipped on the soap in his bathtub and knocked himself cold and drowned. Only he had accident insurance. So they had an autopsy and she didn't get away with it. Phyllis has the glasses now. She hands them to him. He dumps some ice cubes into the glasses. PHYLLIS Who didn't? NEFF His wife. He reaches for the whiskey bottle on top of the china closet. NEFF And there was another case where a guy was found shot and his wife said he was cleaning a gun and his stomach got in the way. All she collected was a three-to-ten stretch in Tehachapi. PHYLLIS Perhaps it was worth it to her. Neff hands her a glass. NEFF See if you can carry this as far as the living room. They move back toward the living room. A-46 LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff go toward the davenport. She is sipping her drink and looking around. PHYLLIS It's nice here, Walter. Who takes care of it for you? NEFF A colored woman comes in twice a week. PHYLLIS You get your own breakfast? NEFF Once in a while I squeeze a grapefruit. The rest I get at the corner drugstore. They sit on the davenport, fairly close together. PHYLLIS It sounds wonderful. Just strangers beside you. You don't know them. You don't hate them. You don't have to sit across the table and smile at him and that daughter of his every morning of your life. NEFF What daughter? Oh, that little girl on the piano. PHYLLIS Yes. Lola. She lives with us. He thinks a lot more of her than he does of me. NEFF Ever think of a divorce? PHYLLIS He wouldn't give me a divorce. NEFF I suppose because it would cost him money. PHYLLIS He hasn't got any money. Not since he went into the oil business. NEFF But he had when you married him? PHYLLIS Yes, he had. And I wanted a home. Why not? But that wasn't the only reason. I was his wife's nurse. She was sick for a long time. When she died, he was all broken up. I pitied him so. NEFF And now you hate him. PHYLLIS Yes, Walter. He's so mean to me. Every-time I buy a dress or a pair of shoes he yells his head off. He won't let me go anywhere. He keeps me shut up. He's always been mean to me. Even his life insurance all goes to that daughter of his. That Lola. NEFF Nothing for you at all, huh? PHYLLIS No. And nothing is just what I'm worth to him. NEFF So you lie awake in the dark and listen to him snore and get ideas. PHYLLIS Walter, I don't want to kill him. I never did. Not even when he gets drunk and slaps my face. NEFF Only sometimes you wish he was dead. PHYLLIS Perhaps I do. NEFF And you wish it was an accident, and you had that policy. For fifty thousand dollars. Is that it? PHYLLIS Perhaps that too. She takes a long drink. PHYLLIS The other night we drove home from a party. He was drunk again. When we got into the garage he just sat there with his head on the steering wheel and the motor still running. And I thought what it would be like if I didn't switch it off, just closed the garage door and left him there. NEFF I'll tell you what it would be like, if you had that accident policy, and tried to pull a monoxide job. We have a guy in our office named Keyes. For him a set-up like that would be just like a slice of rare roast beef. In three minutes he'd know it wasn't an accident. In ten minutes you'd be sitting under the hot lights. In half an hour you'd be signing your name to a confession. PHYLLIS But Walter, I didn't do it. I'm not going to do it. NEFF Not if there's an insurance company in the picture, baby. So long as you're honest they'll pay you with a smile, but you just try to pull something like that and you'll find out. They know more tricks than a carload of monkeys. And if there's a death mixed up in it, you haven't got a prayer. They'll hang you as sure as ten dimes will buy a dollar, baby. She begins to cry. He puts his arms around her and kisses her. NEFF Just stop thinking about it, will you. He holds her tight. Their heads touch, side by side, THE CAMERA SLOWLY STARTS TO RECEDE as we DISSOLVE TO: A-47 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits in the swivel chair, talking into the dictaphone. He has hooked the wastebasket under his feet to sit more comfortably. As he talks, a little cough shakes him now and then. NEFF So we just sat there, and she kept on crying softly, like the rain on the window, and we didn't say anything. Maybe she had stopped thinking about it, but I hadn't. I couldn't. Because it all tied up with something I had been thinking about for years, since long before I ever ran into Phyllis Dietrichson. Because, in this business you can't sleep for trying to figure out the tricks they could pull on you. You're like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don't crook the house. And then one night, you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself. And do it smart. Because you've got that wheel right under your hands. And you know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out in front, a shill to put down the bet. And suddenly the doorbell rings and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you... Look, Keyes, I'm not trying to whitewash myself. I fought it, only maybe I didn't fight it hard enough. The stakes were fifty thousand dollars, but they were the life of a man, too, a man who'd never done me any dirt. Except he was married to a woman he didn't care anything about, and I did... DISSOLVE TO: A-48 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT LIVING ROOM CAMERA MOVES SLOWLY towards the davenport again. Neff sits in one corner with his feet on the low table. He is smoking his cigarette and staring at the ceiling. Phyllis has been sitting fairly close to him. She gets up slowly and crosses to her rain coat, lying over a chair. PHYLLIS I've got to go now, Walter. Neff does not answer. He keeps on staring at the ceiling. She starts to put the rain coat on. PHYLLIS Will you call me, Walter? Neff still does not answer. PHYLLIS Walter! He looks at her slowly, almost absently. PHYLLIS I hate him. I loathe going back to him. You believe me, don't you, Walter? NEFF Sure I believe you. PHYLLIS I can't stand it anymore. What if they did hang me? NEFF You're not going to hang, baby. PHYLLIS It's better than going on this way. NEFF -- you're not going to hang, baby. Not ever. Because you're going to do it the smart way. Because I'm going to help you. PHYLLIS You! NEFF Me. PHYLLIS Do you know what you're saying? NEFF Sure I know what I'm saying. He gets up and grips her arm. NEFF We're going to do it together. We're going to do it right. And I'm the guy that knows how. There is fierce determination in his voice. His fingers dig into her arm. PHYLLIS Walter, you're hurting me. NEFF There isn't going to be any slip up. Nothing sloppy. Nothing weak. It's got to be perfect. He kisses her. NEFF You go now. He leads her towards the door. NEFF Call me tomorrow. But not from your house. From a booth. And watch your step. Every single minute. It's got to be perfect, understand. Straight down the line. They have now reached the door. Neff opens it. Phyllis stands in the doorway, her lips white. PHYLLIS Straight down the line. She goes quietly. He watches her down the corridor. Slowly he closes the door and goes back into the room. He moves across the window and opens it wide. He stands there, looking down into the dark street. From below comes the sound of a car starting and driving off. The rain drifts in against his face. He just stands there motionless. His mind is going a hundred miles a minute. FADE OUT: END OF SEQUENCE "A" SEQUENCE "B" FADE IN: B-1 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits slumped in his chair before the dictaphone. On the desk next to him stands a used record. The cylinder on the dictaphone is not turning. He is smoking a cigarette. He kills it then lifts the needle and slides off the record which is on the machine and stands it on end on the desk beside the other used record. He reaches down painfully to take another record from the rack beneath the dictaphone, looks at it against the light to make sure it has not been used, then slides it into place on the machine and resets the needle. He lifts the horn and resumes his dictation. NEFF The first thing we had to do was fix him up with that accident policy. I knew he wouldn't buy, but all I wanted was his signature on an application. So I had to make him sign without his knowing what he was signing. And I wanted a witness other than Phyllis to hear me give him a sales talk. I was trying to think with your brains, Keyes. I wanted all the answers ready for all the questions you were going to spring as soon as Dietrichson was dead. Neff takes a last drag on his cigarette and kills it by running it under the ledge of the dictaphone stand. He drops the stub on the floor and resumes. NEFF A couple of nights later I went to the house. Everything looked fine, except I didn't like the witness Phyllis had brought in. It was Dietrichson's daughter Lola, and it made me feel a little queer in the belly to have her right there in the room, playing Chinese checkers, as if nothing was going to happen. DISSOLVE: B-2 A BOARD OF CHINESE CHECKERS CAMERA WITHDRAWS AND GRADUALLY REVEALS THE DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM - NIGHT The checker-board is on the davenport between Phyllis and Lola. Mr. Dietrichson sits in a big easy chair. His coat and tie are over the back of the chair, and the evening paper is lying tumbled on the floor beside him. He is smoking a cigar with the band on it. He has a drink in front of him and several more inside him. In another chair sits Neff, his briefcase on the floor, leaning against his chair. He holds his rate book partly open, with a finger in it for a marker. He is going full swing. NEFF I suppose you realize, Mr. Dietrichson, that, not being an employee, you are not covered by the State Compensation Insurance Act. The only way you can protect yourself is by having a personal policy of your own. DIETRICHSON I know all about that. The next thing you'll tell me I need earthquake insurance and lightning insurance and hail insurance. Phyllis looks up from the checker-board and cuts in on the dialogue. Lola listens without much interest. PHYLLIS (To Dietrichson) If we bought all the insurance they can think up, we'd stay broke paying for it, wouldn't we, honey? DIETRICHSON What keeps us broke is you going out and buying five hats at a crack. Who needs a hat in California? NEFF I always say insurance is a lot like a hot water bottle. It looks kind of useless and silly hanging on the hook, but when you get that stomach ache in the middle of the night, it comes in mighty handy. DIETRICHSON Now you want to sell me a hot water bottle. NEFF Dollar for dollar, accident insurance is the cheapest coverage you can buy, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Maybe some other time, Mr. Neff. I had a tough day. NEFF Just as you say, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Suppose we just settle that automobile insurance tonight. NEFF Sure. All we need on that is for you to sign an application for renewal. Phyllis throws a quick glance at Neff. As she looks back she sees that Lola is staring down at her wrist watch. LOLA Phyllis, do you mind if we don't finish this game? It bores me stiff. PHYLLIS Got some thing better to do? LOLA Yes, I have. She gets up. LOLA (To Dietrichson) Father, is it all right if I run along now? DIETRICHSON Run along where? Who with? LOLA Just Anne. We're going roller skating. DIETRICHSON Anne who? LOLA Anne Matthews. PHYLLIS It's not that Nino Zachetti again? DIETRICHSON It better not be that Zachetti guy. If I ever catch you with that --- LOLA It's Anne Matthews, I told you. I also told you we're going roller skating. I'm meeting her at the corner of Vermont and Franklin -- the north- west corner, in case you're interested. And I'm late already. I hope that is all clear. Good night, Father. Good night, Phyllis. She starts to go. NEFF Good night, Miss Dietrichson. LOLA Oh, I'm sorry. Good night, Mr. -- NEFF Neff. LOLA Good night, Mr. Neff. PHYLLIS Now you're not going to take my car again. LOLA No thanks. I'd rather be dead. She goes out through the archway. DIETRICHSON A great little fighter for her weight. Dietrichson sucks down a big swallow of his drink. Neff has taken two blank forms from his briefcase. He puts the briefcase on Mr. Dietrichson's lap and lays the forms on top. Phyllis is watching closely. NEFF This is where you sign, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Sign what? NEFF The applications for your auto renewals. So you'll be protected until the new policies are issued. DIETRICHSON When will that be? NEFF In about a week. DIETRICHSON Just so I'm covered when I drive up North. Neff takes out his fountain pen. NEFF San Francisco, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Palo Alto. PHYLLIS He was a Stanford man, Mr. Neff. And he still goes to his class reunion every year. DIETRICHSON What's wrong with that? Can't I have a little fun even once a year? NEFF Great football school, Stanford. Did you play football, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Left guard. Almost made the varsity, too. Neff has unscrewed his fountain pen. He hands it to Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson puts on his glasses. NEFF On that bottom line, Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson signs. Neff's and Phyllis' eyes meet for a split second. NEFF

calendar

How many times the word 'calendar' appears in the text?

you, Walter. Get out of here before I throw my desk at you. NEFF I love you, too. He walks out, still grinning. A-35 EXT. OFFICES - TWELFTH FLOOR Neff comes out of Keys' office and walks back along the balcony. Activity of secretaries going in and out of doors, etc. Neff enters his own office. NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) I really did, too, you old crab, always yelling your fat head off, always sore at everyone. But behind the cigar ashes on your vest I kind of knew you had a heart as big as a house... Back in my office there was a phone message from Mrs. Dietrichson about the renewals. She didn't want me to come tomorrow evening. She wanted me to come Thursday afternoon at three-thirty instead. I had a lot of stuff lined up for that Thursday afternoon, including a trip down to Santa Monica to see a couple of live prospects about some group insurance. But I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson and the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg. A-36 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE Anderson, a salesman, sits at one of the desks, filling out a report. Neff enters, goes to his own desk. He looks down at some mail. On top there is a typewritten note. He reads it, sits down and leafs through his desk calendar. A-37 INSERT - CLOSEUP - CALENDAR PAGE Showing date: THURSDAY 23 May and five or six appointments penciled in tightly on the page. DISSOLVE TO: A-38 DIETRICHSON HOME - ENTRANCE HALL - (DAY) THE CAMERA PANS with Phyllis Dietrichson's feet and ankles as she comes down the stairs, her high heels clicking on the tiles. The anklet glistens on her leg as she moves. THE CAMERA PANS ON. Phyllis has reached the entrance hall, and as she walks toward the front door her whole body becomes visible. She wears a gay print dress with a wide sash over her hips. She opens the door. Outside is Neff, wearing a sport coat, flannel slacks. He takes his hat off. PHYLLIS Hello, Mr. Neff. He stands there with a little smile. PHYLLIS Aren't you coming in? NEFF I'm considering it. He comes in. PHYLLIS I hope you didn't mind my changing the appointment. Last night wasn't so convenient. NEFF That's okay. I was working on my stamp collection. She leads him toward living room. A-39 DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff come through archway. She heads toward a low tea table which stands in front of the davenport, with tall glasses, ice cubes, lemon, a pot of tea, etc. PHYLLIS I was just fixing some iced tea. Would you like a glass? NEFF Unless you have a bottle of beer that's not working. PHYLLIS There might be some. I never know what's in the ice box. (Calls) Nettie!... She pours herself a glass of tea. PHYLLIS About those renewals, Mr. Neff. I talked to my husband about it. NEFF You did? PHYLLIS Yes. He'll renew with you he told me. In fact, I thought he'd be here this afternoon. NEFF But he's not? PHYLLIS No. NEFF That's terrible. PHYLLIS (Calls again, impatiently) Nettie!... Nettie!... Oh, I forgot, it's the maid's day off. NEFF Don't bother, Mrs. Dietrichson. I'd like some iced tea very much. PHYLLIS Lemon? Sugar? NEFF Fix it your way. She fixes him a glass of tea while he is looking around. He slowly sits down. NEFF Seeing it's the maid's day off maybe there's something I can do for you. She hands him the tea. NEFF Like running the vacuum cleaner. PHYLLIS Fresh. NEFF I used to peddle vacuum cleaners. Not much money but you learn a lot about life. PHYLLIS I didn't think you'd learned it from a correspondence course. NEFF Where did you pick up this tea drinking? You're not English, are you? PHYLLIS No. Californian. Born right here in Los Angeles. NEFF They say native Californians all come from Iowa. PHYLLIS I wanted to ask you something, Mr. Neff. NEFF Make it Walter. PHYLLIS Walter. NEFF Right. PHYLLIS Tell me, Walter, on this insurance -- how much commission do you make? NEFF Twenty percent. Why? PHYLLIS I thought maybe I could throw a little more business your way. NEFF I can always use it. PHYLLIS I was thinking about my husband. I worry a lot about him, down in those oil fields. It's very dangerous. NEFF Not for an executive, is it? PHYLLIS He doesn't just sit behind a desk. He's right down there with the drilling crews. It's got me worried sick. NEFF You mean a crown block might fall on him some rainy night? PHYLLIS Please don't talk like that. NEFF But that's the idea. PHYLLIS The other day a casing line snapped and caught the foreman. He's in the hospital with a broken back. NEFF Bad. PHYLLIS It's got me jittery just thinking about it. Suppose something like that happened to my husband? NEFF It could. PHYLLIS Don't you think he ought to have accident insurance? NEFF Uh huh. PHYLLIS What kind of insurance could he have? NEFF Enough to cover doctors' and hospital bills. Say a hundred and twenty-five a week cash benefit. And he'd rate around fifty thousand capital sum. PHYLLIS Capital sum? What's that? NEFF That's if he got killed. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. PHYLLIS I suppose you have to think of everything in your business. NEFF Mr. Dietrichson would understand. I'm sure I could sell him on the idea of some accident protection. Why don't I talk to him about it. PHYLLIS You could try. But he's pretty tough going. NEFF They're all tough at first. PHYLLIS He's got a lot on his mind. He doesn't want to listen to anything except maybe a baseball game on the radio. Sometimes we sit all evening without saying a word to each other. NEFF Sounds pretty dull. Phyllis shrugs. PHYLLIS So I just sit and knit. NEFF Is that what you married him for? PHYLLIS Maybe I like the way his thumbs hold up the wool. NEFF Anytime his thumbs get tired -- PHYLLIS I want to ask you something, Mr. Neff. Could I get an accident policy for him -- without bothering him at all? NEFF How's that again. PHYLLIS That would make it easier for you, too. You wouldn't even have to talk to him. I have a little allowance of my own. I could pay for it and he needn't know anything about it. NEFF Wait a minute. Why shouldn't he know? PHYLLIS Because I know he doesn't want accident insurance. He's superstitious about it. NEFF A lot of people are. Funny, isn't it? PHYLLIS If there was a way to get it like that, all the worry would be over. You see what I mean, Walter? NEFF Sure. I've got good eyesight. You want him to have the policy without him knowing it. And that means without the insurance company knowing that he doesn't know. That's the set-up, isn't it? PHYLLIS Is there anything wrong with it? NEFF I think it's lovely. And then, some dark wet night, if that crown block fell on him -- PHYLLIS What crown block? NEFF Only sometimes they have to have a little help. They can't quite make it on their own. PHYLLIS I don't know what you're talking about. NEFF Of course, it doesn't have to be a crown block. It can be a car backing over him, or he can fall out of an upstairs window. Any little thing like that, as long as it's a morgue job. PHYLLIS Are you crazy? NEFF Not that crazy. Goodbye, Mrs. Dietrichson. He picks up his hat. PHYLLIS What's the matter? NEFF Look, baby, you can't get away with it. PHYLLIS Get away with what? NEFF You want to knock him off, don't you, baby. PHYLLIS That's a horrible thing to say! NEFF Who'd you think I was, anyway? A guy that walks into a good-looking dame's front parlor and says "Good afternoon, I sell accident insurance on husbands. You got one that's been around too long? Somebody you'd like to turn into a little hard cash? Just give me a smile and I'll help you collect." Boy, what a dope I must look to you! PHYLLIS I think you're rotten. NEFF I think you're swell. So long as I'm not your husband. PHYLLIS Get out of here. NEFF You bet I will. You bet I'll get out of here, baby. But quick. He goes out. She looks after him. A-40 EXT. DIETRICHSON HOME - (DAY) Neff bangs the front door shut, walks quickly to his car and drives away. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Over scene) So I let her have it, straight between the eyes. She didn't fool me for a minute, not this time. I knew I had hold of a redhot poker and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off. I stopped at a drive-in for a bottle of beer, the one I had wanted all along, only I wanted it worse now, to get rid of the sour taste of her iced tea, and everything that went with it. I didn't want to go back to the office, so I dropped by a bowling alley at Third and Western and rolled a few lines to get my mind thinking about something else for a while. A-41 DRIVE-IN RESTAURANT - (DAY) Shooting past Neff sitting behind the wheel of his car The car hop hangs a tray on the door and serves him a bottle of beer. DISSOLVE TO: A-42 INT. BOWLING ALLEY Neff bowling. He rolls the ball with an effort at concentration, but his mind is not really on the game. DISSOLVE TO: A-43 EXT. APARTMENT HOUSE - (DUSK) It is late afternoon. The apartment house is called the LOS OLIVOS APARTMENTS. It is a six-story building in the Normandie- Wilshire district, with a basement garage. THE CAMERA PANS UP the front of the building to the top floor windows, as a little rain starts to fall. DISSOLVE TO: NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) I didn't feel like eating dinner when I left, and I didn't feel like a show, so I drove home, put the car away and went up to my apartment. A-44 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT - LIVING ROOM - (DUSK) It is a double apartment of conventional design, with kitchen, dinette, and bathroom, squarecut overstuffed borax furniture. Gas logs are lit in the imitation fireplace. Neff stands by the window with his coat off and his tie loose. Raindrops strike against the glass. He turns away impatiently, paces up and down past a caddy bag with golf clubs in it, pulls one out at random, makes a couple of short swings, throws the club on the couch, paces again. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) It had begun to rain outside and I watched it get dark and didn't even turn on the light. That didn't help me either. I was all twisted up inside, and I was still holding on to that red-hot poker. And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all, that the hook was too strong, that this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning. The doorbell rings. NEFF'S VOICE (Continuing) So at eight o'clock the bell would ring and I would know who it was without even having to think, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Neff goes to the door and opens it. PHYLLIS Hello. Neff just looks at her. PHYLLIS You forgot your hat this afternoon. She has nothing in her hands but her bag. NEFF Did I? He looks down at her hands. PHYLLIS Don't you want me to bring it in? NEFF Sure. Put it on the chair. She comes in. He closes the door. NEFF How did you know where I live? PHYLLIS It's in the phone book. Neff switches on the standing lamp. PHYLLIS It's raining. NEFF So it is. Peel off your coat and sit down. She starts to take off her coat. NEFF Your husband out? PHYLLIS Long Beach. They're spudding in a new well. He phoned he'd be late. About nine-thirty. He takes her coat and lays it across the back of a chair. PHYLLIS It's about time you said you're glad to see me. NEFF I knew you wouldn't leave it like that. PHYLLIS Like what? NEFF Like it was this afternoon. PHYLLIS I must have said something that gave you a terribly wrong impression. You must surely see that. You must never think anything like that about me, Walter. NEFF Okay. PHYLLIS It's not okay. Not if you don't believe me. NEFF What do you want me to do? PHYLLIS I want you to be nice to me. Like the first time you came to the house. NEFF It can't be like the first time. Something has happened. PHYLLIS I know it has. It's happened to us. NEFF That's what I mean. Phyllis has moved over to the window. She stares out through the wet window-pane. NEFF What's the matter now? PHYLLIS I feel as if he was watching me. Not that he cares about me. Not any more. But he keeps me on a leash. So tight I can't breathe. I'm scared. NEFF What of? He's in Long Beach, isn't he? PHYLLIS I oughtn't to have come. NEFF Maybe you oughtn't. PHYLLIS You want me to go? NEFF If you want to. PHYLLIS Right now? NEFF Sure. Right now. By this time, he has hold of her wrist. He draws her to him slowly and kisses her. Her arms tighten around him. After a moment he pulls his head back, still holding her close. NEFF How were you going to do it? PHYLLIS Do what? NEFF Kill him. PHYLLIS Walter, for the last time -- She tries to jerk away but he holds her and kisses her again. NEFF I'm crazy about you, baby. PHYLLIS I'm crazy about you, Walter. NEFF That perfume on your hair. What's the name of it? PHYLLIS Something French. I bought it down at Ensenada. NEFF We ought to have some of that pink wine to go with it. The kind that bubbles. But all I have is bourbon. PHYLLIS Bourbon is fine, Walter. He lets her go and moves toward the dinette. A-45 THE DINETTE AND KITCHEN It contains a small table and some chairs. A low glass-and- china cabinet is built between the dinette and kitchen, leaving a space like a doorway. The kitchen is the usual apartment house kitchen, with stove, ice-box, sink, etc. It is quite small. Neff goes to the ice-box and Phyllis drifts in after him. NEFF Soda? PHYLLIS Plain water, please. NEFF Get a couple of glasses, will you. He points at the china closet. He has taken a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator and is holding it under the hot- water faucet. NEFF You know, about six months ago a guy slipped on the soap in his bathtub and knocked himself cold and drowned. Only he had accident insurance. So they had an autopsy and she didn't get away with it. Phyllis has the glasses now. She hands them to him. He dumps some ice cubes into the glasses. PHYLLIS Who didn't? NEFF His wife. He reaches for the whiskey bottle on top of the china closet. NEFF And there was another case where a guy was found shot and his wife said he was cleaning a gun and his stomach got in the way. All she collected was a three-to-ten stretch in Tehachapi. PHYLLIS Perhaps it was worth it to her. Neff hands her a glass. NEFF See if you can carry this as far as the living room. They move back toward the living room. A-46 LIVING ROOM Phyllis and Neff go toward the davenport. She is sipping her drink and looking around. PHYLLIS It's nice here, Walter. Who takes care of it for you? NEFF A colored woman comes in twice a week. PHYLLIS You get your own breakfast? NEFF Once in a while I squeeze a grapefruit. The rest I get at the corner drugstore. They sit on the davenport, fairly close together. PHYLLIS It sounds wonderful. Just strangers beside you. You don't know them. You don't hate them. You don't have to sit across the table and smile at him and that daughter of his every morning of your life. NEFF What daughter? Oh, that little girl on the piano. PHYLLIS Yes. Lola. She lives with us. He thinks a lot more of her than he does of me. NEFF Ever think of a divorce? PHYLLIS He wouldn't give me a divorce. NEFF I suppose because it would cost him money. PHYLLIS He hasn't got any money. Not since he went into the oil business. NEFF But he had when you married him? PHYLLIS Yes, he had. And I wanted a home. Why not? But that wasn't the only reason. I was his wife's nurse. She was sick for a long time. When she died, he was all broken up. I pitied him so. NEFF And now you hate him. PHYLLIS Yes, Walter. He's so mean to me. Every-time I buy a dress or a pair of shoes he yells his head off. He won't let me go anywhere. He keeps me shut up. He's always been mean to me. Even his life insurance all goes to that daughter of his. That Lola. NEFF Nothing for you at all, huh? PHYLLIS No. And nothing is just what I'm worth to him. NEFF So you lie awake in the dark and listen to him snore and get ideas. PHYLLIS Walter, I don't want to kill him. I never did. Not even when he gets drunk and slaps my face. NEFF Only sometimes you wish he was dead. PHYLLIS Perhaps I do. NEFF And you wish it was an accident, and you had that policy. For fifty thousand dollars. Is that it? PHYLLIS Perhaps that too. She takes a long drink. PHYLLIS The other night we drove home from a party. He was drunk again. When we got into the garage he just sat there with his head on the steering wheel and the motor still running. And I thought what it would be like if I didn't switch it off, just closed the garage door and left him there. NEFF I'll tell you what it would be like, if you had that accident policy, and tried to pull a monoxide job. We have a guy in our office named Keyes. For him a set-up like that would be just like a slice of rare roast beef. In three minutes he'd know it wasn't an accident. In ten minutes you'd be sitting under the hot lights. In half an hour you'd be signing your name to a confession. PHYLLIS But Walter, I didn't do it. I'm not going to do it. NEFF Not if there's an insurance company in the picture, baby. So long as you're honest they'll pay you with a smile, but you just try to pull something like that and you'll find out. They know more tricks than a carload of monkeys. And if there's a death mixed up in it, you haven't got a prayer. They'll hang you as sure as ten dimes will buy a dollar, baby. She begins to cry. He puts his arms around her and kisses her. NEFF Just stop thinking about it, will you. He holds her tight. Their heads touch, side by side, THE CAMERA SLOWLY STARTS TO RECEDE as we DISSOLVE TO: A-47 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits in the swivel chair, talking into the dictaphone. He has hooked the wastebasket under his feet to sit more comfortably. As he talks, a little cough shakes him now and then. NEFF So we just sat there, and she kept on crying softly, like the rain on the window, and we didn't say anything. Maybe she had stopped thinking about it, but I hadn't. I couldn't. Because it all tied up with something I had been thinking about for years, since long before I ever ran into Phyllis Dietrichson. Because, in this business you can't sleep for trying to figure out the tricks they could pull on you. You're like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don't crook the house. And then one night, you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself. And do it smart. Because you've got that wheel right under your hands. And you know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out in front, a shill to put down the bet. And suddenly the doorbell rings and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you... Look, Keyes, I'm not trying to whitewash myself. I fought it, only maybe I didn't fight it hard enough. The stakes were fifty thousand dollars, but they were the life of a man, too, a man who'd never done me any dirt. Except he was married to a woman he didn't care anything about, and I did... DISSOLVE TO: A-48 INT. NEFF'S APARTMENT LIVING ROOM CAMERA MOVES SLOWLY towards the davenport again. Neff sits in one corner with his feet on the low table. He is smoking his cigarette and staring at the ceiling. Phyllis has been sitting fairly close to him. She gets up slowly and crosses to her rain coat, lying over a chair. PHYLLIS I've got to go now, Walter. Neff does not answer. He keeps on staring at the ceiling. She starts to put the rain coat on. PHYLLIS Will you call me, Walter? Neff still does not answer. PHYLLIS Walter! He looks at her slowly, almost absently. PHYLLIS I hate him. I loathe going back to him. You believe me, don't you, Walter? NEFF Sure I believe you. PHYLLIS I can't stand it anymore. What if they did hang me? NEFF You're not going to hang, baby. PHYLLIS It's better than going on this way. NEFF -- you're not going to hang, baby. Not ever. Because you're going to do it the smart way. Because I'm going to help you. PHYLLIS You! NEFF Me. PHYLLIS Do you know what you're saying? NEFF Sure I know what I'm saying. He gets up and grips her arm. NEFF We're going to do it together. We're going to do it right. And I'm the guy that knows how. There is fierce determination in his voice. His fingers dig into her arm. PHYLLIS Walter, you're hurting me. NEFF There isn't going to be any slip up. Nothing sloppy. Nothing weak. It's got to be perfect. He kisses her. NEFF You go now. He leads her towards the door. NEFF Call me tomorrow. But not from your house. From a booth. And watch your step. Every single minute. It's got to be perfect, understand. Straight down the line. They have now reached the door. Neff opens it. Phyllis stands in the doorway, her lips white. PHYLLIS Straight down the line. She goes quietly. He watches her down the corridor. Slowly he closes the door and goes back into the room. He moves across the window and opens it wide. He stands there, looking down into the dark street. From below comes the sound of a car starting and driving off. The rain drifts in against his face. He just stands there motionless. His mind is going a hundred miles a minute. FADE OUT: END OF SEQUENCE "A" SEQUENCE "B" FADE IN: B-1 INT. NEFF'S OFFICE - (NIGHT) Neff sits slumped in his chair before the dictaphone. On the desk next to him stands a used record. The cylinder on the dictaphone is not turning. He is smoking a cigarette. He kills it then lifts the needle and slides off the record which is on the machine and stands it on end on the desk beside the other used record. He reaches down painfully to take another record from the rack beneath the dictaphone, looks at it against the light to make sure it has not been used, then slides it into place on the machine and resets the needle. He lifts the horn and resumes his dictation. NEFF The first thing we had to do was fix him up with that accident policy. I knew he wouldn't buy, but all I wanted was his signature on an application. So I had to make him sign without his knowing what he was signing. And I wanted a witness other than Phyllis to hear me give him a sales talk. I was trying to think with your brains, Keyes. I wanted all the answers ready for all the questions you were going to spring as soon as Dietrichson was dead. Neff takes a last drag on his cigarette and kills it by running it under the ledge of the dictaphone stand. He drops the stub on the floor and resumes. NEFF A couple of nights later I went to the house. Everything looked fine, except I didn't like the witness Phyllis had brought in. It was Dietrichson's daughter Lola, and it made me feel a little queer in the belly to have her right there in the room, playing Chinese checkers, as if nothing was going to happen. DISSOLVE: B-2 A BOARD OF CHINESE CHECKERS CAMERA WITHDRAWS AND GRADUALLY REVEALS THE DIETRICHSON LIVING ROOM - NIGHT The checker-board is on the davenport between Phyllis and Lola. Mr. Dietrichson sits in a big easy chair. His coat and tie are over the back of the chair, and the evening paper is lying tumbled on the floor beside him. He is smoking a cigar with the band on it. He has a drink in front of him and several more inside him. In another chair sits Neff, his briefcase on the floor, leaning against his chair. He holds his rate book partly open, with a finger in it for a marker. He is going full swing. NEFF I suppose you realize, Mr. Dietrichson, that, not being an employee, you are not covered by the State Compensation Insurance Act. The only way you can protect yourself is by having a personal policy of your own. DIETRICHSON I know all about that. The next thing you'll tell me I need earthquake insurance and lightning insurance and hail insurance. Phyllis looks up from the checker-board and cuts in on the dialogue. Lola listens without much interest. PHYLLIS (To Dietrichson) If we bought all the insurance they can think up, we'd stay broke paying for it, wouldn't we, honey? DIETRICHSON What keeps us broke is you going out and buying five hats at a crack. Who needs a hat in California? NEFF I always say insurance is a lot like a hot water bottle. It looks kind of useless and silly hanging on the hook, but when you get that stomach ache in the middle of the night, it comes in mighty handy. DIETRICHSON Now you want to sell me a hot water bottle. NEFF Dollar for dollar, accident insurance is the cheapest coverage you can buy, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Maybe some other time, Mr. Neff. I had a tough day. NEFF Just as you say, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Suppose we just settle that automobile insurance tonight. NEFF Sure. All we need on that is for you to sign an application for renewal. Phyllis throws a quick glance at Neff. As she looks back she sees that Lola is staring down at her wrist watch. LOLA Phyllis, do you mind if we don't finish this game? It bores me stiff. PHYLLIS Got some thing better to do? LOLA Yes, I have. She gets up. LOLA (To Dietrichson) Father, is it all right if I run along now? DIETRICHSON Run along where? Who with? LOLA Just Anne. We're going roller skating. DIETRICHSON Anne who? LOLA Anne Matthews. PHYLLIS It's not that Nino Zachetti again? DIETRICHSON It better not be that Zachetti guy. If I ever catch you with that --- LOLA It's Anne Matthews, I told you. I also told you we're going roller skating. I'm meeting her at the corner of Vermont and Franklin -- the north- west corner, in case you're interested. And I'm late already. I hope that is all clear. Good night, Father. Good night, Phyllis. She starts to go. NEFF Good night, Miss Dietrichson. LOLA Oh, I'm sorry. Good night, Mr. -- NEFF Neff. LOLA Good night, Mr. Neff. PHYLLIS Now you're not going to take my car again. LOLA No thanks. I'd rather be dead. She goes out through the archway. DIETRICHSON A great little fighter for her weight. Dietrichson sucks down a big swallow of his drink. Neff has taken two blank forms from his briefcase. He puts the briefcase on Mr. Dietrichson's lap and lays the forms on top. Phyllis is watching closely. NEFF This is where you sign, Mr. Dietrichson. DIETRICHSON Sign what? NEFF The applications for your auto renewals. So you'll be protected until the new policies are issued. DIETRICHSON When will that be? NEFF In about a week. DIETRICHSON Just so I'm covered when I drive up North. Neff takes out his fountain pen. NEFF San Francisco, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Palo Alto. PHYLLIS He was a Stanford man, Mr. Neff. And he still goes to his class reunion every year. DIETRICHSON What's wrong with that? Can't I have a little fun even once a year? NEFF Great football school, Stanford. Did you play football, Mr. Dietrichson? DIETRICHSON Left guard. Almost made the varsity, too. Neff has unscrewed his fountain pen. He hands it to Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson puts on his glasses. NEFF On that bottom line, Mr. Dietrichson. Dietrichson signs. Neff's and Phyllis' eyes meet for a split second. NEFF

hospital

How many times the word 'hospital' appears in the text?

you, reverend father, I am totally ignorant. My brother, answered the Abbot, you are wise, and ought to know-- I am not--I am not--I am not wise, replied the horticulturist, pettishly, and stopping his ears with his fingers-- I was never called wise but when men wanted to engage me in some action of notorious folly. But, my good brother, said the Abbot-- I am not good neither, said the peevish gardener; I am neither good nor wise--Had I been wise, you would not have been admitted here; and were I good, methinks I should send you elsewhere to hatch plots for destroying the quiet of the country. What signifies disputing about queen or king,--when men may sit at peace--_sub umbra vitis sui?_ and so would I do, after the precept of Holy Writ, were I, as you term me, wise or good. But such as I am, my neck is in the yoke, and you make me draw what weight you list.--Follow me, youngster. This reverend father, who makes in his jackman's dress nearly as reverend a figure as I myself, will agree with me in one thing at least, and that is, that you have been long enough here. Follow the good father, Roland, said the Abbot, and remember my words--a day is approaching that will try the temper of all true Scotsmen--may thy heart prove faithful as the steel of thy blade! The page bowed in silence, and they parted; the gardener, notwithstanding his advanced age, walking on before him very briskly, and muttering as he went, partly to himself, partly to his companion, after the manner of old men of weakened intellects-- When I was great, thus ran his maundering, and had my mule and my ambling palfrey at command, I warrant you I could have as well flown through the air as have walked at this pace. I had my gout and my rheumatics, and an hundred things besides, that hung fetters on my heels; and, now, thanks to Our Lady, and honest labour, I can walk with any good man of my age in the kingdom of Fife--Fy upon it, that experience should be so long in coming! As he was thus muttering, his eye fell upon the branch of a pear-tree which drooped down for want of support, and at once forgetting his haste, the old man stopped and set seriously about binding it up. Roland Graeme had both readiness, neatness of hand, and good nature in abundance; he immediately lent his aid, and in a minute or two the bough was supported, and tied up in a way perfectly satisfactory to the old man, who looked at it with great complaisance. They are bergamots, he said, and if you will come ashore in autumn, you shall taste of them--the like are not in Lochleven Castle--the garden there is a poor pin-fold, and the gardener, Hugh Houkham, hath little skill of his craft--so come ashore, Master Page, in autumn, when you would eat pears. But what am I thinking of--ere that time come, they may have given thee sour pears for plums. Take an old man's advice, youth, one who hath seen many days, and sat in higher places than thou canst hope for--bend thy sword into a pruning-hook, and make a dibble of thy dagger--thy days shall be the longer, and thy health the better for it,--and come to aid me in my garden, and I will teach thee the real French fashion of _imping_, which the Southron call graffing. Do this, and do it without loss of time, for there is a whirlwind coming over the land, and only those shall escape who lie too much beneath the storm to have their boughs broken by it. So saying, he dismissed Roland Graeme, through a different door from that by which he had entered, signed a cross, and pronounced a benedicite as they parted, and then, still muttering to himself, retired into the garden, and locked the door on the inside. Chapter the Twenty-Ninth. Pray God she prove not masculine ere long! KING HENRY VI. Dismissed from the old man's garden, Roland Graeme found that a grassy paddock, in which sauntered two cows, the property of the gardener, still separated him from the village. He paced through it, lost in meditation upon the words of the Abbot. Father Ambrosius had, with success enough, exerted over him that powerful influence which the guardians and instructors of our childhood possess over our more mature youth. And yet, when Roland looked back upon what the father had said, he could not but suspect that he had rather sought to evade entering into the controversy betwixt the churches, than to repel the objections and satisfy the doubts which the lectures of Henderson had excited. For this he had no time, said the page to himself, neither have I now calmness and learning sufficient to judge upon points of such magnitude. Besides, it were base to quit my faith while the wind of fortune sets against it, unless I were so placed, that my conversion, should it take place, were free as light from the imputation of self-interest. I was bred a Catholic--bred in the faith of Bruce and Wallace--I will hold that faith till time and reason shall convince me that it errs. I will serve this poor Queen as a subject should serve an imprisoned and wronged sovereign--they who placed me in her service have to blame themselves--who sent me hither, a gentleman trained in the paths of loyalty and honour, when they should have sought out some truckling, cogging, double-dealing knave, who would have been at once the observant page of the Queen, and the obsequious spy of her enemies. Since I must choose betwixt aiding and betraying her, I will decide as becomes her servant and her subject; but Catherine Seyton--Catherine Seyton, beloved by Douglas and holding me on or off as the intervals of her leisure or caprice will permit--how shall I deal with the coquette?--By heaven, when I next have an opportunity, she shall render me some reason for her conduct, or I will break with her for ever! As he formed this doughty resolution, he crossed the stile which led out of the little enclosure, and was almost immediately greeted by Dr. Luke Lundin. Ha! my most excellent young friend, said the Doctor, from whence come you?--but I note the place.--Yes, neighbour Blinkhoolie's garden is a pleasant rendezvous, and you are of the age when lads look after a bonny lass with one eye, and a dainty plum with another. But hey! you look subtriste and melancholic--I fear the maiden has proved cruel, or the plums unripe; and surely I think neighbour Blinkhoolie's damsons can scarcely have been well preserved throughout the winter--he spares the saccharine juice on his confects. But courage, man, there are more Kates in Kinross; and for the immature fruit, a glass of my double distilled _aqua mirabilis--probatum est_. The page darted an ireful glance at the facetious physician; but presently recollecting that the name Kate, which had provoked his displeasure, was probably but introduced for the sake of alliteration, he suppressed his wrath, and only asked if the wains had been heard of? Why, I have been seeking for you this hour, to tell you that the stuff is in your boat, and that the boat waits your pleasure. Auchtermuchty had only fallen into company with an idle knave like himself, and a stoup of aquavitae between them. Your boatmen lie on their oars, and there have already been made two wefts from the warder's turret to intimate that those in the castle are impatient for your return. Yet there is time for you to take a slight repast; and, as your friend and physician, I hold it unfit you should face the water-breeze with an empty stomach. Roland Graeme had nothing for it but to return, with such cheer as he might, to the place where his boat was moored on the beach, and resisted all offer of refreshment, although the Doctor promised that he should prelude the collation with a gentle appetizer--a decoction of herbs, gathered and distilled by himself. Indeed, as Roland had not forgotten the contents of his morning cup, it is possible that the recollection induced him to stand firm in his refusal of all food, to which such an unpalatable preface was the preliminary. As they passed towards the boat, (for the ceremonious politeness of the worthy Chamberlain would not permit the page to go thither without attendance,) Roland Graeme, amidst a group who seemed to be assembled around a party of wandering musicians, distinguished, as he thought, the dress of Catherine Seyton. He shook himself clear from his attendant, and at one spring was in the midst of the crowd, and at the side of the damsel. Catherine, he whispered, is it well for you to be still here?--will you not return to the castle? To the devil with your Catherines and your castles! answered the maiden, snappishly; have you not had time enough already to get rid of your follies? Begone! I desire not your farther company, and there will be danger in thrusting it upon me. Nay--but if there be danger, fairest Catherine, replied Roland; why will you not allow me to stay and share it with you? Intruding fool, said the maiden, the danger is all on thine own side--the risk in, in plain terms, that I strike thee on the mouth with the hilt of my dagger. So saying, she turned haughtily from him, and moved through the crowd, who gave way in some astonishment at the masculine activity with which she forced her way among them. As Roland, though much irritated, prepared to follow, he was grappled on the other side by Doctor Luke Lundin, who reminded him of the loaded boat, of the two wefts, or signals with the flag, which had been made from the tower, of the danger of the cold breeze to an empty stomach, and of the vanity of spending more time upon coy wenches and sour plums. Roland was thus, in a manner, dragged back to his boat, and obliged to launch her forth upon his return to Lochleven Castle. That little voyage was speedily accomplished, and the page was greeted at the landing-place by the severe and caustic welcome of old Dryfesdale. So, young gallant, you are come at last, after a delay of six hours, and after two signals from the castle? But, I warrant, some idle junketing hath occupied you too deeply to think of your service or your duty. Where is the note of the plate and household stuff?--Pray Heaven it hath not been diminished under the sleeveless care of so young a gad-about! Diminished under my care, Sir Steward! retorted the page angrily; say so in earnest, and by Heaven your gray hair shall hardly protect your saucy tongue! A truce with your swaggering, young esquire, returned the steward; we have bolts and dungeons for brawlers. Go to my lady, and swagger before her, if thou darest--she will give thee proper cause of offence, for she has waited for thee long and impatiently. And where then is the Lady of Lochleven? said the page; for I conceive it is of her thou speakest. Ay--of whom else? replied Dryfesdale; or who besides the Lady of Lochleven hath a right to command in this castle? The Lady of Lochleven is thy mistress, said Roland Graeme; but mine is the Queen of Scotland. The steward looked at him fixedly for a moment, with an air in which suspicion and dislike were ill concealed by an affectation of contempt. The bragging cock-chicken, he said, will betray himself by his rash crowing. I have marked thy altered manner in the chapel of late--ay, and your changing of glances at meal-time with a certain idle damsel, who, like thyself, laughs at all gravity and goodness. There is something about you, my master, which should be looked to. But, if you would know whether the Lady of Lochleven, or that other lady, hath a right to command thy service, thou wilt find them together in the Lady Mary's ante-room. Roland hastened thither, not unwilling to escape from the ill-natured penetration of the old man, and marvelling at the same time what peculiarity could have occasioned the Lady of Lochleven's being in the Queen's apartment at this time of the afternoon, so much contrary to her usual wont. His acuteness instantly penetrated the meaning. She wishes, he concluded, to see the meeting betwixt the Queen and me on my return, that she may form a guess whether there is any private intelligence or understanding betwixt us--I must be guarded. With this resolution he entered the parlour, where the Queen, seated in her chair, with the Lady Fleming leaning upon the back of it, had already kept the Lady of Lochleven standing in her presence for the space of nearly an hour, to the manifest increase of her very visible bad humour. Roland Graeme, on entering the apartment, made a deep obeisance to the Queen, and another to the Lady, and then stood still as if to await their farther question. Speaking almost together, the Lady Lochleven said, So, young man, you are returned at length? And then stopped indignantly short, while the Queen went on without regarding her-- Roland, you are welcome home to us--you have proved the true dove and not the raven--Yet I am sure I could have forgiven you, if, once dismissed, from this water-circled ark of ours, you had never again returned to us. I trust you have brought back an olive-branch, for our kind and worthy hostess has chafed herself much on account of your long absence, and we never needed more some symbol of peace and reconciliation. I grieve I should have been detained, madam, answered the page; but from the delay of the person intrusted with the matters for which I was sent, I did not receive them till late in the day. See you there now, said the Queen to the Lady Lochleven; we could not persuade you, our dearest hostess, that your household goods were in all safe keeping and surety. True it is, that we can excuse your anxiety, considering that these august apartments are so scantily furnished, that we have not been able to offer you even the relief of a stool during the long time you have afforded us the pleasure of your society. The will, madam, said the lady, the will to offer such accommodation was more wanting than the means. What! said the Queen, looking round, and affecting surprise, there are then stools in this apartment--one, two--no less than four, including the broken one--a royal garniture!--We observed them not--will it please your ladyship to sit? No, madam, I will soon relieve you of my presence, replied the Lady Lochleven; and while with you, my aged limbs can still better brook fatigue, than my mind stoop to accept of constrained courtesy. Nay, Lady of Lochleven, if you take it so deeply, said the Queen, rising and motioning to her own vacant chair, I would rather you assumed my seat--you are not the first of your family who has done so. The Lady of Lochleven curtsied a negative, but seemed with much difficulty to suppress the angry answer which rose to her lips. During this sharp conversation, the page's attention had been almost entirely occupied by the entrance of Catherine Seyton, who came from the inner apartment, in the usual dress in which she attended upon the Queen, and with nothing in her manner which marked either the hurry or confusion incident to a hasty change of disguise, or the conscious fear of detection in a perilous enterprise. Roland Graeme ventured to make her an obeisance as she entered, but she returned it with an air of the utmost indifference, which, in his opinion, was extremely inconsistent with the circumstances in which they stood towards each other.-- Surely, he thought, she cannot in reason expect to bully me out of the belief due to mine own eyes, as she tried to do concerning the apparition in the hostelry of Saint Michael's--I will try if I cannot make her feel that this will be but a vain task, and that confidence in me is the wiser and safer course to pursue. These thoughts had passed rapidly through his mind, when the Queen, having finished her altercation with the Lady of the castle, again addressed him-- What of the revels at Kinross, Roland Graeme? Methought they were gay, if I may judge from some faint sounds of mirth and distant music, which found their way so far as these grated windows, and died when they entered them, as all that is mirthful must--But thou lookest as sad as if thou hadst come from a conventicle of the Huguenots! And so perchance he hath, madam, replied the Lady of Lochleven, at whom this side-shaft was lanched. I trust, amid yonder idle fooleries, there wanted not some pouring forth of doctrine to a better purpose than that vain mirth, which, blazing and vanishing like the crackling of dry thorns, leaves to the fools who love it nothing but dust and ashes. Mary Fleming, said the Queen, turning round and drawing her mantle about her, I would that we had the chimney-grate supplied with a fagot or two of these same thorns which the Lady of Lochleven describes so well. Methinks the damp air from the lake, which stagnates in these vaulted rooms, renders them deadly cold. Your Grace's pleasure shall be obeyed, said the Lady of Lochleven; yet may I presume to remind you that we are now in summer? I thank you for the information, my good lady, said the Queen; for prisoners better learn their calender from the mouth of their jailor, than from any change they themselves feel in the seasons.--Once more, Roland Graeme, what of the revels? They were gay, madam, said the page, but of the usual sort, and little worth your Highness's ear. Oh, you know not, said the Queen, how very indulgent my ear has become to all that speaks of freedom and the pleasures of the free. Methinks I would rather have seen the gay villagers dance their ring round the Maypole, than have witnessed the most stately masques within the precincts of a palace. The absence of stone-wall--the sense that the green turf is under the foot which may tread it free and unrestrained, is worth all that art or splendour can add to more courtly revels. I trust, said the Lady Lochleven, addressing the page in her turn, there were amongst these follies none of the riots or disturbances to which they so naturally lead? Roland gave a slight glance to Catherine Seyton, as if to bespeak her attention, as he replied,-- I witnessed no offence, madam, worthy of marking--none indeed of any kind, save that a bold damsel made her hand somewhat too familiar with the cheek of a player-man, and ran some hazard of being ducked in the lake. As he uttered these words he cast a hasty glance at Catherine; but she sustained, with the utmost serenity of manner and countenance, the hint which he had deemed could not have been thrown out before her without exciting some fear and confusion. I will cumber your Grace no longer with my presence, said the Lady Lochleven, unless you have aught to command me. Nought, our good hostess, answered the Queen, unless it be to pray you, that on another occasion you deem it not needful to postpone your better employment to wait so long upon us. May it please you, added the Lady Lochleven, to command this your gentleman to attend us, that I may receive some account of these matters which have been sent hither for your Grace's use? We may not refuse what you are pleased to require, madam, answered the Queen. Go with the lady, Roland, if our commands be indeed necessary to thy doing so. We will hear to-morrow the history of thy Kinross pleasures. For this night we dismiss thy attendance. Roland Graeme went with the Lady of Lochleven, who failed not to ask him many questions concerning what had passed at the sports, to which he rendered such answers as were most likely to lull asleep any suspicions which she might entertain of his disposition to favour Queen Mary, taking especial care to avoid all allusion to the apparition of Magdalen Graeme, and of the Abbot Ambrosius. At length, after undergoing a long and somewhat close examination, he was dismissed with such expressions, as, coming from the reserved and stern Lady of Lochleven, might seem to express a degree of favour and countenance. His first care was to obtain some refreshment, which was more cheerfully afforded him by a good-natured pantler than by Dryfesdale, who was, on this occasion, much disposed to abide by the fashion of Pudding-burn House, where They who came not the first call. Gat no more meat till the next meal. When Roland Graeme had finished his repast, having his dismissal from the Queen for the evening, and being little inclined for such society as the castle afforded, he stole into the garden, in which he had permission to spend his leisure time, when it pleased him. In this place, the ingenuity of the contriver and disposer of the walks had exerted itself to make the most of little space, and by screens, both of stone ornamented with rude sculpture, and hedges of living green, had endeavoured to give as much intricacy and variety as the confined limits of the garden would admit. Here the young man walked sadly, considering the events of the day, and comparing what had dropped from the Abbot with what he had himself noticed of the demeanour of George Douglas. It must be so, was the painful but inevitable conclusion at which he arrived. It must be by his aid that she is thus enabled, like a phantom, to transport herself from place to place, and to appear at pleasure on the mainland or on the islet.--It must be so, he repeated once more; with him she holds a close, secret, and intimate correspondence, altogether inconsistent with the eye of favour which she has sometimes cast upon me, and destructive to the hopes which she must have known these glances have necessarily inspired. And yet (for love will hope where reason despairs) the thought rushed on his mind, that it was possible she only encouraged Douglas's passion so far as might serve her mistress's interest, and that she was of too frank, noble, and candid a nature, to hold out to himself hopes which she meant not to fulfil. Lost in these various conjectures, he seated himself upon a bank of turf which commanded a view of the lake on the one side, and on the other of that front of the castle along which the Queen's apartments were situated. The sun had now for some time set, and the twilight of May was rapidly fading into a serene night. On the lake, the expanded water rose and fell, with the slightest and softest influence of a southern breeze, which scarcely dimpled the surface over which it passed. In the distance was still seen the dim outline of the island of Saint Serf, once visited by many a sandalled pilgrim, as the blessed spot trodden by a man of God--now neglected or violated, as the refuge of lazy priests, who had with justice been compelled to give place to the sheep and the heifers of a Protestant baron. As Roland gazed on the dark speck, amid the lighter blue of the waters which surrounded it, the mazes of polemical discussion again stretched themselves before the eye of the mind. Had these men justly suffered their exile as licentious drones, the robbers, at once, and disgrace, of the busy hive? or had the hand of avarice and rapine expelled from the temple, not the ribalds who polluted, but the faithful priests who served the shrine in honour and fidelity? The arguments of Henderson, in this contemplative hour, rose with double force before him; and could scarcely be parried by the appeal which the Abbot Ambrosius had made from his understanding to his feelings,--an appeal which he had felt more forcibly amid the bustle of stirring life, than now when his reflections were more undisturbed. It required an effort to divert his mind from this embarrassing topic; and he found that he best succeeded by turning his eyes to the front of the tower, watching where a twinkling light still streamed from the casement of Catherine Seyton's apartment, obscured by times for a moment as the shadow of the fair inhabitant passed betwixt the taper and the window. At length the light was removed or extinguished, and that object of speculation was also withdrawn from the eyes of the meditative lover. Dare I confess the fact, without injuring his character for ever as a hero of romance? These eyes gradually became heavy; speculative doubts on the subject of religious controversy, and anxious conjectures concerning the state of his mistress's affections, became confusedly blended together in his musings; the fatigues of a busy day prevailed over the harassing subjects of contemplation which occupied his mind, and he fell fast asleep. Sound were his slumbers, until they were suddenly dispelled by the iron tongue of the castle-bell, which sent its deep and sullen sounds wide over the bosom of the lake, and awakened the echoes of Bennarty, the hill which descends steeply on its southern bank. Roland started up, for this bell was always tolled at ten o'clock, as the signal for locking the castle gates, and placing the keys under the charge of the seneschal. He therefore hastened to the wicket by which the garden communicated with the building, and had the mortification, just as he reached it, to hear the bolt leave its sheath with a discordant crash, and enter the stone groove of the door-lintel. Hold, hold, cried the page, and let me in ere you lock the wicket. The voice of Dryfesdale replied from within, in his usual tone of embittered sullenness, The hour is passed, fair master--you like not the inside of these walls--even make it a complete holiday, and spend the night as well as the day out of bounds. Open the door, exclaimed the indignant page, or by Saint Giles I will make thy gold chain smoke for it! Make no alarm here, retorted the impenetrable Dryfesdale, but keep thy sinful oaths and silly threats for those that regard them--I do mine office, and carry the keys to the seneschal.--Adieu, my young master! the cool night air will advantage your hot blood. The steward was right in what he said; for the cooling breeze was very necessary to appease the feverish fit of anger which Roland experienced, nor did the remedy succeed for some time. At length, after some hasty turns made through the garden, exhausting his passion in vain vows of vengeance, Roland Graeme began to be sensible that his situation ought rather to be held as matter of laughter than of serious resentment. To one bred a sportsman, a night spent in the open air had in it little of hardship, and the poor malice of the steward seemed more worthy of his contempt than his anger. I would to God, he said, that the grim old man may always have contented himself with such sportive revenge. He often looks as he were capable of doing us a darker turn. Returning, therefore, to the turf-seat which he had formerly occupied, and which was partially sheltered by a trim fence of green holly, he drew his mantle around him, stretched himself at length on the verdant settle, and endeavoured to resume that sleep which the castle bell had interrupted to so little purpose. Sleep, like other earthly blessings, is niggard of its favours when most courted. The more Roland invoked her aid, the farther she fled from his eyelids. He had been completely awakened, first, by the sounds of the bell, and then by his own aroused vivacity of temper, and he found it difficult again to compose himself to slumber. At length, when his mind--was wearied out with a maze of unpleasing meditation, he succeeded in coaxing himself into a broken slumber. This was again dispelled by the voices of two persons who were walking in the garden, the sound of whose conversation, after mingling for some time in the page's dreams, at length succeeded in awaking him thoroughly. He raised himself from his reclining posture in the utmost astonishment, which the circumstance of hearing two persons at that late hour conversing on the outside of the watchfully guarded Castle of Lochloven, was so well calculated to excite. His first thought was of supernatural beings; his next, upon some attempt on the part of Queen Mary's friends and followers; his last was, that George of Douglas, possessed of the keys, and having the means of ingress and egress at pleasure, was availing himself of his office to hold a rendezvous with Catherine Seyton in the castle garden. He was confirmed in this opinion by the tone of the voice, which asked in a low whisper, whether all was ready? Chapter the Thirtieth. In some breasts passion lies conceal'd and silent, Like war's swart powder in a castle vault, Until occasion, like the linstock, lights it: Then comes at once the lightning--and the thunder, And distant echoes tell that all is rent asunder. OLD PLAY. Roland Graeme, availing himself of a breach in the holly screen, and of the assistance of the full moon, which was now arisen, had a perfect opportunity, himself unobserved, to reconnoitre the persons and the motions

men

How many times the word 'men' appears in the text?

you, reverend father, I am totally ignorant. My brother, answered the Abbot, you are wise, and ought to know-- I am not--I am not--I am not wise, replied the horticulturist, pettishly, and stopping his ears with his fingers-- I was never called wise but when men wanted to engage me in some action of notorious folly. But, my good brother, said the Abbot-- I am not good neither, said the peevish gardener; I am neither good nor wise--Had I been wise, you would not have been admitted here; and were I good, methinks I should send you elsewhere to hatch plots for destroying the quiet of the country. What signifies disputing about queen or king,--when men may sit at peace--_sub umbra vitis sui?_ and so would I do, after the precept of Holy Writ, were I, as you term me, wise or good. But such as I am, my neck is in the yoke, and you make me draw what weight you list.--Follow me, youngster. This reverend father, who makes in his jackman's dress nearly as reverend a figure as I myself, will agree with me in one thing at least, and that is, that you have been long enough here. Follow the good father, Roland, said the Abbot, and remember my words--a day is approaching that will try the temper of all true Scotsmen--may thy heart prove faithful as the steel of thy blade! The page bowed in silence, and they parted; the gardener, notwithstanding his advanced age, walking on before him very briskly, and muttering as he went, partly to himself, partly to his companion, after the manner of old men of weakened intellects-- When I was great, thus ran his maundering, and had my mule and my ambling palfrey at command, I warrant you I could have as well flown through the air as have walked at this pace. I had my gout and my rheumatics, and an hundred things besides, that hung fetters on my heels; and, now, thanks to Our Lady, and honest labour, I can walk with any good man of my age in the kingdom of Fife--Fy upon it, that experience should be so long in coming! As he was thus muttering, his eye fell upon the branch of a pear-tree which drooped down for want of support, and at once forgetting his haste, the old man stopped and set seriously about binding it up. Roland Graeme had both readiness, neatness of hand, and good nature in abundance; he immediately lent his aid, and in a minute or two the bough was supported, and tied up in a way perfectly satisfactory to the old man, who looked at it with great complaisance. They are bergamots, he said, and if you will come ashore in autumn, you shall taste of them--the like are not in Lochleven Castle--the garden there is a poor pin-fold, and the gardener, Hugh Houkham, hath little skill of his craft--so come ashore, Master Page, in autumn, when you would eat pears. But what am I thinking of--ere that time come, they may have given thee sour pears for plums. Take an old man's advice, youth, one who hath seen many days, and sat in higher places than thou canst hope for--bend thy sword into a pruning-hook, and make a dibble of thy dagger--thy days shall be the longer, and thy health the better for it,--and come to aid me in my garden, and I will teach thee the real French fashion of _imping_, which the Southron call graffing. Do this, and do it without loss of time, for there is a whirlwind coming over the land, and only those shall escape who lie too much beneath the storm to have their boughs broken by it. So saying, he dismissed Roland Graeme, through a different door from that by which he had entered, signed a cross, and pronounced a benedicite as they parted, and then, still muttering to himself, retired into the garden, and locked the door on the inside. Chapter the Twenty-Ninth. Pray God she prove not masculine ere long! KING HENRY VI. Dismissed from the old man's garden, Roland Graeme found that a grassy paddock, in which sauntered two cows, the property of the gardener, still separated him from the village. He paced through it, lost in meditation upon the words of the Abbot. Father Ambrosius had, with success enough, exerted over him that powerful influence which the guardians and instructors of our childhood possess over our more mature youth. And yet, when Roland looked back upon what the father had said, he could not but suspect that he had rather sought to evade entering into the controversy betwixt the churches, than to repel the objections and satisfy the doubts which the lectures of Henderson had excited. For this he had no time, said the page to himself, neither have I now calmness and learning sufficient to judge upon points of such magnitude. Besides, it were base to quit my faith while the wind of fortune sets against it, unless I were so placed, that my conversion, should it take place, were free as light from the imputation of self-interest. I was bred a Catholic--bred in the faith of Bruce and Wallace--I will hold that faith till time and reason shall convince me that it errs. I will serve this poor Queen as a subject should serve an imprisoned and wronged sovereign--they who placed me in her service have to blame themselves--who sent me hither, a gentleman trained in the paths of loyalty and honour, when they should have sought out some truckling, cogging, double-dealing knave, who would have been at once the observant page of the Queen, and the obsequious spy of her enemies. Since I must choose betwixt aiding and betraying her, I will decide as becomes her servant and her subject; but Catherine Seyton--Catherine Seyton, beloved by Douglas and holding me on or off as the intervals of her leisure or caprice will permit--how shall I deal with the coquette?--By heaven, when I next have an opportunity, she shall render me some reason for her conduct, or I will break with her for ever! As he formed this doughty resolution, he crossed the stile which led out of the little enclosure, and was almost immediately greeted by Dr. Luke Lundin. Ha! my most excellent young friend, said the Doctor, from whence come you?--but I note the place.--Yes, neighbour Blinkhoolie's garden is a pleasant rendezvous, and you are of the age when lads look after a bonny lass with one eye, and a dainty plum with another. But hey! you look subtriste and melancholic--I fear the maiden has proved cruel, or the plums unripe; and surely I think neighbour Blinkhoolie's damsons can scarcely have been well preserved throughout the winter--he spares the saccharine juice on his confects. But courage, man, there are more Kates in Kinross; and for the immature fruit, a glass of my double distilled _aqua mirabilis--probatum est_. The page darted an ireful glance at the facetious physician; but presently recollecting that the name Kate, which had provoked his displeasure, was probably but introduced for the sake of alliteration, he suppressed his wrath, and only asked if the wains had been heard of? Why, I have been seeking for you this hour, to tell you that the stuff is in your boat, and that the boat waits your pleasure. Auchtermuchty had only fallen into company with an idle knave like himself, and a stoup of aquavitae between them. Your boatmen lie on their oars, and there have already been made two wefts from the warder's turret to intimate that those in the castle are impatient for your return. Yet there is time for you to take a slight repast; and, as your friend and physician, I hold it unfit you should face the water-breeze with an empty stomach. Roland Graeme had nothing for it but to return, with such cheer as he might, to the place where his boat was moored on the beach, and resisted all offer of refreshment, although the Doctor promised that he should prelude the collation with a gentle appetizer--a decoction of herbs, gathered and distilled by himself. Indeed, as Roland had not forgotten the contents of his morning cup, it is possible that the recollection induced him to stand firm in his refusal of all food, to which such an unpalatable preface was the preliminary. As they passed towards the boat, (for the ceremonious politeness of the worthy Chamberlain would not permit the page to go thither without attendance,) Roland Graeme, amidst a group who seemed to be assembled around a party of wandering musicians, distinguished, as he thought, the dress of Catherine Seyton. He shook himself clear from his attendant, and at one spring was in the midst of the crowd, and at the side of the damsel. Catherine, he whispered, is it well for you to be still here?--will you not return to the castle? To the devil with your Catherines and your castles! answered the maiden, snappishly; have you not had time enough already to get rid of your follies? Begone! I desire not your farther company, and there will be danger in thrusting it upon me. Nay--but if there be danger, fairest Catherine, replied Roland; why will you not allow me to stay and share it with you? Intruding fool, said the maiden, the danger is all on thine own side--the risk in, in plain terms, that I strike thee on the mouth with the hilt of my dagger. So saying, she turned haughtily from him, and moved through the crowd, who gave way in some astonishment at the masculine activity with which she forced her way among them. As Roland, though much irritated, prepared to follow, he was grappled on the other side by Doctor Luke Lundin, who reminded him of the loaded boat, of the two wefts, or signals with the flag, which had been made from the tower, of the danger of the cold breeze to an empty stomach, and of the vanity of spending more time upon coy wenches and sour plums. Roland was thus, in a manner, dragged back to his boat, and obliged to launch her forth upon his return to Lochleven Castle. That little voyage was speedily accomplished, and the page was greeted at the landing-place by the severe and caustic welcome of old Dryfesdale. So, young gallant, you are come at last, after a delay of six hours, and after two signals from the castle? But, I warrant, some idle junketing hath occupied you too deeply to think of your service or your duty. Where is the note of the plate and household stuff?--Pray Heaven it hath not been diminished under the sleeveless care of so young a gad-about! Diminished under my care, Sir Steward! retorted the page angrily; say so in earnest, and by Heaven your gray hair shall hardly protect your saucy tongue! A truce with your swaggering, young esquire, returned the steward; we have bolts and dungeons for brawlers. Go to my lady, and swagger before her, if thou darest--she will give thee proper cause of offence, for she has waited for thee long and impatiently. And where then is the Lady of Lochleven? said the page; for I conceive it is of her thou speakest. Ay--of whom else? replied Dryfesdale; or who besides the Lady of Lochleven hath a right to command in this castle? The Lady of Lochleven is thy mistress, said Roland Graeme; but mine is the Queen of Scotland. The steward looked at him fixedly for a moment, with an air in which suspicion and dislike were ill concealed by an affectation of contempt. The bragging cock-chicken, he said, will betray himself by his rash crowing. I have marked thy altered manner in the chapel of late--ay, and your changing of glances at meal-time with a certain idle damsel, who, like thyself, laughs at all gravity and goodness. There is something about you, my master, which should be looked to. But, if you would know whether the Lady of Lochleven, or that other lady, hath a right to command thy service, thou wilt find them together in the Lady Mary's ante-room. Roland hastened thither, not unwilling to escape from the ill-natured penetration of the old man, and marvelling at the same time what peculiarity could have occasioned the Lady of Lochleven's being in the Queen's apartment at this time of the afternoon, so much contrary to her usual wont. His acuteness instantly penetrated the meaning. She wishes, he concluded, to see the meeting betwixt the Queen and me on my return, that she may form a guess whether there is any private intelligence or understanding betwixt us--I must be guarded. With this resolution he entered the parlour, where the Queen, seated in her chair, with the Lady Fleming leaning upon the back of it, had already kept the Lady of Lochleven standing in her presence for the space of nearly an hour, to the manifest increase of her very visible bad humour. Roland Graeme, on entering the apartment, made a deep obeisance to the Queen, and another to the Lady, and then stood still as if to await their farther question. Speaking almost together, the Lady Lochleven said, So, young man, you are returned at length? And then stopped indignantly short, while the Queen went on without regarding her-- Roland, you are welcome home to us--you have proved the true dove and not the raven--Yet I am sure I could have forgiven you, if, once dismissed, from this water-circled ark of ours, you had never again returned to us. I trust you have brought back an olive-branch, for our kind and worthy hostess has chafed herself much on account of your long absence, and we never needed more some symbol of peace and reconciliation. I grieve I should have been detained, madam, answered the page; but from the delay of the person intrusted with the matters for which I was sent, I did not receive them till late in the day. See you there now, said the Queen to the Lady Lochleven; we could not persuade you, our dearest hostess, that your household goods were in all safe keeping and surety. True it is, that we can excuse your anxiety, considering that these august apartments are so scantily furnished, that we have not been able to offer you even the relief of a stool during the long time you have afforded us the pleasure of your society. The will, madam, said the lady, the will to offer such accommodation was more wanting than the means. What! said the Queen, looking round, and affecting surprise, there are then stools in this apartment--one, two--no less than four, including the broken one--a royal garniture!--We observed them not--will it please your ladyship to sit? No, madam, I will soon relieve you of my presence, replied the Lady Lochleven; and while with you, my aged limbs can still better brook fatigue, than my mind stoop to accept of constrained courtesy. Nay, Lady of Lochleven, if you take it so deeply, said the Queen, rising and motioning to her own vacant chair, I would rather you assumed my seat--you are not the first of your family who has done so. The Lady of Lochleven curtsied a negative, but seemed with much difficulty to suppress the angry answer which rose to her lips. During this sharp conversation, the page's attention had been almost entirely occupied by the entrance of Catherine Seyton, who came from the inner apartment, in the usual dress in which she attended upon the Queen, and with nothing in her manner which marked either the hurry or confusion incident to a hasty change of disguise, or the conscious fear of detection in a perilous enterprise. Roland Graeme ventured to make her an obeisance as she entered, but she returned it with an air of the utmost indifference, which, in his opinion, was extremely inconsistent with the circumstances in which they stood towards each other.-- Surely, he thought, she cannot in reason expect to bully me out of the belief due to mine own eyes, as she tried to do concerning the apparition in the hostelry of Saint Michael's--I will try if I cannot make her feel that this will be but a vain task, and that confidence in me is the wiser and safer course to pursue. These thoughts had passed rapidly through his mind, when the Queen, having finished her altercation with the Lady of the castle, again addressed him-- What of the revels at Kinross, Roland Graeme? Methought they were gay, if I may judge from some faint sounds of mirth and distant music, which found their way so far as these grated windows, and died when they entered them, as all that is mirthful must--But thou lookest as sad as if thou hadst come from a conventicle of the Huguenots! And so perchance he hath, madam, replied the Lady of Lochleven, at whom this side-shaft was lanched. I trust, amid yonder idle fooleries, there wanted not some pouring forth of doctrine to a better purpose than that vain mirth, which, blazing and vanishing like the crackling of dry thorns, leaves to the fools who love it nothing but dust and ashes. Mary Fleming, said the Queen, turning round and drawing her mantle about her, I would that we had the chimney-grate supplied with a fagot or two of these same thorns which the Lady of Lochleven describes so well. Methinks the damp air from the lake, which stagnates in these vaulted rooms, renders them deadly cold. Your Grace's pleasure shall be obeyed, said the Lady of Lochleven; yet may I presume to remind you that we are now in summer? I thank you for the information, my good lady, said the Queen; for prisoners better learn their calender from the mouth of their jailor, than from any change they themselves feel in the seasons.--Once more, Roland Graeme, what of the revels? They were gay, madam, said the page, but of the usual sort, and little worth your Highness's ear. Oh, you know not, said the Queen, how very indulgent my ear has become to all that speaks of freedom and the pleasures of the free. Methinks I would rather have seen the gay villagers dance their ring round the Maypole, than have witnessed the most stately masques within the precincts of a palace. The absence of stone-wall--the sense that the green turf is under the foot which may tread it free and unrestrained, is worth all that art or splendour can add to more courtly revels. I trust, said the Lady Lochleven, addressing the page in her turn, there were amongst these follies none of the riots or disturbances to which they so naturally lead? Roland gave a slight glance to Catherine Seyton, as if to bespeak her attention, as he replied,-- I witnessed no offence, madam, worthy of marking--none indeed of any kind, save that a bold damsel made her hand somewhat too familiar with the cheek of a player-man, and ran some hazard of being ducked in the lake. As he uttered these words he cast a hasty glance at Catherine; but she sustained, with the utmost serenity of manner and countenance, the hint which he had deemed could not have been thrown out before her without exciting some fear and confusion. I will cumber your Grace no longer with my presence, said the Lady Lochleven, unless you have aught to command me. Nought, our good hostess, answered the Queen, unless it be to pray you, that on another occasion you deem it not needful to postpone your better employment to wait so long upon us. May it please you, added the Lady Lochleven, to command this your gentleman to attend us, that I may receive some account of these matters which have been sent hither for your Grace's use? We may not refuse what you are pleased to require, madam, answered the Queen. Go with the lady, Roland, if our commands be indeed necessary to thy doing so. We will hear to-morrow the history of thy Kinross pleasures. For this night we dismiss thy attendance. Roland Graeme went with the Lady of Lochleven, who failed not to ask him many questions concerning what had passed at the sports, to which he rendered such answers as were most likely to lull asleep any suspicions which she might entertain of his disposition to favour Queen Mary, taking especial care to avoid all allusion to the apparition of Magdalen Graeme, and of the Abbot Ambrosius. At length, after undergoing a long and somewhat close examination, he was dismissed with such expressions, as, coming from the reserved and stern Lady of Lochleven, might seem to express a degree of favour and countenance. His first care was to obtain some refreshment, which was more cheerfully afforded him by a good-natured pantler than by Dryfesdale, who was, on this occasion, much disposed to abide by the fashion of Pudding-burn House, where They who came not the first call. Gat no more meat till the next meal. When Roland Graeme had finished his repast, having his dismissal from the Queen for the evening, and being little inclined for such society as the castle afforded, he stole into the garden, in which he had permission to spend his leisure time, when it pleased him. In this place, the ingenuity of the contriver and disposer of the walks had exerted itself to make the most of little space, and by screens, both of stone ornamented with rude sculpture, and hedges of living green, had endeavoured to give as much intricacy and variety as the confined limits of the garden would admit. Here the young man walked sadly, considering the events of the day, and comparing what had dropped from the Abbot with what he had himself noticed of the demeanour of George Douglas. It must be so, was the painful but inevitable conclusion at which he arrived. It must be by his aid that she is thus enabled, like a phantom, to transport herself from place to place, and to appear at pleasure on the mainland or on the islet.--It must be so, he repeated once more; with him she holds a close, secret, and intimate correspondence, altogether inconsistent with the eye of favour which she has sometimes cast upon me, and destructive to the hopes which she must have known these glances have necessarily inspired. And yet (for love will hope where reason despairs) the thought rushed on his mind, that it was possible she only encouraged Douglas's passion so far as might serve her mistress's interest, and that she was of too frank, noble, and candid a nature, to hold out to himself hopes which she meant not to fulfil. Lost in these various conjectures, he seated himself upon a bank of turf which commanded a view of the lake on the one side, and on the other of that front of the castle along which the Queen's apartments were situated. The sun had now for some time set, and the twilight of May was rapidly fading into a serene night. On the lake, the expanded water rose and fell, with the slightest and softest influence of a southern breeze, which scarcely dimpled the surface over which it passed. In the distance was still seen the dim outline of the island of Saint Serf, once visited by many a sandalled pilgrim, as the blessed spot trodden by a man of God--now neglected or violated, as the refuge of lazy priests, who had with justice been compelled to give place to the sheep and the heifers of a Protestant baron. As Roland gazed on the dark speck, amid the lighter blue of the waters which surrounded it, the mazes of polemical discussion again stretched themselves before the eye of the mind. Had these men justly suffered their exile as licentious drones, the robbers, at once, and disgrace, of the busy hive? or had the hand of avarice and rapine expelled from the temple, not the ribalds who polluted, but the faithful priests who served the shrine in honour and fidelity? The arguments of Henderson, in this contemplative hour, rose with double force before him; and could scarcely be parried by the appeal which the Abbot Ambrosius had made from his understanding to his feelings,--an appeal which he had felt more forcibly amid the bustle of stirring life, than now when his reflections were more undisturbed. It required an effort to divert his mind from this embarrassing topic; and he found that he best succeeded by turning his eyes to the front of the tower, watching where a twinkling light still streamed from the casement of Catherine Seyton's apartment, obscured by times for a moment as the shadow of the fair inhabitant passed betwixt the taper and the window. At length the light was removed or extinguished, and that object of speculation was also withdrawn from the eyes of the meditative lover. Dare I confess the fact, without injuring his character for ever as a hero of romance? These eyes gradually became heavy; speculative doubts on the subject of religious controversy, and anxious conjectures concerning the state of his mistress's affections, became confusedly blended together in his musings; the fatigues of a busy day prevailed over the harassing subjects of contemplation which occupied his mind, and he fell fast asleep. Sound were his slumbers, until they were suddenly dispelled by the iron tongue of the castle-bell, which sent its deep and sullen sounds wide over the bosom of the lake, and awakened the echoes of Bennarty, the hill which descends steeply on its southern bank. Roland started up, for this bell was always tolled at ten o'clock, as the signal for locking the castle gates, and placing the keys under the charge of the seneschal. He therefore hastened to the wicket by which the garden communicated with the building, and had the mortification, just as he reached it, to hear the bolt leave its sheath with a discordant crash, and enter the stone groove of the door-lintel. Hold, hold, cried the page, and let me in ere you lock the wicket. The voice of Dryfesdale replied from within, in his usual tone of embittered sullenness, The hour is passed, fair master--you like not the inside of these walls--even make it a complete holiday, and spend the night as well as the day out of bounds. Open the door, exclaimed the indignant page, or by Saint Giles I will make thy gold chain smoke for it! Make no alarm here, retorted the impenetrable Dryfesdale, but keep thy sinful oaths and silly threats for those that regard them--I do mine office, and carry the keys to the seneschal.--Adieu, my young master! the cool night air will advantage your hot blood. The steward was right in what he said; for the cooling breeze was very necessary to appease the feverish fit of anger which Roland experienced, nor did the remedy succeed for some time. At length, after some hasty turns made through the garden, exhausting his passion in vain vows of vengeance, Roland Graeme began to be sensible that his situation ought rather to be held as matter of laughter than of serious resentment. To one bred a sportsman, a night spent in the open air had in it little of hardship, and the poor malice of the steward seemed more worthy of his contempt than his anger. I would to God, he said, that the grim old man may always have contented himself with such sportive revenge. He often looks as he were capable of doing us a darker turn. Returning, therefore, to the turf-seat which he had formerly occupied, and which was partially sheltered by a trim fence of green holly, he drew his mantle around him, stretched himself at length on the verdant settle, and endeavoured to resume that sleep which the castle bell had interrupted to so little purpose. Sleep, like other earthly blessings, is niggard of its favours when most courted. The more Roland invoked her aid, the farther she fled from his eyelids. He had been completely awakened, first, by the sounds of the bell, and then by his own aroused vivacity of temper, and he found it difficult again to compose himself to slumber. At length, when his mind--was wearied out with a maze of unpleasing meditation, he succeeded in coaxing himself into a broken slumber. This was again dispelled by the voices of two persons who were walking in the garden, the sound of whose conversation, after mingling for some time in the page's dreams, at length succeeded in awaking him thoroughly. He raised himself from his reclining posture in the utmost astonishment, which the circumstance of hearing two persons at that late hour conversing on the outside of the watchfully guarded Castle of Lochloven, was so well calculated to excite. His first thought was of supernatural beings; his next, upon some attempt on the part of Queen Mary's friends and followers; his last was, that George of Douglas, possessed of the keys, and having the means of ingress and egress at pleasure, was availing himself of his office to hold a rendezvous with Catherine Seyton in the castle garden. He was confirmed in this opinion by the tone of the voice, which asked in a low whisper, whether all was ready? Chapter the Thirtieth. In some breasts passion lies conceal'd and silent, Like war's swart powder in a castle vault, Until occasion, like the linstock, lights it: Then comes at once the lightning--and the thunder, And distant echoes tell that all is rent asunder. OLD PLAY. Roland Graeme, availing himself of a breach in the holly screen, and of the assistance of the full moon, which was now arisen, had a perfect opportunity, himself unobserved, to reconnoitre the persons and the motions

look

How many times the word 'look' appears in the text?

you, reverend father, I am totally ignorant. My brother, answered the Abbot, you are wise, and ought to know-- I am not--I am not--I am not wise, replied the horticulturist, pettishly, and stopping his ears with his fingers-- I was never called wise but when men wanted to engage me in some action of notorious folly. But, my good brother, said the Abbot-- I am not good neither, said the peevish gardener; I am neither good nor wise--Had I been wise, you would not have been admitted here; and were I good, methinks I should send you elsewhere to hatch plots for destroying the quiet of the country. What signifies disputing about queen or king,--when men may sit at peace--_sub umbra vitis sui?_ and so would I do, after the precept of Holy Writ, were I, as you term me, wise or good. But such as I am, my neck is in the yoke, and you make me draw what weight you list.--Follow me, youngster. This reverend father, who makes in his jackman's dress nearly as reverend a figure as I myself, will agree with me in one thing at least, and that is, that you have been long enough here. Follow the good father, Roland, said the Abbot, and remember my words--a day is approaching that will try the temper of all true Scotsmen--may thy heart prove faithful as the steel of thy blade! The page bowed in silence, and they parted; the gardener, notwithstanding his advanced age, walking on before him very briskly, and muttering as he went, partly to himself, partly to his companion, after the manner of old men of weakened intellects-- When I was great, thus ran his maundering, and had my mule and my ambling palfrey at command, I warrant you I could have as well flown through the air as have walked at this pace. I had my gout and my rheumatics, and an hundred things besides, that hung fetters on my heels; and, now, thanks to Our Lady, and honest labour, I can walk with any good man of my age in the kingdom of Fife--Fy upon it, that experience should be so long in coming! As he was thus muttering, his eye fell upon the branch of a pear-tree which drooped down for want of support, and at once forgetting his haste, the old man stopped and set seriously about binding it up. Roland Graeme had both readiness, neatness of hand, and good nature in abundance; he immediately lent his aid, and in a minute or two the bough was supported, and tied up in a way perfectly satisfactory to the old man, who looked at it with great complaisance. They are bergamots, he said, and if you will come ashore in autumn, you shall taste of them--the like are not in Lochleven Castle--the garden there is a poor pin-fold, and the gardener, Hugh Houkham, hath little skill of his craft--so come ashore, Master Page, in autumn, when you would eat pears. But what am I thinking of--ere that time come, they may have given thee sour pears for plums. Take an old man's advice, youth, one who hath seen many days, and sat in higher places than thou canst hope for--bend thy sword into a pruning-hook, and make a dibble of thy dagger--thy days shall be the longer, and thy health the better for it,--and come to aid me in my garden, and I will teach thee the real French fashion of _imping_, which the Southron call graffing. Do this, and do it without loss of time, for there is a whirlwind coming over the land, and only those shall escape who lie too much beneath the storm to have their boughs broken by it. So saying, he dismissed Roland Graeme, through a different door from that by which he had entered, signed a cross, and pronounced a benedicite as they parted, and then, still muttering to himself, retired into the garden, and locked the door on the inside. Chapter the Twenty-Ninth. Pray God she prove not masculine ere long! KING HENRY VI. Dismissed from the old man's garden, Roland Graeme found that a grassy paddock, in which sauntered two cows, the property of the gardener, still separated him from the village. He paced through it, lost in meditation upon the words of the Abbot. Father Ambrosius had, with success enough, exerted over him that powerful influence which the guardians and instructors of our childhood possess over our more mature youth. And yet, when Roland looked back upon what the father had said, he could not but suspect that he had rather sought to evade entering into the controversy betwixt the churches, than to repel the objections and satisfy the doubts which the lectures of Henderson had excited. For this he had no time, said the page to himself, neither have I now calmness and learning sufficient to judge upon points of such magnitude. Besides, it were base to quit my faith while the wind of fortune sets against it, unless I were so placed, that my conversion, should it take place, were free as light from the imputation of self-interest. I was bred a Catholic--bred in the faith of Bruce and Wallace--I will hold that faith till time and reason shall convince me that it errs. I will serve this poor Queen as a subject should serve an imprisoned and wronged sovereign--they who placed me in her service have to blame themselves--who sent me hither, a gentleman trained in the paths of loyalty and honour, when they should have sought out some truckling, cogging, double-dealing knave, who would have been at once the observant page of the Queen, and the obsequious spy of her enemies. Since I must choose betwixt aiding and betraying her, I will decide as becomes her servant and her subject; but Catherine Seyton--Catherine Seyton, beloved by Douglas and holding me on or off as the intervals of her leisure or caprice will permit--how shall I deal with the coquette?--By heaven, when I next have an opportunity, she shall render me some reason for her conduct, or I will break with her for ever! As he formed this doughty resolution, he crossed the stile which led out of the little enclosure, and was almost immediately greeted by Dr. Luke Lundin. Ha! my most excellent young friend, said the Doctor, from whence come you?--but I note the place.--Yes, neighbour Blinkhoolie's garden is a pleasant rendezvous, and you are of the age when lads look after a bonny lass with one eye, and a dainty plum with another. But hey! you look subtriste and melancholic--I fear the maiden has proved cruel, or the plums unripe; and surely I think neighbour Blinkhoolie's damsons can scarcely have been well preserved throughout the winter--he spares the saccharine juice on his confects. But courage, man, there are more Kates in Kinross; and for the immature fruit, a glass of my double distilled _aqua mirabilis--probatum est_. The page darted an ireful glance at the facetious physician; but presently recollecting that the name Kate, which had provoked his displeasure, was probably but introduced for the sake of alliteration, he suppressed his wrath, and only asked if the wains had been heard of? Why, I have been seeking for you this hour, to tell you that the stuff is in your boat, and that the boat waits your pleasure. Auchtermuchty had only fallen into company with an idle knave like himself, and a stoup of aquavitae between them. Your boatmen lie on their oars, and there have already been made two wefts from the warder's turret to intimate that those in the castle are impatient for your return. Yet there is time for you to take a slight repast; and, as your friend and physician, I hold it unfit you should face the water-breeze with an empty stomach. Roland Graeme had nothing for it but to return, with such cheer as he might, to the place where his boat was moored on the beach, and resisted all offer of refreshment, although the Doctor promised that he should prelude the collation with a gentle appetizer--a decoction of herbs, gathered and distilled by himself. Indeed, as Roland had not forgotten the contents of his morning cup, it is possible that the recollection induced him to stand firm in his refusal of all food, to which such an unpalatable preface was the preliminary. As they passed towards the boat, (for the ceremonious politeness of the worthy Chamberlain would not permit the page to go thither without attendance,) Roland Graeme, amidst a group who seemed to be assembled around a party of wandering musicians, distinguished, as he thought, the dress of Catherine Seyton. He shook himself clear from his attendant, and at one spring was in the midst of the crowd, and at the side of the damsel. Catherine, he whispered, is it well for you to be still here?--will you not return to the castle? To the devil with your Catherines and your castles! answered the maiden, snappishly; have you not had time enough already to get rid of your follies? Begone! I desire not your farther company, and there will be danger in thrusting it upon me. Nay--but if there be danger, fairest Catherine, replied Roland; why will you not allow me to stay and share it with you? Intruding fool, said the maiden, the danger is all on thine own side--the risk in, in plain terms, that I strike thee on the mouth with the hilt of my dagger. So saying, she turned haughtily from him, and moved through the crowd, who gave way in some astonishment at the masculine activity with which she forced her way among them. As Roland, though much irritated, prepared to follow, he was grappled on the other side by Doctor Luke Lundin, who reminded him of the loaded boat, of the two wefts, or signals with the flag, which had been made from the tower, of the danger of the cold breeze to an empty stomach, and of the vanity of spending more time upon coy wenches and sour plums. Roland was thus, in a manner, dragged back to his boat, and obliged to launch her forth upon his return to Lochleven Castle. That little voyage was speedily accomplished, and the page was greeted at the landing-place by the severe and caustic welcome of old Dryfesdale. So, young gallant, you are come at last, after a delay of six hours, and after two signals from the castle? But, I warrant, some idle junketing hath occupied you too deeply to think of your service or your duty. Where is the note of the plate and household stuff?--Pray Heaven it hath not been diminished under the sleeveless care of so young a gad-about! Diminished under my care, Sir Steward! retorted the page angrily; say so in earnest, and by Heaven your gray hair shall hardly protect your saucy tongue! A truce with your swaggering, young esquire, returned the steward; we have bolts and dungeons for brawlers. Go to my lady, and swagger before her, if thou darest--she will give thee proper cause of offence, for she has waited for thee long and impatiently. And where then is the Lady of Lochleven? said the page; for I conceive it is of her thou speakest. Ay--of whom else? replied Dryfesdale; or who besides the Lady of Lochleven hath a right to command in this castle? The Lady of Lochleven is thy mistress, said Roland Graeme; but mine is the Queen of Scotland. The steward looked at him fixedly for a moment, with an air in which suspicion and dislike were ill concealed by an affectation of contempt. The bragging cock-chicken, he said, will betray himself by his rash crowing. I have marked thy altered manner in the chapel of late--ay, and your changing of glances at meal-time with a certain idle damsel, who, like thyself, laughs at all gravity and goodness. There is something about you, my master, which should be looked to. But, if you would know whether the Lady of Lochleven, or that other lady, hath a right to command thy service, thou wilt find them together in the Lady Mary's ante-room. Roland hastened thither, not unwilling to escape from the ill-natured penetration of the old man, and marvelling at the same time what peculiarity could have occasioned the Lady of Lochleven's being in the Queen's apartment at this time of the afternoon, so much contrary to her usual wont. His acuteness instantly penetrated the meaning. She wishes, he concluded, to see the meeting betwixt the Queen and me on my return, that she may form a guess whether there is any private intelligence or understanding betwixt us--I must be guarded. With this resolution he entered the parlour, where the Queen, seated in her chair, with the Lady Fleming leaning upon the back of it, had already kept the Lady of Lochleven standing in her presence for the space of nearly an hour, to the manifest increase of her very visible bad humour. Roland Graeme, on entering the apartment, made a deep obeisance to the Queen, and another to the Lady, and then stood still as if to await their farther question. Speaking almost together, the Lady Lochleven said, So, young man, you are returned at length? And then stopped indignantly short, while the Queen went on without regarding her-- Roland, you are welcome home to us--you have proved the true dove and not the raven--Yet I am sure I could have forgiven you, if, once dismissed, from this water-circled ark of ours, you had never again returned to us. I trust you have brought back an olive-branch, for our kind and worthy hostess has chafed herself much on account of your long absence, and we never needed more some symbol of peace and reconciliation. I grieve I should have been detained, madam, answered the page; but from the delay of the person intrusted with the matters for which I was sent, I did not receive them till late in the day. See you there now, said the Queen to the Lady Lochleven; we could not persuade you, our dearest hostess, that your household goods were in all safe keeping and surety. True it is, that we can excuse your anxiety, considering that these august apartments are so scantily furnished, that we have not been able to offer you even the relief of a stool during the long time you have afforded us the pleasure of your society. The will, madam, said the lady, the will to offer such accommodation was more wanting than the means. What! said the Queen, looking round, and affecting surprise, there are then stools in this apartment--one, two--no less than four, including the broken one--a royal garniture!--We observed them not--will it please your ladyship to sit? No, madam, I will soon relieve you of my presence, replied the Lady Lochleven; and while with you, my aged limbs can still better brook fatigue, than my mind stoop to accept of constrained courtesy. Nay, Lady of Lochleven, if you take it so deeply, said the Queen, rising and motioning to her own vacant chair, I would rather you assumed my seat--you are not the first of your family who has done so. The Lady of Lochleven curtsied a negative, but seemed with much difficulty to suppress the angry answer which rose to her lips. During this sharp conversation, the page's attention had been almost entirely occupied by the entrance of Catherine Seyton, who came from the inner apartment, in the usual dress in which she attended upon the Queen, and with nothing in her manner which marked either the hurry or confusion incident to a hasty change of disguise, or the conscious fear of detection in a perilous enterprise. Roland Graeme ventured to make her an obeisance as she entered, but she returned it with an air of the utmost indifference, which, in his opinion, was extremely inconsistent with the circumstances in which they stood towards each other.-- Surely, he thought, she cannot in reason expect to bully me out of the belief due to mine own eyes, as she tried to do concerning the apparition in the hostelry of Saint Michael's--I will try if I cannot make her feel that this will be but a vain task, and that confidence in me is the wiser and safer course to pursue. These thoughts had passed rapidly through his mind, when the Queen, having finished her altercation with the Lady of the castle, again addressed him-- What of the revels at Kinross, Roland Graeme? Methought they were gay, if I may judge from some faint sounds of mirth and distant music, which found their way so far as these grated windows, and died when they entered them, as all that is mirthful must--But thou lookest as sad as if thou hadst come from a conventicle of the Huguenots! And so perchance he hath, madam, replied the Lady of Lochleven, at whom this side-shaft was lanched. I trust, amid yonder idle fooleries, there wanted not some pouring forth of doctrine to a better purpose than that vain mirth, which, blazing and vanishing like the crackling of dry thorns, leaves to the fools who love it nothing but dust and ashes. Mary Fleming, said the Queen, turning round and drawing her mantle about her, I would that we had the chimney-grate supplied with a fagot or two of these same thorns which the Lady of Lochleven describes so well. Methinks the damp air from the lake, which stagnates in these vaulted rooms, renders them deadly cold. Your Grace's pleasure shall be obeyed, said the Lady of Lochleven; yet may I presume to remind you that we are now in summer? I thank you for the information, my good lady, said the Queen; for prisoners better learn their calender from the mouth of their jailor, than from any change they themselves feel in the seasons.--Once more, Roland Graeme, what of the revels? They were gay, madam, said the page, but of the usual sort, and little worth your Highness's ear. Oh, you know not, said the Queen, how very indulgent my ear has become to all that speaks of freedom and the pleasures of the free. Methinks I would rather have seen the gay villagers dance their ring round the Maypole, than have witnessed the most stately masques within the precincts of a palace. The absence of stone-wall--the sense that the green turf is under the foot which may tread it free and unrestrained, is worth all that art or splendour can add to more courtly revels. I trust, said the Lady Lochleven, addressing the page in her turn, there were amongst these follies none of the riots or disturbances to which they so naturally lead? Roland gave a slight glance to Catherine Seyton, as if to bespeak her attention, as he replied,-- I witnessed no offence, madam, worthy of marking--none indeed of any kind, save that a bold damsel made her hand somewhat too familiar with the cheek of a player-man, and ran some hazard of being ducked in the lake. As he uttered these words he cast a hasty glance at Catherine; but she sustained, with the utmost serenity of manner and countenance, the hint which he had deemed could not have been thrown out before her without exciting some fear and confusion. I will cumber your Grace no longer with my presence, said the Lady Lochleven, unless you have aught to command me. Nought, our good hostess, answered the Queen, unless it be to pray you, that on another occasion you deem it not needful to postpone your better employment to wait so long upon us. May it please you, added the Lady Lochleven, to command this your gentleman to attend us, that I may receive some account of these matters which have been sent hither for your Grace's use? We may not refuse what you are pleased to require, madam, answered the Queen. Go with the lady, Roland, if our commands be indeed necessary to thy doing so. We will hear to-morrow the history of thy Kinross pleasures. For this night we dismiss thy attendance. Roland Graeme went with the Lady of Lochleven, who failed not to ask him many questions concerning what had passed at the sports, to which he rendered such answers as were most likely to lull asleep any suspicions which she might entertain of his disposition to favour Queen Mary, taking especial care to avoid all allusion to the apparition of Magdalen Graeme, and of the Abbot Ambrosius. At length, after undergoing a long and somewhat close examination, he was dismissed with such expressions, as, coming from the reserved and stern Lady of Lochleven, might seem to express a degree of favour and countenance. His first care was to obtain some refreshment, which was more cheerfully afforded him by a good-natured pantler than by Dryfesdale, who was, on this occasion, much disposed to abide by the fashion of Pudding-burn House, where They who came not the first call. Gat no more meat till the next meal. When Roland Graeme had finished his repast, having his dismissal from the Queen for the evening, and being little inclined for such society as the castle afforded, he stole into the garden, in which he had permission to spend his leisure time, when it pleased him. In this place, the ingenuity of the contriver and disposer of the walks had exerted itself to make the most of little space, and by screens, both of stone ornamented with rude sculpture, and hedges of living green, had endeavoured to give as much intricacy and variety as the confined limits of the garden would admit. Here the young man walked sadly, considering the events of the day, and comparing what had dropped from the Abbot with what he had himself noticed of the demeanour of George Douglas. It must be so, was the painful but inevitable conclusion at which he arrived. It must be by his aid that she is thus enabled, like a phantom, to transport herself from place to place, and to appear at pleasure on the mainland or on the islet.--It must be so, he repeated once more; with him she holds a close, secret, and intimate correspondence, altogether inconsistent with the eye of favour which she has sometimes cast upon me, and destructive to the hopes which she must have known these glances have necessarily inspired. And yet (for love will hope where reason despairs) the thought rushed on his mind, that it was possible she only encouraged Douglas's passion so far as might serve her mistress's interest, and that she was of too frank, noble, and candid a nature, to hold out to himself hopes which she meant not to fulfil. Lost in these various conjectures, he seated himself upon a bank of turf which commanded a view of the lake on the one side, and on the other of that front of the castle along which the Queen's apartments were situated. The sun had now for some time set, and the twilight of May was rapidly fading into a serene night. On the lake, the expanded water rose and fell, with the slightest and softest influence of a southern breeze, which scarcely dimpled the surface over which it passed. In the distance was still seen the dim outline of the island of Saint Serf, once visited by many a sandalled pilgrim, as the blessed spot trodden by a man of God--now neglected or violated, as the refuge of lazy priests, who had with justice been compelled to give place to the sheep and the heifers of a Protestant baron. As Roland gazed on the dark speck, amid the lighter blue of the waters which surrounded it, the mazes of polemical discussion again stretched themselves before the eye of the mind. Had these men justly suffered their exile as licentious drones, the robbers, at once, and disgrace, of the busy hive? or had the hand of avarice and rapine expelled from the temple, not the ribalds who polluted, but the faithful priests who served the shrine in honour and fidelity? The arguments of Henderson, in this contemplative hour, rose with double force before him; and could scarcely be parried by the appeal which the Abbot Ambrosius had made from his understanding to his feelings,--an appeal which he had felt more forcibly amid the bustle of stirring life, than now when his reflections were more undisturbed. It required an effort to divert his mind from this embarrassing topic; and he found that he best succeeded by turning his eyes to the front of the tower, watching where a twinkling light still streamed from the casement of Catherine Seyton's apartment, obscured by times for a moment as the shadow of the fair inhabitant passed betwixt the taper and the window. At length the light was removed or extinguished, and that object of speculation was also withdrawn from the eyes of the meditative lover. Dare I confess the fact, without injuring his character for ever as a hero of romance? These eyes gradually became heavy; speculative doubts on the subject of religious controversy, and anxious conjectures concerning the state of his mistress's affections, became confusedly blended together in his musings; the fatigues of a busy day prevailed over the harassing subjects of contemplation which occupied his mind, and he fell fast asleep. Sound were his slumbers, until they were suddenly dispelled by the iron tongue of the castle-bell, which sent its deep and sullen sounds wide over the bosom of the lake, and awakened the echoes of Bennarty, the hill which descends steeply on its southern bank. Roland started up, for this bell was always tolled at ten o'clock, as the signal for locking the castle gates, and placing the keys under the charge of the seneschal. He therefore hastened to the wicket by which the garden communicated with the building, and had the mortification, just as he reached it, to hear the bolt leave its sheath with a discordant crash, and enter the stone groove of the door-lintel. Hold, hold, cried the page, and let me in ere you lock the wicket. The voice of Dryfesdale replied from within, in his usual tone of embittered sullenness, The hour is passed, fair master--you like not the inside of these walls--even make it a complete holiday, and spend the night as well as the day out of bounds. Open the door, exclaimed the indignant page, or by Saint Giles I will make thy gold chain smoke for it! Make no alarm here, retorted the impenetrable Dryfesdale, but keep thy sinful oaths and silly threats for those that regard them--I do mine office, and carry the keys to the seneschal.--Adieu, my young master! the cool night air will advantage your hot blood. The steward was right in what he said; for the cooling breeze was very necessary to appease the feverish fit of anger which Roland experienced, nor did the remedy succeed for some time. At length, after some hasty turns made through the garden, exhausting his passion in vain vows of vengeance, Roland Graeme began to be sensible that his situation ought rather to be held as matter of laughter than of serious resentment. To one bred a sportsman, a night spent in the open air had in it little of hardship, and the poor malice of the steward seemed more worthy of his contempt than his anger. I would to God, he said, that the grim old man may always have contented himself with such sportive revenge. He often looks as he were capable of doing us a darker turn. Returning, therefore, to the turf-seat which he had formerly occupied, and which was partially sheltered by a trim fence of green holly, he drew his mantle around him, stretched himself at length on the verdant settle, and endeavoured to resume that sleep which the castle bell had interrupted to so little purpose. Sleep, like other earthly blessings, is niggard of its favours when most courted. The more Roland invoked her aid, the farther she fled from his eyelids. He had been completely awakened, first, by the sounds of the bell, and then by his own aroused vivacity of temper, and he found it difficult again to compose himself to slumber. At length, when his mind--was wearied out with a maze of unpleasing meditation, he succeeded in coaxing himself into a broken slumber. This was again dispelled by the voices of two persons who were walking in the garden, the sound of whose conversation, after mingling for some time in the page's dreams, at length succeeded in awaking him thoroughly. He raised himself from his reclining posture in the utmost astonishment, which the circumstance of hearing two persons at that late hour conversing on the outside of the watchfully guarded Castle of Lochloven, was so well calculated to excite. His first thought was of supernatural beings; his next, upon some attempt on the part of Queen Mary's friends and followers; his last was, that George of Douglas, possessed of the keys, and having the means of ingress and egress at pleasure, was availing himself of his office to hold a rendezvous with Catherine Seyton in the castle garden. He was confirmed in this opinion by the tone of the voice, which asked in a low whisper, whether all was ready? Chapter the Thirtieth. In some breasts passion lies conceal'd and silent, Like war's swart powder in a castle vault, Until occasion, like the linstock, lights it: Then comes at once the lightning--and the thunder, And distant echoes tell that all is rent asunder. OLD PLAY. Roland Graeme, availing himself of a breach in the holly screen, and of the assistance of the full moon, which was now arisen, had a perfect opportunity, himself unobserved, to reconnoitre the persons and the motions

besides

How many times the word 'besides' appears in the text?

you, reverend father, I am totally ignorant. My brother, answered the Abbot, you are wise, and ought to know-- I am not--I am not--I am not wise, replied the horticulturist, pettishly, and stopping his ears with his fingers-- I was never called wise but when men wanted to engage me in some action of notorious folly. But, my good brother, said the Abbot-- I am not good neither, said the peevish gardener; I am neither good nor wise--Had I been wise, you would not have been admitted here; and were I good, methinks I should send you elsewhere to hatch plots for destroying the quiet of the country. What signifies disputing about queen or king,--when men may sit at peace--_sub umbra vitis sui?_ and so would I do, after the precept of Holy Writ, were I, as you term me, wise or good. But such as I am, my neck is in the yoke, and you make me draw what weight you list.--Follow me, youngster. This reverend father, who makes in his jackman's dress nearly as reverend a figure as I myself, will agree with me in one thing at least, and that is, that you have been long enough here. Follow the good father, Roland, said the Abbot, and remember my words--a day is approaching that will try the temper of all true Scotsmen--may thy heart prove faithful as the steel of thy blade! The page bowed in silence, and they parted; the gardener, notwithstanding his advanced age, walking on before him very briskly, and muttering as he went, partly to himself, partly to his companion, after the manner of old men of weakened intellects-- When I was great, thus ran his maundering, and had my mule and my ambling palfrey at command, I warrant you I could have as well flown through the air as have walked at this pace. I had my gout and my rheumatics, and an hundred things besides, that hung fetters on my heels; and, now, thanks to Our Lady, and honest labour, I can walk with any good man of my age in the kingdom of Fife--Fy upon it, that experience should be so long in coming! As he was thus muttering, his eye fell upon the branch of a pear-tree which drooped down for want of support, and at once forgetting his haste, the old man stopped and set seriously about binding it up. Roland Graeme had both readiness, neatness of hand, and good nature in abundance; he immediately lent his aid, and in a minute or two the bough was supported, and tied up in a way perfectly satisfactory to the old man, who looked at it with great complaisance. They are bergamots, he said, and if you will come ashore in autumn, you shall taste of them--the like are not in Lochleven Castle--the garden there is a poor pin-fold, and the gardener, Hugh Houkham, hath little skill of his craft--so come ashore, Master Page, in autumn, when you would eat pears. But what am I thinking of--ere that time come, they may have given thee sour pears for plums. Take an old man's advice, youth, one who hath seen many days, and sat in higher places than thou canst hope for--bend thy sword into a pruning-hook, and make a dibble of thy dagger--thy days shall be the longer, and thy health the better for it,--and come to aid me in my garden, and I will teach thee the real French fashion of _imping_, which the Southron call graffing. Do this, and do it without loss of time, for there is a whirlwind coming over the land, and only those shall escape who lie too much beneath the storm to have their boughs broken by it. So saying, he dismissed Roland Graeme, through a different door from that by which he had entered, signed a cross, and pronounced a benedicite as they parted, and then, still muttering to himself, retired into the garden, and locked the door on the inside. Chapter the Twenty-Ninth. Pray God she prove not masculine ere long! KING HENRY VI. Dismissed from the old man's garden, Roland Graeme found that a grassy paddock, in which sauntered two cows, the property of the gardener, still separated him from the village. He paced through it, lost in meditation upon the words of the Abbot. Father Ambrosius had, with success enough, exerted over him that powerful influence which the guardians and instructors of our childhood possess over our more mature youth. And yet, when Roland looked back upon what the father had said, he could not but suspect that he had rather sought to evade entering into the controversy betwixt the churches, than to repel the objections and satisfy the doubts which the lectures of Henderson had excited. For this he had no time, said the page to himself, neither have I now calmness and learning sufficient to judge upon points of such magnitude. Besides, it were base to quit my faith while the wind of fortune sets against it, unless I were so placed, that my conversion, should it take place, were free as light from the imputation of self-interest. I was bred a Catholic--bred in the faith of Bruce and Wallace--I will hold that faith till time and reason shall convince me that it errs. I will serve this poor Queen as a subject should serve an imprisoned and wronged sovereign--they who placed me in her service have to blame themselves--who sent me hither, a gentleman trained in the paths of loyalty and honour, when they should have sought out some truckling, cogging, double-dealing knave, who would have been at once the observant page of the Queen, and the obsequious spy of her enemies. Since I must choose betwixt aiding and betraying her, I will decide as becomes her servant and her subject; but Catherine Seyton--Catherine Seyton, beloved by Douglas and holding me on or off as the intervals of her leisure or caprice will permit--how shall I deal with the coquette?--By heaven, when I next have an opportunity, she shall render me some reason for her conduct, or I will break with her for ever! As he formed this doughty resolution, he crossed the stile which led out of the little enclosure, and was almost immediately greeted by Dr. Luke Lundin. Ha! my most excellent young friend, said the Doctor, from whence come you?--but I note the place.--Yes, neighbour Blinkhoolie's garden is a pleasant rendezvous, and you are of the age when lads look after a bonny lass with one eye, and a dainty plum with another. But hey! you look subtriste and melancholic--I fear the maiden has proved cruel, or the plums unripe; and surely I think neighbour Blinkhoolie's damsons can scarcely have been well preserved throughout the winter--he spares the saccharine juice on his confects. But courage, man, there are more Kates in Kinross; and for the immature fruit, a glass of my double distilled _aqua mirabilis--probatum est_. The page darted an ireful glance at the facetious physician; but presently recollecting that the name Kate, which had provoked his displeasure, was probably but introduced for the sake of alliteration, he suppressed his wrath, and only asked if the wains had been heard of? Why, I have been seeking for you this hour, to tell you that the stuff is in your boat, and that the boat waits your pleasure. Auchtermuchty had only fallen into company with an idle knave like himself, and a stoup of aquavitae between them. Your boatmen lie on their oars, and there have already been made two wefts from the warder's turret to intimate that those in the castle are impatient for your return. Yet there is time for you to take a slight repast; and, as your friend and physician, I hold it unfit you should face the water-breeze with an empty stomach. Roland Graeme had nothing for it but to return, with such cheer as he might, to the place where his boat was moored on the beach, and resisted all offer of refreshment, although the Doctor promised that he should prelude the collation with a gentle appetizer--a decoction of herbs, gathered and distilled by himself. Indeed, as Roland had not forgotten the contents of his morning cup, it is possible that the recollection induced him to stand firm in his refusal of all food, to which such an unpalatable preface was the preliminary. As they passed towards the boat, (for the ceremonious politeness of the worthy Chamberlain would not permit the page to go thither without attendance,) Roland Graeme, amidst a group who seemed to be assembled around a party of wandering musicians, distinguished, as he thought, the dress of Catherine Seyton. He shook himself clear from his attendant, and at one spring was in the midst of the crowd, and at the side of the damsel. Catherine, he whispered, is it well for you to be still here?--will you not return to the castle? To the devil with your Catherines and your castles! answered the maiden, snappishly; have you not had time enough already to get rid of your follies? Begone! I desire not your farther company, and there will be danger in thrusting it upon me. Nay--but if there be danger, fairest Catherine, replied Roland; why will you not allow me to stay and share it with you? Intruding fool, said the maiden, the danger is all on thine own side--the risk in, in plain terms, that I strike thee on the mouth with the hilt of my dagger. So saying, she turned haughtily from him, and moved through the crowd, who gave way in some astonishment at the masculine activity with which she forced her way among them. As Roland, though much irritated, prepared to follow, he was grappled on the other side by Doctor Luke Lundin, who reminded him of the loaded boat, of the two wefts, or signals with the flag, which had been made from the tower, of the danger of the cold breeze to an empty stomach, and of the vanity of spending more time upon coy wenches and sour plums. Roland was thus, in a manner, dragged back to his boat, and obliged to launch her forth upon his return to Lochleven Castle. That little voyage was speedily accomplished, and the page was greeted at the landing-place by the severe and caustic welcome of old Dryfesdale. So, young gallant, you are come at last, after a delay of six hours, and after two signals from the castle? But, I warrant, some idle junketing hath occupied you too deeply to think of your service or your duty. Where is the note of the plate and household stuff?--Pray Heaven it hath not been diminished under the sleeveless care of so young a gad-about! Diminished under my care, Sir Steward! retorted the page angrily; say so in earnest, and by Heaven your gray hair shall hardly protect your saucy tongue! A truce with your swaggering, young esquire, returned the steward; we have bolts and dungeons for brawlers. Go to my lady, and swagger before her, if thou darest--she will give thee proper cause of offence, for she has waited for thee long and impatiently. And where then is the Lady of Lochleven? said the page; for I conceive it is of her thou speakest. Ay--of whom else? replied Dryfesdale; or who besides the Lady of Lochleven hath a right to command in this castle? The Lady of Lochleven is thy mistress, said Roland Graeme; but mine is the Queen of Scotland. The steward looked at him fixedly for a moment, with an air in which suspicion and dislike were ill concealed by an affectation of contempt. The bragging cock-chicken, he said, will betray himself by his rash crowing. I have marked thy altered manner in the chapel of late--ay, and your changing of glances at meal-time with a certain idle damsel, who, like thyself, laughs at all gravity and goodness. There is something about you, my master, which should be looked to. But, if you would know whether the Lady of Lochleven, or that other lady, hath a right to command thy service, thou wilt find them together in the Lady Mary's ante-room. Roland hastened thither, not unwilling to escape from the ill-natured penetration of the old man, and marvelling at the same time what peculiarity could have occasioned the Lady of Lochleven's being in the Queen's apartment at this time of the afternoon, so much contrary to her usual wont. His acuteness instantly penetrated the meaning. She wishes, he concluded, to see the meeting betwixt the Queen and me on my return, that she may form a guess whether there is any private intelligence or understanding betwixt us--I must be guarded. With this resolution he entered the parlour, where the Queen, seated in her chair, with the Lady Fleming leaning upon the back of it, had already kept the Lady of Lochleven standing in her presence for the space of nearly an hour, to the manifest increase of her very visible bad humour. Roland Graeme, on entering the apartment, made a deep obeisance to the Queen, and another to the Lady, and then stood still as if to await their farther question. Speaking almost together, the Lady Lochleven said, So, young man, you are returned at length? And then stopped indignantly short, while the Queen went on without regarding her-- Roland, you are welcome home to us--you have proved the true dove and not the raven--Yet I am sure I could have forgiven you, if, once dismissed, from this water-circled ark of ours, you had never again returned to us. I trust you have brought back an olive-branch, for our kind and worthy hostess has chafed herself much on account of your long absence, and we never needed more some symbol of peace and reconciliation. I grieve I should have been detained, madam, answered the page; but from the delay of the person intrusted with the matters for which I was sent, I did not receive them till late in the day. See you there now, said the Queen to the Lady Lochleven; we could not persuade you, our dearest hostess, that your household goods were in all safe keeping and surety. True it is, that we can excuse your anxiety, considering that these august apartments are so scantily furnished, that we have not been able to offer you even the relief of a stool during the long time you have afforded us the pleasure of your society. The will, madam, said the lady, the will to offer such accommodation was more wanting than the means. What! said the Queen, looking round, and affecting surprise, there are then stools in this apartment--one, two--no less than four, including the broken one--a royal garniture!--We observed them not--will it please your ladyship to sit? No, madam, I will soon relieve you of my presence, replied the Lady Lochleven; and while with you, my aged limbs can still better brook fatigue, than my mind stoop to accept of constrained courtesy. Nay, Lady of Lochleven, if you take it so deeply, said the Queen, rising and motioning to her own vacant chair, I would rather you assumed my seat--you are not the first of your family who has done so. The Lady of Lochleven curtsied a negative, but seemed with much difficulty to suppress the angry answer which rose to her lips. During this sharp conversation, the page's attention had been almost entirely occupied by the entrance of Catherine Seyton, who came from the inner apartment, in the usual dress in which she attended upon the Queen, and with nothing in her manner which marked either the hurry or confusion incident to a hasty change of disguise, or the conscious fear of detection in a perilous enterprise. Roland Graeme ventured to make her an obeisance as she entered, but she returned it with an air of the utmost indifference, which, in his opinion, was extremely inconsistent with the circumstances in which they stood towards each other.-- Surely, he thought, she cannot in reason expect to bully me out of the belief due to mine own eyes, as she tried to do concerning the apparition in the hostelry of Saint Michael's--I will try if I cannot make her feel that this will be but a vain task, and that confidence in me is the wiser and safer course to pursue. These thoughts had passed rapidly through his mind, when the Queen, having finished her altercation with the Lady of the castle, again addressed him-- What of the revels at Kinross, Roland Graeme? Methought they were gay, if I may judge from some faint sounds of mirth and distant music, which found their way so far as these grated windows, and died when they entered them, as all that is mirthful must--But thou lookest as sad as if thou hadst come from a conventicle of the Huguenots! And so perchance he hath, madam, replied the Lady of Lochleven, at whom this side-shaft was lanched. I trust, amid yonder idle fooleries, there wanted not some pouring forth of doctrine to a better purpose than that vain mirth, which, blazing and vanishing like the crackling of dry thorns, leaves to the fools who love it nothing but dust and ashes. Mary Fleming, said the Queen, turning round and drawing her mantle about her, I would that we had the chimney-grate supplied with a fagot or two of these same thorns which the Lady of Lochleven describes so well. Methinks the damp air from the lake, which stagnates in these vaulted rooms, renders them deadly cold. Your Grace's pleasure shall be obeyed, said the Lady of Lochleven; yet may I presume to remind you that we are now in summer? I thank you for the information, my good lady, said the Queen; for prisoners better learn their calender from the mouth of their jailor, than from any change they themselves feel in the seasons.--Once more, Roland Graeme, what of the revels? They were gay, madam, said the page, but of the usual sort, and little worth your Highness's ear. Oh, you know not, said the Queen, how very indulgent my ear has become to all that speaks of freedom and the pleasures of the free. Methinks I would rather have seen the gay villagers dance their ring round the Maypole, than have witnessed the most stately masques within the precincts of a palace. The absence of stone-wall--the sense that the green turf is under the foot which may tread it free and unrestrained, is worth all that art or splendour can add to more courtly revels. I trust, said the Lady Lochleven, addressing the page in her turn, there were amongst these follies none of the riots or disturbances to which they so naturally lead? Roland gave a slight glance to Catherine Seyton, as if to bespeak her attention, as he replied,-- I witnessed no offence, madam, worthy of marking--none indeed of any kind, save that a bold damsel made her hand somewhat too familiar with the cheek of a player-man, and ran some hazard of being ducked in the lake. As he uttered these words he cast a hasty glance at Catherine; but she sustained, with the utmost serenity of manner and countenance, the hint which he had deemed could not have been thrown out before her without exciting some fear and confusion. I will cumber your Grace no longer with my presence, said the Lady Lochleven, unless you have aught to command me. Nought, our good hostess, answered the Queen, unless it be to pray you, that on another occasion you deem it not needful to postpone your better employment to wait so long upon us. May it please you, added the Lady Lochleven, to command this your gentleman to attend us, that I may receive some account of these matters which have been sent hither for your Grace's use? We may not refuse what you are pleased to require, madam, answered the Queen. Go with the lady, Roland, if our commands be indeed necessary to thy doing so. We will hear to-morrow the history of thy Kinross pleasures. For this night we dismiss thy attendance. Roland Graeme went with the Lady of Lochleven, who failed not to ask him many questions concerning what had passed at the sports, to which he rendered such answers as were most likely to lull asleep any suspicions which she might entertain of his disposition to favour Queen Mary, taking especial care to avoid all allusion to the apparition of Magdalen Graeme, and of the Abbot Ambrosius. At length, after undergoing a long and somewhat close examination, he was dismissed with such expressions, as, coming from the reserved and stern Lady of Lochleven, might seem to express a degree of favour and countenance. His first care was to obtain some refreshment, which was more cheerfully afforded him by a good-natured pantler than by Dryfesdale, who was, on this occasion, much disposed to abide by the fashion of Pudding-burn House, where They who came not the first call. Gat no more meat till the next meal. When Roland Graeme had finished his repast, having his dismissal from the Queen for the evening, and being little inclined for such society as the castle afforded, he stole into the garden, in which he had permission to spend his leisure time, when it pleased him. In this place, the ingenuity of the contriver and disposer of the walks had exerted itself to make the most of little space, and by screens, both of stone ornamented with rude sculpture, and hedges of living green, had endeavoured to give as much intricacy and variety as the confined limits of the garden would admit. Here the young man walked sadly, considering the events of the day, and comparing what had dropped from the Abbot with what he had himself noticed of the demeanour of George Douglas. It must be so, was the painful but inevitable conclusion at which he arrived. It must be by his aid that she is thus enabled, like a phantom, to transport herself from place to place, and to appear at pleasure on the mainland or on the islet.--It must be so, he repeated once more; with him she holds a close, secret, and intimate correspondence, altogether inconsistent with the eye of favour which she has sometimes cast upon me, and destructive to the hopes which she must have known these glances have necessarily inspired. And yet (for love will hope where reason despairs) the thought rushed on his mind, that it was possible she only encouraged Douglas's passion so far as might serve her mistress's interest, and that she was of too frank, noble, and candid a nature, to hold out to himself hopes which she meant not to fulfil. Lost in these various conjectures, he seated himself upon a bank of turf which commanded a view of the lake on the one side, and on the other of that front of the castle along which the Queen's apartments were situated. The sun had now for some time set, and the twilight of May was rapidly fading into a serene night. On the lake, the expanded water rose and fell, with the slightest and softest influence of a southern breeze, which scarcely dimpled the surface over which it passed. In the distance was still seen the dim outline of the island of Saint Serf, once visited by many a sandalled pilgrim, as the blessed spot trodden by a man of God--now neglected or violated, as the refuge of lazy priests, who had with justice been compelled to give place to the sheep and the heifers of a Protestant baron. As Roland gazed on the dark speck, amid the lighter blue of the waters which surrounded it, the mazes of polemical discussion again stretched themselves before the eye of the mind. Had these men justly suffered their exile as licentious drones, the robbers, at once, and disgrace, of the busy hive? or had the hand of avarice and rapine expelled from the temple, not the ribalds who polluted, but the faithful priests who served the shrine in honour and fidelity? The arguments of Henderson, in this contemplative hour, rose with double force before him; and could scarcely be parried by the appeal which the Abbot Ambrosius had made from his understanding to his feelings,--an appeal which he had felt more forcibly amid the bustle of stirring life, than now when his reflections were more undisturbed. It required an effort to divert his mind from this embarrassing topic; and he found that he best succeeded by turning his eyes to the front of the tower, watching where a twinkling light still streamed from the casement of Catherine Seyton's apartment, obscured by times for a moment as the shadow of the fair inhabitant passed betwixt the taper and the window. At length the light was removed or extinguished, and that object of speculation was also withdrawn from the eyes of the meditative lover. Dare I confess the fact, without injuring his character for ever as a hero of romance? These eyes gradually became heavy; speculative doubts on the subject of religious controversy, and anxious conjectures concerning the state of his mistress's affections, became confusedly blended together in his musings; the fatigues of a busy day prevailed over the harassing subjects of contemplation which occupied his mind, and he fell fast asleep. Sound were his slumbers, until they were suddenly dispelled by the iron tongue of the castle-bell, which sent its deep and sullen sounds wide over the bosom of the lake, and awakened the echoes of Bennarty, the hill which descends steeply on its southern bank. Roland started up, for this bell was always tolled at ten o'clock, as the signal for locking the castle gates, and placing the keys under the charge of the seneschal. He therefore hastened to the wicket by which the garden communicated with the building, and had the mortification, just as he reached it, to hear the bolt leave its sheath with a discordant crash, and enter the stone groove of the door-lintel. Hold, hold, cried the page, and let me in ere you lock the wicket. The voice of Dryfesdale replied from within, in his usual tone of embittered sullenness, The hour is passed, fair master--you like not the inside of these walls--even make it a complete holiday, and spend the night as well as the day out of bounds. Open the door, exclaimed the indignant page, or by Saint Giles I will make thy gold chain smoke for it! Make no alarm here, retorted the impenetrable Dryfesdale, but keep thy sinful oaths and silly threats for those that regard them--I do mine office, and carry the keys to the seneschal.--Adieu, my young master! the cool night air will advantage your hot blood. The steward was right in what he said; for the cooling breeze was very necessary to appease the feverish fit of anger which Roland experienced, nor did the remedy succeed for some time. At length, after some hasty turns made through the garden, exhausting his passion in vain vows of vengeance, Roland Graeme began to be sensible that his situation ought rather to be held as matter of laughter than of serious resentment. To one bred a sportsman, a night spent in the open air had in it little of hardship, and the poor malice of the steward seemed more worthy of his contempt than his anger. I would to God, he said, that the grim old man may always have contented himself with such sportive revenge. He often looks as he were capable of doing us a darker turn. Returning, therefore, to the turf-seat which he had formerly occupied, and which was partially sheltered by a trim fence of green holly, he drew his mantle around him, stretched himself at length on the verdant settle, and endeavoured to resume that sleep which the castle bell had interrupted to so little purpose. Sleep, like other earthly blessings, is niggard of its favours when most courted. The more Roland invoked her aid, the farther she fled from his eyelids. He had been completely awakened, first, by the sounds of the bell, and then by his own aroused vivacity of temper, and he found it difficult again to compose himself to slumber. At length, when his mind--was wearied out with a maze of unpleasing meditation, he succeeded in coaxing himself into a broken slumber. This was again dispelled by the voices of two persons who were walking in the garden, the sound of whose conversation, after mingling for some time in the page's dreams, at length succeeded in awaking him thoroughly. He raised himself from his reclining posture in the utmost astonishment, which the circumstance of hearing two persons at that late hour conversing on the outside of the watchfully guarded Castle of Lochloven, was so well calculated to excite. His first thought was of supernatural beings; his next, upon some attempt on the part of Queen Mary's friends and followers; his last was, that George of Douglas, possessed of the keys, and having the means of ingress and egress at pleasure, was availing himself of his office to hold a rendezvous with Catherine Seyton in the castle garden. He was confirmed in this opinion by the tone of the voice, which asked in a low whisper, whether all was ready? Chapter the Thirtieth. In some breasts passion lies conceal'd and silent, Like war's swart powder in a castle vault, Until occasion, like the linstock, lights it: Then comes at once the lightning--and the thunder, And distant echoes tell that all is rent asunder. OLD PLAY. Roland Graeme, availing himself of a breach in the holly screen, and of the assistance of the full moon, which was now arisen, had a perfect opportunity, himself unobserved, to reconnoitre the persons and the motions

reverend

How many times the word 'reverend' appears in the text?

you, reverend father, I am totally ignorant. My brother, answered the Abbot, you are wise, and ought to know-- I am not--I am not--I am not wise, replied the horticulturist, pettishly, and stopping his ears with his fingers-- I was never called wise but when men wanted to engage me in some action of notorious folly. But, my good brother, said the Abbot-- I am not good neither, said the peevish gardener; I am neither good nor wise--Had I been wise, you would not have been admitted here; and were I good, methinks I should send you elsewhere to hatch plots for destroying the quiet of the country. What signifies disputing about queen or king,--when men may sit at peace--_sub umbra vitis sui?_ and so would I do, after the precept of Holy Writ, were I, as you term me, wise or good. But such as I am, my neck is in the yoke, and you make me draw what weight you list.--Follow me, youngster. This reverend father, who makes in his jackman's dress nearly as reverend a figure as I myself, will agree with me in one thing at least, and that is, that you have been long enough here. Follow the good father, Roland, said the Abbot, and remember my words--a day is approaching that will try the temper of all true Scotsmen--may thy heart prove faithful as the steel of thy blade! The page bowed in silence, and they parted; the gardener, notwithstanding his advanced age, walking on before him very briskly, and muttering as he went, partly to himself, partly to his companion, after the manner of old men of weakened intellects-- When I was great, thus ran his maundering, and had my mule and my ambling palfrey at command, I warrant you I could have as well flown through the air as have walked at this pace. I had my gout and my rheumatics, and an hundred things besides, that hung fetters on my heels; and, now, thanks to Our Lady, and honest labour, I can walk with any good man of my age in the kingdom of Fife--Fy upon it, that experience should be so long in coming! As he was thus muttering, his eye fell upon the branch of a pear-tree which drooped down for want of support, and at once forgetting his haste, the old man stopped and set seriously about binding it up. Roland Graeme had both readiness, neatness of hand, and good nature in abundance; he immediately lent his aid, and in a minute or two the bough was supported, and tied up in a way perfectly satisfactory to the old man, who looked at it with great complaisance. They are bergamots, he said, and if you will come ashore in autumn, you shall taste of them--the like are not in Lochleven Castle--the garden there is a poor pin-fold, and the gardener, Hugh Houkham, hath little skill of his craft--so come ashore, Master Page, in autumn, when you would eat pears. But what am I thinking of--ere that time come, they may have given thee sour pears for plums. Take an old man's advice, youth, one who hath seen many days, and sat in higher places than thou canst hope for--bend thy sword into a pruning-hook, and make a dibble of thy dagger--thy days shall be the longer, and thy health the better for it,--and come to aid me in my garden, and I will teach thee the real French fashion of _imping_, which the Southron call graffing. Do this, and do it without loss of time, for there is a whirlwind coming over the land, and only those shall escape who lie too much beneath the storm to have their boughs broken by it. So saying, he dismissed Roland Graeme, through a different door from that by which he had entered, signed a cross, and pronounced a benedicite as they parted, and then, still muttering to himself, retired into the garden, and locked the door on the inside. Chapter the Twenty-Ninth. Pray God she prove not masculine ere long! KING HENRY VI. Dismissed from the old man's garden, Roland Graeme found that a grassy paddock, in which sauntered two cows, the property of the gardener, still separated him from the village. He paced through it, lost in meditation upon the words of the Abbot. Father Ambrosius had, with success enough, exerted over him that powerful influence which the guardians and instructors of our childhood possess over our more mature youth. And yet, when Roland looked back upon what the father had said, he could not but suspect that he had rather sought to evade entering into the controversy betwixt the churches, than to repel the objections and satisfy the doubts which the lectures of Henderson had excited. For this he had no time, said the page to himself, neither have I now calmness and learning sufficient to judge upon points of such magnitude. Besides, it were base to quit my faith while the wind of fortune sets against it, unless I were so placed, that my conversion, should it take place, were free as light from the imputation of self-interest. I was bred a Catholic--bred in the faith of Bruce and Wallace--I will hold that faith till time and reason shall convince me that it errs. I will serve this poor Queen as a subject should serve an imprisoned and wronged sovereign--they who placed me in her service have to blame themselves--who sent me hither, a gentleman trained in the paths of loyalty and honour, when they should have sought out some truckling, cogging, double-dealing knave, who would have been at once the observant page of the Queen, and the obsequious spy of her enemies. Since I must choose betwixt aiding and betraying her, I will decide as becomes her servant and her subject; but Catherine Seyton--Catherine Seyton, beloved by Douglas and holding me on or off as the intervals of her leisure or caprice will permit--how shall I deal with the coquette?--By heaven, when I next have an opportunity, she shall render me some reason for her conduct, or I will break with her for ever! As he formed this doughty resolution, he crossed the stile which led out of the little enclosure, and was almost immediately greeted by Dr. Luke Lundin. Ha! my most excellent young friend, said the Doctor, from whence come you?--but I note the place.--Yes, neighbour Blinkhoolie's garden is a pleasant rendezvous, and you are of the age when lads look after a bonny lass with one eye, and a dainty plum with another. But hey! you look subtriste and melancholic--I fear the maiden has proved cruel, or the plums unripe; and surely I think neighbour Blinkhoolie's damsons can scarcely have been well preserved throughout the winter--he spares the saccharine juice on his confects. But courage, man, there are more Kates in Kinross; and for the immature fruit, a glass of my double distilled _aqua mirabilis--probatum est_. The page darted an ireful glance at the facetious physician; but presently recollecting that the name Kate, which had provoked his displeasure, was probably but introduced for the sake of alliteration, he suppressed his wrath, and only asked if the wains had been heard of? Why, I have been seeking for you this hour, to tell you that the stuff is in your boat, and that the boat waits your pleasure. Auchtermuchty had only fallen into company with an idle knave like himself, and a stoup of aquavitae between them. Your boatmen lie on their oars, and there have already been made two wefts from the warder's turret to intimate that those in the castle are impatient for your return. Yet there is time for you to take a slight repast; and, as your friend and physician, I hold it unfit you should face the water-breeze with an empty stomach. Roland Graeme had nothing for it but to return, with such cheer as he might, to the place where his boat was moored on the beach, and resisted all offer of refreshment, although the Doctor promised that he should prelude the collation with a gentle appetizer--a decoction of herbs, gathered and distilled by himself. Indeed, as Roland had not forgotten the contents of his morning cup, it is possible that the recollection induced him to stand firm in his refusal of all food, to which such an unpalatable preface was the preliminary. As they passed towards the boat, (for the ceremonious politeness of the worthy Chamberlain would not permit the page to go thither without attendance,) Roland Graeme, amidst a group who seemed to be assembled around a party of wandering musicians, distinguished, as he thought, the dress of Catherine Seyton. He shook himself clear from his attendant, and at one spring was in the midst of the crowd, and at the side of the damsel. Catherine, he whispered, is it well for you to be still here?--will you not return to the castle? To the devil with your Catherines and your castles! answered the maiden, snappishly; have you not had time enough already to get rid of your follies? Begone! I desire not your farther company, and there will be danger in thrusting it upon me. Nay--but if there be danger, fairest Catherine, replied Roland; why will you not allow me to stay and share it with you? Intruding fool, said the maiden, the danger is all on thine own side--the risk in, in plain terms, that I strike thee on the mouth with the hilt of my dagger. So saying, she turned haughtily from him, and moved through the crowd, who gave way in some astonishment at the masculine activity with which she forced her way among them. As Roland, though much irritated, prepared to follow, he was grappled on the other side by Doctor Luke Lundin, who reminded him of the loaded boat, of the two wefts, or signals with the flag, which had been made from the tower, of the danger of the cold breeze to an empty stomach, and of the vanity of spending more time upon coy wenches and sour plums. Roland was thus, in a manner, dragged back to his boat, and obliged to launch her forth upon his return to Lochleven Castle. That little voyage was speedily accomplished, and the page was greeted at the landing-place by the severe and caustic welcome of old Dryfesdale. So, young gallant, you are come at last, after a delay of six hours, and after two signals from the castle? But, I warrant, some idle junketing hath occupied you too deeply to think of your service or your duty. Where is the note of the plate and household stuff?--Pray Heaven it hath not been diminished under the sleeveless care of so young a gad-about! Diminished under my care, Sir Steward! retorted the page angrily; say so in earnest, and by Heaven your gray hair shall hardly protect your saucy tongue! A truce with your swaggering, young esquire, returned the steward; we have bolts and dungeons for brawlers. Go to my lady, and swagger before her, if thou darest--she will give thee proper cause of offence, for she has waited for thee long and impatiently. And where then is the Lady of Lochleven? said the page; for I conceive it is of her thou speakest. Ay--of whom else? replied Dryfesdale; or who besides the Lady of Lochleven hath a right to command in this castle? The Lady of Lochleven is thy mistress, said Roland Graeme; but mine is the Queen of Scotland. The steward looked at him fixedly for a moment, with an air in which suspicion and dislike were ill concealed by an affectation of contempt. The bragging cock-chicken, he said, will betray himself by his rash crowing. I have marked thy altered manner in the chapel of late--ay, and your changing of glances at meal-time with a certain idle damsel, who, like thyself, laughs at all gravity and goodness. There is something about you, my master, which should be looked to. But, if you would know whether the Lady of Lochleven, or that other lady, hath a right to command thy service, thou wilt find them together in the Lady Mary's ante-room. Roland hastened thither, not unwilling to escape from the ill-natured penetration of the old man, and marvelling at the same time what peculiarity could have occasioned the Lady of Lochleven's being in the Queen's apartment at this time of the afternoon, so much contrary to her usual wont. His acuteness instantly penetrated the meaning. She wishes, he concluded, to see the meeting betwixt the Queen and me on my return, that she may form a guess whether there is any private intelligence or understanding betwixt us--I must be guarded. With this resolution he entered the parlour, where the Queen, seated in her chair, with the Lady Fleming leaning upon the back of it, had already kept the Lady of Lochleven standing in her presence for the space of nearly an hour, to the manifest increase of her very visible bad humour. Roland Graeme, on entering the apartment, made a deep obeisance to the Queen, and another to the Lady, and then stood still as if to await their farther question. Speaking almost together, the Lady Lochleven said, So, young man, you are returned at length? And then stopped indignantly short, while the Queen went on without regarding her-- Roland, you are welcome home to us--you have proved the true dove and not the raven--Yet I am sure I could have forgiven you, if, once dismissed, from this water-circled ark of ours, you had never again returned to us. I trust you have brought back an olive-branch, for our kind and worthy hostess has chafed herself much on account of your long absence, and we never needed more some symbol of peace and reconciliation. I grieve I should have been detained, madam, answered the page; but from the delay of the person intrusted with the matters for which I was sent, I did not receive them till late in the day. See you there now, said the Queen to the Lady Lochleven; we could not persuade you, our dearest hostess, that your household goods were in all safe keeping and surety. True it is, that we can excuse your anxiety, considering that these august apartments are so scantily furnished, that we have not been able to offer you even the relief of a stool during the long time you have afforded us the pleasure of your society. The will, madam, said the lady, the will to offer such accommodation was more wanting than the means. What! said the Queen, looking round, and affecting surprise, there are then stools in this apartment--one, two--no less than four, including the broken one--a royal garniture!--We observed them not--will it please your ladyship to sit? No, madam, I will soon relieve you of my presence, replied the Lady Lochleven; and while with you, my aged limbs can still better brook fatigue, than my mind stoop to accept of constrained courtesy. Nay, Lady of Lochleven, if you take it so deeply, said the Queen, rising and motioning to her own vacant chair, I would rather you assumed my seat--you are not the first of your family who has done so. The Lady of Lochleven curtsied a negative, but seemed with much difficulty to suppress the angry answer which rose to her lips. During this sharp conversation, the page's attention had been almost entirely occupied by the entrance of Catherine Seyton, who came from the inner apartment, in the usual dress in which she attended upon the Queen, and with nothing in her manner which marked either the hurry or confusion incident to a hasty change of disguise, or the conscious fear of detection in a perilous enterprise. Roland Graeme ventured to make her an obeisance as she entered, but she returned it with an air of the utmost indifference, which, in his opinion, was extremely inconsistent with the circumstances in which they stood towards each other.-- Surely, he thought, she cannot in reason expect to bully me out of the belief due to mine own eyes, as she tried to do concerning the apparition in the hostelry of Saint Michael's--I will try if I cannot make her feel that this will be but a vain task, and that confidence in me is the wiser and safer course to pursue. These thoughts had passed rapidly through his mind, when the Queen, having finished her altercation with the Lady of the castle, again addressed him-- What of the revels at Kinross, Roland Graeme? Methought they were gay, if I may judge from some faint sounds of mirth and distant music, which found their way so far as these grated windows, and died when they entered them, as all that is mirthful must--But thou lookest as sad as if thou hadst come from a conventicle of the Huguenots! And so perchance he hath, madam, replied the Lady of Lochleven, at whom this side-shaft was lanched. I trust, amid yonder idle fooleries, there wanted not some pouring forth of doctrine to a better purpose than that vain mirth, which, blazing and vanishing like the crackling of dry thorns, leaves to the fools who love it nothing but dust and ashes. Mary Fleming, said the Queen, turning round and drawing her mantle about her, I would that we had the chimney-grate supplied with a fagot or two of these same thorns which the Lady of Lochleven describes so well. Methinks the damp air from the lake, which stagnates in these vaulted rooms, renders them deadly cold. Your Grace's pleasure shall be obeyed, said the Lady of Lochleven; yet may I presume to remind you that we are now in summer? I thank you for the information, my good lady, said the Queen; for prisoners better learn their calender from the mouth of their jailor, than from any change they themselves feel in the seasons.--Once more, Roland Graeme, what of the revels? They were gay, madam, said the page, but of the usual sort, and little worth your Highness's ear. Oh, you know not, said the Queen, how very indulgent my ear has become to all that speaks of freedom and the pleasures of the free. Methinks I would rather have seen the gay villagers dance their ring round the Maypole, than have witnessed the most stately masques within the precincts of a palace. The absence of stone-wall--the sense that the green turf is under the foot which may tread it free and unrestrained, is worth all that art or splendour can add to more courtly revels. I trust, said the Lady Lochleven, addressing the page in her turn, there were amongst these follies none of the riots or disturbances to which they so naturally lead? Roland gave a slight glance to Catherine Seyton, as if to bespeak her attention, as he replied,-- I witnessed no offence, madam, worthy of marking--none indeed of any kind, save that a bold damsel made her hand somewhat too familiar with the cheek of a player-man, and ran some hazard of being ducked in the lake. As he uttered these words he cast a hasty glance at Catherine; but she sustained, with the utmost serenity of manner and countenance, the hint which he had deemed could not have been thrown out before her without exciting some fear and confusion. I will cumber your Grace no longer with my presence, said the Lady Lochleven, unless you have aught to command me. Nought, our good hostess, answered the Queen, unless it be to pray you, that on another occasion you deem it not needful to postpone your better employment to wait so long upon us. May it please you, added the Lady Lochleven, to command this your gentleman to attend us, that I may receive some account of these matters which have been sent hither for your Grace's use? We may not refuse what you are pleased to require, madam, answered the Queen. Go with the lady, Roland, if our commands be indeed necessary to thy doing so. We will hear to-morrow the history of thy Kinross pleasures. For this night we dismiss thy attendance. Roland Graeme went with the Lady of Lochleven, who failed not to ask him many questions concerning what had passed at the sports, to which he rendered such answers as were most likely to lull asleep any suspicions which she might entertain of his disposition to favour Queen Mary, taking especial care to avoid all allusion to the apparition of Magdalen Graeme, and of the Abbot Ambrosius. At length, after undergoing a long and somewhat close examination, he was dismissed with such expressions, as, coming from the reserved and stern Lady of Lochleven, might seem to express a degree of favour and countenance. His first care was to obtain some refreshment, which was more cheerfully afforded him by a good-natured pantler than by Dryfesdale, who was, on this occasion, much disposed to abide by the fashion of Pudding-burn House, where They who came not the first call. Gat no more meat till the next meal. When Roland Graeme had finished his repast, having his dismissal from the Queen for the evening, and being little inclined for such society as the castle afforded, he stole into the garden, in which he had permission to spend his leisure time, when it pleased him. In this place, the ingenuity of the contriver and disposer of the walks had exerted itself to make the most of little space, and by screens, both of stone ornamented with rude sculpture, and hedges of living green, had endeavoured to give as much intricacy and variety as the confined limits of the garden would admit. Here the young man walked sadly, considering the events of the day, and comparing what had dropped from the Abbot with what he had himself noticed of the demeanour of George Douglas. It must be so, was the painful but inevitable conclusion at which he arrived. It must be by his aid that she is thus enabled, like a phantom, to transport herself from place to place, and to appear at pleasure on the mainland or on the islet.--It must be so, he repeated once more; with him she holds a close, secret, and intimate correspondence, altogether inconsistent with the eye of favour which she has sometimes cast upon me, and destructive to the hopes which she must have known these glances have necessarily inspired. And yet (for love will hope where reason despairs) the thought rushed on his mind, that it was possible she only encouraged Douglas's passion so far as might serve her mistress's interest, and that she was of too frank, noble, and candid a nature, to hold out to himself hopes which she meant not to fulfil. Lost in these various conjectures, he seated himself upon a bank of turf which commanded a view of the lake on the one side, and on the other of that front of the castle along which the Queen's apartments were situated. The sun had now for some time set, and the twilight of May was rapidly fading into a serene night. On the lake, the expanded water rose and fell, with the slightest and softest influence of a southern breeze, which scarcely dimpled the surface over which it passed. In the distance was still seen the dim outline of the island of Saint Serf, once visited by many a sandalled pilgrim, as the blessed spot trodden by a man of God--now neglected or violated, as the refuge of lazy priests, who had with justice been compelled to give place to the sheep and the heifers of a Protestant baron. As Roland gazed on the dark speck, amid the lighter blue of the waters which surrounded it, the mazes of polemical discussion again stretched themselves before the eye of the mind. Had these men justly suffered their exile as licentious drones, the robbers, at once, and disgrace, of the busy hive? or had the hand of avarice and rapine expelled from the temple, not the ribalds who polluted, but the faithful priests who served the shrine in honour and fidelity? The arguments of Henderson, in this contemplative hour, rose with double force before him; and could scarcely be parried by the appeal which the Abbot Ambrosius had made from his understanding to his feelings,--an appeal which he had felt more forcibly amid the bustle of stirring life, than now when his reflections were more undisturbed. It required an effort to divert his mind from this embarrassing topic; and he found that he best succeeded by turning his eyes to the front of the tower, watching where a twinkling light still streamed from the casement of Catherine Seyton's apartment, obscured by times for a moment as the shadow of the fair inhabitant passed betwixt the taper and the window. At length the light was removed or extinguished, and that object of speculation was also withdrawn from the eyes of the meditative lover. Dare I confess the fact, without injuring his character for ever as a hero of romance? These eyes gradually became heavy; speculative doubts on the subject of religious controversy, and anxious conjectures concerning the state of his mistress's affections, became confusedly blended together in his musings; the fatigues of a busy day prevailed over the harassing subjects of contemplation which occupied his mind, and he fell fast asleep. Sound were his slumbers, until they were suddenly dispelled by the iron tongue of the castle-bell, which sent its deep and sullen sounds wide over the bosom of the lake, and awakened the echoes of Bennarty, the hill which descends steeply on its southern bank. Roland started up, for this bell was always tolled at ten o'clock, as the signal for locking the castle gates, and placing the keys under the charge of the seneschal. He therefore hastened to the wicket by which the garden communicated with the building, and had the mortification, just as he reached it, to hear the bolt leave its sheath with a discordant crash, and enter the stone groove of the door-lintel. Hold, hold, cried the page, and let me in ere you lock the wicket. The voice of Dryfesdale replied from within, in his usual tone of embittered sullenness, The hour is passed, fair master--you like not the inside of these walls--even make it a complete holiday, and spend the night as well as the day out of bounds. Open the door, exclaimed the indignant page, or by Saint Giles I will make thy gold chain smoke for it! Make no alarm here, retorted the impenetrable Dryfesdale, but keep thy sinful oaths and silly threats for those that regard them--I do mine office, and carry the keys to the seneschal.--Adieu, my young master! the cool night air will advantage your hot blood. The steward was right in what he said; for the cooling breeze was very necessary to appease the feverish fit of anger which Roland experienced, nor did the remedy succeed for some time. At length, after some hasty turns made through the garden, exhausting his passion in vain vows of vengeance, Roland Graeme began to be sensible that his situation ought rather to be held as matter of laughter than of serious resentment. To one bred a sportsman, a night spent in the open air had in it little of hardship, and the poor malice of the steward seemed more worthy of his contempt than his anger. I would to God, he said, that the grim old man may always have contented himself with such sportive revenge. He often looks as he were capable of doing us a darker turn. Returning, therefore, to the turf-seat which he had formerly occupied, and which was partially sheltered by a trim fence of green holly, he drew his mantle around him, stretched himself at length on the verdant settle, and endeavoured to resume that sleep which the castle bell had interrupted to so little purpose. Sleep, like other earthly blessings, is niggard of its favours when most courted. The more Roland invoked her aid, the farther she fled from his eyelids. He had been completely awakened, first, by the sounds of the bell, and then by his own aroused vivacity of temper, and he found it difficult again to compose himself to slumber. At length, when his mind--was wearied out with a maze of unpleasing meditation, he succeeded in coaxing himself into a broken slumber. This was again dispelled by the voices of two persons who were walking in the garden, the sound of whose conversation, after mingling for some time in the page's dreams, at length succeeded in awaking him thoroughly. He raised himself from his reclining posture in the utmost astonishment, which the circumstance of hearing two persons at that late hour conversing on the outside of the watchfully guarded Castle of Lochloven, was so well calculated to excite. His first thought was of supernatural beings; his next, upon some attempt on the part of Queen Mary's friends and followers; his last was, that George of Douglas, possessed of the keys, and having the means of ingress and egress at pleasure, was availing himself of his office to hold a rendezvous with Catherine Seyton in the castle garden. He was confirmed in this opinion by the tone of the voice, which asked in a low whisper, whether all was ready? Chapter the Thirtieth. In some breasts passion lies conceal'd and silent, Like war's swart powder in a castle vault, Until occasion, like the linstock, lights it: Then comes at once the lightning--and the thunder, And distant echoes tell that all is rent asunder. OLD PLAY. Roland Graeme, availing himself of a breach in the holly screen, and of the assistance of the full moon, which was now arisen, had a perfect opportunity, himself unobserved, to reconnoitre the persons and the motions

faith

How many times the word 'faith' appears in the text?

you, reverend father, I am totally ignorant. My brother, answered the Abbot, you are wise, and ought to know-- I am not--I am not--I am not wise, replied the horticulturist, pettishly, and stopping his ears with his fingers-- I was never called wise but when men wanted to engage me in some action of notorious folly. But, my good brother, said the Abbot-- I am not good neither, said the peevish gardener; I am neither good nor wise--Had I been wise, you would not have been admitted here; and were I good, methinks I should send you elsewhere to hatch plots for destroying the quiet of the country. What signifies disputing about queen or king,--when men may sit at peace--_sub umbra vitis sui?_ and so would I do, after the precept of Holy Writ, were I, as you term me, wise or good. But such as I am, my neck is in the yoke, and you make me draw what weight you list.--Follow me, youngster. This reverend father, who makes in his jackman's dress nearly as reverend a figure as I myself, will agree with me in one thing at least, and that is, that you have been long enough here. Follow the good father, Roland, said the Abbot, and remember my words--a day is approaching that will try the temper of all true Scotsmen--may thy heart prove faithful as the steel of thy blade! The page bowed in silence, and they parted; the gardener, notwithstanding his advanced age, walking on before him very briskly, and muttering as he went, partly to himself, partly to his companion, after the manner of old men of weakened intellects-- When I was great, thus ran his maundering, and had my mule and my ambling palfrey at command, I warrant you I could have as well flown through the air as have walked at this pace. I had my gout and my rheumatics, and an hundred things besides, that hung fetters on my heels; and, now, thanks to Our Lady, and honest labour, I can walk with any good man of my age in the kingdom of Fife--Fy upon it, that experience should be so long in coming! As he was thus muttering, his eye fell upon the branch of a pear-tree which drooped down for want of support, and at once forgetting his haste, the old man stopped and set seriously about binding it up. Roland Graeme had both readiness, neatness of hand, and good nature in abundance; he immediately lent his aid, and in a minute or two the bough was supported, and tied up in a way perfectly satisfactory to the old man, who looked at it with great complaisance. They are bergamots, he said, and if you will come ashore in autumn, you shall taste of them--the like are not in Lochleven Castle--the garden there is a poor pin-fold, and the gardener, Hugh Houkham, hath little skill of his craft--so come ashore, Master Page, in autumn, when you would eat pears. But what am I thinking of--ere that time come, they may have given thee sour pears for plums. Take an old man's advice, youth, one who hath seen many days, and sat in higher places than thou canst hope for--bend thy sword into a pruning-hook, and make a dibble of thy dagger--thy days shall be the longer, and thy health the better for it,--and come to aid me in my garden, and I will teach thee the real French fashion of _imping_, which the Southron call graffing. Do this, and do it without loss of time, for there is a whirlwind coming over the land, and only those shall escape who lie too much beneath the storm to have their boughs broken by it. So saying, he dismissed Roland Graeme, through a different door from that by which he had entered, signed a cross, and pronounced a benedicite as they parted, and then, still muttering to himself, retired into the garden, and locked the door on the inside. Chapter the Twenty-Ninth. Pray God she prove not masculine ere long! KING HENRY VI. Dismissed from the old man's garden, Roland Graeme found that a grassy paddock, in which sauntered two cows, the property of the gardener, still separated him from the village. He paced through it, lost in meditation upon the words of the Abbot. Father Ambrosius had, with success enough, exerted over him that powerful influence which the guardians and instructors of our childhood possess over our more mature youth. And yet, when Roland looked back upon what the father had said, he could not but suspect that he had rather sought to evade entering into the controversy betwixt the churches, than to repel the objections and satisfy the doubts which the lectures of Henderson had excited. For this he had no time, said the page to himself, neither have I now calmness and learning sufficient to judge upon points of such magnitude. Besides, it were base to quit my faith while the wind of fortune sets against it, unless I were so placed, that my conversion, should it take place, were free as light from the imputation of self-interest. I was bred a Catholic--bred in the faith of Bruce and Wallace--I will hold that faith till time and reason shall convince me that it errs. I will serve this poor Queen as a subject should serve an imprisoned and wronged sovereign--they who placed me in her service have to blame themselves--who sent me hither, a gentleman trained in the paths of loyalty and honour, when they should have sought out some truckling, cogging, double-dealing knave, who would have been at once the observant page of the Queen, and the obsequious spy of her enemies. Since I must choose betwixt aiding and betraying her, I will decide as becomes her servant and her subject; but Catherine Seyton--Catherine Seyton, beloved by Douglas and holding me on or off as the intervals of her leisure or caprice will permit--how shall I deal with the coquette?--By heaven, when I next have an opportunity, she shall render me some reason for her conduct, or I will break with her for ever! As he formed this doughty resolution, he crossed the stile which led out of the little enclosure, and was almost immediately greeted by Dr. Luke Lundin. Ha! my most excellent young friend, said the Doctor, from whence come you?--but I note the place.--Yes, neighbour Blinkhoolie's garden is a pleasant rendezvous, and you are of the age when lads look after a bonny lass with one eye, and a dainty plum with another. But hey! you look subtriste and melancholic--I fear the maiden has proved cruel, or the plums unripe; and surely I think neighbour Blinkhoolie's damsons can scarcely have been well preserved throughout the winter--he spares the saccharine juice on his confects. But courage, man, there are more Kates in Kinross; and for the immature fruit, a glass of my double distilled _aqua mirabilis--probatum est_. The page darted an ireful glance at the facetious physician; but presently recollecting that the name Kate, which had provoked his displeasure, was probably but introduced for the sake of alliteration, he suppressed his wrath, and only asked if the wains had been heard of? Why, I have been seeking for you this hour, to tell you that the stuff is in your boat, and that the boat waits your pleasure. Auchtermuchty had only fallen into company with an idle knave like himself, and a stoup of aquavitae between them. Your boatmen lie on their oars, and there have already been made two wefts from the warder's turret to intimate that those in the castle are impatient for your return. Yet there is time for you to take a slight repast; and, as your friend and physician, I hold it unfit you should face the water-breeze with an empty stomach. Roland Graeme had nothing for it but to return, with such cheer as he might, to the place where his boat was moored on the beach, and resisted all offer of refreshment, although the Doctor promised that he should prelude the collation with a gentle appetizer--a decoction of herbs, gathered and distilled by himself. Indeed, as Roland had not forgotten the contents of his morning cup, it is possible that the recollection induced him to stand firm in his refusal of all food, to which such an unpalatable preface was the preliminary. As they passed towards the boat, (for the ceremonious politeness of the worthy Chamberlain would not permit the page to go thither without attendance,) Roland Graeme, amidst a group who seemed to be assembled around a party of wandering musicians, distinguished, as he thought, the dress of Catherine Seyton. He shook himself clear from his attendant, and at one spring was in the midst of the crowd, and at the side of the damsel. Catherine, he whispered, is it well for you to be still here?--will you not return to the castle? To the devil with your Catherines and your castles! answered the maiden, snappishly; have you not had time enough already to get rid of your follies? Begone! I desire not your farther company, and there will be danger in thrusting it upon me. Nay--but if there be danger, fairest Catherine, replied Roland; why will you not allow me to stay and share it with you? Intruding fool, said the maiden, the danger is all on thine own side--the risk in, in plain terms, that I strike thee on the mouth with the hilt of my dagger. So saying, she turned haughtily from him, and moved through the crowd, who gave way in some astonishment at the masculine activity with which she forced her way among them. As Roland, though much irritated, prepared to follow, he was grappled on the other side by Doctor Luke Lundin, who reminded him of the loaded boat, of the two wefts, or signals with the flag, which had been made from the tower, of the danger of the cold breeze to an empty stomach, and of the vanity of spending more time upon coy wenches and sour plums. Roland was thus, in a manner, dragged back to his boat, and obliged to launch her forth upon his return to Lochleven Castle. That little voyage was speedily accomplished, and the page was greeted at the landing-place by the severe and caustic welcome of old Dryfesdale. So, young gallant, you are come at last, after a delay of six hours, and after two signals from the castle? But, I warrant, some idle junketing hath occupied you too deeply to think of your service or your duty. Where is the note of the plate and household stuff?--Pray Heaven it hath not been diminished under the sleeveless care of so young a gad-about! Diminished under my care, Sir Steward! retorted the page angrily; say so in earnest, and by Heaven your gray hair shall hardly protect your saucy tongue! A truce with your swaggering, young esquire, returned the steward; we have bolts and dungeons for brawlers. Go to my lady, and swagger before her, if thou darest--she will give thee proper cause of offence, for she has waited for thee long and impatiently. And where then is the Lady of Lochleven? said the page; for I conceive it is of her thou speakest. Ay--of whom else? replied Dryfesdale; or who besides the Lady of Lochleven hath a right to command in this castle? The Lady of Lochleven is thy mistress, said Roland Graeme; but mine is the Queen of Scotland. The steward looked at him fixedly for a moment, with an air in which suspicion and dislike were ill concealed by an affectation of contempt. The bragging cock-chicken, he said, will betray himself by his rash crowing. I have marked thy altered manner in the chapel of late--ay, and your changing of glances at meal-time with a certain idle damsel, who, like thyself, laughs at all gravity and goodness. There is something about you, my master, which should be looked to. But, if you would know whether the Lady of Lochleven, or that other lady, hath a right to command thy service, thou wilt find them together in the Lady Mary's ante-room. Roland hastened thither, not unwilling to escape from the ill-natured penetration of the old man, and marvelling at the same time what peculiarity could have occasioned the Lady of Lochleven's being in the Queen's apartment at this time of the afternoon, so much contrary to her usual wont. His acuteness instantly penetrated the meaning. She wishes, he concluded, to see the meeting betwixt the Queen and me on my return, that she may form a guess whether there is any private intelligence or understanding betwixt us--I must be guarded. With this resolution he entered the parlour, where the Queen, seated in her chair, with the Lady Fleming leaning upon the back of it, had already kept the Lady of Lochleven standing in her presence for the space of nearly an hour, to the manifest increase of her very visible bad humour. Roland Graeme, on entering the apartment, made a deep obeisance to the Queen, and another to the Lady, and then stood still as if to await their farther question. Speaking almost together, the Lady Lochleven said, So, young man, you are returned at length? And then stopped indignantly short, while the Queen went on without regarding her-- Roland, you are welcome home to us--you have proved the true dove and not the raven--Yet I am sure I could have forgiven you, if, once dismissed, from this water-circled ark of ours, you had never again returned to us. I trust you have brought back an olive-branch, for our kind and worthy hostess has chafed herself much on account of your long absence, and we never needed more some symbol of peace and reconciliation. I grieve I should have been detained, madam, answered the page; but from the delay of the person intrusted with the matters for which I was sent, I did not receive them till late in the day. See you there now, said the Queen to the Lady Lochleven; we could not persuade you, our dearest hostess, that your household goods were in all safe keeping and surety. True it is, that we can excuse your anxiety, considering that these august apartments are so scantily furnished, that we have not been able to offer you even the relief of a stool during the long time you have afforded us the pleasure of your society. The will, madam, said the lady, the will to offer such accommodation was more wanting than the means. What! said the Queen, looking round, and affecting surprise, there are then stools in this apartment--one, two--no less than four, including the broken one--a royal garniture!--We observed them not--will it please your ladyship to sit? No, madam, I will soon relieve you of my presence, replied the Lady Lochleven; and while with you, my aged limbs can still better brook fatigue, than my mind stoop to accept of constrained courtesy. Nay, Lady of Lochleven, if you take it so deeply, said the Queen, rising and motioning to her own vacant chair, I would rather you assumed my seat--you are not the first of your family who has done so. The Lady of Lochleven curtsied a negative, but seemed with much difficulty to suppress the angry answer which rose to her lips. During this sharp conversation, the page's attention had been almost entirely occupied by the entrance of Catherine Seyton, who came from the inner apartment, in the usual dress in which she attended upon the Queen, and with nothing in her manner which marked either the hurry or confusion incident to a hasty change of disguise, or the conscious fear of detection in a perilous enterprise. Roland Graeme ventured to make her an obeisance as she entered, but she returned it with an air of the utmost indifference, which, in his opinion, was extremely inconsistent with the circumstances in which they stood towards each other.-- Surely, he thought, she cannot in reason expect to bully me out of the belief due to mine own eyes, as she tried to do concerning the apparition in the hostelry of Saint Michael's--I will try if I cannot make her feel that this will be but a vain task, and that confidence in me is the wiser and safer course to pursue. These thoughts had passed rapidly through his mind, when the Queen, having finished her altercation with the Lady of the castle, again addressed him-- What of the revels at Kinross, Roland Graeme? Methought they were gay, if I may judge from some faint sounds of mirth and distant music, which found their way so far as these grated windows, and died when they entered them, as all that is mirthful must--But thou lookest as sad as if thou hadst come from a conventicle of the Huguenots! And so perchance he hath, madam, replied the Lady of Lochleven, at whom this side-shaft was lanched. I trust, amid yonder idle fooleries, there wanted not some pouring forth of doctrine to a better purpose than that vain mirth, which, blazing and vanishing like the crackling of dry thorns, leaves to the fools who love it nothing but dust and ashes. Mary Fleming, said the Queen, turning round and drawing her mantle about her, I would that we had the chimney-grate supplied with a fagot or two of these same thorns which the Lady of Lochleven describes so well. Methinks the damp air from the lake, which stagnates in these vaulted rooms, renders them deadly cold. Your Grace's pleasure shall be obeyed, said the Lady of Lochleven; yet may I presume to remind you that we are now in summer? I thank you for the information, my good lady, said the Queen; for prisoners better learn their calender from the mouth of their jailor, than from any change they themselves feel in the seasons.--Once more, Roland Graeme, what of the revels? They were gay, madam, said the page, but of the usual sort, and little worth your Highness's ear. Oh, you know not, said the Queen, how very indulgent my ear has become to all that speaks of freedom and the pleasures of the free. Methinks I would rather have seen the gay villagers dance their ring round the Maypole, than have witnessed the most stately masques within the precincts of a palace. The absence of stone-wall--the sense that the green turf is under the foot which may tread it free and unrestrained, is worth all that art or splendour can add to more courtly revels. I trust, said the Lady Lochleven, addressing the page in her turn, there were amongst these follies none of the riots or disturbances to which they so naturally lead? Roland gave a slight glance to Catherine Seyton, as if to bespeak her attention, as he replied,-- I witnessed no offence, madam, worthy of marking--none indeed of any kind, save that a bold damsel made her hand somewhat too familiar with the cheek of a player-man, and ran some hazard of being ducked in the lake. As he uttered these words he cast a hasty glance at Catherine; but she sustained, with the utmost serenity of manner and countenance, the hint which he had deemed could not have been thrown out before her without exciting some fear and confusion. I will cumber your Grace no longer with my presence, said the Lady Lochleven, unless you have aught to command me. Nought, our good hostess, answered the Queen, unless it be to pray you, that on another occasion you deem it not needful to postpone your better employment to wait so long upon us. May it please you, added the Lady Lochleven, to command this your gentleman to attend us, that I may receive some account of these matters which have been sent hither for your Grace's use? We may not refuse what you are pleased to require, madam, answered the Queen. Go with the lady, Roland, if our commands be indeed necessary to thy doing so. We will hear to-morrow the history of thy Kinross pleasures. For this night we dismiss thy attendance. Roland Graeme went with the Lady of Lochleven, who failed not to ask him many questions concerning what had passed at the sports, to which he rendered such answers as were most likely to lull asleep any suspicions which she might entertain of his disposition to favour Queen Mary, taking especial care to avoid all allusion to the apparition of Magdalen Graeme, and of the Abbot Ambrosius. At length, after undergoing a long and somewhat close examination, he was dismissed with such expressions, as, coming from the reserved and stern Lady of Lochleven, might seem to express a degree of favour and countenance. His first care was to obtain some refreshment, which was more cheerfully afforded him by a good-natured pantler than by Dryfesdale, who was, on this occasion, much disposed to abide by the fashion of Pudding-burn House, where They who came not the first call. Gat no more meat till the next meal. When Roland Graeme had finished his repast, having his dismissal from the Queen for the evening, and being little inclined for such society as the castle afforded, he stole into the garden, in which he had permission to spend his leisure time, when it pleased him. In this place, the ingenuity of the contriver and disposer of the walks had exerted itself to make the most of little space, and by screens, both of stone ornamented with rude sculpture, and hedges of living green, had endeavoured to give as much intricacy and variety as the confined limits of the garden would admit. Here the young man walked sadly, considering the events of the day, and comparing what had dropped from the Abbot with what he had himself noticed of the demeanour of George Douglas. It must be so, was the painful but inevitable conclusion at which he arrived. It must be by his aid that she is thus enabled, like a phantom, to transport herself from place to place, and to appear at pleasure on the mainland or on the islet.--It must be so, he repeated once more; with him she holds a close, secret, and intimate correspondence, altogether inconsistent with the eye of favour which she has sometimes cast upon me, and destructive to the hopes which she must have known these glances have necessarily inspired. And yet (for love will hope where reason despairs) the thought rushed on his mind, that it was possible she only encouraged Douglas's passion so far as might serve her mistress's interest, and that she was of too frank, noble, and candid a nature, to hold out to himself hopes which she meant not to fulfil. Lost in these various conjectures, he seated himself upon a bank of turf which commanded a view of the lake on the one side, and on the other of that front of the castle along which the Queen's apartments were situated. The sun had now for some time set, and the twilight of May was rapidly fading into a serene night. On the lake, the expanded water rose and fell, with the slightest and softest influence of a southern breeze, which scarcely dimpled the surface over which it passed. In the distance was still seen the dim outline of the island of Saint Serf, once visited by many a sandalled pilgrim, as the blessed spot trodden by a man of God--now neglected or violated, as the refuge of lazy priests, who had with justice been compelled to give place to the sheep and the heifers of a Protestant baron. As Roland gazed on the dark speck, amid the lighter blue of the waters which surrounded it, the mazes of polemical discussion again stretched themselves before the eye of the mind. Had these men justly suffered their exile as licentious drones, the robbers, at once, and disgrace, of the busy hive? or had the hand of avarice and rapine expelled from the temple, not the ribalds who polluted, but the faithful priests who served the shrine in honour and fidelity? The arguments of Henderson, in this contemplative hour, rose with double force before him; and could scarcely be parried by the appeal which the Abbot Ambrosius had made from his understanding to his feelings,--an appeal which he had felt more forcibly amid the bustle of stirring life, than now when his reflections were more undisturbed. It required an effort to divert his mind from this embarrassing topic; and he found that he best succeeded by turning his eyes to the front of the tower, watching where a twinkling light still streamed from the casement of Catherine Seyton's apartment, obscured by times for a moment as the shadow of the fair inhabitant passed betwixt the taper and the window. At length the light was removed or extinguished, and that object of speculation was also withdrawn from the eyes of the meditative lover. Dare I confess the fact, without injuring his character for ever as a hero of romance? These eyes gradually became heavy; speculative doubts on the subject of religious controversy, and anxious conjectures concerning the state of his mistress's affections, became confusedly blended together in his musings; the fatigues of a busy day prevailed over the harassing subjects of contemplation which occupied his mind, and he fell fast asleep. Sound were his slumbers, until they were suddenly dispelled by the iron tongue of the castle-bell, which sent its deep and sullen sounds wide over the bosom of the lake, and awakened the echoes of Bennarty, the hill which descends steeply on its southern bank. Roland started up, for this bell was always tolled at ten o'clock, as the signal for locking the castle gates, and placing the keys under the charge of the seneschal. He therefore hastened to the wicket by which the garden communicated with the building, and had the mortification, just as he reached it, to hear the bolt leave its sheath with a discordant crash, and enter the stone groove of the door-lintel. Hold, hold, cried the page, and let me in ere you lock the wicket. The voice of Dryfesdale replied from within, in his usual tone of embittered sullenness, The hour is passed, fair master--you like not the inside of these walls--even make it a complete holiday, and spend the night as well as the day out of bounds. Open the door, exclaimed the indignant page, or by Saint Giles I will make thy gold chain smoke for it! Make no alarm here, retorted the impenetrable Dryfesdale, but keep thy sinful oaths and silly threats for those that regard them--I do mine office, and carry the keys to the seneschal.--Adieu, my young master! the cool night air will advantage your hot blood. The steward was right in what he said; for the cooling breeze was very necessary to appease the feverish fit of anger which Roland experienced, nor did the remedy succeed for some time. At length, after some hasty turns made through the garden, exhausting his passion in vain vows of vengeance, Roland Graeme began to be sensible that his situation ought rather to be held as matter of laughter than of serious resentment. To one bred a sportsman, a night spent in the open air had in it little of hardship, and the poor malice of the steward seemed more worthy of his contempt than his anger. I would to God, he said, that the grim old man may always have contented himself with such sportive revenge. He often looks as he were capable of doing us a darker turn. Returning, therefore, to the turf-seat which he had formerly occupied, and which was partially sheltered by a trim fence of green holly, he drew his mantle around him, stretched himself at length on the verdant settle, and endeavoured to resume that sleep which the castle bell had interrupted to so little purpose. Sleep, like other earthly blessings, is niggard of its favours when most courted. The more Roland invoked her aid, the farther she fled from his eyelids. He had been completely awakened, first, by the sounds of the bell, and then by his own aroused vivacity of temper, and he found it difficult again to compose himself to slumber. At length, when his mind--was wearied out with a maze of unpleasing meditation, he succeeded in coaxing himself into a broken slumber. This was again dispelled by the voices of two persons who were walking in the garden, the sound of whose conversation, after mingling for some time in the page's dreams, at length succeeded in awaking him thoroughly. He raised himself from his reclining posture in the utmost astonishment, which the circumstance of hearing two persons at that late hour conversing on the outside of the watchfully guarded Castle of Lochloven, was so well calculated to excite. His first thought was of supernatural beings; his next, upon some attempt on the part of Queen Mary's friends and followers; his last was, that George of Douglas, possessed of the keys, and having the means of ingress and egress at pleasure, was availing himself of his office to hold a rendezvous with Catherine Seyton in the castle garden. He was confirmed in this opinion by the tone of the voice, which asked in a low whisper, whether all was ready? Chapter the Thirtieth. In some breasts passion lies conceal'd and silent, Like war's swart powder in a castle vault, Until occasion, like the linstock, lights it: Then comes at once the lightning--and the thunder, And distant echoes tell that all is rent asunder. OLD PLAY. Roland Graeme, availing himself of a breach in the holly screen, and of the assistance of the full moon, which was now arisen, had a perfect opportunity, himself unobserved, to reconnoitre the persons and the motions

autumn

How many times the word 'autumn' appears in the text?

you, reverend father, I am totally ignorant. My brother, answered the Abbot, you are wise, and ought to know-- I am not--I am not--I am not wise, replied the horticulturist, pettishly, and stopping his ears with his fingers-- I was never called wise but when men wanted to engage me in some action of notorious folly. But, my good brother, said the Abbot-- I am not good neither, said the peevish gardener; I am neither good nor wise--Had I been wise, you would not have been admitted here; and were I good, methinks I should send you elsewhere to hatch plots for destroying the quiet of the country. What signifies disputing about queen or king,--when men may sit at peace--_sub umbra vitis sui?_ and so would I do, after the precept of Holy Writ, were I, as you term me, wise or good. But such as I am, my neck is in the yoke, and you make me draw what weight you list.--Follow me, youngster. This reverend father, who makes in his jackman's dress nearly as reverend a figure as I myself, will agree with me in one thing at least, and that is, that you have been long enough here. Follow the good father, Roland, said the Abbot, and remember my words--a day is approaching that will try the temper of all true Scotsmen--may thy heart prove faithful as the steel of thy blade! The page bowed in silence, and they parted; the gardener, notwithstanding his advanced age, walking on before him very briskly, and muttering as he went, partly to himself, partly to his companion, after the manner of old men of weakened intellects-- When I was great, thus ran his maundering, and had my mule and my ambling palfrey at command, I warrant you I could have as well flown through the air as have walked at this pace. I had my gout and my rheumatics, and an hundred things besides, that hung fetters on my heels; and, now, thanks to Our Lady, and honest labour, I can walk with any good man of my age in the kingdom of Fife--Fy upon it, that experience should be so long in coming! As he was thus muttering, his eye fell upon the branch of a pear-tree which drooped down for want of support, and at once forgetting his haste, the old man stopped and set seriously about binding it up. Roland Graeme had both readiness, neatness of hand, and good nature in abundance; he immediately lent his aid, and in a minute or two the bough was supported, and tied up in a way perfectly satisfactory to the old man, who looked at it with great complaisance. They are bergamots, he said, and if you will come ashore in autumn, you shall taste of them--the like are not in Lochleven Castle--the garden there is a poor pin-fold, and the gardener, Hugh Houkham, hath little skill of his craft--so come ashore, Master Page, in autumn, when you would eat pears. But what am I thinking of--ere that time come, they may have given thee sour pears for plums. Take an old man's advice, youth, one who hath seen many days, and sat in higher places than thou canst hope for--bend thy sword into a pruning-hook, and make a dibble of thy dagger--thy days shall be the longer, and thy health the better for it,--and come to aid me in my garden, and I will teach thee the real French fashion of _imping_, which the Southron call graffing. Do this, and do it without loss of time, for there is a whirlwind coming over the land, and only those shall escape who lie too much beneath the storm to have their boughs broken by it. So saying, he dismissed Roland Graeme, through a different door from that by which he had entered, signed a cross, and pronounced a benedicite as they parted, and then, still muttering to himself, retired into the garden, and locked the door on the inside. Chapter the Twenty-Ninth. Pray God she prove not masculine ere long! KING HENRY VI. Dismissed from the old man's garden, Roland Graeme found that a grassy paddock, in which sauntered two cows, the property of the gardener, still separated him from the village. He paced through it, lost in meditation upon the words of the Abbot. Father Ambrosius had, with success enough, exerted over him that powerful influence which the guardians and instructors of our childhood possess over our more mature youth. And yet, when Roland looked back upon what the father had said, he could not but suspect that he had rather sought to evade entering into the controversy betwixt the churches, than to repel the objections and satisfy the doubts which the lectures of Henderson had excited. For this he had no time, said the page to himself, neither have I now calmness and learning sufficient to judge upon points of such magnitude. Besides, it were base to quit my faith while the wind of fortune sets against it, unless I were so placed, that my conversion, should it take place, were free as light from the imputation of self-interest. I was bred a Catholic--bred in the faith of Bruce and Wallace--I will hold that faith till time and reason shall convince me that it errs. I will serve this poor Queen as a subject should serve an imprisoned and wronged sovereign--they who placed me in her service have to blame themselves--who sent me hither, a gentleman trained in the paths of loyalty and honour, when they should have sought out some truckling, cogging, double-dealing knave, who would have been at once the observant page of the Queen, and the obsequious spy of her enemies. Since I must choose betwixt aiding and betraying her, I will decide as becomes her servant and her subject; but Catherine Seyton--Catherine Seyton, beloved by Douglas and holding me on or off as the intervals of her leisure or caprice will permit--how shall I deal with the coquette?--By heaven, when I next have an opportunity, she shall render me some reason for her conduct, or I will break with her for ever! As he formed this doughty resolution, he crossed the stile which led out of the little enclosure, and was almost immediately greeted by Dr. Luke Lundin. Ha! my most excellent young friend, said the Doctor, from whence come you?--but I note the place.--Yes, neighbour Blinkhoolie's garden is a pleasant rendezvous, and you are of the age when lads look after a bonny lass with one eye, and a dainty plum with another. But hey! you look subtriste and melancholic--I fear the maiden has proved cruel, or the plums unripe; and surely I think neighbour Blinkhoolie's damsons can scarcely have been well preserved throughout the winter--he spares the saccharine juice on his confects. But courage, man, there are more Kates in Kinross; and for the immature fruit, a glass of my double distilled _aqua mirabilis--probatum est_. The page darted an ireful glance at the facetious physician; but presently recollecting that the name Kate, which had provoked his displeasure, was probably but introduced for the sake of alliteration, he suppressed his wrath, and only asked if the wains had been heard of? Why, I have been seeking for you this hour, to tell you that the stuff is in your boat, and that the boat waits your pleasure. Auchtermuchty had only fallen into company with an idle knave like himself, and a stoup of aquavitae between them. Your boatmen lie on their oars, and there have already been made two wefts from the warder's turret to intimate that those in the castle are impatient for your return. Yet there is time for you to take a slight repast; and, as your friend and physician, I hold it unfit you should face the water-breeze with an empty stomach. Roland Graeme had nothing for it but to return, with such cheer as he might, to the place where his boat was moored on the beach, and resisted all offer of refreshment, although the Doctor promised that he should prelude the collation with a gentle appetizer--a decoction of herbs, gathered and distilled by himself. Indeed, as Roland had not forgotten the contents of his morning cup, it is possible that the recollection induced him to stand firm in his refusal of all food, to which such an unpalatable preface was the preliminary. As they passed towards the boat, (for the ceremonious politeness of the worthy Chamberlain would not permit the page to go thither without attendance,) Roland Graeme, amidst a group who seemed to be assembled around a party of wandering musicians, distinguished, as he thought, the dress of Catherine Seyton. He shook himself clear from his attendant, and at one spring was in the midst of the crowd, and at the side of the damsel. Catherine, he whispered, is it well for you to be still here?--will you not return to the castle? To the devil with your Catherines and your castles! answered the maiden, snappishly; have you not had time enough already to get rid of your follies? Begone! I desire not your farther company, and there will be danger in thrusting it upon me. Nay--but if there be danger, fairest Catherine, replied Roland; why will you not allow me to stay and share it with you? Intruding fool, said the maiden, the danger is all on thine own side--the risk in, in plain terms, that I strike thee on the mouth with the hilt of my dagger. So saying, she turned haughtily from him, and moved through the crowd, who gave way in some astonishment at the masculine activity with which she forced her way among them. As Roland, though much irritated, prepared to follow, he was grappled on the other side by Doctor Luke Lundin, who reminded him of the loaded boat, of the two wefts, or signals with the flag, which had been made from the tower, of the danger of the cold breeze to an empty stomach, and of the vanity of spending more time upon coy wenches and sour plums. Roland was thus, in a manner, dragged back to his boat, and obliged to launch her forth upon his return to Lochleven Castle. That little voyage was speedily accomplished, and the page was greeted at the landing-place by the severe and caustic welcome of old Dryfesdale. So, young gallant, you are come at last, after a delay of six hours, and after two signals from the castle? But, I warrant, some idle junketing hath occupied you too deeply to think of your service or your duty. Where is the note of the plate and household stuff?--Pray Heaven it hath not been diminished under the sleeveless care of so young a gad-about! Diminished under my care, Sir Steward! retorted the page angrily; say so in earnest, and by Heaven your gray hair shall hardly protect your saucy tongue! A truce with your swaggering, young esquire, returned the steward; we have bolts and dungeons for brawlers. Go to my lady, and swagger before her, if thou darest--she will give thee proper cause of offence, for she has waited for thee long and impatiently. And where then is the Lady of Lochleven? said the page; for I conceive it is of her thou speakest. Ay--of whom else? replied Dryfesdale; or who besides the Lady of Lochleven hath a right to command in this castle? The Lady of Lochleven is thy mistress, said Roland Graeme; but mine is the Queen of Scotland. The steward looked at him fixedly for a moment, with an air in which suspicion and dislike were ill concealed by an affectation of contempt. The bragging cock-chicken, he said, will betray himself by his rash crowing. I have marked thy altered manner in the chapel of late--ay, and your changing of glances at meal-time with a certain idle damsel, who, like thyself, laughs at all gravity and goodness. There is something about you, my master, which should be looked to. But, if you would know whether the Lady of Lochleven, or that other lady, hath a right to command thy service, thou wilt find them together in the Lady Mary's ante-room. Roland hastened thither, not unwilling to escape from the ill-natured penetration of the old man, and marvelling at the same time what peculiarity could have occasioned the Lady of Lochleven's being in the Queen's apartment at this time of the afternoon, so much contrary to her usual wont. His acuteness instantly penetrated the meaning. She wishes, he concluded, to see the meeting betwixt the Queen and me on my return, that she may form a guess whether there is any private intelligence or understanding betwixt us--I must be guarded. With this resolution he entered the parlour, where the Queen, seated in her chair, with the Lady Fleming leaning upon the back of it, had already kept the Lady of Lochleven standing in her presence for the space of nearly an hour, to the manifest increase of her very visible bad humour. Roland Graeme, on entering the apartment, made a deep obeisance to the Queen, and another to the Lady, and then stood still as if to await their farther question. Speaking almost together, the Lady Lochleven said, So, young man, you are returned at length? And then stopped indignantly short, while the Queen went on without regarding her-- Roland, you are welcome home to us--you have proved the true dove and not the raven--Yet I am sure I could have forgiven you, if, once dismissed, from this water-circled ark of ours, you had never again returned to us. I trust you have brought back an olive-branch, for our kind and worthy hostess has chafed herself much on account of your long absence, and we never needed more some symbol of peace and reconciliation. I grieve I should have been detained, madam, answered the page; but from the delay of the person intrusted with the matters for which I was sent, I did not receive them till late in the day. See you there now, said the Queen to the Lady Lochleven; we could not persuade you, our dearest hostess, that your household goods were in all safe keeping and surety. True it is, that we can excuse your anxiety, considering that these august apartments are so scantily furnished, that we have not been able to offer you even the relief of a stool during the long time you have afforded us the pleasure of your society. The will, madam, said the lady, the will to offer such accommodation was more wanting than the means. What! said the Queen, looking round, and affecting surprise, there are then stools in this apartment--one, two--no less than four, including the broken one--a royal garniture!--We observed them not--will it please your ladyship to sit? No, madam, I will soon relieve you of my presence, replied the Lady Lochleven; and while with you, my aged limbs can still better brook fatigue, than my mind stoop to accept of constrained courtesy. Nay, Lady of Lochleven, if you take it so deeply, said the Queen, rising and motioning to her own vacant chair, I would rather you assumed my seat--you are not the first of your family who has done so. The Lady of Lochleven curtsied a negative, but seemed with much difficulty to suppress the angry answer which rose to her lips. During this sharp conversation, the page's attention had been almost entirely occupied by the entrance of Catherine Seyton, who came from the inner apartment, in the usual dress in which she attended upon the Queen, and with nothing in her manner which marked either the hurry or confusion incident to a hasty change of disguise, or the conscious fear of detection in a perilous enterprise. Roland Graeme ventured to make her an obeisance as she entered, but she returned it with an air of the utmost indifference, which, in his opinion, was extremely inconsistent with the circumstances in which they stood towards each other.-- Surely, he thought, she cannot in reason expect to bully me out of the belief due to mine own eyes, as she tried to do concerning the apparition in the hostelry of Saint Michael's--I will try if I cannot make her feel that this will be but a vain task, and that confidence in me is the wiser and safer course to pursue. These thoughts had passed rapidly through his mind, when the Queen, having finished her altercation with the Lady of the castle, again addressed him-- What of the revels at Kinross, Roland Graeme? Methought they were gay, if I may judge from some faint sounds of mirth and distant music, which found their way so far as these grated windows, and died when they entered them, as all that is mirthful must--But thou lookest as sad as if thou hadst come from a conventicle of the Huguenots! And so perchance he hath, madam, replied the Lady of Lochleven, at whom this side-shaft was lanched. I trust, amid yonder idle fooleries, there wanted not some pouring forth of doctrine to a better purpose than that vain mirth, which, blazing and vanishing like the crackling of dry thorns, leaves to the fools who love it nothing but dust and ashes. Mary Fleming, said the Queen, turning round and drawing her mantle about her, I would that we had the chimney-grate supplied with a fagot or two of these same thorns which the Lady of Lochleven describes so well. Methinks the damp air from the lake, which stagnates in these vaulted rooms, renders them deadly cold. Your Grace's pleasure shall be obeyed, said the Lady of Lochleven; yet may I presume to remind you that we are now in summer? I thank you for the information, my good lady, said the Queen; for prisoners better learn their calender from the mouth of their jailor, than from any change they themselves feel in the seasons.--Once more, Roland Graeme, what of the revels? They were gay, madam, said the page, but of the usual sort, and little worth your Highness's ear. Oh, you know not, said the Queen, how very indulgent my ear has become to all that speaks of freedom and the pleasures of the free. Methinks I would rather have seen the gay villagers dance their ring round the Maypole, than have witnessed the most stately masques within the precincts of a palace. The absence of stone-wall--the sense that the green turf is under the foot which may tread it free and unrestrained, is worth all that art or splendour can add to more courtly revels. I trust, said the Lady Lochleven, addressing the page in her turn, there were amongst these follies none of the riots or disturbances to which they so naturally lead? Roland gave a slight glance to Catherine Seyton, as if to bespeak her attention, as he replied,-- I witnessed no offence, madam, worthy of marking--none indeed of any kind, save that a bold damsel made her hand somewhat too familiar with the cheek of a player-man, and ran some hazard of being ducked in the lake. As he uttered these words he cast a hasty glance at Catherine; but she sustained, with the utmost serenity of manner and countenance, the hint which he had deemed could not have been thrown out before her without exciting some fear and confusion. I will cumber your Grace no longer with my presence, said the Lady Lochleven, unless you have aught to command me. Nought, our good hostess, answered the Queen, unless it be to pray you, that on another occasion you deem it not needful to postpone your better employment to wait so long upon us. May it please you, added the Lady Lochleven, to command this your gentleman to attend us, that I may receive some account of these matters which have been sent hither for your Grace's use? We may not refuse what you are pleased to require, madam, answered the Queen. Go with the lady, Roland, if our commands be indeed necessary to thy doing so. We will hear to-morrow the history of thy Kinross pleasures. For this night we dismiss thy attendance. Roland Graeme went with the Lady of Lochleven, who failed not to ask him many questions concerning what had passed at the sports, to which he rendered such answers as were most likely to lull asleep any suspicions which she might entertain of his disposition to favour Queen Mary, taking especial care to avoid all allusion to the apparition of Magdalen Graeme, and of the Abbot Ambrosius. At length, after undergoing a long and somewhat close examination, he was dismissed with such expressions, as, coming from the reserved and stern Lady of Lochleven, might seem to express a degree of favour and countenance. His first care was to obtain some refreshment, which was more cheerfully afforded him by a good-natured pantler than by Dryfesdale, who was, on this occasion, much disposed to abide by the fashion of Pudding-burn House, where They who came not the first call. Gat no more meat till the next meal. When Roland Graeme had finished his repast, having his dismissal from the Queen for the evening, and being little inclined for such society as the castle afforded, he stole into the garden, in which he had permission to spend his leisure time, when it pleased him. In this place, the ingenuity of the contriver and disposer of the walks had exerted itself to make the most of little space, and by screens, both of stone ornamented with rude sculpture, and hedges of living green, had endeavoured to give as much intricacy and variety as the confined limits of the garden would admit. Here the young man walked sadly, considering the events of the day, and comparing what had dropped from the Abbot with what he had himself noticed of the demeanour of George Douglas. It must be so, was the painful but inevitable conclusion at which he arrived. It must be by his aid that she is thus enabled, like a phantom, to transport herself from place to place, and to appear at pleasure on the mainland or on the islet.--It must be so, he repeated once more; with him she holds a close, secret, and intimate correspondence, altogether inconsistent with the eye of favour which she has sometimes cast upon me, and destructive to the hopes which she must have known these glances have necessarily inspired. And yet (for love will hope where reason despairs) the thought rushed on his mind, that it was possible she only encouraged Douglas's passion so far as might serve her mistress's interest, and that she was of too frank, noble, and candid a nature, to hold out to himself hopes which she meant not to fulfil. Lost in these various conjectures, he seated himself upon a bank of turf which commanded a view of the lake on the one side, and on the other of that front of the castle along which the Queen's apartments were situated. The sun had now for some time set, and the twilight of May was rapidly fading into a serene night. On the lake, the expanded water rose and fell, with the slightest and softest influence of a southern breeze, which scarcely dimpled the surface over which it passed. In the distance was still seen the dim outline of the island of Saint Serf, once visited by many a sandalled pilgrim, as the blessed spot trodden by a man of God--now neglected or violated, as the refuge of lazy priests, who had with justice been compelled to give place to the sheep and the heifers of a Protestant baron. As Roland gazed on the dark speck, amid the lighter blue of the waters which surrounded it, the mazes of polemical discussion again stretched themselves before the eye of the mind. Had these men justly suffered their exile as licentious drones, the robbers, at once, and disgrace, of the busy hive? or had the hand of avarice and rapine expelled from the temple, not the ribalds who polluted, but the faithful priests who served the shrine in honour and fidelity? The arguments of Henderson, in this contemplative hour, rose with double force before him; and could scarcely be parried by the appeal which the Abbot Ambrosius had made from his understanding to his feelings,--an appeal which he had felt more forcibly amid the bustle of stirring life, than now when his reflections were more undisturbed. It required an effort to divert his mind from this embarrassing topic; and he found that he best succeeded by turning his eyes to the front of the tower, watching where a twinkling light still streamed from the casement of Catherine Seyton's apartment, obscured by times for a moment as the shadow of the fair inhabitant passed betwixt the taper and the window. At length the light was removed or extinguished, and that object of speculation was also withdrawn from the eyes of the meditative lover. Dare I confess the fact, without injuring his character for ever as a hero of romance? These eyes gradually became heavy; speculative doubts on the subject of religious controversy, and anxious conjectures concerning the state of his mistress's affections, became confusedly blended together in his musings; the fatigues of a busy day prevailed over the harassing subjects of contemplation which occupied his mind, and he fell fast asleep. Sound were his slumbers, until they were suddenly dispelled by the iron tongue of the castle-bell, which sent its deep and sullen sounds wide over the bosom of the lake, and awakened the echoes of Bennarty, the hill which descends steeply on its southern bank. Roland started up, for this bell was always tolled at ten o'clock, as the signal for locking the castle gates, and placing the keys under the charge of the seneschal. He therefore hastened to the wicket by which the garden communicated with the building, and had the mortification, just as he reached it, to hear the bolt leave its sheath with a discordant crash, and enter the stone groove of the door-lintel. Hold, hold, cried the page, and let me in ere you lock the wicket. The voice of Dryfesdale replied from within, in his usual tone of embittered sullenness, The hour is passed, fair master--you like not the inside of these walls--even make it a complete holiday, and spend the night as well as the day out of bounds. Open the door, exclaimed the indignant page, or by Saint Giles I will make thy gold chain smoke for it! Make no alarm here, retorted the impenetrable Dryfesdale, but keep thy sinful oaths and silly threats for those that regard them--I do mine office, and carry the keys to the seneschal.--Adieu, my young master! the cool night air will advantage your hot blood. The steward was right in what he said; for the cooling breeze was very necessary to appease the feverish fit of anger which Roland experienced, nor did the remedy succeed for some time. At length, after some hasty turns made through the garden, exhausting his passion in vain vows of vengeance, Roland Graeme began to be sensible that his situation ought rather to be held as matter of laughter than of serious resentment. To one bred a sportsman, a night spent in the open air had in it little of hardship, and the poor malice of the steward seemed more worthy of his contempt than his anger. I would to God, he said, that the grim old man may always have contented himself with such sportive revenge. He often looks as he were capable of doing us a darker turn. Returning, therefore, to the turf-seat which he had formerly occupied, and which was partially sheltered by a trim fence of green holly, he drew his mantle around him, stretched himself at length on the verdant settle, and endeavoured to resume that sleep which the castle bell had interrupted to so little purpose. Sleep, like other earthly blessings, is niggard of its favours when most courted. The more Roland invoked her aid, the farther she fled from his eyelids. He had been completely awakened, first, by the sounds of the bell, and then by his own aroused vivacity of temper, and he found it difficult again to compose himself to slumber. At length, when his mind--was wearied out with a maze of unpleasing meditation, he succeeded in coaxing himself into a broken slumber. This was again dispelled by the voices of two persons who were walking in the garden, the sound of whose conversation, after mingling for some time in the page's dreams, at length succeeded in awaking him thoroughly. He raised himself from his reclining posture in the utmost astonishment, which the circumstance of hearing two persons at that late hour conversing on the outside of the watchfully guarded Castle of Lochloven, was so well calculated to excite. His first thought was of supernatural beings; his next, upon some attempt on the part of Queen Mary's friends and followers; his last was, that George of Douglas, possessed of the keys, and having the means of ingress and egress at pleasure, was availing himself of his office to hold a rendezvous with Catherine Seyton in the castle garden. He was confirmed in this opinion by the tone of the voice, which asked in a low whisper, whether all was ready? Chapter the Thirtieth. In some breasts passion lies conceal'd and silent, Like war's swart powder in a castle vault, Until occasion, like the linstock, lights it: Then comes at once the lightning--and the thunder, And distant echoes tell that all is rent asunder. OLD PLAY. Roland Graeme, availing himself of a breach in the holly screen, and of the assistance of the full moon, which was now arisen, had a perfect opportunity, himself unobserved, to reconnoitre the persons and the motions

retired

How many times the word 'retired' appears in the text?

you, reverend father, I am totally ignorant. My brother, answered the Abbot, you are wise, and ought to know-- I am not--I am not--I am not wise, replied the horticulturist, pettishly, and stopping his ears with his fingers-- I was never called wise but when men wanted to engage me in some action of notorious folly. But, my good brother, said the Abbot-- I am not good neither, said the peevish gardener; I am neither good nor wise--Had I been wise, you would not have been admitted here; and were I good, methinks I should send you elsewhere to hatch plots for destroying the quiet of the country. What signifies disputing about queen or king,--when men may sit at peace--_sub umbra vitis sui?_ and so would I do, after the precept of Holy Writ, were I, as you term me, wise or good. But such as I am, my neck is in the yoke, and you make me draw what weight you list.--Follow me, youngster. This reverend father, who makes in his jackman's dress nearly as reverend a figure as I myself, will agree with me in one thing at least, and that is, that you have been long enough here. Follow the good father, Roland, said the Abbot, and remember my words--a day is approaching that will try the temper of all true Scotsmen--may thy heart prove faithful as the steel of thy blade! The page bowed in silence, and they parted; the gardener, notwithstanding his advanced age, walking on before him very briskly, and muttering as he went, partly to himself, partly to his companion, after the manner of old men of weakened intellects-- When I was great, thus ran his maundering, and had my mule and my ambling palfrey at command, I warrant you I could have as well flown through the air as have walked at this pace. I had my gout and my rheumatics, and an hundred things besides, that hung fetters on my heels; and, now, thanks to Our Lady, and honest labour, I can walk with any good man of my age in the kingdom of Fife--Fy upon it, that experience should be so long in coming! As he was thus muttering, his eye fell upon the branch of a pear-tree which drooped down for want of support, and at once forgetting his haste, the old man stopped and set seriously about binding it up. Roland Graeme had both readiness, neatness of hand, and good nature in abundance; he immediately lent his aid, and in a minute or two the bough was supported, and tied up in a way perfectly satisfactory to the old man, who looked at it with great complaisance. They are bergamots, he said, and if you will come ashore in autumn, you shall taste of them--the like are not in Lochleven Castle--the garden there is a poor pin-fold, and the gardener, Hugh Houkham, hath little skill of his craft--so come ashore, Master Page, in autumn, when you would eat pears. But what am I thinking of--ere that time come, they may have given thee sour pears for plums. Take an old man's advice, youth, one who hath seen many days, and sat in higher places than thou canst hope for--bend thy sword into a pruning-hook, and make a dibble of thy dagger--thy days shall be the longer, and thy health the better for it,--and come to aid me in my garden, and I will teach thee the real French fashion of _imping_, which the Southron call graffing. Do this, and do it without loss of time, for there is a whirlwind coming over the land, and only those shall escape who lie too much beneath the storm to have their boughs broken by it. So saying, he dismissed Roland Graeme, through a different door from that by which he had entered, signed a cross, and pronounced a benedicite as they parted, and then, still muttering to himself, retired into the garden, and locked the door on the inside. Chapter the Twenty-Ninth. Pray God she prove not masculine ere long! KING HENRY VI. Dismissed from the old man's garden, Roland Graeme found that a grassy paddock, in which sauntered two cows, the property of the gardener, still separated him from the village. He paced through it, lost in meditation upon the words of the Abbot. Father Ambrosius had, with success enough, exerted over him that powerful influence which the guardians and instructors of our childhood possess over our more mature youth. And yet, when Roland looked back upon what the father had said, he could not but suspect that he had rather sought to evade entering into the controversy betwixt the churches, than to repel the objections and satisfy the doubts which the lectures of Henderson had excited. For this he had no time, said the page to himself, neither have I now calmness and learning sufficient to judge upon points of such magnitude. Besides, it were base to quit my faith while the wind of fortune sets against it, unless I were so placed, that my conversion, should it take place, were free as light from the imputation of self-interest. I was bred a Catholic--bred in the faith of Bruce and Wallace--I will hold that faith till time and reason shall convince me that it errs. I will serve this poor Queen as a subject should serve an imprisoned and wronged sovereign--they who placed me in her service have to blame themselves--who sent me hither, a gentleman trained in the paths of loyalty and honour, when they should have sought out some truckling, cogging, double-dealing knave, who would have been at once the observant page of the Queen, and the obsequious spy of her enemies. Since I must choose betwixt aiding and betraying her, I will decide as becomes her servant and her subject; but Catherine Seyton--Catherine Seyton, beloved by Douglas and holding me on or off as the intervals of her leisure or caprice will permit--how shall I deal with the coquette?--By heaven, when I next have an opportunity, she shall render me some reason for her conduct, or I will break with her for ever! As he formed this doughty resolution, he crossed the stile which led out of the little enclosure, and was almost immediately greeted by Dr. Luke Lundin. Ha! my most excellent young friend, said the Doctor, from whence come you?--but I note the place.--Yes, neighbour Blinkhoolie's garden is a pleasant rendezvous, and you are of the age when lads look after a bonny lass with one eye, and a dainty plum with another. But hey! you look subtriste and melancholic--I fear the maiden has proved cruel, or the plums unripe; and surely I think neighbour Blinkhoolie's damsons can scarcely have been well preserved throughout the winter--he spares the saccharine juice on his confects. But courage, man, there are more Kates in Kinross; and for the immature fruit, a glass of my double distilled _aqua mirabilis--probatum est_. The page darted an ireful glance at the facetious physician; but presently recollecting that the name Kate, which had provoked his displeasure, was probably but introduced for the sake of alliteration, he suppressed his wrath, and only asked if the wains had been heard of? Why, I have been seeking for you this hour, to tell you that the stuff is in your boat, and that the boat waits your pleasure. Auchtermuchty had only fallen into company with an idle knave like himself, and a stoup of aquavitae between them. Your boatmen lie on their oars, and there have already been made two wefts from the warder's turret to intimate that those in the castle are impatient for your return. Yet there is time for you to take a slight repast; and, as your friend and physician, I hold it unfit you should face the water-breeze with an empty stomach. Roland Graeme had nothing for it but to return, with such cheer as he might, to the place where his boat was moored on the beach, and resisted all offer of refreshment, although the Doctor promised that he should prelude the collation with a gentle appetizer--a decoction of herbs, gathered and distilled by himself. Indeed, as Roland had not forgotten the contents of his morning cup, it is possible that the recollection induced him to stand firm in his refusal of all food, to which such an unpalatable preface was the preliminary. As they passed towards the boat, (for the ceremonious politeness of the worthy Chamberlain would not permit the page to go thither without attendance,) Roland Graeme, amidst a group who seemed to be assembled around a party of wandering musicians, distinguished, as he thought, the dress of Catherine Seyton. He shook himself clear from his attendant, and at one spring was in the midst of the crowd, and at the side of the damsel. Catherine, he whispered, is it well for you to be still here?--will you not return to the castle? To the devil with your Catherines and your castles! answered the maiden, snappishly; have you not had time enough already to get rid of your follies? Begone! I desire not your farther company, and there will be danger in thrusting it upon me. Nay--but if there be danger, fairest Catherine, replied Roland; why will you not allow me to stay and share it with you? Intruding fool, said the maiden, the danger is all on thine own side--the risk in, in plain terms, that I strike thee on the mouth with the hilt of my dagger. So saying, she turned haughtily from him, and moved through the crowd, who gave way in some astonishment at the masculine activity with which she forced her way among them. As Roland, though much irritated, prepared to follow, he was grappled on the other side by Doctor Luke Lundin, who reminded him of the loaded boat, of the two wefts, or signals with the flag, which had been made from the tower, of the danger of the cold breeze to an empty stomach, and of the vanity of spending more time upon coy wenches and sour plums. Roland was thus, in a manner, dragged back to his boat, and obliged to launch her forth upon his return to Lochleven Castle. That little voyage was speedily accomplished, and the page was greeted at the landing-place by the severe and caustic welcome of old Dryfesdale. So, young gallant, you are come at last, after a delay of six hours, and after two signals from the castle? But, I warrant, some idle junketing hath occupied you too deeply to think of your service or your duty. Where is the note of the plate and household stuff?--Pray Heaven it hath not been diminished under the sleeveless care of so young a gad-about! Diminished under my care, Sir Steward! retorted the page angrily; say so in earnest, and by Heaven your gray hair shall hardly protect your saucy tongue! A truce with your swaggering, young esquire, returned the steward; we have bolts and dungeons for brawlers. Go to my lady, and swagger before her, if thou darest--she will give thee proper cause of offence, for she has waited for thee long and impatiently. And where then is the Lady of Lochleven? said the page; for I conceive it is of her thou speakest. Ay--of whom else? replied Dryfesdale; or who besides the Lady of Lochleven hath a right to command in this castle? The Lady of Lochleven is thy mistress, said Roland Graeme; but mine is the Queen of Scotland. The steward looked at him fixedly for a moment, with an air in which suspicion and dislike were ill concealed by an affectation of contempt. The bragging cock-chicken, he said, will betray himself by his rash crowing. I have marked thy altered manner in the chapel of late--ay, and your changing of glances at meal-time with a certain idle damsel, who, like thyself, laughs at all gravity and goodness. There is something about you, my master, which should be looked to. But, if you would know whether the Lady of Lochleven, or that other lady, hath a right to command thy service, thou wilt find them together in the Lady Mary's ante-room. Roland hastened thither, not unwilling to escape from the ill-natured penetration of the old man, and marvelling at the same time what peculiarity could have occasioned the Lady of Lochleven's being in the Queen's apartment at this time of the afternoon, so much contrary to her usual wont. His acuteness instantly penetrated the meaning. She wishes, he concluded, to see the meeting betwixt the Queen and me on my return, that she may form a guess whether there is any private intelligence or understanding betwixt us--I must be guarded. With this resolution he entered the parlour, where the Queen, seated in her chair, with the Lady Fleming leaning upon the back of it, had already kept the Lady of Lochleven standing in her presence for the space of nearly an hour, to the manifest increase of her very visible bad humour. Roland Graeme, on entering the apartment, made a deep obeisance to the Queen, and another to the Lady, and then stood still as if to await their farther question. Speaking almost together, the Lady Lochleven said, So, young man, you are returned at length? And then stopped indignantly short, while the Queen went on without regarding her-- Roland, you are welcome home to us--you have proved the true dove and not the raven--Yet I am sure I could have forgiven you, if, once dismissed, from this water-circled ark of ours, you had never again returned to us. I trust you have brought back an olive-branch, for our kind and worthy hostess has chafed herself much on account of your long absence, and we never needed more some symbol of peace and reconciliation. I grieve I should have been detained, madam, answered the page; but from the delay of the person intrusted with the matters for which I was sent, I did not receive them till late in the day. See you there now, said the Queen to the Lady Lochleven; we could not persuade you, our dearest hostess, that your household goods were in all safe keeping and surety. True it is, that we can excuse your anxiety, considering that these august apartments are so scantily furnished, that we have not been able to offer you even the relief of a stool during the long time you have afforded us the pleasure of your society. The will, madam, said the lady, the will to offer such accommodation was more wanting than the means. What! said the Queen, looking round, and affecting surprise, there are then stools in this apartment--one, two--no less than four, including the broken one--a royal garniture!--We observed them not--will it please your ladyship to sit? No, madam, I will soon relieve you of my presence, replied the Lady Lochleven; and while with you, my aged limbs can still better brook fatigue, than my mind stoop to accept of constrained courtesy. Nay, Lady of Lochleven, if you take it so deeply, said the Queen, rising and motioning to her own vacant chair, I would rather you assumed my seat--you are not the first of your family who has done so. The Lady of Lochleven curtsied a negative, but seemed with much difficulty to suppress the angry answer which rose to her lips. During this sharp conversation, the page's attention had been almost entirely occupied by the entrance of Catherine Seyton, who came from the inner apartment, in the usual dress in which she attended upon the Queen, and with nothing in her manner which marked either the hurry or confusion incident to a hasty change of disguise, or the conscious fear of detection in a perilous enterprise. Roland Graeme ventured to make her an obeisance as she entered, but she returned it with an air of the utmost indifference, which, in his opinion, was extremely inconsistent with the circumstances in which they stood towards each other.-- Surely, he thought, she cannot in reason expect to bully me out of the belief due to mine own eyes, as she tried to do concerning the apparition in the hostelry of Saint Michael's--I will try if I cannot make her feel that this will be but a vain task, and that confidence in me is the wiser and safer course to pursue. These thoughts had passed rapidly through his mind, when the Queen, having finished her altercation with the Lady of the castle, again addressed him-- What of the revels at Kinross, Roland Graeme? Methought they were gay, if I may judge from some faint sounds of mirth and distant music, which found their way so far as these grated windows, and died when they entered them, as all that is mirthful must--But thou lookest as sad as if thou hadst come from a conventicle of the Huguenots! And so perchance he hath, madam, replied the Lady of Lochleven, at whom this side-shaft was lanched. I trust, amid yonder idle fooleries, there wanted not some pouring forth of doctrine to a better purpose than that vain mirth, which, blazing and vanishing like the crackling of dry thorns, leaves to the fools who love it nothing but dust and ashes. Mary Fleming, said the Queen, turning round and drawing her mantle about her, I would that we had the chimney-grate supplied with a fagot or two of these same thorns which the Lady of Lochleven describes so well. Methinks the damp air from the lake, which stagnates in these vaulted rooms, renders them deadly cold. Your Grace's pleasure shall be obeyed, said the Lady of Lochleven; yet may I presume to remind you that we are now in summer? I thank you for the information, my good lady, said the Queen; for prisoners better learn their calender from the mouth of their jailor, than from any change they themselves feel in the seasons.--Once more, Roland Graeme, what of the revels? They were gay, madam, said the page, but of the usual sort, and little worth your Highness's ear. Oh, you know not, said the Queen, how very indulgent my ear has become to all that speaks of freedom and the pleasures of the free. Methinks I would rather have seen the gay villagers dance their ring round the Maypole, than have witnessed the most stately masques within the precincts of a palace. The absence of stone-wall--the sense that the green turf is under the foot which may tread it free and unrestrained, is worth all that art or splendour can add to more courtly revels. I trust, said the Lady Lochleven, addressing the page in her turn, there were amongst these follies none of the riots or disturbances to which they so naturally lead? Roland gave a slight glance to Catherine Seyton, as if to bespeak her attention, as he replied,-- I witnessed no offence, madam, worthy of marking--none indeed of any kind, save that a bold damsel made her hand somewhat too familiar with the cheek of a player-man, and ran some hazard of being ducked in the lake. As he uttered these words he cast a hasty glance at Catherine; but she sustained, with the utmost serenity of manner and countenance, the hint which he had deemed could not have been thrown out before her without exciting some fear and confusion. I will cumber your Grace no longer with my presence, said the Lady Lochleven, unless you have aught to command me. Nought, our good hostess, answered the Queen, unless it be to pray you, that on another occasion you deem it not needful to postpone your better employment to wait so long upon us. May it please you, added the Lady Lochleven, to command this your gentleman to attend us, that I may receive some account of these matters which have been sent hither for your Grace's use? We may not refuse what you are pleased to require, madam, answered the Queen. Go with the lady, Roland, if our commands be indeed necessary to thy doing so. We will hear to-morrow the history of thy Kinross pleasures. For this night we dismiss thy attendance. Roland Graeme went with the Lady of Lochleven, who failed not to ask him many questions concerning what had passed at the sports, to which he rendered such answers as were most likely to lull asleep any suspicions which she might entertain of his disposition to favour Queen Mary, taking especial care to avoid all allusion to the apparition of Magdalen Graeme, and of the Abbot Ambrosius. At length, after undergoing a long and somewhat close examination, he was dismissed with such expressions, as, coming from the reserved and stern Lady of Lochleven, might seem to express a degree of favour and countenance. His first care was to obtain some refreshment, which was more cheerfully afforded him by a good-natured pantler than by Dryfesdale, who was, on this occasion, much disposed to abide by the fashion of Pudding-burn House, where They who came not the first call. Gat no more meat till the next meal. When Roland Graeme had finished his repast, having his dismissal from the Queen for the evening, and being little inclined for such society as the castle afforded, he stole into the garden, in which he had permission to spend his leisure time, when it pleased him. In this place, the ingenuity of the contriver and disposer of the walks had exerted itself to make the most of little space, and by screens, both of stone ornamented with rude sculpture, and hedges of living green, had endeavoured to give as much intricacy and variety as the confined limits of the garden would admit. Here the young man walked sadly, considering the events of the day, and comparing what had dropped from the Abbot with what he had himself noticed of the demeanour of George Douglas. It must be so, was the painful but inevitable conclusion at which he arrived. It must be by his aid that she is thus enabled, like a phantom, to transport herself from place to place, and to appear at pleasure on the mainland or on the islet.--It must be so, he repeated once more; with him she holds a close, secret, and intimate correspondence, altogether inconsistent with the eye of favour which she has sometimes cast upon me, and destructive to the hopes which she must have known these glances have necessarily inspired. And yet (for love will hope where reason despairs) the thought rushed on his mind, that it was possible she only encouraged Douglas's passion so far as might serve her mistress's interest, and that she was of too frank, noble, and candid a nature, to hold out to himself hopes which she meant not to fulfil. Lost in these various conjectures, he seated himself upon a bank of turf which commanded a view of the lake on the one side, and on the other of that front of the castle along which the Queen's apartments were situated. The sun had now for some time set, and the twilight of May was rapidly fading into a serene night. On the lake, the expanded water rose and fell, with the slightest and softest influence of a southern breeze, which scarcely dimpled the surface over which it passed. In the distance was still seen the dim outline of the island of Saint Serf, once visited by many a sandalled pilgrim, as the blessed spot trodden by a man of God--now neglected or violated, as the refuge of lazy priests, who had with justice been compelled to give place to the sheep and the heifers of a Protestant baron. As Roland gazed on the dark speck, amid the lighter blue of the waters which surrounded it, the mazes of polemical discussion again stretched themselves before the eye of the mind. Had these men justly suffered their exile as licentious drones, the robbers, at once, and disgrace, of the busy hive? or had the hand of avarice and rapine expelled from the temple, not the ribalds who polluted, but the faithful priests who served the shrine in honour and fidelity? The arguments of Henderson, in this contemplative hour, rose with double force before him; and could scarcely be parried by the appeal which the Abbot Ambrosius had made from his understanding to his feelings,--an appeal which he had felt more forcibly amid the bustle of stirring life, than now when his reflections were more undisturbed. It required an effort to divert his mind from this embarrassing topic; and he found that he best succeeded by turning his eyes to the front of the tower, watching where a twinkling light still streamed from the casement of Catherine Seyton's apartment, obscured by times for a moment as the shadow of the fair inhabitant passed betwixt the taper and the window. At length the light was removed or extinguished, and that object of speculation was also withdrawn from the eyes of the meditative lover. Dare I confess the fact, without injuring his character for ever as a hero of romance? These eyes gradually became heavy; speculative doubts on the subject of religious controversy, and anxious conjectures concerning the state of his mistress's affections, became confusedly blended together in his musings; the fatigues of a busy day prevailed over the harassing subjects of contemplation which occupied his mind, and he fell fast asleep. Sound were his slumbers, until they were suddenly dispelled by the iron tongue of the castle-bell, which sent its deep and sullen sounds wide over the bosom of the lake, and awakened the echoes of Bennarty, the hill which descends steeply on its southern bank. Roland started up, for this bell was always tolled at ten o'clock, as the signal for locking the castle gates, and placing the keys under the charge of the seneschal. He therefore hastened to the wicket by which the garden communicated with the building, and had the mortification, just as he reached it, to hear the bolt leave its sheath with a discordant crash, and enter the stone groove of the door-lintel. Hold, hold, cried the page, and let me in ere you lock the wicket. The voice of Dryfesdale replied from within, in his usual tone of embittered sullenness, The hour is passed, fair master--you like not the inside of these walls--even make it a complete holiday, and spend the night as well as the day out of bounds. Open the door, exclaimed the indignant page, or by Saint Giles I will make thy gold chain smoke for it! Make no alarm here, retorted the impenetrable Dryfesdale, but keep thy sinful oaths and silly threats for those that regard them--I do mine office, and carry the keys to the seneschal.--Adieu, my young master! the cool night air will advantage your hot blood. The steward was right in what he said; for the cooling breeze was very necessary to appease the feverish fit of anger which Roland experienced, nor did the remedy succeed for some time. At length, after some hasty turns made through the garden, exhausting his passion in vain vows of vengeance, Roland Graeme began to be sensible that his situation ought rather to be held as matter of laughter than of serious resentment. To one bred a sportsman, a night spent in the open air had in it little of hardship, and the poor malice of the steward seemed more worthy of his contempt than his anger. I would to God, he said, that the grim old man may always have contented himself with such sportive revenge. He often looks as he were capable of doing us a darker turn. Returning, therefore, to the turf-seat which he had formerly occupied, and which was partially sheltered by a trim fence of green holly, he drew his mantle around him, stretched himself at length on the verdant settle, and endeavoured to resume that sleep which the castle bell had interrupted to so little purpose. Sleep, like other earthly blessings, is niggard of its favours when most courted. The more Roland invoked her aid, the farther she fled from his eyelids. He had been completely awakened, first, by the sounds of the bell, and then by his own aroused vivacity of temper, and he found it difficult again to compose himself to slumber. At length, when his mind--was wearied out with a maze of unpleasing meditation, he succeeded in coaxing himself into a broken slumber. This was again dispelled by the voices of two persons who were walking in the garden, the sound of whose conversation, after mingling for some time in the page's dreams, at length succeeded in awaking him thoroughly. He raised himself from his reclining posture in the utmost astonishment, which the circumstance of hearing two persons at that late hour conversing on the outside of the watchfully guarded Castle of Lochloven, was so well calculated to excite. His first thought was of supernatural beings; his next, upon some attempt on the part of Queen Mary's friends and followers; his last was, that George of Douglas, possessed of the keys, and having the means of ingress and egress at pleasure, was availing himself of his office to hold a rendezvous with Catherine Seyton in the castle garden. He was confirmed in this opinion by the tone of the voice, which asked in a low whisper, whether all was ready? Chapter the Thirtieth. In some breasts passion lies conceal'd and silent, Like war's swart powder in a castle vault, Until occasion, like the linstock, lights it: Then comes at once the lightning--and the thunder, And distant echoes tell that all is rent asunder. OLD PLAY. Roland Graeme, availing himself of a breach in the holly screen, and of the assistance of the full moon, which was now arisen, had a perfect opportunity, himself unobserved, to reconnoitre the persons and the motions

catholic

How many times the word 'catholic' appears in the text?

you, reverend father, I am totally ignorant. My brother, answered the Abbot, you are wise, and ought to know-- I am not--I am not--I am not wise, replied the horticulturist, pettishly, and stopping his ears with his fingers-- I was never called wise but when men wanted to engage me in some action of notorious folly. But, my good brother, said the Abbot-- I am not good neither, said the peevish gardener; I am neither good nor wise--Had I been wise, you would not have been admitted here; and were I good, methinks I should send you elsewhere to hatch plots for destroying the quiet of the country. What signifies disputing about queen or king,--when men may sit at peace--_sub umbra vitis sui?_ and so would I do, after the precept of Holy Writ, were I, as you term me, wise or good. But such as I am, my neck is in the yoke, and you make me draw what weight you list.--Follow me, youngster. This reverend father, who makes in his jackman's dress nearly as reverend a figure as I myself, will agree with me in one thing at least, and that is, that you have been long enough here. Follow the good father, Roland, said the Abbot, and remember my words--a day is approaching that will try the temper of all true Scotsmen--may thy heart prove faithful as the steel of thy blade! The page bowed in silence, and they parted; the gardener, notwithstanding his advanced age, walking on before him very briskly, and muttering as he went, partly to himself, partly to his companion, after the manner of old men of weakened intellects-- When I was great, thus ran his maundering, and had my mule and my ambling palfrey at command, I warrant you I could have as well flown through the air as have walked at this pace. I had my gout and my rheumatics, and an hundred things besides, that hung fetters on my heels; and, now, thanks to Our Lady, and honest labour, I can walk with any good man of my age in the kingdom of Fife--Fy upon it, that experience should be so long in coming! As he was thus muttering, his eye fell upon the branch of a pear-tree which drooped down for want of support, and at once forgetting his haste, the old man stopped and set seriously about binding it up. Roland Graeme had both readiness, neatness of hand, and good nature in abundance; he immediately lent his aid, and in a minute or two the bough was supported, and tied up in a way perfectly satisfactory to the old man, who looked at it with great complaisance. They are bergamots, he said, and if you will come ashore in autumn, you shall taste of them--the like are not in Lochleven Castle--the garden there is a poor pin-fold, and the gardener, Hugh Houkham, hath little skill of his craft--so come ashore, Master Page, in autumn, when you would eat pears. But what am I thinking of--ere that time come, they may have given thee sour pears for plums. Take an old man's advice, youth, one who hath seen many days, and sat in higher places than thou canst hope for--bend thy sword into a pruning-hook, and make a dibble of thy dagger--thy days shall be the longer, and thy health the better for it,--and come to aid me in my garden, and I will teach thee the real French fashion of _imping_, which the Southron call graffing. Do this, and do it without loss of time, for there is a whirlwind coming over the land, and only those shall escape who lie too much beneath the storm to have their boughs broken by it. So saying, he dismissed Roland Graeme, through a different door from that by which he had entered, signed a cross, and pronounced a benedicite as they parted, and then, still muttering to himself, retired into the garden, and locked the door on the inside. Chapter the Twenty-Ninth. Pray God she prove not masculine ere long! KING HENRY VI. Dismissed from the old man's garden, Roland Graeme found that a grassy paddock, in which sauntered two cows, the property of the gardener, still separated him from the village. He paced through it, lost in meditation upon the words of the Abbot. Father Ambrosius had, with success enough, exerted over him that powerful influence which the guardians and instructors of our childhood possess over our more mature youth. And yet, when Roland looked back upon what the father had said, he could not but suspect that he had rather sought to evade entering into the controversy betwixt the churches, than to repel the objections and satisfy the doubts which the lectures of Henderson had excited. For this he had no time, said the page to himself, neither have I now calmness and learning sufficient to judge upon points of such magnitude. Besides, it were base to quit my faith while the wind of fortune sets against it, unless I were so placed, that my conversion, should it take place, were free as light from the imputation of self-interest. I was bred a Catholic--bred in the faith of Bruce and Wallace--I will hold that faith till time and reason shall convince me that it errs. I will serve this poor Queen as a subject should serve an imprisoned and wronged sovereign--they who placed me in her service have to blame themselves--who sent me hither, a gentleman trained in the paths of loyalty and honour, when they should have sought out some truckling, cogging, double-dealing knave, who would have been at once the observant page of the Queen, and the obsequious spy of her enemies. Since I must choose betwixt aiding and betraying her, I will decide as becomes her servant and her subject; but Catherine Seyton--Catherine Seyton, beloved by Douglas and holding me on or off as the intervals of her leisure or caprice will permit--how shall I deal with the coquette?--By heaven, when I next have an opportunity, she shall render me some reason for her conduct, or I will break with her for ever! As he formed this doughty resolution, he crossed the stile which led out of the little enclosure, and was almost immediately greeted by Dr. Luke Lundin. Ha! my most excellent young friend, said the Doctor, from whence come you?--but I note the place.--Yes, neighbour Blinkhoolie's garden is a pleasant rendezvous, and you are of the age when lads look after a bonny lass with one eye, and a dainty plum with another. But hey! you look subtriste and melancholic--I fear the maiden has proved cruel, or the plums unripe; and surely I think neighbour Blinkhoolie's damsons can scarcely have been well preserved throughout the winter--he spares the saccharine juice on his confects. But courage, man, there are more Kates in Kinross; and for the immature fruit, a glass of my double distilled _aqua mirabilis--probatum est_. The page darted an ireful glance at the facetious physician; but presently recollecting that the name Kate, which had provoked his displeasure, was probably but introduced for the sake of alliteration, he suppressed his wrath, and only asked if the wains had been heard of? Why, I have been seeking for you this hour, to tell you that the stuff is in your boat, and that the boat waits your pleasure. Auchtermuchty had only fallen into company with an idle knave like himself, and a stoup of aquavitae between them. Your boatmen lie on their oars, and there have already been made two wefts from the warder's turret to intimate that those in the castle are impatient for your return. Yet there is time for you to take a slight repast; and, as your friend and physician, I hold it unfit you should face the water-breeze with an empty stomach. Roland Graeme had nothing for it but to return, with such cheer as he might, to the place where his boat was moored on the beach, and resisted all offer of refreshment, although the Doctor promised that he should prelude the collation with a gentle appetizer--a decoction of herbs, gathered and distilled by himself. Indeed, as Roland had not forgotten the contents of his morning cup, it is possible that the recollection induced him to stand firm in his refusal of all food, to which such an unpalatable preface was the preliminary. As they passed towards the boat, (for the ceremonious politeness of the worthy Chamberlain would not permit the page to go thither without attendance,) Roland Graeme, amidst a group who seemed to be assembled around a party of wandering musicians, distinguished, as he thought, the dress of Catherine Seyton. He shook himself clear from his attendant, and at one spring was in the midst of the crowd, and at the side of the damsel. Catherine, he whispered, is it well for you to be still here?--will you not return to the castle? To the devil with your Catherines and your castles! answered the maiden, snappishly; have you not had time enough already to get rid of your follies? Begone! I desire not your farther company, and there will be danger in thrusting it upon me. Nay--but if there be danger, fairest Catherine, replied Roland; why will you not allow me to stay and share it with you? Intruding fool, said the maiden, the danger is all on thine own side--the risk in, in plain terms, that I strike thee on the mouth with the hilt of my dagger. So saying, she turned haughtily from him, and moved through the crowd, who gave way in some astonishment at the masculine activity with which she forced her way among them. As Roland, though much irritated, prepared to follow, he was grappled on the other side by Doctor Luke Lundin, who reminded him of the loaded boat, of the two wefts, or signals with the flag, which had been made from the tower, of the danger of the cold breeze to an empty stomach, and of the vanity of spending more time upon coy wenches and sour plums. Roland was thus, in a manner, dragged back to his boat, and obliged to launch her forth upon his return to Lochleven Castle. That little voyage was speedily accomplished, and the page was greeted at the landing-place by the severe and caustic welcome of old Dryfesdale. So, young gallant, you are come at last, after a delay of six hours, and after two signals from the castle? But, I warrant, some idle junketing hath occupied you too deeply to think of your service or your duty. Where is the note of the plate and household stuff?--Pray Heaven it hath not been diminished under the sleeveless care of so young a gad-about! Diminished under my care, Sir Steward! retorted the page angrily; say so in earnest, and by Heaven your gray hair shall hardly protect your saucy tongue! A truce with your swaggering, young esquire, returned the steward; we have bolts and dungeons for brawlers. Go to my lady, and swagger before her, if thou darest--she will give thee proper cause of offence, for she has waited for thee long and impatiently. And where then is the Lady of Lochleven? said the page; for I conceive it is of her thou speakest. Ay--of whom else? replied Dryfesdale; or who besides the Lady of Lochleven hath a right to command in this castle? The Lady of Lochleven is thy mistress, said Roland Graeme; but mine is the Queen of Scotland. The steward looked at him fixedly for a moment, with an air in which suspicion and dislike were ill concealed by an affectation of contempt. The bragging cock-chicken, he said, will betray himself by his rash crowing. I have marked thy altered manner in the chapel of late--ay, and your changing of glances at meal-time with a certain idle damsel, who, like thyself, laughs at all gravity and goodness. There is something about you, my master, which should be looked to. But, if you would know whether the Lady of Lochleven, or that other lady, hath a right to command thy service, thou wilt find them together in the Lady Mary's ante-room. Roland hastened thither, not unwilling to escape from the ill-natured penetration of the old man, and marvelling at the same time what peculiarity could have occasioned the Lady of Lochleven's being in the Queen's apartment at this time of the afternoon, so much contrary to her usual wont. His acuteness instantly penetrated the meaning. She wishes, he concluded, to see the meeting betwixt the Queen and me on my return, that she may form a guess whether there is any private intelligence or understanding betwixt us--I must be guarded. With this resolution he entered the parlour, where the Queen, seated in her chair, with the Lady Fleming leaning upon the back of it, had already kept the Lady of Lochleven standing in her presence for the space of nearly an hour, to the manifest increase of her very visible bad humour. Roland Graeme, on entering the apartment, made a deep obeisance to the Queen, and another to the Lady, and then stood still as if to await their farther question. Speaking almost together, the Lady Lochleven said, So, young man, you are returned at length? And then stopped indignantly short, while the Queen went on without regarding her-- Roland, you are welcome home to us--you have proved the true dove and not the raven--Yet I am sure I could have forgiven you, if, once dismissed, from this water-circled ark of ours, you had never again returned to us. I trust you have brought back an olive-branch, for our kind and worthy hostess has chafed herself much on account of your long absence, and we never needed more some symbol of peace and reconciliation. I grieve I should have been detained, madam, answered the page; but from the delay of the person intrusted with the matters for which I was sent, I did not receive them till late in the day. See you there now, said the Queen to the Lady Lochleven; we could not persuade you, our dearest hostess, that your household goods were in all safe keeping and surety. True it is, that we can excuse your anxiety, considering that these august apartments are so scantily furnished, that we have not been able to offer you even the relief of a stool during the long time you have afforded us the pleasure of your society. The will, madam, said the lady, the will to offer such accommodation was more wanting than the means. What! said the Queen, looking round, and affecting surprise, there are then stools in this apartment--one, two--no less than four, including the broken one--a royal garniture!--We observed them not--will it please your ladyship to sit? No, madam, I will soon relieve you of my presence, replied the Lady Lochleven; and while with you, my aged limbs can still better brook fatigue, than my mind stoop to accept of constrained courtesy. Nay, Lady of Lochleven, if you take it so deeply, said the Queen, rising and motioning to her own vacant chair, I would rather you assumed my seat--you are not the first of your family who has done so. The Lady of Lochleven curtsied a negative, but seemed with much difficulty to suppress the angry answer which rose to her lips. During this sharp conversation, the page's attention had been almost entirely occupied by the entrance of Catherine Seyton, who came from the inner apartment, in the usual dress in which she attended upon the Queen, and with nothing in her manner which marked either the hurry or confusion incident to a hasty change of disguise, or the conscious fear of detection in a perilous enterprise. Roland Graeme ventured to make her an obeisance as she entered, but she returned it with an air of the utmost indifference, which, in his opinion, was extremely inconsistent with the circumstances in which they stood towards each other.-- Surely, he thought, she cannot in reason expect to bully me out of the belief due to mine own eyes, as she tried to do concerning the apparition in the hostelry of Saint Michael's--I will try if I cannot make her feel that this will be but a vain task, and that confidence in me is the wiser and safer course to pursue. These thoughts had passed rapidly through his mind, when the Queen, having finished her altercation with the Lady of the castle, again addressed him-- What of the revels at Kinross, Roland Graeme? Methought they were gay, if I may judge from some faint sounds of mirth and distant music, which found their way so far as these grated windows, and died when they entered them, as all that is mirthful must--But thou lookest as sad as if thou hadst come from a conventicle of the Huguenots! And so perchance he hath, madam, replied the Lady of Lochleven, at whom this side-shaft was lanched. I trust, amid yonder idle fooleries, there wanted not some pouring forth of doctrine to a better purpose than that vain mirth, which, blazing and vanishing like the crackling of dry thorns, leaves to the fools who love it nothing but dust and ashes. Mary Fleming, said the Queen, turning round and drawing her mantle about her, I would that we had the chimney-grate supplied with a fagot or two of these same thorns which the Lady of Lochleven describes so well. Methinks the damp air from the lake, which stagnates in these vaulted rooms, renders them deadly cold. Your Grace's pleasure shall be obeyed, said the Lady of Lochleven; yet may I presume to remind you that we are now in summer? I thank you for the information, my good lady, said the Queen; for prisoners better learn their calender from the mouth of their jailor, than from any change they themselves feel in the seasons.--Once more, Roland Graeme, what of the revels? They were gay, madam, said the page, but of the usual sort, and little worth your Highness's ear. Oh, you know not, said the Queen, how very indulgent my ear has become to all that speaks of freedom and the pleasures of the free. Methinks I would rather have seen the gay villagers dance their ring round the Maypole, than have witnessed the most stately masques within the precincts of a palace. The absence of stone-wall--the sense that the green turf is under the foot which may tread it free and unrestrained, is worth all that art or splendour can add to more courtly revels. I trust, said the Lady Lochleven, addressing the page in her turn, there were amongst these follies none of the riots or disturbances to which they so naturally lead? Roland gave a slight glance to Catherine Seyton, as if to bespeak her attention, as he replied,-- I witnessed no offence, madam, worthy of marking--none indeed of any kind, save that a bold damsel made her hand somewhat too familiar with the cheek of a player-man, and ran some hazard of being ducked in the lake. As he uttered these words he cast a hasty glance at Catherine; but she sustained, with the utmost serenity of manner and countenance, the hint which he had deemed could not have been thrown out before her without exciting some fear and confusion. I will cumber your Grace no longer with my presence, said the Lady Lochleven, unless you have aught to command me. Nought, our good hostess, answered the Queen, unless it be to pray you, that on another occasion you deem it not needful to postpone your better employment to wait so long upon us. May it please you, added the Lady Lochleven, to command this your gentleman to attend us, that I may receive some account of these matters which have been sent hither for your Grace's use? We may not refuse what you are pleased to require, madam, answered the Queen. Go with the lady, Roland, if our commands be indeed necessary to thy doing so. We will hear to-morrow the history of thy Kinross pleasures. For this night we dismiss thy attendance. Roland Graeme went with the Lady of Lochleven, who failed not to ask him many questions concerning what had passed at the sports, to which he rendered such answers as were most likely to lull asleep any suspicions which she might entertain of his disposition to favour Queen Mary, taking especial care to avoid all allusion to the apparition of Magdalen Graeme, and of the Abbot Ambrosius. At length, after undergoing a long and somewhat close examination, he was dismissed with such expressions, as, coming from the reserved and stern Lady of Lochleven, might seem to express a degree of favour and countenance. His first care was to obtain some refreshment, which was more cheerfully afforded him by a good-natured pantler than by Dryfesdale, who was, on this occasion, much disposed to abide by the fashion of Pudding-burn House, where They who came not the first call. Gat no more meat till the next meal. When Roland Graeme had finished his repast, having his dismissal from the Queen for the evening, and being little inclined for such society as the castle afforded, he stole into the garden, in which he had permission to spend his leisure time, when it pleased him. In this place, the ingenuity of the contriver and disposer of the walks had exerted itself to make the most of little space, and by screens, both of stone ornamented with rude sculpture, and hedges of living green, had endeavoured to give as much intricacy and variety as the confined limits of the garden would admit. Here the young man walked sadly, considering the events of the day, and comparing what had dropped from the Abbot with what he had himself noticed of the demeanour of George Douglas. It must be so, was the painful but inevitable conclusion at which he arrived. It must be by his aid that she is thus enabled, like a phantom, to transport herself from place to place, and to appear at pleasure on the mainland or on the islet.--It must be so, he repeated once more; with him she holds a close, secret, and intimate correspondence, altogether inconsistent with the eye of favour which she has sometimes cast upon me, and destructive to the hopes which she must have known these glances have necessarily inspired. And yet (for love will hope where reason despairs) the thought rushed on his mind, that it was possible she only encouraged Douglas's passion so far as might serve her mistress's interest, and that she was of too frank, noble, and candid a nature, to hold out to himself hopes which she meant not to fulfil. Lost in these various conjectures, he seated himself upon a bank of turf which commanded a view of the lake on the one side, and on the other of that front of the castle along which the Queen's apartments were situated. The sun had now for some time set, and the twilight of May was rapidly fading into a serene night. On the lake, the expanded water rose and fell, with the slightest and softest influence of a southern breeze, which scarcely dimpled the surface over which it passed. In the distance was still seen the dim outline of the island of Saint Serf, once visited by many a sandalled pilgrim, as the blessed spot trodden by a man of God--now neglected or violated, as the refuge of lazy priests, who had with justice been compelled to give place to the sheep and the heifers of a Protestant baron. As Roland gazed on the dark speck, amid the lighter blue of the waters which surrounded it, the mazes of polemical discussion again stretched themselves before the eye of the mind. Had these men justly suffered their exile as licentious drones, the robbers, at once, and disgrace, of the busy hive? or had the hand of avarice and rapine expelled from the temple, not the ribalds who polluted, but the faithful priests who served the shrine in honour and fidelity? The arguments of Henderson, in this contemplative hour, rose with double force before him; and could scarcely be parried by the appeal which the Abbot Ambrosius had made from his understanding to his feelings,--an appeal which he had felt more forcibly amid the bustle of stirring life, than now when his reflections were more undisturbed. It required an effort to divert his mind from this embarrassing topic; and he found that he best succeeded by turning his eyes to the front of the tower, watching where a twinkling light still streamed from the casement of Catherine Seyton's apartment, obscured by times for a moment as the shadow of the fair inhabitant passed betwixt the taper and the window. At length the light was removed or extinguished, and that object of speculation was also withdrawn from the eyes of the meditative lover. Dare I confess the fact, without injuring his character for ever as a hero of romance? These eyes gradually became heavy; speculative doubts on the subject of religious controversy, and anxious conjectures concerning the state of his mistress's affections, became confusedly blended together in his musings; the fatigues of a busy day prevailed over the harassing subjects of contemplation which occupied his mind, and he fell fast asleep. Sound were his slumbers, until they were suddenly dispelled by the iron tongue of the castle-bell, which sent its deep and sullen sounds wide over the bosom of the lake, and awakened the echoes of Bennarty, the hill which descends steeply on its southern bank. Roland started up, for this bell was always tolled at ten o'clock, as the signal for locking the castle gates, and placing the keys under the charge of the seneschal. He therefore hastened to the wicket by which the garden communicated with the building, and had the mortification, just as he reached it, to hear the bolt leave its sheath with a discordant crash, and enter the stone groove of the door-lintel. Hold, hold, cried the page, and let me in ere you lock the wicket. The voice of Dryfesdale replied from within, in his usual tone of embittered sullenness, The hour is passed, fair master--you like not the inside of these walls--even make it a complete holiday, and spend the night as well as the day out of bounds. Open the door, exclaimed the indignant page, or by Saint Giles I will make thy gold chain smoke for it! Make no alarm here, retorted the impenetrable Dryfesdale, but keep thy sinful oaths and silly threats for those that regard them--I do mine office, and carry the keys to the seneschal.--Adieu, my young master! the cool night air will advantage your hot blood. The steward was right in what he said; for the cooling breeze was very necessary to appease the feverish fit of anger which Roland experienced, nor did the remedy succeed for some time. At length, after some hasty turns made through the garden, exhausting his passion in vain vows of vengeance, Roland Graeme began to be sensible that his situation ought rather to be held as matter of laughter than of serious resentment. To one bred a sportsman, a night spent in the open air had in it little of hardship, and the poor malice of the steward seemed more worthy of his contempt than his anger. I would to God, he said, that the grim old man may always have contented himself with such sportive revenge. He often looks as he were capable of doing us a darker turn. Returning, therefore, to the turf-seat which he had formerly occupied, and which was partially sheltered by a trim fence of green holly, he drew his mantle around him, stretched himself at length on the verdant settle, and endeavoured to resume that sleep which the castle bell had interrupted to so little purpose. Sleep, like other earthly blessings, is niggard of its favours when most courted. The more Roland invoked her aid, the farther she fled from his eyelids. He had been completely awakened, first, by the sounds of the bell, and then by his own aroused vivacity of temper, and he found it difficult again to compose himself to slumber. At length, when his mind--was wearied out with a maze of unpleasing meditation, he succeeded in coaxing himself into a broken slumber. This was again dispelled by the voices of two persons who were walking in the garden, the sound of whose conversation, after mingling for some time in the page's dreams, at length succeeded in awaking him thoroughly. He raised himself from his reclining posture in the utmost astonishment, which the circumstance of hearing two persons at that late hour conversing on the outside of the watchfully guarded Castle of Lochloven, was so well calculated to excite. His first thought was of supernatural beings; his next, upon some attempt on the part of Queen Mary's friends and followers; his last was, that George of Douglas, possessed of the keys, and having the means of ingress and egress at pleasure, was availing himself of his office to hold a rendezvous with Catherine Seyton in the castle garden. He was confirmed in this opinion by the tone of the voice, which asked in a low whisper, whether all was ready? Chapter the Thirtieth. In some breasts passion lies conceal'd and silent, Like war's swart powder in a castle vault, Until occasion, like the linstock, lights it: Then comes at once the lightning--and the thunder, And distant echoes tell that all is rent asunder. OLD PLAY. Roland Graeme, availing himself of a breach in the holly screen, and of the assistance of the full moon, which was now arisen, had a perfect opportunity, himself unobserved, to reconnoitre the persons and the motions

neighbour

How many times the word 'neighbour' appears in the text?

you, reverend father, I am totally ignorant. My brother, answered the Abbot, you are wise, and ought to know-- I am not--I am not--I am not wise, replied the horticulturist, pettishly, and stopping his ears with his fingers-- I was never called wise but when men wanted to engage me in some action of notorious folly. But, my good brother, said the Abbot-- I am not good neither, said the peevish gardener; I am neither good nor wise--Had I been wise, you would not have been admitted here; and were I good, methinks I should send you elsewhere to hatch plots for destroying the quiet of the country. What signifies disputing about queen or king,--when men may sit at peace--_sub umbra vitis sui?_ and so would I do, after the precept of Holy Writ, were I, as you term me, wise or good. But such as I am, my neck is in the yoke, and you make me draw what weight you list.--Follow me, youngster. This reverend father, who makes in his jackman's dress nearly as reverend a figure as I myself, will agree with me in one thing at least, and that is, that you have been long enough here. Follow the good father, Roland, said the Abbot, and remember my words--a day is approaching that will try the temper of all true Scotsmen--may thy heart prove faithful as the steel of thy blade! The page bowed in silence, and they parted; the gardener, notwithstanding his advanced age, walking on before him very briskly, and muttering as he went, partly to himself, partly to his companion, after the manner of old men of weakened intellects-- When I was great, thus ran his maundering, and had my mule and my ambling palfrey at command, I warrant you I could have as well flown through the air as have walked at this pace. I had my gout and my rheumatics, and an hundred things besides, that hung fetters on my heels; and, now, thanks to Our Lady, and honest labour, I can walk with any good man of my age in the kingdom of Fife--Fy upon it, that experience should be so long in coming! As he was thus muttering, his eye fell upon the branch of a pear-tree which drooped down for want of support, and at once forgetting his haste, the old man stopped and set seriously about binding it up. Roland Graeme had both readiness, neatness of hand, and good nature in abundance; he immediately lent his aid, and in a minute or two the bough was supported, and tied up in a way perfectly satisfactory to the old man, who looked at it with great complaisance. They are bergamots, he said, and if you will come ashore in autumn, you shall taste of them--the like are not in Lochleven Castle--the garden there is a poor pin-fold, and the gardener, Hugh Houkham, hath little skill of his craft--so come ashore, Master Page, in autumn, when you would eat pears. But what am I thinking of--ere that time come, they may have given thee sour pears for plums. Take an old man's advice, youth, one who hath seen many days, and sat in higher places than thou canst hope for--bend thy sword into a pruning-hook, and make a dibble of thy dagger--thy days shall be the longer, and thy health the better for it,--and come to aid me in my garden, and I will teach thee the real French fashion of _imping_, which the Southron call graffing. Do this, and do it without loss of time, for there is a whirlwind coming over the land, and only those shall escape who lie too much beneath the storm to have their boughs broken by it. So saying, he dismissed Roland Graeme, through a different door from that by which he had entered, signed a cross, and pronounced a benedicite as they parted, and then, still muttering to himself, retired into the garden, and locked the door on the inside. Chapter the Twenty-Ninth. Pray God she prove not masculine ere long! KING HENRY VI. Dismissed from the old man's garden, Roland Graeme found that a grassy paddock, in which sauntered two cows, the property of the gardener, still separated him from the village. He paced through it, lost in meditation upon the words of the Abbot. Father Ambrosius had, with success enough, exerted over him that powerful influence which the guardians and instructors of our childhood possess over our more mature youth. And yet, when Roland looked back upon what the father had said, he could not but suspect that he had rather sought to evade entering into the controversy betwixt the churches, than to repel the objections and satisfy the doubts which the lectures of Henderson had excited. For this he had no time, said the page to himself, neither have I now calmness and learning sufficient to judge upon points of such magnitude. Besides, it were base to quit my faith while the wind of fortune sets against it, unless I were so placed, that my conversion, should it take place, were free as light from the imputation of self-interest. I was bred a Catholic--bred in the faith of Bruce and Wallace--I will hold that faith till time and reason shall convince me that it errs. I will serve this poor Queen as a subject should serve an imprisoned and wronged sovereign--they who placed me in her service have to blame themselves--who sent me hither, a gentleman trained in the paths of loyalty and honour, when they should have sought out some truckling, cogging, double-dealing knave, who would have been at once the observant page of the Queen, and the obsequious spy of her enemies. Since I must choose betwixt aiding and betraying her, I will decide as becomes her servant and her subject; but Catherine Seyton--Catherine Seyton, beloved by Douglas and holding me on or off as the intervals of her leisure or caprice will permit--how shall I deal with the coquette?--By heaven, when I next have an opportunity, she shall render me some reason for her conduct, or I will break with her for ever! As he formed this doughty resolution, he crossed the stile which led out of the little enclosure, and was almost immediately greeted by Dr. Luke Lundin. Ha! my most excellent young friend, said the Doctor, from whence come you?--but I note the place.--Yes, neighbour Blinkhoolie's garden is a pleasant rendezvous, and you are of the age when lads look after a bonny lass with one eye, and a dainty plum with another. But hey! you look subtriste and melancholic--I fear the maiden has proved cruel, or the plums unripe; and surely I think neighbour Blinkhoolie's damsons can scarcely have been well preserved throughout the winter--he spares the saccharine juice on his confects. But courage, man, there are more Kates in Kinross; and for the immature fruit, a glass of my double distilled _aqua mirabilis--probatum est_. The page darted an ireful glance at the facetious physician; but presently recollecting that the name Kate, which had provoked his displeasure, was probably but introduced for the sake of alliteration, he suppressed his wrath, and only asked if the wains had been heard of? Why, I have been seeking for you this hour, to tell you that the stuff is in your boat, and that the boat waits your pleasure. Auchtermuchty had only fallen into company with an idle knave like himself, and a stoup of aquavitae between them. Your boatmen lie on their oars, and there have already been made two wefts from the warder's turret to intimate that those in the castle are impatient for your return. Yet there is time for you to take a slight repast; and, as your friend and physician, I hold it unfit you should face the water-breeze with an empty stomach. Roland Graeme had nothing for it but to return, with such cheer as he might, to the place where his boat was moored on the beach, and resisted all offer of refreshment, although the Doctor promised that he should prelude the collation with a gentle appetizer--a decoction of herbs, gathered and distilled by himself. Indeed, as Roland had not forgotten the contents of his morning cup, it is possible that the recollection induced him to stand firm in his refusal of all food, to which such an unpalatable preface was the preliminary. As they passed towards the boat, (for the ceremonious politeness of the worthy Chamberlain would not permit the page to go thither without attendance,) Roland Graeme, amidst a group who seemed to be assembled around a party of wandering musicians, distinguished, as he thought, the dress of Catherine Seyton. He shook himself clear from his attendant, and at one spring was in the midst of the crowd, and at the side of the damsel. Catherine, he whispered, is it well for you to be still here?--will you not return to the castle? To the devil with your Catherines and your castles! answered the maiden, snappishly; have you not had time enough already to get rid of your follies? Begone! I desire not your farther company, and there will be danger in thrusting it upon me. Nay--but if there be danger, fairest Catherine, replied Roland; why will you not allow me to stay and share it with you? Intruding fool, said the maiden, the danger is all on thine own side--the risk in, in plain terms, that I strike thee on the mouth with the hilt of my dagger. So saying, she turned haughtily from him, and moved through the crowd, who gave way in some astonishment at the masculine activity with which she forced her way among them. As Roland, though much irritated, prepared to follow, he was grappled on the other side by Doctor Luke Lundin, who reminded him of the loaded boat, of the two wefts, or signals with the flag, which had been made from the tower, of the danger of the cold breeze to an empty stomach, and of the vanity of spending more time upon coy wenches and sour plums. Roland was thus, in a manner, dragged back to his boat, and obliged to launch her forth upon his return to Lochleven Castle. That little voyage was speedily accomplished, and the page was greeted at the landing-place by the severe and caustic welcome of old Dryfesdale. So, young gallant, you are come at last, after a delay of six hours, and after two signals from the castle? But, I warrant, some idle junketing hath occupied you too deeply to think of your service or your duty. Where is the note of the plate and household stuff?--Pray Heaven it hath not been diminished under the sleeveless care of so young a gad-about! Diminished under my care, Sir Steward! retorted the page angrily; say so in earnest, and by Heaven your gray hair shall hardly protect your saucy tongue! A truce with your swaggering, young esquire, returned the steward; we have bolts and dungeons for brawlers. Go to my lady, and swagger before her, if thou darest--she will give thee proper cause of offence, for she has waited for thee long and impatiently. And where then is the Lady of Lochleven? said the page; for I conceive it is of her thou speakest. Ay--of whom else? replied Dryfesdale; or who besides the Lady of Lochleven hath a right to command in this castle? The Lady of Lochleven is thy mistress, said Roland Graeme; but mine is the Queen of Scotland. The steward looked at him fixedly for a moment, with an air in which suspicion and dislike were ill concealed by an affectation of contempt. The bragging cock-chicken, he said, will betray himself by his rash crowing. I have marked thy altered manner in the chapel of late--ay, and your changing of glances at meal-time with a certain idle damsel, who, like thyself, laughs at all gravity and goodness. There is something about you, my master, which should be looked to. But, if you would know whether the Lady of Lochleven, or that other lady, hath a right to command thy service, thou wilt find them together in the Lady Mary's ante-room. Roland hastened thither, not unwilling to escape from the ill-natured penetration of the old man, and marvelling at the same time what peculiarity could have occasioned the Lady of Lochleven's being in the Queen's apartment at this time of the afternoon, so much contrary to her usual wont. His acuteness instantly penetrated the meaning. She wishes, he concluded, to see the meeting betwixt the Queen and me on my return, that she may form a guess whether there is any private intelligence or understanding betwixt us--I must be guarded. With this resolution he entered the parlour, where the Queen, seated in her chair, with the Lady Fleming leaning upon the back of it, had already kept the Lady of Lochleven standing in her presence for the space of nearly an hour, to the manifest increase of her very visible bad humour. Roland Graeme, on entering the apartment, made a deep obeisance to the Queen, and another to the Lady, and then stood still as if to await their farther question. Speaking almost together, the Lady Lochleven said, So, young man, you are returned at length? And then stopped indignantly short, while the Queen went on without regarding her-- Roland, you are welcome home to us--you have proved the true dove and not the raven--Yet I am sure I could have forgiven you, if, once dismissed, from this water-circled ark of ours, you had never again returned to us. I trust you have brought back an olive-branch, for our kind and worthy hostess has chafed herself much on account of your long absence, and we never needed more some symbol of peace and reconciliation. I grieve I should have been detained, madam, answered the page; but from the delay of the person intrusted with the matters for which I was sent, I did not receive them till late in the day. See you there now, said the Queen to the Lady Lochleven; we could not persuade you, our dearest hostess, that your household goods were in all safe keeping and surety. True it is, that we can excuse your anxiety, considering that these august apartments are so scantily furnished, that we have not been able to offer you even the relief of a stool during the long time you have afforded us the pleasure of your society. The will, madam, said the lady, the will to offer such accommodation was more wanting than the means. What! said the Queen, looking round, and affecting surprise, there are then stools in this apartment--one, two--no less than four, including the broken one--a royal garniture!--We observed them not--will it please your ladyship to sit? No, madam, I will soon relieve you of my presence, replied the Lady Lochleven; and while with you, my aged limbs can still better brook fatigue, than my mind stoop to accept of constrained courtesy. Nay, Lady of Lochleven, if you take it so deeply, said the Queen, rising and motioning to her own vacant chair, I would rather you assumed my seat--you are not the first of your family who has done so. The Lady of Lochleven curtsied a negative, but seemed with much difficulty to suppress the angry answer which rose to her lips. During this sharp conversation, the page's attention had been almost entirely occupied by the entrance of Catherine Seyton, who came from the inner apartment, in the usual dress in which she attended upon the Queen, and with nothing in her manner which marked either the hurry or confusion incident to a hasty change of disguise, or the conscious fear of detection in a perilous enterprise. Roland Graeme ventured to make her an obeisance as she entered, but she returned it with an air of the utmost indifference, which, in his opinion, was extremely inconsistent with the circumstances in which they stood towards each other.-- Surely, he thought, she cannot in reason expect to bully me out of the belief due to mine own eyes, as she tried to do concerning the apparition in the hostelry of Saint Michael's--I will try if I cannot make her feel that this will be but a vain task, and that confidence in me is the wiser and safer course to pursue. These thoughts had passed rapidly through his mind, when the Queen, having finished her altercation with the Lady of the castle, again addressed him-- What of the revels at Kinross, Roland Graeme? Methought they were gay, if I may judge from some faint sounds of mirth and distant music, which found their way so far as these grated windows, and died when they entered them, as all that is mirthful must--But thou lookest as sad as if thou hadst come from a conventicle of the Huguenots! And so perchance he hath, madam, replied the Lady of Lochleven, at whom this side-shaft was lanched. I trust, amid yonder idle fooleries, there wanted not some pouring forth of doctrine to a better purpose than that vain mirth, which, blazing and vanishing like the crackling of dry thorns, leaves to the fools who love it nothing but dust and ashes. Mary Fleming, said the Queen, turning round and drawing her mantle about her, I would that we had the chimney-grate supplied with a fagot or two of these same thorns which the Lady of Lochleven describes so well. Methinks the damp air from the lake, which stagnates in these vaulted rooms, renders them deadly cold. Your Grace's pleasure shall be obeyed, said the Lady of Lochleven; yet may I presume to remind you that we are now in summer? I thank you for the information, my good lady, said the Queen; for prisoners better learn their calender from the mouth of their jailor, than from any change they themselves feel in the seasons.--Once more, Roland Graeme, what of the revels? They were gay, madam, said the page, but of the usual sort, and little worth your Highness's ear. Oh, you know not, said the Queen, how very indulgent my ear has become to all that speaks of freedom and the pleasures of the free. Methinks I would rather have seen the gay villagers dance their ring round the Maypole, than have witnessed the most stately masques within the precincts of a palace. The absence of stone-wall--the sense that the green turf is under the foot which may tread it free and unrestrained, is worth all that art or splendour can add to more courtly revels. I trust, said the Lady Lochleven, addressing the page in her turn, there were amongst these follies none of the riots or disturbances to which they so naturally lead? Roland gave a slight glance to Catherine Seyton, as if to bespeak her attention, as he replied,-- I witnessed no offence, madam, worthy of marking--none indeed of any kind, save that a bold damsel made her hand somewhat too familiar with the cheek of a player-man, and ran some hazard of being ducked in the lake. As he uttered these words he cast a hasty glance at Catherine; but she sustained, with the utmost serenity of manner and countenance, the hint which he had deemed could not have been thrown out before her without exciting some fear and confusion. I will cumber your Grace no longer with my presence, said the Lady Lochleven, unless you have aught to command me. Nought, our good hostess, answered the Queen, unless it be to pray you, that on another occasion you deem it not needful to postpone your better employment to wait so long upon us. May it please you, added the Lady Lochleven, to command this your gentleman to attend us, that I may receive some account of these matters which have been sent hither for your Grace's use? We may not refuse what you are pleased to require, madam, answered the Queen. Go with the lady, Roland, if our commands be indeed necessary to thy doing so. We will hear to-morrow the history of thy Kinross pleasures. For this night we dismiss thy attendance. Roland Graeme went with the Lady of Lochleven, who failed not to ask him many questions concerning what had passed at the sports, to which he rendered such answers as were most likely to lull asleep any suspicions which she might entertain of his disposition to favour Queen Mary, taking especial care to avoid all allusion to the apparition of Magdalen Graeme, and of the Abbot Ambrosius. At length, after undergoing a long and somewhat close examination, he was dismissed with such expressions, as, coming from the reserved and stern Lady of Lochleven, might seem to express a degree of favour and countenance. His first care was to obtain some refreshment, which was more cheerfully afforded him by a good-natured pantler than by Dryfesdale, who was, on this occasion, much disposed to abide by the fashion of Pudding-burn House, where They who came not the first call. Gat no more meat till the next meal. When Roland Graeme had finished his repast, having his dismissal from the Queen for the evening, and being little inclined for such society as the castle afforded, he stole into the garden, in which he had permission to spend his leisure time, when it pleased him. In this place, the ingenuity of the contriver and disposer of the walks had exerted itself to make the most of little space, and by screens, both of stone ornamented with rude sculpture, and hedges of living green, had endeavoured to give as much intricacy and variety as the confined limits of the garden would admit. Here the young man walked sadly, considering the events of the day, and comparing what had dropped from the Abbot with what he had himself noticed of the demeanour of George Douglas. It must be so, was the painful but inevitable conclusion at which he arrived. It must be by his aid that she is thus enabled, like a phantom, to transport herself from place to place, and to appear at pleasure on the mainland or on the islet.--It must be so, he repeated once more; with him she holds a close, secret, and intimate correspondence, altogether inconsistent with the eye of favour which she has sometimes cast upon me, and destructive to the hopes which she must have known these glances have necessarily inspired. And yet (for love will hope where reason despairs) the thought rushed on his mind, that it was possible she only encouraged Douglas's passion so far as might serve her mistress's interest, and that she was of too frank, noble, and candid a nature, to hold out to himself hopes which she meant not to fulfil. Lost in these various conjectures, he seated himself upon a bank of turf which commanded a view of the lake on the one side, and on the other of that front of the castle along which the Queen's apartments were situated. The sun had now for some time set, and the twilight of May was rapidly fading into a serene night. On the lake, the expanded water rose and fell, with the slightest and softest influence of a southern breeze, which scarcely dimpled the surface over which it passed. In the distance was still seen the dim outline of the island of Saint Serf, once visited by many a sandalled pilgrim, as the blessed spot trodden by a man of God--now neglected or violated, as the refuge of lazy priests, who had with justice been compelled to give place to the sheep and the heifers of a Protestant baron. As Roland gazed on the dark speck, amid the lighter blue of the waters which surrounded it, the mazes of polemical discussion again stretched themselves before the eye of the mind. Had these men justly suffered their exile as licentious drones, the robbers, at once, and disgrace, of the busy hive? or had the hand of avarice and rapine expelled from the temple, not the ribalds who polluted, but the faithful priests who served the shrine in honour and fidelity? The arguments of Henderson, in this contemplative hour, rose with double force before him; and could scarcely be parried by the appeal which the Abbot Ambrosius had made from his understanding to his feelings,--an appeal which he had felt more forcibly amid the bustle of stirring life, than now when his reflections were more undisturbed. It required an effort to divert his mind from this embarrassing topic; and he found that he best succeeded by turning his eyes to the front of the tower, watching where a twinkling light still streamed from the casement of Catherine Seyton's apartment, obscured by times for a moment as the shadow of the fair inhabitant passed betwixt the taper and the window. At length the light was removed or extinguished, and that object of speculation was also withdrawn from the eyes of the meditative lover. Dare I confess the fact, without injuring his character for ever as a hero of romance? These eyes gradually became heavy; speculative doubts on the subject of religious controversy, and anxious conjectures concerning the state of his mistress's affections, became confusedly blended together in his musings; the fatigues of a busy day prevailed over the harassing subjects of contemplation which occupied his mind, and he fell fast asleep. Sound were his slumbers, until they were suddenly dispelled by the iron tongue of the castle-bell, which sent its deep and sullen sounds wide over the bosom of the lake, and awakened the echoes of Bennarty, the hill which descends steeply on its southern bank. Roland started up, for this bell was always tolled at ten o'clock, as the signal for locking the castle gates, and placing the keys under the charge of the seneschal. He therefore hastened to the wicket by which the garden communicated with the building, and had the mortification, just as he reached it, to hear the bolt leave its sheath with a discordant crash, and enter the stone groove of the door-lintel. Hold, hold, cried the page, and let me in ere you lock the wicket. The voice of Dryfesdale replied from within, in his usual tone of embittered sullenness, The hour is passed, fair master--you like not the inside of these walls--even make it a complete holiday, and spend the night as well as the day out of bounds. Open the door, exclaimed the indignant page, or by Saint Giles I will make thy gold chain smoke for it! Make no alarm here, retorted the impenetrable Dryfesdale, but keep thy sinful oaths and silly threats for those that regard them--I do mine office, and carry the keys to the seneschal.--Adieu, my young master! the cool night air will advantage your hot blood. The steward was right in what he said; for the cooling breeze was very necessary to appease the feverish fit of anger which Roland experienced, nor did the remedy succeed for some time. At length, after some hasty turns made through the garden, exhausting his passion in vain vows of vengeance, Roland Graeme began to be sensible that his situation ought rather to be held as matter of laughter than of serious resentment. To one bred a sportsman, a night spent in the open air had in it little of hardship, and the poor malice of the steward seemed more worthy of his contempt than his anger. I would to God, he said, that the grim old man may always have contented himself with such sportive revenge. He often looks as he were capable of doing us a darker turn. Returning, therefore, to the turf-seat which he had formerly occupied, and which was partially sheltered by a trim fence of green holly, he drew his mantle around him, stretched himself at length on the verdant settle, and endeavoured to resume that sleep which the castle bell had interrupted to so little purpose. Sleep, like other earthly blessings, is niggard of its favours when most courted. The more Roland invoked her aid, the farther she fled from his eyelids. He had been completely awakened, first, by the sounds of the bell, and then by his own aroused vivacity of temper, and he found it difficult again to compose himself to slumber. At length, when his mind--was wearied out with a maze of unpleasing meditation, he succeeded in coaxing himself into a broken slumber. This was again dispelled by the voices of two persons who were walking in the garden, the sound of whose conversation, after mingling for some time in the page's dreams, at length succeeded in awaking him thoroughly. He raised himself from his reclining posture in the utmost astonishment, which the circumstance of hearing two persons at that late hour conversing on the outside of the watchfully guarded Castle of Lochloven, was so well calculated to excite. His first thought was of supernatural beings; his next, upon some attempt on the part of Queen Mary's friends and followers; his last was, that George of Douglas, possessed of the keys, and having the means of ingress and egress at pleasure, was availing himself of his office to hold a rendezvous with Catherine Seyton in the castle garden. He was confirmed in this opinion by the tone of the voice, which asked in a low whisper, whether all was ready? Chapter the Thirtieth. In some breasts passion lies conceal'd and silent, Like war's swart powder in a castle vault, Until occasion, like the linstock, lights it: Then comes at once the lightning--and the thunder, And distant echoes tell that all is rent asunder. OLD PLAY. Roland Graeme, availing himself of a breach in the holly screen, and of the assistance of the full moon, which was now arisen, had a perfect opportunity, himself unobserved, to reconnoitre the persons and the motions

age

How many times the word 'age' appears in the text?

you, reverend father, I am totally ignorant. My brother, answered the Abbot, you are wise, and ought to know-- I am not--I am not--I am not wise, replied the horticulturist, pettishly, and stopping his ears with his fingers-- I was never called wise but when men wanted to engage me in some action of notorious folly. But, my good brother, said the Abbot-- I am not good neither, said the peevish gardener; I am neither good nor wise--Had I been wise, you would not have been admitted here; and were I good, methinks I should send you elsewhere to hatch plots for destroying the quiet of the country. What signifies disputing about queen or king,--when men may sit at peace--_sub umbra vitis sui?_ and so would I do, after the precept of Holy Writ, were I, as you term me, wise or good. But such as I am, my neck is in the yoke, and you make me draw what weight you list.--Follow me, youngster. This reverend father, who makes in his jackman's dress nearly as reverend a figure as I myself, will agree with me in one thing at least, and that is, that you have been long enough here. Follow the good father, Roland, said the Abbot, and remember my words--a day is approaching that will try the temper of all true Scotsmen--may thy heart prove faithful as the steel of thy blade! The page bowed in silence, and they parted; the gardener, notwithstanding his advanced age, walking on before him very briskly, and muttering as he went, partly to himself, partly to his companion, after the manner of old men of weakened intellects-- When I was great, thus ran his maundering, and had my mule and my ambling palfrey at command, I warrant you I could have as well flown through the air as have walked at this pace. I had my gout and my rheumatics, and an hundred things besides, that hung fetters on my heels; and, now, thanks to Our Lady, and honest labour, I can walk with any good man of my age in the kingdom of Fife--Fy upon it, that experience should be so long in coming! As he was thus muttering, his eye fell upon the branch of a pear-tree which drooped down for want of support, and at once forgetting his haste, the old man stopped and set seriously about binding it up. Roland Graeme had both readiness, neatness of hand, and good nature in abundance; he immediately lent his aid, and in a minute or two the bough was supported, and tied up in a way perfectly satisfactory to the old man, who looked at it with great complaisance. They are bergamots, he said, and if you will come ashore in autumn, you shall taste of them--the like are not in Lochleven Castle--the garden there is a poor pin-fold, and the gardener, Hugh Houkham, hath little skill of his craft--so come ashore, Master Page, in autumn, when you would eat pears. But what am I thinking of--ere that time come, they may have given thee sour pears for plums. Take an old man's advice, youth, one who hath seen many days, and sat in higher places than thou canst hope for--bend thy sword into a pruning-hook, and make a dibble of thy dagger--thy days shall be the longer, and thy health the better for it,--and come to aid me in my garden, and I will teach thee the real French fashion of _imping_, which the Southron call graffing. Do this, and do it without loss of time, for there is a whirlwind coming over the land, and only those shall escape who lie too much beneath the storm to have their boughs broken by it. So saying, he dismissed Roland Graeme, through a different door from that by which he had entered, signed a cross, and pronounced a benedicite as they parted, and then, still muttering to himself, retired into the garden, and locked the door on the inside. Chapter the Twenty-Ninth. Pray God she prove not masculine ere long! KING HENRY VI. Dismissed from the old man's garden, Roland Graeme found that a grassy paddock, in which sauntered two cows, the property of the gardener, still separated him from the village. He paced through it, lost in meditation upon the words of the Abbot. Father Ambrosius had, with success enough, exerted over him that powerful influence which the guardians and instructors of our childhood possess over our more mature youth. And yet, when Roland looked back upon what the father had said, he could not but suspect that he had rather sought to evade entering into the controversy betwixt the churches, than to repel the objections and satisfy the doubts which the lectures of Henderson had excited. For this he had no time, said the page to himself, neither have I now calmness and learning sufficient to judge upon points of such magnitude. Besides, it were base to quit my faith while the wind of fortune sets against it, unless I were so placed, that my conversion, should it take place, were free as light from the imputation of self-interest. I was bred a Catholic--bred in the faith of Bruce and Wallace--I will hold that faith till time and reason shall convince me that it errs. I will serve this poor Queen as a subject should serve an imprisoned and wronged sovereign--they who placed me in her service have to blame themselves--who sent me hither, a gentleman trained in the paths of loyalty and honour, when they should have sought out some truckling, cogging, double-dealing knave, who would have been at once the observant page of the Queen, and the obsequious spy of her enemies. Since I must choose betwixt aiding and betraying her, I will decide as becomes her servant and her subject; but Catherine Seyton--Catherine Seyton, beloved by Douglas and holding me on or off as the intervals of her leisure or caprice will permit--how shall I deal with the coquette?--By heaven, when I next have an opportunity, she shall render me some reason for her conduct, or I will break with her for ever! As he formed this doughty resolution, he crossed the stile which led out of the little enclosure, and was almost immediately greeted by Dr. Luke Lundin. Ha! my most excellent young friend, said the Doctor, from whence come you?--but I note the place.--Yes, neighbour Blinkhoolie's garden is a pleasant rendezvous, and you are of the age when lads look after a bonny lass with one eye, and a dainty plum with another. But hey! you look subtriste and melancholic--I fear the maiden has proved cruel, or the plums unripe; and surely I think neighbour Blinkhoolie's damsons can scarcely have been well preserved throughout the winter--he spares the saccharine juice on his confects. But courage, man, there are more Kates in Kinross; and for the immature fruit, a glass of my double distilled _aqua mirabilis--probatum est_. The page darted an ireful glance at the facetious physician; but presently recollecting that the name Kate, which had provoked his displeasure, was probably but introduced for the sake of alliteration, he suppressed his wrath, and only asked if the wains had been heard of? Why, I have been seeking for you this hour, to tell you that the stuff is in your boat, and that the boat waits your pleasure. Auchtermuchty had only fallen into company with an idle knave like himself, and a stoup of aquavitae between them. Your boatmen lie on their oars, and there have already been made two wefts from the warder's turret to intimate that those in the castle are impatient for your return. Yet there is time for you to take a slight repast; and, as your friend and physician, I hold it unfit you should face the water-breeze with an empty stomach. Roland Graeme had nothing for it but to return, with such cheer as he might, to the place where his boat was moored on the beach, and resisted all offer of refreshment, although the Doctor promised that he should prelude the collation with a gentle appetizer--a decoction of herbs, gathered and distilled by himself. Indeed, as Roland had not forgotten the contents of his morning cup, it is possible that the recollection induced him to stand firm in his refusal of all food, to which such an unpalatable preface was the preliminary. As they passed towards the boat, (for the ceremonious politeness of the worthy Chamberlain would not permit the page to go thither without attendance,) Roland Graeme, amidst a group who seemed to be assembled around a party of wandering musicians, distinguished, as he thought, the dress of Catherine Seyton. He shook himself clear from his attendant, and at one spring was in the midst of the crowd, and at the side of the damsel. Catherine, he whispered, is it well for you to be still here?--will you not return to the castle? To the devil with your Catherines and your castles! answered the maiden, snappishly; have you not had time enough already to get rid of your follies? Begone! I desire not your farther company, and there will be danger in thrusting it upon me. Nay--but if there be danger, fairest Catherine, replied Roland; why will you not allow me to stay and share it with you? Intruding fool, said the maiden, the danger is all on thine own side--the risk in, in plain terms, that I strike thee on the mouth with the hilt of my dagger. So saying, she turned haughtily from him, and moved through the crowd, who gave way in some astonishment at the masculine activity with which she forced her way among them. As Roland, though much irritated, prepared to follow, he was grappled on the other side by Doctor Luke Lundin, who reminded him of the loaded boat, of the two wefts, or signals with the flag, which had been made from the tower, of the danger of the cold breeze to an empty stomach, and of the vanity of spending more time upon coy wenches and sour plums. Roland was thus, in a manner, dragged back to his boat, and obliged to launch her forth upon his return to Lochleven Castle. That little voyage was speedily accomplished, and the page was greeted at the landing-place by the severe and caustic welcome of old Dryfesdale. So, young gallant, you are come at last, after a delay of six hours, and after two signals from the castle? But, I warrant, some idle junketing hath occupied you too deeply to think of your service or your duty. Where is the note of the plate and household stuff?--Pray Heaven it hath not been diminished under the sleeveless care of so young a gad-about! Diminished under my care, Sir Steward! retorted the page angrily; say so in earnest, and by Heaven your gray hair shall hardly protect your saucy tongue! A truce with your swaggering, young esquire, returned the steward; we have bolts and dungeons for brawlers. Go to my lady, and swagger before her, if thou darest--she will give thee proper cause of offence, for she has waited for thee long and impatiently. And where then is the Lady of Lochleven? said the page; for I conceive it is of her thou speakest. Ay--of whom else? replied Dryfesdale; or who besides the Lady of Lochleven hath a right to command in this castle? The Lady of Lochleven is thy mistress, said Roland Graeme; but mine is the Queen of Scotland. The steward looked at him fixedly for a moment, with an air in which suspicion and dislike were ill concealed by an affectation of contempt. The bragging cock-chicken, he said, will betray himself by his rash crowing. I have marked thy altered manner in the chapel of late--ay, and your changing of glances at meal-time with a certain idle damsel, who, like thyself, laughs at all gravity and goodness. There is something about you, my master, which should be looked to. But, if you would know whether the Lady of Lochleven, or that other lady, hath a right to command thy service, thou wilt find them together in the Lady Mary's ante-room. Roland hastened thither, not unwilling to escape from the ill-natured penetration of the old man, and marvelling at the same time what peculiarity could have occasioned the Lady of Lochleven's being in the Queen's apartment at this time of the afternoon, so much contrary to her usual wont. His acuteness instantly penetrated the meaning. She wishes, he concluded, to see the meeting betwixt the Queen and me on my return, that she may form a guess whether there is any private intelligence or understanding betwixt us--I must be guarded. With this resolution he entered the parlour, where the Queen, seated in her chair, with the Lady Fleming leaning upon the back of it, had already kept the Lady of Lochleven standing in her presence for the space of nearly an hour, to the manifest increase of her very visible bad humour. Roland Graeme, on entering the apartment, made a deep obeisance to the Queen, and another to the Lady, and then stood still as if to await their farther question. Speaking almost together, the Lady Lochleven said, So, young man, you are returned at length? And then stopped indignantly short, while the Queen went on without regarding her-- Roland, you are welcome home to us--you have proved the true dove and not the raven--Yet I am sure I could have forgiven you, if, once dismissed, from this water-circled ark of ours, you had never again returned to us. I trust you have brought back an olive-branch, for our kind and worthy hostess has chafed herself much on account of your long absence, and we never needed more some symbol of peace and reconciliation. I grieve I should have been detained, madam, answered the page; but from the delay of the person intrusted with the matters for which I was sent, I did not receive them till late in the day. See you there now, said the Queen to the Lady Lochleven; we could not persuade you, our dearest hostess, that your household goods were in all safe keeping and surety. True it is, that we can excuse your anxiety, considering that these august apartments are so scantily furnished, that we have not been able to offer you even the relief of a stool during the long time you have afforded us the pleasure of your society. The will, madam, said the lady, the will to offer such accommodation was more wanting than the means. What! said the Queen, looking round, and affecting surprise, there are then stools in this apartment--one, two--no less than four, including the broken one--a royal garniture!--We observed them not--will it please your ladyship to sit? No, madam, I will soon relieve you of my presence, replied the Lady Lochleven; and while with you, my aged limbs can still better brook fatigue, than my mind stoop to accept of constrained courtesy. Nay, Lady of Lochleven, if you take it so deeply, said the Queen, rising and motioning to her own vacant chair, I would rather you assumed my seat--you are not the first of your family who has done so. The Lady of Lochleven curtsied a negative, but seemed with much difficulty to suppress the angry answer which rose to her lips. During this sharp conversation, the page's attention had been almost entirely occupied by the entrance of Catherine Seyton, who came from the inner apartment, in the usual dress in which she attended upon the Queen, and with nothing in her manner which marked either the hurry or confusion incident to a hasty change of disguise, or the conscious fear of detection in a perilous enterprise. Roland Graeme ventured to make her an obeisance as she entered, but she returned it with an air of the utmost indifference, which, in his opinion, was extremely inconsistent with the circumstances in which they stood towards each other.-- Surely, he thought, she cannot in reason expect to bully me out of the belief due to mine own eyes, as she tried to do concerning the apparition in the hostelry of Saint Michael's--I will try if I cannot make her feel that this will be but a vain task, and that confidence in me is the wiser and safer course to pursue. These thoughts had passed rapidly through his mind, when the Queen, having finished her altercation with the Lady of the castle, again addressed him-- What of the revels at Kinross, Roland Graeme? Methought they were gay, if I may judge from some faint sounds of mirth and distant music, which found their way so far as these grated windows, and died when they entered them, as all that is mirthful must--But thou lookest as sad as if thou hadst come from a conventicle of the Huguenots! And so perchance he hath, madam, replied the Lady of Lochleven, at whom this side-shaft was lanched. I trust, amid yonder idle fooleries, there wanted not some pouring forth of doctrine to a better purpose than that vain mirth, which, blazing and vanishing like the crackling of dry thorns, leaves to the fools who love it nothing but dust and ashes. Mary Fleming, said the Queen, turning round and drawing her mantle about her, I would that we had the chimney-grate supplied with a fagot or two of these same thorns which the Lady of Lochleven describes so well. Methinks the damp air from the lake, which stagnates in these vaulted rooms, renders them deadly cold. Your Grace's pleasure shall be obeyed, said the Lady of Lochleven; yet may I presume to remind you that we are now in summer? I thank you for the information, my good lady, said the Queen; for prisoners better learn their calender from the mouth of their jailor, than from any change they themselves feel in the seasons.--Once more, Roland Graeme, what of the revels? They were gay, madam, said the page, but of the usual sort, and little worth your Highness's ear. Oh, you know not, said the Queen, how very indulgent my ear has become to all that speaks of freedom and the pleasures of the free. Methinks I would rather have seen the gay villagers dance their ring round the Maypole, than have witnessed the most stately masques within the precincts of a palace. The absence of stone-wall--the sense that the green turf is under the foot which may tread it free and unrestrained, is worth all that art or splendour can add to more courtly revels. I trust, said the Lady Lochleven, addressing the page in her turn, there were amongst these follies none of the riots or disturbances to which they so naturally lead? Roland gave a slight glance to Catherine Seyton, as if to bespeak her attention, as he replied,-- I witnessed no offence, madam, worthy of marking--none indeed of any kind, save that a bold damsel made her hand somewhat too familiar with the cheek of a player-man, and ran some hazard of being ducked in the lake. As he uttered these words he cast a hasty glance at Catherine; but she sustained, with the utmost serenity of manner and countenance, the hint which he had deemed could not have been thrown out before her without exciting some fear and confusion. I will cumber your Grace no longer with my presence, said the Lady Lochleven, unless you have aught to command me. Nought, our good hostess, answered the Queen, unless it be to pray you, that on another occasion you deem it not needful to postpone your better employment to wait so long upon us. May it please you, added the Lady Lochleven, to command this your gentleman to attend us, that I may receive some account of these matters which have been sent hither for your Grace's use? We may not refuse what you are pleased to require, madam, answered the Queen. Go with the lady, Roland, if our commands be indeed necessary to thy doing so. We will hear to-morrow the history of thy Kinross pleasures. For this night we dismiss thy attendance. Roland Graeme went with the Lady of Lochleven, who failed not to ask him many questions concerning what had passed at the sports, to which he rendered such answers as were most likely to lull asleep any suspicions which she might entertain of his disposition to favour Queen Mary, taking especial care to avoid all allusion to the apparition of Magdalen Graeme, and of the Abbot Ambrosius. At length, after undergoing a long and somewhat close examination, he was dismissed with such expressions, as, coming from the reserved and stern Lady of Lochleven, might seem to express a degree of favour and countenance. His first care was to obtain some refreshment, which was more cheerfully afforded him by a good-natured pantler than by Dryfesdale, who was, on this occasion, much disposed to abide by the fashion of Pudding-burn House, where They who came not the first call. Gat no more meat till the next meal. When Roland Graeme had finished his repast, having his dismissal from the Queen for the evening, and being little inclined for such society as the castle afforded, he stole into the garden, in which he had permission to spend his leisure time, when it pleased him. In this place, the ingenuity of the contriver and disposer of the walks had exerted itself to make the most of little space, and by screens, both of stone ornamented with rude sculpture, and hedges of living green, had endeavoured to give as much intricacy and variety as the confined limits of the garden would admit. Here the young man walked sadly, considering the events of the day, and comparing what had dropped from the Abbot with what he had himself noticed of the demeanour of George Douglas. It must be so, was the painful but inevitable conclusion at which he arrived. It must be by his aid that she is thus enabled, like a phantom, to transport herself from place to place, and to appear at pleasure on the mainland or on the islet.--It must be so, he repeated once more; with him she holds a close, secret, and intimate correspondence, altogether inconsistent with the eye of favour which she has sometimes cast upon me, and destructive to the hopes which she must have known these glances have necessarily inspired. And yet (for love will hope where reason despairs) the thought rushed on his mind, that it was possible she only encouraged Douglas's passion so far as might serve her mistress's interest, and that she was of too frank, noble, and candid a nature, to hold out to himself hopes which she meant not to fulfil. Lost in these various conjectures, he seated himself upon a bank of turf which commanded a view of the lake on the one side, and on the other of that front of the castle along which the Queen's apartments were situated. The sun had now for some time set, and the twilight of May was rapidly fading into a serene night. On the lake, the expanded water rose and fell, with the slightest and softest influence of a southern breeze, which scarcely dimpled the surface over which it passed. In the distance was still seen the dim outline of the island of Saint Serf, once visited by many a sandalled pilgrim, as the blessed spot trodden by a man of God--now neglected or violated, as the refuge of lazy priests, who had with justice been compelled to give place to the sheep and the heifers of a Protestant baron. As Roland gazed on the dark speck, amid the lighter blue of the waters which surrounded it, the mazes of polemical discussion again stretched themselves before the eye of the mind. Had these men justly suffered their exile as licentious drones, the robbers, at once, and disgrace, of the busy hive? or had the hand of avarice and rapine expelled from the temple, not the ribalds who polluted, but the faithful priests who served the shrine in honour and fidelity? The arguments of Henderson, in this contemplative hour, rose with double force before him; and could scarcely be parried by the appeal which the Abbot Ambrosius had made from his understanding to his feelings,--an appeal which he had felt more forcibly amid the bustle of stirring life, than now when his reflections were more undisturbed. It required an effort to divert his mind from this embarrassing topic; and he found that he best succeeded by turning his eyes to the front of the tower, watching where a twinkling light still streamed from the casement of Catherine Seyton's apartment, obscured by times for a moment as the shadow of the fair inhabitant passed betwixt the taper and the window. At length the light was removed or extinguished, and that object of speculation was also withdrawn from the eyes of the meditative lover. Dare I confess the fact, without injuring his character for ever as a hero of romance? These eyes gradually became heavy; speculative doubts on the subject of religious controversy, and anxious conjectures concerning the state of his mistress's affections, became confusedly blended together in his musings; the fatigues of a busy day prevailed over the harassing subjects of contemplation which occupied his mind, and he fell fast asleep. Sound were his slumbers, until they were suddenly dispelled by the iron tongue of the castle-bell, which sent its deep and sullen sounds wide over the bosom of the lake, and awakened the echoes of Bennarty, the hill which descends steeply on its southern bank. Roland started up, for this bell was always tolled at ten o'clock, as the signal for locking the castle gates, and placing the keys under the charge of the seneschal. He therefore hastened to the wicket by which the garden communicated with the building, and had the mortification, just as he reached it, to hear the bolt leave its sheath with a discordant crash, and enter the stone groove of the door-lintel. Hold, hold, cried the page, and let me in ere you lock the wicket. The voice of Dryfesdale replied from within, in his usual tone of embittered sullenness, The hour is passed, fair master--you like not the inside of these walls--even make it a complete holiday, and spend the night as well as the day out of bounds. Open the door, exclaimed the indignant page, or by Saint Giles I will make thy gold chain smoke for it! Make no alarm here, retorted the impenetrable Dryfesdale, but keep thy sinful oaths and silly threats for those that regard them--I do mine office, and carry the keys to the seneschal.--Adieu, my young master! the cool night air will advantage your hot blood. The steward was right in what he said; for the cooling breeze was very necessary to appease the feverish fit of anger which Roland experienced, nor did the remedy succeed for some time. At length, after some hasty turns made through the garden, exhausting his passion in vain vows of vengeance, Roland Graeme began to be sensible that his situation ought rather to be held as matter of laughter than of serious resentment. To one bred a sportsman, a night spent in the open air had in it little of hardship, and the poor malice of the steward seemed more worthy of his contempt than his anger. I would to God, he said, that the grim old man may always have contented himself with such sportive revenge. He often looks as he were capable of doing us a darker turn. Returning, therefore, to the turf-seat which he had formerly occupied, and which was partially sheltered by a trim fence of green holly, he drew his mantle around him, stretched himself at length on the verdant settle, and endeavoured to resume that sleep which the castle bell had interrupted to so little purpose. Sleep, like other earthly blessings, is niggard of its favours when most courted. The more Roland invoked her aid, the farther she fled from his eyelids. He had been completely awakened, first, by the sounds of the bell, and then by his own aroused vivacity of temper, and he found it difficult again to compose himself to slumber. At length, when his mind--was wearied out with a maze of unpleasing meditation, he succeeded in coaxing himself into a broken slumber. This was again dispelled by the voices of two persons who were walking in the garden, the sound of whose conversation, after mingling for some time in the page's dreams, at length succeeded in awaking him thoroughly. He raised himself from his reclining posture in the utmost astonishment, which the circumstance of hearing two persons at that late hour conversing on the outside of the watchfully guarded Castle of Lochloven, was so well calculated to excite. His first thought was of supernatural beings; his next, upon some attempt on the part of Queen Mary's friends and followers; his last was, that George of Douglas, possessed of the keys, and having the means of ingress and egress at pleasure, was availing himself of his office to hold a rendezvous with Catherine Seyton in the castle garden. He was confirmed in this opinion by the tone of the voice, which asked in a low whisper, whether all was ready? Chapter the Thirtieth. In some breasts passion lies conceal'd and silent, Like war's swart powder in a castle vault, Until occasion, like the linstock, lights it: Then comes at once the lightning--and the thunder, And distant echoes tell that all is rent asunder. OLD PLAY. Roland Graeme, availing himself of a breach in the holly screen, and of the assistance of the full moon, which was now arisen, had a perfect opportunity, himself unobserved, to reconnoitre the persons and the motions

moderated

How many times the word 'moderated' appears in the text?

you, reverend father, I am totally ignorant. My brother, answered the Abbot, you are wise, and ought to know-- I am not--I am not--I am not wise, replied the horticulturist, pettishly, and stopping his ears with his fingers-- I was never called wise but when men wanted to engage me in some action of notorious folly. But, my good brother, said the Abbot-- I am not good neither, said the peevish gardener; I am neither good nor wise--Had I been wise, you would not have been admitted here; and were I good, methinks I should send you elsewhere to hatch plots for destroying the quiet of the country. What signifies disputing about queen or king,--when men may sit at peace--_sub umbra vitis sui?_ and so would I do, after the precept of Holy Writ, were I, as you term me, wise or good. But such as I am, my neck is in the yoke, and you make me draw what weight you list.--Follow me, youngster. This reverend father, who makes in his jackman's dress nearly as reverend a figure as I myself, will agree with me in one thing at least, and that is, that you have been long enough here. Follow the good father, Roland, said the Abbot, and remember my words--a day is approaching that will try the temper of all true Scotsmen--may thy heart prove faithful as the steel of thy blade! The page bowed in silence, and they parted; the gardener, notwithstanding his advanced age, walking on before him very briskly, and muttering as he went, partly to himself, partly to his companion, after the manner of old men of weakened intellects-- When I was great, thus ran his maundering, and had my mule and my ambling palfrey at command, I warrant you I could have as well flown through the air as have walked at this pace. I had my gout and my rheumatics, and an hundred things besides, that hung fetters on my heels; and, now, thanks to Our Lady, and honest labour, I can walk with any good man of my age in the kingdom of Fife--Fy upon it, that experience should be so long in coming! As he was thus muttering, his eye fell upon the branch of a pear-tree which drooped down for want of support, and at once forgetting his haste, the old man stopped and set seriously about binding it up. Roland Graeme had both readiness, neatness of hand, and good nature in abundance; he immediately lent his aid, and in a minute or two the bough was supported, and tied up in a way perfectly satisfactory to the old man, who looked at it with great complaisance. They are bergamots, he said, and if you will come ashore in autumn, you shall taste of them--the like are not in Lochleven Castle--the garden there is a poor pin-fold, and the gardener, Hugh Houkham, hath little skill of his craft--so come ashore, Master Page, in autumn, when you would eat pears. But what am I thinking of--ere that time come, they may have given thee sour pears for plums. Take an old man's advice, youth, one who hath seen many days, and sat in higher places than thou canst hope for--bend thy sword into a pruning-hook, and make a dibble of thy dagger--thy days shall be the longer, and thy health the better for it,--and come to aid me in my garden, and I will teach thee the real French fashion of _imping_, which the Southron call graffing. Do this, and do it without loss of time, for there is a whirlwind coming over the land, and only those shall escape who lie too much beneath the storm to have their boughs broken by it. So saying, he dismissed Roland Graeme, through a different door from that by which he had entered, signed a cross, and pronounced a benedicite as they parted, and then, still muttering to himself, retired into the garden, and locked the door on the inside. Chapter the Twenty-Ninth. Pray God she prove not masculine ere long! KING HENRY VI. Dismissed from the old man's garden, Roland Graeme found that a grassy paddock, in which sauntered two cows, the property of the gardener, still separated him from the village. He paced through it, lost in meditation upon the words of the Abbot. Father Ambrosius had, with success enough, exerted over him that powerful influence which the guardians and instructors of our childhood possess over our more mature youth. And yet, when Roland looked back upon what the father had said, he could not but suspect that he had rather sought to evade entering into the controversy betwixt the churches, than to repel the objections and satisfy the doubts which the lectures of Henderson had excited. For this he had no time, said the page to himself, neither have I now calmness and learning sufficient to judge upon points of such magnitude. Besides, it were base to quit my faith while the wind of fortune sets against it, unless I were so placed, that my conversion, should it take place, were free as light from the imputation of self-interest. I was bred a Catholic--bred in the faith of Bruce and Wallace--I will hold that faith till time and reason shall convince me that it errs. I will serve this poor Queen as a subject should serve an imprisoned and wronged sovereign--they who placed me in her service have to blame themselves--who sent me hither, a gentleman trained in the paths of loyalty and honour, when they should have sought out some truckling, cogging, double-dealing knave, who would have been at once the observant page of the Queen, and the obsequious spy of her enemies. Since I must choose betwixt aiding and betraying her, I will decide as becomes her servant and her subject; but Catherine Seyton--Catherine Seyton, beloved by Douglas and holding me on or off as the intervals of her leisure or caprice will permit--how shall I deal with the coquette?--By heaven, when I next have an opportunity, she shall render me some reason for her conduct, or I will break with her for ever! As he formed this doughty resolution, he crossed the stile which led out of the little enclosure, and was almost immediately greeted by Dr. Luke Lundin. Ha! my most excellent young friend, said the Doctor, from whence come you?--but I note the place.--Yes, neighbour Blinkhoolie's garden is a pleasant rendezvous, and you are of the age when lads look after a bonny lass with one eye, and a dainty plum with another. But hey! you look subtriste and melancholic--I fear the maiden has proved cruel, or the plums unripe; and surely I think neighbour Blinkhoolie's damsons can scarcely have been well preserved throughout the winter--he spares the saccharine juice on his confects. But courage, man, there are more Kates in Kinross; and for the immature fruit, a glass of my double distilled _aqua mirabilis--probatum est_. The page darted an ireful glance at the facetious physician; but presently recollecting that the name Kate, which had provoked his displeasure, was probably but introduced for the sake of alliteration, he suppressed his wrath, and only asked if the wains had been heard of? Why, I have been seeking for you this hour, to tell you that the stuff is in your boat, and that the boat waits your pleasure. Auchtermuchty had only fallen into company with an idle knave like himself, and a stoup of aquavitae between them. Your boatmen lie on their oars, and there have already been made two wefts from the warder's turret to intimate that those in the castle are impatient for your return. Yet there is time for you to take a slight repast; and, as your friend and physician, I hold it unfit you should face the water-breeze with an empty stomach. Roland Graeme had nothing for it but to return, with such cheer as he might, to the place where his boat was moored on the beach, and resisted all offer of refreshment, although the Doctor promised that he should prelude the collation with a gentle appetizer--a decoction of herbs, gathered and distilled by himself. Indeed, as Roland had not forgotten the contents of his morning cup, it is possible that the recollection induced him to stand firm in his refusal of all food, to which such an unpalatable preface was the preliminary. As they passed towards the boat, (for the ceremonious politeness of the worthy Chamberlain would not permit the page to go thither without attendance,) Roland Graeme, amidst a group who seemed to be assembled around a party of wandering musicians, distinguished, as he thought, the dress of Catherine Seyton. He shook himself clear from his attendant, and at one spring was in the midst of the crowd, and at the side of the damsel. Catherine, he whispered, is it well for you to be still here?--will you not return to the castle? To the devil with your Catherines and your castles! answered the maiden, snappishly; have you not had time enough already to get rid of your follies? Begone! I desire not your farther company, and there will be danger in thrusting it upon me. Nay--but if there be danger, fairest Catherine, replied Roland; why will you not allow me to stay and share it with you? Intruding fool, said the maiden, the danger is all on thine own side--the risk in, in plain terms, that I strike thee on the mouth with the hilt of my dagger. So saying, she turned haughtily from him, and moved through the crowd, who gave way in some astonishment at the masculine activity with which she forced her way among them. As Roland, though much irritated, prepared to follow, he was grappled on the other side by Doctor Luke Lundin, who reminded him of the loaded boat, of the two wefts, or signals with the flag, which had been made from the tower, of the danger of the cold breeze to an empty stomach, and of the vanity of spending more time upon coy wenches and sour plums. Roland was thus, in a manner, dragged back to his boat, and obliged to launch her forth upon his return to Lochleven Castle. That little voyage was speedily accomplished, and the page was greeted at the landing-place by the severe and caustic welcome of old Dryfesdale. So, young gallant, you are come at last, after a delay of six hours, and after two signals from the castle? But, I warrant, some idle junketing hath occupied you too deeply to think of your service or your duty. Where is the note of the plate and household stuff?--Pray Heaven it hath not been diminished under the sleeveless care of so young a gad-about! Diminished under my care, Sir Steward! retorted the page angrily; say so in earnest, and by Heaven your gray hair shall hardly protect your saucy tongue! A truce with your swaggering, young esquire, returned the steward; we have bolts and dungeons for brawlers. Go to my lady, and swagger before her, if thou darest--she will give thee proper cause of offence, for she has waited for thee long and impatiently. And where then is the Lady of Lochleven? said the page; for I conceive it is of her thou speakest. Ay--of whom else? replied Dryfesdale; or who besides the Lady of Lochleven hath a right to command in this castle? The Lady of Lochleven is thy mistress, said Roland Graeme; but mine is the Queen of Scotland. The steward looked at him fixedly for a moment, with an air in which suspicion and dislike were ill concealed by an affectation of contempt. The bragging cock-chicken, he said, will betray himself by his rash crowing. I have marked thy altered manner in the chapel of late--ay, and your changing of glances at meal-time with a certain idle damsel, who, like thyself, laughs at all gravity and goodness. There is something about you, my master, which should be looked to. But, if you would know whether the Lady of Lochleven, or that other lady, hath a right to command thy service, thou wilt find them together in the Lady Mary's ante-room. Roland hastened thither, not unwilling to escape from the ill-natured penetration of the old man, and marvelling at the same time what peculiarity could have occasioned the Lady of Lochleven's being in the Queen's apartment at this time of the afternoon, so much contrary to her usual wont. His acuteness instantly penetrated the meaning. She wishes, he concluded, to see the meeting betwixt the Queen and me on my return, that she may form a guess whether there is any private intelligence or understanding betwixt us--I must be guarded. With this resolution he entered the parlour, where the Queen, seated in her chair, with the Lady Fleming leaning upon the back of it, had already kept the Lady of Lochleven standing in her presence for the space of nearly an hour, to the manifest increase of her very visible bad humour. Roland Graeme, on entering the apartment, made a deep obeisance to the Queen, and another to the Lady, and then stood still as if to await their farther question. Speaking almost together, the Lady Lochleven said, So, young man, you are returned at length? And then stopped indignantly short, while the Queen went on without regarding her-- Roland, you are welcome home to us--you have proved the true dove and not the raven--Yet I am sure I could have forgiven you, if, once dismissed, from this water-circled ark of ours, you had never again returned to us. I trust you have brought back an olive-branch, for our kind and worthy hostess has chafed herself much on account of your long absence, and we never needed more some symbol of peace and reconciliation. I grieve I should have been detained, madam, answered the page; but from the delay of the person intrusted with the matters for which I was sent, I did not receive them till late in the day. See you there now, said the Queen to the Lady Lochleven; we could not persuade you, our dearest hostess, that your household goods were in all safe keeping and surety. True it is, that we can excuse your anxiety, considering that these august apartments are so scantily furnished, that we have not been able to offer you even the relief of a stool during the long time you have afforded us the pleasure of your society. The will, madam, said the lady, the will to offer such accommodation was more wanting than the means. What! said the Queen, looking round, and affecting surprise, there are then stools in this apartment--one, two--no less than four, including the broken one--a royal garniture!--We observed them not--will it please your ladyship to sit? No, madam, I will soon relieve you of my presence, replied the Lady Lochleven; and while with you, my aged limbs can still better brook fatigue, than my mind stoop to accept of constrained courtesy. Nay, Lady of Lochleven, if you take it so deeply, said the Queen, rising and motioning to her own vacant chair, I would rather you assumed my seat--you are not the first of your family who has done so. The Lady of Lochleven curtsied a negative, but seemed with much difficulty to suppress the angry answer which rose to her lips. During this sharp conversation, the page's attention had been almost entirely occupied by the entrance of Catherine Seyton, who came from the inner apartment, in the usual dress in which she attended upon the Queen, and with nothing in her manner which marked either the hurry or confusion incident to a hasty change of disguise, or the conscious fear of detection in a perilous enterprise. Roland Graeme ventured to make her an obeisance as she entered, but she returned it with an air of the utmost indifference, which, in his opinion, was extremely inconsistent with the circumstances in which they stood towards each other.-- Surely, he thought, she cannot in reason expect to bully me out of the belief due to mine own eyes, as she tried to do concerning the apparition in the hostelry of Saint Michael's--I will try if I cannot make her feel that this will be but a vain task, and that confidence in me is the wiser and safer course to pursue. These thoughts had passed rapidly through his mind, when the Queen, having finished her altercation with the Lady of the castle, again addressed him-- What of the revels at Kinross, Roland Graeme? Methought they were gay, if I may judge from some faint sounds of mirth and distant music, which found their way so far as these grated windows, and died when they entered them, as all that is mirthful must--But thou lookest as sad as if thou hadst come from a conventicle of the Huguenots! And so perchance he hath, madam, replied the Lady of Lochleven, at whom this side-shaft was lanched. I trust, amid yonder idle fooleries, there wanted not some pouring forth of doctrine to a better purpose than that vain mirth, which, blazing and vanishing like the crackling of dry thorns, leaves to the fools who love it nothing but dust and ashes. Mary Fleming, said the Queen, turning round and drawing her mantle about her, I would that we had the chimney-grate supplied with a fagot or two of these same thorns which the Lady of Lochleven describes so well. Methinks the damp air from the lake, which stagnates in these vaulted rooms, renders them deadly cold. Your Grace's pleasure shall be obeyed, said the Lady of Lochleven; yet may I presume to remind you that we are now in summer? I thank you for the information, my good lady, said the Queen; for prisoners better learn their calender from the mouth of their jailor, than from any change they themselves feel in the seasons.--Once more, Roland Graeme, what of the revels? They were gay, madam, said the page, but of the usual sort, and little worth your Highness's ear. Oh, you know not, said the Queen, how very indulgent my ear has become to all that speaks of freedom and the pleasures of the free. Methinks I would rather have seen the gay villagers dance their ring round the Maypole, than have witnessed the most stately masques within the precincts of a palace. The absence of stone-wall--the sense that the green turf is under the foot which may tread it free and unrestrained, is worth all that art or splendour can add to more courtly revels. I trust, said the Lady Lochleven, addressing the page in her turn, there were amongst these follies none of the riots or disturbances to which they so naturally lead? Roland gave a slight glance to Catherine Seyton, as if to bespeak her attention, as he replied,-- I witnessed no offence, madam, worthy of marking--none indeed of any kind, save that a bold damsel made her hand somewhat too familiar with the cheek of a player-man, and ran some hazard of being ducked in the lake. As he uttered these words he cast a hasty glance at Catherine; but she sustained, with the utmost serenity of manner and countenance, the hint which he had deemed could not have been thrown out before her without exciting some fear and confusion. I will cumber your Grace no longer with my presence, said the Lady Lochleven, unless you have aught to command me. Nought, our good hostess, answered the Queen, unless it be to pray you, that on another occasion you deem it not needful to postpone your better employment to wait so long upon us. May it please you, added the Lady Lochleven, to command this your gentleman to attend us, that I may receive some account of these matters which have been sent hither for your Grace's use? We may not refuse what you are pleased to require, madam, answered the Queen. Go with the lady, Roland, if our commands be indeed necessary to thy doing so. We will hear to-morrow the history of thy Kinross pleasures. For this night we dismiss thy attendance. Roland Graeme went with the Lady of Lochleven, who failed not to ask him many questions concerning what had passed at the sports, to which he rendered such answers as were most likely to lull asleep any suspicions which she might entertain of his disposition to favour Queen Mary, taking especial care to avoid all allusion to the apparition of Magdalen Graeme, and of the Abbot Ambrosius. At length, after undergoing a long and somewhat close examination, he was dismissed with such expressions, as, coming from the reserved and stern Lady of Lochleven, might seem to express a degree of favour and countenance. His first care was to obtain some refreshment, which was more cheerfully afforded him by a good-natured pantler than by Dryfesdale, who was, on this occasion, much disposed to abide by the fashion of Pudding-burn House, where They who came not the first call. Gat no more meat till the next meal. When Roland Graeme had finished his repast, having his dismissal from the Queen for the evening, and being little inclined for such society as the castle afforded, he stole into the garden, in which he had permission to spend his leisure time, when it pleased him. In this place, the ingenuity of the contriver and disposer of the walks had exerted itself to make the most of little space, and by screens, both of stone ornamented with rude sculpture, and hedges of living green, had endeavoured to give as much intricacy and variety as the confined limits of the garden would admit. Here the young man walked sadly, considering the events of the day, and comparing what had dropped from the Abbot with what he had himself noticed of the demeanour of George Douglas. It must be so, was the painful but inevitable conclusion at which he arrived. It must be by his aid that she is thus enabled, like a phantom, to transport herself from place to place, and to appear at pleasure on the mainland or on the islet.--It must be so, he repeated once more; with him she holds a close, secret, and intimate correspondence, altogether inconsistent with the eye of favour which she has sometimes cast upon me, and destructive to the hopes which she must have known these glances have necessarily inspired. And yet (for love will hope where reason despairs) the thought rushed on his mind, that it was possible she only encouraged Douglas's passion so far as might serve her mistress's interest, and that she was of too frank, noble, and candid a nature, to hold out to himself hopes which she meant not to fulfil. Lost in these various conjectures, he seated himself upon a bank of turf which commanded a view of the lake on the one side, and on the other of that front of the castle along which the Queen's apartments were situated. The sun had now for some time set, and the twilight of May was rapidly fading into a serene night. On the lake, the expanded water rose and fell, with the slightest and softest influence of a southern breeze, which scarcely dimpled the surface over which it passed. In the distance was still seen the dim outline of the island of Saint Serf, once visited by many a sandalled pilgrim, as the blessed spot trodden by a man of God--now neglected or violated, as the refuge of lazy priests, who had with justice been compelled to give place to the sheep and the heifers of a Protestant baron. As Roland gazed on the dark speck, amid the lighter blue of the waters which surrounded it, the mazes of polemical discussion again stretched themselves before the eye of the mind. Had these men justly suffered their exile as licentious drones, the robbers, at once, and disgrace, of the busy hive? or had the hand of avarice and rapine expelled from the temple, not the ribalds who polluted, but the faithful priests who served the shrine in honour and fidelity? The arguments of Henderson, in this contemplative hour, rose with double force before him; and could scarcely be parried by the appeal which the Abbot Ambrosius had made from his understanding to his feelings,--an appeal which he had felt more forcibly amid the bustle of stirring life, than now when his reflections were more undisturbed. It required an effort to divert his mind from this embarrassing topic; and he found that he best succeeded by turning his eyes to the front of the tower, watching where a twinkling light still streamed from the casement of Catherine Seyton's apartment, obscured by times for a moment as the shadow of the fair inhabitant passed betwixt the taper and the window. At length the light was removed or extinguished, and that object of speculation was also withdrawn from the eyes of the meditative lover. Dare I confess the fact, without injuring his character for ever as a hero of romance? These eyes gradually became heavy; speculative doubts on the subject of religious controversy, and anxious conjectures concerning the state of his mistress's affections, became confusedly blended together in his musings; the fatigues of a busy day prevailed over the harassing subjects of contemplation which occupied his mind, and he fell fast asleep. Sound were his slumbers, until they were suddenly dispelled by the iron tongue of the castle-bell, which sent its deep and sullen sounds wide over the bosom of the lake, and awakened the echoes of Bennarty, the hill which descends steeply on its southern bank. Roland started up, for this bell was always tolled at ten o'clock, as the signal for locking the castle gates, and placing the keys under the charge of the seneschal. He therefore hastened to the wicket by which the garden communicated with the building, and had the mortification, just as he reached it, to hear the bolt leave its sheath with a discordant crash, and enter the stone groove of the door-lintel. Hold, hold, cried the page, and let me in ere you lock the wicket. The voice of Dryfesdale replied from within, in his usual tone of embittered sullenness, The hour is passed, fair master--you like not the inside of these walls--even make it a complete holiday, and spend the night as well as the day out of bounds. Open the door, exclaimed the indignant page, or by Saint Giles I will make thy gold chain smoke for it! Make no alarm here, retorted the impenetrable Dryfesdale, but keep thy sinful oaths and silly threats for those that regard them--I do mine office, and carry the keys to the seneschal.--Adieu, my young master! the cool night air will advantage your hot blood. The steward was right in what he said; for the cooling breeze was very necessary to appease the feverish fit of anger which Roland experienced, nor did the remedy succeed for some time. At length, after some hasty turns made through the garden, exhausting his passion in vain vows of vengeance, Roland Graeme began to be sensible that his situation ought rather to be held as matter of laughter than of serious resentment. To one bred a sportsman, a night spent in the open air had in it little of hardship, and the poor malice of the steward seemed more worthy of his contempt than his anger. I would to God, he said, that the grim old man may always have contented himself with such sportive revenge. He often looks as he were capable of doing us a darker turn. Returning, therefore, to the turf-seat which he had formerly occupied, and which was partially sheltered by a trim fence of green holly, he drew his mantle around him, stretched himself at length on the verdant settle, and endeavoured to resume that sleep which the castle bell had interrupted to so little purpose. Sleep, like other earthly blessings, is niggard of its favours when most courted. The more Roland invoked her aid, the farther she fled from his eyelids. He had been completely awakened, first, by the sounds of the bell, and then by his own aroused vivacity of temper, and he found it difficult again to compose himself to slumber. At length, when his mind--was wearied out with a maze of unpleasing meditation, he succeeded in coaxing himself into a broken slumber. This was again dispelled by the voices of two persons who were walking in the garden, the sound of whose conversation, after mingling for some time in the page's dreams, at length succeeded in awaking him thoroughly. He raised himself from his reclining posture in the utmost astonishment, which the circumstance of hearing two persons at that late hour conversing on the outside of the watchfully guarded Castle of Lochloven, was so well calculated to excite. His first thought was of supernatural beings; his next, upon some attempt on the part of Queen Mary's friends and followers; his last was, that George of Douglas, possessed of the keys, and having the means of ingress and egress at pleasure, was availing himself of his office to hold a rendezvous with Catherine Seyton in the castle garden. He was confirmed in this opinion by the tone of the voice, which asked in a low whisper, whether all was ready? Chapter the Thirtieth. In some breasts passion lies conceal'd and silent, Like war's swart powder in a castle vault, Until occasion, like the linstock, lights it: Then comes at once the lightning--and the thunder, And distant echoes tell that all is rent asunder. OLD PLAY. Roland Graeme, availing himself of a breach in the holly screen, and of the assistance of the full moon, which was now arisen, had a perfect opportunity, himself unobserved, to reconnoitre the persons and the motions

destroying

How many times the word 'destroying' appears in the text?

you, reverend father, I am totally ignorant. My brother, answered the Abbot, you are wise, and ought to know-- I am not--I am not--I am not wise, replied the horticulturist, pettishly, and stopping his ears with his fingers-- I was never called wise but when men wanted to engage me in some action of notorious folly. But, my good brother, said the Abbot-- I am not good neither, said the peevish gardener; I am neither good nor wise--Had I been wise, you would not have been admitted here; and were I good, methinks I should send you elsewhere to hatch plots for destroying the quiet of the country. What signifies disputing about queen or king,--when men may sit at peace--_sub umbra vitis sui?_ and so would I do, after the precept of Holy Writ, were I, as you term me, wise or good. But such as I am, my neck is in the yoke, and you make me draw what weight you list.--Follow me, youngster. This reverend father, who makes in his jackman's dress nearly as reverend a figure as I myself, will agree with me in one thing at least, and that is, that you have been long enough here. Follow the good father, Roland, said the Abbot, and remember my words--a day is approaching that will try the temper of all true Scotsmen--may thy heart prove faithful as the steel of thy blade! The page bowed in silence, and they parted; the gardener, notwithstanding his advanced age, walking on before him very briskly, and muttering as he went, partly to himself, partly to his companion, after the manner of old men of weakened intellects-- When I was great, thus ran his maundering, and had my mule and my ambling palfrey at command, I warrant you I could have as well flown through the air as have walked at this pace. I had my gout and my rheumatics, and an hundred things besides, that hung fetters on my heels; and, now, thanks to Our Lady, and honest labour, I can walk with any good man of my age in the kingdom of Fife--Fy upon it, that experience should be so long in coming! As he was thus muttering, his eye fell upon the branch of a pear-tree which drooped down for want of support, and at once forgetting his haste, the old man stopped and set seriously about binding it up. Roland Graeme had both readiness, neatness of hand, and good nature in abundance; he immediately lent his aid, and in a minute or two the bough was supported, and tied up in a way perfectly satisfactory to the old man, who looked at it with great complaisance. They are bergamots, he said, and if you will come ashore in autumn, you shall taste of them--the like are not in Lochleven Castle--the garden there is a poor pin-fold, and the gardener, Hugh Houkham, hath little skill of his craft--so come ashore, Master Page, in autumn, when you would eat pears. But what am I thinking of--ere that time come, they may have given thee sour pears for plums. Take an old man's advice, youth, one who hath seen many days, and sat in higher places than thou canst hope for--bend thy sword into a pruning-hook, and make a dibble of thy dagger--thy days shall be the longer, and thy health the better for it,--and come to aid me in my garden, and I will teach thee the real French fashion of _imping_, which the Southron call graffing. Do this, and do it without loss of time, for there is a whirlwind coming over the land, and only those shall escape who lie too much beneath the storm to have their boughs broken by it. So saying, he dismissed Roland Graeme, through a different door from that by which he had entered, signed a cross, and pronounced a benedicite as they parted, and then, still muttering to himself, retired into the garden, and locked the door on the inside. Chapter the Twenty-Ninth. Pray God she prove not masculine ere long! KING HENRY VI. Dismissed from the old man's garden, Roland Graeme found that a grassy paddock, in which sauntered two cows, the property of the gardener, still separated him from the village. He paced through it, lost in meditation upon the words of the Abbot. Father Ambrosius had, with success enough, exerted over him that powerful influence which the guardians and instructors of our childhood possess over our more mature youth. And yet, when Roland looked back upon what the father had said, he could not but suspect that he had rather sought to evade entering into the controversy betwixt the churches, than to repel the objections and satisfy the doubts which the lectures of Henderson had excited. For this he had no time, said the page to himself, neither have I now calmness and learning sufficient to judge upon points of such magnitude. Besides, it were base to quit my faith while the wind of fortune sets against it, unless I were so placed, that my conversion, should it take place, were free as light from the imputation of self-interest. I was bred a Catholic--bred in the faith of Bruce and Wallace--I will hold that faith till time and reason shall convince me that it errs. I will serve this poor Queen as a subject should serve an imprisoned and wronged sovereign--they who placed me in her service have to blame themselves--who sent me hither, a gentleman trained in the paths of loyalty and honour, when they should have sought out some truckling, cogging, double-dealing knave, who would have been at once the observant page of the Queen, and the obsequious spy of her enemies. Since I must choose betwixt aiding and betraying her, I will decide as becomes her servant and her subject; but Catherine Seyton--Catherine Seyton, beloved by Douglas and holding me on or off as the intervals of her leisure or caprice will permit--how shall I deal with the coquette?--By heaven, when I next have an opportunity, she shall render me some reason for her conduct, or I will break with her for ever! As he formed this doughty resolution, he crossed the stile which led out of the little enclosure, and was almost immediately greeted by Dr. Luke Lundin. Ha! my most excellent young friend, said the Doctor, from whence come you?--but I note the place.--Yes, neighbour Blinkhoolie's garden is a pleasant rendezvous, and you are of the age when lads look after a bonny lass with one eye, and a dainty plum with another. But hey! you look subtriste and melancholic--I fear the maiden has proved cruel, or the plums unripe; and surely I think neighbour Blinkhoolie's damsons can scarcely have been well preserved throughout the winter--he spares the saccharine juice on his confects. But courage, man, there are more Kates in Kinross; and for the immature fruit, a glass of my double distilled _aqua mirabilis--probatum est_. The page darted an ireful glance at the facetious physician; but presently recollecting that the name Kate, which had provoked his displeasure, was probably but introduced for the sake of alliteration, he suppressed his wrath, and only asked if the wains had been heard of? Why, I have been seeking for you this hour, to tell you that the stuff is in your boat, and that the boat waits your pleasure. Auchtermuchty had only fallen into company with an idle knave like himself, and a stoup of aquavitae between them. Your boatmen lie on their oars, and there have already been made two wefts from the warder's turret to intimate that those in the castle are impatient for your return. Yet there is time for you to take a slight repast; and, as your friend and physician, I hold it unfit you should face the water-breeze with an empty stomach. Roland Graeme had nothing for it but to return, with such cheer as he might, to the place where his boat was moored on the beach, and resisted all offer of refreshment, although the Doctor promised that he should prelude the collation with a gentle appetizer--a decoction of herbs, gathered and distilled by himself. Indeed, as Roland had not forgotten the contents of his morning cup, it is possible that the recollection induced him to stand firm in his refusal of all food, to which such an unpalatable preface was the preliminary. As they passed towards the boat, (for the ceremonious politeness of the worthy Chamberlain would not permit the page to go thither without attendance,) Roland Graeme, amidst a group who seemed to be assembled around a party of wandering musicians, distinguished, as he thought, the dress of Catherine Seyton. He shook himself clear from his attendant, and at one spring was in the midst of the crowd, and at the side of the damsel. Catherine, he whispered, is it well for you to be still here?--will you not return to the castle? To the devil with your Catherines and your castles! answered the maiden, snappishly; have you not had time enough already to get rid of your follies? Begone! I desire not your farther company, and there will be danger in thrusting it upon me. Nay--but if there be danger, fairest Catherine, replied Roland; why will you not allow me to stay and share it with you? Intruding fool, said the maiden, the danger is all on thine own side--the risk in, in plain terms, that I strike thee on the mouth with the hilt of my dagger. So saying, she turned haughtily from him, and moved through the crowd, who gave way in some astonishment at the masculine activity with which she forced her way among them. As Roland, though much irritated, prepared to follow, he was grappled on the other side by Doctor Luke Lundin, who reminded him of the loaded boat, of the two wefts, or signals with the flag, which had been made from the tower, of the danger of the cold breeze to an empty stomach, and of the vanity of spending more time upon coy wenches and sour plums. Roland was thus, in a manner, dragged back to his boat, and obliged to launch her forth upon his return to Lochleven Castle. That little voyage was speedily accomplished, and the page was greeted at the landing-place by the severe and caustic welcome of old Dryfesdale. So, young gallant, you are come at last, after a delay of six hours, and after two signals from the castle? But, I warrant, some idle junketing hath occupied you too deeply to think of your service or your duty. Where is the note of the plate and household stuff?--Pray Heaven it hath not been diminished under the sleeveless care of so young a gad-about! Diminished under my care, Sir Steward! retorted the page angrily; say so in earnest, and by Heaven your gray hair shall hardly protect your saucy tongue! A truce with your swaggering, young esquire, returned the steward; we have bolts and dungeons for brawlers. Go to my lady, and swagger before her, if thou darest--she will give thee proper cause of offence, for she has waited for thee long and impatiently. And where then is the Lady of Lochleven? said the page; for I conceive it is of her thou speakest. Ay--of whom else? replied Dryfesdale; or who besides the Lady of Lochleven hath a right to command in this castle? The Lady of Lochleven is thy mistress, said Roland Graeme; but mine is the Queen of Scotland. The steward looked at him fixedly for a moment, with an air in which suspicion and dislike were ill concealed by an affectation of contempt. The bragging cock-chicken, he said, will betray himself by his rash crowing. I have marked thy altered manner in the chapel of late--ay, and your changing of glances at meal-time with a certain idle damsel, who, like thyself, laughs at all gravity and goodness. There is something about you, my master, which should be looked to. But, if you would know whether the Lady of Lochleven, or that other lady, hath a right to command thy service, thou wilt find them together in the Lady Mary's ante-room. Roland hastened thither, not unwilling to escape from the ill-natured penetration of the old man, and marvelling at the same time what peculiarity could have occasioned the Lady of Lochleven's being in the Queen's apartment at this time of the afternoon, so much contrary to her usual wont. His acuteness instantly penetrated the meaning. She wishes, he concluded, to see the meeting betwixt the Queen and me on my return, that she may form a guess whether there is any private intelligence or understanding betwixt us--I must be guarded. With this resolution he entered the parlour, where the Queen, seated in her chair, with the Lady Fleming leaning upon the back of it, had already kept the Lady of Lochleven standing in her presence for the space of nearly an hour, to the manifest increase of her very visible bad humour. Roland Graeme, on entering the apartment, made a deep obeisance to the Queen, and another to the Lady, and then stood still as if to await their farther question. Speaking almost together, the Lady Lochleven said, So, young man, you are returned at length? And then stopped indignantly short, while the Queen went on without regarding her-- Roland, you are welcome home to us--you have proved the true dove and not the raven--Yet I am sure I could have forgiven you, if, once dismissed, from this water-circled ark of ours, you had never again returned to us. I trust you have brought back an olive-branch, for our kind and worthy hostess has chafed herself much on account of your long absence, and we never needed more some symbol of peace and reconciliation. I grieve I should have been detained, madam, answered the page; but from the delay of the person intrusted with the matters for which I was sent, I did not receive them till late in the day. See you there now, said the Queen to the Lady Lochleven; we could not persuade you, our dearest hostess, that your household goods were in all safe keeping and surety. True it is, that we can excuse your anxiety, considering that these august apartments are so scantily furnished, that we have not been able to offer you even the relief of a stool during the long time you have afforded us the pleasure of your society. The will, madam, said the lady, the will to offer such accommodation was more wanting than the means. What! said the Queen, looking round, and affecting surprise, there are then stools in this apartment--one, two--no less than four, including the broken one--a royal garniture!--We observed them not--will it please your ladyship to sit? No, madam, I will soon relieve you of my presence, replied the Lady Lochleven; and while with you, my aged limbs can still better brook fatigue, than my mind stoop to accept of constrained courtesy. Nay, Lady of Lochleven, if you take it so deeply, said the Queen, rising and motioning to her own vacant chair, I would rather you assumed my seat--you are not the first of your family who has done so. The Lady of Lochleven curtsied a negative, but seemed with much difficulty to suppress the angry answer which rose to her lips. During this sharp conversation, the page's attention had been almost entirely occupied by the entrance of Catherine Seyton, who came from the inner apartment, in the usual dress in which she attended upon the Queen, and with nothing in her manner which marked either the hurry or confusion incident to a hasty change of disguise, or the conscious fear of detection in a perilous enterprise. Roland Graeme ventured to make her an obeisance as she entered, but she returned it with an air of the utmost indifference, which, in his opinion, was extremely inconsistent with the circumstances in which they stood towards each other.-- Surely, he thought, she cannot in reason expect to bully me out of the belief due to mine own eyes, as she tried to do concerning the apparition in the hostelry of Saint Michael's--I will try if I cannot make her feel that this will be but a vain task, and that confidence in me is the wiser and safer course to pursue. These thoughts had passed rapidly through his mind, when the Queen, having finished her altercation with the Lady of the castle, again addressed him-- What of the revels at Kinross, Roland Graeme? Methought they were gay, if I may judge from some faint sounds of mirth and distant music, which found their way so far as these grated windows, and died when they entered them, as all that is mirthful must--But thou lookest as sad as if thou hadst come from a conventicle of the Huguenots! And so perchance he hath, madam, replied the Lady of Lochleven, at whom this side-shaft was lanched. I trust, amid yonder idle fooleries, there wanted not some pouring forth of doctrine to a better purpose than that vain mirth, which, blazing and vanishing like the crackling of dry thorns, leaves to the fools who love it nothing but dust and ashes. Mary Fleming, said the Queen, turning round and drawing her mantle about her, I would that we had the chimney-grate supplied with a fagot or two of these same thorns which the Lady of Lochleven describes so well. Methinks the damp air from the lake, which stagnates in these vaulted rooms, renders them deadly cold. Your Grace's pleasure shall be obeyed, said the Lady of Lochleven; yet may I presume to remind you that we are now in summer? I thank you for the information, my good lady, said the Queen; for prisoners better learn their calender from the mouth of their jailor, than from any change they themselves feel in the seasons.--Once more, Roland Graeme, what of the revels? They were gay, madam, said the page, but of the usual sort, and little worth your Highness's ear. Oh, you know not, said the Queen, how very indulgent my ear has become to all that speaks of freedom and the pleasures of the free. Methinks I would rather have seen the gay villagers dance their ring round the Maypole, than have witnessed the most stately masques within the precincts of a palace. The absence of stone-wall--the sense that the green turf is under the foot which may tread it free and unrestrained, is worth all that art or splendour can add to more courtly revels. I trust, said the Lady Lochleven, addressing the page in her turn, there were amongst these follies none of the riots or disturbances to which they so naturally lead? Roland gave a slight glance to Catherine Seyton, as if to bespeak her attention, as he replied,-- I witnessed no offence, madam, worthy of marking--none indeed of any kind, save that a bold damsel made her hand somewhat too familiar with the cheek of a player-man, and ran some hazard of being ducked in the lake. As he uttered these words he cast a hasty glance at Catherine; but she sustained, with the utmost serenity of manner and countenance, the hint which he had deemed could not have been thrown out before her without exciting some fear and confusion. I will cumber your Grace no longer with my presence, said the Lady Lochleven, unless you have aught to command me. Nought, our good hostess, answered the Queen, unless it be to pray you, that on another occasion you deem it not needful to postpone your better employment to wait so long upon us. May it please you, added the Lady Lochleven, to command this your gentleman to attend us, that I may receive some account of these matters which have been sent hither for your Grace's use? We may not refuse what you are pleased to require, madam, answered the Queen. Go with the lady, Roland, if our commands be indeed necessary to thy doing so. We will hear to-morrow the history of thy Kinross pleasures. For this night we dismiss thy attendance. Roland Graeme went with the Lady of Lochleven, who failed not to ask him many questions concerning what had passed at the sports, to which he rendered such answers as were most likely to lull asleep any suspicions which she might entertain of his disposition to favour Queen Mary, taking especial care to avoid all allusion to the apparition of Magdalen Graeme, and of the Abbot Ambrosius. At length, after undergoing a long and somewhat close examination, he was dismissed with such expressions, as, coming from the reserved and stern Lady of Lochleven, might seem to express a degree of favour and countenance. His first care was to obtain some refreshment, which was more cheerfully afforded him by a good-natured pantler than by Dryfesdale, who was, on this occasion, much disposed to abide by the fashion of Pudding-burn House, where They who came not the first call. Gat no more meat till the next meal. When Roland Graeme had finished his repast, having his dismissal from the Queen for the evening, and being little inclined for such society as the castle afforded, he stole into the garden, in which he had permission to spend his leisure time, when it pleased him. In this place, the ingenuity of the contriver and disposer of the walks had exerted itself to make the most of little space, and by screens, both of stone ornamented with rude sculpture, and hedges of living green, had endeavoured to give as much intricacy and variety as the confined limits of the garden would admit. Here the young man walked sadly, considering the events of the day, and comparing what had dropped from the Abbot with what he had himself noticed of the demeanour of George Douglas. It must be so, was the painful but inevitable conclusion at which he arrived. It must be by his aid that she is thus enabled, like a phantom, to transport herself from place to place, and to appear at pleasure on the mainland or on the islet.--It must be so, he repeated once more; with him she holds a close, secret, and intimate correspondence, altogether inconsistent with the eye of favour which she has sometimes cast upon me, and destructive to the hopes which she must have known these glances have necessarily inspired. And yet (for love will hope where reason despairs) the thought rushed on his mind, that it was possible she only encouraged Douglas's passion so far as might serve her mistress's interest, and that she was of too frank, noble, and candid a nature, to hold out to himself hopes which she meant not to fulfil. Lost in these various conjectures, he seated himself upon a bank of turf which commanded a view of the lake on the one side, and on the other of that front of the castle along which the Queen's apartments were situated. The sun had now for some time set, and the twilight of May was rapidly fading into a serene night. On the lake, the expanded water rose and fell, with the slightest and softest influence of a southern breeze, which scarcely dimpled the surface over which it passed. In the distance was still seen the dim outline of the island of Saint Serf, once visited by many a sandalled pilgrim, as the blessed spot trodden by a man of God--now neglected or violated, as the refuge of lazy priests, who had with justice been compelled to give place to the sheep and the heifers of a Protestant baron. As Roland gazed on the dark speck, amid the lighter blue of the waters which surrounded it, the mazes of polemical discussion again stretched themselves before the eye of the mind. Had these men justly suffered their exile as licentious drones, the robbers, at once, and disgrace, of the busy hive? or had the hand of avarice and rapine expelled from the temple, not the ribalds who polluted, but the faithful priests who served the shrine in honour and fidelity? The arguments of Henderson, in this contemplative hour, rose with double force before him; and could scarcely be parried by the appeal which the Abbot Ambrosius had made from his understanding to his feelings,--an appeal which he had felt more forcibly amid the bustle of stirring life, than now when his reflections were more undisturbed. It required an effort to divert his mind from this embarrassing topic; and he found that he best succeeded by turning his eyes to the front of the tower, watching where a twinkling light still streamed from the casement of Catherine Seyton's apartment, obscured by times for a moment as the shadow of the fair inhabitant passed betwixt the taper and the window. At length the light was removed or extinguished, and that object of speculation was also withdrawn from the eyes of the meditative lover. Dare I confess the fact, without injuring his character for ever as a hero of romance? These eyes gradually became heavy; speculative doubts on the subject of religious controversy, and anxious conjectures concerning the state of his mistress's affections, became confusedly blended together in his musings; the fatigues of a busy day prevailed over the harassing subjects of contemplation which occupied his mind, and he fell fast asleep. Sound were his slumbers, until they were suddenly dispelled by the iron tongue of the castle-bell, which sent its deep and sullen sounds wide over the bosom of the lake, and awakened the echoes of Bennarty, the hill which descends steeply on its southern bank. Roland started up, for this bell was always tolled at ten o'clock, as the signal for locking the castle gates, and placing the keys under the charge of the seneschal. He therefore hastened to the wicket by which the garden communicated with the building, and had the mortification, just as he reached it, to hear the bolt leave its sheath with a discordant crash, and enter the stone groove of the door-lintel. Hold, hold, cried the page, and let me in ere you lock the wicket. The voice of Dryfesdale replied from within, in his usual tone of embittered sullenness, The hour is passed, fair master--you like not the inside of these walls--even make it a complete holiday, and spend the night as well as the day out of bounds. Open the door, exclaimed the indignant page, or by Saint Giles I will make thy gold chain smoke for it! Make no alarm here, retorted the impenetrable Dryfesdale, but keep thy sinful oaths and silly threats for those that regard them--I do mine office, and carry the keys to the seneschal.--Adieu, my young master! the cool night air will advantage your hot blood. The steward was right in what he said; for the cooling breeze was very necessary to appease the feverish fit of anger which Roland experienced, nor did the remedy succeed for some time. At length, after some hasty turns made through the garden, exhausting his passion in vain vows of vengeance, Roland Graeme began to be sensible that his situation ought rather to be held as matter of laughter than of serious resentment. To one bred a sportsman, a night spent in the open air had in it little of hardship, and the poor malice of the steward seemed more worthy of his contempt than his anger. I would to God, he said, that the grim old man may always have contented himself with such sportive revenge. He often looks as he were capable of doing us a darker turn. Returning, therefore, to the turf-seat which he had formerly occupied, and which was partially sheltered by a trim fence of green holly, he drew his mantle around him, stretched himself at length on the verdant settle, and endeavoured to resume that sleep which the castle bell had interrupted to so little purpose. Sleep, like other earthly blessings, is niggard of its favours when most courted. The more Roland invoked her aid, the farther she fled from his eyelids. He had been completely awakened, first, by the sounds of the bell, and then by his own aroused vivacity of temper, and he found it difficult again to compose himself to slumber. At length, when his mind--was wearied out with a maze of unpleasing meditation, he succeeded in coaxing himself into a broken slumber. This was again dispelled by the voices of two persons who were walking in the garden, the sound of whose conversation, after mingling for some time in the page's dreams, at length succeeded in awaking him thoroughly. He raised himself from his reclining posture in the utmost astonishment, which the circumstance of hearing two persons at that late hour conversing on the outside of the watchfully guarded Castle of Lochloven, was so well calculated to excite. His first thought was of supernatural beings; his next, upon some attempt on the part of Queen Mary's friends and followers; his last was, that George of Douglas, possessed of the keys, and having the means of ingress and egress at pleasure, was availing himself of his office to hold a rendezvous with Catherine Seyton in the castle garden. He was confirmed in this opinion by the tone of the voice, which asked in a low whisper, whether all was ready? Chapter the Thirtieth. In some breasts passion lies conceal'd and silent, Like war's swart powder in a castle vault, Until occasion, like the linstock, lights it: Then comes at once the lightning--and the thunder, And distant echoes tell that all is rent asunder. OLD PLAY. Roland Graeme, availing himself of a breach in the holly screen, and of the assistance of the full moon, which was now arisen, had a perfect opportunity, himself unobserved, to reconnoitre the persons and the motions

king

How many times the word 'king' appears in the text?

you, reverend father, I am totally ignorant. My brother, answered the Abbot, you are wise, and ought to know-- I am not--I am not--I am not wise, replied the horticulturist, pettishly, and stopping his ears with his fingers-- I was never called wise but when men wanted to engage me in some action of notorious folly. But, my good brother, said the Abbot-- I am not good neither, said the peevish gardener; I am neither good nor wise--Had I been wise, you would not have been admitted here; and were I good, methinks I should send you elsewhere to hatch plots for destroying the quiet of the country. What signifies disputing about queen or king,--when men may sit at peace--_sub umbra vitis sui?_ and so would I do, after the precept of Holy Writ, were I, as you term me, wise or good. But such as I am, my neck is in the yoke, and you make me draw what weight you list.--Follow me, youngster. This reverend father, who makes in his jackman's dress nearly as reverend a figure as I myself, will agree with me in one thing at least, and that is, that you have been long enough here. Follow the good father, Roland, said the Abbot, and remember my words--a day is approaching that will try the temper of all true Scotsmen--may thy heart prove faithful as the steel of thy blade! The page bowed in silence, and they parted; the gardener, notwithstanding his advanced age, walking on before him very briskly, and muttering as he went, partly to himself, partly to his companion, after the manner of old men of weakened intellects-- When I was great, thus ran his maundering, and had my mule and my ambling palfrey at command, I warrant you I could have as well flown through the air as have walked at this pace. I had my gout and my rheumatics, and an hundred things besides, that hung fetters on my heels; and, now, thanks to Our Lady, and honest labour, I can walk with any good man of my age in the kingdom of Fife--Fy upon it, that experience should be so long in coming! As he was thus muttering, his eye fell upon the branch of a pear-tree which drooped down for want of support, and at once forgetting his haste, the old man stopped and set seriously about binding it up. Roland Graeme had both readiness, neatness of hand, and good nature in abundance; he immediately lent his aid, and in a minute or two the bough was supported, and tied up in a way perfectly satisfactory to the old man, who looked at it with great complaisance. They are bergamots, he said, and if you will come ashore in autumn, you shall taste of them--the like are not in Lochleven Castle--the garden there is a poor pin-fold, and the gardener, Hugh Houkham, hath little skill of his craft--so come ashore, Master Page, in autumn, when you would eat pears. But what am I thinking of--ere that time come, they may have given thee sour pears for plums. Take an old man's advice, youth, one who hath seen many days, and sat in higher places than thou canst hope for--bend thy sword into a pruning-hook, and make a dibble of thy dagger--thy days shall be the longer, and thy health the better for it,--and come to aid me in my garden, and I will teach thee the real French fashion of _imping_, which the Southron call graffing. Do this, and do it without loss of time, for there is a whirlwind coming over the land, and only those shall escape who lie too much beneath the storm to have their boughs broken by it. So saying, he dismissed Roland Graeme, through a different door from that by which he had entered, signed a cross, and pronounced a benedicite as they parted, and then, still muttering to himself, retired into the garden, and locked the door on the inside. Chapter the Twenty-Ninth. Pray God she prove not masculine ere long! KING HENRY VI. Dismissed from the old man's garden, Roland Graeme found that a grassy paddock, in which sauntered two cows, the property of the gardener, still separated him from the village. He paced through it, lost in meditation upon the words of the Abbot. Father Ambrosius had, with success enough, exerted over him that powerful influence which the guardians and instructors of our childhood possess over our more mature youth. And yet, when Roland looked back upon what the father had said, he could not but suspect that he had rather sought to evade entering into the controversy betwixt the churches, than to repel the objections and satisfy the doubts which the lectures of Henderson had excited. For this he had no time, said the page to himself, neither have I now calmness and learning sufficient to judge upon points of such magnitude. Besides, it were base to quit my faith while the wind of fortune sets against it, unless I were so placed, that my conversion, should it take place, were free as light from the imputation of self-interest. I was bred a Catholic--bred in the faith of Bruce and Wallace--I will hold that faith till time and reason shall convince me that it errs. I will serve this poor Queen as a subject should serve an imprisoned and wronged sovereign--they who placed me in her service have to blame themselves--who sent me hither, a gentleman trained in the paths of loyalty and honour, when they should have sought out some truckling, cogging, double-dealing knave, who would have been at once the observant page of the Queen, and the obsequious spy of her enemies. Since I must choose betwixt aiding and betraying her, I will decide as becomes her servant and her subject; but Catherine Seyton--Catherine Seyton, beloved by Douglas and holding me on or off as the intervals of her leisure or caprice will permit--how shall I deal with the coquette?--By heaven, when I next have an opportunity, she shall render me some reason for her conduct, or I will break with her for ever! As he formed this doughty resolution, he crossed the stile which led out of the little enclosure, and was almost immediately greeted by Dr. Luke Lundin. Ha! my most excellent young friend, said the Doctor, from whence come you?--but I note the place.--Yes, neighbour Blinkhoolie's garden is a pleasant rendezvous, and you are of the age when lads look after a bonny lass with one eye, and a dainty plum with another. But hey! you look subtriste and melancholic--I fear the maiden has proved cruel, or the plums unripe; and surely I think neighbour Blinkhoolie's damsons can scarcely have been well preserved throughout the winter--he spares the saccharine juice on his confects. But courage, man, there are more Kates in Kinross; and for the immature fruit, a glass of my double distilled _aqua mirabilis--probatum est_. The page darted an ireful glance at the facetious physician; but presently recollecting that the name Kate, which had provoked his displeasure, was probably but introduced for the sake of alliteration, he suppressed his wrath, and only asked if the wains had been heard of? Why, I have been seeking for you this hour, to tell you that the stuff is in your boat, and that the boat waits your pleasure. Auchtermuchty had only fallen into company with an idle knave like himself, and a stoup of aquavitae between them. Your boatmen lie on their oars, and there have already been made two wefts from the warder's turret to intimate that those in the castle are impatient for your return. Yet there is time for you to take a slight repast; and, as your friend and physician, I hold it unfit you should face the water-breeze with an empty stomach. Roland Graeme had nothing for it but to return, with such cheer as he might, to the place where his boat was moored on the beach, and resisted all offer of refreshment, although the Doctor promised that he should prelude the collation with a gentle appetizer--a decoction of herbs, gathered and distilled by himself. Indeed, as Roland had not forgotten the contents of his morning cup, it is possible that the recollection induced him to stand firm in his refusal of all food, to which such an unpalatable preface was the preliminary. As they passed towards the boat, (for the ceremonious politeness of the worthy Chamberlain would not permit the page to go thither without attendance,) Roland Graeme, amidst a group who seemed to be assembled around a party of wandering musicians, distinguished, as he thought, the dress of Catherine Seyton. He shook himself clear from his attendant, and at one spring was in the midst of the crowd, and at the side of the damsel. Catherine, he whispered, is it well for you to be still here?--will you not return to the castle? To the devil with your Catherines and your castles! answered the maiden, snappishly; have you not had time enough already to get rid of your follies? Begone! I desire not your farther company, and there will be danger in thrusting it upon me. Nay--but if there be danger, fairest Catherine, replied Roland; why will you not allow me to stay and share it with you? Intruding fool, said the maiden, the danger is all on thine own side--the risk in, in plain terms, that I strike thee on the mouth with the hilt of my dagger. So saying, she turned haughtily from him, and moved through the crowd, who gave way in some astonishment at the masculine activity with which she forced her way among them. As Roland, though much irritated, prepared to follow, he was grappled on the other side by Doctor Luke Lundin, who reminded him of the loaded boat, of the two wefts, or signals with the flag, which had been made from the tower, of the danger of the cold breeze to an empty stomach, and of the vanity of spending more time upon coy wenches and sour plums. Roland was thus, in a manner, dragged back to his boat, and obliged to launch her forth upon his return to Lochleven Castle. That little voyage was speedily accomplished, and the page was greeted at the landing-place by the severe and caustic welcome of old Dryfesdale. So, young gallant, you are come at last, after a delay of six hours, and after two signals from the castle? But, I warrant, some idle junketing hath occupied you too deeply to think of your service or your duty. Where is the note of the plate and household stuff?--Pray Heaven it hath not been diminished under the sleeveless care of so young a gad-about! Diminished under my care, Sir Steward! retorted the page angrily; say so in earnest, and by Heaven your gray hair shall hardly protect your saucy tongue! A truce with your swaggering, young esquire, returned the steward; we have bolts and dungeons for brawlers. Go to my lady, and swagger before her, if thou darest--she will give thee proper cause of offence, for she has waited for thee long and impatiently. And where then is the Lady of Lochleven? said the page; for I conceive it is of her thou speakest. Ay--of whom else? replied Dryfesdale; or who besides the Lady of Lochleven hath a right to command in this castle? The Lady of Lochleven is thy mistress, said Roland Graeme; but mine is the Queen of Scotland. The steward looked at him fixedly for a moment, with an air in which suspicion and dislike were ill concealed by an affectation of contempt. The bragging cock-chicken, he said, will betray himself by his rash crowing. I have marked thy altered manner in the chapel of late--ay, and your changing of glances at meal-time with a certain idle damsel, who, like thyself, laughs at all gravity and goodness. There is something about you, my master, which should be looked to. But, if you would know whether the Lady of Lochleven, or that other lady, hath a right to command thy service, thou wilt find them together in the Lady Mary's ante-room. Roland hastened thither, not unwilling to escape from the ill-natured penetration of the old man, and marvelling at the same time what peculiarity could have occasioned the Lady of Lochleven's being in the Queen's apartment at this time of the afternoon, so much contrary to her usual wont. His acuteness instantly penetrated the meaning. She wishes, he concluded, to see the meeting betwixt the Queen and me on my return, that she may form a guess whether there is any private intelligence or understanding betwixt us--I must be guarded. With this resolution he entered the parlour, where the Queen, seated in her chair, with the Lady Fleming leaning upon the back of it, had already kept the Lady of Lochleven standing in her presence for the space of nearly an hour, to the manifest increase of her very visible bad humour. Roland Graeme, on entering the apartment, made a deep obeisance to the Queen, and another to the Lady, and then stood still as if to await their farther question. Speaking almost together, the Lady Lochleven said, So, young man, you are returned at length? And then stopped indignantly short, while the Queen went on without regarding her-- Roland, you are welcome home to us--you have proved the true dove and not the raven--Yet I am sure I could have forgiven you, if, once dismissed, from this water-circled ark of ours, you had never again returned to us. I trust you have brought back an olive-branch, for our kind and worthy hostess has chafed herself much on account of your long absence, and we never needed more some symbol of peace and reconciliation. I grieve I should have been detained, madam, answered the page; but from the delay of the person intrusted with the matters for which I was sent, I did not receive them till late in the day. See you there now, said the Queen to the Lady Lochleven; we could not persuade you, our dearest hostess, that your household goods were in all safe keeping and surety. True it is, that we can excuse your anxiety, considering that these august apartments are so scantily furnished, that we have not been able to offer you even the relief of a stool during the long time you have afforded us the pleasure of your society. The will, madam, said the lady, the will to offer such accommodation was more wanting than the means. What! said the Queen, looking round, and affecting surprise, there are then stools in this apartment--one, two--no less than four, including the broken one--a royal garniture!--We observed them not--will it please your ladyship to sit? No, madam, I will soon relieve you of my presence, replied the Lady Lochleven; and while with you, my aged limbs can still better brook fatigue, than my mind stoop to accept of constrained courtesy. Nay, Lady of Lochleven, if you take it so deeply, said the Queen, rising and motioning to her own vacant chair, I would rather you assumed my seat--you are not the first of your family who has done so. The Lady of Lochleven curtsied a negative, but seemed with much difficulty to suppress the angry answer which rose to her lips. During this sharp conversation, the page's attention had been almost entirely occupied by the entrance of Catherine Seyton, who came from the inner apartment, in the usual dress in which she attended upon the Queen, and with nothing in her manner which marked either the hurry or confusion incident to a hasty change of disguise, or the conscious fear of detection in a perilous enterprise. Roland Graeme ventured to make her an obeisance as she entered, but she returned it with an air of the utmost indifference, which, in his opinion, was extremely inconsistent with the circumstances in which they stood towards each other.-- Surely, he thought, she cannot in reason expect to bully me out of the belief due to mine own eyes, as she tried to do concerning the apparition in the hostelry of Saint Michael's--I will try if I cannot make her feel that this will be but a vain task, and that confidence in me is the wiser and safer course to pursue. These thoughts had passed rapidly through his mind, when the Queen, having finished her altercation with the Lady of the castle, again addressed him-- What of the revels at Kinross, Roland Graeme? Methought they were gay, if I may judge from some faint sounds of mirth and distant music, which found their way so far as these grated windows, and died when they entered them, as all that is mirthful must--But thou lookest as sad as if thou hadst come from a conventicle of the Huguenots! And so perchance he hath, madam, replied the Lady of Lochleven, at whom this side-shaft was lanched. I trust, amid yonder idle fooleries, there wanted not some pouring forth of doctrine to a better purpose than that vain mirth, which, blazing and vanishing like the crackling of dry thorns, leaves to the fools who love it nothing but dust and ashes. Mary Fleming, said the Queen, turning round and drawing her mantle about her, I would that we had the chimney-grate supplied with a fagot or two of these same thorns which the Lady of Lochleven describes so well. Methinks the damp air from the lake, which stagnates in these vaulted rooms, renders them deadly cold. Your Grace's pleasure shall be obeyed, said the Lady of Lochleven; yet may I presume to remind you that we are now in summer? I thank you for the information, my good lady, said the Queen; for prisoners better learn their calender from the mouth of their jailor, than from any change they themselves feel in the seasons.--Once more, Roland Graeme, what of the revels? They were gay, madam, said the page, but of the usual sort, and little worth your Highness's ear. Oh, you know not, said the Queen, how very indulgent my ear has become to all that speaks of freedom and the pleasures of the free. Methinks I would rather have seen the gay villagers dance their ring round the Maypole, than have witnessed the most stately masques within the precincts of a palace. The absence of stone-wall--the sense that the green turf is under the foot which may tread it free and unrestrained, is worth all that art or splendour can add to more courtly revels. I trust, said the Lady Lochleven, addressing the page in her turn, there were amongst these follies none of the riots or disturbances to which they so naturally lead? Roland gave a slight glance to Catherine Seyton, as if to bespeak her attention, as he replied,-- I witnessed no offence, madam, worthy of marking--none indeed of any kind, save that a bold damsel made her hand somewhat too familiar with the cheek of a player-man, and ran some hazard of being ducked in the lake. As he uttered these words he cast a hasty glance at Catherine; but she sustained, with the utmost serenity of manner and countenance, the hint which he had deemed could not have been thrown out before her without exciting some fear and confusion. I will cumber your Grace no longer with my presence, said the Lady Lochleven, unless you have aught to command me. Nought, our good hostess, answered the Queen, unless it be to pray you, that on another occasion you deem it not needful to postpone your better employment to wait so long upon us. May it please you, added the Lady Lochleven, to command this your gentleman to attend us, that I may receive some account of these matters which have been sent hither for your Grace's use? We may not refuse what you are pleased to require, madam, answered the Queen. Go with the lady, Roland, if our commands be indeed necessary to thy doing so. We will hear to-morrow the history of thy Kinross pleasures. For this night we dismiss thy attendance. Roland Graeme went with the Lady of Lochleven, who failed not to ask him many questions concerning what had passed at the sports, to which he rendered such answers as were most likely to lull asleep any suspicions which she might entertain of his disposition to favour Queen Mary, taking especial care to avoid all allusion to the apparition of Magdalen Graeme, and of the Abbot Ambrosius. At length, after undergoing a long and somewhat close examination, he was dismissed with such expressions, as, coming from the reserved and stern Lady of Lochleven, might seem to express a degree of favour and countenance. His first care was to obtain some refreshment, which was more cheerfully afforded him by a good-natured pantler than by Dryfesdale, who was, on this occasion, much disposed to abide by the fashion of Pudding-burn House, where They who came not the first call. Gat no more meat till the next meal. When Roland Graeme had finished his repast, having his dismissal from the Queen for the evening, and being little inclined for such society as the castle afforded, he stole into the garden, in which he had permission to spend his leisure time, when it pleased him. In this place, the ingenuity of the contriver and disposer of the walks had exerted itself to make the most of little space, and by screens, both of stone ornamented with rude sculpture, and hedges of living green, had endeavoured to give as much intricacy and variety as the confined limits of the garden would admit. Here the young man walked sadly, considering the events of the day, and comparing what had dropped from the Abbot with what he had himself noticed of the demeanour of George Douglas. It must be so, was the painful but inevitable conclusion at which he arrived. It must be by his aid that she is thus enabled, like a phantom, to transport herself from place to place, and to appear at pleasure on the mainland or on the islet.--It must be so, he repeated once more; with him she holds a close, secret, and intimate correspondence, altogether inconsistent with the eye of favour which she has sometimes cast upon me, and destructive to the hopes which she must have known these glances have necessarily inspired. And yet (for love will hope where reason despairs) the thought rushed on his mind, that it was possible she only encouraged Douglas's passion so far as might serve her mistress's interest, and that she was of too frank, noble, and candid a nature, to hold out to himself hopes which she meant not to fulfil. Lost in these various conjectures, he seated himself upon a bank of turf which commanded a view of the lake on the one side, and on the other of that front of the castle along which the Queen's apartments were situated. The sun had now for some time set, and the twilight of May was rapidly fading into a serene night. On the lake, the expanded water rose and fell, with the slightest and softest influence of a southern breeze, which scarcely dimpled the surface over which it passed. In the distance was still seen the dim outline of the island of Saint Serf, once visited by many a sandalled pilgrim, as the blessed spot trodden by a man of God--now neglected or violated, as the refuge of lazy priests, who had with justice been compelled to give place to the sheep and the heifers of a Protestant baron. As Roland gazed on the dark speck, amid the lighter blue of the waters which surrounded it, the mazes of polemical discussion again stretched themselves before the eye of the mind. Had these men justly suffered their exile as licentious drones, the robbers, at once, and disgrace, of the busy hive? or had the hand of avarice and rapine expelled from the temple, not the ribalds who polluted, but the faithful priests who served the shrine in honour and fidelity? The arguments of Henderson, in this contemplative hour, rose with double force before him; and could scarcely be parried by the appeal which the Abbot Ambrosius had made from his understanding to his feelings,--an appeal which he had felt more forcibly amid the bustle of stirring life, than now when his reflections were more undisturbed. It required an effort to divert his mind from this embarrassing topic; and he found that he best succeeded by turning his eyes to the front of the tower, watching where a twinkling light still streamed from the casement of Catherine Seyton's apartment, obscured by times for a moment as the shadow of the fair inhabitant passed betwixt the taper and the window. At length the light was removed or extinguished, and that object of speculation was also withdrawn from the eyes of the meditative lover. Dare I confess the fact, without injuring his character for ever as a hero of romance? These eyes gradually became heavy; speculative doubts on the subject of religious controversy, and anxious conjectures concerning the state of his mistress's affections, became confusedly blended together in his musings; the fatigues of a busy day prevailed over the harassing subjects of contemplation which occupied his mind, and he fell fast asleep. Sound were his slumbers, until they were suddenly dispelled by the iron tongue of the castle-bell, which sent its deep and sullen sounds wide over the bosom of the lake, and awakened the echoes of Bennarty, the hill which descends steeply on its southern bank. Roland started up, for this bell was always tolled at ten o'clock, as the signal for locking the castle gates, and placing the keys under the charge of the seneschal. He therefore hastened to the wicket by which the garden communicated with the building, and had the mortification, just as he reached it, to hear the bolt leave its sheath with a discordant crash, and enter the stone groove of the door-lintel. Hold, hold, cried the page, and let me in ere you lock the wicket. The voice of Dryfesdale replied from within, in his usual tone of embittered sullenness, The hour is passed, fair master--you like not the inside of these walls--even make it a complete holiday, and spend the night as well as the day out of bounds. Open the door, exclaimed the indignant page, or by Saint Giles I will make thy gold chain smoke for it! Make no alarm here, retorted the impenetrable Dryfesdale, but keep thy sinful oaths and silly threats for those that regard them--I do mine office, and carry the keys to the seneschal.--Adieu, my young master! the cool night air will advantage your hot blood. The steward was right in what he said; for the cooling breeze was very necessary to appease the feverish fit of anger which Roland experienced, nor did the remedy succeed for some time. At length, after some hasty turns made through the garden, exhausting his passion in vain vows of vengeance, Roland Graeme began to be sensible that his situation ought rather to be held as matter of laughter than of serious resentment. To one bred a sportsman, a night spent in the open air had in it little of hardship, and the poor malice of the steward seemed more worthy of his contempt than his anger. I would to God, he said, that the grim old man may always have contented himself with such sportive revenge. He often looks as he were capable of doing us a darker turn. Returning, therefore, to the turf-seat which he had formerly occupied, and which was partially sheltered by a trim fence of green holly, he drew his mantle around him, stretched himself at length on the verdant settle, and endeavoured to resume that sleep which the castle bell had interrupted to so little purpose. Sleep, like other earthly blessings, is niggard of its favours when most courted. The more Roland invoked her aid, the farther she fled from his eyelids. He had been completely awakened, first, by the sounds of the bell, and then by his own aroused vivacity of temper, and he found it difficult again to compose himself to slumber. At length, when his mind--was wearied out with a maze of unpleasing meditation, he succeeded in coaxing himself into a broken slumber. This was again dispelled by the voices of two persons who were walking in the garden, the sound of whose conversation, after mingling for some time in the page's dreams, at length succeeded in awaking him thoroughly. He raised himself from his reclining posture in the utmost astonishment, which the circumstance of hearing two persons at that late hour conversing on the outside of the watchfully guarded Castle of Lochloven, was so well calculated to excite. His first thought was of supernatural beings; his next, upon some attempt on the part of Queen Mary's friends and followers; his last was, that George of Douglas, possessed of the keys, and having the means of ingress and egress at pleasure, was availing himself of his office to hold a rendezvous with Catherine Seyton in the castle garden. He was confirmed in this opinion by the tone of the voice, which asked in a low whisper, whether all was ready? Chapter the Thirtieth. In some breasts passion lies conceal'd and silent, Like war's swart powder in a castle vault, Until occasion, like the linstock, lights it: Then comes at once the lightning--and the thunder, And distant echoes tell that all is rent asunder. OLD PLAY. Roland Graeme, availing himself of a breach in the holly screen, and of the assistance of the full moon, which was now arisen, had a perfect opportunity, himself unobserved, to reconnoitre the persons and the motions

neither

How many times the word 'neither' appears in the text?

you, reverend father, I am totally ignorant. My brother, answered the Abbot, you are wise, and ought to know-- I am not--I am not--I am not wise, replied the horticulturist, pettishly, and stopping his ears with his fingers-- I was never called wise but when men wanted to engage me in some action of notorious folly. But, my good brother, said the Abbot-- I am not good neither, said the peevish gardener; I am neither good nor wise--Had I been wise, you would not have been admitted here; and were I good, methinks I should send you elsewhere to hatch plots for destroying the quiet of the country. What signifies disputing about queen or king,--when men may sit at peace--_sub umbra vitis sui?_ and so would I do, after the precept of Holy Writ, were I, as you term me, wise or good. But such as I am, my neck is in the yoke, and you make me draw what weight you list.--Follow me, youngster. This reverend father, who makes in his jackman's dress nearly as reverend a figure as I myself, will agree with me in one thing at least, and that is, that you have been long enough here. Follow the good father, Roland, said the Abbot, and remember my words--a day is approaching that will try the temper of all true Scotsmen--may thy heart prove faithful as the steel of thy blade! The page bowed in silence, and they parted; the gardener, notwithstanding his advanced age, walking on before him very briskly, and muttering as he went, partly to himself, partly to his companion, after the manner of old men of weakened intellects-- When I was great, thus ran his maundering, and had my mule and my ambling palfrey at command, I warrant you I could have as well flown through the air as have walked at this pace. I had my gout and my rheumatics, and an hundred things besides, that hung fetters on my heels; and, now, thanks to Our Lady, and honest labour, I can walk with any good man of my age in the kingdom of Fife--Fy upon it, that experience should be so long in coming! As he was thus muttering, his eye fell upon the branch of a pear-tree which drooped down for want of support, and at once forgetting his haste, the old man stopped and set seriously about binding it up. Roland Graeme had both readiness, neatness of hand, and good nature in abundance; he immediately lent his aid, and in a minute or two the bough was supported, and tied up in a way perfectly satisfactory to the old man, who looked at it with great complaisance. They are bergamots, he said, and if you will come ashore in autumn, you shall taste of them--the like are not in Lochleven Castle--the garden there is a poor pin-fold, and the gardener, Hugh Houkham, hath little skill of his craft--so come ashore, Master Page, in autumn, when you would eat pears. But what am I thinking of--ere that time come, they may have given thee sour pears for plums. Take an old man's advice, youth, one who hath seen many days, and sat in higher places than thou canst hope for--bend thy sword into a pruning-hook, and make a dibble of thy dagger--thy days shall be the longer, and thy health the better for it,--and come to aid me in my garden, and I will teach thee the real French fashion of _imping_, which the Southron call graffing. Do this, and do it without loss of time, for there is a whirlwind coming over the land, and only those shall escape who lie too much beneath the storm to have their boughs broken by it. So saying, he dismissed Roland Graeme, through a different door from that by which he had entered, signed a cross, and pronounced a benedicite as they parted, and then, still muttering to himself, retired into the garden, and locked the door on the inside. Chapter the Twenty-Ninth. Pray God she prove not masculine ere long! KING HENRY VI. Dismissed from the old man's garden, Roland Graeme found that a grassy paddock, in which sauntered two cows, the property of the gardener, still separated him from the village. He paced through it, lost in meditation upon the words of the Abbot. Father Ambrosius had, with success enough, exerted over him that powerful influence which the guardians and instructors of our childhood possess over our more mature youth. And yet, when Roland looked back upon what the father had said, he could not but suspect that he had rather sought to evade entering into the controversy betwixt the churches, than to repel the objections and satisfy the doubts which the lectures of Henderson had excited. For this he had no time, said the page to himself, neither have I now calmness and learning sufficient to judge upon points of such magnitude. Besides, it were base to quit my faith while the wind of fortune sets against it, unless I were so placed, that my conversion, should it take place, were free as light from the imputation of self-interest. I was bred a Catholic--bred in the faith of Bruce and Wallace--I will hold that faith till time and reason shall convince me that it errs. I will serve this poor Queen as a subject should serve an imprisoned and wronged sovereign--they who placed me in her service have to blame themselves--who sent me hither, a gentleman trained in the paths of loyalty and honour, when they should have sought out some truckling, cogging, double-dealing knave, who would have been at once the observant page of the Queen, and the obsequious spy of her enemies. Since I must choose betwixt aiding and betraying her, I will decide as becomes her servant and her subject; but Catherine Seyton--Catherine Seyton, beloved by Douglas and holding me on or off as the intervals of her leisure or caprice will permit--how shall I deal with the coquette?--By heaven, when I next have an opportunity, she shall render me some reason for her conduct, or I will break with her for ever! As he formed this doughty resolution, he crossed the stile which led out of the little enclosure, and was almost immediately greeted by Dr. Luke Lundin. Ha! my most excellent young friend, said the Doctor, from whence come you?--but I note the place.--Yes, neighbour Blinkhoolie's garden is a pleasant rendezvous, and you are of the age when lads look after a bonny lass with one eye, and a dainty plum with another. But hey! you look subtriste and melancholic--I fear the maiden has proved cruel, or the plums unripe; and surely I think neighbour Blinkhoolie's damsons can scarcely have been well preserved throughout the winter--he spares the saccharine juice on his confects. But courage, man, there are more Kates in Kinross; and for the immature fruit, a glass of my double distilled _aqua mirabilis--probatum est_. The page darted an ireful glance at the facetious physician; but presently recollecting that the name Kate, which had provoked his displeasure, was probably but introduced for the sake of alliteration, he suppressed his wrath, and only asked if the wains had been heard of? Why, I have been seeking for you this hour, to tell you that the stuff is in your boat, and that the boat waits your pleasure. Auchtermuchty had only fallen into company with an idle knave like himself, and a stoup of aquavitae between them. Your boatmen lie on their oars, and there have already been made two wefts from the warder's turret to intimate that those in the castle are impatient for your return. Yet there is time for you to take a slight repast; and, as your friend and physician, I hold it unfit you should face the water-breeze with an empty stomach. Roland Graeme had nothing for it but to return, with such cheer as he might, to the place where his boat was moored on the beach, and resisted all offer of refreshment, although the Doctor promised that he should prelude the collation with a gentle appetizer--a decoction of herbs, gathered and distilled by himself. Indeed, as Roland had not forgotten the contents of his morning cup, it is possible that the recollection induced him to stand firm in his refusal of all food, to which such an unpalatable preface was the preliminary. As they passed towards the boat, (for the ceremonious politeness of the worthy Chamberlain would not permit the page to go thither without attendance,) Roland Graeme, amidst a group who seemed to be assembled around a party of wandering musicians, distinguished, as he thought, the dress of Catherine Seyton. He shook himself clear from his attendant, and at one spring was in the midst of the crowd, and at the side of the damsel. Catherine, he whispered, is it well for you to be still here?--will you not return to the castle? To the devil with your Catherines and your castles! answered the maiden, snappishly; have you not had time enough already to get rid of your follies? Begone! I desire not your farther company, and there will be danger in thrusting it upon me. Nay--but if there be danger, fairest Catherine, replied Roland; why will you not allow me to stay and share it with you? Intruding fool, said the maiden, the danger is all on thine own side--the risk in, in plain terms, that I strike thee on the mouth with the hilt of my dagger. So saying, she turned haughtily from him, and moved through the crowd, who gave way in some astonishment at the masculine activity with which she forced her way among them. As Roland, though much irritated, prepared to follow, he was grappled on the other side by Doctor Luke Lundin, who reminded him of the loaded boat, of the two wefts, or signals with the flag, which had been made from the tower, of the danger of the cold breeze to an empty stomach, and of the vanity of spending more time upon coy wenches and sour plums. Roland was thus, in a manner, dragged back to his boat, and obliged to launch her forth upon his return to Lochleven Castle. That little voyage was speedily accomplished, and the page was greeted at the landing-place by the severe and caustic welcome of old Dryfesdale. So, young gallant, you are come at last, after a delay of six hours, and after two signals from the castle? But, I warrant, some idle junketing hath occupied you too deeply to think of your service or your duty. Where is the note of the plate and household stuff?--Pray Heaven it hath not been diminished under the sleeveless care of so young a gad-about! Diminished under my care, Sir Steward! retorted the page angrily; say so in earnest, and by Heaven your gray hair shall hardly protect your saucy tongue! A truce with your swaggering, young esquire, returned the steward; we have bolts and dungeons for brawlers. Go to my lady, and swagger before her, if thou darest--she will give thee proper cause of offence, for she has waited for thee long and impatiently. And where then is the Lady of Lochleven? said the page; for I conceive it is of her thou speakest. Ay--of whom else? replied Dryfesdale; or who besides the Lady of Lochleven hath a right to command in this castle? The Lady of Lochleven is thy mistress, said Roland Graeme; but mine is the Queen of Scotland. The steward looked at him fixedly for a moment, with an air in which suspicion and dislike were ill concealed by an affectation of contempt. The bragging cock-chicken, he said, will betray himself by his rash crowing. I have marked thy altered manner in the chapel of late--ay, and your changing of glances at meal-time with a certain idle damsel, who, like thyself, laughs at all gravity and goodness. There is something about you, my master, which should be looked to. But, if you would know whether the Lady of Lochleven, or that other lady, hath a right to command thy service, thou wilt find them together in the Lady Mary's ante-room. Roland hastened thither, not unwilling to escape from the ill-natured penetration of the old man, and marvelling at the same time what peculiarity could have occasioned the Lady of Lochleven's being in the Queen's apartment at this time of the afternoon, so much contrary to her usual wont. His acuteness instantly penetrated the meaning. She wishes, he concluded, to see the meeting betwixt the Queen and me on my return, that she may form a guess whether there is any private intelligence or understanding betwixt us--I must be guarded. With this resolution he entered the parlour, where the Queen, seated in her chair, with the Lady Fleming leaning upon the back of it, had already kept the Lady of Lochleven standing in her presence for the space of nearly an hour, to the manifest increase of her very visible bad humour. Roland Graeme, on entering the apartment, made a deep obeisance to the Queen, and another to the Lady, and then stood still as if to await their farther question. Speaking almost together, the Lady Lochleven said, So, young man, you are returned at length? And then stopped indignantly short, while the Queen went on without regarding her-- Roland, you are welcome home to us--you have proved the true dove and not the raven--Yet I am sure I could have forgiven you, if, once dismissed, from this water-circled ark of ours, you had never again returned to us. I trust you have brought back an olive-branch, for our kind and worthy hostess has chafed herself much on account of your long absence, and we never needed more some symbol of peace and reconciliation. I grieve I should have been detained, madam, answered the page; but from the delay of the person intrusted with the matters for which I was sent, I did not receive them till late in the day. See you there now, said the Queen to the Lady Lochleven; we could not persuade you, our dearest hostess, that your household goods were in all safe keeping and surety. True it is, that we can excuse your anxiety, considering that these august apartments are so scantily furnished, that we have not been able to offer you even the relief of a stool during the long time you have afforded us the pleasure of your society. The will, madam, said the lady, the will to offer such accommodation was more wanting than the means. What! said the Queen, looking round, and affecting surprise, there are then stools in this apartment--one, two--no less than four, including the broken one--a royal garniture!--We observed them not--will it please your ladyship to sit? No, madam, I will soon relieve you of my presence, replied the Lady Lochleven; and while with you, my aged limbs can still better brook fatigue, than my mind stoop to accept of constrained courtesy. Nay, Lady of Lochleven, if you take it so deeply, said the Queen, rising and motioning to her own vacant chair, I would rather you assumed my seat--you are not the first of your family who has done so. The Lady of Lochleven curtsied a negative, but seemed with much difficulty to suppress the angry answer which rose to her lips. During this sharp conversation, the page's attention had been almost entirely occupied by the entrance of Catherine Seyton, who came from the inner apartment, in the usual dress in which she attended upon the Queen, and with nothing in her manner which marked either the hurry or confusion incident to a hasty change of disguise, or the conscious fear of detection in a perilous enterprise. Roland Graeme ventured to make her an obeisance as she entered, but she returned it with an air of the utmost indifference, which, in his opinion, was extremely inconsistent with the circumstances in which they stood towards each other.-- Surely, he thought, she cannot in reason expect to bully me out of the belief due to mine own eyes, as she tried to do concerning the apparition in the hostelry of Saint Michael's--I will try if I cannot make her feel that this will be but a vain task, and that confidence in me is the wiser and safer course to pursue. These thoughts had passed rapidly through his mind, when the Queen, having finished her altercation with the Lady of the castle, again addressed him-- What of the revels at Kinross, Roland Graeme? Methought they were gay, if I may judge from some faint sounds of mirth and distant music, which found their way so far as these grated windows, and died when they entered them, as all that is mirthful must--But thou lookest as sad as if thou hadst come from a conventicle of the Huguenots! And so perchance he hath, madam, replied the Lady of Lochleven, at whom this side-shaft was lanched. I trust, amid yonder idle fooleries, there wanted not some pouring forth of doctrine to a better purpose than that vain mirth, which, blazing and vanishing like the crackling of dry thorns, leaves to the fools who love it nothing but dust and ashes. Mary Fleming, said the Queen, turning round and drawing her mantle about her, I would that we had the chimney-grate supplied with a fagot or two of these same thorns which the Lady of Lochleven describes so well. Methinks the damp air from the lake, which stagnates in these vaulted rooms, renders them deadly cold. Your Grace's pleasure shall be obeyed, said the Lady of Lochleven; yet may I presume to remind you that we are now in summer? I thank you for the information, my good lady, said the Queen; for prisoners better learn their calender from the mouth of their jailor, than from any change they themselves feel in the seasons.--Once more, Roland Graeme, what of the revels? They were gay, madam, said the page, but of the usual sort, and little worth your Highness's ear. Oh, you know not, said the Queen, how very indulgent my ear has become to all that speaks of freedom and the pleasures of the free. Methinks I would rather have seen the gay villagers dance their ring round the Maypole, than have witnessed the most stately masques within the precincts of a palace. The absence of stone-wall--the sense that the green turf is under the foot which may tread it free and unrestrained, is worth all that art or splendour can add to more courtly revels. I trust, said the Lady Lochleven, addressing the page in her turn, there were amongst these follies none of the riots or disturbances to which they so naturally lead? Roland gave a slight glance to Catherine Seyton, as if to bespeak her attention, as he replied,-- I witnessed no offence, madam, worthy of marking--none indeed of any kind, save that a bold damsel made her hand somewhat too familiar with the cheek of a player-man, and ran some hazard of being ducked in the lake. As he uttered these words he cast a hasty glance at Catherine; but she sustained, with the utmost serenity of manner and countenance, the hint which he had deemed could not have been thrown out before her without exciting some fear and confusion. I will cumber your Grace no longer with my presence, said the Lady Lochleven, unless you have aught to command me. Nought, our good hostess, answered the Queen, unless it be to pray you, that on another occasion you deem it not needful to postpone your better employment to wait so long upon us. May it please you, added the Lady Lochleven, to command this your gentleman to attend us, that I may receive some account of these matters which have been sent hither for your Grace's use? We may not refuse what you are pleased to require, madam, answered the Queen. Go with the lady, Roland, if our commands be indeed necessary to thy doing so. We will hear to-morrow the history of thy Kinross pleasures. For this night we dismiss thy attendance. Roland Graeme went with the Lady of Lochleven, who failed not to ask him many questions concerning what had passed at the sports, to which he rendered such answers as were most likely to lull asleep any suspicions which she might entertain of his disposition to favour Queen Mary, taking especial care to avoid all allusion to the apparition of Magdalen Graeme, and of the Abbot Ambrosius. At length, after undergoing a long and somewhat close examination, he was dismissed with such expressions, as, coming from the reserved and stern Lady of Lochleven, might seem to express a degree of favour and countenance. His first care was to obtain some refreshment, which was more cheerfully afforded him by a good-natured pantler than by Dryfesdale, who was, on this occasion, much disposed to abide by the fashion of Pudding-burn House, where They who came not the first call. Gat no more meat till the next meal. When Roland Graeme had finished his repast, having his dismissal from the Queen for the evening, and being little inclined for such society as the castle afforded, he stole into the garden, in which he had permission to spend his leisure time, when it pleased him. In this place, the ingenuity of the contriver and disposer of the walks had exerted itself to make the most of little space, and by screens, both of stone ornamented with rude sculpture, and hedges of living green, had endeavoured to give as much intricacy and variety as the confined limits of the garden would admit. Here the young man walked sadly, considering the events of the day, and comparing what had dropped from the Abbot with what he had himself noticed of the demeanour of George Douglas. It must be so, was the painful but inevitable conclusion at which he arrived. It must be by his aid that she is thus enabled, like a phantom, to transport herself from place to place, and to appear at pleasure on the mainland or on the islet.--It must be so, he repeated once more; with him she holds a close, secret, and intimate correspondence, altogether inconsistent with the eye of favour which she has sometimes cast upon me, and destructive to the hopes which she must have known these glances have necessarily inspired. And yet (for love will hope where reason despairs) the thought rushed on his mind, that it was possible she only encouraged Douglas's passion so far as might serve her mistress's interest, and that she was of too frank, noble, and candid a nature, to hold out to himself hopes which she meant not to fulfil. Lost in these various conjectures, he seated himself upon a bank of turf which commanded a view of the lake on the one side, and on the other of that front of the castle along which the Queen's apartments were situated. The sun had now for some time set, and the twilight of May was rapidly fading into a serene night. On the lake, the expanded water rose and fell, with the slightest and softest influence of a southern breeze, which scarcely dimpled the surface over which it passed. In the distance was still seen the dim outline of the island of Saint Serf, once visited by many a sandalled pilgrim, as the blessed spot trodden by a man of God--now neglected or violated, as the refuge of lazy priests, who had with justice been compelled to give place to the sheep and the heifers of a Protestant baron. As Roland gazed on the dark speck, amid the lighter blue of the waters which surrounded it, the mazes of polemical discussion again stretched themselves before the eye of the mind. Had these men justly suffered their exile as licentious drones, the robbers, at once, and disgrace, of the busy hive? or had the hand of avarice and rapine expelled from the temple, not the ribalds who polluted, but the faithful priests who served the shrine in honour and fidelity? The arguments of Henderson, in this contemplative hour, rose with double force before him; and could scarcely be parried by the appeal which the Abbot Ambrosius had made from his understanding to his feelings,--an appeal which he had felt more forcibly amid the bustle of stirring life, than now when his reflections were more undisturbed. It required an effort to divert his mind from this embarrassing topic; and he found that he best succeeded by turning his eyes to the front of the tower, watching where a twinkling light still streamed from the casement of Catherine Seyton's apartment, obscured by times for a moment as the shadow of the fair inhabitant passed betwixt the taper and the window. At length the light was removed or extinguished, and that object of speculation was also withdrawn from the eyes of the meditative lover. Dare I confess the fact, without injuring his character for ever as a hero of romance? These eyes gradually became heavy; speculative doubts on the subject of religious controversy, and anxious conjectures concerning the state of his mistress's affections, became confusedly blended together in his musings; the fatigues of a busy day prevailed over the harassing subjects of contemplation which occupied his mind, and he fell fast asleep. Sound were his slumbers, until they were suddenly dispelled by the iron tongue of the castle-bell, which sent its deep and sullen sounds wide over the bosom of the lake, and awakened the echoes of Bennarty, the hill which descends steeply on its southern bank. Roland started up, for this bell was always tolled at ten o'clock, as the signal for locking the castle gates, and placing the keys under the charge of the seneschal. He therefore hastened to the wicket by which the garden communicated with the building, and had the mortification, just as he reached it, to hear the bolt leave its sheath with a discordant crash, and enter the stone groove of the door-lintel. Hold, hold, cried the page, and let me in ere you lock the wicket. The voice of Dryfesdale replied from within, in his usual tone of embittered sullenness, The hour is passed, fair master--you like not the inside of these walls--even make it a complete holiday, and spend the night as well as the day out of bounds. Open the door, exclaimed the indignant page, or by Saint Giles I will make thy gold chain smoke for it! Make no alarm here, retorted the impenetrable Dryfesdale, but keep thy sinful oaths and silly threats for those that regard them--I do mine office, and carry the keys to the seneschal.--Adieu, my young master! the cool night air will advantage your hot blood. The steward was right in what he said; for the cooling breeze was very necessary to appease the feverish fit of anger which Roland experienced, nor did the remedy succeed for some time. At length, after some hasty turns made through the garden, exhausting his passion in vain vows of vengeance, Roland Graeme began to be sensible that his situation ought rather to be held as matter of laughter than of serious resentment. To one bred a sportsman, a night spent in the open air had in it little of hardship, and the poor malice of the steward seemed more worthy of his contempt than his anger. I would to God, he said, that the grim old man may always have contented himself with such sportive revenge. He often looks as he were capable of doing us a darker turn. Returning, therefore, to the turf-seat which he had formerly occupied, and which was partially sheltered by a trim fence of green holly, he drew his mantle around him, stretched himself at length on the verdant settle, and endeavoured to resume that sleep which the castle bell had interrupted to so little purpose. Sleep, like other earthly blessings, is niggard of its favours when most courted. The more Roland invoked her aid, the farther she fled from his eyelids. He had been completely awakened, first, by the sounds of the bell, and then by his own aroused vivacity of temper, and he found it difficult again to compose himself to slumber. At length, when his mind--was wearied out with a maze of unpleasing meditation, he succeeded in coaxing himself into a broken slumber. This was again dispelled by the voices of two persons who were walking in the garden, the sound of whose conversation, after mingling for some time in the page's dreams, at length succeeded in awaking him thoroughly. He raised himself from his reclining posture in the utmost astonishment, which the circumstance of hearing two persons at that late hour conversing on the outside of the watchfully guarded Castle of Lochloven, was so well calculated to excite. His first thought was of supernatural beings; his next, upon some attempt on the part of Queen Mary's friends and followers; his last was, that George of Douglas, possessed of the keys, and having the means of ingress and egress at pleasure, was availing himself of his office to hold a rendezvous with Catherine Seyton in the castle garden. He was confirmed in this opinion by the tone of the voice, which asked in a low whisper, whether all was ready? Chapter the Thirtieth. In some breasts passion lies conceal'd and silent, Like war's swart powder in a castle vault, Until occasion, like the linstock, lights it: Then comes at once the lightning--and the thunder, And distant echoes tell that all is rent asunder. OLD PLAY. Roland Graeme, availing himself of a breach in the holly screen, and of the assistance of the full moon, which was now arisen, had a perfect opportunity, himself unobserved, to reconnoitre the persons and the motions

me

How many times the word 'me' appears in the text?

you, reverend father, I am totally ignorant. My brother, answered the Abbot, you are wise, and ought to know-- I am not--I am not--I am not wise, replied the horticulturist, pettishly, and stopping his ears with his fingers-- I was never called wise but when men wanted to engage me in some action of notorious folly. But, my good brother, said the Abbot-- I am not good neither, said the peevish gardener; I am neither good nor wise--Had I been wise, you would not have been admitted here; and were I good, methinks I should send you elsewhere to hatch plots for destroying the quiet of the country. What signifies disputing about queen or king,--when men may sit at peace--_sub umbra vitis sui?_ and so would I do, after the precept of Holy Writ, were I, as you term me, wise or good. But such as I am, my neck is in the yoke, and you make me draw what weight you list.--Follow me, youngster. This reverend father, who makes in his jackman's dress nearly as reverend a figure as I myself, will agree with me in one thing at least, and that is, that you have been long enough here. Follow the good father, Roland, said the Abbot, and remember my words--a day is approaching that will try the temper of all true Scotsmen--may thy heart prove faithful as the steel of thy blade! The page bowed in silence, and they parted; the gardener, notwithstanding his advanced age, walking on before him very briskly, and muttering as he went, partly to himself, partly to his companion, after the manner of old men of weakened intellects-- When I was great, thus ran his maundering, and had my mule and my ambling palfrey at command, I warrant you I could have as well flown through the air as have walked at this pace. I had my gout and my rheumatics, and an hundred things besides, that hung fetters on my heels; and, now, thanks to Our Lady, and honest labour, I can walk with any good man of my age in the kingdom of Fife--Fy upon it, that experience should be so long in coming! As he was thus muttering, his eye fell upon the branch of a pear-tree which drooped down for want of support, and at once forgetting his haste, the old man stopped and set seriously about binding it up. Roland Graeme had both readiness, neatness of hand, and good nature in abundance; he immediately lent his aid, and in a minute or two the bough was supported, and tied up in a way perfectly satisfactory to the old man, who looked at it with great complaisance. They are bergamots, he said, and if you will come ashore in autumn, you shall taste of them--the like are not in Lochleven Castle--the garden there is a poor pin-fold, and the gardener, Hugh Houkham, hath little skill of his craft--so come ashore, Master Page, in autumn, when you would eat pears. But what am I thinking of--ere that time come, they may have given thee sour pears for plums. Take an old man's advice, youth, one who hath seen many days, and sat in higher places than thou canst hope for--bend thy sword into a pruning-hook, and make a dibble of thy dagger--thy days shall be the longer, and thy health the better for it,--and come to aid me in my garden, and I will teach thee the real French fashion of _imping_, which the Southron call graffing. Do this, and do it without loss of time, for there is a whirlwind coming over the land, and only those shall escape who lie too much beneath the storm to have their boughs broken by it. So saying, he dismissed Roland Graeme, through a different door from that by which he had entered, signed a cross, and pronounced a benedicite as they parted, and then, still muttering to himself, retired into the garden, and locked the door on the inside. Chapter the Twenty-Ninth. Pray God she prove not masculine ere long! KING HENRY VI. Dismissed from the old man's garden, Roland Graeme found that a grassy paddock, in which sauntered two cows, the property of the gardener, still separated him from the village. He paced through it, lost in meditation upon the words of the Abbot. Father Ambrosius had, with success enough, exerted over him that powerful influence which the guardians and instructors of our childhood possess over our more mature youth. And yet, when Roland looked back upon what the father had said, he could not but suspect that he had rather sought to evade entering into the controversy betwixt the churches, than to repel the objections and satisfy the doubts which the lectures of Henderson had excited. For this he had no time, said the page to himself, neither have I now calmness and learning sufficient to judge upon points of such magnitude. Besides, it were base to quit my faith while the wind of fortune sets against it, unless I were so placed, that my conversion, should it take place, were free as light from the imputation of self-interest. I was bred a Catholic--bred in the faith of Bruce and Wallace--I will hold that faith till time and reason shall convince me that it errs. I will serve this poor Queen as a subject should serve an imprisoned and wronged sovereign--they who placed me in her service have to blame themselves--who sent me hither, a gentleman trained in the paths of loyalty and honour, when they should have sought out some truckling, cogging, double-dealing knave, who would have been at once the observant page of the Queen, and the obsequious spy of her enemies. Since I must choose betwixt aiding and betraying her, I will decide as becomes her servant and her subject; but Catherine Seyton--Catherine Seyton, beloved by Douglas and holding me on or off as the intervals of her leisure or caprice will permit--how shall I deal with the coquette?--By heaven, when I next have an opportunity, she shall render me some reason for her conduct, or I will break with her for ever! As he formed this doughty resolution, he crossed the stile which led out of the little enclosure, and was almost immediately greeted by Dr. Luke Lundin. Ha! my most excellent young friend, said the Doctor, from whence come you?--but I note the place.--Yes, neighbour Blinkhoolie's garden is a pleasant rendezvous, and you are of the age when lads look after a bonny lass with one eye, and a dainty plum with another. But hey! you look subtriste and melancholic--I fear the maiden has proved cruel, or the plums unripe; and surely I think neighbour Blinkhoolie's damsons can scarcely have been well preserved throughout the winter--he spares the saccharine juice on his confects. But courage, man, there are more Kates in Kinross; and for the immature fruit, a glass of my double distilled _aqua mirabilis--probatum est_. The page darted an ireful glance at the facetious physician; but presently recollecting that the name Kate, which had provoked his displeasure, was probably but introduced for the sake of alliteration, he suppressed his wrath, and only asked if the wains had been heard of? Why, I have been seeking for you this hour, to tell you that the stuff is in your boat, and that the boat waits your pleasure. Auchtermuchty had only fallen into company with an idle knave like himself, and a stoup of aquavitae between them. Your boatmen lie on their oars, and there have already been made two wefts from the warder's turret to intimate that those in the castle are impatient for your return. Yet there is time for you to take a slight repast; and, as your friend and physician, I hold it unfit you should face the water-breeze with an empty stomach. Roland Graeme had nothing for it but to return, with such cheer as he might, to the place where his boat was moored on the beach, and resisted all offer of refreshment, although the Doctor promised that he should prelude the collation with a gentle appetizer--a decoction of herbs, gathered and distilled by himself. Indeed, as Roland had not forgotten the contents of his morning cup, it is possible that the recollection induced him to stand firm in his refusal of all food, to which such an unpalatable preface was the preliminary. As they passed towards the boat, (for the ceremonious politeness of the worthy Chamberlain would not permit the page to go thither without attendance,) Roland Graeme, amidst a group who seemed to be assembled around a party of wandering musicians, distinguished, as he thought, the dress of Catherine Seyton. He shook himself clear from his attendant, and at one spring was in the midst of the crowd, and at the side of the damsel. Catherine, he whispered, is it well for you to be still here?--will you not return to the castle? To the devil with your Catherines and your castles! answered the maiden, snappishly; have you not had time enough already to get rid of your follies? Begone! I desire not your farther company, and there will be danger in thrusting it upon me. Nay--but if there be danger, fairest Catherine, replied Roland; why will you not allow me to stay and share it with you? Intruding fool, said the maiden, the danger is all on thine own side--the risk in, in plain terms, that I strike thee on the mouth with the hilt of my dagger. So saying, she turned haughtily from him, and moved through the crowd, who gave way in some astonishment at the masculine activity with which she forced her way among them. As Roland, though much irritated, prepared to follow, he was grappled on the other side by Doctor Luke Lundin, who reminded him of the loaded boat, of the two wefts, or signals with the flag, which had been made from the tower, of the danger of the cold breeze to an empty stomach, and of the vanity of spending more time upon coy wenches and sour plums. Roland was thus, in a manner, dragged back to his boat, and obliged to launch her forth upon his return to Lochleven Castle. That little voyage was speedily accomplished, and the page was greeted at the landing-place by the severe and caustic welcome of old Dryfesdale. So, young gallant, you are come at last, after a delay of six hours, and after two signals from the castle? But, I warrant, some idle junketing hath occupied you too deeply to think of your service or your duty. Where is the note of the plate and household stuff?--Pray Heaven it hath not been diminished under the sleeveless care of so young a gad-about! Diminished under my care, Sir Steward! retorted the page angrily; say so in earnest, and by Heaven your gray hair shall hardly protect your saucy tongue! A truce with your swaggering, young esquire, returned the steward; we have bolts and dungeons for brawlers. Go to my lady, and swagger before her, if thou darest--she will give thee proper cause of offence, for she has waited for thee long and impatiently. And where then is the Lady of Lochleven? said the page; for I conceive it is of her thou speakest. Ay--of whom else? replied Dryfesdale; or who besides the Lady of Lochleven hath a right to command in this castle? The Lady of Lochleven is thy mistress, said Roland Graeme; but mine is the Queen of Scotland. The steward looked at him fixedly for a moment, with an air in which suspicion and dislike were ill concealed by an affectation of contempt. The bragging cock-chicken, he said, will betray himself by his rash crowing. I have marked thy altered manner in the chapel of late--ay, and your changing of glances at meal-time with a certain idle damsel, who, like thyself, laughs at all gravity and goodness. There is something about you, my master, which should be looked to. But, if you would know whether the Lady of Lochleven, or that other lady, hath a right to command thy service, thou wilt find them together in the Lady Mary's ante-room. Roland hastened thither, not unwilling to escape from the ill-natured penetration of the old man, and marvelling at the same time what peculiarity could have occasioned the Lady of Lochleven's being in the Queen's apartment at this time of the afternoon, so much contrary to her usual wont. His acuteness instantly penetrated the meaning. She wishes, he concluded, to see the meeting betwixt the Queen and me on my return, that she may form a guess whether there is any private intelligence or understanding betwixt us--I must be guarded. With this resolution he entered the parlour, where the Queen, seated in her chair, with the Lady Fleming leaning upon the back of it, had already kept the Lady of Lochleven standing in her presence for the space of nearly an hour, to the manifest increase of her very visible bad humour. Roland Graeme, on entering the apartment, made a deep obeisance to the Queen, and another to the Lady, and then stood still as if to await their farther question. Speaking almost together, the Lady Lochleven said, So, young man, you are returned at length? And then stopped indignantly short, while the Queen went on without regarding her-- Roland, you are welcome home to us--you have proved the true dove and not the raven--Yet I am sure I could have forgiven you, if, once dismissed, from this water-circled ark of ours, you had never again returned to us. I trust you have brought back an olive-branch, for our kind and worthy hostess has chafed herself much on account of your long absence, and we never needed more some symbol of peace and reconciliation. I grieve I should have been detained, madam, answered the page; but from the delay of the person intrusted with the matters for which I was sent, I did not receive them till late in the day. See you there now, said the Queen to the Lady Lochleven; we could not persuade you, our dearest hostess, that your household goods were in all safe keeping and surety. True it is, that we can excuse your anxiety, considering that these august apartments are so scantily furnished, that we have not been able to offer you even the relief of a stool during the long time you have afforded us the pleasure of your society. The will, madam, said the lady, the will to offer such accommodation was more wanting than the means. What! said the Queen, looking round, and affecting surprise, there are then stools in this apartment--one, two--no less than four, including the broken one--a royal garniture!--We observed them not--will it please your ladyship to sit? No, madam, I will soon relieve you of my presence, replied the Lady Lochleven; and while with you, my aged limbs can still better brook fatigue, than my mind stoop to accept of constrained courtesy. Nay, Lady of Lochleven, if you take it so deeply, said the Queen, rising and motioning to her own vacant chair, I would rather you assumed my seat--you are not the first of your family who has done so. The Lady of Lochleven curtsied a negative, but seemed with much difficulty to suppress the angry answer which rose to her lips. During this sharp conversation, the page's attention had been almost entirely occupied by the entrance of Catherine Seyton, who came from the inner apartment, in the usual dress in which she attended upon the Queen, and with nothing in her manner which marked either the hurry or confusion incident to a hasty change of disguise, or the conscious fear of detection in a perilous enterprise. Roland Graeme ventured to make her an obeisance as she entered, but she returned it with an air of the utmost indifference, which, in his opinion, was extremely inconsistent with the circumstances in which they stood towards each other.-- Surely, he thought, she cannot in reason expect to bully me out of the belief due to mine own eyes, as she tried to do concerning the apparition in the hostelry of Saint Michael's--I will try if I cannot make her feel that this will be but a vain task, and that confidence in me is the wiser and safer course to pursue. These thoughts had passed rapidly through his mind, when the Queen, having finished her altercation with the Lady of the castle, again addressed him-- What of the revels at Kinross, Roland Graeme? Methought they were gay, if I may judge from some faint sounds of mirth and distant music, which found their way so far as these grated windows, and died when they entered them, as all that is mirthful must--But thou lookest as sad as if thou hadst come from a conventicle of the Huguenots! And so perchance he hath, madam, replied the Lady of Lochleven, at whom this side-shaft was lanched. I trust, amid yonder idle fooleries, there wanted not some pouring forth of doctrine to a better purpose than that vain mirth, which, blazing and vanishing like the crackling of dry thorns, leaves to the fools who love it nothing but dust and ashes. Mary Fleming, said the Queen, turning round and drawing her mantle about her, I would that we had the chimney-grate supplied with a fagot or two of these same thorns which the Lady of Lochleven describes so well. Methinks the damp air from the lake, which stagnates in these vaulted rooms, renders them deadly cold. Your Grace's pleasure shall be obeyed, said the Lady of Lochleven; yet may I presume to remind you that we are now in summer? I thank you for the information, my good lady, said the Queen; for prisoners better learn their calender from the mouth of their jailor, than from any change they themselves feel in the seasons.--Once more, Roland Graeme, what of the revels? They were gay, madam, said the page, but of the usual sort, and little worth your Highness's ear. Oh, you know not, said the Queen, how very indulgent my ear has become to all that speaks of freedom and the pleasures of the free. Methinks I would rather have seen the gay villagers dance their ring round the Maypole, than have witnessed the most stately masques within the precincts of a palace. The absence of stone-wall--the sense that the green turf is under the foot which may tread it free and unrestrained, is worth all that art or splendour can add to more courtly revels. I trust, said the Lady Lochleven, addressing the page in her turn, there were amongst these follies none of the riots or disturbances to which they so naturally lead? Roland gave a slight glance to Catherine Seyton, as if to bespeak her attention, as he replied,-- I witnessed no offence, madam, worthy of marking--none indeed of any kind, save that a bold damsel made her hand somewhat too familiar with the cheek of a player-man, and ran some hazard of being ducked in the lake. As he uttered these words he cast a hasty glance at Catherine; but she sustained, with the utmost serenity of manner and countenance, the hint which he had deemed could not have been thrown out before her without exciting some fear and confusion. I will cumber your Grace no longer with my presence, said the Lady Lochleven, unless you have aught to command me. Nought, our good hostess, answered the Queen, unless it be to pray you, that on another occasion you deem it not needful to postpone your better employment to wait so long upon us. May it please you, added the Lady Lochleven, to command this your gentleman to attend us, that I may receive some account of these matters which have been sent hither for your Grace's use? We may not refuse what you are pleased to require, madam, answered the Queen. Go with the lady, Roland, if our commands be indeed necessary to thy doing so. We will hear to-morrow the history of thy Kinross pleasures. For this night we dismiss thy attendance. Roland Graeme went with the Lady of Lochleven, who failed not to ask him many questions concerning what had passed at the sports, to which he rendered such answers as were most likely to lull asleep any suspicions which she might entertain of his disposition to favour Queen Mary, taking especial care to avoid all allusion to the apparition of Magdalen Graeme, and of the Abbot Ambrosius. At length, after undergoing a long and somewhat close examination, he was dismissed with such expressions, as, coming from the reserved and stern Lady of Lochleven, might seem to express a degree of favour and countenance. His first care was to obtain some refreshment, which was more cheerfully afforded him by a good-natured pantler than by Dryfesdale, who was, on this occasion, much disposed to abide by the fashion of Pudding-burn House, where They who came not the first call. Gat no more meat till the next meal. When Roland Graeme had finished his repast, having his dismissal from the Queen for the evening, and being little inclined for such society as the castle afforded, he stole into the garden, in which he had permission to spend his leisure time, when it pleased him. In this place, the ingenuity of the contriver and disposer of the walks had exerted itself to make the most of little space, and by screens, both of stone ornamented with rude sculpture, and hedges of living green, had endeavoured to give as much intricacy and variety as the confined limits of the garden would admit. Here the young man walked sadly, considering the events of the day, and comparing what had dropped from the Abbot with what he had himself noticed of the demeanour of George Douglas. It must be so, was the painful but inevitable conclusion at which he arrived. It must be by his aid that she is thus enabled, like a phantom, to transport herself from place to place, and to appear at pleasure on the mainland or on the islet.--It must be so, he repeated once more; with him she holds a close, secret, and intimate correspondence, altogether inconsistent with the eye of favour which she has sometimes cast upon me, and destructive to the hopes which she must have known these glances have necessarily inspired. And yet (for love will hope where reason despairs) the thought rushed on his mind, that it was possible she only encouraged Douglas's passion so far as might serve her mistress's interest, and that she was of too frank, noble, and candid a nature, to hold out to himself hopes which she meant not to fulfil. Lost in these various conjectures, he seated himself upon a bank of turf which commanded a view of the lake on the one side, and on the other of that front of the castle along which the Queen's apartments were situated. The sun had now for some time set, and the twilight of May was rapidly fading into a serene night. On the lake, the expanded water rose and fell, with the slightest and softest influence of a southern breeze, which scarcely dimpled the surface over which it passed. In the distance was still seen the dim outline of the island of Saint Serf, once visited by many a sandalled pilgrim, as the blessed spot trodden by a man of God--now neglected or violated, as the refuge of lazy priests, who had with justice been compelled to give place to the sheep and the heifers of a Protestant baron. As Roland gazed on the dark speck, amid the lighter blue of the waters which surrounded it, the mazes of polemical discussion again stretched themselves before the eye of the mind. Had these men justly suffered their exile as licentious drones, the robbers, at once, and disgrace, of the busy hive? or had the hand of avarice and rapine expelled from the temple, not the ribalds who polluted, but the faithful priests who served the shrine in honour and fidelity? The arguments of Henderson, in this contemplative hour, rose with double force before him; and could scarcely be parried by the appeal which the Abbot Ambrosius had made from his understanding to his feelings,--an appeal which he had felt more forcibly amid the bustle of stirring life, than now when his reflections were more undisturbed. It required an effort to divert his mind from this embarrassing topic; and he found that he best succeeded by turning his eyes to the front of the tower, watching where a twinkling light still streamed from the casement of Catherine Seyton's apartment, obscured by times for a moment as the shadow of the fair inhabitant passed betwixt the taper and the window. At length the light was removed or extinguished, and that object of speculation was also withdrawn from the eyes of the meditative lover. Dare I confess the fact, without injuring his character for ever as a hero of romance? These eyes gradually became heavy; speculative doubts on the subject of religious controversy, and anxious conjectures concerning the state of his mistress's affections, became confusedly blended together in his musings; the fatigues of a busy day prevailed over the harassing subjects of contemplation which occupied his mind, and he fell fast asleep. Sound were his slumbers, until they were suddenly dispelled by the iron tongue of the castle-bell, which sent its deep and sullen sounds wide over the bosom of the lake, and awakened the echoes of Bennarty, the hill which descends steeply on its southern bank. Roland started up, for this bell was always tolled at ten o'clock, as the signal for locking the castle gates, and placing the keys under the charge of the seneschal. He therefore hastened to the wicket by which the garden communicated with the building, and had the mortification, just as he reached it, to hear the bolt leave its sheath with a discordant crash, and enter the stone groove of the door-lintel. Hold, hold, cried the page, and let me in ere you lock the wicket. The voice of Dryfesdale replied from within, in his usual tone of embittered sullenness, The hour is passed, fair master--you like not the inside of these walls--even make it a complete holiday, and spend the night as well as the day out of bounds. Open the door, exclaimed the indignant page, or by Saint Giles I will make thy gold chain smoke for it! Make no alarm here, retorted the impenetrable Dryfesdale, but keep thy sinful oaths and silly threats for those that regard them--I do mine office, and carry the keys to the seneschal.--Adieu, my young master! the cool night air will advantage your hot blood. The steward was right in what he said; for the cooling breeze was very necessary to appease the feverish fit of anger which Roland experienced, nor did the remedy succeed for some time. At length, after some hasty turns made through the garden, exhausting his passion in vain vows of vengeance, Roland Graeme began to be sensible that his situation ought rather to be held as matter of laughter than of serious resentment. To one bred a sportsman, a night spent in the open air had in it little of hardship, and the poor malice of the steward seemed more worthy of his contempt than his anger. I would to God, he said, that the grim old man may always have contented himself with such sportive revenge. He often looks as he were capable of doing us a darker turn. Returning, therefore, to the turf-seat which he had formerly occupied, and which was partially sheltered by a trim fence of green holly, he drew his mantle around him, stretched himself at length on the verdant settle, and endeavoured to resume that sleep which the castle bell had interrupted to so little purpose. Sleep, like other earthly blessings, is niggard of its favours when most courted. The more Roland invoked her aid, the farther she fled from his eyelids. He had been completely awakened, first, by the sounds of the bell, and then by his own aroused vivacity of temper, and he found it difficult again to compose himself to slumber. At length, when his mind--was wearied out with a maze of unpleasing meditation, he succeeded in coaxing himself into a broken slumber. This was again dispelled by the voices of two persons who were walking in the garden, the sound of whose conversation, after mingling for some time in the page's dreams, at length succeeded in awaking him thoroughly. He raised himself from his reclining posture in the utmost astonishment, which the circumstance of hearing two persons at that late hour conversing on the outside of the watchfully guarded Castle of Lochloven, was so well calculated to excite. His first thought was of supernatural beings; his next, upon some attempt on the part of Queen Mary's friends and followers; his last was, that George of Douglas, possessed of the keys, and having the means of ingress and egress at pleasure, was availing himself of his office to hold a rendezvous with Catherine Seyton in the castle garden. He was confirmed in this opinion by the tone of the voice, which asked in a low whisper, whether all was ready? Chapter the Thirtieth. In some breasts passion lies conceal'd and silent, Like war's swart powder in a castle vault, Until occasion, like the linstock, lights it: Then comes at once the lightning--and the thunder, And distant echoes tell that all is rent asunder. OLD PLAY. Roland Graeme, availing himself of a breach in the holly screen, and of the assistance of the full moon, which was now arisen, had a perfect opportunity, himself unobserved, to reconnoitre the persons and the motions

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you, reverend father, I am totally ignorant. My brother, answered the Abbot, you are wise, and ought to know-- I am not--I am not--I am not wise, replied the horticulturist, pettishly, and stopping his ears with his fingers-- I was never called wise but when men wanted to engage me in some action of notorious folly. But, my good brother, said the Abbot-- I am not good neither, said the peevish gardener; I am neither good nor wise--Had I been wise, you would not have been admitted here; and were I good, methinks I should send you elsewhere to hatch plots for destroying the quiet of the country. What signifies disputing about queen or king,--when men may sit at peace--_sub umbra vitis sui?_ and so would I do, after the precept of Holy Writ, were I, as you term me, wise or good. But such as I am, my neck is in the yoke, and you make me draw what weight you list.--Follow me, youngster. This reverend father, who makes in his jackman's dress nearly as reverend a figure as I myself, will agree with me in one thing at least, and that is, that you have been long enough here. Follow the good father, Roland, said the Abbot, and remember my words--a day is approaching that will try the temper of all true Scotsmen--may thy heart prove faithful as the steel of thy blade! The page bowed in silence, and they parted; the gardener, notwithstanding his advanced age, walking on before him very briskly, and muttering as he went, partly to himself, partly to his companion, after the manner of old men of weakened intellects-- When I was great, thus ran his maundering, and had my mule and my ambling palfrey at command, I warrant you I could have as well flown through the air as have walked at this pace. I had my gout and my rheumatics, and an hundred things besides, that hung fetters on my heels; and, now, thanks to Our Lady, and honest labour, I can walk with any good man of my age in the kingdom of Fife--Fy upon it, that experience should be so long in coming! As he was thus muttering, his eye fell upon the branch of a pear-tree which drooped down for want of support, and at once forgetting his haste, the old man stopped and set seriously about binding it up. Roland Graeme had both readiness, neatness of hand, and good nature in abundance; he immediately lent his aid, and in a minute or two the bough was supported, and tied up in a way perfectly satisfactory to the old man, who looked at it with great complaisance. They are bergamots, he said, and if you will come ashore in autumn, you shall taste of them--the like are not in Lochleven Castle--the garden there is a poor pin-fold, and the gardener, Hugh Houkham, hath little skill of his craft--so come ashore, Master Page, in autumn, when you would eat pears. But what am I thinking of--ere that time come, they may have given thee sour pears for plums. Take an old man's advice, youth, one who hath seen many days, and sat in higher places than thou canst hope for--bend thy sword into a pruning-hook, and make a dibble of thy dagger--thy days shall be the longer, and thy health the better for it,--and come to aid me in my garden, and I will teach thee the real French fashion of _imping_, which the Southron call graffing. Do this, and do it without loss of time, for there is a whirlwind coming over the land, and only those shall escape who lie too much beneath the storm to have their boughs broken by it. So saying, he dismissed Roland Graeme, through a different door from that by which he had entered, signed a cross, and pronounced a benedicite as they parted, and then, still muttering to himself, retired into the garden, and locked the door on the inside. Chapter the Twenty-Ninth. Pray God she prove not masculine ere long! KING HENRY VI. Dismissed from the old man's garden, Roland Graeme found that a grassy paddock, in which sauntered two cows, the property of the gardener, still separated him from the village. He paced through it, lost in meditation upon the words of the Abbot. Father Ambrosius had, with success enough, exerted over him that powerful influence which the guardians and instructors of our childhood possess over our more mature youth. And yet, when Roland looked back upon what the father had said, he could not but suspect that he had rather sought to evade entering into the controversy betwixt the churches, than to repel the objections and satisfy the doubts which the lectures of Henderson had excited. For this he had no time, said the page to himself, neither have I now calmness and learning sufficient to judge upon points of such magnitude. Besides, it were base to quit my faith while the wind of fortune sets against it, unless I were so placed, that my conversion, should it take place, were free as light from the imputation of self-interest. I was bred a Catholic--bred in the faith of Bruce and Wallace--I will hold that faith till time and reason shall convince me that it errs. I will serve this poor Queen as a subject should serve an imprisoned and wronged sovereign--they who placed me in her service have to blame themselves--who sent me hither, a gentleman trained in the paths of loyalty and honour, when they should have sought out some truckling, cogging, double-dealing knave, who would have been at once the observant page of the Queen, and the obsequious spy of her enemies. Since I must choose betwixt aiding and betraying her, I will decide as becomes her servant and her subject; but Catherine Seyton--Catherine Seyton, beloved by Douglas and holding me on or off as the intervals of her leisure or caprice will permit--how shall I deal with the coquette?--By heaven, when I next have an opportunity, she shall render me some reason for her conduct, or I will break with her for ever! As he formed this doughty resolution, he crossed the stile which led out of the little enclosure, and was almost immediately greeted by Dr. Luke Lundin. Ha! my most excellent young friend, said the Doctor, from whence come you?--but I note the place.--Yes, neighbour Blinkhoolie's garden is a pleasant rendezvous, and you are of the age when lads look after a bonny lass with one eye, and a dainty plum with another. But hey! you look subtriste and melancholic--I fear the maiden has proved cruel, or the plums unripe; and surely I think neighbour Blinkhoolie's damsons can scarcely have been well preserved throughout the winter--he spares the saccharine juice on his confects. But courage, man, there are more Kates in Kinross; and for the immature fruit, a glass of my double distilled _aqua mirabilis--probatum est_. The page darted an ireful glance at the facetious physician; but presently recollecting that the name Kate, which had provoked his displeasure, was probably but introduced for the sake of alliteration, he suppressed his wrath, and only asked if the wains had been heard of? Why, I have been seeking for you this hour, to tell you that the stuff is in your boat, and that the boat waits your pleasure. Auchtermuchty had only fallen into company with an idle knave like himself, and a stoup of aquavitae between them. Your boatmen lie on their oars, and there have already been made two wefts from the warder's turret to intimate that those in the castle are impatient for your return. Yet there is time for you to take a slight repast; and, as your friend and physician, I hold it unfit you should face the water-breeze with an empty stomach. Roland Graeme had nothing for it but to return, with such cheer as he might, to the place where his boat was moored on the beach, and resisted all offer of refreshment, although the Doctor promised that he should prelude the collation with a gentle appetizer--a decoction of herbs, gathered and distilled by himself. Indeed, as Roland had not forgotten the contents of his morning cup, it is possible that the recollection induced him to stand firm in his refusal of all food, to which such an unpalatable preface was the preliminary. As they passed towards the boat, (for the ceremonious politeness of the worthy Chamberlain would not permit the page to go thither without attendance,) Roland Graeme, amidst a group who seemed to be assembled around a party of wandering musicians, distinguished, as he thought, the dress of Catherine Seyton. He shook himself clear from his attendant, and at one spring was in the midst of the crowd, and at the side of the damsel. Catherine, he whispered, is it well for you to be still here?--will you not return to the castle? To the devil with your Catherines and your castles! answered the maiden, snappishly; have you not had time enough already to get rid of your follies? Begone! I desire not your farther company, and there will be danger in thrusting it upon me. Nay--but if there be danger, fairest Catherine, replied Roland; why will you not allow me to stay and share it with you? Intruding fool, said the maiden, the danger is all on thine own side--the risk in, in plain terms, that I strike thee on the mouth with the hilt of my dagger. So saying, she turned haughtily from him, and moved through the crowd, who gave way in some astonishment at the masculine activity with which she forced her way among them. As Roland, though much irritated, prepared to follow, he was grappled on the other side by Doctor Luke Lundin, who reminded him of the loaded boat, of the two wefts, or signals with the flag, which had been made from the tower, of the danger of the cold breeze to an empty stomach, and of the vanity of spending more time upon coy wenches and sour plums. Roland was thus, in a manner, dragged back to his boat, and obliged to launch her forth upon his return to Lochleven Castle. That little voyage was speedily accomplished, and the page was greeted at the landing-place by the severe and caustic welcome of old Dryfesdale. So, young gallant, you are come at last, after a delay of six hours, and after two signals from the castle? But, I warrant, some idle junketing hath occupied you too deeply to think of your service or your duty. Where is the note of the plate and household stuff?--Pray Heaven it hath not been diminished under the sleeveless care of so young a gad-about! Diminished under my care, Sir Steward! retorted the page angrily; say so in earnest, and by Heaven your gray hair shall hardly protect your saucy tongue! A truce with your swaggering, young esquire, returned the steward; we have bolts and dungeons for brawlers. Go to my lady, and swagger before her, if thou darest--she will give thee proper cause of offence, for she has waited for thee long and impatiently. And where then is the Lady of Lochleven? said the page; for I conceive it is of her thou speakest. Ay--of whom else? replied Dryfesdale; or who besides the Lady of Lochleven hath a right to command in this castle? The Lady of Lochleven is thy mistress, said Roland Graeme; but mine is the Queen of Scotland. The steward looked at him fixedly for a moment, with an air in which suspicion and dislike were ill concealed by an affectation of contempt. The bragging cock-chicken, he said, will betray himself by his rash crowing. I have marked thy altered manner in the chapel of late--ay, and your changing of glances at meal-time with a certain idle damsel, who, like thyself, laughs at all gravity and goodness. There is something about you, my master, which should be looked to. But, if you would know whether the Lady of Lochleven, or that other lady, hath a right to command thy service, thou wilt find them together in the Lady Mary's ante-room. Roland hastened thither, not unwilling to escape from the ill-natured penetration of the old man, and marvelling at the same time what peculiarity could have occasioned the Lady of Lochleven's being in the Queen's apartment at this time of the afternoon, so much contrary to her usual wont. His acuteness instantly penetrated the meaning. She wishes, he concluded, to see the meeting betwixt the Queen and me on my return, that she may form a guess whether there is any private intelligence or understanding betwixt us--I must be guarded. With this resolution he entered the parlour, where the Queen, seated in her chair, with the Lady Fleming leaning upon the back of it, had already kept the Lady of Lochleven standing in her presence for the space of nearly an hour, to the manifest increase of her very visible bad humour. Roland Graeme, on entering the apartment, made a deep obeisance to the Queen, and another to the Lady, and then stood still as if to await their farther question. Speaking almost together, the Lady Lochleven said, So, young man, you are returned at length? And then stopped indignantly short, while the Queen went on without regarding her-- Roland, you are welcome home to us--you have proved the true dove and not the raven--Yet I am sure I could have forgiven you, if, once dismissed, from this water-circled ark of ours, you had never again returned to us. I trust you have brought back an olive-branch, for our kind and worthy hostess has chafed herself much on account of your long absence, and we never needed more some symbol of peace and reconciliation. I grieve I should have been detained, madam, answered the page; but from the delay of the person intrusted with the matters for which I was sent, I did not receive them till late in the day. See you there now, said the Queen to the Lady Lochleven; we could not persuade you, our dearest hostess, that your household goods were in all safe keeping and surety. True it is, that we can excuse your anxiety, considering that these august apartments are so scantily furnished, that we have not been able to offer you even the relief of a stool during the long time you have afforded us the pleasure of your society. The will, madam, said the lady, the will to offer such accommodation was more wanting than the means. What! said the Queen, looking round, and affecting surprise, there are then stools in this apartment--one, two--no less than four, including the broken one--a royal garniture!--We observed them not--will it please your ladyship to sit? No, madam, I will soon relieve you of my presence, replied the Lady Lochleven; and while with you, my aged limbs can still better brook fatigue, than my mind stoop to accept of constrained courtesy. Nay, Lady of Lochleven, if you take it so deeply, said the Queen, rising and motioning to her own vacant chair, I would rather you assumed my seat--you are not the first of your family who has done so. The Lady of Lochleven curtsied a negative, but seemed with much difficulty to suppress the angry answer which rose to her lips. During this sharp conversation, the page's attention had been almost entirely occupied by the entrance of Catherine Seyton, who came from the inner apartment, in the usual dress in which she attended upon the Queen, and with nothing in her manner which marked either the hurry or confusion incident to a hasty change of disguise, or the conscious fear of detection in a perilous enterprise. Roland Graeme ventured to make her an obeisance as she entered, but she returned it with an air of the utmost indifference, which, in his opinion, was extremely inconsistent with the circumstances in which they stood towards each other.-- Surely, he thought, she cannot in reason expect to bully me out of the belief due to mine own eyes, as she tried to do concerning the apparition in the hostelry of Saint Michael's--I will try if I cannot make her feel that this will be but a vain task, and that confidence in me is the wiser and safer course to pursue. These thoughts had passed rapidly through his mind, when the Queen, having finished her altercation with the Lady of the castle, again addressed him-- What of the revels at Kinross, Roland Graeme? Methought they were gay, if I may judge from some faint sounds of mirth and distant music, which found their way so far as these grated windows, and died when they entered them, as all that is mirthful must--But thou lookest as sad as if thou hadst come from a conventicle of the Huguenots! And so perchance he hath, madam, replied the Lady of Lochleven, at whom this side-shaft was lanched. I trust, amid yonder idle fooleries, there wanted not some pouring forth of doctrine to a better purpose than that vain mirth, which, blazing and vanishing like the crackling of dry thorns, leaves to the fools who love it nothing but dust and ashes. Mary Fleming, said the Queen, turning round and drawing her mantle about her, I would that we had the chimney-grate supplied with a fagot or two of these same thorns which the Lady of Lochleven describes so well. Methinks the damp air from the lake, which stagnates in these vaulted rooms, renders them deadly cold. Your Grace's pleasure shall be obeyed, said the Lady of Lochleven; yet may I presume to remind you that we are now in summer? I thank you for the information, my good lady, said the Queen; for prisoners better learn their calender from the mouth of their jailor, than from any change they themselves feel in the seasons.--Once more, Roland Graeme, what of the revels? They were gay, madam, said the page, but of the usual sort, and little worth your Highness's ear. Oh, you know not, said the Queen, how very indulgent my ear has become to all that speaks of freedom and the pleasures of the free. Methinks I would rather have seen the gay villagers dance their ring round the Maypole, than have witnessed the most stately masques within the precincts of a palace. The absence of stone-wall--the sense that the green turf is under the foot which may tread it free and unrestrained, is worth all that art or splendour can add to more courtly revels. I trust, said the Lady Lochleven, addressing the page in her turn, there were amongst these follies none of the riots or disturbances to which they so naturally lead? Roland gave a slight glance to Catherine Seyton, as if to bespeak her attention, as he replied,-- I witnessed no offence, madam, worthy of marking--none indeed of any kind, save that a bold damsel made her hand somewhat too familiar with the cheek of a player-man, and ran some hazard of being ducked in the lake. As he uttered these words he cast a hasty glance at Catherine; but she sustained, with the utmost serenity of manner and countenance, the hint which he had deemed could not have been thrown out before her without exciting some fear and confusion. I will cumber your Grace no longer with my presence, said the Lady Lochleven, unless you have aught to command me. Nought, our good hostess, answered the Queen, unless it be to pray you, that on another occasion you deem it not needful to postpone your better employment to wait so long upon us. May it please you, added the Lady Lochleven, to command this your gentleman to attend us, that I may receive some account of these matters which have been sent hither for your Grace's use? We may not refuse what you are pleased to require, madam, answered the Queen. Go with the lady, Roland, if our commands be indeed necessary to thy doing so. We will hear to-morrow the history of thy Kinross pleasures. For this night we dismiss thy attendance. Roland Graeme went with the Lady of Lochleven, who failed not to ask him many questions concerning what had passed at the sports, to which he rendered such answers as were most likely to lull asleep any suspicions which she might entertain of his disposition to favour Queen Mary, taking especial care to avoid all allusion to the apparition of Magdalen Graeme, and of the Abbot Ambrosius. At length, after undergoing a long and somewhat close examination, he was dismissed with such expressions, as, coming from the reserved and stern Lady of Lochleven, might seem to express a degree of favour and countenance. His first care was to obtain some refreshment, which was more cheerfully afforded him by a good-natured pantler than by Dryfesdale, who was, on this occasion, much disposed to abide by the fashion of Pudding-burn House, where They who came not the first call. Gat no more meat till the next meal. When Roland Graeme had finished his repast, having his dismissal from the Queen for the evening, and being little inclined for such society as the castle afforded, he stole into the garden, in which he had permission to spend his leisure time, when it pleased him. In this place, the ingenuity of the contriver and disposer of the walks had exerted itself to make the most of little space, and by screens, both of stone ornamented with rude sculpture, and hedges of living green, had endeavoured to give as much intricacy and variety as the confined limits of the garden would admit. Here the young man walked sadly, considering the events of the day, and comparing what had dropped from the Abbot with what he had himself noticed of the demeanour of George Douglas. It must be so, was the painful but inevitable conclusion at which he arrived. It must be by his aid that she is thus enabled, like a phantom, to transport herself from place to place, and to appear at pleasure on the mainland or on the islet.--It must be so, he repeated once more; with him she holds a close, secret, and intimate correspondence, altogether inconsistent with the eye of favour which she has sometimes cast upon me, and destructive to the hopes which she must have known these glances have necessarily inspired. And yet (for love will hope where reason despairs) the thought rushed on his mind, that it was possible she only encouraged Douglas's passion so far as might serve her mistress's interest, and that she was of too frank, noble, and candid a nature, to hold out to himself hopes which she meant not to fulfil. Lost in these various conjectures, he seated himself upon a bank of turf which commanded a view of the lake on the one side, and on the other of that front of the castle along which the Queen's apartments were situated. The sun had now for some time set, and the twilight of May was rapidly fading into a serene night. On the lake, the expanded water rose and fell, with the slightest and softest influence of a southern breeze, which scarcely dimpled the surface over which it passed. In the distance was still seen the dim outline of the island of Saint Serf, once visited by many a sandalled pilgrim, as the blessed spot trodden by a man of God--now neglected or violated, as the refuge of lazy priests, who had with justice been compelled to give place to the sheep and the heifers of a Protestant baron. As Roland gazed on the dark speck, amid the lighter blue of the waters which surrounded it, the mazes of polemical discussion again stretched themselves before the eye of the mind. Had these men justly suffered their exile as licentious drones, the robbers, at once, and disgrace, of the busy hive? or had the hand of avarice and rapine expelled from the temple, not the ribalds who polluted, but the faithful priests who served the shrine in honour and fidelity? The arguments of Henderson, in this contemplative hour, rose with double force before him; and could scarcely be parried by the appeal which the Abbot Ambrosius had made from his understanding to his feelings,--an appeal which he had felt more forcibly amid the bustle of stirring life, than now when his reflections were more undisturbed. It required an effort to divert his mind from this embarrassing topic; and he found that he best succeeded by turning his eyes to the front of the tower, watching where a twinkling light still streamed from the casement of Catherine Seyton's apartment, obscured by times for a moment as the shadow of the fair inhabitant passed betwixt the taper and the window. At length the light was removed or extinguished, and that object of speculation was also withdrawn from the eyes of the meditative lover. Dare I confess the fact, without injuring his character for ever as a hero of romance? These eyes gradually became heavy; speculative doubts on the subject of religious controversy, and anxious conjectures concerning the state of his mistress's affections, became confusedly blended together in his musings; the fatigues of a busy day prevailed over the harassing subjects of contemplation which occupied his mind, and he fell fast asleep. Sound were his slumbers, until they were suddenly dispelled by the iron tongue of the castle-bell, which sent its deep and sullen sounds wide over the bosom of the lake, and awakened the echoes of Bennarty, the hill which descends steeply on its southern bank. Roland started up, for this bell was always tolled at ten o'clock, as the signal for locking the castle gates, and placing the keys under the charge of the seneschal. He therefore hastened to the wicket by which the garden communicated with the building, and had the mortification, just as he reached it, to hear the bolt leave its sheath with a discordant crash, and enter the stone groove of the door-lintel. Hold, hold, cried the page, and let me in ere you lock the wicket. The voice of Dryfesdale replied from within, in his usual tone of embittered sullenness, The hour is passed, fair master--you like not the inside of these walls--even make it a complete holiday, and spend the night as well as the day out of bounds. Open the door, exclaimed the indignant page, or by Saint Giles I will make thy gold chain smoke for it! Make no alarm here, retorted the impenetrable Dryfesdale, but keep thy sinful oaths and silly threats for those that regard them--I do mine office, and carry the keys to the seneschal.--Adieu, my young master! the cool night air will advantage your hot blood. The steward was right in what he said; for the cooling breeze was very necessary to appease the feverish fit of anger which Roland experienced, nor did the remedy succeed for some time. At length, after some hasty turns made through the garden, exhausting his passion in vain vows of vengeance, Roland Graeme began to be sensible that his situation ought rather to be held as matter of laughter than of serious resentment. To one bred a sportsman, a night spent in the open air had in it little of hardship, and the poor malice of the steward seemed more worthy of his contempt than his anger. I would to God, he said, that the grim old man may always have contented himself with such sportive revenge. He often looks as he were capable of doing us a darker turn. Returning, therefore, to the turf-seat which he had formerly occupied, and which was partially sheltered by a trim fence of green holly, he drew his mantle around him, stretched himself at length on the verdant settle, and endeavoured to resume that sleep which the castle bell had interrupted to so little purpose. Sleep, like other earthly blessings, is niggard of its favours when most courted. The more Roland invoked her aid, the farther she fled from his eyelids. He had been completely awakened, first, by the sounds of the bell, and then by his own aroused vivacity of temper, and he found it difficult again to compose himself to slumber. At length, when his mind--was wearied out with a maze of unpleasing meditation, he succeeded in coaxing himself into a broken slumber. This was again dispelled by the voices of two persons who were walking in the garden, the sound of whose conversation, after mingling for some time in the page's dreams, at length succeeded in awaking him thoroughly. He raised himself from his reclining posture in the utmost astonishment, which the circumstance of hearing two persons at that late hour conversing on the outside of the watchfully guarded Castle of Lochloven, was so well calculated to excite. His first thought was of supernatural beings; his next, upon some attempt on the part of Queen Mary's friends and followers; his last was, that George of Douglas, possessed of the keys, and having the means of ingress and egress at pleasure, was availing himself of his office to hold a rendezvous with Catherine Seyton in the castle garden. He was confirmed in this opinion by the tone of the voice, which asked in a low whisper, whether all was ready? Chapter the Thirtieth. In some breasts passion lies conceal'd and silent, Like war's swart powder in a castle vault, Until occasion, like the linstock, lights it: Then comes at once the lightning--and the thunder, And distant echoes tell that all is rent asunder. OLD PLAY. Roland Graeme, availing himself of a breach in the holly screen, and of the assistance of the full moon, which was now arisen, had a perfect opportunity, himself unobserved, to reconnoitre the persons and the motions

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you, reverend father, I am totally ignorant. My brother, answered the Abbot, you are wise, and ought to know-- I am not--I am not--I am not wise, replied the horticulturist, pettishly, and stopping his ears with his fingers-- I was never called wise but when men wanted to engage me in some action of notorious folly. But, my good brother, said the Abbot-- I am not good neither, said the peevish gardener; I am neither good nor wise--Had I been wise, you would not have been admitted here; and were I good, methinks I should send you elsewhere to hatch plots for destroying the quiet of the country. What signifies disputing about queen or king,--when men may sit at peace--_sub umbra vitis sui?_ and so would I do, after the precept of Holy Writ, were I, as you term me, wise or good. But such as I am, my neck is in the yoke, and you make me draw what weight you list.--Follow me, youngster. This reverend father, who makes in his jackman's dress nearly as reverend a figure as I myself, will agree with me in one thing at least, and that is, that you have been long enough here. Follow the good father, Roland, said the Abbot, and remember my words--a day is approaching that will try the temper of all true Scotsmen--may thy heart prove faithful as the steel of thy blade! The page bowed in silence, and they parted; the gardener, notwithstanding his advanced age, walking on before him very briskly, and muttering as he went, partly to himself, partly to his companion, after the manner of old men of weakened intellects-- When I was great, thus ran his maundering, and had my mule and my ambling palfrey at command, I warrant you I could have as well flown through the air as have walked at this pace. I had my gout and my rheumatics, and an hundred things besides, that hung fetters on my heels; and, now, thanks to Our Lady, and honest labour, I can walk with any good man of my age in the kingdom of Fife--Fy upon it, that experience should be so long in coming! As he was thus muttering, his eye fell upon the branch of a pear-tree which drooped down for want of support, and at once forgetting his haste, the old man stopped and set seriously about binding it up. Roland Graeme had both readiness, neatness of hand, and good nature in abundance; he immediately lent his aid, and in a minute or two the bough was supported, and tied up in a way perfectly satisfactory to the old man, who looked at it with great complaisance. They are bergamots, he said, and if you will come ashore in autumn, you shall taste of them--the like are not in Lochleven Castle--the garden there is a poor pin-fold, and the gardener, Hugh Houkham, hath little skill of his craft--so come ashore, Master Page, in autumn, when you would eat pears. But what am I thinking of--ere that time come, they may have given thee sour pears for plums. Take an old man's advice, youth, one who hath seen many days, and sat in higher places than thou canst hope for--bend thy sword into a pruning-hook, and make a dibble of thy dagger--thy days shall be the longer, and thy health the better for it,--and come to aid me in my garden, and I will teach thee the real French fashion of _imping_, which the Southron call graffing. Do this, and do it without loss of time, for there is a whirlwind coming over the land, and only those shall escape who lie too much beneath the storm to have their boughs broken by it. So saying, he dismissed Roland Graeme, through a different door from that by which he had entered, signed a cross, and pronounced a benedicite as they parted, and then, still muttering to himself, retired into the garden, and locked the door on the inside. Chapter the Twenty-Ninth. Pray God she prove not masculine ere long! KING HENRY VI. Dismissed from the old man's garden, Roland Graeme found that a grassy paddock, in which sauntered two cows, the property of the gardener, still separated him from the village. He paced through it, lost in meditation upon the words of the Abbot. Father Ambrosius had, with success enough, exerted over him that powerful influence which the guardians and instructors of our childhood possess over our more mature youth. And yet, when Roland looked back upon what the father had said, he could not but suspect that he had rather sought to evade entering into the controversy betwixt the churches, than to repel the objections and satisfy the doubts which the lectures of Henderson had excited. For this he had no time, said the page to himself, neither have I now calmness and learning sufficient to judge upon points of such magnitude. Besides, it were base to quit my faith while the wind of fortune sets against it, unless I were so placed, that my conversion, should it take place, were free as light from the imputation of self-interest. I was bred a Catholic--bred in the faith of Bruce and Wallace--I will hold that faith till time and reason shall convince me that it errs. I will serve this poor Queen as a subject should serve an imprisoned and wronged sovereign--they who placed me in her service have to blame themselves--who sent me hither, a gentleman trained in the paths of loyalty and honour, when they should have sought out some truckling, cogging, double-dealing knave, who would have been at once the observant page of the Queen, and the obsequious spy of her enemies. Since I must choose betwixt aiding and betraying her, I will decide as becomes her servant and her subject; but Catherine Seyton--Catherine Seyton, beloved by Douglas and holding me on or off as the intervals of her leisure or caprice will permit--how shall I deal with the coquette?--By heaven, when I next have an opportunity, she shall render me some reason for her conduct, or I will break with her for ever! As he formed this doughty resolution, he crossed the stile which led out of the little enclosure, and was almost immediately greeted by Dr. Luke Lundin. Ha! my most excellent young friend, said the Doctor, from whence come you?--but I note the place.--Yes, neighbour Blinkhoolie's garden is a pleasant rendezvous, and you are of the age when lads look after a bonny lass with one eye, and a dainty plum with another. But hey! you look subtriste and melancholic--I fear the maiden has proved cruel, or the plums unripe; and surely I think neighbour Blinkhoolie's damsons can scarcely have been well preserved throughout the winter--he spares the saccharine juice on his confects. But courage, man, there are more Kates in Kinross; and for the immature fruit, a glass of my double distilled _aqua mirabilis--probatum est_. The page darted an ireful glance at the facetious physician; but presently recollecting that the name Kate, which had provoked his displeasure, was probably but introduced for the sake of alliteration, he suppressed his wrath, and only asked if the wains had been heard of? Why, I have been seeking for you this hour, to tell you that the stuff is in your boat, and that the boat waits your pleasure. Auchtermuchty had only fallen into company with an idle knave like himself, and a stoup of aquavitae between them. Your boatmen lie on their oars, and there have already been made two wefts from the warder's turret to intimate that those in the castle are impatient for your return. Yet there is time for you to take a slight repast; and, as your friend and physician, I hold it unfit you should face the water-breeze with an empty stomach. Roland Graeme had nothing for it but to return, with such cheer as he might, to the place where his boat was moored on the beach, and resisted all offer of refreshment, although the Doctor promised that he should prelude the collation with a gentle appetizer--a decoction of herbs, gathered and distilled by himself. Indeed, as Roland had not forgotten the contents of his morning cup, it is possible that the recollection induced him to stand firm in his refusal of all food, to which such an unpalatable preface was the preliminary. As they passed towards the boat, (for the ceremonious politeness of the worthy Chamberlain would not permit the page to go thither without attendance,) Roland Graeme, amidst a group who seemed to be assembled around a party of wandering musicians, distinguished, as he thought, the dress of Catherine Seyton. He shook himself clear from his attendant, and at one spring was in the midst of the crowd, and at the side of the damsel. Catherine, he whispered, is it well for you to be still here?--will you not return to the castle? To the devil with your Catherines and your castles! answered the maiden, snappishly; have you not had time enough already to get rid of your follies? Begone! I desire not your farther company, and there will be danger in thrusting it upon me. Nay--but if there be danger, fairest Catherine, replied Roland; why will you not allow me to stay and share it with you? Intruding fool, said the maiden, the danger is all on thine own side--the risk in, in plain terms, that I strike thee on the mouth with the hilt of my dagger. So saying, she turned haughtily from him, and moved through the crowd, who gave way in some astonishment at the masculine activity with which she forced her way among them. As Roland, though much irritated, prepared to follow, he was grappled on the other side by Doctor Luke Lundin, who reminded him of the loaded boat, of the two wefts, or signals with the flag, which had been made from the tower, of the danger of the cold breeze to an empty stomach, and of the vanity of spending more time upon coy wenches and sour plums. Roland was thus, in a manner, dragged back to his boat, and obliged to launch her forth upon his return to Lochleven Castle. That little voyage was speedily accomplished, and the page was greeted at the landing-place by the severe and caustic welcome of old Dryfesdale. So, young gallant, you are come at last, after a delay of six hours, and after two signals from the castle? But, I warrant, some idle junketing hath occupied you too deeply to think of your service or your duty. Where is the note of the plate and household stuff?--Pray Heaven it hath not been diminished under the sleeveless care of so young a gad-about! Diminished under my care, Sir Steward! retorted the page angrily; say so in earnest, and by Heaven your gray hair shall hardly protect your saucy tongue! A truce with your swaggering, young esquire, returned the steward; we have bolts and dungeons for brawlers. Go to my lady, and swagger before her, if thou darest--she will give thee proper cause of offence, for she has waited for thee long and impatiently. And where then is the Lady of Lochleven? said the page; for I conceive it is of her thou speakest. Ay--of whom else? replied Dryfesdale; or who besides the Lady of Lochleven hath a right to command in this castle? The Lady of Lochleven is thy mistress, said Roland Graeme; but mine is the Queen of Scotland. The steward looked at him fixedly for a moment, with an air in which suspicion and dislike were ill concealed by an affectation of contempt. The bragging cock-chicken, he said, will betray himself by his rash crowing. I have marked thy altered manner in the chapel of late--ay, and your changing of glances at meal-time with a certain idle damsel, who, like thyself, laughs at all gravity and goodness. There is something about you, my master, which should be looked to. But, if you would know whether the Lady of Lochleven, or that other lady, hath a right to command thy service, thou wilt find them together in the Lady Mary's ante-room. Roland hastened thither, not unwilling to escape from the ill-natured penetration of the old man, and marvelling at the same time what peculiarity could have occasioned the Lady of Lochleven's being in the Queen's apartment at this time of the afternoon, so much contrary to her usual wont. His acuteness instantly penetrated the meaning. She wishes, he concluded, to see the meeting betwixt the Queen and me on my return, that she may form a guess whether there is any private intelligence or understanding betwixt us--I must be guarded. With this resolution he entered the parlour, where the Queen, seated in her chair, with the Lady Fleming leaning upon the back of it, had already kept the Lady of Lochleven standing in her presence for the space of nearly an hour, to the manifest increase of her very visible bad humour. Roland Graeme, on entering the apartment, made a deep obeisance to the Queen, and another to the Lady, and then stood still as if to await their farther question. Speaking almost together, the Lady Lochleven said, So, young man, you are returned at length? And then stopped indignantly short, while the Queen went on without regarding her-- Roland, you are welcome home to us--you have proved the true dove and not the raven--Yet I am sure I could have forgiven you, if, once dismissed, from this water-circled ark of ours, you had never again returned to us. I trust you have brought back an olive-branch, for our kind and worthy hostess has chafed herself much on account of your long absence, and we never needed more some symbol of peace and reconciliation. I grieve I should have been detained, madam, answered the page; but from the delay of the person intrusted with the matters for which I was sent, I did not receive them till late in the day. See you there now, said the Queen to the Lady Lochleven; we could not persuade you, our dearest hostess, that your household goods were in all safe keeping and surety. True it is, that we can excuse your anxiety, considering that these august apartments are so scantily furnished, that we have not been able to offer you even the relief of a stool during the long time you have afforded us the pleasure of your society. The will, madam, said the lady, the will to offer such accommodation was more wanting than the means. What! said the Queen, looking round, and affecting surprise, there are then stools in this apartment--one, two--no less than four, including the broken one--a royal garniture!--We observed them not--will it please your ladyship to sit? No, madam, I will soon relieve you of my presence, replied the Lady Lochleven; and while with you, my aged limbs can still better brook fatigue, than my mind stoop to accept of constrained courtesy. Nay, Lady of Lochleven, if you take it so deeply, said the Queen, rising and motioning to her own vacant chair, I would rather you assumed my seat--you are not the first of your family who has done so. The Lady of Lochleven curtsied a negative, but seemed with much difficulty to suppress the angry answer which rose to her lips. During this sharp conversation, the page's attention had been almost entirely occupied by the entrance of Catherine Seyton, who came from the inner apartment, in the usual dress in which she attended upon the Queen, and with nothing in her manner which marked either the hurry or confusion incident to a hasty change of disguise, or the conscious fear of detection in a perilous enterprise. Roland Graeme ventured to make her an obeisance as she entered, but she returned it with an air of the utmost indifference, which, in his opinion, was extremely inconsistent with the circumstances in which they stood towards each other.-- Surely, he thought, she cannot in reason expect to bully me out of the belief due to mine own eyes, as she tried to do concerning the apparition in the hostelry of Saint Michael's--I will try if I cannot make her feel that this will be but a vain task, and that confidence in me is the wiser and safer course to pursue. These thoughts had passed rapidly through his mind, when the Queen, having finished her altercation with the Lady of the castle, again addressed him-- What of the revels at Kinross, Roland Graeme? Methought they were gay, if I may judge from some faint sounds of mirth and distant music, which found their way so far as these grated windows, and died when they entered them, as all that is mirthful must--But thou lookest as sad as if thou hadst come from a conventicle of the Huguenots! And so perchance he hath, madam, replied the Lady of Lochleven, at whom this side-shaft was lanched. I trust, amid yonder idle fooleries, there wanted not some pouring forth of doctrine to a better purpose than that vain mirth, which, blazing and vanishing like the crackling of dry thorns, leaves to the fools who love it nothing but dust and ashes. Mary Fleming, said the Queen, turning round and drawing her mantle about her, I would that we had the chimney-grate supplied with a fagot or two of these same thorns which the Lady of Lochleven describes so well. Methinks the damp air from the lake, which stagnates in these vaulted rooms, renders them deadly cold. Your Grace's pleasure shall be obeyed, said the Lady of Lochleven; yet may I presume to remind you that we are now in summer? I thank you for the information, my good lady, said the Queen; for prisoners better learn their calender from the mouth of their jailor, than from any change they themselves feel in the seasons.--Once more, Roland Graeme, what of the revels? They were gay, madam, said the page, but of the usual sort, and little worth your Highness's ear. Oh, you know not, said the Queen, how very indulgent my ear has become to all that speaks of freedom and the pleasures of the free. Methinks I would rather have seen the gay villagers dance their ring round the Maypole, than have witnessed the most stately masques within the precincts of a palace. The absence of stone-wall--the sense that the green turf is under the foot which may tread it free and unrestrained, is worth all that art or splendour can add to more courtly revels. I trust, said the Lady Lochleven, addressing the page in her turn, there were amongst these follies none of the riots or disturbances to which they so naturally lead? Roland gave a slight glance to Catherine Seyton, as if to bespeak her attention, as he replied,-- I witnessed no offence, madam, worthy of marking--none indeed of any kind, save that a bold damsel made her hand somewhat too familiar with the cheek of a player-man, and ran some hazard of being ducked in the lake. As he uttered these words he cast a hasty glance at Catherine; but she sustained, with the utmost serenity of manner and countenance, the hint which he had deemed could not have been thrown out before her without exciting some fear and confusion. I will cumber your Grace no longer with my presence, said the Lady Lochleven, unless you have aught to command me. Nought, our good hostess, answered the Queen, unless it be to pray you, that on another occasion you deem it not needful to postpone your better employment to wait so long upon us. May it please you, added the Lady Lochleven, to command this your gentleman to attend us, that I may receive some account of these matters which have been sent hither for your Grace's use? We may not refuse what you are pleased to require, madam, answered the Queen. Go with the lady, Roland, if our commands be indeed necessary to thy doing so. We will hear to-morrow the history of thy Kinross pleasures. For this night we dismiss thy attendance. Roland Graeme went with the Lady of Lochleven, who failed not to ask him many questions concerning what had passed at the sports, to which he rendered such answers as were most likely to lull asleep any suspicions which she might entertain of his disposition to favour Queen Mary, taking especial care to avoid all allusion to the apparition of Magdalen Graeme, and of the Abbot Ambrosius. At length, after undergoing a long and somewhat close examination, he was dismissed with such expressions, as, coming from the reserved and stern Lady of Lochleven, might seem to express a degree of favour and countenance. His first care was to obtain some refreshment, which was more cheerfully afforded him by a good-natured pantler than by Dryfesdale, who was, on this occasion, much disposed to abide by the fashion of Pudding-burn House, where They who came not the first call. Gat no more meat till the next meal. When Roland Graeme had finished his repast, having his dismissal from the Queen for the evening, and being little inclined for such society as the castle afforded, he stole into the garden, in which he had permission to spend his leisure time, when it pleased him. In this place, the ingenuity of the contriver and disposer of the walks had exerted itself to make the most of little space, and by screens, both of stone ornamented with rude sculpture, and hedges of living green, had endeavoured to give as much intricacy and variety as the confined limits of the garden would admit. Here the young man walked sadly, considering the events of the day, and comparing what had dropped from the Abbot with what he had himself noticed of the demeanour of George Douglas. It must be so, was the painful but inevitable conclusion at which he arrived. It must be by his aid that she is thus enabled, like a phantom, to transport herself from place to place, and to appear at pleasure on the mainland or on the islet.--It must be so, he repeated once more; with him she holds a close, secret, and intimate correspondence, altogether inconsistent with the eye of favour which she has sometimes cast upon me, and destructive to the hopes which she must have known these glances have necessarily inspired. And yet (for love will hope where reason despairs) the thought rushed on his mind, that it was possible she only encouraged Douglas's passion so far as might serve her mistress's interest, and that she was of too frank, noble, and candid a nature, to hold out to himself hopes which she meant not to fulfil. Lost in these various conjectures, he seated himself upon a bank of turf which commanded a view of the lake on the one side, and on the other of that front of the castle along which the Queen's apartments were situated. The sun had now for some time set, and the twilight of May was rapidly fading into a serene night. On the lake, the expanded water rose and fell, with the slightest and softest influence of a southern breeze, which scarcely dimpled the surface over which it passed. In the distance was still seen the dim outline of the island of Saint Serf, once visited by many a sandalled pilgrim, as the blessed spot trodden by a man of God--now neglected or violated, as the refuge of lazy priests, who had with justice been compelled to give place to the sheep and the heifers of a Protestant baron. As Roland gazed on the dark speck, amid the lighter blue of the waters which surrounded it, the mazes of polemical discussion again stretched themselves before the eye of the mind. Had these men justly suffered their exile as licentious drones, the robbers, at once, and disgrace, of the busy hive? or had the hand of avarice and rapine expelled from the temple, not the ribalds who polluted, but the faithful priests who served the shrine in honour and fidelity? The arguments of Henderson, in this contemplative hour, rose with double force before him; and could scarcely be parried by the appeal which the Abbot Ambrosius had made from his understanding to his feelings,--an appeal which he had felt more forcibly amid the bustle of stirring life, than now when his reflections were more undisturbed. It required an effort to divert his mind from this embarrassing topic; and he found that he best succeeded by turning his eyes to the front of the tower, watching where a twinkling light still streamed from the casement of Catherine Seyton's apartment, obscured by times for a moment as the shadow of the fair inhabitant passed betwixt the taper and the window. At length the light was removed or extinguished, and that object of speculation was also withdrawn from the eyes of the meditative lover. Dare I confess the fact, without injuring his character for ever as a hero of romance? These eyes gradually became heavy; speculative doubts on the subject of religious controversy, and anxious conjectures concerning the state of his mistress's affections, became confusedly blended together in his musings; the fatigues of a busy day prevailed over the harassing subjects of contemplation which occupied his mind, and he fell fast asleep. Sound were his slumbers, until they were suddenly dispelled by the iron tongue of the castle-bell, which sent its deep and sullen sounds wide over the bosom of the lake, and awakened the echoes of Bennarty, the hill which descends steeply on its southern bank. Roland started up, for this bell was always tolled at ten o'clock, as the signal for locking the castle gates, and placing the keys under the charge of the seneschal. He therefore hastened to the wicket by which the garden communicated with the building, and had the mortification, just as he reached it, to hear the bolt leave its sheath with a discordant crash, and enter the stone groove of the door-lintel. Hold, hold, cried the page, and let me in ere you lock the wicket. The voice of Dryfesdale replied from within, in his usual tone of embittered sullenness, The hour is passed, fair master--you like not the inside of these walls--even make it a complete holiday, and spend the night as well as the day out of bounds. Open the door, exclaimed the indignant page, or by Saint Giles I will make thy gold chain smoke for it! Make no alarm here, retorted the impenetrable Dryfesdale, but keep thy sinful oaths and silly threats for those that regard them--I do mine office, and carry the keys to the seneschal.--Adieu, my young master! the cool night air will advantage your hot blood. The steward was right in what he said; for the cooling breeze was very necessary to appease the feverish fit of anger which Roland experienced, nor did the remedy succeed for some time. At length, after some hasty turns made through the garden, exhausting his passion in vain vows of vengeance, Roland Graeme began to be sensible that his situation ought rather to be held as matter of laughter than of serious resentment. To one bred a sportsman, a night spent in the open air had in it little of hardship, and the poor malice of the steward seemed more worthy of his contempt than his anger. I would to God, he said, that the grim old man may always have contented himself with such sportive revenge. He often looks as he were capable of doing us a darker turn. Returning, therefore, to the turf-seat which he had formerly occupied, and which was partially sheltered by a trim fence of green holly, he drew his mantle around him, stretched himself at length on the verdant settle, and endeavoured to resume that sleep which the castle bell had interrupted to so little purpose. Sleep, like other earthly blessings, is niggard of its favours when most courted. The more Roland invoked her aid, the farther she fled from his eyelids. He had been completely awakened, first, by the sounds of the bell, and then by his own aroused vivacity of temper, and he found it difficult again to compose himself to slumber. At length, when his mind--was wearied out with a maze of unpleasing meditation, he succeeded in coaxing himself into a broken slumber. This was again dispelled by the voices of two persons who were walking in the garden, the sound of whose conversation, after mingling for some time in the page's dreams, at length succeeded in awaking him thoroughly. He raised himself from his reclining posture in the utmost astonishment, which the circumstance of hearing two persons at that late hour conversing on the outside of the watchfully guarded Castle of Lochloven, was so well calculated to excite. His first thought was of supernatural beings; his next, upon some attempt on the part of Queen Mary's friends and followers; his last was, that George of Douglas, possessed of the keys, and having the means of ingress and egress at pleasure, was availing himself of his office to hold a rendezvous with Catherine Seyton in the castle garden. He was confirmed in this opinion by the tone of the voice, which asked in a low whisper, whether all was ready? Chapter the Thirtieth. In some breasts passion lies conceal'd and silent, Like war's swart powder in a castle vault, Until occasion, like the linstock, lights it: Then comes at once the lightning--and the thunder, And distant echoes tell that all is rent asunder. OLD PLAY. Roland Graeme, availing himself of a breach in the holly screen, and of the assistance of the full moon, which was now arisen, had a perfect opportunity, himself unobserved, to reconnoitre the persons and the motions

tidily

How many times the word 'tidily' appears in the text?

you, reverend father, I am totally ignorant. My brother, answered the Abbot, you are wise, and ought to know-- I am not--I am not--I am not wise, replied the horticulturist, pettishly, and stopping his ears with his fingers-- I was never called wise but when men wanted to engage me in some action of notorious folly. But, my good brother, said the Abbot-- I am not good neither, said the peevish gardener; I am neither good nor wise--Had I been wise, you would not have been admitted here; and were I good, methinks I should send you elsewhere to hatch plots for destroying the quiet of the country. What signifies disputing about queen or king,--when men may sit at peace--_sub umbra vitis sui?_ and so would I do, after the precept of Holy Writ, were I, as you term me, wise or good. But such as I am, my neck is in the yoke, and you make me draw what weight you list.--Follow me, youngster. This reverend father, who makes in his jackman's dress nearly as reverend a figure as I myself, will agree with me in one thing at least, and that is, that you have been long enough here. Follow the good father, Roland, said the Abbot, and remember my words--a day is approaching that will try the temper of all true Scotsmen--may thy heart prove faithful as the steel of thy blade! The page bowed in silence, and they parted; the gardener, notwithstanding his advanced age, walking on before him very briskly, and muttering as he went, partly to himself, partly to his companion, after the manner of old men of weakened intellects-- When I was great, thus ran his maundering, and had my mule and my ambling palfrey at command, I warrant you I could have as well flown through the air as have walked at this pace. I had my gout and my rheumatics, and an hundred things besides, that hung fetters on my heels; and, now, thanks to Our Lady, and honest labour, I can walk with any good man of my age in the kingdom of Fife--Fy upon it, that experience should be so long in coming! As he was thus muttering, his eye fell upon the branch of a pear-tree which drooped down for want of support, and at once forgetting his haste, the old man stopped and set seriously about binding it up. Roland Graeme had both readiness, neatness of hand, and good nature in abundance; he immediately lent his aid, and in a minute or two the bough was supported, and tied up in a way perfectly satisfactory to the old man, who looked at it with great complaisance. They are bergamots, he said, and if you will come ashore in autumn, you shall taste of them--the like are not in Lochleven Castle--the garden there is a poor pin-fold, and the gardener, Hugh Houkham, hath little skill of his craft--so come ashore, Master Page, in autumn, when you would eat pears. But what am I thinking of--ere that time come, they may have given thee sour pears for plums. Take an old man's advice, youth, one who hath seen many days, and sat in higher places than thou canst hope for--bend thy sword into a pruning-hook, and make a dibble of thy dagger--thy days shall be the longer, and thy health the better for it,--and come to aid me in my garden, and I will teach thee the real French fashion of _imping_, which the Southron call graffing. Do this, and do it without loss of time, for there is a whirlwind coming over the land, and only those shall escape who lie too much beneath the storm to have their boughs broken by it. So saying, he dismissed Roland Graeme, through a different door from that by which he had entered, signed a cross, and pronounced a benedicite as they parted, and then, still muttering to himself, retired into the garden, and locked the door on the inside. Chapter the Twenty-Ninth. Pray God she prove not masculine ere long! KING HENRY VI. Dismissed from the old man's garden, Roland Graeme found that a grassy paddock, in which sauntered two cows, the property of the gardener, still separated him from the village. He paced through it, lost in meditation upon the words of the Abbot. Father Ambrosius had, with success enough, exerted over him that powerful influence which the guardians and instructors of our childhood possess over our more mature youth. And yet, when Roland looked back upon what the father had said, he could not but suspect that he had rather sought to evade entering into the controversy betwixt the churches, than to repel the objections and satisfy the doubts which the lectures of Henderson had excited. For this he had no time, said the page to himself, neither have I now calmness and learning sufficient to judge upon points of such magnitude. Besides, it were base to quit my faith while the wind of fortune sets against it, unless I were so placed, that my conversion, should it take place, were free as light from the imputation of self-interest. I was bred a Catholic--bred in the faith of Bruce and Wallace--I will hold that faith till time and reason shall convince me that it errs. I will serve this poor Queen as a subject should serve an imprisoned and wronged sovereign--they who placed me in her service have to blame themselves--who sent me hither, a gentleman trained in the paths of loyalty and honour, when they should have sought out some truckling, cogging, double-dealing knave, who would have been at once the observant page of the Queen, and the obsequious spy of her enemies. Since I must choose betwixt aiding and betraying her, I will decide as becomes her servant and her subject; but Catherine Seyton--Catherine Seyton, beloved by Douglas and holding me on or off as the intervals of her leisure or caprice will permit--how shall I deal with the coquette?--By heaven, when I next have an opportunity, she shall render me some reason for her conduct, or I will break with her for ever! As he formed this doughty resolution, he crossed the stile which led out of the little enclosure, and was almost immediately greeted by Dr. Luke Lundin. Ha! my most excellent young friend, said the Doctor, from whence come you?--but I note the place.--Yes, neighbour Blinkhoolie's garden is a pleasant rendezvous, and you are of the age when lads look after a bonny lass with one eye, and a dainty plum with another. But hey! you look subtriste and melancholic--I fear the maiden has proved cruel, or the plums unripe; and surely I think neighbour Blinkhoolie's damsons can scarcely have been well preserved throughout the winter--he spares the saccharine juice on his confects. But courage, man, there are more Kates in Kinross; and for the immature fruit, a glass of my double distilled _aqua mirabilis--probatum est_. The page darted an ireful glance at the facetious physician; but presently recollecting that the name Kate, which had provoked his displeasure, was probably but introduced for the sake of alliteration, he suppressed his wrath, and only asked if the wains had been heard of? Why, I have been seeking for you this hour, to tell you that the stuff is in your boat, and that the boat waits your pleasure. Auchtermuchty had only fallen into company with an idle knave like himself, and a stoup of aquavitae between them. Your boatmen lie on their oars, and there have already been made two wefts from the warder's turret to intimate that those in the castle are impatient for your return. Yet there is time for you to take a slight repast; and, as your friend and physician, I hold it unfit you should face the water-breeze with an empty stomach. Roland Graeme had nothing for it but to return, with such cheer as he might, to the place where his boat was moored on the beach, and resisted all offer of refreshment, although the Doctor promised that he should prelude the collation with a gentle appetizer--a decoction of herbs, gathered and distilled by himself. Indeed, as Roland had not forgotten the contents of his morning cup, it is possible that the recollection induced him to stand firm in his refusal of all food, to which such an unpalatable preface was the preliminary. As they passed towards the boat, (for the ceremonious politeness of the worthy Chamberlain would not permit the page to go thither without attendance,) Roland Graeme, amidst a group who seemed to be assembled around a party of wandering musicians, distinguished, as he thought, the dress of Catherine Seyton. He shook himself clear from his attendant, and at one spring was in the midst of the crowd, and at the side of the damsel. Catherine, he whispered, is it well for you to be still here?--will you not return to the castle? To the devil with your Catherines and your castles! answered the maiden, snappishly; have you not had time enough already to get rid of your follies? Begone! I desire not your farther company, and there will be danger in thrusting it upon me. Nay--but if there be danger, fairest Catherine, replied Roland; why will you not allow me to stay and share it with you? Intruding fool, said the maiden, the danger is all on thine own side--the risk in, in plain terms, that I strike thee on the mouth with the hilt of my dagger. So saying, she turned haughtily from him, and moved through the crowd, who gave way in some astonishment at the masculine activity with which she forced her way among them. As Roland, though much irritated, prepared to follow, he was grappled on the other side by Doctor Luke Lundin, who reminded him of the loaded boat, of the two wefts, or signals with the flag, which had been made from the tower, of the danger of the cold breeze to an empty stomach, and of the vanity of spending more time upon coy wenches and sour plums. Roland was thus, in a manner, dragged back to his boat, and obliged to launch her forth upon his return to Lochleven Castle. That little voyage was speedily accomplished, and the page was greeted at the landing-place by the severe and caustic welcome of old Dryfesdale. So, young gallant, you are come at last, after a delay of six hours, and after two signals from the castle? But, I warrant, some idle junketing hath occupied you too deeply to think of your service or your duty. Where is the note of the plate and household stuff?--Pray Heaven it hath not been diminished under the sleeveless care of so young a gad-about! Diminished under my care, Sir Steward! retorted the page angrily; say so in earnest, and by Heaven your gray hair shall hardly protect your saucy tongue! A truce with your swaggering, young esquire, returned the steward; we have bolts and dungeons for brawlers. Go to my lady, and swagger before her, if thou darest--she will give thee proper cause of offence, for she has waited for thee long and impatiently. And where then is the Lady of Lochleven? said the page; for I conceive it is of her thou speakest. Ay--of whom else? replied Dryfesdale; or who besides the Lady of Lochleven hath a right to command in this castle? The Lady of Lochleven is thy mistress, said Roland Graeme; but mine is the Queen of Scotland. The steward looked at him fixedly for a moment, with an air in which suspicion and dislike were ill concealed by an affectation of contempt. The bragging cock-chicken, he said, will betray himself by his rash crowing. I have marked thy altered manner in the chapel of late--ay, and your changing of glances at meal-time with a certain idle damsel, who, like thyself, laughs at all gravity and goodness. There is something about you, my master, which should be looked to. But, if you would know whether the Lady of Lochleven, or that other lady, hath a right to command thy service, thou wilt find them together in the Lady Mary's ante-room. Roland hastened thither, not unwilling to escape from the ill-natured penetration of the old man, and marvelling at the same time what peculiarity could have occasioned the Lady of Lochleven's being in the Queen's apartment at this time of the afternoon, so much contrary to her usual wont. His acuteness instantly penetrated the meaning. She wishes, he concluded, to see the meeting betwixt the Queen and me on my return, that she may form a guess whether there is any private intelligence or understanding betwixt us--I must be guarded. With this resolution he entered the parlour, where the Queen, seated in her chair, with the Lady Fleming leaning upon the back of it, had already kept the Lady of Lochleven standing in her presence for the space of nearly an hour, to the manifest increase of her very visible bad humour. Roland Graeme, on entering the apartment, made a deep obeisance to the Queen, and another to the Lady, and then stood still as if to await their farther question. Speaking almost together, the Lady Lochleven said, So, young man, you are returned at length? And then stopped indignantly short, while the Queen went on without regarding her-- Roland, you are welcome home to us--you have proved the true dove and not the raven--Yet I am sure I could have forgiven you, if, once dismissed, from this water-circled ark of ours, you had never again returned to us. I trust you have brought back an olive-branch, for our kind and worthy hostess has chafed herself much on account of your long absence, and we never needed more some symbol of peace and reconciliation. I grieve I should have been detained, madam, answered the page; but from the delay of the person intrusted with the matters for which I was sent, I did not receive them till late in the day. See you there now, said the Queen to the Lady Lochleven; we could not persuade you, our dearest hostess, that your household goods were in all safe keeping and surety. True it is, that we can excuse your anxiety, considering that these august apartments are so scantily furnished, that we have not been able to offer you even the relief of a stool during the long time you have afforded us the pleasure of your society. The will, madam, said the lady, the will to offer such accommodation was more wanting than the means. What! said the Queen, looking round, and affecting surprise, there are then stools in this apartment--one, two--no less than four, including the broken one--a royal garniture!--We observed them not--will it please your ladyship to sit? No, madam, I will soon relieve you of my presence, replied the Lady Lochleven; and while with you, my aged limbs can still better brook fatigue, than my mind stoop to accept of constrained courtesy. Nay, Lady of Lochleven, if you take it so deeply, said the Queen, rising and motioning to her own vacant chair, I would rather you assumed my seat--you are not the first of your family who has done so. The Lady of Lochleven curtsied a negative, but seemed with much difficulty to suppress the angry answer which rose to her lips. During this sharp conversation, the page's attention had been almost entirely occupied by the entrance of Catherine Seyton, who came from the inner apartment, in the usual dress in which she attended upon the Queen, and with nothing in her manner which marked either the hurry or confusion incident to a hasty change of disguise, or the conscious fear of detection in a perilous enterprise. Roland Graeme ventured to make her an obeisance as she entered, but she returned it with an air of the utmost indifference, which, in his opinion, was extremely inconsistent with the circumstances in which they stood towards each other.-- Surely, he thought, she cannot in reason expect to bully me out of the belief due to mine own eyes, as she tried to do concerning the apparition in the hostelry of Saint Michael's--I will try if I cannot make her feel that this will be but a vain task, and that confidence in me is the wiser and safer course to pursue. These thoughts had passed rapidly through his mind, when the Queen, having finished her altercation with the Lady of the castle, again addressed him-- What of the revels at Kinross, Roland Graeme? Methought they were gay, if I may judge from some faint sounds of mirth and distant music, which found their way so far as these grated windows, and died when they entered them, as all that is mirthful must--But thou lookest as sad as if thou hadst come from a conventicle of the Huguenots! And so perchance he hath, madam, replied the Lady of Lochleven, at whom this side-shaft was lanched. I trust, amid yonder idle fooleries, there wanted not some pouring forth of doctrine to a better purpose than that vain mirth, which, blazing and vanishing like the crackling of dry thorns, leaves to the fools who love it nothing but dust and ashes. Mary Fleming, said the Queen, turning round and drawing her mantle about her, I would that we had the chimney-grate supplied with a fagot or two of these same thorns which the Lady of Lochleven describes so well. Methinks the damp air from the lake, which stagnates in these vaulted rooms, renders them deadly cold. Your Grace's pleasure shall be obeyed, said the Lady of Lochleven; yet may I presume to remind you that we are now in summer? I thank you for the information, my good lady, said the Queen; for prisoners better learn their calender from the mouth of their jailor, than from any change they themselves feel in the seasons.--Once more, Roland Graeme, what of the revels? They were gay, madam, said the page, but of the usual sort, and little worth your Highness's ear. Oh, you know not, said the Queen, how very indulgent my ear has become to all that speaks of freedom and the pleasures of the free. Methinks I would rather have seen the gay villagers dance their ring round the Maypole, than have witnessed the most stately masques within the precincts of a palace. The absence of stone-wall--the sense that the green turf is under the foot which may tread it free and unrestrained, is worth all that art or splendour can add to more courtly revels. I trust, said the Lady Lochleven, addressing the page in her turn, there were amongst these follies none of the riots or disturbances to which they so naturally lead? Roland gave a slight glance to Catherine Seyton, as if to bespeak her attention, as he replied,-- I witnessed no offence, madam, worthy of marking--none indeed of any kind, save that a bold damsel made her hand somewhat too familiar with the cheek of a player-man, and ran some hazard of being ducked in the lake. As he uttered these words he cast a hasty glance at Catherine; but she sustained, with the utmost serenity of manner and countenance, the hint which he had deemed could not have been thrown out before her without exciting some fear and confusion. I will cumber your Grace no longer with my presence, said the Lady Lochleven, unless you have aught to command me. Nought, our good hostess, answered the Queen, unless it be to pray you, that on another occasion you deem it not needful to postpone your better employment to wait so long upon us. May it please you, added the Lady Lochleven, to command this your gentleman to attend us, that I may receive some account of these matters which have been sent hither for your Grace's use? We may not refuse what you are pleased to require, madam, answered the Queen. Go with the lady, Roland, if our commands be indeed necessary to thy doing so. We will hear to-morrow the history of thy Kinross pleasures. For this night we dismiss thy attendance. Roland Graeme went with the Lady of Lochleven, who failed not to ask him many questions concerning what had passed at the sports, to which he rendered such answers as were most likely to lull asleep any suspicions which she might entertain of his disposition to favour Queen Mary, taking especial care to avoid all allusion to the apparition of Magdalen Graeme, and of the Abbot Ambrosius. At length, after undergoing a long and somewhat close examination, he was dismissed with such expressions, as, coming from the reserved and stern Lady of Lochleven, might seem to express a degree of favour and countenance. His first care was to obtain some refreshment, which was more cheerfully afforded him by a good-natured pantler than by Dryfesdale, who was, on this occasion, much disposed to abide by the fashion of Pudding-burn House, where They who came not the first call. Gat no more meat till the next meal. When Roland Graeme had finished his repast, having his dismissal from the Queen for the evening, and being little inclined for such society as the castle afforded, he stole into the garden, in which he had permission to spend his leisure time, when it pleased him. In this place, the ingenuity of the contriver and disposer of the walks had exerted itself to make the most of little space, and by screens, both of stone ornamented with rude sculpture, and hedges of living green, had endeavoured to give as much intricacy and variety as the confined limits of the garden would admit. Here the young man walked sadly, considering the events of the day, and comparing what had dropped from the Abbot with what he had himself noticed of the demeanour of George Douglas. It must be so, was the painful but inevitable conclusion at which he arrived. It must be by his aid that she is thus enabled, like a phantom, to transport herself from place to place, and to appear at pleasure on the mainland or on the islet.--It must be so, he repeated once more; with him she holds a close, secret, and intimate correspondence, altogether inconsistent with the eye of favour which she has sometimes cast upon me, and destructive to the hopes which she must have known these glances have necessarily inspired. And yet (for love will hope where reason despairs) the thought rushed on his mind, that it was possible she only encouraged Douglas's passion so far as might serve her mistress's interest, and that she was of too frank, noble, and candid a nature, to hold out to himself hopes which she meant not to fulfil. Lost in these various conjectures, he seated himself upon a bank of turf which commanded a view of the lake on the one side, and on the other of that front of the castle along which the Queen's apartments were situated. The sun had now for some time set, and the twilight of May was rapidly fading into a serene night. On the lake, the expanded water rose and fell, with the slightest and softest influence of a southern breeze, which scarcely dimpled the surface over which it passed. In the distance was still seen the dim outline of the island of Saint Serf, once visited by many a sandalled pilgrim, as the blessed spot trodden by a man of God--now neglected or violated, as the refuge of lazy priests, who had with justice been compelled to give place to the sheep and the heifers of a Protestant baron. As Roland gazed on the dark speck, amid the lighter blue of the waters which surrounded it, the mazes of polemical discussion again stretched themselves before the eye of the mind. Had these men justly suffered their exile as licentious drones, the robbers, at once, and disgrace, of the busy hive? or had the hand of avarice and rapine expelled from the temple, not the ribalds who polluted, but the faithful priests who served the shrine in honour and fidelity? The arguments of Henderson, in this contemplative hour, rose with double force before him; and could scarcely be parried by the appeal which the Abbot Ambrosius had made from his understanding to his feelings,--an appeal which he had felt more forcibly amid the bustle of stirring life, than now when his reflections were more undisturbed. It required an effort to divert his mind from this embarrassing topic; and he found that he best succeeded by turning his eyes to the front of the tower, watching where a twinkling light still streamed from the casement of Catherine Seyton's apartment, obscured by times for a moment as the shadow of the fair inhabitant passed betwixt the taper and the window. At length the light was removed or extinguished, and that object of speculation was also withdrawn from the eyes of the meditative lover. Dare I confess the fact, without injuring his character for ever as a hero of romance? These eyes gradually became heavy; speculative doubts on the subject of religious controversy, and anxious conjectures concerning the state of his mistress's affections, became confusedly blended together in his musings; the fatigues of a busy day prevailed over the harassing subjects of contemplation which occupied his mind, and he fell fast asleep. Sound were his slumbers, until they were suddenly dispelled by the iron tongue of the castle-bell, which sent its deep and sullen sounds wide over the bosom of the lake, and awakened the echoes of Bennarty, the hill which descends steeply on its southern bank. Roland started up, for this bell was always tolled at ten o'clock, as the signal for locking the castle gates, and placing the keys under the charge of the seneschal. He therefore hastened to the wicket by which the garden communicated with the building, and had the mortification, just as he reached it, to hear the bolt leave its sheath with a discordant crash, and enter the stone groove of the door-lintel. Hold, hold, cried the page, and let me in ere you lock the wicket. The voice of Dryfesdale replied from within, in his usual tone of embittered sullenness, The hour is passed, fair master--you like not the inside of these walls--even make it a complete holiday, and spend the night as well as the day out of bounds. Open the door, exclaimed the indignant page, or by Saint Giles I will make thy gold chain smoke for it! Make no alarm here, retorted the impenetrable Dryfesdale, but keep thy sinful oaths and silly threats for those that regard them--I do mine office, and carry the keys to the seneschal.--Adieu, my young master! the cool night air will advantage your hot blood. The steward was right in what he said; for the cooling breeze was very necessary to appease the feverish fit of anger which Roland experienced, nor did the remedy succeed for some time. At length, after some hasty turns made through the garden, exhausting his passion in vain vows of vengeance, Roland Graeme began to be sensible that his situation ought rather to be held as matter of laughter than of serious resentment. To one bred a sportsman, a night spent in the open air had in it little of hardship, and the poor malice of the steward seemed more worthy of his contempt than his anger. I would to God, he said, that the grim old man may always have contented himself with such sportive revenge. He often looks as he were capable of doing us a darker turn. Returning, therefore, to the turf-seat which he had formerly occupied, and which was partially sheltered by a trim fence of green holly, he drew his mantle around him, stretched himself at length on the verdant settle, and endeavoured to resume that sleep which the castle bell had interrupted to so little purpose. Sleep, like other earthly blessings, is niggard of its favours when most courted. The more Roland invoked her aid, the farther she fled from his eyelids. He had been completely awakened, first, by the sounds of the bell, and then by his own aroused vivacity of temper, and he found it difficult again to compose himself to slumber. At length, when his mind--was wearied out with a maze of unpleasing meditation, he succeeded in coaxing himself into a broken slumber. This was again dispelled by the voices of two persons who were walking in the garden, the sound of whose conversation, after mingling for some time in the page's dreams, at length succeeded in awaking him thoroughly. He raised himself from his reclining posture in the utmost astonishment, which the circumstance of hearing two persons at that late hour conversing on the outside of the watchfully guarded Castle of Lochloven, was so well calculated to excite. His first thought was of supernatural beings; his next, upon some attempt on the part of Queen Mary's friends and followers; his last was, that George of Douglas, possessed of the keys, and having the means of ingress and egress at pleasure, was availing himself of his office to hold a rendezvous with Catherine Seyton in the castle garden. He was confirmed in this opinion by the tone of the voice, which asked in a low whisper, whether all was ready? Chapter the Thirtieth. In some breasts passion lies conceal'd and silent, Like war's swart powder in a castle vault, Until occasion, like the linstock, lights it: Then comes at once the lightning--and the thunder, And distant echoes tell that all is rent asunder. OLD PLAY. Roland Graeme, availing himself of a breach in the holly screen, and of the assistance of the full moon, which was now arisen, had a perfect opportunity, himself unobserved, to reconnoitre the persons and the motions

formed

How many times the word 'formed' appears in the text?

you, reverend father, I am totally ignorant. My brother, answered the Abbot, you are wise, and ought to know-- I am not--I am not--I am not wise, replied the horticulturist, pettishly, and stopping his ears with his fingers-- I was never called wise but when men wanted to engage me in some action of notorious folly. But, my good brother, said the Abbot-- I am not good neither, said the peevish gardener; I am neither good nor wise--Had I been wise, you would not have been admitted here; and were I good, methinks I should send you elsewhere to hatch plots for destroying the quiet of the country. What signifies disputing about queen or king,--when men may sit at peace--_sub umbra vitis sui?_ and so would I do, after the precept of Holy Writ, were I, as you term me, wise or good. But such as I am, my neck is in the yoke, and you make me draw what weight you list.--Follow me, youngster. This reverend father, who makes in his jackman's dress nearly as reverend a figure as I myself, will agree with me in one thing at least, and that is, that you have been long enough here. Follow the good father, Roland, said the Abbot, and remember my words--a day is approaching that will try the temper of all true Scotsmen--may thy heart prove faithful as the steel of thy blade! The page bowed in silence, and they parted; the gardener, notwithstanding his advanced age, walking on before him very briskly, and muttering as he went, partly to himself, partly to his companion, after the manner of old men of weakened intellects-- When I was great, thus ran his maundering, and had my mule and my ambling palfrey at command, I warrant you I could have as well flown through the air as have walked at this pace. I had my gout and my rheumatics, and an hundred things besides, that hung fetters on my heels; and, now, thanks to Our Lady, and honest labour, I can walk with any good man of my age in the kingdom of Fife--Fy upon it, that experience should be so long in coming! As he was thus muttering, his eye fell upon the branch of a pear-tree which drooped down for want of support, and at once forgetting his haste, the old man stopped and set seriously about binding it up. Roland Graeme had both readiness, neatness of hand, and good nature in abundance; he immediately lent his aid, and in a minute or two the bough was supported, and tied up in a way perfectly satisfactory to the old man, who looked at it with great complaisance. They are bergamots, he said, and if you will come ashore in autumn, you shall taste of them--the like are not in Lochleven Castle--the garden there is a poor pin-fold, and the gardener, Hugh Houkham, hath little skill of his craft--so come ashore, Master Page, in autumn, when you would eat pears. But what am I thinking of--ere that time come, they may have given thee sour pears for plums. Take an old man's advice, youth, one who hath seen many days, and sat in higher places than thou canst hope for--bend thy sword into a pruning-hook, and make a dibble of thy dagger--thy days shall be the longer, and thy health the better for it,--and come to aid me in my garden, and I will teach thee the real French fashion of _imping_, which the Southron call graffing. Do this, and do it without loss of time, for there is a whirlwind coming over the land, and only those shall escape who lie too much beneath the storm to have their boughs broken by it. So saying, he dismissed Roland Graeme, through a different door from that by which he had entered, signed a cross, and pronounced a benedicite as they parted, and then, still muttering to himself, retired into the garden, and locked the door on the inside. Chapter the Twenty-Ninth. Pray God she prove not masculine ere long! KING HENRY VI. Dismissed from the old man's garden, Roland Graeme found that a grassy paddock, in which sauntered two cows, the property of the gardener, still separated him from the village. He paced through it, lost in meditation upon the words of the Abbot. Father Ambrosius had, with success enough, exerted over him that powerful influence which the guardians and instructors of our childhood possess over our more mature youth. And yet, when Roland looked back upon what the father had said, he could not but suspect that he had rather sought to evade entering into the controversy betwixt the churches, than to repel the objections and satisfy the doubts which the lectures of Henderson had excited. For this he had no time, said the page to himself, neither have I now calmness and learning sufficient to judge upon points of such magnitude. Besides, it were base to quit my faith while the wind of fortune sets against it, unless I were so placed, that my conversion, should it take place, were free as light from the imputation of self-interest. I was bred a Catholic--bred in the faith of Bruce and Wallace--I will hold that faith till time and reason shall convince me that it errs. I will serve this poor Queen as a subject should serve an imprisoned and wronged sovereign--they who placed me in her service have to blame themselves--who sent me hither, a gentleman trained in the paths of loyalty and honour, when they should have sought out some truckling, cogging, double-dealing knave, who would have been at once the observant page of the Queen, and the obsequious spy of her enemies. Since I must choose betwixt aiding and betraying her, I will decide as becomes her servant and her subject; but Catherine Seyton--Catherine Seyton, beloved by Douglas and holding me on or off as the intervals of her leisure or caprice will permit--how shall I deal with the coquette?--By heaven, when I next have an opportunity, she shall render me some reason for her conduct, or I will break with her for ever! As he formed this doughty resolution, he crossed the stile which led out of the little enclosure, and was almost immediately greeted by Dr. Luke Lundin. Ha! my most excellent young friend, said the Doctor, from whence come you?--but I note the place.--Yes, neighbour Blinkhoolie's garden is a pleasant rendezvous, and you are of the age when lads look after a bonny lass with one eye, and a dainty plum with another. But hey! you look subtriste and melancholic--I fear the maiden has proved cruel, or the plums unripe; and surely I think neighbour Blinkhoolie's damsons can scarcely have been well preserved throughout the winter--he spares the saccharine juice on his confects. But courage, man, there are more Kates in Kinross; and for the immature fruit, a glass of my double distilled _aqua mirabilis--probatum est_. The page darted an ireful glance at the facetious physician; but presently recollecting that the name Kate, which had provoked his displeasure, was probably but introduced for the sake of alliteration, he suppressed his wrath, and only asked if the wains had been heard of? Why, I have been seeking for you this hour, to tell you that the stuff is in your boat, and that the boat waits your pleasure. Auchtermuchty had only fallen into company with an idle knave like himself, and a stoup of aquavitae between them. Your boatmen lie on their oars, and there have already been made two wefts from the warder's turret to intimate that those in the castle are impatient for your return. Yet there is time for you to take a slight repast; and, as your friend and physician, I hold it unfit you should face the water-breeze with an empty stomach. Roland Graeme had nothing for it but to return, with such cheer as he might, to the place where his boat was moored on the beach, and resisted all offer of refreshment, although the Doctor promised that he should prelude the collation with a gentle appetizer--a decoction of herbs, gathered and distilled by himself. Indeed, as Roland had not forgotten the contents of his morning cup, it is possible that the recollection induced him to stand firm in his refusal of all food, to which such an unpalatable preface was the preliminary. As they passed towards the boat, (for the ceremonious politeness of the worthy Chamberlain would not permit the page to go thither without attendance,) Roland Graeme, amidst a group who seemed to be assembled around a party of wandering musicians, distinguished, as he thought, the dress of Catherine Seyton. He shook himself clear from his attendant, and at one spring was in the midst of the crowd, and at the side of the damsel. Catherine, he whispered, is it well for you to be still here?--will you not return to the castle? To the devil with your Catherines and your castles! answered the maiden, snappishly; have you not had time enough already to get rid of your follies? Begone! I desire not your farther company, and there will be danger in thrusting it upon me. Nay--but if there be danger, fairest Catherine, replied Roland; why will you not allow me to stay and share it with you? Intruding fool, said the maiden, the danger is all on thine own side--the risk in, in plain terms, that I strike thee on the mouth with the hilt of my dagger. So saying, she turned haughtily from him, and moved through the crowd, who gave way in some astonishment at the masculine activity with which she forced her way among them. As Roland, though much irritated, prepared to follow, he was grappled on the other side by Doctor Luke Lundin, who reminded him of the loaded boat, of the two wefts, or signals with the flag, which had been made from the tower, of the danger of the cold breeze to an empty stomach, and of the vanity of spending more time upon coy wenches and sour plums. Roland was thus, in a manner, dragged back to his boat, and obliged to launch her forth upon his return to Lochleven Castle. That little voyage was speedily accomplished, and the page was greeted at the landing-place by the severe and caustic welcome of old Dryfesdale. So, young gallant, you are come at last, after a delay of six hours, and after two signals from the castle? But, I warrant, some idle junketing hath occupied you too deeply to think of your service or your duty. Where is the note of the plate and household stuff?--Pray Heaven it hath not been diminished under the sleeveless care of so young a gad-about! Diminished under my care, Sir Steward! retorted the page angrily; say so in earnest, and by Heaven your gray hair shall hardly protect your saucy tongue! A truce with your swaggering, young esquire, returned the steward; we have bolts and dungeons for brawlers. Go to my lady, and swagger before her, if thou darest--she will give thee proper cause of offence, for she has waited for thee long and impatiently. And where then is the Lady of Lochleven? said the page; for I conceive it is of her thou speakest. Ay--of whom else? replied Dryfesdale; or who besides the Lady of Lochleven hath a right to command in this castle? The Lady of Lochleven is thy mistress, said Roland Graeme; but mine is the Queen of Scotland. The steward looked at him fixedly for a moment, with an air in which suspicion and dislike were ill concealed by an affectation of contempt. The bragging cock-chicken, he said, will betray himself by his rash crowing. I have marked thy altered manner in the chapel of late--ay, and your changing of glances at meal-time with a certain idle damsel, who, like thyself, laughs at all gravity and goodness. There is something about you, my master, which should be looked to. But, if you would know whether the Lady of Lochleven, or that other lady, hath a right to command thy service, thou wilt find them together in the Lady Mary's ante-room. Roland hastened thither, not unwilling to escape from the ill-natured penetration of the old man, and marvelling at the same time what peculiarity could have occasioned the Lady of Lochleven's being in the Queen's apartment at this time of the afternoon, so much contrary to her usual wont. His acuteness instantly penetrated the meaning. She wishes, he concluded, to see the meeting betwixt the Queen and me on my return, that she may form a guess whether there is any private intelligence or understanding betwixt us--I must be guarded. With this resolution he entered the parlour, where the Queen, seated in her chair, with the Lady Fleming leaning upon the back of it, had already kept the Lady of Lochleven standing in her presence for the space of nearly an hour, to the manifest increase of her very visible bad humour. Roland Graeme, on entering the apartment, made a deep obeisance to the Queen, and another to the Lady, and then stood still as if to await their farther question. Speaking almost together, the Lady Lochleven said, So, young man, you are returned at length? And then stopped indignantly short, while the Queen went on without regarding her-- Roland, you are welcome home to us--you have proved the true dove and not the raven--Yet I am sure I could have forgiven you, if, once dismissed, from this water-circled ark of ours, you had never again returned to us. I trust you have brought back an olive-branch, for our kind and worthy hostess has chafed herself much on account of your long absence, and we never needed more some symbol of peace and reconciliation. I grieve I should have been detained, madam, answered the page; but from the delay of the person intrusted with the matters for which I was sent, I did not receive them till late in the day. See you there now, said the Queen to the Lady Lochleven; we could not persuade you, our dearest hostess, that your household goods were in all safe keeping and surety. True it is, that we can excuse your anxiety, considering that these august apartments are so scantily furnished, that we have not been able to offer you even the relief of a stool during the long time you have afforded us the pleasure of your society. The will, madam, said the lady, the will to offer such accommodation was more wanting than the means. What! said the Queen, looking round, and affecting surprise, there are then stools in this apartment--one, two--no less than four, including the broken one--a royal garniture!--We observed them not--will it please your ladyship to sit? No, madam, I will soon relieve you of my presence, replied the Lady Lochleven; and while with you, my aged limbs can still better brook fatigue, than my mind stoop to accept of constrained courtesy. Nay, Lady of Lochleven, if you take it so deeply, said the Queen, rising and motioning to her own vacant chair, I would rather you assumed my seat--you are not the first of your family who has done so. The Lady of Lochleven curtsied a negative, but seemed with much difficulty to suppress the angry answer which rose to her lips. During this sharp conversation, the page's attention had been almost entirely occupied by the entrance of Catherine Seyton, who came from the inner apartment, in the usual dress in which she attended upon the Queen, and with nothing in her manner which marked either the hurry or confusion incident to a hasty change of disguise, or the conscious fear of detection in a perilous enterprise. Roland Graeme ventured to make her an obeisance as she entered, but she returned it with an air of the utmost indifference, which, in his opinion, was extremely inconsistent with the circumstances in which they stood towards each other.-- Surely, he thought, she cannot in reason expect to bully me out of the belief due to mine own eyes, as she tried to do concerning the apparition in the hostelry of Saint Michael's--I will try if I cannot make her feel that this will be but a vain task, and that confidence in me is the wiser and safer course to pursue. These thoughts had passed rapidly through his mind, when the Queen, having finished her altercation with the Lady of the castle, again addressed him-- What of the revels at Kinross, Roland Graeme? Methought they were gay, if I may judge from some faint sounds of mirth and distant music, which found their way so far as these grated windows, and died when they entered them, as all that is mirthful must--But thou lookest as sad as if thou hadst come from a conventicle of the Huguenots! And so perchance he hath, madam, replied the Lady of Lochleven, at whom this side-shaft was lanched. I trust, amid yonder idle fooleries, there wanted not some pouring forth of doctrine to a better purpose than that vain mirth, which, blazing and vanishing like the crackling of dry thorns, leaves to the fools who love it nothing but dust and ashes. Mary Fleming, said the Queen, turning round and drawing her mantle about her, I would that we had the chimney-grate supplied with a fagot or two of these same thorns which the Lady of Lochleven describes so well. Methinks the damp air from the lake, which stagnates in these vaulted rooms, renders them deadly cold. Your Grace's pleasure shall be obeyed, said the Lady of Lochleven; yet may I presume to remind you that we are now in summer? I thank you for the information, my good lady, said the Queen; for prisoners better learn their calender from the mouth of their jailor, than from any change they themselves feel in the seasons.--Once more, Roland Graeme, what of the revels? They were gay, madam, said the page, but of the usual sort, and little worth your Highness's ear. Oh, you know not, said the Queen, how very indulgent my ear has become to all that speaks of freedom and the pleasures of the free. Methinks I would rather have seen the gay villagers dance their ring round the Maypole, than have witnessed the most stately masques within the precincts of a palace. The absence of stone-wall--the sense that the green turf is under the foot which may tread it free and unrestrained, is worth all that art or splendour can add to more courtly revels. I trust, said the Lady Lochleven, addressing the page in her turn, there were amongst these follies none of the riots or disturbances to which they so naturally lead? Roland gave a slight glance to Catherine Seyton, as if to bespeak her attention, as he replied,-- I witnessed no offence, madam, worthy of marking--none indeed of any kind, save that a bold damsel made her hand somewhat too familiar with the cheek of a player-man, and ran some hazard of being ducked in the lake. As he uttered these words he cast a hasty glance at Catherine; but she sustained, with the utmost serenity of manner and countenance, the hint which he had deemed could not have been thrown out before her without exciting some fear and confusion. I will cumber your Grace no longer with my presence, said the Lady Lochleven, unless you have aught to command me. Nought, our good hostess, answered the Queen, unless it be to pray you, that on another occasion you deem it not needful to postpone your better employment to wait so long upon us. May it please you, added the Lady Lochleven, to command this your gentleman to attend us, that I may receive some account of these matters which have been sent hither for your Grace's use? We may not refuse what you are pleased to require, madam, answered the Queen. Go with the lady, Roland, if our commands be indeed necessary to thy doing so. We will hear to-morrow the history of thy Kinross pleasures. For this night we dismiss thy attendance. Roland Graeme went with the Lady of Lochleven, who failed not to ask him many questions concerning what had passed at the sports, to which he rendered such answers as were most likely to lull asleep any suspicions which she might entertain of his disposition to favour Queen Mary, taking especial care to avoid all allusion to the apparition of Magdalen Graeme, and of the Abbot Ambrosius. At length, after undergoing a long and somewhat close examination, he was dismissed with such expressions, as, coming from the reserved and stern Lady of Lochleven, might seem to express a degree of favour and countenance. His first care was to obtain some refreshment, which was more cheerfully afforded him by a good-natured pantler than by Dryfesdale, who was, on this occasion, much disposed to abide by the fashion of Pudding-burn House, where They who came not the first call. Gat no more meat till the next meal. When Roland Graeme had finished his repast, having his dismissal from the Queen for the evening, and being little inclined for such society as the castle afforded, he stole into the garden, in which he had permission to spend his leisure time, when it pleased him. In this place, the ingenuity of the contriver and disposer of the walks had exerted itself to make the most of little space, and by screens, both of stone ornamented with rude sculpture, and hedges of living green, had endeavoured to give as much intricacy and variety as the confined limits of the garden would admit. Here the young man walked sadly, considering the events of the day, and comparing what had dropped from the Abbot with what he had himself noticed of the demeanour of George Douglas. It must be so, was the painful but inevitable conclusion at which he arrived. It must be by his aid that she is thus enabled, like a phantom, to transport herself from place to place, and to appear at pleasure on the mainland or on the islet.--It must be so, he repeated once more; with him she holds a close, secret, and intimate correspondence, altogether inconsistent with the eye of favour which she has sometimes cast upon me, and destructive to the hopes which she must have known these glances have necessarily inspired. And yet (for love will hope where reason despairs) the thought rushed on his mind, that it was possible she only encouraged Douglas's passion so far as might serve her mistress's interest, and that she was of too frank, noble, and candid a nature, to hold out to himself hopes which she meant not to fulfil. Lost in these various conjectures, he seated himself upon a bank of turf which commanded a view of the lake on the one side, and on the other of that front of the castle along which the Queen's apartments were situated. The sun had now for some time set, and the twilight of May was rapidly fading into a serene night. On the lake, the expanded water rose and fell, with the slightest and softest influence of a southern breeze, which scarcely dimpled the surface over which it passed. In the distance was still seen the dim outline of the island of Saint Serf, once visited by many a sandalled pilgrim, as the blessed spot trodden by a man of God--now neglected or violated, as the refuge of lazy priests, who had with justice been compelled to give place to the sheep and the heifers of a Protestant baron. As Roland gazed on the dark speck, amid the lighter blue of the waters which surrounded it, the mazes of polemical discussion again stretched themselves before the eye of the mind. Had these men justly suffered their exile as licentious drones, the robbers, at once, and disgrace, of the busy hive? or had the hand of avarice and rapine expelled from the temple, not the ribalds who polluted, but the faithful priests who served the shrine in honour and fidelity? The arguments of Henderson, in this contemplative hour, rose with double force before him; and could scarcely be parried by the appeal which the Abbot Ambrosius had made from his understanding to his feelings,--an appeal which he had felt more forcibly amid the bustle of stirring life, than now when his reflections were more undisturbed. It required an effort to divert his mind from this embarrassing topic; and he found that he best succeeded by turning his eyes to the front of the tower, watching where a twinkling light still streamed from the casement of Catherine Seyton's apartment, obscured by times for a moment as the shadow of the fair inhabitant passed betwixt the taper and the window. At length the light was removed or extinguished, and that object of speculation was also withdrawn from the eyes of the meditative lover. Dare I confess the fact, without injuring his character for ever as a hero of romance? These eyes gradually became heavy; speculative doubts on the subject of religious controversy, and anxious conjectures concerning the state of his mistress's affections, became confusedly blended together in his musings; the fatigues of a busy day prevailed over the harassing subjects of contemplation which occupied his mind, and he fell fast asleep. Sound were his slumbers, until they were suddenly dispelled by the iron tongue of the castle-bell, which sent its deep and sullen sounds wide over the bosom of the lake, and awakened the echoes of Bennarty, the hill which descends steeply on its southern bank. Roland started up, for this bell was always tolled at ten o'clock, as the signal for locking the castle gates, and placing the keys under the charge of the seneschal. He therefore hastened to the wicket by which the garden communicated with the building, and had the mortification, just as he reached it, to hear the bolt leave its sheath with a discordant crash, and enter the stone groove of the door-lintel. Hold, hold, cried the page, and let me in ere you lock the wicket. The voice of Dryfesdale replied from within, in his usual tone of embittered sullenness, The hour is passed, fair master--you like not the inside of these walls--even make it a complete holiday, and spend the night as well as the day out of bounds. Open the door, exclaimed the indignant page, or by Saint Giles I will make thy gold chain smoke for it! Make no alarm here, retorted the impenetrable Dryfesdale, but keep thy sinful oaths and silly threats for those that regard them--I do mine office, and carry the keys to the seneschal.--Adieu, my young master! the cool night air will advantage your hot blood. The steward was right in what he said; for the cooling breeze was very necessary to appease the feverish fit of anger which Roland experienced, nor did the remedy succeed for some time. At length, after some hasty turns made through the garden, exhausting his passion in vain vows of vengeance, Roland Graeme began to be sensible that his situation ought rather to be held as matter of laughter than of serious resentment. To one bred a sportsman, a night spent in the open air had in it little of hardship, and the poor malice of the steward seemed more worthy of his contempt than his anger. I would to God, he said, that the grim old man may always have contented himself with such sportive revenge. He often looks as he were capable of doing us a darker turn. Returning, therefore, to the turf-seat which he had formerly occupied, and which was partially sheltered by a trim fence of green holly, he drew his mantle around him, stretched himself at length on the verdant settle, and endeavoured to resume that sleep which the castle bell had interrupted to so little purpose. Sleep, like other earthly blessings, is niggard of its favours when most courted. The more Roland invoked her aid, the farther she fled from his eyelids. He had been completely awakened, first, by the sounds of the bell, and then by his own aroused vivacity of temper, and he found it difficult again to compose himself to slumber. At length, when his mind--was wearied out with a maze of unpleasing meditation, he succeeded in coaxing himself into a broken slumber. This was again dispelled by the voices of two persons who were walking in the garden, the sound of whose conversation, after mingling for some time in the page's dreams, at length succeeded in awaking him thoroughly. He raised himself from his reclining posture in the utmost astonishment, which the circumstance of hearing two persons at that late hour conversing on the outside of the watchfully guarded Castle of Lochloven, was so well calculated to excite. His first thought was of supernatural beings; his next, upon some attempt on the part of Queen Mary's friends and followers; his last was, that George of Douglas, possessed of the keys, and having the means of ingress and egress at pleasure, was availing himself of his office to hold a rendezvous with Catherine Seyton in the castle garden. He was confirmed in this opinion by the tone of the voice, which asked in a low whisper, whether all was ready? Chapter the Thirtieth. In some breasts passion lies conceal'd and silent, Like war's swart powder in a castle vault, Until occasion, like the linstock, lights it: Then comes at once the lightning--and the thunder, And distant echoes tell that all is rent asunder. OLD PLAY. Roland Graeme, availing himself of a breach in the holly screen, and of the assistance of the full moon, which was now arisen, had a perfect opportunity, himself unobserved, to reconnoitre the persons and the motions

politics

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