CHAPTER X.

ANOTHER ADVENTURER APPEARS UPON THE SCENE.

About half-past ten o’clock, as they were thus conversing, Israel’s acquaintance, the pretty chambermaid, rapped at the door, saying, with a titter, that a very rude gentleman in the passage of the court, desired to see Doctor Franklin.

“A very rude gentleman?” repeated the wise man in French, narrowly looking at the girl; “that means, a very fine gentleman who has just paid you some energetic compliment.  But let him come up, my girl,” he added patriarchially.

In a few moments, a swift coquettish step was heard, followed, as if in chase, by a sharp and manly one.  The door opened.  Israel was sitting so that, accidentally, his eye pierced the crevice made by the opening of the door, which, like a theatrical screen, stood for a moment between Doctor Franklin and the just entering visitor.  And behind that screen, through the crack, Israel caught one momentary glimpse of a little bit of by-play between the pretty chambermaid and the stranger.  The vivacious nymph appeared to have affectedly run from him on the stairs—­doubtless in freakish return for some liberal advances—­but had suffered herself to be overtaken at last ere too late; and on the instant Israel caught sight of her, was with an insincere air of rosy resentment, receiving a roguish pinch on the arm, and a still more roguish salute on the cheek.

The next instant both disappeared from the range of the crevice; the girl departing whence she had come; the stranger—­transiently invisible as he advanced behind the door—­entering the room.  When Israel now perceived him again, he seemed, while momentarily hidden, to have undergone a complete transformation.

He was a rather small, elastic, swarthy man, with an aspect as of a disinherited Indian Chief in European clothes.  An unvanquishable enthusiasm, intensified to perfect sobriety, couched in his savage, self-possessed eye.  He was elegantly and somewhat extravagantly dressed as a civilian; he carried himself with a rustic, barbaric jauntiness, strangely dashed with a superinduced touch of the Parisian salon.  His tawny cheek, like a date, spoke of the tropic, A wonderful atmosphere of proud friendlessness and scornful isolation invested him.  Yet there was a bit of the poet as well as the outlaw in him, too.  A cool solemnity of intrepidity sat on his lip.  He looked like one who of purpose sought out harm’s way.  He looked like one who never had been, and never would be, a subordinate.

Israel thought to himself that seldom before had he seen such a being.  Though dressed a-la-mode, he did not seem to be altogether civilized.

So absorbed was our adventurer by the person of the stranger, that a few moments passed ere he began to be aware of the circumstance, that Dr. Franklin and this new visitor having saluted as old acquaintances, were now sitting in earnest conversation together.