The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade
The bachelor fell into a troubled reverie. At last, with much hesitancy,
he spoke:
"Do you think now, candidly, that--I say candidly--candidly--could I
have some small, limited--some faint, conditional degree of confidence
in that boy? Candidly, now?"
"Candidly, you could."
"A sound boy? A good boy?"
"Never knew one more so."
The bachelor fell into another irresolute reverie; then said: "Well,
now, you have suggested some rather new views of boys, and men, too.
Upon those views in the concrete I at present decline to determine.
Nevertheless, for the sake purely of a scientific experiment, I will try
that boy. I don't think him an angel, mind. No, no. But I'll try him.
There are my three dollars, and here is my address. Send him along this
day two weeks. Hold, you will be wanting the money for his passage.
There," handing it somewhat reluctantly.
"Ah, thank you. I had forgotten his passage;" then, altering in manner,
and gravely holding the bills, continued: "Respected sir, never
willingly do I handle money not with perfect willingness, nay, with a
certain alacrity, paid. Either tell me that you have a perfect and
unquestioning confidence in me (never mind the boy now) or permit me
respectfully to return these bills."
"Put 'em up, put 'em-up!"
"Thank you. Confidence is the indispensable basis of all sorts of
business transactions. Without it, commerce between man and man, as
between country and country, would, like a watch, run down and stop. And
now, supposing that against present expectation the lad should, after
all, evince some little undesirable trait, do not, respected sir, rashly
dismiss him. Have but patience, have but confidence. Those transient
vices will, ere long, fall out, and be replaced by the sound, firm, even
and permanent virtues. Ah," glancing shoreward, towards a
grotesquely-shaped bluff, "there's the Devil's Joke, as they call it:
the bell for landing will shortly ring. I must go look up the cook I
brought for the innkeeper at Cairo."
CHAPTER XXIII.
IN WHICH THE POWERFUL EFFECT OF NATURAL SCENERY IS EVINCED IN THE CASE
OF THE MISSOURIAN, WHO, IN VIEW OF THE REGION ROUND-ABOUT CAIRO, HAS A
RETURN OF HIS CHILLY FIT.
At Cairo, the old established firm of Fever & Ague is still settling up
its unfinished business; that Creole grave-digger, Yellow Jack--his hand
at the mattock and spade has not lost its cunning; while Don Saturninus
Typhus taking his constitutional with Death, Calvin Edson and three
undertakers, in the morass, snuffs up the mephitic breeze with zest.
In the dank twilight, fanned with mosquitoes, and sparkling with
fire-flies, the boat now lies before Cairo. She has landed certain
passengers, and tarries for the coming of expected ones. Leaning over
the rail on the inshore side, the Missourian eyes through the dubious
medium that swampy and squalid domain; and over it audibly mumbles his
cynical mind to himself, as Apermantus' dog may have mumbled his bone.
He bethinks him that the man with the brass-plate was to land on this
villainous bank, and for that cause, if no other, begins to suspect him.
Like one beginning to rouse himself from a dose of chloroform
treacherously given, he half divines, too, that he, the philosopher,
had unwittingly been betrayed into being an unphilosophical dupe. To
what vicissitudes of light and shade is man subject! He ponders the
mystery of human subjectivity in general. He thinks he perceives with
Crossbones, his favorite author, that, as one may wake up well in the
morning, very well, indeed, and brisk as a buck, I thank you, but ere
bed-time get under the weather, there is no telling how--so one may wake
up wise, and slow of assent, very wise and very slow, I assure you, and
for all that, before night, by like trick in the atmosphere, be left in
the lurch a ninny. Health and wisdom equally precious, and equally
little as unfluctuating possessions to be relied on.
But where was slipped in the entering wedge? Philosophy, knowledge,
experience--were those trusty knights of the castle recreant? No, but
unbeknown to them, the enemy stole on the castle's south side, its
genial one, where Suspicion, the warder, parleyed. In fine, his too
indulgent, too artless and companionable nature betrayed him. Admonished
by which, he thinks he must be a little splenetic in his intercourse
henceforth.
He revolves the crafty process of sociable chat, by which, as he
fancies, the man with the brass-plate wormed into him, and made such a
fool of him as insensibly to persuade him to waive, in his exceptional
case, that general law of distrust systematically applied to the race.
He revolves, but cannot comprehend, the operation, still less the
operator. Was the man a trickster, it must be more for the love than the
lucre. Two or three dirty dollars the motive to so many nice wiles? And
yet how full of mean needs his seeming. Before his mental vision the
person of that threadbare Talleyrand, that impoverished Machiavelli,
that seedy Rosicrucian--for something of all these he vaguely deems
him--passes now in puzzled review. Fain, in his disfavor, would he make
out a logical case. The doctrine of analogies recurs. Fallacious enough
doctrine when wielded against one's prejudices, but in corroboration of
cherished suspicions not without likelihood. Analogically, he couples
the slanting cut of the equivocator's coat-tails with the sinister cast
in his eye; he weighs slyboot's sleek speech in the light imparted by
the oblique import of the smooth slope of his worn boot-heels; the
insinuator's undulating flunkyisms dovetail into those of the flunky
beast that windeth his way on his belly.
From these uncordial reveries he is roused by a cordial slap on the
shoulder, accompanied by a spicy volume of tobacco-smoke, out of which
came a voice, sweet as a seraph's:
"A penny for your thoughts, my fine fellow."
CHAPTER XXIV.
A PHILANTHROPIST UNDERTAKES TO CONVERT A MISANTHROPE, BUT DOES NOT GET
BEYOND CONFUTING HIM.
"Hands off!" cried the bachelor, involuntarily covering dejection with
moroseness.
"Hands off? that sort of label won't do in our Fair. Whoever in our Fair
has fine feelings loves to feel the nap of fine cloth, especially when a
fine fellow wears it."
"And who of my fine-fellow species may you be? From the Brazils, ain't
you? Toucan fowl. Fine feathers on foul meat."
This ungentle mention of the toucan was not improbably suggested by the
parti-hued, and rather plumagy aspect of the stranger, no bigot it would
seem, but a liberalist, in dress, and whose wardrobe, almost anywhere
than on the liberal Mississippi, used to all sorts of fantastic
informalities, might, even to observers less critical than the bachelor,
have looked, if anything, a little out of the common; but not more so
perhaps, than, considering the bear and raccoon costume, the bachelor's
own appearance. In short, the stranger sported a vesture barred with
various hues, that of the cochineal predominating, in style
participating of a Highland plaid, Emir's robe, and French blouse; from
its plaited sort of front peeped glimpses of a flowered regatta-shirt,
while, for the rest, white trowsers of ample duck flowed over
maroon-colored slippers, and a jaunty smoking-cap of regal purple
crowned him off at top; king of traveled good-fellows, evidently.
Grotesque as all was, nothing looked stiff or unused; all showed signs
of easy service, the least wonted thing setting like a wonted glove.
That genial hand, which had just been laid on the ungenial shoulder, was
now carelessly thrust down before him, sailor-fashion, into a sort of
Indian belt, confining the redundant vesture; the other held, by its
long bright cherry-stem, a Nuremburgh pipe in blast, its great porcelain
bowl painted in miniature with linked crests and arms of interlinked
nations--a florid show. As by subtle saturations of its mellowing
essence the tobacco had ripened the bowl, so it looked as if something
similar of the interior spirit came rosily out on the cheek. But rosy
pipe-bowl, or rosy countenance, all was lost on that unrosy man, the
bachelor, who, waiting a moment till the commotion, caused by the boat's
renewed progress, had a little abated, thus continued:
"Hark ye," jeeringly eying the cap and belt, "did you ever see Signor
Marzetti in the African pantomime?"
"No;--good performer?"
"Excellent; plays the intelligent ape till he seems it. With such
naturalness can a being endowed with an immortal spirit enter into that
of a monkey. But where's your tail? In the pantomime, Marzetti, no
hypocrite in his monkery, prides himself on that."
The stranger, now at rest, sideways and genially, on one hip, his right
leg cavalierly crossed before the other, the toe of his vertical slipper
pointed easily down on the deck, whiffed out a long, leisurely sort of
indifferent and charitable puff, betokening him more or less of the
mature man of the world, a character which, like its opposite, the
sincere Christian's, is not always swift to take offense; and then,
drawing near, still smoking, again laid his hand, this time with mild
impressiveness, on the ursine shoulder, and not unamiably said: "That in
your address there is a sufficiency of the _fortiter in re_ few unbiased
observers will question; but that this is duly attempered with the
_suaviter in modo_ may admit, I think, of an honest doubt. My dear
fellow," beaming his eyes full upon him, "what injury have I done you,
that you should receive my greeting with a curtailed civility?"
"Off hands;" once more shaking the friendly member from him. "Who in the
name of the great chimpanzee, in whose likeness, you, Marzetti, and the
other chatterers are made, who in thunder are you?"
"A cosmopolitan, a catholic man; who, being such, ties himself to no
narrow tailor or teacher, but federates, in heart as in costume,
something of the various gallantries of men under various suns. Oh, one
roams not over the gallant globe in vain. Bred by it, is a fraternal and
fusing feeling. No man is a stranger. You accost anybody. Warm and
confiding, you wait not for measured advances. And though, indeed,
mine, in this instance, have met with no very hilarious encouragement,
yet the principle of a true citizen of the world is still to return good
for ill.--My dear fellow, tell me how I can serve you."
"By dispatching yourself, Mr. Popinjay-of-the-world, into the heart of
the Lunar Mountains. You are another of them. Out of my sight!"
"Is the sight of humanity so very disagreeable to you then? Ah, I may be
foolish, but for my part, in all its aspects, I love it. Served up à la
Pole, or à la Moor, à la Ladrone, or à la Yankee, that good dish, man,
still delights me; or rather is man a wine I never weary of comparing
and sipping; wherefore am I a pledged cosmopolitan, a sort of
London-Dock-Vault connoisseur, going about from Teheran to Natchitoches,
a taster of races; in all his vintages, smacking my lips over this racy
creature, man, continually. But as there are teetotal palates which have
a distaste even for Amontillado, so I suppose there may be teetotal
souls which relish not even the very best brands of humanity. Excuse me,
but it just occurs to me that you, my dear fellow, possibly lead a
solitary life."
"Solitary?" starting as at a touch of divination.
"Yes: in a solitary life one insensibly contracts oddities,--talking to
one's self now."
"Been eaves-dropping, eh?"
"Why, a soliloquist in a crowd can hardly but be overheard, and without
much reproach to the hearer."
"You are an eaves-dropper."
"Well. Be it so."
"Confess yourself an eaves-dropper?"
"I confess that when you were muttering here I, passing by, caught a
word or two, and, by like chance, something previous of your chat with