Page:Dumas - Tales of Strange adventure (Methuen, 1907).djvu/84

72 I made him a silent assent, to which he replied with a knowing wink. Then landing with the help of Simon and Jude we stepped up to the portal of the Bonhomme Tropique, where stood our fair hostess awaiting us with a smile on her pretty lips.

CHAPTER V

FIRST MARRIAGE OF PERE OLIFUS

E were warmly welcomed by Mile Marguerite Olifus. She showed us to a double-bedded room and asked us if we should prefer to take our meals in our chamber or in the common diningroom. The hope that Père Olifus would tell us the story of his adventures led us to choose the former alternative. Then she wished to know what we would rather have for supper and we said we would trust entirely to Mile Marguerite's selection. The whole conversation of course was conducted by signs; but the language of signs, ridiculous enough between men who get angry and impatient, becomes a very agreeable mode of intercourse when practised with a pretty woman who smiles in your face all the time. The net result was that, without a single word having been uttered on either side, at the end of ten minutes we perfectly understood each other's meaning.

Pè^re Olifus was not mistaken; the wind began to blow harder and harder. There was no positive danger, but as a measure of precaution the dykes had to be watched. From the window we saw three of P^re Olifus' sons making for the shore; the remaining two, Simon and Jude, went into a neighbouring house, where we learnt subsequently they were courting two sisters.

Whilst we were looking out through the ever darkening twilight at the stir of street and harbour, our table was furnished, to begin with, with a dish of grilled salmon and another of hard-boiled eggs piping hot.

These eggs, of the size of pigeon's, were green with red spots: they were lapwings' eggs, which are found in abundance in May, and have a much more delicate flavour than fowls' eggs. A bottle of Bordeaux towered in the midst of these national comestibles, like a tall slender steeple lording it over the lowly roofs of a village. We took our places with a sailor's appetite; both wine and food were of the best.

However, the meal after all was not the main thing; what we looked for with most impatience was the appearance of Père Olifus. During dessert we heard on the stairs the sound of heavy footsteps advancing furtively. The door opened and Père Olifus, a bottle under his arm and his pipe in his mouth, entered laughing to himself.

"H'sh," he said, "here I am."

"And in good company it would appear."

"Oh, yes, I said to myself there are two Frenchmen, we must be four strong to make head against them, so I took a bottle of schnapps, a bottle of rum, a bottle of rack-punch and here I am."

"Upon my word, Père Olifus," I told him, "the more I hear you speak, the more you surprise me; you speak French more like a subject of His Late Majesty Louis XlVth than a sailor-man of His Majesty William III."

"The fact is, I am a Frenchman at bottom," said Père Olifus, winking one eye.

"How do you mean at bottom?"

"Why, my father was a Frenchman and my mother a Dane; my grandfather was French and my grandmother came from Hamburg. As for my children, I am proud to say they have a French father, while their mother . . . Oh! for their mother I won't make bold to say quite what she was; they at any rate are true Dutchmen. It would not have happened if I had been there to attend to their bringing up; but I was in the Indies."

"Still, you used to come home now and again!" I suggested with a laugh.

"That is where you are wrong; I never did."

"Then your wife used to go out to join you?"

"Yes and no."

"What do you mean yes and no?"

"Here's where the plot thickens, look you. It seems distance goes for nothing when you have a witch for a wife."

"Now we are coming to it, eh?"

"That is so; anyhow I am going to tell you the whole story; but first a glass of schnapps, it is the real stuff I give you my word. To your good health!"