Chapter 10

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 à-la-mode, he did not seem to be altogether civilized.

So absorbed was our adventurer by the person of the stranger, that a few