For all his volubility in matters of romance and sentiment The Major was
exceeding reticent about his immediate self and his own affairs. His
legends referred to the distant of time and place. A certain dignity could
not be denied him, and, on occasion, a proper reserve; he rarely mentioned
his business--though he worked like a slave, and could not have been making
much or any profit--so that there rose the query how he contrived to make
both ends meet. Little by little I came into the knowledge that there was
a money supply from somewhere; finally, it matters not how, that he had an
annuity of forty thousand francs, paid in quarterly installments of ten
thousand francs each.

Occasionally he mentioned "the Old House," and in relating the famous
Sophonisba episode late at night, and only in the very fastnesses of
the wine cellar, as it were, at the most lachrymose passage he spoke of
"l'Oncle Celestin," with the deepest feeling.

"Did you ever hear The Frenchman tell that story about Sophonisba?" Doctor
Stoic, whom on account of his affectation of insensibility we were wont to
call Old Adamant, once asked me. "Well, sir, the other night he told it to
me, and he was drunk, and he cried, sir; and I was drunk, and I cried too!"

I had known The Frenchman now ten or a dozen years. That he came
from Marseilles, that he had served on the Confederate side in the
Trans-Mississippi, that he possessed an annuity, that he must have been
well-born and reared, that he was simple, yet canny, and in his money
dealings scrupulously honest--was all I could be sure of. What had he done
to be ashamed about or wish to conceal? In what was he a black sheep, for
that he had been one seemed certain? Had the beautiful woman, his wife--a
tireless church and charity worker, who lived the life of a recluse and a
saint--had she reclaimed him from his former self? I knew that she had