No 44, The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain

Author:Mark Twain [Twain, Mark]
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

A week passed.

Meantime, where was he? what was become of him? I had gone often to his room, but had always found it vacant. I was missing him sorely. Ah, he was so interesting! there was none that could approach him for that. And there could not be a more engaging mystery than he. He was always doing and saying strange and curious things, and then leaving them but half explained or not explained at all. Who was he? what was he? where was he from? I wished I knew. Could he be converted? could he be saved? Ah, if only this could happen, and I be in some humble way a helper toward it!

While I was thus cogitating about him, he appeared—gay, of course, and even more gaily clad than he was that day that the magician burnt him. He said he had been “home.” I pricked up my ears hopefully, but was disappointed: with that mere touch he left the subject, just as if because it had no interest for him it couldn’t have any for others. A chuckle-headed idea, certainly. He was handy about disparaging other people’s reasoning powers, but it never seemed to occur to him to look nearer home. He smacked me on the thigh and said,

“Come, you need an outing, you’ve been shut up here quite long enough. I’ll do the handsome thing by you, now—I’ll show you something creditable to your race.”

That pleased me, and I said so; and said it was very kind and courteous of him to find something to its credit, and be good enough to mention it.

“Oh, yes,” he said, lightly, and paying no attention to my sarcasm, “I’ll show you a really creditable thing. At the same time I’ll have to show you something discreditable, too, but that’s nothing—that’s merely human, you know. Make yourself invisible.”

I did so, and he did the like. We were presently floating away, high in the air, over the frosty fields and hills.

“We shall go to a small town fifty miles removed,” he said. “Thirty years ago Father Adolf was priest there, and was thirty years old. Johann Brinker, twenty years old, resided there, with his widowed mother and his four sisters—three younger than himself, and one a couple of years older, and marriageable. He was a rising young artist. Indeed one might say that he had already risen, for he had exhibited a picture in Vienna which had brought him great praise, and made him at once a celebrity. The family had been very poor, but now his pictures were wanted, and he sold all of his little stock at fine prices, and took orders for as many more as he could paint in two or three years. It was a happy family! and was suddenly become courted, caressed and—envied, of course, for that is human. To be envied is the human being’s chiefest joy.

“Then a thing happened. On a winter’s morning Johann was skating, when he heard a choking cry

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