Maurice Tiernay, Soldier of Fortune

By what instinctive impulse I still held on my grasp, I cannot explain; but there I clung during the whole of that long dreadful day, and the still more dreadful night, when the piercing cold cramped my limbs, and seemed as if freezing the very blood within me. It was no wish for life, it was no anxiety to save myself, that now filled me. It seemed like a vague impulse of necessity that compelled me to hang on. It was, as it were, part of that terrible sentence which made this my doom for ever!

An utter unconsciousness must have followed this state, and a dreary blank, with flitting shapes of suffering, is all that remains to my recollection.

Probably within the whole range of human sensations, there is not one so perfect in its calm and soothing influence as the first burst of gratitude we feel when recovering from a long and severe illness. There is not an object, however humble and insignificant, that is not for the time invested with a new interest. The air is balmier, flowers are sweeter, the voices of friends, the smiles and kind looks, are dearer and fonder than we have ever known them. The whole world has put on a new aspect for us, and we have not a thought that is not teeming with forgiveness and affection. Such, in all their completeness, were my feelings as I lay on the poop-deck of a large three-masted ship, which, with studding and topgallant sails all set, proudly held her course up the Gulf of St Lawrence.

She was a Danzig barque, the Hoffnung, bound for Quebec, her only passengers being a Moravian minister and his wife, on their way to join a small German colony established near Lake Champlain. To Gottfried Kroller and his dear little wife I owe not life alone, but nearly all that has made it valuable. With means barely removed from absolute poverty, I found that they had spared nothing to assist in my recovery; for, when discovered, emaciation and wasting had so far reduced me that nothing but the most unremitting care and kindness could have succeeded in restoring me. To this end they bestowed not only their whole time and attention, but every little delicacy of their humble sea-store. All the little cordials and restoratives, meant for a season of sickness or debility, were lavished unsparingly on me, and every instinct of national thrift and carefulness gave way before the more powerful influence of Christian benevolence.

I can think of nothing but that bright morning, as I lay on a mattress on the deck, with the ‘Pfarrer’ on one side of me, and his good little wife, Lieschen, on the other; he with his volume of ‘Wieland,’ and she working away with her long knitting-needles, and never raising her head save to bestow a glance at the poor sick boy, whose bloodless lips were trying to mutter her name in thankfulness. It is like the most delicious dream as I think over those hours, when, rocked by the surging motion of the large ship, hearing in half distinctness the words of the ‘Pfarrer’s’ reading, I followed out little fancies – now self-originating, now rising from the theme of the poet’s musings.

How softly the cloud-shadows moved over the white sails and swept along the bright deck! How pleasantly the water rippled against the vessel’s side I With what a glad sound the great ensign napped and fluttered in the breeze! There was light, and life, and motion on every side, and I felt all the intoxication of enjoyment.

And like a dream was the portion of my life which followed. I accompanied the Pfarrer to a small settlement near ‘Crown Point,’ where he was to take up his residence as minister. Here we lived amid a population of about four or five hundred Germans, principally from Pomerania, on the shores of the Baltic, a peaceful, thrifty, quiet set of beings, who, content with the little interests revolving around themselves, never troubled their heads about the great events of war or politics. And here in all likelihood should I have been content to pass my days, when an accidental journey I made to Albany, to receive some letters for the Pfarrer, once more turned the fortune of my life.

It was a great incident in the quiet monotony of my life, when I set out one morning, arrayed in a full suit of coarse, glossy black, with buttons like small saucers, and a hat whose brim almost protected my shoulders. I was, indeed, an object of very considerable envy to some, and I hope, also, not denied the admiring approval of some others. Had the respectable city I was about to visit been the chief metropolis of a certain destination which I must not name, the warnings I received about its dangers, dissipations, and seductions, could scarcely have been more earnest or impressive. I was neither to speak with, nor even to look at, those I met in the streets. I was carefully to avoid taking my meals at any of the public eating-houses, rigidly guarding myself from the contamination of even a chance acquaintance. It was deemed as needless to caution me against theatres or places of amusement, as to hint to me that I should not commit a highway robbery or a murder; and so, in sooth, I should myself have felt it. The patriarchal simplicity in which I had lived for above a year had not been without its affect in subduing exaggerated feeling, or controlling that passion for excitement so common to youth. I felt a kind of dreamy, religious languor over me, which I sincerely believed represented a pious and well-regulated temperament. Perhaps in time it might have become such. Perhaps with others, more happily constituted, the impression would have been confirmed and fixed; but in my case it was a mere lacquer, that the first rubbing in the world was sure to brush off.

I arrived safely at Albany, and having presented myself at the bank of Gabriel Shultze, was desired to call the following morning, when all the letters and papers of Gottfried Kröller should be delivered to me. A very cold invitation to supper was the only hospitality extended to me. This I declined on pretext of weariness, and set out to explore the town, to which my long residence in rural life imparted a high degree of interest.

I don’t know what it may now be – doubtless a great capital, like one of the European cities; but at that time I speak of, Albany was a strange, incongruous assemblage of stores and wooden houses, great buildings like granaries, with whole streets of low sheds around them, where, open to the passer-by, men worked at various trades, and people followed out the various duties of domestic life in sight of the public: daughters knitted and sewed; mothers cooked, and nursed their children; men ate, and worked, and smoked, and sang, as if in all the privacy of closed dwellings, while a thick current of population poured by, apparently too much immersed in their own cares, or too much accustomed to the scene, to give it more than passing notice.

It was curious how one bred and born in the great city of Paris, with all its sights and sounds, and scenes of excitement and display, could have been so rusticated by time as to feel a lively interest in surveying the motley aspect of this quaint town. There were, it is true, features in the picture very unlike the figures in ‘Old-World’ landscape. A group of ‘red men,’ seated around a fire in the open street, or a squaw carrying on her back a baby, firmly tied to a piece of curved bark; a Southern-stater, with a spanking waggon-team, and two grinning negroes behind, were new and strange elements in the life of a city. Still, the mere movement, the actual busy stir and occupation of the inhabitants, attracted me as much as anything else; and the shops and stalls, where trades were carried on, were a seduction I could not resist.

The strict puritanism in which I had lately lived taught me to regard all these things with a certain degree of distrust. They were the impulses of that gold-seeking passion of which Gottfried had spoken so frequently; they were the great vice of that civilisation, whose luxurious tendency he often deplored; and here, now, more than one-half around me were arts that only ministered to voluptuous tastes. Brilliant articles of jewellery; gay cloaks, worked with wampum, in Indian taste; ornamental turning, and costly weapons, inlaid with gold and silver, succeeded each other, street after street; and the very sight of them, however pleasurable to the eye, set me a-moralising in a strain that would have done credit to a son of Geneva. It might have been that, in my enthusiasm, I uttered half aloud what I intended for soliloquy; or perhaps some gesture, or peculiarity of manner, had the effect; but so it was, I found myself an object of notice; and my queer-cut coat and wide hat, contrasting so strangely with my youthful appearance and slender make, drew many a criticism on me.

‘He ain’t a Quaker, that’s a fact,’ cried one, ‘for they don’t wear black.’

‘He’s a down-easter – a horse-jockey chap, I’ll be bound,’ cried another. ‘They put on all manner of disguises and “masqueroonings.” I know ‘em!’

‘He’s a calf preacher – a young bottle-nosed Gospeller,’ broke in a thick, short fellow, like the skipper of a merchant-ship. ‘Let’s have him out for a preachment.’

‘Ay, you’re right,’ chimed in another. ‘I’ll get you a sugar hogshead in no time’; and away he ran on the mission.

Between twenty and thirty persons had now collected; and I saw myself, to my unspeakable shame and mortification, the centre of all their looks and speculations. A little more aplomb or knowledge of life would have taught me coolness enough in a few words to undeceive them; but such a task was far above me now, and I saw nothing for it but flight. Could I only have known which way to take, I need not have feared any pursuer, for I was a capital runner, and in high condition; but of the locality I was utterly ignorant, and should only surrender myself to mere chance. With a bold rush, then, I dashed right through the crowd, and set off down the street, the whole crew after me.

The dusk of the closing evening was in my favour; and although volunteers were enlisted in the chase at every corner and turning, I distanced them, and held on my way in advance. My great object being not to turn on my course, lest I should come back to my starting point, I directed my steps nearly straight onward, clearing apple-stalls and fruit-tables at a bound, and more than once taking a flying-leap over an Indian’s fire, when the mad shout of the red man would swell the chorus that followed me. At last I reached a network of narrow lanes and alleys, by turning and wending through which I speedily found myself in a quiet secluded spot, with here and there a flickering candle-light from the windows, but no other sign of habitation. I looked anxiously about for an open door; but they were all safe barred and fastened; and it was only on turning a corner I spied what seemed to me a little shop, with a solitary lamp over the entrance. A narrow canal, crossed by a rickety old bridge, led to this; and the moment I had crossed over, I seized the single plank which formed the footway, and shoved it into the stream. My retreat being thus secured, I opened the door, and entered. It was a barber’s shop; at least, so a great chair before a cracked old looking-glass, with some well-worn combs and brushes, bespoke it; but the place seemed untenanted, and although I called aloud several times, no one came or responded to my summons.

I now took a survey of the spot, which seemed of the poorest imaginable. A few empty pomatum pots, a case of razors that might have defied the most determined suicide, and a half-finished wig, on a block painted like a red man, were the entire stock-in-trade. On the walls, however, were some coloured prints of the battles of the French army in Germany and Italy. Execrably done things they were, but full of meaning and interest to my eyes in spite of that. With all the faults of drawing and all the travesties of costume, I could recognise different corps of the service, and my heart bounded as I gazed on the tall shakos swarming to a breach, or the loose jacket as it floated from the hussar in a charge. All the wild pleasures of soldiering rose once more to my mind, and I thought over old comrades who doubtless were now earning the high rewards of their bravery in the great career of glory. And as I did so, my own image confronted me in the glass, as with long lank hair, and a great bolster of a white cravat, I stood before it. What a contrast! – how unlike the smart hussar, with curling locks and fierce moustache! Was I as much changed in heart as in looks? Had my spirit died out within me? Would the proud notes of the bugle or the trumpet fall meaningless on my ears, or the hoarse cry of ‘Charge!’ send no bursting fulness to my temples? Ay, even these coarse representations stirred the blood in my veins, and my step grew firmer as I walked the room.

In a passionate burst of enthusiasm, I tore off my slouched hat and hurled it from me. It felt like the badge of some ignoble slavery, and I determined to endure it no longer. The noise of the act called up a voice from the inner room, and a man, to all appearance suddenly roused from sleep, stood at the door. He was evidently young, but poverty, dissipation, and raggedness made the question of his age a difficult one to solve. A light-coloured moustache and beard covered all the lower part of his face, and his long blonde hair fell heavily over his shoulders.

‘Well,’ cried he, half angrily, ‘what’s the matter; are you so impatient that you must smash the furniture?’

Although the words were spoken as correctly as I have written them, they were uttered with a foreign accent; and, hazarding the stroke, I answered him in French by apologising for the noise.

‘What! a Frenchman,’ exclaimed he, ‘and in that dress! what can that mean?’

‘If you’ll shut your door, and cut off pursuit of me, I’ll tell you everything,’ said I, ‘for I hear the voices of people coming down that street in front.’

‘I’ll do better,’ said he quickly; ‘I’ll upset the bridge, and they cannot come over.’

‘That’s done already,’ replied I; ‘I shoved it into the stream as I passed.’

He looked at me steadily for a moment without speaking, and then approaching close to me, said, ‘Parbleu! the act was very unlike your costume!’ At the same time he shut the door, and drew a strong bar across it. This done, he turned to me once more – ‘Now for it: who are you, and what has happened to you?’

‘As to what I am,’ replied I, imitating his own abruptness, ‘my dress would almost save the trouble of explaining; these Albany folk, however, would make a field-preacher of me, and to escape them I took to flight.’

‘Well, if a fellow will wear his hair that fashion, he must take the consequence,’ said he, drawing out my long lank locks as they hung over my shoulders. ‘And so you wouldn’t hold forth for them – not even give them a stave of a conventicle chant.’ He kept his eyes riveted on me as he spoke, and then seizing two pieces of stick from the firewood, he beat on the table the rataplan of the French drum. ‘That’s the music you know best, lad, eh? – that’s the air, which, if it has not led heavenward, has conducted many a brave fellow out of this world at least. Do you forget it?’

‘Forget it! no,’ cried I;’ but who are you; and how comes it that – that – ’ I stopped in confusion at the rudeness of the question I had begun. ‘That I stand here, half fed, and all but naked – a barber in a land where men don’t shave once a month. Parbleu! they’d come even seldomer to my shop if they knew how tempted I feel to draw the razor sharp and quick across the gullet of a fellow with a well-stocked pouch.’

As he continued to speak, his voice assumed a tone and cadence that sounded familiar to my ears as I stared at him in amazement.

‘Not know me yet!’ exclaimed he, laughing; ‘and yet all this poverty and squalor isn’t as great a disguise as your own, Tiernay. Come, lad, rub your eyes a bit, and try if you can’t recognise an old comrade.’

‘I know you, yet cannot remember how or where we met,’ said I, in bewilderment.

‘I’ll refresh your memory,’ said he, crossing his arms, and drawing himself proudly up. ‘If you can trace back in your mind to a certain hot and dusty day, on the Metz road, when you, a private in the Ninth Hussars, were eating an onion and a slice of black bread for your dinner, a young officer, well looking and well mounted, cantered up and threw you his brandy flask. Your acknowledgment of the civility showed you to be a gentleman; and the acquaintance thus opened soon ripened into intimacy.’

‘But he was the young Marquis de Saint-Trône,’ said I, perfectly remembering the incident.

‘Or Eugène Santron, of the republican army, or the barber at Albany, without any name at all,’ said he, laughing. ‘What, Maurice, don’t you know me yet?’

‘What! the lieutenant of my regiment? The dashing officer of hussars?’

‘Just so, and as ready to resume the old skin as ever,’ cried he, ‘and brandish a weapon somewhat longer, and perhaps somewhat sharper, too, than a razor.’

We shook hands with all the cordiality of old comrades, meeting far away from home, and in a land of strangers; and although each was full of curiosity to learn the other’s history, a kind of reserve held back the inquiry, till Santron said, ‘My confession is soon made, Maurice: I left the service in the Meuse, to escape being shot. One day, on returning from a field manouvre, I discovered that my portmanteau had been opened, and a number of letters and papers taken out. They were part of a correspondence I held with old General Lamarre, about the restoration of the Bourbons – a subject, I’m certain, that half the officers in the army were interested in, and, even to Bonaparte himself, deeply implicated in, too. No matter, my treason, as they called it, was too flagrant, and I had just twenty minutes’ start of the order which was issued for my arrest to make my escape into Holland. There I managed to pass several months in various disguises, part of the time being employed as a Dutch spy, and actually charged with an order to discover tidings of myself, until I finally got away in an Antwerp schooner to New York. From that time my life has been nothing but a struggle – a hard one, too, with actual want, for in this land of enterprise and activity, mere intelligence, without some craft or calling, will do nothing.

‘I tried fifty things: to teach riding – and when I mounted into the saddle, I forgot everything but my own enjoyment, and caracoled, and plunged, and passaged, till the poor beast hadn’t a leg to stand on; fencing – and I got into a duel with a rival teacher, and ran him through the neck, and was obliged to fly from Halifax; French – I made love to my pupil, a pretty-looking Dutch girl, whose father didn’t smile on our affection; and so on, I descended from a dancing-master to a waiter, a laquais de place, and at last settled down as a barber, which brilliant speculation I had just determined to abandon this very night, for to-morrow morning, Maurice, I start for New York and France again; ay, boy, and you’ll go with me. This is no land for either of us.’

‘But I have found happiness, at least contentment, here,’ said I gravely.

‘What! play the hypocrite with an old comrade! shame on you, Maurice,’ cried he. ‘It is these confounded locks have perverted the boy,’ added he, jumping up; and before I knew what he was about, he had shorn my hair, in two quick cuts of the scissors, close to the head. ‘There,’ said he, throwing the cut-off hair towards me, ‘there lies all your saintship; depend upon it, boy, they ‘d hunt you out of the settlement if you came back to them cropped in this fashion.’

‘But you return to certain death, Santron,’ said I; ‘your crime is too recent to be forgiven or forgotten.’

‘Not a bit of it; Fouché, Cassaubon, and a dozen others, now in office, were deeper than I was. There’s not a public man in France could stand an exposure, or hazard recrimination. It’s a thieves’ amnesty at this moment, and I must not lose the opportunity. I’ll show you letters that will prove it, Maurice; for, poor and ill-fed as I am, I like life just as well as ever I did. I mean to be a general of division one of these days, and so will you too, lad, if there’s any spirit left in you.’

Thus did Santron rattle on, sometimes of himself and his own future; sometimes discussing mine; for while talking, he had contrived to learn all the chief particulars of my history, from the time of my sailing from La Rochelle for Ireland.

The unlucky expedition afforded him great amusement, and he was never weary of laughing at all our adventures and mischances in Ireland. Of Humbert, he spoke as a fourth or fifth-rate man, and actually shocked me by all the heresies he uttered against our generals, and the plan of campaign; but, perhaps, I could have borne even these better than the sarcasms and sneers at the little life of ‘the settlement.’ He treated all my efforts at defence as mere hypocrisy, and affected to regard me as a mere knave, that had traded on the confiding kindness of these simple villagers. I could not undeceive him on this head; nor, what was more, could I satisfy my own conscience that he was altogether in the wrong; for, with a diabolical ingenuity, he had contrived to hit on some of the most vexatious doubts which disturbed my mind, and instinctively to detect the secret cares and difficulties that beset me. The lesson should never be lost on us, that the devil was depicted as a sneerer! I verily believe the powers of temptation have no such advocacy as sarcasm. Many can resist the softest seductions of vice; many are proof against all the blandishments of mere enjoyment, come in what shape it will; but how few can stand firm against the assaults of clever irony, or hold fast to their convictions when assailed by the sharp shafts of witty depreciation!

I am ashamed to own how little I could oppose to all his impertinences about our village and its habits; or how impossible I found it not to laugh at his absurd descriptions of a life which, without having ever witnessed, he depicted with a rare accuracy. He was shrewd enough not to push this ridicule offensively; and long before I knew it, I found myself regarding, with his eyes, a picture in which, but a few months back, I stood as a foreground figure. I ought to confess, that no artificial aid was derived from either good cheer or the graces of hospitality; we sat by a miserable lamp, in a wretchedly cold chamber, our sole solace some bad cigars, and a can of flat, stale cider.

‘I have not a morsel to offer you to eat, Maurice, but to-morrow we’ll breakfast on my razors, dine on that old looking-glass, and sup on two hard brushes and the wig!’

Such were the brilliant pledges, and we closed a talk which the nickering lamp at last put an end to.

A broken, unconnected conversation followed for a little time, but at length, worn out and wearied, each dropped off to sleep – Eugène on the straw settle, and I in the old chair – never to awake till the bright sun was streaming in between the shutters, and dancing merrily on the tiled floor.

An hour before I awoke, he had completed the sale of all his little stock-in-trade, and with a last look round the spot where he had passed some months of struggling poverty, out we sailed into the town.

‘We’ll breakfast at Jonathan Hone’s,’ said Santron.

‘It’s the first place here. I’ll treat you to rump-steaks, pumpkin pie, and a gin twister that will astonish you. Then, while I’m arranging for our passage down the Hudson, you’ll see the hospitable banker, and tell him how to forward all his papers, and so forth, to the settlement, with your respectful compliments and regrets, and the rest of it.’

‘But am I to take leave of them in this fashion?’ asked I.

‘Unless you want me to accompany you there, I think it’s by far the best way,’ said he laughingly. ‘If, however, you think that my presence and companionship will add any lustre to your position, say the word, and I’m ready. I know enough of the barber’s craft now to make up a head en Puritain, and, if you wish, I’ll pledge myself to impose upon the whole colony.’

Here was a threat there was no mistaking; and any imputation of ingratitude on my part were far preferable to the thought of such an indignity. He saw his advantage at once, and boldly declared that nothing should separate us.

‘The greatest favour, my dear Maurice, you can ever expect at my hands is, never to speak of this freak of yours; or, if I do, to say that you performed the part to perfection.’