A Day's Ride: A Life's Romance

The sliding window at my back was again drawn aside, and I heard Miss Herbert’s voice, —

“If I am not giving you too much trouble, sir, would you kindly see if I have not dropped a bracelet – a small jet bracelet – in the coupé?”

“I ‘m in the dark here, but I’ll do my best to find it.”

“We are very nearly so, too,” said she; “and Mrs. Keats is fast asleep, quite unmindful of the thunder.”

With some struggling I managed to get down on my knees, and was soon engaged in a very vigorous search. To aid me, I lighted a lucifer match, and by its flickering glare I saw right in front of me that beautiful pale face, enclosed as it were in a frame by the little window. She blushed at the fixedness of my gaze, for I utterly forgot myself in my admiration, and stared as though at a picture. My match went out, and I lit another. Alas! there she was still, and I could not force myself to turn away, but gazed on in rapture.

“I’m sorry to give you this trouble, sir,” said she, in some confusion. “Pray never mind it. It will doubtless be found this evening when we arrive.”

Another lucifer, and now I pretended to be in most eager pursuit; but somehow my eyes would look up and rest upon her sweet countenance.

“A diamond bracelet, you said?” muttered I, not knowing what I was saying.

“No, sir, mere jet, and of no value whatever, save to myself. I am really distressed at all the inconvenience I have occasioned you. I entreat you to think no more of it.”

My match was out, and I had not another. “Was ever a man robbed of such ecstasy for a mere pennyworth of stick and a little sulphur? O Fortune! is not this downright cruelty?”

As I mumbled my complaints, I searched away with an honest zeal, patting the cushions all over, and poking away into most inscrutable pockets and recesses, while she, in a most beseeching tone, apologized for her request and besought me to forget it.

“Found! found!” cried I, in true delight, as I chanced upon the treasure at my feet.

“Oh, sir, you have made me so happy, and I am so much obliged, and so grateful to you!”

“Not another word, I beseech you,” whispered I; “you are actually turning my head with ecstasy. Give me your hand, let me clasp it on your arm, and I am repaid.”

“Will you kindly pass it to me, sir, through the window?” said she, timidly.

“Ah!” cried I, in anguish, “your gratitude has been very fleeting.”

She muttered something I could not catch, but I heard the rustle of her sleeve against the window-frame, and dark as it was, pitch dark, I knew her hand was close to me. Opening the bracelet, I passed it round her wrist as reverently as though it were the arm of a Queen of Spain, one touch of whom is high treason. I trembled so, that it was some seconds before I could make the clasp meet. This done, I felt she was withdrawing her hand, when, with something like that headlong impulse by which men set their lives on one chance, I seized the fingers in my grasp, and implanted two rapturous kisses on them. She snatched her hand hastily away, closed the window with a sharp bang, and I was alone once more in my darkness, but in such a flutter of blissful delight that even the last reproving gesture could scarcely pain me. It mattered little to me that day that the lightning felled a great pine and threw it across the road, that the torrents were so swollen that we only could pass them with crowds of peasants around the carriage with ropes and poles to secure it, that four oxen were harnessed in front of our leaders to enable us to meet the hurricane, or that the postboys were paid treble their usual fare for all their perils to life and limb. I cared for none of these, Enough for me that, on this day, I can say with Schiller,

“Ich habe genossen das irdische Gluck,Ich habe gelebt and geliebt!”

CHAPTER XXIII. JEALOUSY UNSUPPORTED BY COURAGE

We arrived at a small inn on the bordera of the Titi-see at nightfall; and though the rain continued to come down unceasingly, and huge masses of cloud hung half-way down the mountain, I could see that the spot was highly picturesque and romantic. Before I could descend from my lofty eminence, so strapped and buttoned and buckled up was I, the ladies had time to get out and reach their rooms. When I asked to be shown mine, the landlord, in a very free-and-easy tone, told me that there was nothing for me but a double-bedded room, which I must share with another traveller. I scouted this proposition at once with a degree of force, and, indeed, of violence, that I fancied must prove irresistible; but the stupid German, armed with native impassiveness, simply said, “Take it or leave it, it’s nothing to me,” and left me to look after his business. I stormed and fumed. I asked the chambermaid if she knew who I was, and sent for the Hausknecht to tell him that all Europe should ring with this indignity. I more than hinted that the landlord had sealed his own doom, and that his miserable cabaret had seen its last days of prosperity.

I asked next, where was the Jew pedler? I felt certain he was a fellow with pencil-cases and pipe-beads, who owned the other half of the territory. Could he not be bought up? He would surely sleep in the cow-house, if it were too wet to go up a tree!

François came to inform me that he was out fishing; that he fished all day, and only came home after dark; his man had told him so much.

“His man? Why, has he a servant?” asked I.

“He’s not exactly like a servant, sir; but a sort of peasant with a green jacket and a tall hat and leather gaiters, like a Tyrolese.”

“Strolling actors, I ‘ll be sworn,” mattered I; “fellows taking a week’s holiday on their way to a new engagement How long have they been here?”

“Came on Monday last in the diligence, and are to remain till the twentieth; two florins a day they give for everything.”

“What nation are they?”

“Germans, sir, regular Germans; never a pipe ont of their mouths, master and man. I learned all this from his servant, for they have put up a bed for me in his room.”

A sudden thought now struck me: “Why should not François give up his bed to this stranger, and occupy the one in my room?” This arrangement would suit me better, and it ought to be all the same to Hamlet or Groetz, or whatever he was. “Just lounge about the door, François,” said I, “till he comes back; and when you see him, open the thing to him, civilly, of course; and if a crown piece, or even two, will help the negotiation, slip it slyly into his hand. You understand?”

François winked like a man who had corrupted customhouse officers in his time, and even bribed bigger functionaries at a pinch.

“If he’s in trade, you know, François, just hint that if he sends in his pack in the course of the evening, the ladies might possibly take a fancy to something.”

Another wink.

“And throw out – vaguely, of course, very vaguely – that we are swells, but in strict incog.”

A great scoundrel was François; he was a Swiss, and could cheat any one, and, like a regular rogue, never happier than when you gave him a mission of deceit or duplicity. In a word, when I gave him his instructions, I regarded the negotiation as though it were completed, and now addressed myself to the task of looking after our supper, which, with national obstinacy, the landlord declared could not be ready before nine o’clock. As usual, Mrs. Keats had gone to bed immediately on arriving; but when sending me a “good-night” by her maid, she added, “that whenever supper was served, Miss Herbert would come down.”

We had no sitting-room save the common room of the inn, a long, low-ceilinged, dreary chamber, with a huge green-tile stove in one corner, and down the centre a great oak table, which might have served about forty guests. At one end of this three covers were laid for us, the napkins enclosed in bone circlets, and the salt in great leaden receptacles, like big ink-bottles; a very ancient brass lamp giving its dim radiance over all. It was wearisome to sit down on the straight-backed wooden chairs, and not less irksome to walk on the gritty, sanded floor, and so I lounged in one of the windows, and watched the rain. As I looked, I saw the figure of a man with a fishing-basket and rod on his shoulder approaching the house. I guessed at once it was our stranger, and, opening the window a few inches, I listened to hear the dialogue between him and François. The window was enclosed in the same porch as the door, so that I could hear a good deal of what passed. François accosted him familiarly, questioned him as to his sport, and the size of the fish he had taken. I could not hear the reply, but I remarked that the stranger emptied his basket, and was despatching the contents in different directions: some were for the curé, and some for the postmaster, some for the brigadier of the gendarmerie, and one large trout for the miller’s daughter.

“A good-looking wench, I’ll be sworn,” said François, as he heard the message delivered.

Again the stranger said something, and I thought, from the tone, angrily, and François responded; and then I saw them walk apart for a few seconds, during which François seemed to have all the talk to himself, – a good omen, as it appeared to me, of success, and a sure warranty that the treaty was signed. Francois, however, did not come to report progress, and so I closed the window and sat down.

“So you have got company to-night, Master Ludwig,” said the stranger, as he entered, followed by the host, who speedily seemed to whisper that one of the arrivals was then before him. The stranger bowed stiffly but courteously to me, which I returned not less haughtily; and I now saw that he was a man about thirty-five, but much freckled, with a light-brown beard and moustache. On the whole, a good-looking fellow, with a very upright carriage, and something of a cavalry soldier in the swing of his gait.

“Would you like it at once, Herr Graf?” said the host, obsequiously.

“Oh, he ‘s a count, is he?” said I, with a sneer to myself. “These countships go a short way with me.”

“You had better consult your other guests; I am ready when they are,” said the stranger.

Now, though the speech was polite and even considerate, I lost sight of the courtesy in thinking that it implied we were about to sup in common, and that the third cover was meant for him.

“I say, landlord,” said I, “you don’t intend to tell me that you have no private sitting-room, but that ladies of condition must needs come down and sup here with” – I was going to say, “Heaven knows who;” but I halted, and said – “with the general company.”

“That, or nothing!” was the sturdy response. “The guests in this house eat here, or don’t eat at all; eh, Herr Graf?”

“Well, so far as my experience goes, I can corroborate you,” said the stranger, laughing; “though, you may remember, I have often counselled you to make some change.”

“That you have; but I don’t want to be better than my father and my grandfather; and the Archduke Charles stopped here in their time, and never quarrelled with his treatment.”

I told the landlord to apprise the young lady whenever supper was ready, and I walked to a distant part of the room and sat down.

In about two minutes after, Miss Herbert appeared, and the supper was served at once. I had not met her since the incident of the bracelet, and I was shocked to see how cold she was in her manner, and how resolute in repelling the most harmless familiarity towards her.

I wanted to explain to her that it was through no fault of mine we were to have the company of that odious stranger, that it was one of the disagreeables of these wayside hostels, and to be borne with patience, and that though he was a stage-player, or a sergeant of dragoons, he was reasonably well-bred and quiet I did contrive to mumble out some of this explanation; but, instead of attending to it, I saw her eyes following the stranger, who had just draped a large riding-cloak over a clothes-horse behind her chair, to serve as a screen. Thanks are all very well, but I ‘m by no means certain that gratitude requires such a sweet glance as that, not to mention that I saw the expression in her eyes for the first time.

I thought the soup would choke me. I almost hoped it might. Othello was a mild case of jealousy compared to me, and I felt that strangling would not half glut my vengeance. And how they talked! – he complimenting her on her accent, and she telling him how her first governess was a Hanoverian from Celle, where they are all such purists. There was nothing they did not discuss in those detestable gutturals, and as glibly as if it bad been a language meet for human lips. I could not eat a mouthful, but I drank and watched them. The fellow was not long in betraying himself: he was soon deep in the drama. He knew every play of Schiller by heart, and quoted the Wallenstein, the Bobbers, Don Carlos, and Maria Stuart at will; so, too, was he familiar with Goethe and Leasing. He had all the swinging intonation of the boards, and declaimed so very professionally that, as he concluded a passage, I cried out, without knowing it, —

“Take that for your benefit, – it’s the best you have given yet.”

Oh, Lord, how they laughed! She covered up her face and smothered it; but he lay back, and, holding the table with both hands, he positively shouted and screamed aloud. I would have given ten years of life for the courage to have thrown my glass of wine in his face; but it was no use. Nature had been a niggard to me in that quarter, and I had to sit and hear it, – exactly so, sit and hear it, – while they made twenty attempts to recover their gravity and behave like ladies and gentlemen, and when, no sooner would they look towards me, than off they were again as bad as before.

I revolved a dozen cutting sarcasms, all beginning with, “Whenever I feel assured that you have sufficiently regained the customary calm of good society;” but the dessert was served ere I could complete the sentence, and now they were deep in the lyric poets, Uhland, and Körner, and Freiligrath, and the rest of them. As I listened to their enthusiasm, I wondered why people never went into raptures over a cold in the head. But it was not to end here: there was an old harpsichord in the room, and this he opened and set to work on in that fearful two-handed fashion your German alone understands. The poor old crippled instrument shook on its three legs, while the fourth fell clean off, and the loose wires jangled and jarred like knives in a tray; but he only sang the louder, and her ecstasies grew all the greater too.

Heaven reward you, dear old Mrs. Keats, when you sent word down that you could n’t sleep a wink, and begging them to “send that noisy band something and let them go away;” and then Miss Herbert wished him a sweet goodnight, and he accompanied her to the door, and then there was more good-night, and I believe I had a short fit; but when I came to myself, he was sitting smoking his cigar opposite me.

“You are no relative, no connection of the young lady who has just left the room?” said he to me with a grave manner, so significant of something under it that I replied hastily, “None, – none whatever.”

“Was that servant who spoke to me in the porch, as I came in this evening, yours?”

“Yes.” This I said more boldly, as I suspected he was coming to the question François had opened.

“He mentioned to me,” said he, slowly, and puffing his cigar at easy intervals, “that you desire your servant should sleep in the same room with you. I am always happy to meet the wishes of courteous fellow-travellers, and so I have ordered my servant to give you his bed; he will sleep upstairs in what was intended for you. Good-night.” And with an insolent nod he lounged out of the room and left me.

CHAPTER XXIV. MY CANDOR AS AN AUTOBIOGRAPHER

My reader is sufficiently acquainted with me by this time to know that there is one quality in me on which he can always count with safety, – my candor! There may be braver men and more ingenious men; there may be, I will not dispute it, persons more gifted with oratorical powers, better linguists, better mathematicians, and with higher acquirements in art; but I take my stand upon candor, and say, there never lived the man, ancient or modern, who presented a more open and undisguised section of himself than I have done, am doing, and hope to do to the end. And what, I would ask you, is the reason why we have hitherto made so little progress in that greatest of all sciences, – the knowledge of human nature? Is it not because we are always engaged in speculating on what goes on in the hearts of others, guessing, as it were, what people are doing next door, instead of honestly recording what takes place in their own house?

You think this same candor is a small quality. Well, show me one thoroughly honest autobiography. Of all the men who have written their own memoirs, it is fair to presume that some may have lacked personal courage, some been deficient in truthfulness, some forgetful of early friendships, and so on. Yet where will you find me one, I only ask one, who declares, “I was a coward, I never could speak truth, I was by nature ungrateful”?

Now, it would be exactly through such confessions as these our knowledge of humanity would be advanced. The ship that makes her voyage without the loss of a spar or a rope, teaches little; but there is a whole world of information in the log of the vessel with a great hole in her, all her masts carried away, the captain invariably drunk, and the crew mutinous; then we hear of energy and daring and ready-wittedness, marvellous resource, and indomitable perseverance; then we come to estimate a variety of qualities that are only evoked by danger. Just as some gallant skipper might say, “I saw that we couldn’t weather the point, and so I dropped anchor in thirty fathoms, and determined to trust all to my cables;” or, “I perceived that we were settling down, so I crowded all sail on, resolved to beach her.” In the same spirit I would like to read in some personal memoir, “Knowing that I could not rely on my courage; feeling that if pressed hard, I should certainly have told a lie – ” Oh, if we only could get honesty like this! If some great statesman, some grand foreground figure of his age would sit down to give his trials as they really occurred, we should learn more of life from one such volume than we glean from all the mock memoirs we have been reading for centuries!

It is the special pleading of these records that makes them so valueless; the writer always is bent on making out his case. It is the eternal representation of that spectacle said to be so pleasing to the gods, – the good man struggling with adversity. But what we want to see is the weak man, the frail man, the man who has to fight adversity with an old rusty musket and a flint lock, instead of an Enfield rifle, loading at the breech!

I ‘d not give a rush to see Blondin cross the Falls of Niagara on a tight-rope; but I’d cross the Atlantic to see, «ay, the Lord Mayor or the Master of the Rolls try it.

Now, much-respected reader, do not for a moment suppose that I have, even in my most vainglorious raptures, ever imagined that I was here in these records supplying the void I have pointed out. Remember that I have expressly told you such confessions, to be valuable, ought to come from a great man. Painful as the avowal is, I am not a great man! Elements of greatness I have in me, it is true; but there are wants, deficiencies, small little details, many of them, – rivets and bolts, as it were, – without which the machinery can’t work; and I know this, and I feel it.

This digression has all grown out of my unwillingness to mention what mention I must, – that I passed my night at the little inn on the table where we supped. I had not courage to assert the right to my bed in the Count’s room; and so I wrapped myself in my cloak, and with my carpetbag for a pillow, tried to sleep. It was no use; the most elastic spring-mattress and a down cushion would have failed that night to lull me! I was outraged beyond endurance: she had slighted, he had insulted me! Such a provocation as he gave me could have but one expiation. He could not, by any pretext, refuse me satisfaction. But was I as ready to ask it? Was it so very certain that I would insist upon this reparation? He was certain to wound, he might kill me! I believe I cried over that thought. To be cut off in the bud of one’s youth, in the very spring-time of one’s enjoyment, – I could not say of one’s utility, – to go down unnoticed to the grave, never appreciated, never understood, with vulgar and mistaken judgments upon one’s character and motives! I thought my heart would burst with the affliction of such a picture, and I said, “No, Potts, live; and reply to such would-be slanderers by the exercise of the qualities of your great nature.” Numberless beautiful little episodes came thronging to my memory of good men, men whose personal gallantry had won them a world-wide renown, refusing to fight a duel. “We are to storm the citadel to-morrow, Colonel,” said one; “let us see which of us will be first up the breach.” How I loved that fellow for his speech; and I tortured my mind how, as there was no citadel to be carried by assault, I could apply its wisdom to my own case. What if I were to say, “Count, the world is before us, – a world full of trials and troubles. With the common fortune of humanity, we are certain each of us to have our share. What if we meet on this spot, say ten years hence, and see who has best acquitted himself in the conflict?” I wonder what he would say. The Germans are a strange, imaginative, dreamy sort of folk. Is it not likely that he would be struck by a notion so undeniably original? Is it not probable that he would seize my hand with rapture, and say, “Ja! I agree”? Still, it is possible that he might not; he might be one of those vulgar matter-of-fact creatures who will regard nothing through the tinted glass of fancy; he might ridicule the project, and tell it at breakfast as a joke. I felt almost smothered as this notion crossed me.

I next bethought me of the privileges of my rank. Could I, as an R. H., accept the vulgar hazards of a personal encounter? Would not such conduct be derogatory in one to whom great destinies might one day be committed? Not that I lent myself, be it remarked, to the delusion of being a prince; but that I felt, if the line of conduct would be objectionable to men in my rank and condition, it inevitably followed that it must be bad. What I could neither do as the descendant of St. Louis, or the son of Peter Potts, must needs be wrong. These were the grievous meditations of that long, long night; and though I arose from the hard table, weary and with aching bones, I blessed the pinkish-gray light that ushered in the day. I had scarcely completed a very rapid toilet, when François came with a message from Mrs. Keats, “hoping I had rested well, and begging to know at what hour it was my pleasure to continue the journey.” There was an evident astonishment in the fellow’s face at the embassy with which he was charged; and though he delivered the message with reasonable propriety, there was a certain something in his look that said, “What delusion is this you have thrown around the old lady?”

“Say that I am ready, François; that I am even impatient to be off, and the sooner we start the better.”

This I uttered with all my heart; for I was eager to get away before the odious German should be stirring, and could not subdue my anxiety to avoid meeting him again. There was every reason to expect that we should get off unnoticed, and I hastened out myself to order the horses and stimulate the postilions to greater activity. This was no labor of love, I promise you! The sluggardly inertness of that people passes all belief; entreaties, objurgations, curses, even bribes could not move them. They never admitted such a possibility as haste, and stumped about in their wooden shoes or iron-bound boots, searching for articles of horse-gear under bundles of hay or stacks of firewood, as though it was the very first time in their lives that post-horses had ever been required in that locality. “Make a great people out of such materials as these!” muttered I; “what rubbish to imagine it! How, with such intolerable apathy, are they to be moved? Where everything proceeds at the same regulated slowness, how can justice ever overtake crime? When can truth come up with falsehood? Whichever starts first here, must inevitably win.” To urge the creatures on by example, I assisted with my own hands to put on the harness; not, I will own, with much advantage to speed, for I put the collar on upside down, and, in revenge for the indignity, the beast planted one of his feet upon me, and almost drove the cock of his shoe through my instep. Almost mad with pain and passion, I limped away into the garden, and sat down in a damp summer-house. A sleepless night, a lazy ostler, and a bruised foot are, after all, not stunning calamities; but there are moments when our jarred nerves jangle at the slightest touch, and even the most trivial inconveniences grow to the size of afflictions.