Hammer and Anvil Part 9

"Why so punctilious about a trifle?" he asked. "There is no need for you to go to your room for money; here is enough."

He knew that my whole stock of cash did not amount to quite a _thaler_, for I had told him so the previous evening. I blushed crimson, but had not the courage to contradict my kind host's generous falsehood. I drew up my chair with the air of a man who has no wish to spoil sport, and began to play.

Cautiously at first, with small stakes, and with the firm determination to remain perfectly cool; but before long the fever of gaming began to fire my brain. My heart beat ever quicker and quicker, my head and my eyes seemed burning. While the cards were dealing I poured down gla.s.s after gla.s.s of wine to moisten my parched throat, and it was with a shaking hand that I gathered up my winnings. And I won almost incessantly; if a card was turned against me, the next few turns brought me in a three-fold or a five-fold gain. My agitation almost suffocated me as the money before me increased to a larger sum than I had ever before seen in a heap--two or three hundred _thalers_, as I estimated it in my mind.

Presently my luck came to a pause. I ceased winning, but did not lose; and then I began to lose slowly at first, then faster and faster. Cold chills ran over me, as one after another of the large notes pa.s.sed into the banker's hands; but I took care not to imitate the behavior of Herr von Granow, which had struck me so repulsively. Like Herr von Trantow, I lost without the slightest change of countenance, and my calmness was praised by my host, who continued encouraging me. My stock of money had melted away to one-half, when Hans von Trantow declared with a yawn that he was too tired to play any longer. Von Granow said it was not late; but the candles burnt to the sockets, and the great clock on the wall, which pointed to three, told a different story. The two guests lighted fresh cigars, and drove off in their carriages, which had long been waiting at the door, after having arranged a shooting expedition, in which I was to join, for the following day.

My host and I returned to the room, which reeked with the fumes of wine and the smoke of cigars, where old Christian, for whom the difference between night and day seemed to have no existence, was busy clearing up. Von Zehren threw open the window and looked out. I joined him; he laid his hand upon my shoulder and said: "How gloriously the stars are s.h.i.+ning, and how delicious the air is! And there"--he pointed back into the room, "how horrible--disgusting--stifling! Why cannot one play faro by starlight, inhaling the perfume of wall-flowers and mignonette? And why, after every merry night, must repentance come in the form of an old man shaking his head as he counts the emptied bottles and sweeps up the ashes? How stupid it is; but we must not give ourselves gray hairs fretting about it--they will come soon enough of themselves. And now do you go to bed. I see you have a hundred things on your mind, but to-morrow is a new day, and if not--so much the better. Good-night, and pleasant rest."

But it was long ere my host's kind wish was accomplished. A real witch-sabbath of beautiful and hideous figures danced in the wildest gyrations before my feverish, half-sleeping, half-waking eyes: Constance, her father, his guests, the dark form in the park, my father, Professor Lederer, and Smith Pinnow--and all appealing to me to save them from some danger or other;--Professor Lederer especially from two thick lexicons, which were really two great oysters that gaped with open sh.e.l.ls at the lean professor, while the commerzienrath stood in the background, nearly dying with laughter:--and all whirling and swarming together, and caressing and threatening, and charming and terrifying me, until at last, as the gray dawn began to light the ragged hangings of the chamber, a profound slumber dispersed the phantoms.

CHAPTER IX.

If, according to the unanimous report of travellers by that route, the road to h.e.l.l is paved with good intentions, I am convinced that several square rods of it are my work, and that the greater part of it was laid down in the first fortnight of my stay at Zehrendorf. There could, indeed, scarcely have been a place where everything essential to this easy and pleasant occupation was provided in ampler abundance. Wherever one went, or stood, or turned the eyes, there lay the materials ready to hand; and I was too young, too inexperienced, and I will venture to add, too good-hearted, not to fall to work with all my energy. Of what unspeakable folly I was guilty in undertaking to set right the disordered and disjointed world in which I was now moving, after I had already shown that I could not adjust myself to the correct and orderly world from which I came--this thought did not seize me till long afterwards.

No; I was thoroughly convinced of my sublime mission; and I thanked my propitious star that had so gloriously brought me from the harsh slavery of the school and of my father's house, where I was pining away; from the oppressive bonds of Philistine a.s.sociations which hampered the free flight of my heroic soul, into this freedom of the desert which seemed to have no bounds, and behind which must lie a Canaan which I was gallantly resolved to conquer--a land flowing with the milk of friends.h.i.+p and with the honey of love.

True, the letter which soon arrived, with a great box containing my personal chattels, from my father to Herr von Zehren, for a while gave me pause. The letter comprised but very few lines, to the effect that he--my father--was fully convinced of the impossibility of ever leading me by his road to any good end, and that he was compelled to give me over, for weal or woe, to my own devices; only hoping that my disobedience and my obstinacy might not be visited upon me too heavily.

Herr von Zehren showed me the letter, and as he observed my grave look upon reading it, asked me, "Do you wish to go back?" adding immediately, "Do not do it. That is no place for you. The old gentleman wanted to make a draught-horse out of you, but, tall and strong as you are, that is not your vocation. You are a hunter, for whom no ditch is too wide, and no hedge too high. Come along! I saw a covey of some two dozen over in the croft; we will have them before dinner."

He was right, I thought. I felt that my father had given me up too soon, that he might have allowed me one chance more, and that, as it was, he had forfeited the right to threaten me in addition with the retribution of heaven. And yet it pained me, when an hour or so later Herr von Zehren, who had used up all his wads, took my father's letter from his pocket, and tearing it up, rammed it down both barrels of his gun, with the jesting phrase that necessity knows no law. I could not help feeling as if some misfortune would happen. But the gun did not burst, the birds dropped, and nothing remained of the letter but a smouldering sc.r.a.p which fell in some dry stubble, and upon which Herr von Zehren set his foot as he thrust the birds into his game-bag.

If I had any doubt left whether I was right in setting myself upon my own feet, as I phrased it, a letter which I received from Arthur was only too well adapted to confirm me in my notions of my finally-won liberty.

"A lucky dog you always were," he wrote. "You run away from school, and they let you go, as if it was a matter of course; while me they catch as if I were a runaway slave, cram me in the dungeon for three days, every hour cast up to me my disgraceful conduct, and in every way make my life a perfect misery to me. Even my father carries on as if I was guilty of heaven knows what; only mamma is sensible, and says I mustn't take it too much to heart, and that papa will have to come round, or the professor will not let me go into the upper cla.s.s, and there will be more botherations. It is really a shame that I, just because my uncle, the commerzienrath, wills it so, must go through the final examination, while Albert von Zitzewitz, no older than I, is at the cadets' school, and has a pair of colors already. What has my uncle to do with me, anyhow? Papa says that he will not be able to support me during my lieutenancy without the help he expects from my uncle; and that is likely too, for things get tighter with us every day, and papa went quite wild yesterday when he had to pay sixteen _thalers_ for a glove-bill of mine. If mamma did not help me now and then, I don't know what I should do; but she has nothing, and said to me only yesterday that she did not know what would happen at New Year, when all the bills came in.

"Now you might help me out of all this trouble. Papa says that Uncle Malte never looks at money when he happens to have any, and anybody that would hit the lucky moment might get as much from him as they pleased. You, lucky fellow, are now with him all the time, and you might watch your chance, for the sake of an old friend, and slip in a good word for me. Or better, tell him that you have some old debts that you are worried about, and wouldn't he lend you fifty or a hundred _thalers_, and then do you send it to me, for you can't want it, you know. You'll never come back here, whatever happens, for you cannot imagine the way people here talk about you. Lederer prays an extra five minutes every day for the strayed lamb--that's what he calls you, you old sinner. Justizrath Heckepfennig said that if ever it was written in a mortal's face that he would die in his shoes, it is in yours. In Emilie's coterie it was resolved to tear out of all their alb.u.ms the leaves on which you had immortalized yourself; and at my uncle's, day before yesterday, there was a regular scene about you. Uncle said at the table that you must take powerfully long strides if you meant to outrun the ---- and here he made a sign, you understand, at which Hermine began to cry terribly, and Fraulein Duff said it was a shame to talk that way before a child. So you see you have a pair of firm friends among the females. You always did have, and have still, the most unaccountable luck in that quarter. Don't break my pretty cousin's heart, you lucky dog!

"P. S.--Papa once told me that Constance gets a small sum of money every year from an old Spanish aunt of hers. She certainly has no use for it. Maybe you could coax something from her--at all events, you might look into the matter a little."

As soon as I had read this letter, which offered me such an opportunity of heaping coals of fire on the head of my still-loved friend, I resolved to help him out of his difficulties with a part of the money I had won on that first evening; but this intention, which I cannot maintain to have been in any sense a good one, was destined never to be carried into execution. For the same evening Herr von Zehren gave his guests their revenge at Hans von Trantow's, and I lost not only all the money I had won with such palpitations, to the very last _thaler_, but a considerable sum besides, which my obliging host, who was again the winner, had forced upon me. This ill fortune, which I might have foreseen if I had had a grain more sense, struck me as a heavy blow. In spite of my frivolity, I had always been scrupulously conscientious in my small money-matters; had always paid my insignificant debts cheerfully and as promptly as possible; and as we were driving home at daybreak after this unlucky evening, I felt more wretched than I had ever done before. How could I ever be in a position to pay such a sum--especially now that I had resolved never again to touch a card?

How could I venture in broad daylight to look into the face of the man to whom I was already under so many obligations?

Herr von Zehren, who was in the best of humors, laughed aloud when, after some urging on his part, I confessed to him my trouble. "My dear George," said he--he had taken to calling me George altogether--"don't take it amiss, but you really are too absurd. Why, man, do you really think that I would for one instant hold you responsible for what you did at my express request? Whoever lends money to minors, does it, as everybody knows, at his own risk, and you certainly remember that I forced the money upon you. And why did I do it? Simply because it gave me pleasure, and because I liked to see your honest, glowing face across the table, and to compare it with Granow's hang-dog look and Trantow's stony stare. And when a young fellow that is my valued guest, to please me, accompanies me out shooting, or to the faro-table, and he has no money and no gun, it is right and fair and a matter of course that I should place my gun-room and purse at his disposal. And now say no more about the trifle, and give me a cigar if we have any left."

I gave him his cigar-case, which he had handed over to my keeping, and murmured that his kindness crushed me to the earth, and that my only consolation was in the trust that an opportunity might yet offer of my repaying the obligation in some way or other. He laughed again at this, and said I was as proud as Lucifer, but he liked me all the better for it; and as for the possibility of my repaying the obligation, as I called it, he was a man in whose life accidents and lucky hits and mishaps and chances of all kinds had played so important a part, that it would be a wonder if, among all the rest, the chance I so longed for did not turn up. So until then we would let the matter rest.

In this airy way he tried to quiet the twinges of my conscience, but he only succeeded in part; and I went to sleep, and awaked a couple of hours later, with the resolution to set decisively about the execution of another resolution, namely, in my capacity of pupil to devote myself to the neglected estate; to acquire, with the utmost possible dispatch, a complete insight into all matters of rural economy, and by the help of this knowledge and of untiring diligence, and the exertion of all my faculties, to change this ruined place in the shortest possible time--say one or two years--into a paradise, and so relieve my kind host from the necessity of winning at the card-table the resources which he could not win from his fields.

I at once devoted my attention to the forlorn-looking stables, to the cattle-sheds, only tenanted by a few wretched specimens of the bovine genus, and to a score of melancholy sheep; so that Herr von Zehren, who had an acute sense of the comic, could never get done laughing at me, until an incident occurred which gave him an opportunity of speaking a serious word with me, which to a certain extent damped the ardor of my economical studies.

That old man whom I met in the park on the first day after my arrival (whose real name was Christian Halterman, though he always went by the name of Old Christian), in his capacity of under-bailiff, and in default of a master who paid any attention to the management, and of a head-bailiff, a post that was not filled--was the wretched chief of the whole wretched establishment. Such orders as were given emanated from him; though it required no extraordinary perspicuity of vision to see that of the whole bandit-looking gang that called themselves laborers, every man did just what pleased him. When the old man, as I had once or twice seen, fell into an impotent rage, and more to relieve his wrath than in the hope of any effectual result, scolded and stormed in his singular, creaking, parrot-like voice, they laughed in his wrinkled face and kept on their own way, or sometimes even openly insulted him.

Their ringleader in this insolence was a certain John Swart, commonly called "Long Jock," a great, tall, broad-shouldered fellow, with long arms like an ape's, whose physiognomy would probably have appeared to Justizrath Heckepfennig more unprepossessing even than mine, and of whose matchless strength the others told all sorts of wonderful stories.

I came one morning upon this man, quarrelling again with Old Christian.

The subject of dispute was a load of corn which the old man wanted thrown off, and which the other refused to touch. The scene was the straw-littered s.p.a.ce before the barn-door, and the spectators a half-dozen fellows who openly sided with Long Jock, and applauded every coa.r.s.e jeer of his with whinnying laughter.

I had observed the whole affair from a distance, and my blood was already boiling with indignation when I reached the spot. Thrusting a couple of the laughers roughly aside, I confronted Long Jock and asked him if he intended to obey Old Christian's order or not. Jock answered me with an insolent laugh and a coa.r.s.e word. In a moment we were both rolling in the trampled straw, and in the next I was kneeling upon the breast of my vanquished antagonist, and made the unpleasantness of his position so apparent, that he first cried aloud for help, and then, seeing that the rest stood scared and motionless, and that none could deliver him out of my hand, begged for mercy like a craven.

I had just allowed him to rise, badly bruised and half strangled, when Herr von Zehren, who from his chamber-window had been a witness of the whole scene, came hurrying up. He told Long Jock that he had got no more than he richly deserved, and that he would do well to take a lesson from it for the future; reproved the others, but as I thought by no means so severely as their conduct demanded, then took my arm and led me a little aside, until we were out of hearing of the men, when he said, "It is all very well, George, that these fellows should know how strong you are; but I do not want to turn them against me by any repet.i.tion of the proof."

I looked at him in surprise.

"Yes," he went on, "you would have to repeat the process on a thousand other occasions, and not even your strength would suffice for such Herculean labor."

"Let us try that," I said.

"No; let us by no means try that," he answered.

"But the whole estate is going to ruin in this way," I cried, still under excitement. Herr von Zehren shrugged his shoulders, and said, "Well, it has not very far to go--two or three steps at the farthest.

And now you understand, George, the word is, Things as they are! As for the men, they are no bees in point of industry, but they have this much of bees about them, that when they are meddled with they are very apt to sting. So be a little more cautious in future."

He said it with a smile, but I perceived very clearly that he was thoroughly in earnest, and that the paradise I had been planning must be renounced. A paradise in which these brigand-looking malingerers slouched about at their pleasure, presented too glaring a contradiction to escape even my inexperienced eyes.

I cannot say that it cost me much to give up my plans of radical reformation. I had chiefly thrown myself into them because I hoped thus to free myself of my load of obligation to my host. If he did not choose to be paid in this way, it was clearly no fault of mine; and when he reiterated to me every day that he wanted nothing of me but myself, that my company was inexpressibly delightful to him, and, so to speak, a G.o.dsend, whose value he could not sufficiently prize--how could I help believing a.s.surances that were so flattering to me, and how could I withstand the allurements of a life that so exactly corresponded with my inclinations?

Fis.h.i.+ng and bird-catching--there is a.s.sociated with these words an ominous warning, whose justice I was destined to have a long time and a desperately serious occasion to verify; but even now I cannot condemn the fascination that clings to those occupations at which the proverb is aimed. Fish cannot be caught without gazing at the water, nor birds without gazing into the sky; and then the gliding waves and the flying clouds get a mysterious hold of us--or at all events did of me, from my very earliest youth. How often as a boy, coming home from school, did I go out of my way to sit for half an hour on the outermost end of the pier, and yield to the lulling influence of the light lapping of the waves at my feet. How often at my garret-window have I stood gazing over my wearisome books at the blue sky, where our neighbor's white pigeons were wheeling in ethereal circles. And I had always longed just for once to be able to listen to my fill to the plas.h.i.+ng waves, and gaze my fill at the drifting clouds. Then as I grew older, and could extend the range of my excursions, I enjoyed many a happy hour, many a boating-trip, many a ramble into the forest, many an expedition after water-fowl on the beach with one of Smith Pinnow's rusty fowling-pieces; but these at best were only for a few hours at a time, which were far from sufficient for the exuberant energies of youth, and were bought at the price of too much incarceration at home and at school, too much care, trouble, vexation, and anger.

Now for the first time in my life I enjoyed in full measure all that I had longed for all my life: forest and field and sea-sh.o.r.e, unlimited s.p.a.ce, and freedom to wander through all these at my pleasure from the earliest dawn until far in the night, and a companion besides than whom no fitter could be desired by a youth whose ambition it was to excel in these profitless, ruinous arts. The "Wild Zehren's" eye was perhaps not so keen nor his hand so steady as they had been ten or twenty years before, but he was still an excellent shot, and a master in everything belonging to field-sports. No one knew better than he where to find the game; no one had such well-trained dogs, or could handle them so well as he; no one could so skilfully take advantage of all the chances of the chase; and above all, no one was so delightful a companion. If his ardor during the sport carried all away with him, no one could so happily choose the resting-place in the cool edge of the forest or under the thin shade of a little copse by the side of a brook, or so charmingly entertain the tired party with mirth and jest and the most capitally-told stories. But he always seemed most charming to me when we two together were on a long tramp. If in a large company of sportsmen he could not conceal a certain imperious manner, and the better success of another filled him with envy which found vent in acrid sarcasms, there was no trace of all this when he was with me. He taught me all the arts, adroit expedients, and minor dexterities of woodcraft, in which he was so well skilled, and was delighted to find me so apt a scholar; indeed he often laughed heartily when I brought down a bird which he had marked for his own gun.

And then his talk, to which I always listened with new delight! It was the strangest mingling of excellently-told sporting stories and anecdotes, acute observations of nature, and biting satire upon mankind, especially the fairer half of it. In the life of the Wild Zehren, women had played an important and disastrous part. Like so many men of ardent pa.s.sions and fierce desires, he had probably never sought for true love, and now he charged it as a crime upon the s.e.x, that he had never found it; not even with that unhappy lady whom he had carried off from her home under such terrible circ.u.mstances, and who brought him nothing but her parents' curse, beauty which faded but too soon, and a narrow, bigoted spirit, uncultured and perhaps incapable of culture, which already bore in itself the germs of madness.

That he, at that time in his fortieth year, who had seen so much of the world, and had such wide experience, should perceive and acknowledge that the whole was his own fault, that he had to attribute to himself all the misery and misfortune ensuing upon so wicked and insensate a union--all this never occurred to him for a moment. He was the man more sinned against than sinning; he was the victim of his generosity; he had been cheated out of his life's happiness. How could a man have domestic habits who never had any enjoyment in his home? How could he learn the charm of a calm and peaceful life at the side of a woman restlessly tormented night and day by madness and superst.i.tion?

"Yes, yes, my dear George, I once had fine plans of my own: I meant to restore the old castle, laid waste in the time of the French invasion, to its ancient splendor; I thought to regain all the possessions that once belonged to the Zehrens; but it was not to be. It could not be, in the years when I was still young and full of hope; and do you think now to make a careful, economical proprietor of me, now that I am grown old and half savage? You buoyant, hopeful young---- See! there he goes!

That comes of talking. No; don't shoot now, he is too far. To heel, Diana, old girl! So frivolous in your old days? Be ashamed of yourself!

Yes; what I was going to say to you, George, was--beware of the women.

They are the cause of every man's misfortunes, just as they have been of mine. Take my brothers, for instance. There is the steuerrath, whom you know: the man was predestined to a fine career, for he is as fond of the s.h.i.+ning things of this world as any thievish magpie, cunning as a fox, smooth as an eel, and being a man without pa.s.sions of any sort, unpretentious, and so could easily hold his own. If he absolutely must marry, then, at a time when he made no pretensions, it should have been some plain sensible girl, who would have helped him make his way.

Instead of this, when he was a mere penniless barrister, he lets himself be caught by a Baroness Kippenreiter, the oldest of two surviving daughters of an army-contractor, made a baron, I believe, by the King of Sweden, who wasted in speculation the fortune that had enn.o.bled him, to the last farthing, and finally blew out his brains.

And now the steuerrath must take the consequences. A Baroness Kippenreiter will not seal her letters with a coat-of-arms twenty years old, and have the richest man in the province for a brother-in-law, for nothing. If such a thorough plebeian could rise to such distinction and to the dignity of commerzienrath, her husband, sprung from the oldest family in the province, must die prime minister at the very least. The lithe fox with no pretensions would have found his way into the poultry-house; but when with hunger and debt he is changed into a howling and ravenous wolf, he is hunted off with kicks, clubs, and stones. One of these days they will put him off with a pension, to be rid of him once for all.

"Then there is my younger brother Ernest. He is a genius; and like all geniuses, modest, magnanimous as Don Quixote, full of philanthropic crotchets, unpractical to the last degree, and helpless as a child. He should have taken a wife of strong mind, who would have brought order into his genial confusion, and had the ambition to make something out of him. He had the stuff in him, no doubt; it only wanted fas.h.i.+oning.

And what does he do? When a first lieutenant, twenty years old--for already, when he was little more than a boy, he had distinguished himself in the war for freedom, and came back covered with orders, so that attention was drawn to him, and he had a fine career before him--what does he do? He falls in love with an orphan, the daughter of a painter, I believe, or something of that sort, who had served as a volunteer in his battalion, and on his death-bed left her in his charge--the generous soul! He marries her; farewell promotion! They give our lieutenant, who is bent on a _mesalliance_, an honorable discharge, with the rank of captain; make him superintendent of the prison; and there he sits now, for these twenty-five years, in Z., with a half-blind wife and a swarm of children, old and gray before his time, a wretched invalid--and all this for the sake of a stupid young goose, whom the first tailor or cobbler would have suited just as well.

Women! women! Dear George, beware of women!"

Had Herr von Zehren, when he talked to me in this way, any special object in view? I do not think he had. I was now so much with him, we often set out so early, so seldom returned at noon, and usually came home so late at night--as a consequence I saw so little of Constance, and that almost invariably in his presence, when I felt so embarra.s.sed and ill at ease on account of the constant hostilities between father and daughter, that I scarcely ventured to raise my eyes to her face--it was not possible that he could know how I admired the beautiful maiden, how I found her more lovely every time I saw her, and how my heart beat when I merely heard the rustle of her dress.

Then there was another reason which contributed to his unsuspiciousness on this point. Fond as he was of having me with him, and sincerely as he admired my aptness for everything connected with sport, and my remarkable bodily strength, which I liked to display before him, still he scarcely looked upon me as a creature of his own kind. Poor as he was, leading a problematical existence as he had done for many years, he could never forget that he sprang from a most ancient race of n.o.bles, who had once held sway over the island before the princes of Prora-Wiek had been heard of, and when Uselin, my native place, afterwards an important Hanseatic town, was a mere collection of fishers' huts. I am convinced that he, like a dethroned king, had in his heart never renounced his pretensions to the power and wealth which had once been his ancestors'; that he considered that Trantow, Granow, and a score of other t.i.tled or unt.i.tled gentlemen who held estates in the neighborhood that had once belonged to the Zehrens, had come to their so-called possession of these estates by some absurd whimsy of fortune, but had no genuine t.i.tle which he recognized, and that wherever he hunted, it was still upon his own ground. This mystical _cultus_ of a long-vanished splendor, of which he still fancied himself the upholder, gave his eye the haughty look, his bearing the dignity, his speech the graciousness, which belong to sovereign princes whose political impotence is so absolute, and whose legitimacy is so una.s.sailable, that they can allow themselves to be perfectly amiable.

Herr von Zehren was an enthusiastic defender of the right of primogeniture, and found it highly unreasonable that younger brothers should bear and transmit the n.o.bility that they were not permitted to represent. "I have nothing to say against a councillor of excise, nothing against a prison superintendent," he said, "only they ought to be called Muller or Schultze, and not Zehren." For the n.o.bility of the court, the public offices, or the army, he cherished the profoundest contempt. They were only servants, in or out of livery, he maintained; and he drew a sharp distinction between the genuine old and the "new-baked" n.o.bility, to the former cla.s.s of which, for example, the Trantows belonged, who could trace back an unbroken pedigree to the middle of the fourteenth century; while Herr von Granow had had a shepherd for great-grandfather, small tenant-farmer for grandfather, and a land-owner, who had purchased a patent of n.o.bility, for his father. "And the man often behaves as if he was of the same caste with myself! The honor of being permitted to lose his contemptible money to me, seems to have mounted into his foolish brain. I think before long he will ask me if I am not willing to be the father-in-law of a shepherd-boy. Thank heaven, in that point at least I can rely upon Constance; she had rather fling herself into the sea than marry the little puffed-up oaf. But it is foolish in her to treat poor Hans so cavalierly. Trantow is a fellow that can show himself anywhere. He might be put under a gla.s.s-case for exhibition, and n.o.body could find a fault in him. You laugh, you young popinjay! You mean that he was not the man that invented gunpowder, and that if he keeps on as he is going, he will soon have drunk away what little brains he has. Bah! The first fact qualifies him for a good husband; and as for the second, I know of a certainty that it is pure desperation that makes him look into the gla.s.s so much with those staring eyes of his. Poor devil: it makes one right heartily sorry for him; but that, you see, is the way with every man that has anything to do with women. Beware of the women, George; beware of the women!"

Was it possible that the man who held these views and talked with me in this way, could have the least suspicion of my feelings? It could not be. I was in his eyes a young fellow who had fallen in his way, and whom he had picked up as a resource against ennui, whom he kept with him and talked to, because he did not like to be alone and liked to talk. Could I complain of this? Could I make any higher pretensions?

Was I, or did I desire to be, anything else than one of my knight's retinue, even if for the time I happened to be the only one? Could I have any other concern than for the fact that I could not at the same time devote the same reverential service to my knight's lovely daughter?