A Day's Ride Part 29

"The Falls! why, I see them from this, and if I open the window I am stunned with their uproar."

I was really sorry at the pain my hasty speech gave him, for he looked suddenly faint and ill, and after a moment gasped out,--

"But monsieur is surely not going away without a visit to the cataract?

The guide-books give two hours as the very shortest time to see it effectually."

"I only gave ten minutes to Niagara, my good friend," said I, "and would not have spared even that, but that I wanted to hold a sprained ankle under the fall."

He staggered, and had to hold a chair to support himself.

"There is, besides, the Laufen Schloss--"

"As to castles," broke I in, "I have no need to leave my own to see all that mediaeval architecture can boast. No, no," sighed I out, "if I am to have new sensations, they must come through some other channel than sight. Have you no theatre?"

"No, sir. None."

"No concert-rooms, no music-garden?"

"None, sir."

"Not even a circus?" said I, peevishly.

"There was, sir, but it was not attended. The strangers all come to see the Falls."

"Confound the Falls! And what became of the circus?"

"Well, they made a bad business of it; got into debt on all sides, for oil, and forage, and printing placards, and so on, and then they beat a sudden retreat one night, and slipped off, all but two, and, indeed, they were about the best of the company; but somehow they lost their way in the forest, and instead of coming up with their companions, found themselves at daybreak at the outside of the town."

"And these two unlucky ones, what were they?"

"One was the chief clown, sir, a German, and the other was a little girl, a Moor they call her; but the cleverest creature to ride or throw somersaults through hoops of the whole of them."

"And how do they live now?"

"Very hardly, I believe, sir; and but for Tintefleck,--that's what they call her,--they might starve; but she goes about with her guitar through the _cafes_ of an evening, and as she has a sweet voice, she picks up a few batzen. But the maire, I hear, won't permit this any longer, and says that as they have no pa.s.sport or papers of any kind, they must be sent over the frontier as vagabonds."

"Let that maire be brought before me," said I, with a haughty indignation. "Let me tell him in a few brief words what I think of his heartless cruelty--But no, I was forgetting,--I am here _incog_.

Be careful, my good man, that you do not mention what I have so inadvertently dropped; remember that I am n.o.body here; I am Number Five and nothing more. Send the unfortunate creatures, however, here, and let me interrogate them. They can be easily found, I suppose?"

"In a moment, sir. They were in the Platz just when I served the pheasant."

"What name does the man bear?"

"I never heard a name for him. Amongst the company he was called Vaterchen, as he was the oldest of them all; and, indeed, they seemed all very fond of him."

"Let Vaterchen and Tintefleck, then, come hither. And bring fresh gla.s.ses, waiter."

And I spoke as might an Eastern despot giving his orders for a "nautch;"

and then, waving my hand, motioned the messenger away.

CHAPTER XXVI. VATERCHEN AND TINTEFLECK

Had Fortune decreed that I should be rich, I believe I would have been the most popular of men. There is such a natural kindness of disposition in me, blended with the most refined sense of discrimination. I love humanity in the aggregate, and, at the same time, with a rare delicacy of sentiment, I can follow through all the tortuous windings of the heart, and actually sympathize in emotions that I never experienced.

No rank is too exalted, no lot too humble, for the exercise of my benevolence. I have sat in my arm-chair with a beating, throbbing heart, as I imagined the troubles of a king, and I have drunk my Bordeaux with tears of grat.i.tude as I fancied myself a peasant with only water to slake his thirst. To a man of highly organized temperament, the privations themselves are not necessary to eliminate the feeling they would suggest. Coa.r.s.er natures would require starvation to produce the sense of hunger, nakedness to cause that of cold, and so on; the gifted can be in rags, while enclosed in a wadded dressing-gown; they can go supperless to bed after a meal of oysters and toasted cheese; they can, if they will, be fatally wounded as they sit over their wine, or cast away after s.h.i.+pwreck with their feet on the fender. Great privileges all these; happy is he who has them, happy are they amidst whom he tries to spread the blessings of his inheritance!

Amid the many admirable traits which I recognize in myself,--and of which I speak not boastfully, but gratefully, being accidents of my nature as far removed from my own agency as the color of my eyes or the shape of my nose,--of these, I say, I know of none more striking than such as fit me to be a patron. I am graceful as a lover, touching as a friend, but I am really great as a protector.

Revelling in such sentiments as these, I stood at my window, looking at the effect of moonlight on the Falls. It seemed to me as though in the grand spectacle before my eyes I beheld a sort of ill.u.s.tration of my own nature, wherein generous emotions could come gus.h.i.+ng, foaming, and falling, and yet the source be never exhausted, the flood ever at full.

I ought parenthetically to observe that the champagne was excellent, and that I had drunk the third gla.s.s of the second bottle to the health of the widow Cliquot herself. Thus standing and musing, I was startled by a noise behind me, and, turning round, I saw one of the smallest of men in a little red Greek jacket and short yellow breeches, carefully engaged in spreading a small piece of carpet on the floor, a strip like a very diminutive hearth-rug. This done, he gave a little wild exclamation of "Ho!" and cut a somersault in the air, alighting on the flat of his back, which he announced by a like cry of "Ha!" He was up again, however, in an instant, and repeated the performance three times. He was about, as I judged by the arrangement of certain chairs, to proceed to other exercises equally diverting, when I stopped him by asking who he was.

"Your Excellency," said he, drawing himself up to his full height of, say, four feet, "I am Vaterchen!"

Every one knows what provoking things are certain chance resemblances, how disturbing to the right current of thought, how subverting to the free exercise of reason. Now, this creature before me, in his deeply indented temples, high narrow forehead, aquiline nose, and resolute chin, was marvellously like a certain great field-marshal with whose features, notwithstanding the portraits of him, we are all familiar. It was not of the least use to me that I knew he was not the ill.u.s.trious general, but simply a mountebank. There were the stern traits, haughty and defiant; and do what I would, the thought of the great man would clash with the capers of the little one. Owing to this impression, it was impossible for me to address him without a certain sense of deference and respect.

"Will you not be seated?" said I, offering him a chair and taking one myself. He accepted with all the quiet ease of good breeding, and smiled courteously as I filled a gla.s.s and pa.s.sed it towards him.

I pressed my hand across my eyes for a few moments while I reflected, and I muttered to myself,--

"Oh, Potts, if instead of a tumbler this had really been the hero, what an evening might this be! Lives there that man in Europe so capable of feeling in all its intensity the glorious privilege of such a meeting?

Who, like you, would listen to the wisdom distilling from those lips? Who would treasure up every trait of voice, accent, and manner, remembering, not alone every anecdote, but every expression? Who, like you, could have gracefully led the conversation so as to range over the whole wide ocean of that great life, taking in battles and sieges and storm ings and congresses, and scenes of all that is most varied and exciting in existence? Would not the record of one such night, drawn by you, have been worth all the cold compilations and bleak biographies that ever were written? You would have presented him as he sat there in front of you." I opened my eyes to paint from the model, and there was the little dog, with his legs straight up on each side of his head and forming a sort of gothic arch over his face. The wretch had done the feat to amuse me, and I almost fainted with horror as I saw it.

"Sit down, sir," said I, in a voice of stern command. "You little know the misery you have caused me."

I refilled his gla.s.s, and closed my eyes once more. In my old pharmaceutical experiences I had often made bread pills, and remembered well how, almost invariably, they had been deemed successful. What relief from pain to the agonized sufferer had they not given! What slumber to the sleepless! What appet.i.te, what vigor, what excitement!

Why should not the same treatment apply to morals as to medicine? Why, with faith to aid one, cannot he induce every wished-for mood of mind and thought? The lay figure to support the drapery suffices for the artist, the Venus herself is in his brain. Now, if that little fellow there would neither cut capers nor speak, I ask no more of him. Let him sit firmly as he does now, staring me boldly in the face that way.

"Yes," said I, "lay your hand on the arm of your chair, so, and let the other be clenched thus." And so I placed him. "Never utter a word, but nod to me at rare intervals."

He has since acknowledged that he believed me to be deranged; but as I seemed a harmless case, and he could rely on his activity for escape, he made no objection to my directions, the less, too, that he enjoyed his wine immensely, and was at liberty to drink as he pleased.

"Now," thought I, "one glance, only one, to see that he poses properly."

All right; nothing could be better. His face was turned slightly to one side, giving what the painters call action to the head, and he was perfect I now resigned myself to the working of the spell, and already I felt its influence over me. Where and with what was I to begin?

Numberless questions thronged to my mind. I wanted to know a thousand disputed things, and fully as many that were only disputed by myself.

I felt that as such another opportunity would a.s.suredly never present itself twice in my life, that the really great use of the occasion would be to make every inquiry subsidiary to my own case,--to make all my investigations what the Germans would call "Potts-wise." My intensest anxiety was then to ascertain if, like myself, his Grace started in life with very grand aspirations.

"Did you feel, for instance, when playing practical jokes on the maids of honor in Dublin, some sixty-odd years ago, that you were only, in sportive vein, throwing off so much light ballast to make room for the weightier material that was to steady you in the storm-tossed sea before you? Have you experienced the almost necessity of these little expansions of eccentricity as I have? Was there always in your heart, as a young man, as there is now in mine, a profound contempt for the opinions of your contemporaries? Did you continually find yourself repeating, '_Respice finem!_ Mark where I shall be yet'?" There was another investigation which touched me still more closely, but it was long before I could approach it I saw all the difficulty and delicacy of the inquiry; but, with that same recklessness of consequences which would make me catch at a queen by the back hair if I was drowning, I clutched at this discovery now, and, although trembling at my boldness, asked, "Was your Grace ever afraid? I know the impertinence of the question, but if you only guessed how it concerns me, you 'd forgive it. Nature has made me many things, but not courageous. Nothing on earth could induce me to risk life; the more I reason about it, the greater grows my repugnance. Now, I would like to hear, is this what anatomists call congenital? Am I likely to grow out of it? Shall I ever be a dare-devil, intrepid, fire-eating sort of creature? How will the change come over me? Shall I feel it coming? Will it come from within, or through external agencies? And when it has arrived, what shall I become?

Am I destined to drive the Zouaves into the sea by a bayonet charge of the North Cork Rifles, or shall I only be great in council, and take weekly trips in the 'Fairy' to Cowes? I 'd like to know this, and begin a course of preparation for my position, as I once knew of a militia captain who hardened himself for a campaign by sleeping every night with his head on the window-stool."

As I opened my eyes, I saw the stern features in front of me. I thought the words, "I was never afraid, sir!" rang through my brain till they filled every ventricle with their din.

"Not at a.s.saye?"

"No, sir."