Читать книгу "My Novel" — Complete - Эдвард Джордж Бульвер-Литтон, Эдвард Бульвер-Литтон - Страница 34

“Per Bacco!” said Dr. Riccabocca, putting his hand on Lenny’s shoulder, and bending down to look into his face,—“per Bacco! my young friend, do you sit here from choice or necessity?”

Lenny slightly shuddered, and winced under the touch of one whom he had hitherto regarded with a sort of superstitious abhorrence.

“I fear,” resumed Riccabocca, after waiting in vain for an answer to his question, “that though the situation is charming, you did not select it yourself. What is this?”—and the irony of the tone vanished—“what is this, my poor boy? You have been bleeding, and I see that those tears which you try to check come from a deep well. Tell me, povero fanciullo mio” (the sweet Italian vowels, though Lenny did not understand them, sounded softly and soothingly),—“tell me, my child, how all this happened. Perhaps I can help you; we have all erred,—we should all help each other.”

Lenny’s heart, that just before had seemed bound in brass, found itself a way as the Italian spoke thus kindly, and the tears rushed down; but he again stopped them, and gulped out sturdily,—

“I have not done no wrong; it ben’t my fault,—and ‘t is that which kills me!” concluded Lenny, with a burst of energy.

“You have not done wrong? Then,” said the philosopher, drawing out his pocket-handkerchief with great composure, and spreading it on the ground,—“then I may sit beside you. I could only stoop pityingly over sin, but I can lie down on equal terms with misfortune.”

Lenny Fairfield did not quite comprehend the words, but enough of their general meaning was apparent to make him cast a grateful glance on the Italian. Riccabocca resumed, as he adjusted the pocket-handkerchief, “I have a right to your confidence, my child, for I have been afflicted in my day; yet I too say with thee, ‘I have not done wrong.’ Cospetto!” (and here the doctor seated himself deliberately, resting one arm on the side column of the stocks, in familiar contact with the captive’s shoulder, while his eye wandered over the lovely scene around)—“Cospetto! my prison, if they had caught me, would not have had so fair a look-out as this. But, to be sure, it is all one; there are no ugly loves, and no handsome prisons.”

With that sententious maxim, which, indeed, he uttered in his native Italian, Riccabocca turned round and renewed his soothing invitations to confidence. A friend in need is a friend indeed, even if he come in the guise of a Papist and wizard. All Lenny’s ancient dislike to the foreigner had gone, and he told him his little tale.

Dr. Riccabocca was much too shrewd a man not to see exactly the motives which had induced Mr. Stirn to incarcerate his agent (barring only that of personal grudge, to which Lenny’s account gave him no clew). That a man high in office should make a scapegoat of his own watch-dog for an unlucky snap, or even an indiscreet bark, was nothing strange to the wisdom of the student of Machiavelli. However, he set himself to the task of consolation with equal philosophy and tenderness. He began by reminding, or rather informing, Leonard Fairfield of all the instances of illustrious men afflicted by the injustice of others that occurred to his own excellent memory. He told him how the great Epictetus, when in slavery, had a master whose favourite amusement was pinching his leg, which, as the amusement ended in breaking that limb, was worse than the stocks. He also told him the anecdote of Lenny’s own gallant countryman, Admiral Byng, whose execution gave rise to Voltaire’s celebrated witticism, “En Angleterre on tue un admiral pour encourager les autres.”

[“In England they execute one admiral in order to encourage the others.”]

Many other illustrations, still more pertinent to the case in point, his erudition supplied from the stores of history. But on seeing that Lenny did not seem in the slightest degree consoled by these memorable examples, he shifted his ground, and reducing his logic to the strict argumentum ad rem, began to prove, first, that there was no disgrace at all in Lenny’s present position, that every equitable person would recognize the tyranny of Stirn and the innocence of its victim; secondly, that if even here he were mistaken, for public opinion was not always righteous, what was public opinion after all?—“A breath, a puff,” cried Dr. Riccabocca, “a thing without matter,—without length, breadth, or substance,—a shadow, a goblin of our own creating. A man’s own conscience is his sole tribunal, and he should care no more for that phantom ‘opinion’ than he should fear meeting a ghost if he crossed the churchyard at dark.”

Now, as Lenny did very much fear meeting a ghost if he crossed the churchyard at dark, the simile spoiled the argument, and he shook his head very mournfully. Dr. Riccabocca, was about to enter into a third course of reasoning, which, had it come to an end, would doubtless have settled the matter, and reconciled Lenny to sitting in the stocks till doomsday, when the captive, with the quick ear and eye of terror and calamity, became conscious that church was over, that the congregation in a few seconds more would be flocking thitherwards. He saw visionary hats and bonnets through the trees, which Riccabocca saw not, despite all the excellence of his spectacles; heard phantasmal rustlings and murmurings which Riccabocca heard not, despite all that theoretical experience in plots, stratagems, and treasons, which should have made the Italian’s ear as fine as a conspirator’s or a mole’s. And with another violent but vain effort at escape, the prisoner exclaimed,—

“Oh, if I could but get out before they come! Let me out, let me out! Oh, kind sir, have pity,—let me out!”

“Diavolo!” said the philosopher, startled, “I wonder that I never thought of that before. After all, I believe he has hit the right nail on the head,” and, looking close, he perceived that though the partition of wood had hitched firmly into a sort of spring-clasp, which defied Lenny’s unaided struggles, still it was not locked (for, indeed, the padlock and key were snug in the justice-room of the squire, who never dreamed that his orders would be executed so literally and summarily as to dispense with all formal appeal to himself). As soon as Dr. Riccabocca made that discovery, it occurred to him that all the wisdom of all the schools that ever existed can’t reconcile man or boy to a bad position—the moment there is a fair opportunity of letting him out of it. Accordingly, without more ado, he lifted up the creaking board, and Lenny Fairfield darted forth like a bird from a cage, halted a moment as if for breath, or in joy; and then, taking at once to his heels, fled, as a hare to its form, fast to his mother’s home.

Dr. Riccabocca dropped the yawning wood into its place, picked up his handkerchief and restored it to his pocket; and then, with some curiosity, began to examine the nature of that place of duress which had caused so much painful emotion to its rescued victim. “Man is a very irrational animal at best,” quoth the sage, soliloquizing, “and is frightened by strange buggaboos! ‘T is but a piece of wood! how little it really injures! And, after all, the holes are but rests to the legs, and keep the feet out of the dirt. And this green bank to sit upon, under the shade of the elm-tree-verily the position must be more pleasant than otherwise! I’ve a great mind—” Here the doctor looked around, and seeing the coast still clear, the oddest notion imaginable took possession of him; yet, not indeed a notion so odd, considered philosophically,—for all philosophy is based on practical experiment,—and Dr. Riccabocca felt an irresistible desire practically to experience what manner of thing that punishment of the stocks really was. “I can but try! only for a moment,” said he apologetically to his own expostulating sense of dignity. “I have time to do it, before any one comes.” He lifted up the partition again: but stocks are built on the true principle of English law, and don’t easily allow a man to criminate himself,—it was hard to get into them without the help of a friend. However, as we before noticed, obstacles only whetted Dr. Riccabocca’s invention. He looked round, and saw a withered bit of stick under the tree; this he inserted in the division of the stocks, somewhat in the manner in which boys place a stick under a sieve for the purpose of ensnaring sparrows; the fatal wood thus propped, Dr. Riceabocca sat gravely down on the bank, and thrust his feet through the apertures.

“Nothing in it!” cried he, triumphantly, after a moment’s deliberation. “The evil is only in idea. Such is the boasted reason of mortals!” With that reflection, nevertheless, he was about to withdraw his feet from their voluntary dilemma, when the crazy stick suddenly gave way and the partition fell back into its clasp. Dr. Riceabocca was fairly caught,—“Facilis descensus—sed revocare gradum!” True, his hands were at liberty, but his legs were so long that, being thus fixed, they kept the hands from the rescue; and as Dr. Riccabocca’s form was by no means supple, and the twin parts of the wood stuck together with that firmness of adhesion which things newly painted possess, so, after some vain twists and contortions, in which he succeeded at length (not without a stretch of the sinews that made them crack again) in finding the clasp and breaking his nails thereon, the victim of his own rash experiment resigned himself to his fate. Dr. Riceabocca was one of those men who never do things by halves. When I say he resigned himself, I mean not only Christian but philosophical resignation. The position was not quite so pleasant as, theoretically, he had deemed it; but he resolved to make himself as comfortable as he could. At first, as is natural in all troubles to men who have grown familiar with that odoriferous comforter which Sir Walter Raleigh is said first to have bestowed upon the Caucasian races, the doctor made use of his hands to extract from his pocket his pipe, match-box, and tobacco-pouch. After a few whiffs he would have been quite reconciled to his situation, but for the discovery that the sun had shifted its place in the heavens, and was no longer shaded from his face by the elm-tree. The doctor again looked round, and perceived that his red silk umbrella, which he had laid aside when he had seated himself by Lenny, was within arm’s reach. Possessing himself of this treasure, he soon expanded its friendly folds. And thus, doubly fortified within and without, under shade of the umbrella, and his pipe composedly between his lips, Dr. Riceabocca gazed on his own incarcerated legs, even with complacency.

“‘He who can despise all things,’” said he, in one of his native proverbs, “‘possesses all things!’—if one despises freedom, one is free! This seat is as soft as a sofa! I am not sure,” he resumed, soliloquizing, after a pause,—“I am not sure that there is not something more witty than manly and philosophical in that national proverb of mine which I quoted to the fanciullo, ‘that there are no handsome prisons’! Did not the son of that celebrated Frenchman, surnamed Bras de Fer, write a book not only to prove that adversities are more necessary than prosperities, but that among all adversities a prison is the most pleasant and profitable? But is not this condition of mine, voluntarily and experimentally incurred, a type of my life? Is it the first time that I have thrust myself into a hobble? And if in a hobble of mine own choosing, why should I blame the gods?”

Upon this, Dr. Riceabocca fell into a train of musing so remote from time and place, that in a few minutes he no more remembered that he was in the parish stocks than a lover remembers that flesh is grass, a miser that mammon is perishable, a philosopher that wisdom is vanity. Dr. Riccabocca was in the clouds.