Читать книгу Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 12, No. 33, December, 1873 - Various - Страница 1

My first dinner in the avenue of Ettlingen followed upon the twelve-barreled bath, but was far from being so glacial a refreshment. As I descended, quite pink and glowing, I found eight or ten individuals in the dining-room. They were French and Belgians, and exchanged a lively conversation in half a dozen provincial accents. The servants too talked French in levying on the cook for provisions: for this, as I have since learned, the domestics of my snug little boarding-house were deemed somewhat pretentious by the serving-people of the vicinity, who considered the tongue of Paris a sort of court language, for circulation among aristocrats only, and supposed that even in France the hired folk all talked German. My reception at the cheerful board was as cordial as possible.

Placed opposite me, our young hostess was looking in my direction with an intentness that struck me as singular. My passport was uppermost in my mind. I was not, however, very uneasy, for the reply of Sylvester Berkley would soon arrive and put an official seal upon my standing. It occurred to me, however, that I was a traveler accompanied by no other baggage than a tin box and an umbrella, and introduced by a coachman who had no reason whatever for forming lofty notions of my respectability. The landlady, whom I had scarcely seen on my arrival, was pretty, neat and quick, and an argument suggested itself that seemed adapted to her station and habits. I was base enough to take out my watch, a very fine Poitevin, and make an advertisement of that pledge under pretence of comparing time with the mantel-clock. This precious manoeuvre appeared quite successful.

Very soon my ideas of apprehension and defiance were followed by other thoughts of a very different kind. The expression of the youthful housekeeper was not only softened in continuing to watch me, but it took on a look of great kindness and good-humor—a look that the finest watch in the world would never have inspired. On my own side I furtively examined this gentle yet scrutinizing physiognomy. Surely those gentle glances and my own faded old eyes were not entire strangers.

When Winckelmann was filling the villa Albani with antiques, it often happened to him to clasp a fair Greek head in his arms and go pottering along from torso to torso till he could find a shoulder fit to support his lovely burden. Such was my exercise with this pleasant head in its neat cambric cap; but in place of consulting my memory with the proper coolness, I am afraid I questioned my heart.

Immediately after the coffee my pretty hostess, passing my chair, with a quick motion in going out made me a slight gesture. I followed her into a small office or ante-chamber adjoining. The furniture was very simple; the indicator, with a figure for every bell, decorated the wall in its cherry-wood frame; the keys, hanging aslant in rows, like points of interrogation in a letter of Sévigné's, formed a corresponding ornament; and a row of registers on the desk completed the furniture. One of these books she drew forward, opened and presented for my signature, still flashing over my face that intent but benevolent glance.

"Monsieur, have the goodness to inscribe your name, the place you came from, and that of your destination."

I took the pen, and, with the air of complying exactly and courteously with her demand, folded the quill into three or four lengths, and placed it weltering in ink within my waistcoat pocket. I was looking intently into my hostess's face.

I think no American can observe without peculiar complacency the neat artisanne's cap on the brows of a respectable young Frenchwoman. This cap is made of some opaque white substance, tender yet solid, and the theory of its existence is that it should be stainless and incapable of disturbance. It is the badge of an order, the sign of unpretending industry. The personage who wears it does not propose to look like a "dame:" she contentedly crowns herself with the tiara of her rank. Long generations of unaspiring humility have bequeathed her this soft and candid sign of distinction: as her turn comes in the line of inheritance she spends her life in keeping unsullied its difficult purity, and she will leave to her daughters the critical task of its equipoise. If she soils or rumples or tears it, she descends in her little scale of dignities and becomes an ouvrière. If she loses it, she is unclassed entirely, and enters the half-world. The porter's wife with her dubious mob-cap, and the hard, flaunting grisette with her melancholy feathers and determined chapeau, are equally removed from the white cap of the "young person." To maintain it in its vestal candor and proud sincerity is not always an easy task in a land where every careless student and idle nobleman is eager to tumble it with his fingers or to pin among its frills the blossom named love-in-idleness: Mimi Pinson has to wear her cap very close to her wise little head. To herself and to those among whom she moves nothing perhaps seems more natural than the successful carriage of this white emblem, triumphantly borne from age to age above the dust of labor and in the face of all kinds of temptation; but to the republican from beyond the seas it is a kind of sacred relic. The Yankee who knows only the forlorn aureoles of wire and greased gauze surrounding the sainted heads of Lowell factory-girls, and the frowsy ones of New York bookbinders, is struck by the artisanne cap as by something exquisitely fresh, proud and truthful.

My landlady's cap was as far removed from pretence as from vulgarity. Her hair was brown, smooth, old-fashioned and nun-like. I looked at her hand, which, having replaced the pen, was inviting me with a gesture of its handsome squared fingers to contribute my autograph, I made my note, pausing often to look up at my beautiful writing-mistress: "PAUL FLEMMING, American: from Paris to Marly—by way of the Rhine."

I had not finished, when, lowering her pretty head to scrutinize my crabbed handwriting, she cried, "It is certainly he, the américain-flamand! I was certain I could not be mistaken."

"Do you know me then, madame?'

"Do I know you? And you, do you not recognize me?"

"I protest, madame, my memory for faces is shocking; and, though there are few in the world comparable with yours—"

She interrupted me with a gesture too familiar to be mistaken. A tumbler was on the desk filled with goose-quills. Taking this up like a bouquet, and stretching it out at arm's length to an imaginary passer-by, she sang, with a mischievous professional brio, "Fresh roses to-day, all fresh! White lilacs for the bride, and lilies for the holy altar! pinks for the button of the young man who thinks himself handsome. Who buys my bluets, my paquerettes, my marguerites, my penseés?"

It was strangely like something I well knew, yet my mind, confused with the baggage of unexpected travel, refused to throw a clear light over this fascinating rencounter.

The little landlady threw her head back to laugh, and I saw a small rose-colored tongue surrounded with two strings of pearls: "Very well, Monsieur Flemming! Have you forgotten the two chickens?"

It was the exclamation by which, in his neat tavern, I had recognized my brave old friend Joliet: it was impossible, by the same shibboleth, to refuse longer an acquaintance with his daughter.

My entertainer, in fact, was no other than Francine Joliet, grown from a little female stripling into a distracting pattern of a woman. Twelve years had never thrown more fortunate changes over a growing human flower.

The acquaintance being thus renewed, I could not but remember my last conversation with Joliet—his way of acquainting me with her absence from home, his mention of her godmother in Brussels, and his strange reticence as I pressed the subject. A slight chill, owing perhaps to the undue warmth of my admiration for this delicate creature, fell over my first cordiality. I asked a question or two, assuming a kind, elderly type of interest: "How do you find yourself here in Carlsruhe? Are you satisfactorily placed?"

"As well as possible, dear M. Flemming. I am a bird in its nest."

"Mated, no doubt, my dear?"

"No."

"You are not a widow, I hope, my poor little Francine?"

"No." She blushed, as if she had not been pretty enough before.

"They call you madame, you see."

"A mistress of a hotel, that is the usual title. Is it not the custom among the Indians of America?"

"The godmother who took care of you—you perceive how well I know your biography, my child—is she dead, then?"

"No, thank Heaven! She is quite well."

"She is doubtless now living in Carlsruhe?"

"No, at Brussels."

"Then why are you here? why have you quitted so kind a friend?"

My catechism, growing thus more and more brutal, might have been prolonged until bedtime, but on the arrival of a new traveler she left me there, with a pen in my hand and a quantity of delicious cobwebs in my head, saying gently, "I will see you this evening, kind friend."

The same evening, after a botanizing stroll in the adjoining wood—a treat that my tin box and I had promised each other—I found myself again with Francine. Full of curiosity as I was concerning her adventures, I determined that she should direct the conversation herself, and take her own pretty time to tell the more personal parts of the story.

The stage grisette is perpetually exploring the pockets of her apron. Francine, who wore a roundabout apron of a white and crackling nature, adorned her conversation by attending to the hem of hers. When she asked about my last interview with her father, she ironed that hem with the nail of her rosy little thumb; when she fell into reminiscences of her mother, she smoothed the apron respectfully and sadly; when she proposed a question or a doubt, she extracted little threads from the seam: at last, perfectly satisfied with the apron, she laid her two small hands in each other on its dainty snow-bank, and resigned herself to a perfect torrent of remarks about the horse, the van, the little cabin among the roses, the small one-eyed dog and the two chickens. Conversation, a thing which is manufactured by an American girl, is a thing which takes possession of a French girl.

All the while I remained uninstructed as to why my had left her protectress, why she was keeping house at Carlsruhe, and on what understanding her customers called her madame.

I was obliged to take next day a long alterative excursion among the trees of the Haardtwald: in fact, her gentle warmth, her freshness, her nattiness, the very protection she shed over me, were working sad mischief to my peace of mind. I came upon an old shepherd, who, with his music-book thrown into a bush in front of him, was leaning back against a tree and drawing sweet sounds out of a cornet-à-piston.

"Even so," I said, "did Stark the Viking hear the notes of the enchanted horn teaching every tree he came to the echo of his true-love's name."

But the churlish shepherd, the moment he caught sight of me, put up his pipe, whistled to his dogs and rejoined the flock. I was dissatisfied with his unsocial retreat. I felt, with renewed force, that a note was lacking to the full harmony of my life, and I threw myself upon a bank. I tried not to see the artificial roads of the forest, alive with city carriages. I believed myself lost in a primeval wood, and I examined the state of my heart. I perceived with concern that that organ was still lacerated. The languid, musical pageant of my youth streamed toward me again through the leafy aisles, and I remembered my high aspirings, my poems, my ideals: the floating vision of a Dark Ladye passed or looked up at me through the broken waves of Oblivion; she listened to my rhapsodies with the old puzzling silence; she confided to me certain Sibylline leaves out of her diary; then she receded, cold and unresponsive, a statue cut out of a shadow. I was obliged to untie my cravat. Finally, I fell asleep and dreamed of Mary Ashburton crowned with the neat workwoman's cap of Francine Joliet. I returned to dinner considerably exalted, and just touched with rheumatism.

The soup was glacial, the roast was steaming, the conversation was geographical. "Pray, M. Flemming," said my neighbor (he had been stealing a look at the register of visitors' names), "can cattle be wintered out of doors as far north as Pennsylvania, or only up to Virginia?"

"Pray," said another, "is not New York situated between the North River and the Hudson?"

The prayer of a third made itself audible: "Ought we to say 'Delightful Wyoming,' after Campbell, or Wyoming?"

"We ought to eat with thankfulness the good things set before us," I replied, with some presence of mind. "Excuse me, gentlemen," I added, to carry off my vivacity, "but I think informing conversation is a bore until after the nuts and raisins. A Danish proverb says that he who knows what he is saying at a feast has but poor comprehension of what he is eating. On my way hither, breakfasting at Strasburg, I enjoyed a lesson in geography, and I aver that though the lesson was elementary, I breakfasted very badly."

"Who was the teacher?" asked the explorer of Wyoming, a German, in the tone of a man to whom no professor of Geography could properly be a stranger.

"The teacher," I answered with a smile, "was one Fortnoye—"

I did not finish my sentence. At that name, Fortnoye, a kind of electric movement was communicated around the board. Every eye sought the face of Francine, who, troubled and confused, fell upon the cutlet placed before her and cut it feverishly into flinders. Evidently there was a secret thereabouts. When coffee was on, I applied myself to satisfying the topographic doubts of my neighbors, but the name of the geographical professor was approached no more.

When dinner was over, and only two stranded Belgians remained at table, discussing whether the Falls of Niagara plunge from the United States into Canada, or from Canada into the United States, I stole into the narrow office, believing I should see Francine.

She was not there, but the register was lying on the desk. I fell to turning the leaves over furiously: I felt that I was on the trail of Fortnoye. I was not long in amassing a quantity of discoveries. Going back to the previous year, I found the signature of Fortnoye in March and April; in July and September, Fortnoye bound up and down the Rhine; in the depth of the winter, Monsieur Tonson-Fortnoye come again! Evidently one of the most frequent guests of my delicate Francine was the interpreter of Cosmos in Strasburg, the white-bearded mystifier of the champagne-cellar, the finest singing-voice in Épernay.

Toward ten o'clock, as I paced the little grove called the Oak Wood, I saw at the miniature lake four persons, who were regaining the bank after trying to detach the little boat moored by the shore. They were just the four from our social table with whom I best agreed. I joined the party, and, hooking now a friendly arm to the elbow of one, now to that of another, I soon obtained all they had to communicate on the subject which occupied my mind. Each knew Fortnoye intimately: the result of my quadratic amounted to the following:

First. Fortnoye, educated at the Polytechnic School in Paris, is a man of grave character and profound learning.

Second. Fortnoye is a roysterer, latterly occupied in extending the connection of a champagne-house at Épernay. He is a Bohemian, even a poet: he can rhyme, but strictly in the interests of commerce—he composes only drinking-songs.

Third. Fortnoye is an exploded speculator, dismissed from the French Board: obliged to beat a retreat to Belgium, he soon found himself in Baden, where he had good luck at the green table shortly before the war.

Fourth, and last. (This was from the man of Wyoming.) Fortnoye only retreated to Belgium as a refuge for his demagogic opinions. He belongs to the innermost circle of the Commune and to all the French and Italian secret associations. He is represented in the background of several of Courbet's pictures. He has been everywhere: in Italy he joined the society of the Mary Anne, where he met the celebrated Lothair. This order has a branch called the Society of Pure Illumination. If he has liberty to return into France, it is because he is connected with the detective police.

The information, extensive as it was, did not altogether satisfy me. I made little of the inconsistencies betrayed by the various counsels of the Areopagus, but I closed the whole solemnity with one crucial interrogatory: "What the dickens does Fortnoye come prowling around Francine Joliet's house for?"

The answer was not calculated to please me: "She is young and attractive: Fortnoye advanced the funds to set her up in the house."

But my morose thoughts were distracted by the scene around us. The moon burst up above the trees of the Oak Wood—a fine ample German moon, like a Diana of Rubens. Close to our sides passed numerous young couples, holding hands, clasping waists, chattering gayly, or walking in silence with a blonde head laid on a burly shoulder. One of my companions pointed out a specially stalwart and graceful young apprentice, whose elbow, supported on a rustic bench, was bent around a mass of beautiful golden hair.

"An eligible verlobter," said he.

I thought of Perrette and the tall young man who had helped pull her milk-cart. My friend continued: "Betrothal hereabouts is a serious institution. The girl who loses her verlobter becomes a widow. Woe betide her if she dreams of replacing him too early! She will find herself followed by ill looks and contemptuous tongues: she even runs the risk of having nobody to marry better than a dead man, if we may believe the history of Bettina of Ettlingen."

"The history of Bettina of Ettlingen? That sounds like the title to a ballad."

"It is a recent history, which you would take for a legend of the twelfth century."

I cannot help it. In face of that word legend my mind stops and stares rigidly like a pointer dog. The moment was favorable for a good story: the sky was covered with flocked clouds, behind which the ample German moon, shorn of half its brightness, took suddenly the pale gilded tint of sauerkraut. The wandering lovers, half effaced in the gloom, looked like straying shades in an Elysium.

"Ettlingen is between Carlsruhe and Rastadt, an hour's walking as you go to Kehl. The flowers grow there without thinking about it, and sow their own seed. It is therefore a simple thing to be a gardener, and Bettina's father, the florist, attended entirely to his pipe, leaving the cares of business to his apprentice, whose name was Nature. Bettina, as became the daughter of a gardener, was a kind of rose: Wilhelm, the baker's young man, would have thrown himself into the furnace for her. But there came along Fritz, the dyer, who had been in France and who wore gloves. She continued a while to promenade with Wilhelm under the chestnut trees which surround the fortifications of Ettlingen, but one night she suddenly withdrew her hand: 'You had better find a nicer girl than I am: I do not feel that I could make you happy.' Wilhelm disappeared from the country. His departure, which was the talk of Ettlingen, caused Bettina more remorse than regret. For six months she shut herself up: then, hearing nothing of her lover, she reappeared shyly on the promenade, divested of rings, ear-drops and ornaments. The beautiful Fritz, in his loveliest gloves, intercepted her beneath the chestnuts, and, armed with her father's consent, proposed himself for her verlobter.

"'Not yet,' she answered: 'wait till I wear my flowers again.'

"In Germany, as in Switzerland and Italy, natural flowers are indispensable to a young girl's toilet. To appear at an assembly without a blooming tuft at the corsage or in the hair is to indicate that the family is in mourning, the mother sick or the lover conscripted.

"With an exquisite natural sense, Bettina, daughter of a gardener, would never wear any flowers but wild ones. About this time there was a grand fair at Durlach: almost all Ettlingen went there, and Bettina too, but as spectatress only, and without her flowers.

"The dances which animated the others made her sad. She left the ball and wandered on the hillside. There, beneath the hedge of a sunken road, she recognized her beauteous Fritz. Poor Fritz! he was refusing himself the pleasure of the dance which he might not partake with her. Ah, the time for temporizing is over! Bettina determines that to-day, in the eyes of every one, they shall dance together, and he shall be recognized as her verlobter. She looks hastily around for flowers. The hill is bare, the road is stony: an enclosure at the left offers some promise, and Bettina enters.

"It was a cemetery. Animated with her new resolve, she thought little of the profanation, and crowned herself with flowers from the nearest grave. In an hour the villagers from Ettlingen saw her leaning on Fritz's shoulder in the waltz. That night the shade of Wilhelm stood at her bed-head: 'You have accepted the flowers growing on my grave and nourished from my heart. I am once more your verlobter.'

"Next day Fritz came, radiant, with a silver engagement-ring, which he was to exchange for that on Bettina's finger, returned by Wilhelm at his departure. But the ring was gone. At night Wilhelm reappeared, and showed the ring on his finger. Some time passed, and Bettina lost a good part of her beauty, distracted as she was between the laughing Fritz in the daytime and the pale Wilhelm at night. She was a sensible girl, however, and persuaded herself, with Fritz's assistance, that the vision was created by a disordered fancy. But she caused inquiry to be made about the grave in the cemetery at Durlach: the answer came: 'Under the first stone in the line at the right of the gate lies the body of Wilhelm Haussbach of Ettlingen, where he followed the trade of baker.'

"Then she knew that she had robbed her lover's grave to adorn herself for a new verlobter. After this the ghost of Wilhelm began to invade her promenades with Fritz, and she walked evening after evening beneath the chestnuts between her two lovers.

"The gardener's daughter never looked fairer than on her wedding-day. Armed with all her resolution, and filled with love for Fritz, she presented herself at the altar. The priest began to recite the sacramental words, when he came to a pause at the sight of Bettina, pale and wild-eyed, shivering convulsively in her bridal draperies.

"Wilhelm was again at her side, kneeling on the right, as Fritz on the left. He was in bridegroom's habit, and he offered a bouquet of graveyard-flowers—the white immortelle and the forget-me-not. When Fritz rose and put the ring on her finger she felt an icy hand draw the token off and replace it by another. At this, overcome with terror, and making a wild gesture of rejection both to right and left, she ran shrieking out of the church.

"Such is the true and authentic story of Bettina," concluded my narrator. "You may see Bettina any day at Ettlingen, a yellow old maid forty years of age. Every Sunday she goes to mass at Durlach, where she employs the rest of the day in tending flowers on a grave, the first grave in the line to the right of the gateway."

I returned to the house with this grim and tender little idyll crooning through my brains. I took my key and bed-candle, and asked the porter if a letter had arrived for me from Sylvester Berkley. Not a line! This silence became inconvenient. Not only did I rely upon Berkley for my passport, the certificate of my character, but likewise for the revictualing of my purse. As I passed the small throne-room of Francine, where she sat vis-à-vis with all her keys and bells, a light, a presence, an amicable little nod informed me that a friend was there for me, and sent a bath of warm and comfortable emotion all over my poor old heart.

It was late. Francine, at a little velvet account-book, was executing some fairy-like and poetical arithmetic in purple ink. I had the pleasure, before a half hour had passed, of making her commit more than one error in her columns, do violet violence to the neatness of her book, and adorn her thumb-nail with a comical tiny silhouette. My gossip, which had this encouraging and proud effect, was commenced easily upon familiar subjects, such as the old rose-garden and the chickens, but branched imperceptibly into more personal confidences. I found myself growing strangely confidential. Soon I had sketched for Francine my life of opulent loneliness, my cook and my old valet, my philosopher's den at Marly, my negligent existence at Paris, without family, country or obligations.

Her good gray eyes were swimming with tears, I thought. With a look of perfect natural sweetness she said, "To live alone and far from kin and fatherland, that is not amusing. It is like one of the small straight sticks of rose my father would take and plant in the sand in a far-away little red pot."

A delicious vignette, I confess, began to be outlined in my fancy. I cannot describe it, but I know Francine was in the middle repairing a stocking, while my own books and geographical notes, in a state of dustlessness they had never known actually, formed a brown bower around her. Somewhere near, in an old secretary or in a grave, was buried the ideal of an earlier, haughtier love; wrapped up in a stolen ribbon or pressed in a book.

She continued simply, "I am very much alone myself. Without the visits of Monsieur Fortnoye I should be dead of ennui. I am so glad to find you know him, monsieur!"

This jarred upon me more than I can say. I assumed, as one can at my age, an air of parental benevolence, in which I administered my dissatisfaction: "Fortnoye is a roysterer, a squanderer, a wanderer and a pètroleur. At your age, my child, you are really imprudent."

"He is a little wild, but he is young himself. And so good, so generous, so kind! I owe him everything."

"On what conditions?" said I, more severely perhaps than I meant. "Your relations, my daughter, are not very clear. Is he then your verlobter?"

She looked at me with an expression of stupefaction, then buried her face in her hands: "He my intended! Has he ever dreamed of such a thing? Am I not a poor flower-girl?"

And she was sobbing through her fingers.

My nights were sweet at Carlsruhe. My slumber was ushered in with those delicious dream-sketches that lend their grace to folly. Each morning I wondered what surprise the day would arrange for me.

The little wood was hidden from my window by an early fog: the birds were silent. I was meditating on my singular position, in pawn as it were under the care of Joliet's good daughter, when I heard my name pronounced at the bottom of the stairs. It was Sylvester Berkley.

The briskness of our friendships depends on the time when—the place where. To men in prison a familiar face is the next thing to liberty.

Some years ago I had an absurd dispute with a neighbor about a party-wall at Passy, and was obliged to go to the Palace of Justice at ten every morning for a week. My forced intercourse with those solemn birds in black plumage had a singular effect on me. While among them I felt as if cut off from my species, and visiting with Gulliver some dreadful island peopled with mere allegories. As the time passed I grew worse: I dragged myself to the Cité with horror, and before returning home was always obliged to wash out my brains by a short stroll in Notre Dame or amongst the fine glass of the Sainte Chapelle. One day, pacing the pale and shuffling corridors of the palace, waiting for an unpunctual lawyer, and regarding the gowns and caps around me with insupportable hate, at the turning of a passage—oh happiness!—a face was revealed in the distance, the face of a friend, the face of an old neighbor. At the bright apparition I made an involuntary sign of joy: the owner of the face seemed no less pleased. We walked toward each other, our hands expanded. All of a sudden a doubt seemed to strike us both at the same moment: he slackened his pace, I slackened mine. We met: we had never done so before. It was a little mistake. We saluted each other slightly and gravely, and separated once more, as wise in our looks as that irreproachable hero who, after marching up the hill with his men, pocketed his thoughts and marched down again.

My meeting with Berkley Junior was not precisely similar, but connected with the same feelings and associations. I dashed down four steps at a time, precipitated myself on him like a bird of prey, and wrung his hands again and again with fondest violence.

Now, up to that date my relations with Sylvester Berkley had been of a frigid and formal description. I had met him two or three times with his hearty old relation, and had borne away the distinct impression that he was a prig. While the uncle would breakfast in his tub, like Diogenes, off simple bones and cutlets, Sylvester ate some sort of a mash made of bruised oats: while the nephew made an untenable pretension to family honors, the elder talked familiarly of the porcelain trade, freely alluding to the youth as a piece of precious Sèvres that had cracked.

He met my advances with a calmness, imprinted with astonishment, that recalled me to myself. Against such a refrigerator my heart and fancy recovered their proper level: I had been caressing an iceberg in a white cravat. I examined my emotions, and found, to my shame, that my warmth had a selfish origin in the fact that I was alone in Carlsruhe, greatly in need of a passport and a purse.

"Do you intend shortly to quit the archducal seat?" asked Sylvester, by way of an agreeable remark.

"I have the strongest obligations to be at home," I returned. "I only await your kind assistance about my passport."

"It is expected at the office, but I fear it will not be received in time for you to take the next train. I fear we shall be obliged to keep you with us until thirty minutes past one."

He conferred on me, with his neck and his hand, a salute which had the effect of being made from a distant window. Then he departed.

To ask such a man for money was not easy. I dressed myself and marched in great haste to the gay quarter of the town, having made up my mind to depend on the mercies of the chief jeweler and the merits of my Poitevin watch. It had cost a thousand francs, and would surely, after many a service rendered, help me now to regain my home.

Another disappointment—not a pawn-broker to be found in Carlsruhe! I was ready to look upon myself as a fixture in the town, when a brilliant idea flashed upon me. One of my neighbors at table was transportation-agent at the railway dépôt. What so opportune for me as a credit on the railway company? With his recommendation my watch would surely be security enough.

Delighted with the thought, and with my own cleverness in originating it, I made briskly for the Ettlingen Gate, before which the road passes. Glancing at the clock on the dépôt, I regulated first my watch by the time of the place, in order that no doubt might be cast on its perfect regularity. I was holding it in my hand, my eyes still riveted on the great clock, as I stepped over the nearest rails. A shout, mixed with imprecations, was audible. My coat was seized by a vigorous fist, I was rudely pushed, my watch escaped, and the train from Frankfort, which was just entering the dépôt, only rendered it to my hands crushed, peeled and pounded. Instead of a thousand francs, my old friend would hardly bring five dollars.

After such a catastrophe what remained for me to do? Evidently to humble my pride and beg an obolus of young Berkley. I represented to myself that the victory over my own false shame was worth many watches, and I began to compose a little speech intended for his ear, in which I compared myself to Dante at the convent door.

I found him in his office clasping a hand-valise. "I am about to go away by your train," he said, without waiting for me to speak or remarking my shabby-genteel expression of heroism. He added, as he handed me a great sealed envelope, "There is your passport. Nothing imperative requires my stay here: I shall accompany you, then, as far as the station of Oos, and while you are continuing your route toward your beloved metropolis, I will go and finish my leave of absence at Baden-Baden, where I am claimed by certain conditions of my liver."

I was so nervous and uncertain of myself that this little change in the horizon upset me completely. For the life of me I could not, at that moment, and at the risk of seeing him drop his bag and rain its contents over the official courtyard, rehearse my awkward accident and disreputable beggary. On the other hand, it was much to gain a friendly companion and pass arm-in-arm with him to the ticket-office. Leaving every other plan uncertain, I determined to start from Carlsruhe in his diplomatic shadow.

I dashed with surprising agility into the house to ask for my account with Francine. I was about to explain that I would quickly settle with her from Paris, when the thoughtful little woman anticipated me. "Monsieur Flemming," she said, with her sweet supplicating air, "you left the city without meaning it. If you would like a little advance, monsieur, I am quite well supplied just now. Dispose of me: I shall be so thankful!"

The money of Fortnoye! the thought was impossible. It was impossible to resist taking her bright brown head between my hands and secreting a kiss somewhere in the laminations of the artisanne cap.

"Dear infant! I shall be an unhappy old fellow if I do not see you again very soon."

–And I was off, dragged by those obligations of the time-table which have no tenderness toward human sentiment. At one o'clock I was at the railway with Sylvester. I was uncertain of my plans, and the confusion of the dépôt added nothing to the clearness inside my head. Berkley advanced first to the ticket-seller's window. "A first-class place for Baden-Baden," said he.

"How many?" briskly asked the clerk, seeing us together.

At that moment Sylvester heard a ghostly voice at his ear: "You may get a couple." The voice was mine.

Berkley got them and paid. I had reflected that my letter of credit from Munroe & Co. would undoubtedly be drawn on Baden-Baden, and had suddenly taken a resolution to try the effect of the springs on my unfortunate stoutness.

We got down at the Gasthaus zum Hirsch, but I had already sold the ruins of my chronometer, and was twenty-five francs the richer for the transaction.

I cannot call Baden-Baden a city: it is a stage. It is a perpetually set-scene for light opera. Everything seems dressed up and artificial, and meant to be viewed, as it were, in the glare of the foot-lights. But instead of the shepherds in white satin who ought to be the performers in this ingenious theatre, it is the unaccustomed stranger who is forced into the position of actor. As he toils up the steep and slovenly streets, faced with shabby buildings that crack and blacken behind their ill-adjusted fronts of stucco and distemper, he cheapens rapidly in his own view: he feels painfully like the hapless supernumerary whom he has seen mounting an obvious step-ladder behind a screen of rock-work on his way to a wedding in the chapel or a coronation in the Capitol. The difference is, that here the permission to play his rôle is paid for by the performer.

But I, as I sat hugging my knee in the hotel bed-room, was possessed by loftier feelings. If there is one faculty which I can fairly extol in myself, it is that of displaying true sentiment in false situations. My thoughts, with incredible agility, went back to Francine. A knock came at the door, and my emotions received a chill: my visitor could be none but Berkley, in whose face I should see a reminder that I owed him for my car-fare.

In place of frigid politeness, however, the diplomatist wore all that he knew of good-fellowship and Bohemianism. He was now clad in tourists' plaid, and stood upon soles half an inch thick—a true Englishman on his travels.

"Come, old boy!"—old boy, indeed!—"you must taste the pleasures of Baden-Baden: it is but four o'clock, and we can see the Trinkhalle, the Conversations-Haus, and plenty besides before dinner. Is there any place in particular where you would like to go?"

I looked solemnly at him. "I would fain visit the Alt-Schloss," I said.

"With all my heart!" replied Sylvester, tapping his legs and admiring his boots. This unpromising comrade was wearing better than I expected.

"Shall we have a carriage?" he pursued. At this question my face contracted as by the effect of a nervous attack. I thought of the few pence I possessed. I assumed the determined pedestrian.

"For shame!" I cried: "it is but three miles. Where are your tourist muscles? I should like to walk."

"Nothing simpler," said the man of facile views: "we shall do it within the hour."

I breathed again. We set off. We had before us cliffs and hills, with small Gothic towers printed on the blue of the sky; but the mountain-path beneath our steps was sanded, graveled, packed, rolled, weeded, and provided with coquettish sofas at every hundred steps. I, who happened that afternoon to feel the emotions of Manfred, would gladly have exchanged these detestable conveniences for precipices, storms and eagles.

"How ridiculous," I said with a little temper, "to go to a ruin by way of the boulevards!"

"Ah," said my companion of complaisant manners, "you like Nature? It is but the choosing."

And Berkley, perfectly acquainted with the locality, directed our steps into a narrow path hardly traced through the woods. Here at least were flowers and grass and sylvan shadows. No sooner did I smell the balm of the pine trees than my heart resigned itself, with exquisite indecision, to the thoughts of Francine Joliet and the memories of Mary Ashburton. I glanced at Berkley: he seemed, in Scotch clothes, a little less impenetrable than he had appeared in white cravat and dress-gloves. I cannot restrain my confidences when a man is near me: I buttonholed Sylvester, and I made the plunge. "I used to talk of the Alt-Schloss," I murmured, "with one whom I have lost."

"Ah, I comprehend: with my late uncle, perhaps."

"No, sir, not with any cynic in a tub, but with a maiden in her flower. It was one of the best points I made with Miss Ashburton."

"The Alt-Schloss is indeed a picturesque construction," said the diplomate, by way of generally inviting my confidence.

"We were conversing about the poems of Salis and Matthisson," I pursued. "I had in my pocket a little translation of Salis's song entitled 'The Silent Land,' and endeavored to bend the dialogue in a suitable direction, but these allusions are incredibly hard to introduce in conversation, and we happened to stray upon Baden-Baden. I asked Miss Ashburton if she had been here, and she answered, 'Yes, the last summer.' 'And you have not forgotten?' I suggested—'The old castle,' she rejoined. 'Of course not. What a magnificent ruin it is!'"

"What tact your friend displayed," said Berkley, "to feign utter unconsciousness of the green tables, and see nothing but ruins in Baden-Baden!"

"Permit me to say," I replied quickly, "that it is not agreeable to me to have that lady alluded to, however distantly, in connection with gambling-tables. The Ashburtons had been probably drinking the waters, for her mother was noticeably stout and florid. But to continue with the poets. I explained to her that the ruins of the Alt-Schloss had suggested to Matthisson a poem in imitation of an English masterpiece. Matthisson made a study of Gray's 'Elegy,' and from it produced his 'Elegy on the Ruins of an Ancient Castle.' Miss Ashburton became nationally enthusiastic, and said she should like very much to see the poem. Her wish was usually my law, but the translation of the other song being in my pocket, I was obliged to palm it off upon her; and after conceding that Matthisson had written his 'Elegy' with unwonted inspiration, I sailed in upon that tide of feeling—with a slight inconsequence, to be sure—and declaimed my version from Salis. Miss Ashburton, sir, was obliged to turn away to hide her tears."

"I used to hear from my uncle of your attachment," said Sylvester, with his politest air of condolence, "and I assure you my opinion ever has been that your feelings did you honor. Nothing, in my view, is so becoming to gray hairs and the evening of life as fidelity to a first passion."

"Lord forgive you, Berkley!" I exclaimed, startled out of all self-possession by his impertinence. "What on earth do you mean? You are completely ignorant of what you are talking about. I have hardly any gray hairs, and some excellent constitutions are gray at thirty. You are partly bald yourself: I know it from the way you turn up your love-locks. And it was not Miss Ashburton I was talking about. That is, if I did derive my reminiscences from her, it was with an object of a very different character at the end of the perspective. I have adopted other views; that is, I have lately had presented to my mind—"

With these rhetorical somersaults, like the flappings of a carp upon the straw, did I express the mental distractions I was suffering from, and the tugs at my heart respectively administered by Francine's cap-strings and Mary Ashburton's shadowy tresses. Berkley, diplomatically approving the landscape before us, would not get angry, would not be insulted, and offered no prise to my difficult temper.

"Tell me now, Sylvester," said I after a few minutes' silence. "You are young, yet you have seen the world. What is the best refuge, in your view, for a man of delicate sentiments and of ripe age? Would you recommend such a person to shut himself up for ever in a hermitage of musty books, and to flirt there eternally with the memories of his young loves, who are become corpulent matrons or angular maids? Or, don't you think, now, that an autumnal attachment—provided some sweet and healthy intelligence comes in contact with his own—is a capital thing in its way? The crackling fireside instead of the lovers' walk? The perfection of rational comfort subservient to, rather than dominating, his early dreams? Respectful affection, fidelity and fondest care as the conditions surrounding one's character, and upholding it in its best symmetry? Cannot the poet think better if his body is kept snug? Cannot the man of feeling remember better if his slippers are toasted and his buttons sewed? In fact, is not one's faith to a beloved ideal best shown by acquiring a fresh standing-point to see it from?"

"No doubt Hamlet's mother thought so," said Sylvester rather brutally, "and married King Claudius solely to brighten her ideal of her first husband." A more appropriate remark, it seemed to me, might have been found to chime in with my speculations. "But here," pursued the statesman, compromisingly, "are old memories protected by modern conveniences. Here is the 'Repose of Sophie.'"

We had mounted a terrace from whose eminence the whole spread of the valley was visible. Profanation! No sooner had we attained the plateau than a covered gallery appeared, and a Teutonic voice was heard with the familiar inquiry, "Will the gentlemen take wine or beer?"

Was ever a man of delicacy and feeling so ruthlessly treated as I? To be tempted by circumstances into pouring out one's most intimate confessions to an icy person to whom one owes money, and then to have even this imperfect confidence interrupted by a tavern-waiter in an apron! Miserable hireling! give us solitude and meditation, not beer!

Flying the "Repose of Sophie" without the concession of a glance, we mounted toward the ancient castle, whose ruins seemed ready to roll on us down the hillside. It was indeed romantic. The wind, in plaintive, melodious tones, searched our ears as it came perfumed from the tufted walls. We penetrated through a scene of high and mossy rocks, bound in the lean embrace of knotted ivy, and finally by a dismantled postern we intruded into the castle. Sacrilege again! The stone-masons were tranquilly working here and there, solidifying old ruins and very probably fabricating new ones. The wind, whose sighing we had admired, was the cat-like harmony of the æolian harps: these harps were artlessly stretched across each of the old vaulted windows. We arrived at the high portal of the ancient manor, a genuine Roman construction of Aurelius Aquensis—a gateway with a round arch: it was obstructed by hired cabs, by whole herds of venal donkeys saddled and bridled, and by holiday-makers of Baden in Sunday clothes preserved for ten or fifteen years. The old pile itself is transformed into a hostelry. Gray was wrong: the paths of glory lead not to the grave, but to the gasthaus; and Matthisson could have imitated the "Elegy" about as well in the gaming-hall as among these rejuvenated ruins.

The modern idea of a wood is a graveled chess-board on a large scale, flooded at night with gas: the modern idea of a ruin is a dancing-floor, with a few patched arches and walls lifted between the wind and our nobility. We shave the weeds away and produce a fine English turf: we root up the brambles and eglantines which might tear the skirts of the ladies. Our lovers, our poets and romancers must fly to distant glades if they would not walk in the shade of trees that have been transplanted.

I was considering the sorry triumph of the stage-machinists of Baden-Baden, when Berkley, who had disappeared, came in sight again. Our dinner, he said, was ready—ready in the guards' hall. I retreated with a sudden cry of alarm. I had rather dine at the hotel; I had rather not dine at all; I was not in the least hungry. It was the emptiness of my pocket that caused this sudden fullness, of the stomach. Berkley made light of my objections.

"Listen! You can hear from this mountain the dinner-bells of the city. We should arrive too late. Although you hate restored castles, you need not refuse to dine with me in one."

The noble hall was a scene of vulgar festivity, where the ubiquitous kellner, racing to and fro with beer and plates of sausage, solved the problem of perpetual motion. It was not easy, in such circumstances, to maintain the flow of poetic association, but I accomplished the feat in a measure. As the shades of evening closed around the hill, and the bells of twenty dining-tables ascended to us through the still air, I thought of Gray's curfew—of that glimmering Stoke-Pogis landscape that faded into immortality on his sight. I thought of Matthisson's "Elegy" on this forlorn old dandy of a castle. I thought of the sympathetic chest-notes with which I read to Mary Ashburton the "Song of the Silent Land."

I thought of Francine, and of the condition of base terror I was in when I ran away from her with the man who momentarily represented my solvency, my credit and my respectability. May the foul fiend catch me, sweet vision, if I do not find thee soon again! A Tyrolean, who entered by stealth, persuaded a heart-rending lamentation to issue from his wooden trumpet: although the acid sounds proceeding from this terrible whistle set my teeth on edge and caused me at first to start off my seat, yet I rewarded him with such a competency in copper as made his eyes emerge from his face. A singing-girl and some blonde bouquet-sellers had equal cause to rejoice in my generosity. It is when a gentleman is landed finally on his coppers that he becomes penny-liberal. I glanced defiance at Berkley, my creditor, as I showered largess on these humble poets.

We descended under the stars, and I began to think that illuminated gravel-roads were, at night, susceptible of some apology. We returned to the city by easy stages, with a halt at the "Repose of Sophie." At the hotel there was given me, re-directed in the pretty hand of Francine, an unlimited credit from Munroe & Co. on the house of Meyer in Baden-Baden. I was a freeman once more.

EDWARD STRAHAN.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]