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The Grey Woman and other Tales

by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell · English · Gutenberg #28636 · 457,238 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Grey Woman and other Tales

Author: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell


        
Release date: April 29, 2009 [eBook #28636]
                Most recently updated: July 22, 2025

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREY WOMAN AND OTHER TALES ***




[Illustration:

THE GREY WOMAN
AND
OTHER TALES.

MRS. GASKELL



SMITH ELDER & Co
65 CORNHILL
1865]




THE GREY WOMAN.
AND OTHER TALES.


BY MRS. GASKELL,

AUTHOR OF “MARY BARTON,” “NORTH AND SOUTH,” “SYLVIA’S
LOVERS,” “COUSIN PHILLIS,” “CRANFORD,” ETC.


ILLUSTRATED EDITION.


LONDON:
SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, CORNHILL.
M.DCCC.LXV.


[_The Right of Translation is reserved._]





CONTENTS.                      PAGE

THE GREY WOMAN                    5
CURIOUS IF TRUE                  82
SIX WEEKS AT HEPPENHEIM         105
LIBBIE MARSH’S THREE ERAS       158
CHRISTMAS STORMS AND SUNSHINE   197
HAND AND HEART                  213
BESSY’S TROUBLES AT HOME        240
DISAPPEARANCES                  267




THE GREY WOMAN.

PORTION I.


There is a mill by the Neckar-side, to which many people resort for
coffee, according to the fashion which is almost national in Germany.
There is nothing particularly attractive in the situation of this mill;
it is on the Mannheim (the flat and unromantic) side of Heidelberg.
The river turns the mill-wheel with a plenteous gushing sound; the
out-buildings and the dwelling-house of the miller form a well-kept
dusty quadrangle. Again, further from the river, there is a garden
full of willows, and arbours, and flower-beds not well kept, but very
profuse in flowers and luxuriant creepers, knotting and looping the
arbours together. In each of these arbours is a stationary table of
white painted wood, and light moveable chairs of the same colour and
material.

I went to drink coffee there with some friends in 184—. The stately old
miller came out to greet us, as some of the party were known to him of
old. He was of a grand build of a man, and his loud musical voice, with
its tone friendly and familiar, his rolling laugh of welcome, went well
with the keen bright eye, the fine cloth of his coat, and the general
look of substance about the place. Poultry of all kinds abounded in
the mill-yard, where there were ample means of livelihood for them
strewed on the ground; but not content with this, the miller took out
handfuls of corn from the sacks, and threw liberally to the cocks and
hens that ran almost under his feet in their eagerness. And all the
time he was doing this, as it were habitually, he was talking to us,
and ever and anon calling to his daughter and the serving-maids, to bid
them hasten the coffee we had ordered. He followed us to an arbour, and
saw us served to his satisfaction with the best of everything we could
ask for; and then left us to go round to the different arbours and see
that each party was properly attended to; and, as he went, this great,
prosperous, happy-looking man whistled softly one of the most plaintive
airs I ever heard.

“His family have held this mill ever since the old Palatinate days;
or rather, I should say, have possessed the ground ever since then,
for two successive mills of theirs have been burnt down by the French.
If you want to see Scherer in a passion, just talk to him of the
possibility of a French invasion.”

But at this moment, still whistling that mournful air, we saw the
miller going down the steps that led from the somewhat raised garden
into the mill-yard; and so I seemed to have lost my chance of putting
him in a passion.

We had nearly finished our coffee, and our “kucken,” and our cinnamon
cake, when heavy splashes fell on our thick leafy covering; quicker and
quicker they came, coming through the tender leaves as if they were
tearing them asunder; all the people in the garden were hurrying under
shelter, or seeking for their carriages standing outside. Up the steps
the miller came hastening, with a crimson umbrella, fit to cover every
one left in the garden, and followed by his daughter, and one or two
maidens, each bearing an umbrella.

“Come into the house—come in, I say. It is a summer-storm, and will
flood the place for an hour or two, till the river carries it away.
Here, here.”

And we followed him back into his own house. We went into the kitchen
first. Such an array of bright copper and tin vessels I never saw; and
all the wooden things were as thoroughly scoured. The red tile floor
was spotless when we went in, but in two minutes it was all over slop
and dirt with the tread of many feet; for the kitchen was filled, and
still the worthy miller kept bringing in more people under his great
crimson umbrella. He even called the dogs in, and made them lie down
under the tables.

His daughter said something to him in German, and he shook his head
merrily at her. Everybody laughed.

“What did she say?” I asked.

“She told him to bring the ducks in next; but indeed if more people
come we shall be suffocated. What with the thundery weather, and the
stove, and all these steaming clothes, I really think we must ask leave
to pass on. Perhaps we might go in and see Frau Scherer.”

My friend asked the daughter of the house for permission to go into an
inner chamber and see her mother. It was granted, and we went into a
sort of saloon, overlooking the Neckar; very small, very bright, and
very close. The floor was slippery with polish; long narrow pieces
of looking-glass against the walls reflected the perpetual motion of
the river opposite; a white porcelain stove, with some old-fashioned
ornaments of brass about it; a sofa, covered with Utrecht velvet, a
table before it, and a piece of worsted-worked carpet under it; a
vase of artificial flowers; and, lastly, an alcove with a bed in it,
on which lay the paralysed wife of the good miller, knitting busily,
formed the furniture. I spoke as if this was all that was to be seen
in the room; but, sitting quietly, while my friend kept up a brisk
conversation in a language which I but half understood, my eye was
caught by a picture in a dark corner of the room, and I got up to
examine it more nearly.

It was that of a young girl of extreme beauty; evidently of middle
rank. There was a sensitive refinement in her face, as if she almost
shrank from the gaze which, of necessity, the painter must have fixed
upon her. It was not over-well painted, but I felt that it must have
been a good likeness, from this strong impress of peculiar character
which I have tried to describe. From the dress, I should guess it
to have been painted in the latter half of the last century. And I
afterwards heard that I was right.

There was a little pause in the conversation.

“Will you ask Frau Scherer who this is?”

My friend repeated my question, and received a long reply in German.
Then she turned round and translated it to me.

“It is the likeness of a great-aunt of her husband’s.” (My friend was
standing by me, and looking at the picture with sympathetic curiosity.)
“See! here is the name on the open page of this Bible, ‘Anna Scherer,
1778.’ Frau Scherer says there is a tradition in the family that this
pretty girl, with her complexion of lilies and roses, lost her colour
so entirely through fright, that she was known by the name of the
Grey Woman. She speaks as if this Anna Scherer lived in some state
of life-long terror. But she does not know details; refers me to her
husband for them. She thinks he has some papers which were written by
the original of that picture for her daughter, who died in this very
house not long after our friend there was married. We can ask Herr
Scherer for the whole story if you like.”

“Oh yes, pray do!” said I. And, as our host came in at this moment to
ask how we were faring, and to tell us that he had sent to Heidelberg
for carriages to convey us home, seeing no chance of the heavy rain
abating, my friend, after thanking him, passed on to my request.

“Ah!” said he, his face changing, “the aunt Anna had a sad history.
It was all owing to one of those hellish Frenchmen; and her daughter
suffered for it—the cousin Ursula, as we all called her when I was a
child. To be sure, the good cousin Ursula was his child as well. The
sins of the fathers are visited on their children. The lady would
like to know all about it, would she? Well, there are papers—a kind
of apology the aunt Anna wrote for putting an end to her daughter’s
engagement—or rather facts which she revealed, that prevented cousin
Ursula from marrying the man she loved; and so she would never have
any other good fellow, else I have heard say my father would have been
thankful to have made her his wife.” All this time he was rummaging in
the drawer of an old-fashioned bureau, and now he turned round, with a
bundle of yellow MSS. in his hand, which he gave to my friend, saying,
“Take it home, take it home, and if you care to make out our crabbed
German writing, you may keep it as long as you like, and read it at
your leisure. Only I must have it back again when you have done with
it, that’s all.”

And so we became possessed of the manuscript of the following letter,
which it was our employment, during many a long evening that ensuing
winter, to translate, and in some parts to abbreviate. The letter
began with some reference to the pain which she had already inflicted
upon her daughter by some unexplained opposition to a project of
marriage; but I doubt if, without the clue with which the good miller
had furnished us, we could have made out even this much from the
passionate, broken sentences that made us fancy that some scene between
the mother and daughter—and possibly a third person—had occurred just
before the mother had begun to write.


“Thou dost not love thy child, mother! Thou dost not care if her heart
is broken!” Ah, God! and these words of my heart-beloved Ursula ring in
my ears as if the sound of them would fill them when I lie a-dying. And
her poor tear-stained face comes between me and everything else. Child!
hearts do not break; life is very tough as well as very terrible. But
I will not decide for thee. I will tell thee all; and thou shalt bear
the burden of choice. I may be wrong; I have little wit left, and never
had much, I think; but an instinct serves me in place of judgment, and
that instinct tells me that thou and thy Henri must never be married.
Yet I may be in error. I would fain make my child happy. Lay this paper
before the good priest Schriesheim; if, after reading it, thou hast
doubts which make thee uncertain. Only I will tell thee all now, on
condition that no spoken word ever passes between us on the subject. It
would kill me to be questioned. I should have to see all present again.

My father held, as thou knowest, the mill on the Neckar, where thy
new-found uncle, Scherer, now lives. Thou rememberest the surprise with
which we were received there last vintage twelvemonth. How thy uncle
disbelieved me when I said that I was his sister Anna, whom he had
long believed to be dead, and how I had to lead thee underneath the
picture, painted of me long ago, and point out, feature by feature, the
likeness between it and thee; and how, as I spoke, I recalled first to
my own mind, and then by speech to his, the details of the time when it
was painted; the merry words that passed between us then, a happy boy
and girl; the position of the articles of furniture in the room; our
father’s habits; the cherry-tree, now cut down, that shaded the window
of my bedroom, through which my brother was wont to squeeze himself, in
order to spring on to the topmost bough that would bear his weight; and
thence would pass me back his cap laden with fruit to where I sat on
the window-sill, too sick with fright for him to care much for eating
the cherries.

And at length Fritz gave way, and believed me to be his sister Anna,
even as though I were risen from the dead. And thou rememberest how
he fetched in his wife, and told her that I was not dead, but was
come back to the old home once more, changed as I was. And she would
scarce believe him, and scanned me with a cold, distrustful eye, till
at length—for I knew her of old as Babette Müller—I said that I was
well-to-do, and needed not to seek out friends for what they had to
give. And then she asked—not me, but her husband—why I had kept silent
so long, leading all—father, brother, every one that loved me in my own
dear home—to esteem me dead. And then thine uncle (thou rememberest?)
said he cared not to know more than I cared to tell; that I was his
Anna, found again, to be a blessing to him in his old age, as I had
been in his boyhood. I thanked him in my heart for his trust; for were
the need for telling all less than it seems to me now I could not speak
of my past life. But she, who was my sister-in-law still, held back
her welcome, and, for want of that, I did not go to live in Heidelberg
as I had planned beforehand, in order to be near my brother Fritz, but
contented myself with his promise to be a father to my Ursula when I
should die and leave this weary world.

That Babette Müller was, as I may say, the cause of all my life’s
suffering. She was a baker’s daughter in Heidelberg—a great beauty, as
people said, and, indeed, as I could see for myself. I, too—thou sawest
my picture—was reckoned a beauty, and I believe I was so. Babette
Müller looked upon me as a rival. She liked to be admired, and had no
one much to love her. I had several people to love me—thy grandfather,
Fritz, the old servant Kätchen, Karl, the head apprentice at the
mill—and I feared admiration and notice, and the being stared at as the
“Schöne Müllerin,” whenever I went to make my purchases in Heidelberg.

Those were happy, peaceful days. I had Kätchen to help me in the
housework, and whatever we did pleased my brave old father, who was
always gentle and indulgent towards us women, though he was stern
enough with the apprentices in the mill. Karl, the oldest of these, was
his favourite; and I can see now that my father wished him to marry me,
and that Karl himself was desirous to do so. But Karl was rough-spoken,
and passionate—not with me, but with the others—and I shrank from him
in a way which, I fear, gave him pain. And then came thy uncle Fritz’s
marriage; and Babette was brought to the mill to be its mistress. Not
that I cared much for giving up my post, for, in spite of my father’s
great kindness, I always feared that I did not manage well for so
large a family (with the men, and a girl under Kätchen, we sat down
eleven each night to supper). But when Babette began to find fault with
Kätchen, I was unhappy at the blame that fell on faithful servants;
and by-and-by I began to see that Babette was egging on Karl to make
more open love to me, and, as she once said, to get done with it, and
take me off to a home of my own. My father was growing old, and did
not perceive all my daily discomfort. The more Karl advanced, the more
I disliked him. He was good in the main, but I had no notion of being
married, and could not bear any one who talked to me about it.

Things were in this way when I had an invitation to go to Carlsruhe to
visit a schoolfellow, of whom I had been very fond. Babette was all for
my going; I don’t think I wanted to leave home, and yet I had been very
fond of Sophie Rupprecht. But I was always shy among strangers. Somehow
the affair was settled for me, but not until both Fritz and my father
had made inquiries as to the character and position of the Rupprechts.
They learned that the father had held some kind of inferior position
about the Grand-duke’s court, and was now dead, leaving a widow, a
noble lady, and two daughters, the elder of whom was Sophie, my friend.
Madame Rupprecht was not rich, but more than respectable—genteel. When
this was ascertained, my father made no opposition to my going; Babette
forwarded it by all the means in her power, and even my dear Fritz had
his word to say in its favour. Only Kätchen was against it—Kätchen
and Karl. The opposition of Karl did more to send me to Carlsruhe
than anything. For I could have objected to go; but when he took upon
himself to ask what was the good of going a-gadding, visiting strangers
of whom no one knew anything, I yielded to circumstances—to the pulling
of Sophie and the pushing of Babette. I was silently vexed, I remember,
at Babette’s inspection of my clothes; at the way in which she settled
that this gown was too old-fashioned, or that too common, to go with
me on my visit to a noble lady; and at the way in which she took upon
herself to spend the money my father had given me to buy what was
requisite for the occasion. And yet I blamed myself, for every one else
thought her so kind for doing all this; and she herself meant kindly,
too.

At last I quitted the mill by the Neckar-side. It was a long day’s
journey, and Fritz went with me to Carlsruhe. The Rupprechts lived
on the third floor of a house a little behind one of the principal
streets, in a cramped-up court, to which we gained admittance through a
doorway in the street. I remember how pinched their rooms looked after
the large space we had at the mill, and yet they had an air of grandeur
about them which was new to me, and which gave me pleasure, faded as
some of it was. Madame Rupprecht was too formal a lady for me; I was
never at my ease with her; but Sophie was all that I had recollected
her at school: kind, affectionate, and only rather too ready with her
expressions of admiration and regard. The little sister kept out of
our way; and that was all we needed, in the first enthusiastic renewal
of our early friendship. The one great object of Madame Rupprecht’s
life was to retain her position in society; and as her means were much
diminished since her husband’s death, there was not much comfort,
though there was a great deal of show, in their way of living; just
the opposite of what it was at my father’s house. I believe that my
coming was not too much desired by Madame Rupprecht, as I brought with
me another mouth to be fed; but Sophie had spent a year or more in
entreating for permission to invite me, and her mother, having once
consented, was too well bred not to give me a stately welcome.

The life in Carlsruhe was very different from what it was at home. The
hours were later, the coffee was weaker in the morning, the pottage was
weaker, the boiled beef less relieved by other diet, the dresses finer,
the evening engagements constant. I did not find these visits pleasant.
We might not knit, which would have relieved the tedium a little; but
we sat in a circle, talking together, only interrupted occasionally by
a gentleman, who, breaking out of the knot of men who stood near the
door, talking eagerly together, stole across the room on tiptoe, his
hat under his arm, and, bringing his feet together in the position we
called the first at the dancing-school, made a low bow to the lady he
was going to address. The first time I saw these manners I could not
help smiling; but Madame Rupprecht saw me, and spoke to me next morning
rather severely, telling me that, of course, in my country breeding I
could have seen nothing of court manners, or French fashions, but that
that was no reason for my laughing at them. Of course I tried never to
smile again in company. This visit to Carlsruhe took place in ’89, just
when every one was full of the events taking place at Paris; and yet
at Carlsruhe French fashions were more talked of than French politics.
Madame Rupprecht, especially, thought a great deal of all French
people. And this again was quite different to us at home. Fritz could
hardly bear the name of a Frenchman; and it had nearly been an obstacle
to my visit to Sophie that her mother preferred being called Madame to
her proper title of Frau.

[Illustration p. 17: Monsieur de la Tourelle.]

One night I was sitting next to Sophie, and longing for the time when
we might have supper and go home, so as to be able to speak together,
a thing forbidden by Madame Rupprecht’s rules of etiquette, which
strictly prohibited any but the most necessary conversation passing
between members of the same family when in society. I was sitting, I
say, scarcely keeping back my inclination to yawn, when two gentlemen
came in, one of whom was evidently a stranger to the whole party, from
the formal manner in which the host led him up, and presented him to
the hostess. I thought I had never seen any one so handsome or so
elegant. His hair was powdered, of course, but one could see from his
complexion that it was fair in its natural state. His features were as
delicate as a girl’s, and set off by two little “mouches,” as we called
patches in those days, one at the left corner of his mouth, the other
prolonging, as it were, the right eye. His dress was blue and silver.
I was so lost in admiration of this beautiful young man, that I was as
much surprised as if the angel Gabriel had spoken to me, when the lady
of the house brought him forward to present him to me. She called him
Monsieur de la Tourelle, and he began to speak to me in French; but
though I understood him perfectly, I dared not trust myself to reply to
him in that language. Then he tried German, speaking it with a kind of
soft lisp that I thought charming. But, before the end of the evening,
I became a little tired of the affected softness and effeminacy of his
manners, and the exaggerated compliments he paid me, which had the
effect of making all the company turn round and look at me. Madame
Rupprecht was, however, pleased with the precise thing that displeased
me. She liked either Sophie or me to create a sensation; of course
she would have preferred that it should have been her daughter, but
her daughter’s friend was next best. As we went away, I heard Madame
Rupprecht and Monsieur de la Tourelle reciprocating civil speeches with
might and main, from which I found out that the French gentleman was
coming to call on us the next day. I do not know whether I was more
glad or frightened, for I had been kept upon stilts of good manners all
the evening. But still I was flattered when Madame Rupprecht spoke as
if she had invited him, because he had shown pleasure in my society,
and even more gratified by Sophie’s ungrudging delight at the evident
interest I had excited in so fine and agreeable a gentleman. Yet, with
all this, they had hard work to keep me from running out of the salon
the next day, when we heard his voice inquiring at the gate on the
stairs for Madame Rupprecht. They had made me put on my Sunday gown,
and they themselves were dressed as for a reception.

When he was gone away, Madame Rupprecht congratulated me on the
conquest I had made; for, indeed, he had scarcely spoken to any one
else, beyond what mere civility required, and had almost invited
himself to come in the evening to bring some new song, which was all
the fashion in Paris, he said. Madame Rupprecht had been out all
morning, as she told me, to glean information about Monsieur de la
Tourelle. He was a propriétaire, had a small château on the Vosges
mountains; he owned land there, but had a large income from some
sources quite independent of this property. Altogether, he was a
good match, as she emphatically observed. She never seemed to think
that I could refuse him after this account of his wealth, nor do I
believe she would have allowed Sophie a choice, even had he been as
old and ugly as he was young and handsome. I do not quite know—so many
events have come to pass since then, and blurred the clearness of my
recollections—if I loved him or not. He was very much devoted to me; he
almost frightened me by the excess of his demonstrations of love. And
he was very charming to everybody around me, who all spoke of him as
the most fascinating of men, and of me as the most fortunate of girls.
And yet I never felt quite at my ease with him. I was always relieved
when his visits were over, although I missed his presence when he did
not come. He prolonged his visit to the friend with whom he was staying
at Carlsruhe, on purpose to woo me. He loaded me with presents, which
I was unwilling to take, only Madame Rupprecht seemed to consider me
an affected prude if I refused them. Many of these presents consisted
of articles of valuable old jewellery, evidently belonging to his
family; by accepting these I doubled the ties which were formed around
me by circumstances even more than by my own consent. In those days we
did not write letters to absent friends as frequently as is done now,
and I had been unwilling to name him in the few letters that I wrote
home. At length, however, I learned from Madame Rupprecht that she had
written to my father to announce the splendid conquest I had made, and
to request his presence at my betrothal. I started with astonishment.
I had not realized that affairs had gone so far as this. But when she
asked me, in a stern, offended manner, what I had meant by my conduct
if I did not intend to marry Monsieur de la Tourelle—I had received
his visits, his presents, all his various advances without showing
any unwillingness or repugnance—(and it was all true; I had shown no
repugnance, though I did not wish to be married to him,—at least, not
so soon)—what could I do but hang my head, and silently consent to the
rapid enunciation of the only course which now remained for me if I
would not be esteemed a heartless coquette all the rest of my days?

There was some difficulty, which I afterwards learnt that my
sister-in-law had obviated, about my betrothal taking place from home.
My father, and Fritz especially, were for having me return to the mill,
and there be betrothed, and from thence be married. But the Rupprechts
and Monsieur de la Tourelle were equally urgent on the other side; and
Babette was unwilling to have the trouble of the commotion at the mill;
and also, I think, a little disliked the idea of the contrast of my
grander marriage with her own.

So my father and Fritz came over to the betrothal. They were to stay
at an inn in Carlsruhe for a fortnight, at the end of which time the
marriage was to take place. Monsieur de la Tourelle told me he had
business at home, which would oblige him to be absent during the
interval between the two events; and I was very glad of it, for I did
not think that he valued my father and my brother as I could have
wished him to do. He was very polite to them; put on all the soft,
grand manner, which he had rather dropped with me; and complimented us
all round, beginning with my father and Madame Rupprecht, and ending
with little Alwina. But he a little scoffed at the old-fashioned church
ceremonies which my father insisted on; and I fancy Fritz must have
taken some of his compliments as satire, for I saw certain signs of
manner by which I knew that my future husband, for all his civil words,
had irritated and annoyed my brother. But all the money arrangements
were liberal in the extreme, and more than satisfied, almost surprised,
my father. Even Fritz lifted up his eyebrows and whistled. I alone
did not care about anything. I was bewitched,—in a dream,—a kind of
despair. I had got into a net through my own timidity and weakness, and
I did not see how to get out of it. I clung to my own home-people that
fortnight as I had never done before. Their voices, their ways were all
so pleasant and familiar to me, after the constraint in which I had
been living. I might speak and do as I liked without being corrected
by Madame Rupprecht, or reproved in a delicate, complimentary way by
Monsieur de la Tourelle. One day I said to my father that I did not
want to be married, that I would rather go back to the dear old mill;
but he seemed to feel this speech of mine as a dereliction of duty
as great as if I had committed perjury; as if, after the ceremony of
betrothal, no one had any right over me but my future husband. And yet
he asked me some solemn questions; but my answers were not such as to
do me any good.

“Dost thou know any fault or crime in this man that should prevent
God’s blessing from resting on thy marriage with him? Dost thou feel
aversion or repugnance to him in any way?”

And to all this what could I say? I could only stammer out that I
did not think I loved him enough; and my poor old father saw in this
reluctance only the fancy of a silly girl who did not know her own
mind, but who had now gone too far to recede.

So we were married, in the Court chapel, a privilege which Madame
Rupprecht had used no end of efforts to obtain for us, and which she
must have thought was to secure us all possible happiness, both at the
time and in recollection afterwards.

We were married; and after two days spent in festivity at Carlsruhe,
among all our new fashionable friends there, I bade good-by for ever
to my dear old father. I had begged my husband to take me by way of
Heidelberg to his old castle in the Vosges; but I found an amount of
determination, under that effeminate appearance and manner, for which
I was not prepared, and he refused my first request so decidedly that
I dared not urge it. “Henceforth, Anna,” said he, “you will move in a
different sphere of life; and though it is possible that you may have
the power of showing favour to your relations from time to time, yet
much or familiar intercourse will be undesirable, and is what I cannot
allow.” I felt almost afraid, after this formal speech, of asking my
father and Fritz to come and see me; but, when the agony of bidding
them farewell overcame all my prudence, I did beg them to pay me a
visit ere long. But they shook their heads, and spoke of business at
home, of different kinds of life, of my being a Frenchwoman now. Only
my father broke out at last with a blessing, and said, “If my child is
unhappy—which God forbid—let her remember that her father’s house is
ever open to her.” I was on the point of crying out, “Oh! take me back
then now, my father! oh, my father!” when I felt, rather than saw, my
husband present near me. He looked on with a slightly contemptuous air;
and, taking my hand in his, he led me weeping away, saying that short
farewells were always the best when they were inevitable.

It took us two days to reach his château in the Vosges, for the roads
were bad and the way difficult to ascertain. Nothing could be more
devoted than he was all the time of the journey. It seemed as if he
were trying in every way to make up for the separation which every
hour made me feel the more complete between my present and my former
life. I seemed as if I were only now wakening up to a full sense of
what marriage was, and I dare say I was not a cheerful companion on
the tedious journey. At length, jealousy of my regret for my father
and brother got the better of M. de la Tourelle, and he became so
much displeased with me that I thought my heart would break with the
sense of desolation. So it was in no cheerful frame of mind that we
approached Les Rochers, and I thought that perhaps it was because I was
so unhappy that the place looked so dreary. On one side, the château
looked like a raw new building, hastily run up for some immediate
purpose, without any growth of trees or underwood near it, only the
remains of the stone used for building, not yet cleared away from the
immediate neighbourhood, although weeds and lichens had been suffered
to grow near and over the heaps of rubbish; on the other, were the
great rocks from which the place took its name, and rising close
against them, as if almost a natural formation, was the old castle,
whose building dated many centuries back.

It was not large nor grand, but it was strong and picturesque,
and I used to wish that we lived in it rather than in the smart,
half-furnished apartment in the new edifice, which had been hastily
got ready for my reception. Incongruous as the two parts were, they
were joined into a whole by means of intricate passages and unexpected
doors, the exact positions of which I never fully understood. M. de
la Tourelle led me to a suite of rooms set apart for me, and formally
installed me in them, as in a domain of which I was sovereign. He
apologised for the hasty preparation which was all he had been able
to make for me, but promised, before I asked, or even thought of
complaining, that they should be made as luxurious as heart could wish
before many weeks had elapsed. But when, in the gloom of an autumnal
evening, I caught my own face and figure reflected in all the mirrors,
which showed only a mysterious background in the dim light of the
many candles which failed to illuminate the great proportions of the
half-furnished salon, I clung to M. de la Tourelle, and begged to be
taken to the rooms he had occupied before his marriage, he seemed angry
with me, although he affected to laugh, and so decidedly put aside
the notion of my having any other rooms but these, that I trembled in
silence at the fantastic figures and shapes which my imagination called
up as peopling the background of those gloomy mirrors. There was my
boudoir, a little less dreary—my bedroom, with its grand and tarnished
furniture, which I commonly made into my sitting-room, locking up the
various doors which led into the boudoir, the salon, the passages—all
but one, through which M. de la Tourelle always entered from his own
apartments in the older part of the castle. But this preference of mine
for occupying my bedroom annoyed M. de la Tourelle, I am sure, though
he did not care to express his displeasure. He would always allure me
back into the salon, which I disliked more and more from its complete
separation from the rest of the building by the long passage into
which all the doors of my apartment opened. This passage was closed
by heavy doors and portières, through which I could not hear a sound
from the other parts of the house, and, of course, the servants could
not hear any movement or cry of mine unless expressly summoned. To a
girl brought up as I had been in a household where every individual
lived all day in the sight of every other member of the family, never
wanted either cheerful words or the sense of silent companionship, this
grand isolation of mine was very formidable; and the more so, because
M. de la Tourelle, as landed proprietor, sportsman, and what not, was
generally out of doors the greater part of every day, and sometimes for
two or three days at a time. I had no pride to keep me from associating
with the domestics; it would have been natural to me in many ways
to have sought them out for a word of sympathy in those dreary days
when I was left so entirely to myself, had they been like our kindly
German servants. But I disliked them, one and all; I could not tell
why. Some were civil, but there was a familiarity in their civility
which repelled me; others were rude, and treated me more as if I were
an intruder than their master’s chosen wife; and yet of the two sets I
liked these last the best.

The principal male servant belonged to this latter class. I was very
much afraid of him, he had such an air of suspicious surliness about
him in all he did for me; and yet M. de la Tourelle spoke of him
as most valuable and faithful. Indeed, it sometimes struck me that
Lefebvre ruled his master in some things; and this I could not make
out. For, while M. de la Tourelle behaved towards me as if I were some
precious toy or idol, to be cherished, and fostered, and petted, and
indulged, I soon found out how little I, or, apparently, any one else,
could bend the terrible will of the man who had on first acquaintance
appeared to me too effeminate and languid to exert his will in the
slightest particular. I had learnt to know his face better now; and to
see that some vehement depth of feeling, the cause of which I could
not fathom, made his grey eye glitter with pale light, and his lips
contract, and his delicate cheek whiten on certain occasions. But all
had been so open and above board at home, that I had no experience to
help me to unravel any mysteries among those who lived under the same
roof. I understood that I had made what Madame Rupprecht and her set
would have called a great marriage, because I lived in a château with
many servants, bound ostensibly to obey me as a mistress. I understood
that M. de la Tourelle was fond enough of me in his way—proud of my
beauty, I dare say (for he often enough spoke about it to me)—but
he was also jealous, and suspicious, and uninfluenced by my wishes,
unless they tallied with his own. I felt at this time as if I could
have been fond of him too, if he would have let me; but I was timid
from my childhood, and before long my dread of his displeasure (coming
down like thunder into the midst of his love, for such slight causes
as a hesitation in reply, a wrong word, or a sigh for my father),
conquered my humorous inclination to love one who was so handsome, so
accomplished, so indulgent and devoted. But if I could not please him
when indeed I loved him, you may imagine how often I did wrong when I
was so much afraid of him as to quietly avoid his company for fear of
his outbursts of passion. One thing I remember noticing, that the more
M. de la Tourelle was displeased with me, the more Lefebvre seemed to
chuckle; and when I was restored to favour, sometimes on as sudden
an impulse as that which occasioned my disgrace, Lefebvre would look
askance at me with his cold, malicious eyes, and once or twice at such
times he spoke most disrespectfully to M. de la Tourelle.

I have almost forgotten to say that, in the early days of my life at
Les Rochers, M. de la Tourelle, in contemptuous indulgent pity at my
weakness in disliking the dreary grandeur of the salon, wrote up to
the milliner in Paris from whom my corbeille de mariage had come, to
desire her to look out for me a maid of middle age, experienced in the
toilette, and with so much refinement that she might on occasion serve
as companion to me.


PORTION II.

A Norman woman, Amante by name, was sent to Les Rochers by the Paris
milliner, to become my maid. She was tall and handsome, though upwards
of forty, and somewhat gaunt. But, on first seeing her, I liked her;
she was neither rude nor familiar in her manners, and had a pleasant
look of straightforwardness about her that I had missed in all the
inhabitants of the château, and had foolishly set down in my own
mind as a national want. Amante was directed by M. de la Tourelle
to sit in my boudoir, and to be always within call. He also gave
her many instructions as to her duties in matters which, perhaps,
strictly belonged to my department of management. But I was young and
inexperienced, and thankful to be spared any responsibility.

I daresay it was true what M. de la Tourelle said—before many weeks had
elapsed—that, for a great lady, a lady of a castle, I became sadly too
familiar with my Norman waiting-maid. But you know that by birth we
were not very far apart in rank: Amante was the daughter of a Norman
farmer, I of a German miller; and besides that, my life was so lonely!
It almost seemed as if I could not please my husband. He had written
for some one capable of being my companion at times, and now he was
jealous of my free regard for her—angry because I could sometimes laugh
at her original tunes and amusing proverbs, while when with him I was
too much frightened to smile.

From time to time families from a distance of some leagues drove
through the bad roads in their heavy carriages to pay us a visit, and
there was an occasional talk of our going to Paris when public affairs
should be a little more settled. These little events and plans were the
only variations in my life for the first twelve months, if I except the
alternations in M. de la Tourelle’s temper, his unreasonable anger, and
his passionate fondness.

Perhaps one of the reasons that made me take pleasure and comfort in
Amante’s society was, that whereas I was afraid of everybody (I do not
think I was half as much afraid of things as of persons), Amante feared
no one. She would quietly beard Lefebvre, and he respected her all the
more for it; she had a knack of putting questions to M. de la Tourelle,
which respectfully informed him that she had detected the weak point,
but forebore to press him too closely upon it out of deference to his
position as her master. And with all her shrewdness to others, she
had quite tender ways with me; all the more so at this time because
she knew, what I had not yet ventured to tell M. de la Tourelle, that
by-and-by I might become a mother—that wonderful object of mysterious
interest to single women, who no longer hope to enjoy such blessedness
themselves.

It was once more autumn; late in October. But I was reconciled to my
habitation; the walls of the new part of the building no longer looked
bare and desolate; the _débris_ had been so far cleared away by M. de
la Tourelle’s desire as to make me a little flower-garden, in which I
tried to cultivate those plants that I remembered as growing at home.
Amante and I had moved the furniture in the rooms, and adjusted it to
our liking; my husband had ordered many an article from time to time
that he thought would give me pleasure, and I was becoming tame to my
apparent imprisonment in a certain part of the great building, the
whole of which I had never yet explored. It was October, as I say,
once more. The days were lovely, though short in duration, and M. de
la Tourelle had occasion, so he said, to go to that distant estate the
superintendence of which so frequently took him away from home. He took
Lefebvre with him, and possibly some more of the lacqueys; he often
did. And my spirits rose a little at the thought of his absence; and
then the new sensation that he was the father of my unborn babe came
over me, and I tried to invest him with this fresh character. I tried
to believe that it was his passionate love for me that made him so
jealous and tyrannical, imposing, as he did, restrictions on my very
intercourse with my dear father, from whom I was so entirely separated,
as far as personal intercourse was concerned.

I had, it is true, let myself go into a sorrowful review of all the
troubles which lay hidden beneath the seeming luxury of my life. I
knew that no one cared for me except my husband and Amante; for it was
clear enough to see that I, as his wife, and also as a _parvenue_, was
not popular among the few neighbours who surrounded us; and as for
the servants, the women were all hard and impudent-looking, treating
me with a semblance of respect that had more of mockery than reality
in it; while the men had a lurking kind of fierceness about them,
sometimes displayed even to M. de la Tourelle, who on his part, it must
be confessed, was often severe even to cruelty in his management of
them. My husband loved me, I said to myself, but I said it almost in
the form of a question. His love was shown fitfully, and more in ways
calculated to please himself than to please me. I felt that for no wish
of mine would he deviate one tittle from any predetermined course of
action. I had learnt the inflexibility of those thin, delicate lips;
I knew how anger would turn his fair complexion to deadly white, and
bring the cruel light into his pale blue eyes. The love I bore to
any one seemed to be a reason for his hating them, and so I went on
pitying myself one long dreary afternoon during that absence of his
of which I have spoken, only sometimes remembering to check myself in
my murmurings by thinking of the new unseen link between us, and then
crying afresh to think how wicked I was. Oh, how well I remember that
long October evening! Amante came in from time to time, talking away
to cheer me—talking about dress and Paris, and I hardly know what, but
from time to time looking at me keenly with her friendly dark eyes, and
with serious interest, too, though all her words were about frivolity.
At length she heaped the fire with wood, drew the heavy silken curtains
close; for I had been anxious hitherto to keep them open, so that I
might see the pale moon mounting the skies, as I used to see her—the
same moon—rise from behind the Kaiser Stuhl at Heidelberg; but the
sight made me cry, so Amante shut it out. She dictated to me as a nurse
does to a child.

“Now, madame must have the little kitten to keep her company,” she
said, “while I go and ask Marthon for a cup of coffee.” I remember
that speech, and the way it roused me, for I did not like Amante to
think I wanted amusing by a kitten. It might be my petulance, but
this speech—such as she might have made to a child—annoyed me, and I
said that I had reason for my lowness of spirits—meaning that they
were not of so imaginary a nature that I could be diverted from them
by the gambols of a kitten. So, though I did not choose to tell her
all, I told her a part; and as I spoke, I began to suspect that the
good creature knew much of what I withheld, and that the little speech
about the kitten was more thoughtfully kind than it had seemed at
first. I said that it was so long since I had heard from my father;
that he was an old man, and so many things might happen—I might never
see him again—and I so seldom heard from him or my brother. It was a
more complete and total separation than I had ever anticipated when
I married, and something of my home and of my life previous to my
marriage I told the good Amante; for I had not been brought up as a
great lady, and the sympathy of any human being was precious to me.

Amante listened with interest, and in return told me some of the events
and sorrows of her own life. Then, remembering her purpose, she set
out in search of the coffee, which ought to have been brought to me an
hour before; but, in my husband’s absence, my wishes were but seldom
attended to, and I never dared to give orders.

Presently she returned, bringing the coffee and a great large cake.

“See!” said she, setting it down. “Look at my plunder. Madame must
eat. Those who eat always laugh. And, besides, I have a little news
that will please madame.” Then she told me that, lying on a table
in the great kitchen, was a bundle of letters, come by the courier
from Strasburg that very afternoon: then, fresh from her conversation
with me, she had hastily untied the string that bound them, but had
only just traced out one that she thought was from Germany, when a
servant-man came in, and, with the start he gave her, she dropped the
letters, which he picked up, swearing at her for having untied and
disarranged them. She told him that she believed there was a letter
there for her mistress; but he only swore the more, saying, that if
there was it was no business of hers, or of his either, for that he had
the strictest orders always to take all letters that arrived during his
master’s absence into the private sitting-room of the latter—a room
into which I had never entered, although it opened out of my husband’s
dressing-room.

I asked Amante if she had not conquered and brought me this letter.
No, indeed, she replied, it was almost as much as her life was worth
to live among such a set of servants: it was only a month ago that
Jacques had stabbed Valentin for some jesting talk. Had I never missed
Valentin—that handsome young lad who carried up the wood into my salon?
Poor fellow! he lies dead and cold now, and they said in the village
he had put an end to himself, but those of the household knew better.
Oh! I need not be afraid; Jacques was gone, no one knew where; but with
such people it was not safe to upbraid or insist. Monsieur would be at
home the next day, and it would not be long to wait.

But I felt as if I could not exist till the next day, without the
letter. It might be to say that my father was ill, dying—he might
cry for his daughter from his death-bed! In short, there was no end
to the thoughts and fancies that haunted me. It was of no use for
Amante to say that, after all, she might be mistaken—that she did not
read writing well—that she had but a glimpse of the address; I let my
coffee cool, my food all became distasteful, and I wrung my hands with
impatience to get at the letter, and have some news of my dear ones at
home. All the time, Amante kept her imperturbable good temper, first
reasoning, then scolding. At last she said, as if wearied out, that if
I would consent to make a good supper, she would see what could be done
as to our going to monsieur’s room in search of the letter, after the
servants were all gone to bed. We agreed to go together when all was
still, and look over the letters; there could be no harm in that; and
yet, somehow, we were such cowards we dared not do it openly and in the
face of the household.

Presently my supper came up—partridges, bread, fruits, and cream. How
well I remember that supper! We put the untouched cake away in a sort
of buffet, and poured the cold coffee out of the window, in order that
the servants might not take offence at the apparent fancifulness of
sending down for food I could not eat. I was so anxious for all to
be in bed, that I told the footman who served that he need not wait
to take away the plates and dishes, but might go to bed. Long after
I thought the house was quiet, Amante, in her caution, made me wait.
It was past eleven before we set out, with cat-like steps and veiled
light, along the passages, to go to my husband’s room and steal my own
letter, if it was indeed there; a fact about which Amante had become
very uncertain in the progress of our discussion.

To make you understand my story, I must now try to explain to you the
plan of the château. It had been at one time a fortified place of some
strength, perched on the summit of a rock, which projected from the
side of the mountain. But additions had been made to the old building
(which must have borne a strong resemblance to the castles overhanging
the Rhine), and these new buildings were placed so as to command a
magnificent view, being on the steepest side of the rock, from which
the mountain fell away, as it were, leaving the great plain of France
in full survey. The ground-plan was something of the shape of three
sides of an oblong; my apartments in the modern edifice occupied the
narrow end, and had this grand prospect. The front of the castle was
old, and ran parallel to the road far below. In this were contained the
offices and public rooms of various descriptions, into which I never
penetrated. The back wing (considering the new building, in which my
apartments were, as the centre) consisted of many rooms, of a dark and
gloomy character, as the mountain-side shut out much of the sun, and
heavy pine woods came down within a few yards of the windows. Yet on
this side—on a projecting plateau of the rock—my husband had formed the
flower-garden of which I have spoken; for he was a great cultivator of
flowers in his leisure moments.

Now my bedroom was the corner room of the new buildings on the part
next to the mountain. Hence I could have let myself down into the
flower-garden by my hands on the window-sill on one side, without
danger of hurting myself; while the windows at right angles with
these looked sheer down a descent of a hundred feet at least. Going
still farther along this wing, you came to the old building; in fact,
these two fragments of the ancient castle had formerly been attached
by some such connecting apartments as my husband had rebuilt. These
rooms belonged to M. de la Tourelle. His bedroom opened into mine, his
dressing-room lay beyond; and that was pretty nearly all I knew, for
the servants, as well as he himself, had a knack of turning me back,
under some pretence, if ever they found me walking about alone, as I
was inclined to do, when first I came, from a sort of curiosity to
see the whole of the place of which I found myself mistress. M. de la
Tourelle never encouraged me to go out alone, either in a carriage or
for a walk, saying always that the roads were unsafe in those disturbed
times; indeed, I have sometimes fancied since that the flower-garden,
to which the only access from the castle was through his rooms, was
designed in order to give me exercise and employment under his own eye.

But to return to that night. I knew, as I have said, that M. de la
Tourelle’s private room opened out of his dressing-room, and this out
of his bedroom, which again opened into mine, the corner-room. But
there were other doors into all these rooms, and these doors led into
a long gallery, lighted by windows, looking into the inner court. I
do not remember our consulting much about it; we went through my room
into my husband’s apartment through the dressing-room, but the door of
communication into his study was locked, so there was nothing for it
but to turn back and go by the gallery to the other door. I recollect
noticing one or two things in these rooms, then seen by me for the
first time. I remember the sweet perfume that hung in the air, the
scent bottles of silver that decked his toilet-table, and the whole
apparatus for bathing and dressing, more luxurious even than those
which he had provided for me. But the room itself was less splendid in
its proportions than mine. In truth, the new buildings ended at the
entrance to my husband’s dressing-room. There were deep window recesses
in walls eight or nine feet thick, and even the partitions between the
chambers were three feet deep; but over all these doors or windows
there fell thick, heavy draperies, so that I should think no one could
have heard in one room what passed in another. We went back into my
room, and out into the gallery. We had to shade our candle, from a
fear that possessed us, I don’t know why, lest some of the servants
in the opposite wing might trace our progress towards the part of the
castle unused by any one except my husband. Somehow, I had always the
feeling that all the domestics, except Amante, were spies upon me, and
that I was trammelled in a web of observation and unspoken limitation
extending over all my actions.

There was a light in the upper room; we paused, and Amante would have
again retreated, but I was chafing under the delays. What was the
harm of my seeking my father’s unopened letter to me in my husband’s
study? I, generally the coward, now blamed Amante for her unusual
timidity. But the truth was, she had far more reason for suspicion as
to the proceedings of that terrible household than I had ever known
of. I urged her on, I pressed on myself; we came to the door, locked,
but with the key in it; we turned it, we entered; the letters lay on
the table, their white oblongs catching the light in an instant, and
revealing themselves to my eager eyes, hungering after the words of
love from my peaceful, distant home. But just as I pressed forward
to examine the letters, the candle which Amante held, caught in some
draught, went out, and we were in darkness. Amante proposed that we
should carry the letters back to my salon, collecting them as well
as we could in the dark, and returning all but the expected one for
me; but I begged her to return to my room, where I kept tinder and
flint, and to strike a fresh light; and so she went, and I remained
alone in the room, of which I could only just distinguish the size,
and the principal articles of furniture: a large table, with a deep,
overhanging cloth, in the middle, escritoires and other heavy articles
against the walls; all this I could see as I stood there, my hand on
the table close by the letters, my face towards the window, which,
both from the darkness of the wood growing high up the mountain-side
and the faint light of the declining moon, seemed only like an oblong
of paler purpler black than the shadowy room. How much I remembered
from my one instantaneous glance before the candle went out, how much
I saw as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I do not know,
but even now, in my dreams, comes up that room of horror, distinct
in its profound shadow. Amante could hardly have been gone a minute
before I felt an additional gloom before the window, and heard soft
movements outside—soft, but resolute, and continued until the end was
accomplished, and the window raised.

In mortal terror of people forcing an entrance at such an hour, and
in such a manner as to leave no doubt of their purpose, I would have
turned to fly when first I heard the noise, only that I feared by
any quick motion to catch their attention, as I also ran the danger
of doing by opening the door, which was all but closed, and to whose
handlings I was unaccustomed. Again, quick as lightning, I bethought
me of the hiding-place between the locked door to my husband’s
dressing-room and the portière which covered it; but I gave that up,
I felt as if I could not reach it without screaming or fainting. So I
sank down softly, and crept under the table, hidden, as I hoped, by the
great, deep table-cover, with its heavy fringe. I had not recovered my
swooning senses fully, and was trying to reassure myself as to my being
in a place of comparative safety, for, above all things, I dreaded the
betrayal of fainting, and struggled hard for such courage as I might
attain by deadening myself to the danger I was in by inflicting intense
pain on myself. You have often asked me the reason of that mark on
my hand; it was where, in my agony, I bit out a piece of flesh with
my relentless teeth, thankful for the pain, which helped to numb my
terror. I say, I was but just concealed when I heard the window lifted,
and one after another stepped over the sill, and stood by me so close
that I could have touched their feet. Then they laughed and whispered;
my brain swam so that I could not tell the meaning of their words, but
I heard my husband’s laughter among the rest—low, hissing, scornful—as
he kicked something heavy that they had dragged in over the floor, and
which lay near me; so near, that my husband’s kick, in touching it,
touched me too. I don’t know why—I can’t tell how—but some feeling, and
not curiosity, prompted me to put out my hand, ever so softly, ever
so little, and feel in the darkness for what lay spurned beside me. I
stole my groping palm upon the clenched and chilly hand of a corpse!

Strange to say, this roused me to instant vividness of thought. Till
this moment I had almost forgotten Amante; now I planned with feverish
rapidity how I could give her a warning not to return; or rather, I
should say, I tried to plan, for all my projects were utterly futile,
as I might have seen from the first. I could only hope she would hear
the voices of those who were now busy in trying to kindle a light,
swearing awful oaths at the mislaid articles which would have enabled
them to strike fire. I heard her step outside coming nearer and nearer;
I saw from my hiding-place the line of light beneath the door more and
more distinctly; close to it her footstep paused; the men inside—at
the time I thought they had been only two, but I found out afterwards
there were three—paused in their endeavours, and were quite still, as
breathless as myself, I suppose. Then she slowly pushed the door open
with gentle motion, to save her flickering candle from being again
extinguished. For a moment all was still. Then I heard my husband say,
as he advanced towards her (he wore riding-boots, the shape of which I
knew well, as I could see them in the light),—

“Amante, may I ask what brings you here into my private room?”

He stood between her and the dead body of a man, from which ghastly
heap I shrank away as it almost touched me, so close were we all
together. I could not tell whether she saw it or not; I could give her
no warning, nor make any dumb utterance of signs to bid her what to
say—if, indeed, I knew myself what would be best for her to say.

Her voice was quite changed when she spoke; quite hoarse, and very low;
yet it was steady enough as she said, what was the truth, that she had
come to look for a letter which she believed had arrived for me from
Germany. Good, brave Amante! Not a word about me. M. de la Tourelle
answered with a grim blasphemy and a fearful threat. He would have no
one prying into his premises; madame should have her letters, if there
were any, when he chose to give them to her, if, indeed, he thought
it well to give them to her at all. As for Amante, this was her first
warning, but it was also her last; and, taking the candle out of her
hand, he turned her out of the room, his companions discreetly making
a screen, so as to throw the corpse into deep shadow. I heard the key
turn in the door after her—if I had ever had any thought of escape it
was gone now. I only hoped that whatever was to befal me might soon
be over, for the tension of nerve was growing more than I could bear.
The instant she could be supposed to be out of hearing, two voices
began speaking in the most angry terms to my husband, upbraiding him
for not having detained her, gagged her—nay, one was for killing her,
saying he had seen her eye fall on the face of the dead man, whom he
now kicked in his passion. Though the form of their speech was as if
they were speaking to equals, yet in their tone there was something of
fear. I am sure my husband was their superior, or captain, or somewhat.
He replied to them almost as if he were scoffing at them, saying it
was such an expenditure of labour having to do with fools; that, ten
to one, the woman was only telling the simple truth, and that she was
frightened enough by discovering her master in his room to be thankful
to escape and return to her mistress, to whom he could easily explain
on the morrow how he happened to return in the dead of night. But his
companions fell to cursing me, and saying that since M. de la Tourelle
had been married he was fit for nothing but to dress himself fine and
scent himself with perfume; that, as for me, they could have got him
twenty girls prettier, and with far more spirit in them. He quietly
answered that I suited him, and that was enough. All this time they
were doing something—I could not see what—to the corpse; sometimes they
were too busy rifling the dead body, I believe, to talk; again they let
it fall with a heavy, resistless thud, and took to quarrelling. They
taunted my husband with angry vehemence, enraged at his scoffing and
scornful replies, his mocking laughter. Yes, holding up his poor dead
victim, the better to strip him of whatever he wore that was valuable,
I heard my husband laugh just as he had done when exchanging repartees
in the little salon of the Rupprechts at Carlsruhe. I hated and dreaded
him from that moment. At length, as if to make an end of the subject,
he said, with cool determination in his voice,—

“Now, my good friends, what is the use of all this talking, when you
know in your hearts that, if I suspected my wife of knowing more than I
chose of my affairs, she would not outlive the day? Remember Victorine.
Because she merely joked about my affairs in an imprudent manner, and
rejected my advice to keep a prudent tongue—to see what she liked, but
ask nothing and say nothing—she has gone a long journey—longer than to
Paris.”

“But this one is different to her; we knew all that Madame Victorine
knew, she was such a chatterbox; but this one may find out a vast deal,
and never breathe a word about it, she is so sly. Some fine day we may
have the country raised, and the gendarmes down upon us from Strasburg,
and all owing to your pretty doll, with her cunning ways of coming over
you.”

I think this roused M. de la Tourelle a little from his contemptuous
indifference, for he ground an oath through his teeth, and said, “Feel!
this dagger is sharp, Henri. If my wife breathes a word, and I am such
a fool as not to have stopped her mouth effectually before she can
bring down gendarmes upon us, just let that good steel find its way to
my heart. Let her guess but one tittle, let her have but one slight
suspicion that I am not a ‘grand propriétaire,’ much less imagine that
I am a chief of Chauffeurs, and she follows Victorine on the long
journey beyond Paris that very day.”

“She’ll outwit you yet; or I never judged women well. Those still
silent ones are the devil. She’ll be off during some of your absences,
having picked out some secret that will break us all on the wheel.”

“Bah!” said his voice; and then in a minute he added, “Let her go if
she will. But, where she goes, I will follow; so don’t cry before
you’re hurt.”

By this time, they had nearly stripped the body; and the conversation
turned on what they should do with it. I learnt that the dead man was
the Sieur de Poissy, a neighbouring gentleman, whom I had often heard
of as hunting with my husband. I had never seen him, but they spoke as
if he had come upon them while they were robbing some Cologne merchant,
torturing him after the cruel practice of the Chauffeurs, by roasting
the feet of their victims in order to compel them to reveal any hidden
circumstances connected with their wealth, of which the Chauffeurs
afterwards made use; and this Sieur de Poissy coming down upon them,
and recognising M. de la Tourelle, they had killed him, and brought
him thither after nightfall. I heard him whom I called my husband,
laugh his little light laugh as he spoke of the way in which the dead
body had been strapped before one of the riders, in such a way that it
appeared to any passer-by as if, in truth, the murderer were tenderly
supporting some sick person. He repeated some mocking reply of double
meaning, which he himself had given to some one who made inquiry. He
enjoyed the play upon words, softly applauding his own wit. And all
the time the poor helpless outstretched arms of the dead lay close to
his dainty boot! Then another stooped (my heart stopped beating), and
picked up a letter lying on the ground—a letter that had dropped out
of M. de Poissy’s pocket—a letter from his wife, full of tender words
of endearment and pretty babblings of love. This was read aloud, with
coarse ribald comments on every sentence, each trying to outdo the
previous speaker. When they came to some pretty words about a sweet
Maurice, their little child away with its mother on some visit, they
laughed at M. de la Tourelle, and told him that he would be hearing
such woman’s drivelling some day. Up to that moment, I think, I had
only feared him, but his unnatural, half-ferocious reply made me hate
even more than I dreaded him. But now they grew weary of their savage
merriment; the jewels and watch had been apprised, the money and papers
examined; and apparently there was some necessity for the body being
interred quietly and before daybreak. They had not dared to leave him
where he was slain for fear lest people should come and recognise him,
and raise the hue and cry upon them. For they all along spoke as if it
was their constant endeavour to keep the immediate neighbourhood of
Les Rochers in the most orderly and tranquil condition, so as never to
give cause for visits from the gendarmes. They disputed a little as
to whether they should make their way into the castle larder through
the gallery, and satisfy their hunger before the hasty interment, or
afterwards. I listened with eager feverish interest as soon as this
meaning of their speeches reached my hot and troubled brain, for at
the time the words they uttered seemed only to stamp themselves with
terrible force on my memory, so that I could hardly keep from repeating
them aloud like a dull, miserable, unconscious echo; but my brain was
numb to the sense of what they said, unless I myself were named, and
then, I suppose, some instinct of self-preservation stirred within
me, and quickened my sense. And how I strained my ears, and nerved my
hands and limbs, beginning to twitch with convulsive movements, which I
feared might betray me! I gathered every word they spoke, not knowing
which proposal to wish for, but feeling that whatever was finally
decided upon, my only chance of escape was drawing near. I once feared
lest my husband should go to his bedroom before I had had that one
chance, in which case he would most likely have perceived my absence.
He said that his hands were soiled (I shuddered, for it might be with
life-blood), and he would go and cleanse them; but some bitter jest
turned his purpose, and he left the room with the other two—left it by
the gallery door. Left me alone in the dark with the stiffening corpse!

Now, now was my time, if ever; and yet I could not move. It was not my
cramped and stiffened joints that crippled me, it was the sensation of
that dead man’s close presence. I almost fancied—I almost fancy still—I
heard the arm nearest to me move; lift itself up, as if once more
imploring, and fall in dead despair. At that fancy—if fancy it were—I
screamed aloud in mad terror, and the sound of my own strange voice
broke the spell. I drew myself to the side of the table farthest from
the corpse, with as much slow caution as if I really could have feared
the clutch of that poor dead arm, powerless for evermore. I softly
raised myself up, and stood sick and trembling, holding by the table,
too dizzy to know what to do next. I nearly fainted, when a low voice
spoke—when Amante, from the outside of the door, whispered, “Madame!”
The faithful creature had been on the watch, had heard my scream, and
having seen the three ruffians troop along the gallery down the stairs,
and across the court to the offices in the other wing of the castle,
she had stolen to the door of the room in which I was. The sound of her
voice gave me strength; I walked straight towards it, as one benighted
on a dreary moor, suddenly perceiving the small steady light which
tells of human dwellings, takes heart, and steers straight onward.
Where I was, where that voice was, I knew not; but go to it I must, or
die. The door once opened—I know not by which of us—I fell upon her
neck, grasping her tight, till my hands ached with the tension of their
hold. Yet she never uttered a word. Only she took me up in her vigorous
arms, and bore me to my room, and laid me on my bed. I do not know
more; as soon as I was placed there I lost sense; I came to myself with
a horrible dread lest my husband was by me, with a belief that he was
in the room, in hiding, waiting to hear my first words, watching for
the least sign of the terrible knowledge I possessed to murder me. I
dared not breathe quicker, I measured and timed each heavy inspiration;
I did not speak, nor move, nor even open my eyes, for long after I was
in my full, my miserable senses. I heard some one treading softly about
the room, as if with a purpose, not as if for curiosity, or merely to
beguile the time; some one passed in and out of the salon; and I still
lay quiet, feeling as if death were inevitable, but wishing that the
agony of death were past. Again faintness stole over me; but just as I
was sinking into the horrible feeling of nothingness, I heard Amante’s
voice close to me, saying,—

“Drink this, madame, and let us begone. All is ready.”

I let her put her arm under my head and raise me, and pour something
down my throat. All the time she kept talking in a quiet, measured
voice, unlike her own, so dry and authoritative; she told me that
a suit of her clothes lay ready for me, that she herself was as
much disguised as the circumstances permitted her to be, that what
provisions I had left from my supper were stowed away in her pockets,
and so she went on, dwelling on little details of the most commonplace
description, but never alluding for an instant to the fearful cause why
flight was necessary. I made no inquiry as to how she knew, or what she
knew. I never asked her either then or afterwards, I could not bear
it—we kept our dreadful secret close. But I suppose she must have been
in the dressing-room adjoining, and heard all.

In fact, I dared not speak even to her, as if there were anything
beyond the most common event in life in our preparing thus to leave
the house of blood by stealth in the dead of night. She gave me
directions—short condensed directions, without reasons—just as you
do to a child; and like a child I obeyed her. She went often to the
door and listened; and often, too, she went to the window, and looked
anxiously out. For me, I saw nothing but her, and I dared not let my
eyes wander from her for a minute; and I heard nothing in the deep
midnight silence but her soft movements, and the heavy beating of my
own heart. At last she took my hand, and led me in the dark, through
the salon, once more into the terrible gallery, where across the black
darkness the windows admitted pale sheeted ghosts of light upon the
floor. Clinging to her I went; unquestioning—for she was human sympathy
to me after the isolation of my unspeakable terror. On we went, turning
to the left instead of to the right, past my suite of sitting-rooms
where the gilding was red with blood, into that unknown wing of the
castle that fronted the main road lying parallel far below. She guided
me along the basement passages to which we had now descended, until we
came to a little open door, through which the air blew chill and cold,
bringing for the first time a sensation of life to me. The door led
into a kind of cellar, through which we groped our way to an opening
like a window, but which, instead of being glazed, was only fenced with
iron bars, two of which were loose, as Amante evidently knew, for she
took them out with the ease of one who had performed the action often
before, and then helped me to follow her out into the free, open air.

We stole round the end of the building, and on turning the corner—she
first—I felt her hold on me tighten for an instant, and the next step
I, too, heard distant voices, and the blows of a spade upon the heavy
soil, for the night was very warm and still.

We had not spoken a word; we did not speak now. Touch was safer and as
expressive. She turned down towards the high road; I followed. I did
not know the path; we stumbled again and again, and I was much bruised;
so doubtless was she; but bodily pain did me good. At last, we were on
the plainer path of the high road.

I had such faith in her that I did not venture to speak, even when she
paused, as wondering to which hand she should turn. But now, for the
first time, she spoke:—

“Which way did you come when he brought you here first?”

I pointed, I could not speak.

We turned in the opposite direction; still going along the high road.
In about an hour, we struck up to the mountain-side, scrambling far
up before we even dared to rest; far up and away again before day
had fully dawned. Then we looked about for some place of rest and
concealment: and now we dared to speak in whispers. Amante told me that
she had locked the door of communication between his bedroom and mine,
and, as in a dream, I was aware that she had also locked and brought
away the key of the door between the latter and the salon.

“He will have been too busy this night to think much about you—he will
suppose you are asleep—I shall be the first to be missed; but they will
only just now be discovering our loss.”

I remember those last words of hers made me pray to go on; I felt as if
we were losing precious time in thinking either of rest or concealment;
but she hardly replied to me, so busy was she in seeking out some
hiding-place. At length, giving it up in despair, we proceeded onwards
a little way; the mountain-side sloped downwards rapidly, and in the
full morning light we saw ourselves in a narrow valley, made by a
stream which forced its way along it. About a mile lower down there
rose the pale blue smoke of a village, a mill-wheel was lashing up the
water close at hand, though out of sight. Keeping under the cover of
every sheltering tree or bush, we worked our way down past the mill,
down to a one-arched bridge, which doubtless formed part of the road
between the village and the mill.

“This will do,” said she; and we crept under the space, and climbing a
little way up the rough stone-work, we seated ourselves on a projecting
ledge, and crouched in the deep damp shadow. Amante sat a little above
me, and made me lay my head on her lap. Then she fed me, and took some
food herself; and opening out her great dark cloak, she covered up
every light-coloured speck about us; and thus we sat, shivering and
shuddering, yet feeling a kind of rest through it all, simply from the
fact that motion was no longer imperative, and that during the daylight
our only chance of safety was to be still. But the damp shadow in which
we were sitting was blighting, from the circumstance of the sunlight
never penetrating there; and I dreaded lest, before night and the time
for exertion again came on, I should feel illness creeping all over me.
To add to our discomfort, it had rained the whole day long, and the
stream, fed by a thousand little mountain brooklets, began to swell
into a torrent, rushing over the stones with a perpetual and dizzying
noise.

Every now and then I was wakened from the painful doze into which I
continually fell, by a sound of horses’ feet over our head: sometimes
lumbering heavily as if dragging a burden, sometimes rattling and
galloping, and with the sharper cry of men’s voices coming cutting
through the roar of the waters. At length, day fell. We had to drop
into the stream, which came above our knees as we waded to the bank.
There we stood, stiff and shivering. Even Amante’s courage seemed to
fail.

“We must pass this night in shelter, somehow,” said she. For indeed the
rain was coming down pitilessly. I said nothing. I thought that surely
the end must be death in some shape; and I only hoped that to death
might not be added the terror of the cruelty of men. In a minute or so
she had resolved on her course of action. We went up the stream to the
mill. The familiar sounds, the scent of the wheat, the flour whitening
the walls—all reminded me of home, and it seemed to me as if I must
struggle out of this nightmare and waken, and find myself once more a
happy girl by the Neckar-side. They were long in unbarring the door
at which Amante had knocked: at length, an old feeble voice inquired
who was there, and what was sought? Amante answered shelter from
the storm for two women; but the old woman replied, with suspicious
hesitation, that she was sure it was a man who was asking for shelter,
and that she could not let us in. But at length she satisfied herself,
and unbarred the heavy door, and admitted us. She was not an unkindly
woman; but her thoughts all travelled in one circle, and that was, that
her master, the miller, had told her on no account to let any man into
the place during his absence, and that she did not know if he would
not think two women as bad; and yet that as we were not men, no one
could say she had disobeyed him, for it was a shame to let a dog be
out such a night as this. Amante, with ready wit, told her to let no
one know that we had taken shelter there that night, and that then her
master could not blame her; and while she was thus enjoining secrecy
as the wisest course, with a view to far other people than the miller,
she was hastily helping me to take off my wet clothes, and spreading
them, as well as the brown mantle that had covered us both, before the
great stove which warmed the room with the effectual heat that the old
woman’s failing vitality required. All this time the poor creature
was discussing with herself as to whether she had disobeyed orders,
in a kind of garrulous way that made me fear much for her capability
of retaining anything secret if she was questioned. By-and-by, she
wandered away to an unnecessary revelation of her master’s whereabouts:
gone to help in the search for his landlord, the Sieur de Poissy, who
lived at the château just above, and who had not returned from his
chase the day before; so the intendant imagined he might have met with
some accident, and had summoned the neighbours to beat the forest and
the hill-side. She told us much besides, giving us to understand that
she would fain meet with a place as housekeeper where there were more
servants and less to do, as her life here was very lonely and dull,
especially since her master’s son had gone away—gone to the wars.
She then took her supper, which was evidently apportioned out to her
with a sparing hand, as, even if the idea had come into her head, she
had not enough to offer us any. Fortunately, warmth was all that we
required, and that, thanks to Amante’s cares, was returning to our
chilled bodies. After supper, the old woman grew drowsy; but she seemed
uncomfortable at the idea of going to sleep and leaving us still in the
house. Indeed, she gave us pretty broad hints as to the propriety of
our going once more out into the bleak and stormy night; but we begged
to be allowed to stay under shelter of some kind; and, at last, a
bright idea came over her, and she bade us mount by a ladder to a kind
of loft, which went half over the lofty mill-kitchen in which we were
sitting. We obeyed her—what else could we do?—and found ourselves in a
spacious floor, without any safeguard or wall, boarding, or railing,
to keep us from falling over into the kitchen in case we went too near
the edge. It was, in fact, the store-room or garret for the household.
There was bedding piled up, boxes and chests, mill sacks, the winter
store of apples and nuts, bundles of old clothes, broken furniture,
and many other things. No sooner were we up there, than the old woman
dragged the ladder, by which we had ascended, away with a chuckle, as
if she was now secure that we could do no mischief, and sat herself
down again once more, to doze and await her master’s return. We pulled
out some bedding, and gladly laid ourselves down in our dried clothes
and in some warmth, hoping to have the sleep we so much needed to
refresh us and prepare us for the next day. But I could not sleep, and
I was aware, from her breathing, that Amante was equally wakeful. We
could both see through the crevices between the boards that formed the
flooring into the kitchen below, very partially lighted by the common
lamp that hung against the wall near the stove on the opposite side to
that on which we were.


PORTION III.

Far on in the night there were voices outside reached us in our
hiding-place; an angry knocking at the door, and we saw through the
chinks the old woman rouse herself up to go and open it for her master,
who came in, evidently half drunk. To my sick horror, he was followed
by Lefebvre, apparently as sober and wily as ever. They were talking
together as they came in, disputing about something; but the miller
stopped the conversation to swear at the old woman for having fallen
asleep, and, with tipsy anger, and even with blows, drove the poor
old creature out of the kitchen to bed. Then he and Lefebvre went on
talking—about the Sieur de Poissy’s disappearance. It seemed that
Lefebvre had been out all day, along with other of my husband’s men,
ostensibly assisting in the search; in all probability trying to blind
the Sieur de Poissy’s followers by putting them on a wrong scent, and
also, I fancied, from one or two of Lefebvre’s sly questions, combining
the hidden purpose of discovering us.

Although the miller was tenant and vassal to the Sieur de Poissy, he
seemed to me to be much more in league with the people of M. de la
Tourelle. He was evidently aware, in part, of the life which Lefebvre
and the others led; although, again, I do not suppose he knew or
imagined one-half of their crimes; and also, I think, he was seriously
interested in discovering the fate of his master, little suspecting
Lefebvre of murder or violence. He kept talking himself, and letting
out all sorts of thoughts and opinions; watched by the keen eyes of
Lefebvre gleaming out below his shaggy eyebrows. It was evidently not
the cue of the latter to let out that his master’s wife had escaped
from that vile and terrible den; but though he never breathed a word
relating to us, not the less was I certain he was thirsting for our
blood, and lying in wait for us at every turn of events. Presently he
got up and took his leave; and the miller bolted him out, and stumbled
off to bed. Then we fell asleep, and slept sound and long.

The next morning, when I awoke, I saw Amante, half raised, resting on
one hand, and eagerly gazing, with straining eyes, into the kitchen
below. I looked too, and both heard and saw the miller and two of
his men eagerly and loudly talking about the old woman, who had not
appeared as usual to make the fire in the stove, and prepare her
master’s breakfast, and who now, late on in the morning, had been
found dead in her bed; whether from the effect of her master’s blows
the night before, or from natural causes, who can tell? The miller’s
conscience upbraided him a little, I should say, for he was eagerly
declaring his value for his housekeeper, and repeating how often she
had spoken of the happy life she led with him. The men might have their
doubts, but they did not wish to offend the miller, and all agreed
that the necessary steps should be taken for a speedy funeral. And
so they went out, leaving us in our loft, but so much alone, that,
for the first time almost, we ventured to speak freely, though still
in a hushed voice, pausing to listen continually. Amante took a more
cheerful view of the whole occurrence than I did. She said that, had
the old woman lived, we should have had to depart that morning, and
that this quiet departure would have been the best thing we could have
had to hope for, as, in all probability, the housekeeper would have
told her master of us and of our resting-place, and this fact would,
sooner or later, have been brought to the knowledge of those from whom
we most desired to keep it concealed; but that now we had time to rest,
and a shelter to rest in, during the first hot pursuit, which we knew
to a fatal certainty was being carried on. The remnants of our food,
and the stored-up fruit, would supply us with provision; the only thing
to be feared was, that something might be required from the loft, and
the miller or some one else mount up in search of it. But even then,
with a little arrangement of boxes and chests, one part might be so
kept in shadow that we might yet escape observation. All this comforted
me a little; but, I asked, how were we ever to escape? The ladder was
taken away, which was our only means of descent. But Amante replied
that she could make a sufficient ladder of the rope lying coiled among
other things, to drop us down the ten feet or so—with the advantage of
its being portable, so that we might carry it away, and thus avoid all
betrayal of the fact that any one had ever been hidden in the loft.

During the two days that intervened before we did escape, Amante made
good use of her time. She looked into every box and chest during the
man’s absence at his mill; and finding in one box an old suit of man’s
clothes, which had probably belonged to the miller’s absent son, she
put them on to see if they would fit her; and, when she found that they
did, she cut her own hair to the shortness of a man’s, made me clip her
black eyebrows as close as though they had been shaved, and by cutting
up old corks into pieces such as would go into her cheeks, she altered
both the shape of her face and her voice to a degree which I should not
have believed possible.

All this time I lay like one stunned; my body resting, and renewing
its strength, but I myself in an almost idiotic state—else surely I
could not have taken the stupid interest which I remember I did in all
Amante’s energetic preparations for disguise. I absolutely recollect
once the feeling of a smile coming over my stiff face as some new
exercise of her cleverness proved a success.

But towards the second day, she required me, too, to exert myself; and
then all my heavy despair returned. I let her dye my fair hair and
complexion with the decaying shells of the stored-up walnuts, I let her
blacken my teeth, and even voluntarily broke a front tooth the better
to effect my disguise. But through it all I had no hope of evading my
terrible husband. The third night the funeral was over, the drinking
ended, the guests gone; the miller put to bed by his men, being too
drunk to help himself. They stopped a little while in the kitchen,
talking and laughing about the new housekeeper likely to come; and
they, too, went off, shutting, but not locking the door. Everything
favoured us. Amante had tried her ladder on one of the two previous
nights, and could, by a dexterous throw from beneath, unfasten it from
the hook to which it was fixed, when it had served its office; she
made up a bundle of worthless old clothes in order that we might the
better preserve our characters of a travelling pedlar and his wife;
she stuffed a hump on her back, she thickened my figure, she left her
own clothes deep down beneath a heap of others in the chest from which
she had taken the man’s dress which she wore; and with a few francs
in her pocket—the sole money we had either of us had about us when we
escaped—we let ourselves down the ladder, unhooked it, and passed into
the cold darkness of night again.

We had discussed the route which it would be well for us to take while
we lay perdues in our loft. Amante had told me then that her reason for
inquiring, when we first left Les Rochers, by which way I had first
been brought to it, was to avoid the pursuit which she was sure would
first be made in the direction of Germany; but that now she thought we
might return to that district of country where my German fashion of
speaking French would excite least observation. I thought that Amante
herself had something peculiar in her accent, which I had heard M. de
la Tourelle sneer at as Norman patois; but I said not a word beyond
agreeing to her proposal that we should bend our steps towards Germany.
Once there, we should, I thought, be safe. Alas! I forgot the unruly
time that was overspreading all Europe, overturning all law, and all
the protection which law gives.

How we wandered—not daring to ask our way—how we lived, how we
struggled through many a danger and still more terrors of danger, I
shall not tell you now. I will only relate two of our adventures before
we reached Frankfort. The first, although fatal to an innocent lady,
was yet, I believe, the cause of my safety; the second I shall tell
you, that you may understand why I did not return to my former home, as
I had hoped to do when we lay in the miller’s loft, and I first became
capable of groping after an idea of what my future life might be. I
cannot tell you how much in these doubtings and wanderings I became
attached to Amante. I have sometimes feared since, lest I cared for
her only because she was so necessary to my own safety; but, no! it
was not so; or not so only, or principally. She said once that she was
flying for her own life as well as for mine; but we dared not speak
much on our danger, or on the horrors that had gone before. We planned
a little what was to be our future course; but even for that we did
not look forward long; how could we, when every day we scarcely knew
if we should see the sun go down? For Amante knew or conjectured far
more than I did of the atrocity of the gang to which M. de la Tourelle
belonged; and every now and then, just as we seemed to be sinking into
the calm of security, we fell upon traces of a pursuit after us in
all directions. Once I remember—we must have been nearly three weeks
wearily walking through unfrequented ways, day after day, not daring
to make inquiry as to our whereabouts, nor yet to seem purposeless
in our wanderings—we came to a kind of lonely roadside farrier’s and
blacksmith’s. I was so tired, that Amante declared that, come what
might, we would stay there all night; and accordingly she entered the
house, and boldly announced herself as a travelling tailor, ready to
do any odd jobs of work that might be required, for a night’s lodging
and food for herself and wife. She had adopted this plan once or
twice before, and with good success; for her father had been a tailor
in Rouen, and as a girl she had often helped him with his work, and
knew the tailors’ slang and habits, down to the particular whistle
and cry which in France tells so much to those of a trade. At this
blacksmith’s, as at most other solitary houses far away from a town,
there was not only a store of men’s clothes laid by as wanting mending
when the housewife could afford time, but there was a natural craving
after news from a distance, such news as a wandering tailor is bound
to furnish. The early November afternoon was closing into evening, as
we sat down, she cross-legged on the great table in the blacksmith’s
kitchen, drawn close to the window, I close behind her, sewing at
another part of the same garment, and from time to time well scolded by
my seeming husband. All at once she turned round to speak to me. It was
only one word, “Courage!” I had seen nothing; I sat out of the light;
but I turned sick for an instant, and then I braced myself up into a
strange strength of endurance to go through I knew not what.

The blacksmith’s forge was in a shed beside the house, and fronting
the road. I heard the hammers stop plying their continual rhythmical
beat. She had seen why they ceased. A rider had come up to the forge
and dismounted, leading his horse in to be re-shod. The broad red light
of the forge-fire had revealed the face of the rider to Amante, and she
apprehended the consequence that really ensued.

The rider, after some words with the blacksmith, was ushered in by him
into the house-place where we sat.

“Here, good wife, a cup of wine and some galette for this gentleman.”

“Anything, anything, madame, that I can eat and drink in my hand while
my horse is being shod. I am in haste, and must get on to Forbach
to-night.”

The blacksmith’s wife lighted her lamp; Amante had asked her for
it five minutes before. How thankful we were that she had not more
speedily complied with our request! As it was, we sat in dusk shadow,
pretending to stitch away, but scarcely able to see. The lamp was
placed on the stove, near which my husband, for it was he, stood and
warmed himself. By-and-by he turned round, and looked all over the
room, taking us in with about the same degree of interest as the
inanimate furniture. Amante, cross-legged, fronting him, stooped over
her work, whistling softly all the while. He turned again to the stove,
impatiently rubbing his hands. He had finished his wine and galette,
and wanted to be off.

“I am in haste, my good woman. Ask thy husband to get on more quickly.
I will pay him double if he makes haste.”

The woman went out to do his bidding; and he once more turned round to
face us. Amante went on to the second part of the tune. He took it up,
whistled a second for an instant or so, and then the blacksmith’s wife
re-entering, he moved towards her, as if to receive her answer the more
speedily.

“One moment, monsieur—only one moment. There was a nail out of the
off-foreshoe which my husband is replacing; it would delay monsieur
again if that shoe also came off.”

“Madame is right,” said he, “but my haste is urgent. If madame knew
my reasons, she would pardon my impatience. Once a happy husband, now
a deserted and betrayed man, I pursue a wife on whom I lavished all
my love, but who has abused my confidence, and fled from my house,
doubtless to some paramour; carrying off with her all the jewels and
money on which she could lay her hands. It is possible madame may have
heard or seen something of her; she was accompanied in her flight by
a base, profligate woman from Paris, whom I, unhappy man, had myself
engaged for my wife’s waiting-maid, little dreaming what corruption I
was bringing into my house!”

“Is it possible?” said the good woman, throwing up her hands.

Amante went on whistling a little lower, out of respect to the
conversation.

“However, I am tracing the wicked fugitives; I am on their track” (and
the handsome, effeminate face looked as ferocious as any demon’s).
“They will not escape me; but every minute is a minute of misery to me,
till I meet my wife. Madame has sympathy, has she not?”

He drew his face into a hard, unnatural smile, and then both went out
to the forge, as if once more to hasten the blacksmith over his work.

Amante stopped her whistling for one instant.

“Go on as you are, without change of an eyelid even; in a few minutes
he will be gone, and it will be over!”

It was a necessary caution, for I was on the point of giving way, and
throwing myself weakly upon her neck. We went on; she whistling and
stitching, I making semblance to sew. And it was well we did so; for
almost directly he came back for his whip, which he had laid down and
forgotten; and again I felt one of those sharp, quick-scanning glances,
sent all round the room, and taking in all.

Then we heard him ride away; and then, it had been long too dark to see
well, I dropped my work, and gave way to my trembling and shuddering.
The blacksmith’s wife returned. She was a good creature. Amante told
her I was cold and weary, and she insisted on my stopping my work,
and going to sit near the stove; hastening, at the same time, her
preparations for supper, which, in honour of us, and of monsieur’s
liberal payment, was to be a little less frugal than ordinary. It
was well for me that she made me taste a little of the cider-soup
she was preparing, or I could not have held up, in spite of Amante’s
warning look, and the remembrance of her frequent exhortations to
act resolutely up to the characters we had assumed, whatever befel.
To cover my agitation, Amante stopped her whistling, and began to
talk; and, by the time the blacksmith came in, she and the good woman
of the house were in full flow. He began at once upon the handsome
gentleman, who had paid him so well; all his sympathy was with him,
and both he and his wife only wished he might overtake his wicked
wife, and punish her as she deserved. And then the conversation took
a turn, not uncommon to those whose lives are quiet and monotonous;
every one seemed to vie with each other in telling about some horror;
and the savage and mysterious band of robbers called the Chauffeurs,
who infested all the roads leading to the Rhine, with Schinderhannes
at their head, furnished many a tale which made the very marrow of my
bones run cold, and quenched even Amante’s power of talking. Her eyes
grew large and wild, her cheeks blanched, and for once she sought by
her looks help from me. The new call upon me roused me. I rose and
said, with their permission my husband and I would seek our bed, for
that we had travelled far and were early risers. I added that we would
get up betimes, and finish our piece of work. The blacksmith said we
should be early birds if we rose before him; and the good wife seconded
my proposal with kindly bustle. One other such story as those they had
been relating, and I do believe Amante would have fainted.

As it was, a night’s rest set her up; we arose and finished our work
betimes, and shared the plentiful breakfast of the family. Then we had
to set forth again; only knowing that to Forbach we must not go, yet
believing, as was indeed the case, that Forbach lay between us and
that Germany to which we were directing our course. Two days more we
wandered on, making a round, I suspect, and returning upon the road
to Forbach, a league or two nearer to that town than the blacksmith’s
house. But as we never made inquiries I hardly knew where we were,
when we came one night to a small town, with a good large rambling
inn in the very centre of the principal street. We had begun to feel
as if there were more safety in towns than in the loneliness of the
country. As we had parted with a ring of mine not many days before to a
travelling jeweller, who was too glad to purchase it far below its real
value to make many inquiries as to how it came into the possession of a
poor working tailor, such as Amante seemed to be, we resolved to stay
at this inn all night, and gather such particulars and information as
we could by which to direct our onward course.

We took our supper in the darkest corner of the _salle-à-manger_,
having previously bargained for a small bedroom across the court, and
over the stables. We needed food sorely; but we hurried on our meal
from dread of any one entering that public room who might recognize us.
Just in the middle of our meal, the public diligence drove lumbering
up under the _porte-cochère_, and disgorged its passengers. Most of
them turned into the room where we sat, cowering and fearful, for the
door was opposite to the porter’s lodge, and both opened on to the
wide-covered entrance from the street. Among the passengers came in a
young, fair-haired lady, attended by an elderly French maid. The poor
young creature tossed her head, and shrank away from the common room,
full of evil smells and promiscuous company, and demanded, in German
French, to be taken to some private apartment. We heard that she and
her maid had come in the coupé, and, probably from pride, poor young
lady! she had avoided all association with her fellow-passengers,
thereby exciting their dislike and ridicule. All these little pieces of
hearsay had a significance to us afterwards, though, at the time, the
only remark made that bore upon the future was Amante’s whisper to me
that the young lady’s hair was exactly the colour of mine, which she
had cut off and burnt in the stove in the miller’s kitchen in one of
her descents from our hiding-place in the loft.

As soon as we could, we struck round in the shadow, leaving the
boisterous and merry fellow-passengers to their supper. We crossed the
court, borrowed a lantern from the ostler, and scrambled up the rude
steps to our chamber above the stable. There was no door into it; the
entrance was the hole into which the ladder fitted. The window looked
into the court. We were tired and soon fell asleep. I was wakened by
a noise in the stable below. One instant of listening, and I wakened
Amante, placing my hand on her mouth, to prevent any exclamation in
her half-roused state. We heard my husband speaking about his horse
to the ostler. It was his voice. I am sure of it. Amante said so too.
We durst not move to rise and satisfy ourselves. For five minutes or
so he went on giving directions. Then he left the stable, and, softly
stealing to our window, we saw him cross the court and re-enter the
inn. We consulted as to what we should do. We feared to excite remark
or suspicion by descending and leaving our chamber, or else immediate
escape was our strongest idea. Then the ostler left the stable, locking
the door on the outside.

“We must try and drop through the window—if, indeed, it is well to go
at all,” said Amante.

With reflection came wisdom. We should excite suspicion by leaving
without paying our bill. We were on foot, and might easily be pursued.
So we sat on our bed’s edge, talking and shivering, while from across
the court the laughter rang merrily, and the company slowly dispersed
one by one, their lights flitting past the windows as they went
upstairs and settled each one to his rest.

We crept into our bed, holding each other tight, and listening to every
sound, as if we thought we were tracked, and might meet our death
at any moment. In the dead of night, just at the profound stillness
preceding the turn into another day, we heard a soft, cautious step
crossing the yard. The key into the stable was turned—some one came
into the stable—we felt rather than heard him there. A horse started
a little, and made a restless movement with his feet, then whinnied
recognition. He who had entered made two or three low sounds to the
animal, and then led him into the court. Amante sprang to the window
with the noiseless activity of a cat. She looked out, but dared not
speak a word. We heard the great door into the street open—a pause for
mounting, and the horse’s footsteps were lost in distance.

Then Amante came back to me. “It was he! he is gone!” said she, and
once more we lay down, trembling and shaking.

This time we fell sound asleep. We slept long and late. We were wakened
by many hurrying feet, and many confused voices; all the world seemed
awake and astir. We rose and dressed ourselves, and coming down we
looked around among the crowd collected in the court-yard, in order to
assure ourselves _he_ was not there before we left the shelter of the
stable.

The instant we were seen, two or three people rushed to us.

“Have you heard?—Do you know?—That poor young lady—oh, come and see!”
and so we were hurried, almost in spite of ourselves, across the court,
and up the great open stairs of the main building of the inn, into a
bed-chamber, where lay the beautiful young German lady, so full of
graceful pride the night before, now white and still in death. By her
stood the French maid, crying and gesticulating.

“Oh, madame! if you had but suffered me to stay with you! Oh! the
baron, what will he say?” and so she went on. Her state had but just
been discovered; it had been supposed that she was fatigued, and was
sleeping late, until a few minutes before. The surgeon of the town had
been sent for, and the landlord of the inn was trying vainly to enforce
order until he came, and, from time to time, drinking little cups of
brandy, and offering them to the guests, who were all assembled there,
pretty much as the servants were doing in the court-yard.

At last the surgeon came. All fell back, and hung on the words that
were to fall from his lips.

“See!” said the landlord. “This lady came last night by the diligence
with her maid. Doubtless a great lady, for she must have a private
sitting-room——”

“She was Madame the Baroness de Roeder,” said the French maid.

—“And was difficult to please in the matter of supper, and a
sleeping-room. She went to bed well, though fatigued. Her maid left
her——”

“I begged to be allowed to sleep in her room, as we were in a strange
inn, of the character of which we knew nothing; but she would not let
me, my mistress was such a great lady.”

—“And slept with my servants,” continued the landlord. “This morning
we thought madame was still slumbering; but when eight, nine, ten, and
near eleven o’clock came, I bade her maid use my pass-key, and enter
her room——”

“The door was not locked, only closed. And here she was found—dead is
she not, monsieur?—with her face down on her pillow, and her beautiful
hair all scattered wild; she never would let me tie it up, saying it
made her head ache. Such hair!” said the waiting-maid, lifting up a
long golden tress, and letting it fall again.

I remembered Amante’s words the night before, and crept close up to her.

Meanwhile, the doctor was examining the body underneath the
bed-clothes, which the landlord, until now, had not allowed to be
disarranged. The surgeon drew out his hand, all bathed and stained
with blood; and holding up a short, sharp knife, with a piece of paper
fastened round it.

“Here has been foul play,” he said. “The deceased lady has been
murdered. This dagger was aimed straight at her heart.” Then, putting
on his spectacles, he read the writing on the bloody paper, dimmed and
horribly obscured as it was:—

                               NUMÉRO UN.
                    Ainsi les Chauffeurs se vengent.

“Let us go!” said I to Amante. “Oh, let us leave this horrible place!”

“Wait a little,” said she. “Only a few minutes more. It will be better.”

Immediately the voices of all proclaimed their suspicions of the
cavalier who had arrived last the night before. He had, they said, made
so many inquiries about the young lady, whose supercilious conduct all
in the _salle-à-manger_ had been discussing on his entrance. They were
talking about her as we left the room; he must have come in directly
afterwards, and not until he had learnt all about her, had he spoken
of the business which necessitated his departure at dawn of day, and
made his arrangements with both landlord and ostler for the possession
of the keys of the stable and _porte-cochère_. In short, there was
no doubt as to the murderer, even before the arrival of the legal
functionary who had been sent for by the surgeon; but the word on the
paper chilled every one with terror. Les Chauffeurs, who were they? No
one knew, some of the gang might even then be in the room overhearing,
and noting down fresh objects for vengeance. In Germany, I had heard
little of this terrible gang, and I had paid no greater heed to the
stories related once or twice about them in Carlsruhe than one does to
tales about ogres. But here in their very haunts, I learnt the full
amount of the terror they inspired. No one would be legally responsible
for any evidence criminating the murderer. The public prosecutor shrank
from the duties of his office. What do I say? Neither Amante nor I,
knowing far more of the actual guilt of the man who had killed that
poor sleeping young lady, durst breathe a word. We appeared to be
wholly ignorant of everything: we, who might have told so much. But
how could we? we were broken down with terrific anxiety and fatigue,
with the knowledge that we, above all, were doomed victims; and that
the blood, heavily dripping from the bed-clothes on to the floor, was
dripping thus out of the poor dead body, because, when living, she had
been mistaken for me.

At length Amante went up to the landlord, and asked permission to
leave his inn, doing all openly and humbly, so as to excite neither
ill-will nor suspicion. Indeed, suspicion was otherwise directed, and
he willingly gave us leave to depart. A few days afterwards we were
across the Rhine, in Germany, making our way towards Frankfort, but
still keeping our disguises, and Amante still working at her trade.

On the way, we met a young man, a wandering journeyman from Heidelberg.
I knew him, although I did not choose that he should know me. I asked
him, as carelessly as I could, how the old miller was now? He told me
he was dead. This realization of the worst apprehensions caused by his
long silence shocked me inexpressibly. It seemed as though every prop
gave way from under me. I had been talking to Amante only that very day
of the safety and comfort of the home that awaited her in my father’s
house; of the gratitude which the old man would feel towards her; and
how there, in that peaceful dwelling, far away from the terrible land
of France, she should find ease and security for all the rest of her
life. All this I thought I had to promise, and even yet more had I
looked for, for myself. I looked to the unburdening of my heart and
conscience by telling all I knew to my best and wisest friend. I looked
to his love as a sure guidance as well as a comforting stay, and,
behold, he was gone away from me for ever!

I had left the room hastily on hearing of this sad news from the
Heidelberger. Presently, Amante followed:

“Poor madame,” said she, consoling me to the best of her ability. And
then she told me by degrees what more she had learned respecting my
home, about which she knew almost as much as I did, from my frequent
talks on the subject both at Les Rochers and on the dreary, doleful
road we had come along. She had continued the conversation after I
left, by asking about my brother and his wife. Of course, they lived
on at the mill, but the man said (with what truth I know not, but I
believed it firmly at the time) that Babette had completely got the
upper hand of my brother, who only saw through her eyes and heard with
her ears. That there had been much Heidelberg gossip of late days about
her sudden intimacy with a grand French gentleman who had appeared at
the mill—a relation, by marriage—married, in fact, to the miller’s
sister, who, by all accounts, had behaved abominably and ungratefully.
But that was no reason for Babette’s extreme and sudden intimacy with
him, going about everywhere with the French gentleman; and since he
left (as the Heidelberger said he knew for a fact) corresponding with
him constantly. Yet her husband saw no harm in it all, seemingly;
though, to be sure, he was so out of spirits, what with his father’s
death and the news of his sister’s infamy, that he hardly knew how to
hold up his head.

“Now,” said Amante, “all this proves that M. de la Tourelle has
suspected that you would go back to the nest in which you were
reared, and that he has been there, and found that you have not yet
returned; but probably he still imagines that you will do so, and has
accordingly engaged your sister-in-law as a kind of informant. Madame
has said that her sister-in-law bore her no extreme good-will; and the
defamatory story he has got the start of us in spreading, will not
tend to increase the favour in which your sister-in-law holds you.
No doubt the assassin was retracing his steps when we met him near
Forbach, and having heard of the poor German lady, with her French
maid, and her pretty blonde complexion, he followed her. If madame
will still be guided by me—and, my child, I beg of you still to trust
me,” said Amante, breaking out of her respectful formality into the
way of talking more natural to those who had shared and escaped from
common dangers—more natural, too, where the speaker was conscious of a
power of protection which the other did not possess—“we will go on to
Frankfort, and lose ourselves, for a time, at least, in the numbers of
people who throng a great town; and you have told me that Frankfort is
a great town. We will still be husband and wife; we will take a small
lodging, and you shall housekeep and live in-doors. I, as the rougher
and the more alert, will continue my father’s trade, and seek work at
the tailors’ shops.”

I could think of no better plan, so we followed this out. In a back
street at Frankfort we found two furnished rooms to let on a sixth
story. The one we entered had no light from day; a dingy lamp swung
perpetually from the ceiling, and from that, or from the open door
leading into the bedroom beyond, came our only light. The bedroom was
more cheerful, but very small. Such as it was, it almost exceeded
our possible means. The money from the sale of my ring was almost
exhausted, and Amante was a stranger in the place, speaking only
French, moreover, and the good Germans were hating the French people
right heartily. However, we succeeded better than our hopes, and even
laid by a little against the time of my confinement. I never stirred
abroad, and saw no one, and Amante’s want of knowledge of German kept
her in a state of comparative isolation.

At length my child was born—my poor worse than fatherless child. It
was a girl, as I had prayed for. I had feared lest a boy might have
something of the tiger nature of its father, but a girl seemed all my
own. And yet not all my own, for the faithful Amante’s delight and
glory in the babe almost exceeded mine; in outward show it certainly
did.

We had not been able to afford any attendance beyond what a
neighbouring sage-femme could give, and she came frequently, bringing
in with her a little store of gossip, and wonderful tales culled out
of her own experience, every time. One day she began to tell me about
a great lady in whose service her daughter had lived as scullion, or
some such thing. Such a beautiful lady! with such a handsome husband.
But grief comes to the palace as well as to the garret, and why or
wherefore no one knew, but somehow the Baron de Roeder must have
incurred the vengeance of the terrible Chauffeurs; for not many months
ago, as madame was going to see her relations in Alsace, she was
stabbed dead as she lay in bed at some hotel on the road. Had I not
seen it in the _Gazette_? Had I not heard? Why, she had been told that
as far off as Lyons there were placards offering a heavy reward on the
part of the Baron de Roeder for information respecting the murderer of
his wife. But no one could help him, for all who could bear evidence
were in such terror of the Chauffeurs; there were hundreds of them she
had been told, rich and poor, great gentlemen and peasants, all leagued
together by most frightful oaths to hunt to the death any one who bore
witness against them; so that even they who survived the tortures to
which the Chauffeurs subjected many of the people whom they plundered,
dared not to recognise them again, would not dare, even did they see
them at the bar of a court of justice; for, if one were condemned, were
there not hundreds sworn to avenge his death?

I told all this to Amante, and we began to fear that if M. de la
Tourelle, or Lefebvre, or any of the gang at Les Rochers, had seen
these placards, they would know that the poor lady stabbed by the
former was the Baroness de Roeder, and that they would set forth again
in search of me.

This fresh apprehension told on my health and impeded my recovery. We
had so little money we could not call in a physician, at least, not
one in established practice. But Amante found out a young doctor for
whom, indeed, she had sometimes worked; and offering to pay him in
kind, she brought him to see me, her sick wife. He was very gentle
and thoughtful, though, like ourselves, very poor. But he gave much
time and consideration to the case, saying once to Amante that he saw
my constitution had experienced some severe shock from which it was
probable that my nerves would never entirely recover. By-and-by I shall
name this doctor, and then you will know, better than I can describe,
his character.

I grew strong in time—stronger, at least. I was able to work a little
at home, and to sun myself and my baby at the garret-window in the
roof. It was all the air I dared to take. I constantly wore the
disguise I had first set out with; as constantly had I renewed the
disfiguring dye which changed my hair and complexion. But the perpetual
state of terror in which I had been during the whole months succeeding
my escape from Les Rochers made me loathe the idea of ever again
walking in the open daylight, exposed to the sight and recognition of
every passer-by. In vain Amante reasoned—in vain the doctor urged.
Docile in every other thing, in this I was obstinate. I would not stir
out. One day Amante returned from her work, full of news—some of it
good, some such as to cause us apprehension. The good news was this;
the master for whom she worked as journeyman was going to send her with
some others to a great house at the other side of Frankfort, where
there were to be private theatricals, and where many new dresses and
much alteration of old ones would be required. The tailors employed
were all to stay at this house until the day of representation was
over, as it was at some distance from the town, and no one could tell
when their work would be ended. But the pay was to be proportionately
good.

The other thing she had to say was this: she had that day met the
travelling jeweller to whom she and I had sold my ring. It was rather
a peculiar one, given to me by my husband; we had felt at the time
that it might be the means of tracing us, but we were penniless and
starving, and what else could we do? She had seen that this Frenchman
had recognised her at the same instant that she did him, and she
thought at the same time that there was a gleam of more than common
intelligence on his face as he did so. This idea had been confirmed
by his following her for some way on the other side of the street;
but she had evaded him with her better knowledge of the town, and the
increasing darkness of the night. Still it was well that she was going
to such a distance from our dwelling on the next day; and she had
brought me in a stock of provisions, begging me to keep within doors,
with a strange kind of fearful oblivion of the fact that I had never
set foot beyond the threshold of the house since I had first entered
it—scarce ever ventured down the stairs. But, although my poor, my
dear, very faithful Amante was like one possessed that last night, she
spoke continually of the dead, which is a bad sign for the living.
She kissed you—yes! it was you, my daughter, my darling, whom I bore
beneath my bosom away from the fearful castle of your father—I call
him so for the first time, I must call him so once again before I have
done—Amante kissed you, sweet baby, blessed little comforter, as if she
never could leave off. And then she went away, alive.

Two days, three days passed away. That third evening I was sitting
within my bolted doors—you asleep on your pillow by my side—when a
step came up the stair, and I knew it must be for me; for ours were
the topmost rooms. Some one knocked; I held my very breath. But some
one spoke, and I knew it was the good Doctor Voss. Then I crept to the
door, and answered.

“Are you alone?” asked I.

“Yes,” said he, in a still lower voice. “Let me in.” I let him in, and
he was as alert as I in bolting and barring the door. Then he came and
whispered to me his doleful tale. He had come from the hospital in
the opposite quarter of the town, the hospital which he visited; he
should have been with me sooner, but he had feared lest he should be
watched. He had come from Amante’s death-bed. Her fears of the jeweller
were too well founded. She had left the house where she was employed
that morning, to transact some errand connected with her work in the
town; she must have been followed, and dogged on her way back through
solitary wood-paths, for some of the wood-rangers belonging to the
great house had found her lying there, stabbed to death, but not dead;
with the poniard again plunged through the fatal writing, once more;
but this time with the word “un” underlined, so as to show that the
assassin was aware of his previous mistake.

                              Numéro _Un_.
                    Ainsi les Chauffeurs se vengent.

They had carried her to the house, and given her restoratives till she
had recovered the feeble use of her speech. But, oh, faithful, dear
friend and sister! even then she remembered me, and refused to tell
(what no one else among her fellow workmen knew), where she lived or
with whom. Life was ebbing away fast, and they had no resource but to
carry her to the nearest hospital, where, of course, the fact of her
sex was made known. Fortunately both for her and for me, the doctor in
attendance was the very Doctor Voss whom we already knew. To him, while
awaiting her confessor, she told enough to enable him to understand the
position in which I was left; before the priest had heard half her tale
Amante was dead.

Doctor Voss told me he had made all sorts of _détours_, and waited
thus, late at night, for fear of being watched and followed. But I do
not think he was. At any rate, as I afterwards learnt from him, the
Baron Roeder, on hearing of the similitude of this murder with that of
his wife in every particular, made such a search after the assassins,
that, although they were not discovered, they were compelled to take to
flight for the time.

I can hardly tell you now by what arguments Dr. Voss, at first merely
my benefactor, sparing me a portion of his small modicum, at length
persuaded me to become his wife. His wife he called it, I called
it; for we went through the religious ceremony too much slighted at
the time, and as we were both Lutherans, and M. de la Tourelle had
pretended to be of the reformed religion, a divorce from the latter
would have been easily procurable by German law both ecclesiastical and
legal, could we have summoned so fearful a man into any court.

The good doctor took me and my child by stealth to his modest dwelling;
and there I lived in the same deep retirement, never seeing the full
light of day, although when the dye had once passed away from my face
my husband did not wish me to renew it. There was no need; my yellow
hair was grey, my complexion was ashen-coloured, no creature could have
recognized the fresh-coloured, bright-haired young woman of eighteen
months before. The few people whom I saw knew me only as Madame Voss; a
widow much older than himself, whom Dr. Voss had secretly married. They
called me the Grey Woman.

He made me give you his surname. Till now you have known no other
father—while he lived you needed no father’s love. Once only, only once
more, did the old terror come upon me. For some reason which I forget,
I broke through my usual custom, and went to the window of my room for
some purpose, either to shut or to open it. Looking out into the street
for an instant, I was fascinated by the sight of M. de la Tourelle,
gay, young, elegant as ever, walking along on the opposite side of the
street. The noise I had made with the window caused him to look up; he
saw me, an old grey woman, and he did not recognize me! Yet it was not
three years since we had parted, and his eyes were keen and dreadful
like those of the lynx.

I told M. Voss, on his return home, and he tried to cheer me, but the
shock of seeing M. de la Tourelle had been too terrible for me. I was
ill for long months afterwards.

Once again I saw him. Dead. He and Lefebvre were at last caught; hunted
down by the Baron de Roeder in some of their crimes. Dr. Voss had heard
of their arrest; their condemnation, their death; but he never said a
word to me, until one day he bade me show him that I loved him by my
obedience and my trust. He took me a long carriage journey, where to
I know not, for we never spoke of that day again; I was led through a
prison, into a closed court-yard, where, decently draped in the last
robes of death, concealing the marks of decapitation, lay M. de la
Tourelle, and two or three others, whom I had known at Les Rochers.

After that conviction Dr. Voss tried to persuade me to return to a more
natural mode of life, and to go out more. But although I sometimes
complied with his wish, yet the old terror was ever strong upon me, and
he, seeing what an effort it was, gave up urging me at last.

You know all the rest. How we both mourned bitterly the loss of that
dear husband and father—for such I will call him ever—and as such you
must consider him, my child, after this one revelation is over.

Why has it been made, you ask. For this reason, my child. The lover,
whom you have only known as M. Lebrun, a French artist, told me but
yesterday his real name, dropped because the blood-thirsty republicans
might consider it as too aristocratic. It is Maurice de Poissy.




CURIOUS IF TRUE.

(EXTRACT FROM A LETTER FROM RICHARD WHITTINGHAM, ESQ.)


You were formerly so much amused at my pride in my descent from that
sister of Calvin’s, who married a Whittingham, Dean of Durham, that I
doubt if you will be able to enter into the regard for my distinguished
relation that has led me to France, in order to examine registers and
archives, which, I thought, might enable me to discover collateral
descendants of the great reformer, with whom I might call cousins. I
shall not tell you of my troubles and adventures in this research; you
are not worthy to hear of them; but something so curious befel me one
evening last August, that if I had not been perfectly certain I was
wide awake, I might have taken it for a dream.

For the purpose I have named, it was necessary that I should make Tours
my head-quarters for a time. I had traced descendants of the Calvin
family out of Normandy into the centre of France; but I found it was
necessary to have a kind of permission from the bishop of the diocese
before I could see certain family papers, which had fallen into the
possession of the Church; and, as I had several English friends at
Tours, I awaited the answer to my request to Monseigneur de ——, at
that town. I was ready to accept any invitation; but I received very
few; and was sometimes a little at a loss what to do with my evenings.
The _table d’hôte_ was at five o’clock; I did not wish to go to the
expense of a private sitting-room, disliked the dinnery atmosphere
of the _salle à manger_, could not play either at pool or billiards,
and the aspect of my fellow guests was unprepossessing enough to make
me unwilling to enter into any _tête-à-tête_ gamblings with them.
So I usually rose from table early, and tried to make the most of
the remaining light of the August evenings in walking briskly off to
explore the surrounding country; the middle of the day was too hot
for this purpose, and better employed in lounging on a bench in the
Boulevards, lazily listening to the distant band, and noticing with
equal laziness the faces and figures of the women who passed by.

One Thursday evening, the 18th of August it was, I think, I had gone
further than usual in my walk, and I found that it was later than I had
imagined when I paused to turn back. I fancied I could make a round;
I had enough notion of the direction in which I was, to see that by
turning up a narrow straight lane to my left I should shorten my way
back to Tours. And so I believe I should have done, could I have found
an outlet at the right place, but field-paths are almost unknown in
that part of France, and my lane, stiff and straight as any street,
and marked into terribly vanishing perspective by the regular row of
poplars on each side, seemed interminable. Of course night came on, and
I was in darkness. In England I might have had a chance of seeing a
light in some cottage only a field or two off, and asking my way from
the inhabitants; but here I could see no such welcome sight; indeed, I
believe French peasants go to bed with the summer daylight, so if there
were any habitations in the neighbourhood I never saw them. At last—I
believe I must have walked two hours in the darkness,—I saw the dusky
outline of a wood on one side of the weariful lane, and, impatiently
careless of all forest laws and penalties for trespassers, I made my
way to it, thinking that if the worst came to the worst, I could find
some covert—some shelter where I could lie down and rest, until the
morning light gave me a chance of finding my way back to Tours. But
the plantation, on the outskirts of what appeared to me a dense wood,
was of young trees, too closely planted to be more than slender stems
growing up to a good height, with scanty foliage on their summits.
On I went towards the thicker forest, and once there I slackened my
pace, and began to look about me for a good lair. I was as dainty as
Lochiel’s grandchild, who made his grandsire indignant at the luxury of
his pillow of snow: this brake was too full of brambles, that felt damp
with dew; there was no hurry, since I had given up all hope of passing
the night between four walls; and I went leisurely groping about, and
trusting that there were no wolves to be poked up out of their summer
drowsiness by my stick, when all at once I saw a château before me, not
a quarter of a mile off, at the end of what seemed to be an ancient
avenue (now overgrown and irregular), which I happened to be crossing,
when I looked to my right, and saw the welcome sight. Large, stately,
and dark was its outline against the dusky night-sky; there were
pepper-boxes and tourelles and what-not fantastically going up into the
dim starlight. And more to the purpose still, though I could not see
the details of the building that I was now facing, it was plain enough
that there were lights in many windows, as if some great entertainment
was going on.

“They are hospitable people, at any rate,” thought I. “Perhaps they
will give me a bed. I don’t suppose French propriétaires have traps and
horses quite as plentiful as English gentlemen; but they are evidently
having a large party, and some of their guests may be from Tours, and
will give me a cast back to the Lion d’Or. I am not proud, and I am
dog-tired. I am not above hanging on behind, if need be.”

So, putting a little briskness and spirit into my walk, I went up to
the door, which was standing open, most hospitably, and showing a large
lighted hall, all hung round with spoils of the chase, armour, &c, the
details of which I had not time to notice, for the instant I stood
on the threshold a huge porter appeared, in a strange, old-fashioned
dress, a kind of livery which well befitted the general appearance
of the house. He asked me, in French (so curiously pronounced that I
thought I had hit upon a new kind of _patois_), my name, and whence I
came. I thought he would not be much the wiser, still it was but civil
to give it before I made my request for assistance; so, in reply, I
said—

“My name is Whittingham—Richard Whittingham, an English gentleman,
staying at ——.” To my infinite surprise, a light of pleased
intelligence came over the giant’s face; he made me a low bow, and said
(still in the same curious dialect) that I was welcome, that I was long
expected.

“Long expected!” What could the fellow mean? Had I stumbled on a nest
of relations by John Calvin’s side, who had heard of my genealogical
inquiries, and were gratified and interested by them? But I was too
much pleased to be under shelter for the night to think it necessary to
account for my agreeable reception before I enjoyed it. Just as he was
opening the great heavy _battants_ of the door that led from the hall
to the interior, he turned round and said,—

“Apparently Monsieur le Géanquilleur is not come with you.”

“No! I am all alone; I have lost my way,”—and I was going on with my
explanation, when he, as if quite indifferent to it, led the way up
a great stone staircase, as wide as many rooms, and having on each
landing-place massive iron wickets, in a heavy framework; these the
porter unlocked with the solemn slowness of age. Indeed, a strange,
mysterious awe of the centuries that had passed away since this château
was built, came over me as I waited for the turning of the ponderous
keys in the ancient locks. I could almost have fancied that I heard
a mighty rushing murmur (like the ceaseless sound of a distant sea,
ebbing and flowing for ever and for ever), coming forth from the great
vacant galleries that opened out on each side of the broad staircase,
and were to be dimly perceived in the darkness above us. It was as if
the voices of generations of men yet echoed and eddied in the silent
air. It was strange, too, that my friend the porter going before me,
ponderously infirm, with his feeble old hands striving in vain to keep
the tall flambeau he held steadily before him,—strange, I say, that he
was the only domestic I saw in the vast halls and passages, or met with
on the grand staircase. At length we stood before the gilded doors that
led into the saloon where the family—or it might be the company, so
great was the buzz of voices—was assembled. I would have remonstrated
when I found he was going to introduce me, dusty and travel-smeared, in
a morning costume that was not even my best, into this grand _salon_,
with nobody knew how many ladies and gentlemen assembled; but the
obstinate old man was evidently bent upon taking me straight to his
master, and paid no heed to my words.

The doors flew open, and I was ushered into a saloon curiously full of
pale light, which did not culminate on any spot, nor proceed from any
centre, nor flicker with any motion of the air, but filled every nook
and corner, making all things deliciously distinct; different from our
light of gas or candle, as is the difference between a clear southern
atmosphere and that of our misty England.

At the first moment, my arrival excited no attention, the apartment
was so full of people, all intent on their own conversation. But my
friend the porter went up to a handsome lady of middle age, richly
attired in that antique manner which fashion has brought round again of
late years, and, waiting first in an attitude of deep respect till her
attention fell upon him, told her my name and something about me, as
far as I could guess from the gestures of the one and the sudden glance
of the eye of the other.

She immediately came towards me with the most friendly actions of
greeting, even before she had advanced near enough to speak. Then,—and
was it not strange?—her words and accent were that of the commonest
peasant of the country. Yet she herself looked high-bred, and would
have been dignified had she been a shade less restless, had her
countenance worn a little less lively and inquisitive expression. I
had been poking a good deal about the old parts of Tours, and had had
to understand the dialect of the people who dwelt in the Marché au
Vendredi and similar places, or I really should not have understood
my handsome hostess, as she offered to present me to her husband, a
henpecked, gentlemanly man, who was more quaintly attired than she in
the very extreme of that style of dress. I thought to myself that in
France, as in England, it is the provincials who carry fashion to such
an excess as to become ridiculous.

However, he spoke (still in the _patois_) of his pleasure in making
my acquaintance, and led me to a strange uneasy easy-chair, much of a
piece with the rest of the furniture, which might have taken its place
without any anachronism by the side of that in the Hôtel Cluny. Then
again began the clatter of French voices, which my arrival had for an
instant interrupted, and I had leisure to look about me. Opposite to
me sat a very sweet-looking lady, who must have been a great beauty in
her youth, I should think, and would be charming in old age, from the
sweetness of her countenance. She was, however, extremely fat, and on
seeing her feet laid up before her on a cushion, I at once perceived
that they were so swollen as to render her incapable of walking, which
probably brought on her excessive _embonpoint_. Her hands were plump
and small, but rather coarse-grained in texture, not quite so clean as
they might have been, and altogether not so aristocratic-looking as the
charming face. Her dress was of superb black velvet, ermine-trimmed,
with diamonds thrown all abroad over it.

Not far from her stood the least little man I had ever seen; of such
admirable proportions no one could call him a dwarf, because with that
word we usually associate something of deformity; but yet with an
elfin look of shrewd, hard, worldly wisdom in his face that marred the
impression which his delicate regular little features would otherwise
have conveyed. Indeed, I do not think he was quite of equal rank
with the rest of the company, for his dress was inappropriate to the
occasion (and he apparently was an invited, while I was an involuntary
guest); and one or two of his gestures and actions were more like
the tricks of an uneducated rustic than anything else. To explain
what I mean: his boots had evidently seen much service, and had been
re-topped, re-heeled, re-soled to the extent of cobbler’s powers. Why
should he have come in them if they were not his best—his only pair?
And what can be more ungenteel than poverty? Then again he had an
uneasy trick of putting his hand up to his throat, as if he expected to
find something the matter with it; and he had the awkward habit—which
I do not think he could have copied from Dr. Johnson, because most
probably he had never heard of him—of trying always to retrace his
steps on the exact boards on which he had trodden to arrive at any
particular part of the room. Besides, to settle the question, I once
heard him addressed as Monsieur Poucet, without any aristocratic “de”
for a prefix; and nearly every one else in the room was a marquis, at
any rate.

I say, “nearly every one;” for some strange people had the entrée;
unless, indeed, they were, like me, benighted. One of the guests I
should have taken for a servant, but for the extraordinary influence he
seemed to have over the man I took for his master, and who never did
anything without, apparently, being urged thereto by this follower.
The master, magnificently dressed, but ill at ease in his clothes, as
if they had been made for some one else, was a weak-looking, handsome
man, continually sauntering about, and I almost guessed an object of
suspicion to some of the gentlemen present, which, perhaps, drove him
on the companionship of his follower, who was dressed something in the
style of an ambassador’s chasseur; yet it was not a chasseur’s dress
after all; it was something more thoroughly old-world; boots half way
up his ridiculously small legs, which clattered as he walked along, as
if they were too large for his little feet; and a great quantity of
grey fur, as trimming to coat, court-mantle, boots, cap—everything. You
know the way in which certain countenances remind you perpetually of
some animal, be it bird or beast! Well, this chasseur (as I will call
him for want of a better name) was exceedingly like the great Tom-cat
that you have seen so often in my chambers, and laughed at almost
as often for his uncanny gravity of demeanour. Grey whiskers has my
Tom—grey whiskers had the chasseur: grey hair overshadows the upper
lip of my Tom—grey mustachios hid that of the chasseur. The pupils of
Tom’s eyes dilate and contract as I had thought cats’ pupils only could
do, until I saw those of the chasseur. To be sure, canny as Tom is,
the chasseur had the advantage in the more intelligent expression. He
seemed to have obtained most complete sway over his master or patron,
whose looks he watched, and whose steps he followed, with a kind of
distrustful interest that puzzled me greatly.

There were several other groups in the more distant part of the saloon,
all of the stately old school, all grand and noble, I conjectured from
their bearing. They seemed perfectly well acquainted with each other,
as if they were in the habit of meeting. But I was interrupted in my
observations by the tiny little gentleman on the opposite side of the
room coming across to take a place beside me. It is no difficult matter
to a Frenchman to slide into conversation, and so gracefully did my
pigmy friend keep up the character of the nation, that we were almost
confidential before ten minutes had elapsed.

Now I was quite aware that the welcome which all had extended to me,
from the porter up to the vivacious lady and meek lord of the castle,
was intended for some other person. But it required either a degree
of moral courage, of which I cannot boast, or the self-reliance and
conversational powers of a bolder and cleverer man than I, to undeceive
people who had fallen into so fortunate a mistake for me. Yet the
little man by my side insinuated himself so much into my confidence,
that I had half a mind to tell him of my exact situation, and to turn
him into a friend and an ally.

“Madame is perceptibly growing older,” said he, in the midst of my
perplexity, glancing at our hostess.

“Madame is still a very fine woman,” replied I.

“Now, is it not strange,” continued he, lowering his voice, “how
women almost invariably praise the absent, or departed, as if they
were angels of light, while as for the present, or the living”—here
he shrugged up his little shoulders, and made an expressive pause.
“Would you believe it! Madame is always praising her late husband to
monsieur’s face; till, in fact, we guests are quite perplexed how
to look: for, you know, the late M. de Retz’s character was quite
notorious,—everybody has heard of him.” All the world of Touraine,
thought I, but I made an assenting noise.

At this instant, monsieur our host came up to me, and with a civil
look of tender interest (such as some people put on when they inquire
after your mother, about whom they do not care one straw), asked if I
had heard lately how my cat was? “How my cat was!” What could the man
mean? My cat! Could he mean the tailless Tom, born in the Isle of Man,
and now supposed to be keeping guard against the incursions of rats
and mice into my chambers in London? Tom is, as you know, on pretty
good terms with some of my friends, using their legs for rubbing-posts
without scruple, and highly esteemed by them for his gravity of
demeanour, and wise manner of winking his eyes. But could his fame have
reached across the Channel? However, an answer must be returned to the
inquiry, as monsieur’s face was bent down to mine with a look of polite
anxiety; so I, in my turn, assumed an expression of gratitude, and
assured him that, to the best of my belief, my cat was in remarkably
good health.

“And the climate agrees with her?”

“Perfectly,” said I, in a maze of wonder at this deep solicitude in a
tailless cat who had lost one foot and half an ear in some cruel trap.
My host smiled a sweet smile, and, addressing a few words to my little
neighbour, passed on.

“How wearisome those aristocrats are!” quoth my neighbour, with a
slight sneer. “Monsieur’s conversation rarely extends to more than two
sentences to any one. By that time his faculties are exhausted, and
he needs the refreshment of silence. You and I, monsieur, are, at any
rate, indebted to our own wits for our rise in the world!”

Here again I was bewildered! As you know, I am rather proud of my
descent from families which, if not noble themselves, are allied to
nobility,—and as to my “rise in the world”—if I had risen, it would
have been rather for balloon-like qualities than for mother-wit, to
being unencumbered with heavy ballast either in my head or my pockets.
However, it was my cue to agree: so I smiled again.

“For my part,” said he, “if a man does not stick at trifles, if
he knows how to judiciously add to, or withhold facts, and is not
sentimental in his parade of humanity, he is sure to do well; sure to
affix a _de_ or _von_ to his name, and end his days in comfort. There
is an example of what I am saying”—and he glanced furtively at the
weak-looking master of the sharp, intelligent servant, whom I have
called the chasseur.

“Monsieur le Marquis would never have been anything but a miller’s son,
if it had not been for the talents of his servant. Of course you know
his antecedents?”

I was going to make some remarks on the changes in the order of the
peerage since the days of Louis XVI.—going, in fact, to be very
sensible and historical—when there was a slight commotion among the
people at the other end of the room. Lacqueys in quaint liveries
must have come in from behind the tapestry, I suppose (for I never
saw them enter, though I sate right opposite to the doors), and were
handing about the slight beverages and slighter viands which are
considered sufficient refreshments, but which looked rather meagre
to my hungry appetite. These footmen were standing solemnly opposite
to a lady,—beautiful, splendid as the dawn, but—sound asleep in a
magnificent settee. A gentleman who showed so much irritation at her
ill-timed slumbers, that I think he must have been her husband, was
trying to awaken her with actions not far removed from shakings. All
in vain; she was quite unconscious of his annoyance, or the smiles of
the company, or the automatic solemnity of the waiting footman, or the
perplexed anxiety of monsieur and madame.

My little friend sat down with a sneer, as if his curiosity was
quenched in contempt.

“Moralists would make an infinity of wise remarks on that scene,” said
he. “In the first place, note the ridiculous position into which their
superstitious reverence for rank and title puts all these people.
Because monsieur is a reigning prince over some minute principality,
the exact situation of which no one has as yet discovered, no one must
venture to take their glass of eau sucré till Madame la Princesse
awakens; and, judging from past experience, those poor lacqueys may
have to stand for a century before that happens. Next—always speaking
as a moralist, you will observe—note how difficult it is to break off
bad habits acquired in youth!”

Just then the prince succeeded, by what means I did not see, in awaking
the beautiful sleeper. But at first she did not remember where she was,
and looking up at her husband with loving eyes, she smiled and said:

“Is it you, my prince?”

But he was too conscious of the suppressed amusement of the spectators
and his own consequent annoyance, to be reciprocally tender, and turned
away with some little French expression, best rendered into English by
“Pooh, pooh, my dear!”

After I had had a glass of delicious wine of some unknown quality, my
courage was in rather better plight than before, and I told my cynical
little neighbour—whom I must say I was beginning to dislike—that I
had lost my way in the wood, and had arrived at the château quite by
mistake.

He seemed mightily amused at my story; said that the same thing had
happened to himself more than once; and told me that I had better luck
than he had on one of these occasions, when, from his account, he must
have been in considerable danger of his life. He ended his story by
making me admire his boots, which he said he still wore, patched though
they were, and all their excellent quality lost by patching, because
they were of such a first-rate make for long pedestrian excursions.
“Though, indeed,” he wound up by saying, “the new fashion of railroads
would seem to supersede the necessity for this description of boots.”

When I consulted him as to whether I ought to make myself known to
my host and hostess as a benighted traveller, instead of the guest
whom they had taken me for, he exclaimed, “By no means! I hate such
squeamish morality.” And he seemed much offended by my innocent
question, as if it seemed by implication to condemn something in
himself. He was offended and silent; and just at this moment I caught
the sweet, attractive eyes of the lady opposite—that lady whom I
named at first as being no longer in the bloom of youth, but as being
somewhat infirm about the feet, which were supported on a raised
cushion before her. Her looks seemed to say, “Come here, and let us
have some conversation together;” and, with a bow of silent excuse
to my little companion, I went across to the lame old lady. She
acknowledged my coming with the prettiest gesture of thanks possible;
and, half apologetically, said, “It is a little dull to be unable to
move about on such evenings as this; but it is a just punishment to
me for my early vanities. My poor feet, that were by nature so small,
are now taking their revenge for my cruelty in forcing them into such
little slippers.... Besides, monsieur,” with a pleasant smile, “I
thought it was possible you might be weary of the malicious sayings
of your little neighbour. He has not borne the best character in his
youth, and such men are sure to be cynical in their old age.”

“Who is he?” asked I, with English abruptness.

“His name is Poucet, and his father was, I believe, a wood-cutter, or
charcoal burner, or something of the sort. They do tell sad stories
of connivance at murder, ingratitude, and obtaining money on false
pretences—but you will think me as bad as he if I go on with my
slanders. Rather let us admire the lovely lady coming up towards us,
with the roses in her hand—I never see her without roses, they are so
closely connected with her past history, as you are doubtless aware.
Ah, beauty!” said my companion to the lady drawing near to us, “it
is like you to come to me, now that I can no longer go to you.” Then
turning to me, and gracefully drawing me into the conversation, she
said, “You must know that, although we never met until we were both
married, we have been almost like sisters ever since. There have been
so many points of resemblance in our circumstances, and I think I may
say in our characters. We had each two elder sisters—mine were but
half-sisters, though—who were not so kind to us as they might have
been.”

“But have been sorry for it since,” put in the other lady.

“Since we have married princes,” continued the same lady, with an arch
smile that had nothing of unkindness in it, “for we both have married
far above our original stations in life; we are both unpunctual in our
habits, and, in consequence of this failing of ours, we have both had
to suffer mortification and pain.”

“And both are charming,” said a whisper close behind me. “My lord the
marquis, say it—say, ‘And both are charming.’”

“And both are charming,” was spoken aloud by another voice. I turned,
and saw the wily cat-like chasseur, prompting his master to make civil
speeches.

The ladies bowed with that kind of haughty acknowledgment which shows
that compliments from such a source are distasteful. But our trio of
conversation was broken up, and I was sorry for it. The marquis looked
as if he had been stirred up to make that one speech, and hoped that he
would not be expected to say more; while behind him stood the chasseur,
half impertinent and half servile in his ways and attitudes. The
ladies, who were real ladies, seemed to be sorry for the awkwardness
of the marquis, and addressed some trifling questions to him, adapting
themselves to the subjects on which he could have no trouble in
answering. The chasseur, meanwhile, was talking to himself in a
growling tone of voice. I had fallen a little into the background at
this interruption in a conversation which promised to be so pleasant,
and I could not help hearing his words.

“Really, De Carabas grows more stupid every day. I have a great mind to
throw off his boots, and leave him to his fate. I was intended for a
court, and to a court I will go, and make my own fortune as I have made
his. The emperor will appreciate my talents.”

And such are the habits of the French, or such his forgetfulness
of good manners in his anger, that he spat right and left on the
parquetted floor.

Just then a very ugly, very pleasant-looking man, came towards the
two ladies to whom I had lately been speaking, leading up to them a
delicate, fair woman, dressed all in the softest white, as if she were
_vouée au blanc_. I do not think there was a bit of colour about her.
I thought I heard her making, as she came along, a little noise of
pleasure, not exactly like the singing of a tea-kettle, nor yet like
the cooing of a dove, but reminding me of each sound.

“Madame de Mioumiou was anxious to see you,” said he, addressing
the lady with the roses, “so I have brought her across to give you
a pleasure!” What an honest, good face! but oh! how ugly! And yet I
liked his ugliness better than most persons’ beauty. There was a look
of pathetic acknowledgment of his ugliness, and a deprecation of your
too hasty judgment, in his countenance that was positively winning.
The soft, white lady kept glancing at my neighbour the chasseur, as if
they had had some former acquaintance, which puzzled me very much, as
they were of such different rank. However, their nerves were evidently
strung to the same tune, for at a sound behind the tapestry, which was
more like the scuttering of rats and mice than anything else, both
Madame de Mioumiou and the chasseur started with the most eager look of
anxiety on their countenances, and by their restless movements—madame’s
panting, and the fiery dilation of his eyes—one might see that
commonplace sounds affected them both in a manner very different to the
rest of the company. The ugly husband of the lovely lady with the roses
now addressed himself to me.

“We are much disappointed,” he said, “in finding that monsieur is not
accompanied by his countryman—le grand Jean d’Angleterre; I cannot
pronounce his name rightly”—and he looked at me to help him out.

“Le grand Jean d’Angleterre!” now who was le grand Jean d’Angleterre?
John Bull? John Russell? John Bright?

“Jean—Jean”—continued the gentleman, seeing my embarrassment. “Ah,
these terrible English names—‘Jean de Géanquilleur!’”

I was as wise as ever. And yet the name struck me as familiar, but
slightly disguised. I repeated it to myself. It was mighty like John
the Giant-killer, only his friends always call that worthy “Jack.” I
said the name aloud.

“Ah, that is it!” said he. “But why has he not accompanied you to our
little reunion to-night?”

I had been rather puzzled once or twice before, but this serious
question added considerably to my perplexity. Jack the Giant-killer had
once, it is true, been rather an intimate friend of mine, as far as
(printer’s) ink and paper can keep up a friendship, but I had not heard
his name mentioned for years; and for aught I knew he lay enchanted
with King Arthur’s knights, who lie entranced until the blast of the
trumpets of four mighty kings shall call them to help at England’s
need. But the question had been asked in serious earnest by that
gentleman, whom I more wished to think well of me than I did any other
person in the room. So I answered respectfully that it was long since I
had heard anything of my countryman; but that I was sure it would have
given him as much pleasure as it was doing myself to have been present
at such an agreeable gathering of friends. He bowed, and then the lame
lady took up the word.

“To-night is the night when, of all the year, this great old forest
surrounding the castle is said to be haunted by the phantom of a little
peasant girl who once lived hereabouts; the tradition is that she was
devoured by a wolf. In former days I have seen her on this night out
of yonder window at the end of the gallery. Will you, ma belle, take
monsieur to see the view outside by the moonlight (you may possibly see
the phantom-child); and leave me to a little _tête-à-tête_ with your
husband?”

With a gentle movement the lady with the roses complied with the
other’s request, and we went to a great window, looking down on the
forest, in which I had lost my way. The tops of the far-spreading and
leafy trees lay motionless beneath us in that pale, wan light, which
shows objects almost as distinct in form, though not in colour, as by
day. We looked down on the countless avenues, which seemed to converge
from all quarters to the great old castle; and suddenly across one,
quite near to us, there passed the figure of a little girl, with the
“capuchon” on, that takes the place of a peasant girl’s bonnet in
France. She had a basket on one arm, and by her, on the side to which
her head was turned, there went a wolf. I could almost have said it was
licking her hand, as if in penitent love, if either penitence or love
had ever been a quality of wolves,—but though not of living, perhaps it
may be of phantom wolves.

“There, we have seen her!” exclaimed my beautiful companion. “Though
so long dead, her simple story of household goodness and trustful
simplicity still lingers in the hearts of all who have ever heard
of her; and the country-people about here say that seeing that
phantom-child on this anniversary brings good luck for the year. Let us
hope that we shall share in the traditionary good fortune. Ah! here is
Madame de Retz—she retains the name of her first husband, you know, as
he was of higher rank than the present.” We were joined by our hostess.

“If monsieur is fond of the beauties of nature and art,” said she,
perceiving that I had been looking at the view from the great window,
“he will perhaps take pleasure in seeing the picture.” Here she sighed,
with a little affectation of grief. “You know the picture I allude
to,” addressing my companion, who bowed assent, and smiled a little
maliciously, as I followed the lead of madame.

I went after her to the other end of the saloon, noting by the way with
what keen curiosity she caught up what was passing either in word or
action on each side of her. When we stood opposite to the end wall, I
perceived a full-length picture of a handsome, peculiar-looking man,
with—in spite of his good looks—a very fierce and scowling expression.
My hostess clasped her hands together as her arms hung down in front,
and sighed once more. Then, half in soliloquy, she said—

“He was the love of my youth; his stern yet manly character first
touched this heart of mine. When—when shall I cease to deplore his
loss!”

Not being acquainted with her enough to answer this question (if,
indeed, it were not sufficiently answered by the fact of her second
marriage), I felt awkward; and, by way of saying something, I remarked,—

“The countenance strikes me as resembling something I have seen
before—in an engraving from an historical picture, I think; only, it
is there the principal figure in a group: he is holding a lady by her
hair, and threatening her with his scimitar, while two cavaliers are
rushing up the stairs, apparently only just in time to save her life.”

“Alas, alas!” said she, “you too accurately describe a miserable
passage in my life, which has often been represented in a false light.
The best of husbands”—here she sobbed, and became slightly inarticulate
with her grief—“will sometimes be displeased. I was young and curious,
he was justly angry with my disobedience—my brothers were too hasty—the
consequence is, I became a widow!”

After due respect for her tears, I ventured to suggest some commonplace
consolation. She turned round sharply:—

“No, monsieur: my only comfort is that I have never forgiven the
brothers who interfered so cruelly, in such an uncalled-for manner,
between my dear husband and myself. To quote my friend Monsieur
Sganarelle—‘Ce sont petites choses qui sont de temps en temps
necessaires dans l’amitié; et cinq ou six coups d’épée entre gens
qui s’aiment ne font que ragaillardir l’affection.’ You observe the
colouring is not quite what it should be?”

“In this light the beard is of rather a peculiar tint,” said I.

“Yes: the painter did not do it justice. It was most lovely, and gave
him such a distinguished air, quite different from the common herd.
Stay, I will show you the exact colour, if you will come near this
flambeau!” And going near the light, she took off a bracelet of hair,
with a magnificent clasp of pearls. It was peculiar, certainly. I did
not know what to say. “His precious lovely beard!” said she. “And the
pearls go so well with the delicate blue!”

Her husband, who had come up to us, and waited till her eye fell upon
him before venturing to speak, now said, “It is strange Monsieur Ogre
is not yet arrived!”

“Not at all strange,” said she, tartly. “He was always very stupid,
and constantly falls into mistakes, in which he comes worse off; and
it is very well he does, for he is a credulous and cowardly fellow.
Not at all strange! If you will”—turning to her husband, so that I
hardly heard her words, until I caught—“Then everybody would have their
rights, and we should have no more trouble. Is it not, monsieur?”
addressing me.

“If I were in England, I should imagine madame was speaking of the
reform bill, or the millennium,—but I am in ignorance.”

And just as I spoke, the great folding-doors were thrown open wide, and
every one started to their feet to greet a little old lady, leaning on
a thin black wand—and—

“Madame la Féemarraine,” was announced by a chorus of sweet shrill
voices.

And in a moment I was lying in the grass close by a hollow oak-tree,
with the slanting glory of the dawning day shining full in my face, and
thousands of little birds and delicate insects piping and warbling out
their welcome to the ruddy splendour.




SIX WEEKS AT HEPPENHEIM.


After I left Oxford, I determined to spend some months in travel
before settling down in life. My father had left me a few thousands,
the income arising from which would be enough to provide for all the
necessary requirements of a lawyer’s education; such as lodgings in a
quiet part of London, fees and payment to the distinguished barrister
with whom I was to read; but there would be small surplus left over for
luxuries or amusements; and as I was rather in debt on leaving college,
since I had forestalled my income, and the expenses of my travelling
would have to be defrayed out of my capital, I determined that they
should not exceed fifty pounds. As long as that sum would last me I
would remain abroad; when it was spent my holiday should be over, and I
would return and settle down somewhere in the neighbourhood of Russell
Square, in order to be near Mr. ——’s chambers in Lincoln’s-inn. I had
to wait in London for one day while my passport was being made out, and
I went to examine the streets in which I purposed to live; I had picked
them out, from studying a map, as desirable; and so they were, if
judged entirely by my reason; but their aspect was very depressing to
one country-bred, and just fresh from the beautiful street-architecture
of Oxford. The thought of living in such a monotonous gray district for
years made me all the more anxious to prolong my holiday by all the
economy which could eke out my fifty pounds. I thought I could make it
last for one hundred days at least. I was a good walker, and had no
very luxurious tastes in the matter of accommodation or food; I had as
fair a knowledge of German and French as any untravelled Englishman
can have; and I resolved to avoid expensive hotels such as my own
countrymen frequented.

I have stated this much about myself to explain how I fell in with the
little story that I am going to record, but with which I had not much
to do,—my part in it being little more than that of a sympathizing
spectator. I had been through France into Switzerland, where I had
gone beyond my strength in the way of walking, and I was on my way
home, when one evening I came to the village of Heppenheim, on the
Berg-Strasse. I had strolled about the dirty town of Worms all morning,
and dined in a filthy hotel; and after that I had crossed the Rhine,
and walked through Lorsch to Heppenheim. I was unnaturally tired and
languid as I dragged myself up the rough-paved and irregular village
street to the inn recommended to me. It was a large building, with a
green court before it. A cross-looking but scrupulously clean hostess
received me, and showed me into a large room with a dinner-table in it,
which, though it might have accommodated thirty or forty guests, only
stretched down half the length of the eating-room. There were windows
at each end of the room; two looked to the front of the house, on which
the evening shadows had already fallen; the opposite two were partly
doors, opening into a large garden full of trained fruit-trees and beds
of vegetables, amongst which rose-bushes and other flowers seemed to
grow by permission, not by original intention. There was a stove at
each end of the room, which, I suspect, had originally been divided
into two. The door by which I had entered was exactly in the middle,
and opposite to it was another, leading to a great bed-chamber, which
my hostess showed me as my sleeping quarters for the night.

If the place had been much less clean and inviting, I should have
remained there; I was almost surprised myself at my vis inertiæ; once
seated in the last warm rays of the slanting sun by the garden window,
I was disinclined to move, or even to speak. My hostess had taken my
orders as to my evening meal, and had left me. The sun went down, and I
grew shivery. The vast room looked cold and bare; the darkness brought
out shadows that perplexed me, because I could not fully make out the
objects that produced them after dazzling my eyes by gazing out into
the crimson light.

Some one came in; it was the maiden to prepare for my supper. She began
to lay the cloth at one end of the large table. There was a smaller one
close by me. I mustered up my voice, which seemed a little as if it was
getting beyond my control, and called to her,—

“Will you let me have my supper here on this table?”

She came near; the light fell on her while I was in shadow. She was
a tall young woman, with a fine strong figure, a pleasant face,
expressive of goodness and sense, and with a good deal of comeliness
about it, too, although the fair complexion was bronzed and reddened
by weather, so as to have lost much of its delicacy, and the features,
as I had afterwards opportunity enough of observing, were anything
but regular. She had white teeth, however, and well-opened blue
eyes—grave-looking eyes which had shed tears for past sorrow—plenty of
light-brown hair, rather elaborately plaited, and fastened up by two
great silver pins. That was all—perhaps more than all—I noticed that
first night. She began to lay the cloth where I had directed. A shiver
passed over me: she looked at me, and then said,—

“The gentleman is cold: shall I light the stove?”

Something vexed me—I am not usually so impatient: it was the coming-on
of serious illness—I did not like to be noticed so closely; I believed
that food would restore me, and I did not want to have my meal delayed,
as I feared it might be by the lighting of the stove; and most of all I
was feverishly annoyed by movement. I answered sharply and abruptly,—

“No; bring supper quickly; that is all I want.”

Her quiet, sad eyes met mine for a moment; but I saw no change in their
expression, as if I had vexed her by my rudeness: her countenance did
not for an instant lose its look of patient sense, and that is pretty
nearly all I can remember of Thekla that first evening at Heppenheim.

I suppose I ate my supper, or tried to do so, at any rate; and I must
have gone to bed, for days after I became conscious of lying there,
weak as a new-born babe, and with a sense of past pain in all my weary
limbs. As is the case in recovering from fever, one does not care to
connect facts, much less to reason upon them; so how I came to be
lying in that strange bed, in that large, half-furnished room; in what
house that room was; in what town, in what country, I did not take
the trouble to recal. It was of much more consequence to me then to
discover what was the well-known herb that gave the scent to the clean,
coarse sheets in which I lay. Gradually I extended my observations,
always confining myself to the present. I must have been well cared-for
by some one, and that lately, too, for the window was shaded, so as
to prevent the morning sun from coming in upon the bed; there was the
crackling of fresh wood in the great white china stove, which must have
been newly replenished within a short time.

By-and-by the door opened slowly. I cannot tell why, but my impulse
was to shut my eyes as if I were still asleep. But I could see through
my apparently closed eyelids. In came, walking on tip-toe, with a
slow care that defeated its object, two men. The first was aged from
thirty to forty, in the dress of a Black Forest peasant,—old-fashioned
coat and knee-breeches of strong blue cloth, but of a thoroughly
good quality; he was followed by an older man, whose dress, of more
pretension as to cut and colour (it was all black), was, nevertheless,
as I had often the opportunity of observing afterwards, worn threadbare.

Their first sentences, in whispered German, told me who they were: the
landlord of the inn where I was lying a helpless log, and the village
doctor who had been called in. The latter felt my pulse, and nodded his
head repeatedly in approbation. I had instinctively known that I was
getting better, and hardly cared for this confirmation; but it seemed
to give the truest pleasure to the landlord, who shook the hand of the
doctor, in a pantomime expressive of as much thankfulness as if I had
been his brother. Some low-spoken remarks were made, and then some
question was asked, to which, apparently, my host was unable to reply.
He left the room, and in a minute or two returned, followed by Thekla,
who was questioned by the doctor, and replied with a quiet clearness,
showing how carefully the details of my illness had been observed
by her. Then she left the room, and, as if every minute had served
to restore to my brain its power of combining facts, I was suddenly
prompted to open my eyes, and ask in the best German I could muster
what day of the month it was; not that I clearly remembered the date
of my arrival at Heppenheim, but I knew it was about the beginning of
September.

Again the doctor conveyed his sense of extreme satisfaction in a series
of rapid pantomimic nods, and then replied in deliberate but tolerable
English, to my great surprise,—

“It is the 29th of September, my dear sir. You must thank the dear God.
Your fever has made its course of twenty-one days. Now patience and
care must be practised. The good host and his household will have the
care; you must have the patience. If you have relations in England, I
will do my endeavours to tell them the state of your health.”

“I have no near relations,” said I, beginning in my weakness to cry, as
I remembered, as if it had been a dream, the days when I had father,
mother, sister.

“Chut, chut!” said he; then, turning to the landlord, he told him in
German to make Thekla bring me one of her good bouillons; after which
I was to have certain medicines, and to sleep as undisturbedly as
possible. For days, he went on, I should require constant watching and
careful feeding; every twenty minutes I was to have something, either
wine or soup, in small quantities.

A dim notion came into my hazy mind that my previous husbandry of my
fifty pounds, by taking long walks and scanty diet, would prove in the
end very bad economy; but I sank into dozing unconsciousness before I
could quite follow out my idea. I was roused by the touch of a spoon on
my lips; it was Thekla feeding me. Her sweet, grave face had something
approaching to a mother’s look of tenderness upon it, as she gave me
spoonful after spoonful with gentle patience and dainty care: and then
I fell asleep once more. When next I wakened it was night; the stove
was lighted, and the burning wood made a pleasant crackle, though I
could only see the outlines and edges of red flame through the crevices
of the small iron door. The uncurtained window on my left looked into
the purple, solemn night. Turning a little, I saw Thekla sitting near
a table, sewing diligently at some great white piece of household
work. Every now and then she stopped to snuff the candle; sometimes
she began to ply her needle again immediately; but once or twice she
let her busy hands lie idly in her lap, and looked into the darkness,
and thought deeply for a moment or two; these pauses always ended in
a kind of sobbing sigh, the sound of which seemed to restore her to
self-consciousness, and she took to her sewing even more diligently
than before. Watching her had a sort of dreamy interest for me; this
diligence of hers was a pleasant contrast to my repose; it seemed to
enhance the flavour of my rest. I was too much of an animal just then
to have my sympathy, or even my curiosity, strongly excited by her look
of sad remembrance, or by her sighs.

After a while she gave a little start, looked at a watch lying by her
on the table, and came, shading the candle by her hand, softly to my
bedside. When she saw my open eyes she went to a porringer placed at
the top of the stove, and fed me with soup. She did not speak while
doing this. I was half aware that she had done it many times since
the doctor’s visit, although this seemed to be the first time that I
was fully awake. She passed her arm under the pillow on which my head
rested, and raised me a very little; her support was as firm as a man’s
could have been. Again back to her work, and I to my slumbers, without
a word being exchanged.

It was broad daylight when I wakened again; I could see the sunny
atmosphere of the garden outside stealing in through the nicks at the
side of the shawl hung up to darken the room—a shawl which I was sure
had not been there when I had observed the window in the night. How
gently my nurse must have moved about while doing her thoughtful act!

My breakfast was brought me by the hostess; she who had received me on
my first arrival at this hospitable inn. She meant to do everything
kindly, I am sure; but a sick room was not her place; by a thousand
little mal-adroitnesses she fidgeted me past bearing; her shoes
creaked, her dress rustled; she asked me questions about myself which
it irritated me to answer; she congratulated me on being so much
better, while I was faint for want of the food which she delayed giving
me in order to talk. My host had more sense in him when he came in,
although his shoes creaked as well as hers. By this time I was somewhat
revived, and could talk a little; besides, it seemed churlish to be
longer without acknowledging so much kindness received.

“I am afraid I have been a great trouble,” said I. “I can only say that
I am truly grateful.”

His good broad face reddened, and he moved a little uneasily.

“I don’t see how I could have done otherwise than I——than we, did,”
replied he, in the soft German of the district. “We were all glad
enough to do what we could; I don’t say it was a pleasure, because
it is our busiest time of year,—but then,” said he, laughing a
little awkwardly, as if he feared his expression might have been
misunderstood, “I don’t suppose it has been a pleasure to you either,
sir, to be laid up so far from home.”

“No, indeed.”

“I may as well tell you now, sir, that we had to look over your papers
and clothes. In the first place, when you were so ill I would fain have
let your kinsfolk know, if I could have found a clue; and besides, you
needed linen.”

“I am wearing a shirt of yours though,” said I, touching my sleeve.

“Yes, sir!” said he again, reddening a little. “I told Thekla to take
the finest out of the chest; but I am afraid you find it coarser than
your own.”

For all answer I could only lay my weak hand on the great brown paw
resting on the bed-side. He gave me a sudden squeeze in return that I
thought would have crushed my bones.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said he, misinterpreting the sudden look of
pain which I could not repress; “but watching a man come out of the
shadow of death into life makes one feel very friendly towards him.”

“No old or true friend that I have had could have done more for me than
you, and your wife, and Thekla, and the good doctor.”

“I am a widower,” said he, turning round the great wedding-ring that
decked his third finger. “My sister keeps house for me, and takes care
of the children,—that is to say, she does it with the help of Thekla,
the house-maiden. But I have other servants,” he continued. “I am well
to do, the good God be thanked! I have land, and cattle, and vineyards.
It will soon be our vintage-time, and then you must go and see my
grapes as they come into the village. I have a ‘_chasse_,’ too, in the
Odenwald; perhaps one day you will be strong enough to go and shoot the
‘_chevreuil_’ with me.”

His good, true heart was trying to make me feel like a welcome guest.
Some time afterwards I learnt from the doctor that—my poor fifty
pounds being nearly all expended—my host and he had been brought to
believe in my poverty, as the necessary examination of my clothes and
papers showed so little evidence of wealth. But I myself have but
little to do with my story; I only name these things, and repeat these
conversations, to show what a true, kind, honest man my host was. By
the way, I may as well call him by his name henceforward, Fritz Müller.
The doctor’s name, Wiedermann.

I was tired enough with this interview with Fritz Müller; but when Dr.
Wiedermann came he pronounced me to be much better; and through the day
much the same course was pursued as on the previous one: being fed,
lying still, and sleeping, were my passive and active occupations.
It was a hot, sunshiny day, and I craved for air. Fresh air does
not enter into the pharmacopoeia of a German doctor; but somehow I
obtained my wish. During the morning hours the window through which
the sun streamed—the window looking on to the front court—was opened a
little; and through it I heard the sounds of active life, which gave
me pleasure and interest enough. The hen’s cackle, the cock’s exultant
call when he had found the treasure of a grain of corn,—the movements
of a tethered donkey, and the cooing and whirring of the pigeons which
lighted on the window-sill, gave me just subjects enough for interest.
Now and then a cart or carriage drove up,—I could hear them ascending
the rough village street long before they stopped at the “Halbmond,”
the village inn. Then there came a sound of running and haste in the
house; and Thekla was always called for in sharp, imperative tones. I
heard little children’s footsteps, too, from time to time; and once
there must have been some childish accident or hurt, for a shrill,
plaintive little voice kept calling out, “Thekla, Thekla, liebe
Thekla.” Yet, after the first early morning hours, when my hostess
attended on my wants, it was always Thekla who came to give me my food
or my medicine; who redded up my room; who arranged the degree of
light, shifting the temporary curtain with the shifting sun; and always
as quietly and deliberately as though her attendance upon me were her
sole work. Once or twice my hostess came into the large eating-room
(out of which my room opened), and called Thekla away from whatever was
her occupation in my room at the time, in a sharp, injured, imperative
whisper. Once I remember it was to say that sheets were wanted for some
stranger’s bed, and to ask where she, the speaker, could have put the
keys, in a tone of irritation, as though Thekla were responsible for
Fräulein Müller’s own forgetfulness.

Night came on; the sounds of daily life died away into silence; the
children’s voices were no more heard; the poultry were all gone to
roost; the beasts of burden to their stables; and travellers were
housed. Then Thekla came in softly and quietly, and took up her
appointed place, after she had done all in her power for my comfort.
I felt that I was in no state to be left all those weary hours which
intervened between sunset and sunrise; but I did feel ashamed that
this young woman, who had watched by me all the previous night, and
for aught I knew, for many before, and had worked hard, been run off
her legs, as English servants would say, all day long, should come and
take up her care of me again; and it was with a feeling of relief that
I saw her head bend forwards, and finally rest on her arms, which had
fallen on the white piece of sewing spread before her on the table. She
slept; and I slept. When I wakened dawn was stealing into the room,
and making pale the lamplight. Thekla was standing by the stove, where
she had been preparing the bouillon I should require on wakening. But
she did not notice my half-open eyes, although her face was turned
towards the bed. She was reading a letter slowly, as if its words were
familiar to her, yet as though she were trying afresh to extract some
fuller or some different meaning from their construction. She folded
it up softly and slowly, and replaced it in her pocket with the quiet
movement habitual to her. Then she looked before her, not at me, but
at vacancy filled up by memories; and as the enchanter brought up the
scenes and people which she saw, but I could not, her eyes filled with
tears—tears that gathered almost imperceptibly to herself as it would
seem—for when one large drop fell on her hands (held slightly together
before her as she stood) she started a little, and brushed her eyes
with the back of her hand, and then came towards the bed to see if I
was awake. If I had not witnessed her previous emotion, I could never
have guessed that she had any hidden sorrow or pain from her manner;
tranquil, self-restrained as usual. The thought of this letter haunted
me, especially as more than once I, wakeful or watchful during the
ensuing nights, either saw it in her hands, or suspected that she had
been recurring to it from noticing the same sorrowful, dreamy look
upon her face when she thought herself unobserved. Most likely every
one has noticed how inconsistently out of proportion some ideas become
when one is shut up in any place without change of scene or thought. I
really grew quite irritated about this letter. If I did not see it, I
suspected it lay _perdu_ in her pocket. What was in it? Of course it
was a love-letter; but if so, what was going wrong in the course of her
love? I became like a spoilt child in my recovery; every one whom I saw
for the time being was thinking only of me, so it was perhaps no wonder
that I became my sole object of thought; and at last the gratification
of my curiosity about this letter seemed to me a duty that I owed to
myself. As long as my fidgety inquisitiveness remained ungratified, I
felt as if I could not get well. But to do myself justice, it was more
than inquisitiveness. Thekla had tended me with the gentle, thoughtful
care of a sister, in the midst of her busy life. I could often hear
the Fräulein’s sharp voice outside blaming her for something that had
gone wrong; but I never heard much from Thekla in reply. Her name was
called in various tones by different people, more frequently than I
could count, as if her services were in perpetual requisition, yet I
was never neglected, or even long uncared-for. The doctor was kind and
attentive; my host friendly and really generous; his sister subdued
her acerbity of manner when in my room, but Thekla was the one of all
to whom I owed my comforts, if not my life. If I could do anything to
smooth her path (and a little money goes a great way in these primitive
parts of Germany), how willingly would I give it? So one night I
began—she was no longer needed to watch by my bedside, but she was
arranging my room before leaving me for the night—

“Thekla,” said I, “you don’t belong to Heppenheim, do you?”

She looked at me, and reddened a little.

“No. Why do you ask?”

“You have been so good to me that I cannot help wanting to know more
about you. I must needs feel interested in one who has been by my side
through my illness as you have. Where do your friends live? Are your
parents alive?”

All this time I was driving at the letter.

“I was born at Altenahr. My father is an innkeeper there. He owns the
‘Golden Stag.’ My mother is dead, and he has married again, and has
many children.”

“And your stepmother is unkind to you,” said I, jumping to a conclusion.

“Who said so?” asked she, with a shade of indignation in her tone. “She
is a right good woman, and makes my father a good wife.”

“Then why are you here living so far from home?”

Now the look came back to her face which I had seen upon it during the
night hours when I had watched her by stealth; a dimming of the grave
frankness of her eyes, a light quiver at the corners of her mouth. But
all she said was, “It was better.”

Somehow, I persisted with the wilfulness of an invalid. I am half
ashamed of it now.

“But why better, Thekla? Was there——” How should I put it? I stopped a
little, and then rushed blindfold at my object: “Has not that letter
which you read so often something to do with your being here?”

She fixed me with her serious eyes till I believe I reddened far
more than she; and I hastened to pour out, incoherently enough, my
conviction that she had some secret care, and my desire to help her if
she was in any trouble.

“You cannot help me,” said she, a little softened by my explanation,
though some shade of resentment at having been thus surreptitiously
watched yet lingered in her manner. “It is an old story; a sorrow gone
by, past, at least it ought to be, only sometimes I am foolish”—her
tones were softening now—“and it is punishment enough that you have
seen my folly.”

“If you had a brother here, Thekla, you would let him give you his
sympathy if he could not give you his help, and you would not blame
yourself if you had shown him your sorrow, should you? I tell you
again, let me be as a brother to you.”

“In the first place, sir”—this “sir” was to mark the distinction
between me and the imaginary brother—“I should have been ashamed to
have shown even a brother my sorrow, which is also my reproach and my
disgrace.” These were strong words; and I suppose my face showed that
I attributed to them a still stronger meaning than they warranted;
but _honi soit qui mal y pense_—for she went on dropping her eyes and
speaking hurriedly.

“My shame and my reproach is this: I have loved a man who has not loved
me”—she grasped her hands together till the fingers made deep white
dents in the rosy flesh—“and I can’t make out whether he ever did, or
whether he did once and is changed now; if only he did once love me, I
could forgive myself.”

With hasty, trembling hands she began to rearrange the tisane and
medicines for the night on the little table at my bed-side. But, having
got thus far, I was determined to persevere.

“Thekla,” said I, “tell me all about it, as you would to your mother,
if she were alive. There are often misunderstandings which, never set
to rights, make the misery and desolation of a life-time.”

She did not speak at first. Then she pulled out the letter, and said,
in a quiet, hopeless tone of voice:—

“You can read German writing? Read that, and see if I have any reason
for misunderstanding.”

The letter was signed “Franz Weber,” and dated from some small town in
Switzerland—I forget what—about a month previous to the time when I
read it. It began with acknowledging the receipt of some money which
had evidently been requested by the writer, and for which the thanks
were almost fulsome; and then, by the quietest transition in the world,
he went on to consult her as to the desirability of his marrying
some girl in the place from which he wrote, saying that this Anna
Somebody was only eighteen and very pretty, and her father a well-to-do
shopkeeper, and adding, with coarse coxcombry, his belief that he was
not indifferent to the maiden herself. He wound up by saying that, if
this marriage did take place, he should certainly repay the various
sums of money which Thekla had lent him at different times.

I was some time in making out all this. Thekla held the candle for me
to read it; held it patiently and steadily, not speaking a word till I
had folded up the letter again, and given it back to her. Then our eyes
met.

“There is no misunderstanding possible, is there, sir?” asked she, with
a faint smile.

“No,” I replied; “but you are well rid of such a fellow.”

She shook her head a little. “It shows his bad side, sir. We have all
our bad sides. You must not judge him harshly; at least, I cannot. But
then we were brought up together.”

“At Altenahr?”

“Yes; his father kept the other inn, and our parents, instead of being
rivals, were great friends. Franz is a little younger than I, and was a
delicate child. I had to take him to school, and I used to be so proud
of it and of my charge. Then he grew strong, and was the handsomest
lad in the village. Our fathers used to sit and smoke together, and
talk of our marriage, and Franz must have heard as much as I. Whenever
he was in trouble, he would come to me for what advice I could give
him; and he danced twice as often with me as with any other girl at
all the dances, and always brought his nosegay to me. Then his father
wished him to travel, and learn the ways at the great hotels on the
Rhine before he settled down in Altenahr. You know that is the custom
in Germany, sir. They go from town to town as journeymen, learning
something fresh everywhere, they say.”

“I knew that was done in trades,” I replied.

“Oh, yes; and among inn-keepers, too,” she said. “Most of the waiters
at the great hotels in Frankfort, and Heidelberg, and Mayence, and, I
daresay, at all the other places, are the sons of innkeepers in small
towns, who go out into the world to learn new ways, and perhaps to pick
up a little English and French; otherwise, they say, they should never
get on. Franz went off from Altenahr on his journeyings four years ago
next May-day; and before he went, he brought me back a ring from Bonn,
where he bought his new clothes. I don’t wear it now; but I have got
it upstairs, and it comforts me to see something that shows me it was
not all my silly fancy. I suppose he fell among bad people, for he soon
began to play for money,—and then he lost more than he could always
pay—and sometimes I could help him a little, for we wrote to each other
from time to time, as we knew each other’s addresses; for the little
ones grew around my father’s hearth, and I thought that I, too, would
go forth into the world and earn my own living, so that——well, I will
tell the truth—I thought that by going into service, I could lay by
enough for buying a handsome stock of household linen, and plenty of
pans and kettles against—against what will never come to pass now.”

“Do the German women buy the pots and kettles, as you call them,
when they are married?” asked I, awkwardly, laying hold of a trivial
question to conceal the indignant sympathy with her wrongs which I did
not like to express.

“Oh, yes; the bride furnishes all that is wanted in the kitchen, and
all the store of house-linen. If my mother had lived, it would have
been laid by for me, as she could have afforded to buy it, but my
stepmother will have hard enough work to provide for her own four
little girls. However,” she continued, brightening up, “I can help her,
for now I shall never marry; and my master here is just and liberal,
and pays me sixty florins a year, which is high wages.” (Sixty florins
are about five pounds sterling.) “And now, good-night, sir. This cup to
the left holds the tisane, that to the right the acorn-tea.” She shaded
the candle, and was leaving the room. I raised myself on my elbow, and
called her back.

“Don’t go on thinking about this man,” said I. “He was not good enough
for you. You are much better unmarried.”

“Perhaps so,” she answered gravely. “But you cannot do him justice; you
do not know him.”

A few minutes after, I heard her soft and cautious return; she had
taken her shoes off, and came in her stockinged feet up to my bedside,
shading the light with her hand. When she saw that my eyes were open,
she laid down two letters on the table, close by my night-lamp.

“Perhaps, some time, sir, you would take the trouble to read these
letters; you would then see how noble and clever Franz really is. It is
I who ought to be blamed, not he.”

No more was said that night.

Some time the next morning I read the letters. They were filled with
vague, inflated, sentimental descriptions of his inner life and
feelings; entirely egotistical, and intermixed with quotations from
second-rate philosophers and poets. There was, it must be said, nothing
in them offensive to good principle or good feeling, however much they
might be opposed to good taste. I was to go into the next room that
afternoon for the first time of leaving my sick chamber. All morning
I lay and ruminated. From time to time I thought of Thekla and Franz
Weber. She was the strong, good, helpful character, he the weak and
vain; how strange it seemed that she should have cared for one so
dissimilar; and then I remembered the various happy marriages when to
an outsider it seemed as if one was so inferior to the other that their
union would have appeared a subject for despair if it had been looked
at prospectively. My host came in, in the midst of these meditations,
bringing a great flowered dressing-gown, lined with flannel, and the
embroidered smoking-cap which he evidently considered as belonging
to this Indian-looking robe. They had been his father’s, he told me;
and as he helped me to dress, he went on with his communications on
small family matters. His inn was flourishing; the numbers increased
every year of those who came to see the church at Heppenheim: the
church which was the pride of the place, but which I had never yet
seen. It was built by the great Kaiser Karl. And there was the Castle
of Starkenburg, too, which the Abbots of Lorsch had often defended,
stalwart churchmen as they were, against the temporal power of the
emperors. And Melibocus was not beyond a walk either. In fact, it was
the work of one person to superintend the inn alone; but he had his
farm and his vineyards beyond, which of themselves gave him enough
to do. And his sister was oppressed with the perpetual calls made
upon her patience and her nerves in an inn; and would rather go back
and live at Worms. And his children wanted so much looking after. By
the time he had placed himself in a condition for requiring my full
sympathy, I had finished my slow toilette; and I had to interrupt his
confidences, and accept the help of his good strong arm to lead me
into the great eating-room, out of which my chamber opened. I had a
dreamy recollection of the vast apartment. But how pleasantly it was
changed! There was the bare half of the room, it is true, looking as
it had done on that first afternoon, sunless and cheerless, with the
long, unoccupied table, and the necessary chairs for the possible
visitors; but round the windows that opened on the garden a part of
the room was enclosed by the household clothes’-horses hung with great
pieces of the blue homespun cloth of which the dress of the Black
Forest peasant is made. This shut-in space was warmed by the lighted
stove, as well as by the lowering rays of the October sun. There was
a little round walnut table with some flowers upon it, and a great
cushioned armchair placed so as to look out upon the garden and the
hills beyond. I felt sure that this was all Thekla’s arrangement; I
had rather wondered that I had seen so little of her this day. She had
come once or twice on necessary errands into my room in the morning,
but had appeared to be in great haste, and had avoided meeting my eye.
Even when I had returned the letters, which she had entrusted to me
with so evident a purpose of placing the writer in my good opinion, she
had never inquired as to how far they had answered her design; she had
merely taken them with some low word of thanks, and put them hurriedly
into her pocket. I suppose she shrank from remembering how fully she
had given me her confidence the night before, now that daylight and
actual life pressed close around her. Besides, there surely never
was anyone in such constant request as Thekla. I did not like this
estrangement, though it was the natural consequence of my improved
health, which would daily make me less and less require services which
seemed so urgently claimed by others. And, moreover, after my host
left me—I fear I had cut him a little short in the recapitulation of
his domestic difficulties, but he was too thorough and good-hearted a
man to bear malice—I wanted to be amused or interested. So I rang my
little hand-bell, hoping that Thekla would answer it, when I could have
fallen into conversation with her, without specifying any decided want.
Instead of Thekla the Fräulein came, and I had to invent a wish; for I
could not act as a baby, and say that I wanted my nurse. However, the
Fräulein was better than no one, so I asked her if I could have some
grapes, which had been provided for me on every day but this, and which
were especially grateful to my feverish palate. She was a good, kind
woman, although, perhaps, her temper was not the best in the world;
and she expressed the sincerest regret as she told me that there were
no more in the house. Like an invalid I fretted at my wish not being
granted, and spoke out.

“But Thekla told me the vintage was not till the fourteenth; and you
have a vineyard close beyond the garden on the slope of the hill out
there, have you not?”

“Yes; and grapes for the gathering. But perhaps the gentleman does not
know our laws. Until the vintage—(the day of beginning the vintage is
fixed by the Grand Duke, and advertised in the public papers)—until
the vintage, all owners of vineyards may only go on two appointed days
in every week to gather their grapes; on those two days (Tuesdays and
Fridays this year) they must gather enough for the wants of their
fam

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