Arthur O'Leary Part 24

'Softly, softly; don't interrupt public justice,' said he, with a most provoking composure. 'We must draw up the _proces-verbal_.'

'To be sure,' said I, endeavouring to see what might be done by concurrence with him, 'nothing more natural But let me loose first; and then we 'll arrange the _proces_.'

'Not at all; you're all wrong,' interposed he. 'I must have two witnesses first, to establish the fact of your present position; ay, and they must be of sound mind, and able to sign their names.'

'May Heaven grant me patience, or I'll burst!' said I to myself, while he continued in a regular sing-song tone--

[Ill.u.s.tration: 168-245]

'Then we'll take the depositions in form. Where do you come from?'

'Ireland,' said I, with a deep sigh, wis.h.i.+ng I were up to the neck in a bog-hole there, in preference to my actual misfortune.

'What language do you usually speak?'

'English.'

'There, now,' said he, brightening up, 'there's an important fact already in the cla.s.s No. 1--ident.i.ty--which speaks of "all traits, marks, and characteristic signs by which the plaintiff may be known."

Now, we'll set you forth as "an Irishman that speaks English."'

'If you go on this way a little longer, you may put me down as "insane,"

for I vow to heaven I'm becoming so!'

'Come, Bobeche,' said he, turning towards the natural, who stood in mute admiration at his side, 'go over to Claude Gueirans, at the mill, and see if the _notaire_ be up there--there was a marriage of his niece this morning, and I think you 'll find him; then cross the bridge, and make for Papalot's, and ask him to come up here, and bring some stamped paper to take informations with him. You may tell the cure as you go by that there's been a dreadful crime committed in the forest, and that "la justice s'informe.'" These last words were p.r.o.nounced with an accent of the most magniloquent solemnity.

Scarcely had the fool set out on his errand when my temper, so long restrained, burst all bounds, and I abused the mayor in the most outrageous manner. There was no insult I could think of that I did not heap on his absurdity, his ignorance, his folly, his stupidity; and I never ceased till actually want of breath completely exhausted me.

To all this the worthy man made no reply, nor paid even the least attention. Seated on the stump of a beech-tree, he looked steadily at vacancy, till at length I began to doubt whether the whole scene were real, and if he were not a mere creature of my imagination. I verily believe I'd have given five louis d'ors to have been free one moment, if only to pelt a stone at him.

Meanwhile, the shadow of coming night was falling on the forest; the crows came cawing home to their dwelling in the tree-tops; the sounds of insect life were stilled in the gra.s.s; and the odours of the forest, stronger as night closed in, filled the air. Gradually the darkness grew thicker and thicker, and at last all I could distinguish was the stems of the trees near me, and a ma.s.sive black object I judged to be the mayor. I called out to him in accents intended to be most apologetic.

I begged forgiveness for my warmth of temper; protested my regrets, and only asked for the pleasure of his entertaining society till the hour of my liberation should arrive. But no answer came; not a word, not a syllable in reply--I could not even hear him breathing. Provoked at this uncomplying obstinacy, I renewed my attacks on all const.i.tuted authorities; expressed the most lively hopes that the gang of robbers would some day or other burn down Givet and all it contained, not forgetting the mayor and the notary; and, finally, to fill up the measure of insult, tried to sing the _ca ira_, which in good monarchical Holland was, I knew, a dire offence, but I broke down in the melody, and had to come back to prose. However, it came just to the same--all was silent. When I ceased speaking, not even an echo returned me a reply.

At last I grew wearied; the thought that all my anathemas had only an audience of weasels and woodp.e.c.k.e.rs damped the ardour of my eloquence, and I fell into a musing fit on Dutch justice, which seemed admirably adapted to those good old times when people lived to the age of eight or nine hundred years, and when a few months were as the twinkling of an eye. Then I began a little plan of a tour from the time of my liberation, cautiously resolving never to move out of the most beaten tracks, and to avoid all districts where the mayor was a Dutchman.

Hunger and thirst and cold by this time began to tell upon my spirits too, and I grew sleepy from sheer exhaustion.

Scarcely had I nodded my head twice in slumber, when a loud shout awoke me. I opened my eyes, and saw a vast mob of men, women, and children carrying torches, and coming through the wood at full speed, the procession being led by a venerable-looking old man on a white pony, whom I at once guessed to be the cure, while the fool, with a very imposing branch of burning pine, walked beside him. 'Good-evening to you, monsieur,' said the old man, as he took off his hat, with an air of courtesy.

'You must excuse the miserable plight I 'm in, Monsieur le Cure,' said I, 'if I can't return your politeness; but I 'm tied.'

'Cut the cords at once,' said the good man to the crowd that now pressed forward.

'Your pardon, Father Jacques,' said the mayor, as he sat up in the gra.s.s and rubbed his eyes, which sleep seemed to have almost obliterated; 'but the _procesverbal_ is----'

'Quite unnecessary here,' replied the old man. 'Cut the rope, my friends.'

'Not so fast,' said the mayor, pus.h.i.+ng towards me. 'I 'll untie it.

That's a good cord and worth eight sous.'

And so, notwithstanding all my a.s.surances that I 'd give him a crown-piece to use more despatch, he proceeded leisurely to unfasten every knot, and took at least ten minutes before he set me at liberty.

'Hurrah!' said I, as the last coil was withdrawn, and I attempted to spring into the air; but my cramped and chilled limbs were unequal to the effort, and I rolled headlong on the gra.s.s.

The worthy cure, however, was at once beside me, and after a few directions to the party to make a litter for me, he knelt down to offer up a short prayer for my deliverance; the rest followed the act with implicit devotion, while I took off my hat in respect, and sat still where I was.

'I see,' whispered he, when the _Ave_ was over--' I see you are a Protestant. This is a fast day with us; but we 'll get you a poulet at my cottage, and a gla.s.s of wine will soon refresh you.'

With many a thankful speech, I soon suffered myself to be lifted into a large sheet, such as they use in the vineyards; and with a strong cortege of the villagers carrying their torches, we took our way back to Givet.

The circ.u.mstances of my adventure, considerably exaggerated of course, were bruited over the country; and before I was out of bed next morning, a cha.s.seur, in a very showy livery, arrived with a letter from the lord of the manor, entreating me to take my abode for some days at the Chateau de Rochepied, where I should be received with a perfect welcome, and every endeavour made to recover my lost effects. Having consulted with the worthy cure, who counselled me by all means to accept this flattering invitation--a course I was myself disposed to--I wrote a few lines of answer, and despatched a messenger by post to Dinant to bring up my heavy baggage, which I had left there.

Towards noon the count's carriage drove up to convey me to the chateau; and having taken an affectionate farewell of my kind host, I set out for Rochepied. The wicker conveniency in which I travelled, all alone, albeit not the thing for Hyde Park, was easy and pleasant in its motion; the fat Flemish mares, with their long tails tastefully festooned over a huge cus.h.i.+on of plaited straw on their backs, went at a fair, steady pace; the road led through a part of the forest abounding in pretty vistas of woodland scenery; and everything conspired to make me feel that even an affair with a gang of smugglers might not be the worst thing in life, if it were to lead to such pleasant results afterwards.

As we jogged along, I learned from the fat Walloon coachman that the chateau was full of company; that the count had invited numerous guests for the opening of the _cha.s.se_, and that there were French and Germans and English, and for aught he knew Chinese expected to 'a.s.sist' at the ceremony. I confess the information considerably damped the pleasure I at first experienced. I was in hopes to see real country life, the regular course of chateau existence, in a family quietly domesticated on their own property. I looked forward to a peep at that _vie intime_ of Flemish household, of which all I knew was gathered from a Wenix picture, and I wanted to see the thing in reality. The good vrow, with her high cap and her long waist, her pale features lit up with eyes of such brown as only Van Dyck ever caught the colour of; the daughters, prim and stately, with their stiff, quaint courtesy, moving about the terraced walks, like figures stepping from an ancient canvas, with bouquets in their white and dimpled fingers, or mayhap a jess-hawk perched upon their wrist; the Mynheer Baron, a large and portly Fleming, with a slouched beaver and a short trim moustache, deep of voice, heavy of step, seated on a grey Cuyp-like horse, with a flowing mane and a huge ta.s.sel of a tail, napping lazily his brawny flanks, or slapping with heavy stroke the ma.s.sive jack-boots of his rider--such were my notions of a Dutch household. The unchanged looks of the dwellings, which for centuries were the same, in part suggested these thoughts. The quaint old turrets, the stiff and stately terraces, the fosse, stagnant and sluggish, the carved tracery of the ma.s.sive doorway, were all as we see them in the oldest pictures of the land; and when the rind looks so like, it is hard to imagine the fruit with a different flavour.

It was then with considerable regret I learned that I should see the family _en gala_; that I had fallen upon a time of feasting and entertainment. Had it not been too late, I should have beaten my retreat, and taken up my abode for another day with the cure of Givet; as it was, I resolved to make my visit as brief as possible, and take to the road with all convenient despatch.

As we neared the chateau, the Walloon remembered a number of apologies with which the count charged him to account for his not having gone himself to fetch me, alleging the claims of his other guests, and the unavoidable details which the forthcoming _ouverture de la cha.s.se_ demanded at his hands. I paid little attention to the mumbled and broken narrative, interrupted by imprecations on the road and exhortations to the horses; for already we had entered the precincts of the demesne, and I was busy in noting down the appearance of the place. There was, however, little to remark. The transition from the wide forest to the park was only marked by a little improvement in the road; there was neither lodge nor gate--no wall, no fence, no inclosure of any kind. The trim culture, which in our country is so observable around the approach of a house of some consequence, was here totally wanting; the avenue was partly of gravel, partly of smooth turf; the brushwood of p.r.i.c.kly holly was let grow wild, and straggled in many places across the road; the occasional views that opened seemed to have been made by accident, not design; and all was rank vegetation and rich verdure, uncared for--uncultivated, but like the children of the poor, seeming only the healthier and more robust, because left to their own unchecked, untutored impulses. The rabbits played about within a few paces of the carriage tracks; the birds sat motionless on the trees as we pa.s.sed, while here and there through the foliage I could detect the gorgeous colouring of some bright peac.o.c.k's tail, as he rested on a bough and held converse with his wilder brethren of the air, just as if the remoteness of the spot and its seclusions led to intimacies which in the ordinary routine of life had been impossible. At length the trees receded farther and farther from the road, and a beautiful expanse of waving lawn, dotted with sheep, stretched before the eye. In the distance, too, I could perceive the chateau itself--a ma.s.sive pile in the shape of a letter L, bristling with chimneys, and pierced with windows of every size and shape; clumps of flowering shrubs and fruit-trees were planted about, and little beds of flowers spangled the even turf like stars in the expanse of heaven. The Meuse wound round the chateau on three sides, and perhaps thus saved it from being inflicted by a ditch, for without water a Dutchman can no more exist than a mackerel.

'Fine! isn't it?' said the Walloon, as he pointed with his finger to the scene before me, and seemed to revel with delight in my look of astonishment, while he plied his whip with renewed vigour, and soon drew up at a wide flight of stone steps, where a row of orange-trees mounted guard on each side, and filled the place with their fragrance.

A servant in the strange _melange_ of a livery, where the colours seemed chosen from a bed of ranunculuses just near, came out to let down the steps and usher me into the house. He informed me that the count had given orders for my reception, but that he and all his friends were out on horseback, and would not be back before dinner-time. Not sorry to have a little time to myself, I retired to my room, and threw myself down on a most comfortable sofa, excessively well satisfied with the locality and well disposed to take advantage of my good fortune. The little bed, with its snow-white curtains and gilded canopy; the bra.s.s dogs upon the hearth, that shone like gold; the cherry-wood table, that might have served as a mirror; the modest book-shelf, with its pleasant row of volumes; but, better than all, the open window, from which I could see for miles over the top of a dark forest, and watch the Meuse as it came and went, now s.h.i.+ning, now lost in the recesses of the wood--all charmed me; and I fully confessed what I have had very frequently to repeat in life, that 'Arthur O'Leary was born under a lucky planet.'

CHAPTER XII. CHATEAU LIFE

Stretched upon a large old-fas.h.i.+oned sofa, where a burgomaster might have reclined with 'ample room and verge enough,' in all the easy abandonment of dressing-gown and slippers; the cool breeze gently wafting the window-blind to and fro, and tempering the lulling sounds from wood and water; the buzzing of the summer insects and the far-off carol of a peasant's song--I fell into one of those delicious sleeps in which dreams are so faintly marked as to leave us no disappointment on waking: flitting shadowlike before the mind, they live only in a pleasant memory of something vague and undefined, and impart no touch of sorrow for expectations unfulfilled, for hopes that are not to be realised. I would that my dreams might always take this shape. It is a sad thing when they become tangible; when features and looks, eyes, hands, words, and signs, live too strongly in our sleeping minds, and we awake to the cold reality of our daily cares and crosses, tenfold less endurable from very contrast. No! give me rather the faint and waving outline, the shadowy perception of pleasure, than the vivid picture, to end only in the conviction that I am but Christopher Sly after all; or what comes pretty much to the same, nothing but--Arthur O'Leary.

Still, I would not have you deem me discontented with my lot; far from it. I chose my path early in life, and never saw reason to regret the choice. How many of you can say as much? I felt that while the tender ties of home and family, the charities that grow up around the charmed circle of a wife and children, are the great prizes of life, there are also a thousand lesser ones in the wheel, in the kindly sympathies with which the world abounds; that to him who bears no ill-will at his heart--nay, rather loving all things that are lovable, with warm attachments to all who have been kind to him, with strong sources of happiness in his own tranquil thoughts--the wandering life would offer many pleasures.

Most men live, as it were, with one story of their lives, the traits of childhood maturing into manly features; their history consists of the development of early character in circ.u.mstances of good or evil fortune.

They fall in love, they marry, they grow old, and they die--each incident of their existence bearing on that before and that after, like link upon link of some great chain. He, however, who throws himself like a plank upon the waters, to be washed hither and thither as wind or tide may drive him, has a very different experience. To him life is a succession of episodes, each perfect in itself; the world is but a number of tableaux, changing with climate and country--his sorrows in France having no connection with his joys in Italy; his delights in Spain living apart from his griefs on the Rhine. The past throws no shadow on the future; his philosophy is to make the most of the present; and he never forgets La Bruyere's maxim--'Il faut rire avant d'etre heureux, _de peur de mourir sans avoir ri_.'

Now, if you don't like my philosophy, set it down as a dream, and here I am awake once more.

And certainly I claim no great merit on the score of my vigilance; for the tantararara that awoke me would have aroused the Seven Sleepers themselves. Words are weak to convey the most distant conception of the noise; it seemed as though ten thousand peac.o.c.ks had congregated beneath my window, and with brazen throats were bent on giving me a hideous concert; the fiend-chorus in _Robert le Diable_ was a psalm-tune compared to it. I started up and rushed to the cas.e.m.e.nt; and there, in the lawn beneath, beheld some twenty persons costumed in hunting fas.h.i.+on, their horses foaming and splashed, their coats stained with marks of the forest. But the uproar was soon comprehensible, owing to some half-dozen of the party who performed on that most diabolical of all human inventions, the _cor de cha.s.se_.

Imagine, if you can, and thank your stars that it is only a work of imagination, some twenty feet of bra.s.s pipe, worn belt-fas.h.i.+on over one shoulder and under the opposite arm, one end of the aforesaid tube being a mouth-piece, and the other expanding itself into a huge trumpet-mouth; then conceive a Fleming--one of Rubens's cherubs, immensely magnified, and decorated with a beard and moustaches--blowing into this with all the force of his lungs, perfectly unmindful of the five other performers, who at five several and distinct parts of the melody are blasting away also--treble and ba.s.s, contralto and soprano, shake and sostenuto, all blending into one crash of hideous discord, to which the Scotch bagpipe in a pibroch is a soothing, melting melody. A deaf-and-dumb inst.i.tution 'would capitulate in half an hour. Truly, the results of a hunting expedition ought to be of the most satisfactory kind, to make the 'Retour de la Cha.s.se' (it was this they were blowing) at all sufferable to those who were not engaged in the concert. As for the performers, I can readily believe they never heard a note of the whole.

Even Dutch lungs grow tired at last. Having blown the establishment into ecstasies, and myself into a furious headache, they gave in; and now an awful bell announced the time to dress for dinner. While I made my toilette, I endeavoured, as well as my throbbing temples would permit me, to fancy the host's personal appearance, and to conjecture the style of the rest of the party. My preparations over, I took a parting look in the gla.s.s, as if to guess the probable impression I should make below-stairs, and sallied forth.

Cautiously stealing along over the well-waxed floors, slippery as ice itself, I descended the broad oak stairs into a great hall, wainscoted with dark walnut and decorated with antlers' and stags' heads, cross-bows and arquebuses, and, to my shuddering horror, with various _cors de cha.s.se_, now happily, however, silent on the walls. I entered the drawing-room, conning over to myself a little speech in French, and preparing myself to bow for the next fifteen minutes; but, to my surprise, no one had yet appeared. All were still occupied in dressing, and probably taking some well-merited repose after their exertions on the wind-instruments. I had now time for a survey of the apartment; and, generally speaking, a drawing-room is no bad indication of the tastes and temperament of the owners of the establishment.

The practised eye speedily detects in the character and arrangement of a chamber something of its occupant. In some houses, the absence of all decoration, the simple puritanism of the furniture, bespeaks the life of quiet souls whose days are as devoid of luxury as their dwellings.

You read in the cold grey tints the formal stiffness and unrelieved regularity around the Quaker-like flatness of their existence. In others, there is an air of ill-done display, a straining after effect, which shows itself in costly but ill-a.s.sorted details, a mingling of all styles and eras without repose or keeping. The bad pretentious pictures, the faulty bronzes, meagre casts of poor originals, the gaudy china, are safe warranty for the vulgarity of their owners; while the humble parlour of a village inn can be, as I have seen it, made to evidence the cultivated tastes and polished habits of those who have made it the halting-place of a day. We might go back and trace how much of our knowledge of the earliest ages is derived from the study of the interior of their dwellings; what a rich volume of information is conveyed in a mosaic; what a treatise does not lie in a frescoed wall!

The room in which I now found myself was a long, and for its length a narrow, apartment; a range of tall windows, deeply sunk in the thick wall, occupied one side, opposite to which was a plain wall covered with pictures from floor to cornice, save where, at a considerable distance from one another, were two splendidly carved chimney-pieces of black oak, one representing 'The Adoration of the Shepherds,' and the other 'The Miraculous Draught of Fishes'--the latter done with a relief, a vigour, and a movement I have never seen equalled. Above these were some armorial trophies of an early date, in which, among the maces and battle-axes, I could recognise some weapons of Eastern origin, which by the family, I learned, were ascribed to the periods of the Crusades.

Between the windows were placed a succession of carved oak cabinets of the seventeenth century--beautiful specimens of art, and for all their quaintness far handsomer objects of furniture than our modern luxury has introduced among us. j.a.pan vases of dark blue-and-green were filled with rare flowers; here and there small tables of costly buhl invited you to the window recesses, where the downy ottomans, pillowed with Flemish luxury, suggested rest if not sleep. The pictures, over which I could but throw a pa.s.sing glance, were all by Flemish painters, and of that character which so essentially displays their chief merits of richness of colour and tone--Gerard Dow and Ostade, Cuyp, Van der Meer, and Terburg--those admirable groupings of domestic life, where the nation is, as it were, miniatured before you; that perfection of domestic quiet, which bespeaks an heirloom of tranquillity derived whole centuries back. You see at once, in those dark-brown eyes and placid features, the traits that have taken ages to bring to such perfection; and you recognise the origin of those st.u.r.dy burgomasters and bold burghers, who were at the same time the thriftiest merchants and the haughtiest princes of Europe.