Arthur O'Leary Part 40

For what reasons the mills have been always selected as the appropriate scenes for such encounters, I never could discover; but the fact is unquestionable, and I never knew a University town that did not possess its 'water-privileges' in this manner.

Towards the mill I was journeying at the easy pace of my pony, early on a summer's morning, preferring the rural breakfast with the miller--for they are always a kind of innkeepers--to the fare of the village. I entered the little bridle-path that conducted to his door, and was sauntering listlessly along, dreaming pleasantly, as one does, when the song of the lark and the heavy odour of dew-pressed flowers steep the heart in happiness all its own, when, behind me, I heard the regular tramp of marching. I listened; had I been a stranger to the sound, I should have thought them soldiers, but I knew too well the measured tread of the student, and I heard the jingling of their heavy sabres--a peculiar clank a student's ear cannot be deceived in. I guessed at once the object of their coming, and grew sick at heart to think that the storm of men's stubborn pa.s.sions and the strife of their revengeful nature should desecrate a peaceful spot like this. I was about to turn back, disgusted at the thought, when I remembered I must return by the same path, and meet them; but even this I shrank from. The footsteps came nearer and nearer, and I had barely time to move off the path into the brushwood, and lead my pony after, when they turned the angle of the way. They who walked first were m.u.f.fled in their cloaks, whose high collars concealed their faces; but the caps of many a gaudy colour proclaimed them students. At a little distance behind, and with a slower step, came another party, among whom I noticed one who walked between two others, his head sunk on his bosom, and evidently overcome with emotions of deep sorrow. A movement of my horse at this instant attracted their attention towards the thicket; they stopped, and a voice called out my name. I looked round, and there stood Eisendecker before me. He was dressed in deep mourning, and looked pale and worn, his black beard and moustache deepening the haggard expression of features, to which the red borders of his eyelids, and his bloodless lips, gave an air of the deepest suffering. 'Ah, my friend,' said he, with a sad effort at a smile, 'you are here quite _a propos_. I am going to fight Adolphe this morning/ A fearful presentiment that such was the case came over me the instant I saw him; but when he said so, a thrill ran through me, and I grew cold from head to foot.

'I see you are sorry,' said he, tenderly while he took my hand within both of his; 'but you would not blame me--indeed you would not--if you knew all.'

'What, then, was the cause of this quarrel? How came you to an open rupture?'

He turned round, and as he did so his face 'was purple, the blood suffused every feature, and his very eyeb.a.l.l.s seemed as if about to burst. He tried to speak; but I only heard a rus.h.i.+ng noise like a hoa.r.s.e-drawn breath.

'Be calm, my dear Eisendecker,' said I. 'Cannot this be settled otherwise than thus?'

'No, no!' said he, in the voice of indignant pa.s.sion I used to hear from him long before, 'never!' He waved his hand impatiently as he spoke, and turned his head from me. At the same moment one of his companions made a sign with his hand towards me.

'What!' whispered I in horror--'a blow?'

A brief nod was the reply. Alas! from that minute all hope left me.

Too well I knew the desperate alternative that awaited such an insult.

Reconciliation was no longer to be thought of. I asked no more, but followed the group along the path towards the mill.

In a little garden, as it was called--we should rather term it a close-shaven gra.s.s-plot--where some tables and benches were placed under the shade of large chestnut-trees, Adolphe von Muhry stood, surrounded by a number of his friends. He was dressed in his costume as a member of the Prussian club of the Landsmanschaft--a kind of uniform of blue and white, with a silver braiding on the cuffs and collar--and looked handsomer than ever I saw him. The change his features had undergone gave him an air of manliness and confidence that greatly improved him, and his whole carriage indicated a degree of self-reliance and energy which became him perfectly. A faint blush coloured his cheek as he saw me enter, and he lifted his cap straight above his head and saluted me courteously, but with an evident effort to appear at ease before me.

I returned his salute mournfully--perhaps reproachfully, too, for he turned away and whispered something to a friend at his side.

Although I had seen many duels with the sword, it was the first time I was present at an affair with pistols in Germany; and I was no less surprised than shocked to perceive that one of the party produced a dice-box and dice, and placed them on a table.

Eisendecker all this time sat far apart from the rest, and, with folded arms and half-closed eyelids, seemed to wait in patience for the moment of being called on.

'What are they throwing for, yonder?' whispered I to a Saxon student near me.

'For the shot, of course,' said he; 'not but that they might spare themselves the labour. Eisendecker must fire first; and as for who comes second after him----'

'Is he so sure as that?' asked I in terror; for the fearful vision of blood would not leave my mind.

'That is he. The fellow that can knock a bullet off a champagne bottle at five-and-twenty paces may chance to hit a man at fifteen.'

'Muhry has it,' cried out one of those at the table; and I heard the words repeated from mouth to mouth till they reached Eisendecker, as he moved his cane listlessly to and fro in the mill-stream.

'Remember Ludwig,' said his friend, as he grasped his arm with a stronger clasp; 'remember what I told you.'

The other nodded carelessly, and merely said, 'Is all ready?'

'Stand here, Eisendecker,' said Muhry's second, as he dropped a pebble in the gra.s.s.

Muhry was already placed, and stood erect, his eyes steadily directed to his antagonist, who never once looked towards him, but kept his glance fixed straight in front.

'You fire first, sir,' said Muhry's friend, while I could mark that his voice trembled slightly at the words. 'You may reserve your fire till I have counted twenty after the word is given.'

As he spoke he placed the pistol in Eisendecker's hand, and called out--

'Gentlemen, fall back, fall back; I am about to give the word. Herr Eisendecker, are your ready?'

A nod was the reply.

'Now!' cried he, in a loud voice; and scarcely was the word uttered when the discharge of the pistol was heard. So rapid, indeed, was the motion, that we never saw him lift his arm; nor could any one say what direction the ball had taken.

'I knew it, I knew it,' muttered Eisendecker's friend, in tones of agony. 'All is over with him now.'

Before a minute elapsed, the word to fall back was again given, and I now beheld Von Muhry standing with his pistol in hand, while a smile of cool but determined malice sat on his features.

While the second repeated the same words over to him, I turned to look at Eisendecker, but he evinced no apparent consciousness of what was going on about him; his eyes, as before, were bent on vacancy; his pale face, unmoved, showed no signs of pa.s.sion. In an instant the fearful 'Now' rang out, and Muhry slowly raised his arm, and, levelling his pistol steadily, stood with his eye bent on his victim. While the deep voice of the second slowly repeated one--two--three--four--never was anything like the terrible suspense of that moment. It seemed as if the very seconds of human life were measuring out one by one. As the word 'ten' dropped from his lips, I saw Muhry's hand shake. In his revengeful desire to kill his man, he had waited too long, and now he was growing nervous; he let fall his arm to his side, and waited for a few seconds, then raising it again, he took a steady aim, and at the word 'nineteen'

fired.

A slight movement of Eisendecker's head at this instant brought his face full front; and the bullet, which would have transfixed his head, now merely pa.s.sed along his cheek, tearing a rude flesh-wound as it went.

A half-cry broke from Muhry: I heard not the word; but the accent I shall never cease to remember. It was now Eisendecker's time; and as the blood streamed down his cheek, and fell in great drops upon his neck and shoulders, I saw his face a.s.sume the expression it used to wear in former days. A terrible smile lit up his dark features, and a gleam of pa.s.sionate vengeance made his eye glow like that of a maniac.

'I am ready--give the word,' cried he, in frantic impatience.

But Muhry's second, fearful of giving way to such a moment of pa.s.sion, hesitated; when Eisendecker again called out, 'The word, sir, the word!'

and the bystanders, indignant at the appearance of unfairness, repeated the cry.

The crowd fell back, and the word was given. Eisen-decker raised his weapon, poised it for a second in his hand, and then, elevating it above his head, brought it gradually down, till, from the position where I stood, I could see that he aimed at the heart.

His hand was now motionless, as if it were marble; while his eye, riveted on his antagonist, seemed to be fixed on one small spot, as though his whole vengeance was to be glutted there. Never was suspense more dreadful, and I stood breathless, in the expectation of the fatal flash, when, with a jerk of his arm, he threw up the pistol and fired above his head; and then, with a heart-rending cry of 'Mein bruder, mein brader!' he rushed into Muhry's arms, and fell into a torrent of tears.

The scene was indeed a trying one, and few could witness it unmoved. As for me, I turned away completely overcome; while my heart found vent in thankfulness that such a fearful beginning should end thus happily.

'Yes,' said Eisendecker, as we rode home together that evening, when, after a long silence, he spoke; 'yes, I had resolved to kill him; but when my finger was even on the trigger, I saw a look upon his features that reminded me of those earlier and happier days when we had but one home and one heart, and I felt as if I was about to become the murderer of my brother.'

Need I add that they were friends for ever after?

But I must leave Gottingen and its memories too. They recall happy days, it is true; but they who made them so--where are they?

CHAPTER XXII. SPAS AND GRAND DUKEDOMS

It was a strange ordinance of the age that made watering-places equally the resort of the sick and the fas.h.i.+onable, the dyspeptic and the dissipated. One cannot readily see by what magic chalybeates can minister to a mind diseased, nor how sub-carbonates and proto-chlorides may compensate to the faded spirit of an _ennuyee_ fine lady for the bygone delights of a London or a Paris season; much less, through what magnetic influence gambling and gossip can possibly alleviate affections of the liver, or roulette be made a medical agent in the treatment of chronic rheumatism.

It may be replied that much of the benefit--some would go farther, and say all--to be expected from the watering-places is derivable from change of scene and habit of living, new faces, new interests, new objects of curiosity, aided by agreeable intercourse, and what the medical folk call 'pleasant and cheerful society.' This, be it known, is no chance collocation of words set down at random; it is a _bona fide_ technical--as much so as the hardest Greek compound that ever floored an apothecary. 'Pleasant and cheerful society!' they speak of it as they would of the latest improvement in chemistry or the last patent medicine--a thing to be had for asking for, like opodeldoc or Morison's pills. A line of treatment is prescribed for you, winding up in this one principle; and your physician, as he shakes your hand and says 'good-bye,' seems like an angel of benevolence, who, instead of consigning you to the horrors of the pharmacopoeia and a sick-bed, tells you to pack off to the Rhine, spend your summer at Ems or Wiesbaden, and, above all things, keep early hours, and 'pleasant, cheerful society.'

Oh, why has no martyr to the miseries of a 'liver' or the sorrows of 'nerves' ever asked his M.D. where--where is this delightful intercourse to be found? or by what universal principle of application can the same tone of society please the mirthful and the melancholy, the man of depressed, desponding habit, and the man of sanguine, hopeful temperament? How can the indolent and lethargic soul be made to derive pleasure from the hustling energies of more excited natures, or the fidgety victim of instability sympathise with the delights of quiet and tranquillity? He who enjoys 'rude health'--the phrase must have been invented by a fas.h.i.+onable physician; none other could have deemed such a possession an offensive quality--may very well amuse himself by the oddities and eccentricities of his fellow-men, so ludicrously exhibited _en scene_ before him. But in what way will these things appear to the individual with an ailing body and a distempered brain? It is impossible that contrarieties of temperament would ever draw men into close intimacy during illness. The very nature of a sick man's temper is to undervalue all sufferings save his own and those resembling his. The victim of obesity has no sympathies with the martyr to atrophy; he may envy, he cannot pity him. The man who cannot eat surely has little compa.s.sion for the woes of him who has the 'wolf,' and must be muzzled at meal times. The result, then, is obvious. The gloomy men get together in groups, and croak in concert; each mind brings its share of affliction to the common fund, and they form a joint-stock company of misery that rapidly a.s.sists their progress to the grave; while the nervously excited ones herd together by dozens, suggesting daily new extravagances and caprices for the adoption of one another, till there is not an air-drawn dagger of the mind unfamiliar to one among them; and in this race of exaggerated sensibility they not uncommonly tumble over the narrow boundary that separates eccentricity from something worse.

This ma.s.sing together of such people in hundreds must be ruinous to many, and few can resist the depressing influence which streets full of pale faces suggest, or be proof against the melancholy derivable from a whole promenade of cripples. There is something indescribably sad in these rendezvous of ailing people from all parts of Europe--north, south, east, and west; the snows of Norway and the suns of Italy; the mountains of Scotland and the steppes of Russia; comparing their symptoms and chronicling their sufferings; watching with the egotism of sickness the pallor on their neighbour's cheek, and calculating their own chances of recovery by the progress of some other invalid.

But were this all, the aspect might suggest gloomy thoughts, but could not excite indignant ones. Unhappily, however, there is a reverse to the medal. 'The pleasant and cheerful society,' so confidently spoken of by your doctor has another representation than in the faces of sick people.

These watering-places are the depots of continental vice, the licensed bazaars of foreign iniquity, the sanctuary of the outlaw, the home of the swindler, the last resource of the ruined debauchee, the one spot of earth beneath the feet of the banished defaulter. They are the parliaments of European blackguardism, to which Paris contributes her _escrocs_, England her 'legs' from Newmarket and Doncaster, and Poland her refugee counts--victims of Russian cruelty and barbarity.

To begin--and to understand the matter properly, you must begin by forgetting all you have been so studiously storing up as fact from the books of Head, Granville, and others, and merely regard them as the pleasant romances of gentlemen who like to indulge their own easy humours in a vein of agreeable gossip, or the more profitable occupation of collecting grand-ducal stars and snuff-boxes.