Debit and Credit Part 51

"If we could only get on!" returned Anton; "the wind blows cold, and I am s.h.i.+vering in spite of my fur."

"You have slept but little the last few nights, sir," said Karl. "The wind blows here as if over a thres.h.i.+ng-floor. The earth is not round hereabouts as elsewhere, but flat as a cake. This is a complete desert; we have been driving for more than an hour, and there is not a village to be seen."

"A desert indeed," sighed Anton; "let us hope it may improve." They relapsed into profound silence. At length the driver stopped near a pool, unharnessed the horses, and led them to the water's edge, without noticing the travelers.

"What the deuce does this mean?" cried Karl, jumping down from the carriage.

"I am going to feed," replied the servant, sulkily, in a foreign accent.

"I am anxious to know how that will be done," said Karl. "There is not the shadow of a bag of provender."

The horses, however, soon proved that they could live without corn; they stretched down their s.h.a.ggy heads, and began to pull the gra.s.s and weeds at the edge of the pool, sometimes taking a draught of the dirty water.

Meanwhile the servant drew a bundle from under his seat, settled himself under the lee of an alder-bush, and, taking his knife, cut his bread and cheese without even glancing at the travelers.

"I say, Ignatius or Jacob," cried Karl, sharply, "how long will this breakfast of yours last?"

"An hour," replied the man, munching away.

"And how far is it from here to the estate?"

"Six miles, or maybe more."

"You can make nothing of him," said Anton; "we must put up with the customs of the country;" and, leaving the carriage, they went to look on at the horses feeding.

Anton is on his way to the Polish property. He is now the baron's agent.

Anxious months have the last proved to him. The parting from his princ.i.p.al and the firm had been painful in the extreme. For some time before it, indeed, Anton had found himself alone in the midst of his colleagues. The quiet Baumann still remained his friend, but the others considered him a castaway. The merchant received his resignation with icy coldness; and even in the hour of parting, his hand lay impa.s.sive as metal in Anton's grasp. Since then, our hero had undertaken several journeys to the capital and to creditors in the family's behalf, and now he was on his way to set the new estate in order, accompanied by Karl, whom he had induced to become the baron's bailiff.

Ehrenthal had, by the authority conferred on him, taken possession of the property from the time of the sale by auction, and hired the Polish bailiff for the baron. There had been unfair dealings between them at the time, and it was well known in Rosmin that the bailiff had sold off a good deal, and been guilty of all sorts of frauds since, so that Anton had even now no prospect of a quiet life.

"The hour is come when I may execute my commission," cried Karl, groping in the straw under the seat. He drew out a large j.a.panned tin case, and carried it to Anton. "Miss Sabine gave me this in charge for you." He then joyously opened the lid, produced the materials for an excellent breakfast, a bottle of wine, and a silver goblet. Anton took hold of the case.

"It has a very knowing look," said Karl. "Miss Sabine planned it herself."

Anton examined it on all sides, and placed it carefully on a tuft of gra.s.s; then he took up the goblet, and saw his initials engraved on it, and underneath the words, "To thy welfare." Whereupon he forgot the breakfast and all around him, and stood gazing at the goblet, lost in thought.

"Do not forget the breakfast, sir," suggested Karl, respectfully.

"Sit down by me, my faithful friend; eat and drink with me. Leave off your absurd politeness. We shall have but little, either of us, but what we have we will share like brothers. Take the bottle if you have no gla.s.s."

"There's nothing like leather," said Karl, taking a small leathern drinking-cup out of his pocket. "As for what you have just said, it was kindly meant, and I thank you; but there must be subordination, if it were but for the sake of the others; and so, sir, be kind enough to let me shake hands with you now, and then let things be as they were before.

Only look at the horses, Mr. Anton. My faith! the creatures devour thistles."

Again the horses were harnessed, again they threw out their short legs in the sand, and again the carriage rolled through the barren district--first through an empty plain, next through a wretched fir-wood, then past a row of low sand-hills, then over a tumble-down bridge crossing a small stream.

"This is the property," said the driver, turning round, and pointing with his whip to a row of dirty thatched roofs that had just come into sight.

Anton stood up to look for the group of trees in which the Hall might be supposed to stand. Nothing of the sort to be seen. The village was deficient in all that adorns the home of the poorest German peasant--no orchard, no hedged-in gardens, no lime-trees in the market-place.

"This is wretched," said he, sitting down again; "much worse than they told us in Rosmin."

"The village looks as if under a curse," cried Karl; "no teams working in the fields--not a cow or a sheep to be seen."

The farm-servant flogged his horses into an irregular gallop, and so they pa.s.sed through the rows of mud huts which const.i.tuted the village, and arrived at the public house. Karl sprang from the carriage, opened the tavern door, and called for the landlord. A Jew slowly rose from his seat by the stove and came to the threshold. "Is the gendarme from Rosmin come?" He is gone into the village. "Which is the way to the farm-yard?"

The landlord, an elderly man with an intelligent countenance, described the way in German and Polish, and remained standing at the door--bewildered, Karl declared, by the sight of two human beings. The carriage turned into a cross-road, planted on both sides with thick bushes, the remains of a fallen avenue. Over holes, stones, and puddles, it rattled on to a group of mud huts, which still had a remnant of whitewash upon them. "The barns and stables are empty," cried Karl, "for I see gaps in the roofs large enough to drive our carriage through."

Anton said no more; he was prepared for every thing. They drove through a break between the stables into the farm-yard, a large irregular s.p.a.ce, surrounded on three sides by tumble-down buildings, and open to the fields on the fourth. A heap of _debris_ lay there--lime and rotten timber, the remains of a ruined barn. The yard was empty; no trace of farm implements or human labor to be seen. "Which is the inspector's house," inquired Anton, in dismay. The driver looked round, and at last made up his mind that it was a small one-storied building, with straw thatch and dirty windows.

At the noise of the wheels a man appeared on the threshold, and waited phlegmatically till the travelers had dismounted, and were standing close before him. He was a broad-shouldered fellow, with a bloated, brandy-drinking face, dressed in a jacket of s.h.a.ggy cloth, while behind him peered the muzzle of an equally s.h.a.ggy dog, who snarled at the strangers. "Are you the steward of this property?"

"I am," replied the man, in broken German, without stirring from where he was.

"And I am the agent of the new proprietor," said Anton.

"That does not concern me," growled the s.h.a.ggy man, turning sharp round, entering the house, and bolting the door within.

Anton was thoroughly roused. "Break the window in, and help me to catch the rascal," cried he to Karl, who coolly seized a piece of wood, struck the panes so as to make the rotten framework give way, and cleared the opening at one leap. Anton followed him. The room was empty, so was the next, and in it an open window--the man was gone.

"After him!" cried Karl, and dashed on in pursuit, while Anton looked about the house and out-buildings. He soon heard the barking of a dog, and saw Karl capture the fugitive. Hurrying to his help, he held the man fast, while, with a kick, Karl sent the dog flying. They then contrived to force the steward back to the house, though he kept striking out violently all the way.

"Go to the tavern, and bring the gendarme and the landlord," cried Anton to the driver, who, undisturbed by all that had been going on, had meanwhile unpacked the carriage. The man accordingly drove leisurely off, and the fugitive being got into the room, Karl found an old cloth, and with it bound his hands behind his back. "I beg your pardon, sir,"

said he; "it is only for an hour or so, till the arrival of the Rosmin gendarme, whom we have appointed to meet us."

Anton then proceeded to examine the house, but there was nothing to be found but the merest necessaries; no books nor papers of any kind. It had doubtless been emptied already. A bundle projected from the coat-pocket of the prisoner, which turned out to be receipts and legal doc.u.ments in Polish. In time, the driver returned with the landlord and the armed policeman. The landlord stood at the door in some perplexity, and the policeman explained in a few moments what remained to be done.

"You must make a statement to the local judge, and give the man up to me. He shall go back in your carriage to Rosmin. You will do well to get rid of him, for this is a wild country, and it will be safer for you to have him at Rosmin than here, where he has friends and accomplices."

After a long search, a sheet of paper was found in a cupboard, the statement made and submitted to the policeman, who shook his head a little over the Polish composition, and the prisoner lifted into the carriage, the gendarme taking his seat beside him, and saying to Anton, "I have long expected something of the kind. You may have often occasion to want me again." The carriage then drove away, and thus the property came under Anton's administration. He felt as if cast on a desert island.

His portmanteau and traveling effects were leaning against a mud wall, and the Polish landlord was the only man who could give him and Karl any information or advice in their forlorn condition.

Now that the steward was fairly gone, the landlord grew more communicative, and showed himself serviceable and obliging. A long conversation ensued, and its purport was what Anton had apprehended from the warning given by the Commissary Walter and other Rosmin officials.

The inspector had, during the last few weeks, done all he could in the way of spoliation, rendered daring by a report which had found its way from the town to the village, that the present proprietor would never be able to take possession of the estate. At last Anton said, "What that wretched man has done away with he will have to account for; our first care must be to preserve what is still to be found on the property. You must be our guide to-day."

They then examined the empty buildings. Four horses and two servants--they were gone into the wood--a few old plows, a pair of harrows, two wagons, a britzska, a cellar full of potatoes, a few bundles of hay, a little straw--the inventory did not take much time in drawing up. The buildings were all out of repair, not through age, but neglect.

"Where is the dwelling-house?" inquired Anton. The landlord led the way out of the yard to the meadow--a broad plain, gradually sloping down to the level of the brook. It had been a great pasture. The cattle had trodden it down into holes; the snouts of greedy swine had rooted it up; gray molehills and rank tufts of gra.s.s rose on all sides.

The landlord stretched out his hand. "There is the castle. This castle is famous throughout the whole country," he added, reverentially; "no n.o.bleman in the district has a stone house like that. All the gentry here live in wood and mud buildings. Herr von Tarow, the richest of them, has but a poor dwelling."

About three hundred yards from the last out-building rose a great brick edifice, with a black slate roof and a thick round tower. Its gloomy walls on this treeless pasture-land, without one trace of life around, rose beneath the cloudy sky like a phantom fortress which some evil spirit had evoked from the abyss--a station from which to blight all the surrounding landscape.

The strangers approached it. The castle had fallen into ruins before the builders had finished their task. The tower had stood there for ages. It was built of unhewn stone, and had small windows and loop-holes. The former lords of the land had looked down from its summit on the tops of the trees, which then stretched far into the plain. They had then ruled with a rod of iron the serfs who cultivated their land, and toiled and died for them. Many an arrow had sped through those loop-holes at the enemy storming below, and many a Tartar horse had been overthrown before those ma.s.sive walls. Years ago, a despot of the district had, in expiation of former sins, begun to add to the gray tower the walls of a holy monastery; but the monastery never got finished, and the useless walls had already stood there long, when the late count took it into his head to convert them into a lordly dwelling for his race, and to raise a house unparalleled for magnificence in the whole country.

The front of the house was added on to both sides of the tower, which projected in the middle. The intention had been to have a high terrace-road up to the castle, and the princ.i.p.al entrance had been made in the tower, and arched over; but the terrace never having been formed, the stone threshold of the main door was quite inaccessible without the help of ladders, and the wide opening was left. The window-s.p.a.ces of the lower floor were merely closed up with boards, while on the second story were some window-frames of beautifully carved wood, in which large panes had once been placed, but they had got broken. In other windows were temporary frames of rough deal, with small panes of muddy gla.s.s let into them. A company of jackdaws sat on the top of the tower, looking down in amazement on the strangers, and every now and then one flew off, screaming loudly, to contemplate the intruders from a new point of view.

"A house for crows and bats, not for human beings," said Anton. "At least, I see no way of getting into it."

The landlord now took them round the building. Behind, where the two wings made a sort of horse-shoe, there were low entrances to the cellars and offices; beneath which, again, were stables, great arched kitchens, and small cells for the serfs. A wooden staircase led to the upper story. The door turned creaking on its hinges, and a narrow pa.s.sage took them through a side wing to the front part of the house. There all was at least magnificently planned. The circular entrance-hall--an arched room of the old tower--was painted in mosaic, and through the great doorway-opening was seen a wide expanse of country. A broad staircase, worthy of a palace, led up to another round hall, with narrow windows, the second story of the tower. On each side lay suites of apartments: large, lofty, desolate rooms, with heavy oak folding-doors, and dirty plastered walls, the ceiling made of fir branches arranged in squares; in some rooms colossal green tile stoves, in other rooms no stoves at all; in some, beautiful inlaid floors, in others rude deal boards. An immense saloon, with two gigantic chimney-pieces, had merely a provisional ceiling of old laths. The castle was fitted for a wild Asiatic household, for hangings of leather and of silk from France, for costly woodwork from England, for ma.s.sive silver services from German mines, for a proud master, numerous guests, and a troop of retainers to fill the halls and ante-rooms. The builder of the castle had looked back to the wealth of his wild ancestors when he devised the plan; he had had hundreds of trees cut down in the woods, and his hereditary bondsmen had kneaded many thousand bricks with their own hands and feet; but Time, the inexorable, had raised his finger against him, and none of his hopes had been realized. His ruin first, and then his death, occurred during the progress of the building; and his son, brought up among strangers, had, as fast as one fool could, hurried on the ruin of his house. Now the walls of the Slavonic castle stood with doors and windows gaping wide, but no guest spoke his good wishes as he entered; only wild birds flew in and out, and the marten crept over the floors. Useless and unsightly the walls stood there, threatening to crumble and fall, like the race that had raised them up.