Then your writer, poet, historian, novelist, or what not? The Beacon says that “Jones’s work is one of the first order.” The Lamp declares that Jones’s tragedy surpasses every work since the days of Him of Avon.” The Comet asserts that “J’s ‘Life of Goody Twoshoes’ is a [Greek text omitted], a noble and enduring monument to the fame of that admirable Englishwoman,” and so forth. But then Jones knows that he has lent the critic of the Beacon five pounds; that his publisher has a half share in the Lamp; and that the Cornet comes repeatedly to dine with him. It is all very well. Jones is immortal until he is found out; and then down comes the extinguisher, and the immortal is dead and buried. The idea (dies irae!) of discovery must haunt many a man, and make him uneasy, as the trumpets are puffing in his triumph. Brown, who has a higher place than he deserves, cowers before Smith, who has found him out. What is the chorus of critics shouting “Bravo”?–a public clapping hands and flinging garlands? Brown knows that Smith has found him out. Puff, trumpets! Wave, banners! Huzza, boys, for the immortal Brown! This is all very well,” B. thinks (bowing the while, smiling, laying his hand to his heart); “but there stands Smith at the window: HE has measured me; and some day the others will find me out too.” It is a very curious sensation to sit by a man who has found you out, and who, as you know, has found you out; or, vice versa, to sit with a man whom YOU have found out. His talent? Bah! His virtue? We know a little story or two about his virtue, and he knows we know it. We are thinking over friend Robinson’s antecedents, as we grin, bow and talk; and we are both humbugs together. Robinson a good fellow, is he? You know how he behaved to Hicks? A good-natured man, is he? Pray do you remember that little story of Mrs. Robinson’s black eye? How men have to work, to talk, to smile, to go to bed, and try and sleep, with this dread of being found out on their consciences! Bardolph, who has robbed a church, and Nym, who has taken a purse, go to their usual haunts, and smoke their pipes with their companions. Mr. Detective Bullseye appears, and says, “Oh, Bardolph! I want you about that there pyx business!” Mr. Bardolph knocks the ashes out of his pipe, puts out his hands to the little steel cuffs, and walks away quite meekly. He is found out. He must go. “Good-by, ‘Doll Tearsheet! Good-by, Mrs. Quickly, ma’am!” The other gentlemen and ladies de la societe look on and exchange mute adieux with the departing friends. And an assured time will come when the other gentlemen and ladies will be found out too.
What a wonderful and beautiful provision of nature it has been that, for the most part, our womankind are not endowed with the faculty of finding us out! THEY don’t doubt, and probe, and weigh, and take your measure. Lay down this paper, my benevolent friend and reader, go into your drawing-room now, and utter a joke ever so old, and I wager sixpence the ladies there will all begin to laugh. Go to Brown’s house, and tell Mrs. Brown and the young ladies what you think of him, and see what a welcome you will get! In like manner, let him come to your house, and tell YOUR good lady his candid opinion of you, and fancy how she will receive him! Would you have your wife and children know you exactly for what you are, and esteem you precisely at your worth? If so, my friend, you will live in a dreary house, and you will have but a chilly fireside. Do you suppose the people round it don’t see your homely face as under a glamour, and, as it were, with a halo of love round it? You don’t fancy you ARE as you seem to them? No such thing, my man. Put away that monstrous conceit, and be thankful that THEY have not found you out.
The Notch on the Ax
A Story a la Mode*
* (Here Thackeray reduces to an absurdity the literary fashion of the day–the vogue for startling stories and “Tales of Terror,” which was high in his time, and which influenced several of the stories which precede in this volume. But while Dickens made fun, with mental reservations; while Bulwer Lytton tried to explain by rising to the heights of natural philosophy, and Maturin did not explain at all, but let his extravagant genius roam between heaven and earth–Thackeray’s keen wit saw mainly one chance for exquisite literary satire and parody. At one point or another in this skit, the style of each principal sensational novelist of the day is delightfully imitated.–EDITOR.)
I
Every one remembers in the Fourth Book of the immortal poem of your Blind Bard (to whose sightless orbs no doubt Glorious Shapes were apparent, and Visions Celestial), how Adam discourses to Eve of the Bright Visitors who hovered round their Eden–
‘Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth, Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.’
“‘How often,’ says Father Adam, ‘from the steep of echoing hill or thicket, have we heard celestial voices to the midnight air, sole, or responsive to each other’s notes, singing!’ After the Act of Disobedience, when the erring pair from Eden took their solitary way, and went forth to toil and trouble on common earth–though the Glorious Ones no longer were visible, you cannot say they were gone. It was not that the Bright Ones were absent, but that the dim eyes of rebel man no longer could see them. In your chamber hangs a picture of one whom you never knew, but whom you have long held in tenderest regard, and who was painted for you by a friend of mine, the Knight of Plympton. She communes with you. She smiles on you. When your spirits are low, her bright eyes shine on you and cheer you. Her innocent sweet smile is a caress to you. She never fails to soothe you with her speechless prattle. You love her. She is alive with you. As you extinguish your candle and turn to sleep, though your eyes see her not, is she not there still smiling? As you lie in the night awake, and thinking of your duties, and the morrow’s inevitable toil oppressing the busy, weary, wakeful brain as with a remorse, the crackling fire flashes up for a moment in the grate, and she is there, your little Beauteous Maiden, smiling with her sweet eyes! When moon is down, when fire is out, when curtains are drawn, when lids are closed, is she not there, the little Beautiful One, though invisible, present and smiling still? Friend, the Unseen Ones are round about us. Does it not seem as if the time were drawing near when it shall be given to men to behold them?”
The print of which my friend spoke, and which, indeed, hangs in my room, though he has never been there, is that charming little winter piece of Sir Joshua, representing the little Lady Caroline Montague, afterwards Duchess of Buccleuch. She is represented as standing in the midst of a winter landscape, wrapped in muff and cloak; and she looks out of her picture with a smile so exquisite that a Herod could not see her without being charmed.
“I beg your pardon, Mr. PINTO,” I said to the person with whom I was conversing. (I wonder, by the way, that I was not surprised at his knowing how fond I am of this print.) “You spoke of the Knight of Plympton. Sir Joshua died 1792: and you say he was your dear friend?”
As I spoke I chanced to look at Mr. Pinto; and then it suddenly struck me: Gracious powers! Perhaps you ARE a hundred years old, now I think of it. You look more than a hundred. Yes, you may be a thousand years old for what I know. Your teeth are false. One eye is evidently false. Can I say that the other is not? If a man’s age may be calculated by the rings round his eyes, this man may be as old as Methuselah. He has no beard. He wears a large curly glossy brown wig, and his eyebrows are painted a deep olive- green. It was odd to hear this man, this walking mummy, talking sentiment, in these queer old chambers in Shepherd’s Inn.
Pinto passed a yellow bandanna handkerchief over his awful white teeth, and kept his glass eye steadily fixed on me. “Sir Joshua’s friend?” said he (you perceive, eluding my direct question). “Is not everyone that knows his pictures Reynolds’s friend? Suppose I tell you that I have been in his painting room scores of times, and that his sister The has made me tea, and his sister Toffy has made coffee for me? You will only say I am an old ombog.” (Mr. Pinto, I remarked, spoke all languages with an accent equally foreign.) “Suppose I tell you that I knew Mr. Sam Johnson, and did not like him? that I was at that very ball at Madame Cornelis’, which you have mentioned in one of your little–what do you call them?–bah! my memory begins to fail me–in one of your little Whirligig Papers? Suppose I tell you that Sir Joshua has been here, in this very room?”
“Have you, then, had these apartments for–more–than–seventy years?” I asked.
“They look as if they had not been swept for that time–don’t they? Hey? I did not say that I had them for seventy years, but that Sir Joshua has visited me here.”
“When?” I asked, eying the man sternly, for I began to think he was an impostor.
He answered me with a glance still more stern: “Sir Joshua Reynolds was here this very morning, with Angelica Kaufmann and Mr. Oliver Goldschmidt. He is still very much attached to Angelica, who still does not care for him. Because he is dead (and I was in the fourth mourning coach at his funeral) is that any reason why he should not come back to earth again? My good sir, you are laughing at me. He has sat many a time on that very chair which you are now occupying. There are several spirits in the room now, whom you cannot see. Excuse me.” Here he turned round as if he was addressing somebody, and began rapidly speaking a language unknown to me. “It is Arabic,” he said; “a bad patois, I own. I learned it in Barbary, when I was a prisoner among the Moors. In anno 1609, bin ick aldus ghekledt gheghaen. Ha! you doubt me: look at me well. At least I am like–”
Perhaps some of my readers remember a paper of which the figure of a man carrying a barrel formed the initial letter, and which I copied from an old spoon now in my possession. As I looked at Mr. Pinto I do declare he looked so like the figure on that old piece of plate that I started and felt very uneasy. “Ha!” said he, laughing through his false teeth (I declare they were false–I could see utterly toothless gums working up and down behind the pink coral), “you see I wore a beard den; I am shafed now; perhaps you tink I am A SPOON. Ha, ha!” And as he laughed he gave a cough which I thought would have coughed his teeth out, his glass eye out, his wig off, his very head off; but he stopped this convulsion by stumping across the room and seizing a little bottle of bright pink medicine, which, being opened, spread a singular acrid aromatic odor through the apartment; and I thought I saw–but of this I cannot take an affirmation–a light green and violet flame flickering round the neck of the vial as he opened it. By the way, from the peculiar stumping noise which he made in crossing the bare-boarded apartment, I knew at once that my strange entertainer had a wooden leg. Over the dust which lay quite thick on the boards, you could see the mark of one foot very neat and pretty, and then a round O, which was naturally the impression made by the wooden stump. I own I had a queer thrill as I saw that mark, and felt a secret comfort that it was not CLOVEN.
In this desolate apartment in which Mr. Pinto had invited me to see him, there were three chairs, one bottomless, a little table on which you might put a breakfast tray, and not a single other article of furniture. In the next room, the door of which was open, I could see a magnificent gilt dressing case, with some splendid diamond and ruby shirt studs lying by it, and a chest of drawers, and a cupboard apparently full of clothes.
Remembering him in Baden-Baden in great magnificence I wondered at his present denuded state. “You have a house elsewhere, Mr. Pinto?” I said.
“Many,” says he. “I have apartments in many cities. I lock dem up, and do not carry mosh logish.”
I then remembered that his apartment at Baden, where I first met him, was bare, and had no bed in it.
“There is, then, a sleeping room beyond?”
“This is the sleeping room.” (He pronounces it DIS. Can this, by the way, give any clew to the nationality of this singular man?)
“If you sleep on these two old chairs you have a rickety couch; if on the floor, a dusty one.”
“Suppose I sleep up dere?” said this strange man, and he actually pointed up to the ceiling. I thought him mad or what he himself called “an ombog.” “I know. You do not believe me; for why should I deceive you? I came but to propose a matter of business to you. I told you I could give you the clew to the mystery of the Two Children in Black, whom you met at Baden, and you came to see me. If I told you you would not believe me. What for try and convinz you? Ha hey?” And he shook his hand once, twice, thrice, at me, and glared at me out of his eye in a peculiar way.
Of what happened now I protest I cannot give an accurate account. It seemed to me that there shot a flame from his eye into my brain, while behind his GLASS eye there was a green illumination as if a candle had been lit in it. It seemed to me that from his long fingers two quivering flames issued, sputtering, as it were, which penetrated me, and forced me back into one of the chairs–the broken one–out of which I had much difficulty in scrambling, when the strange glamour was ended. It seemed to me that, when I was so fixed, so transfixed in the broken chair, the man floated up to the ceiling, crossed his legs, folded his arms as if he was lying on a sofa, and grinned down at me. When I came to myself he was down from the ceiling, and, taking me out of the broken cane-bottomed chair, kindly enough–“Bah!” said he, “it is the smell of my medicine. It often gives the vertigo. I thought you would have had a little fit. Come into the open air.” And we went down the steps, and into Shepherd’s Inn, where the setting sun was just shining on the statue of Shepherd; the laundresses were traipsing about; the porters were leaning against the railings; and the clerks were playing at marbles, to my inexpressible consolation.
“You said you were going to dine at the ‘Gray’s-Inn Coffee-House,'” he said. I was. I often dine there. There is excellent wine at the “Gray’s-Inn Coffee-House”; but I declare I NEVER SAID so. I was not astonished at his remark; no more astonished than if I was in a dream. Perhaps I WAS in a dream. Is life a dream? Are dreams facts? Is sleeping being really awake? I don’t know. I tell you I am puzzled. I have read “The Woman in White,” “The Strange Story”–not to mention that story “Stranger than Fiction” in the Cornhill Magazine–that story for which THREE credible witnesses are ready to vouch. I have had messages from the dead; and not only from the dead, but from people who never existed at all. I own I am in a state of much bewilderment: but, if you please, will proceed with my simple, my artless story.
Well, then. We passed from Shepherd’s Inn into Holborn, and looked for a while at Woodgate’s bric-a-brac shop, which I never can pass without delaying at the windows–indeed, if I were going to be hung, I would beg the cart to stop, and let me have one look more at that delightful omnium gatherum. And passing Woodgate’s, we come to Gale’s little shop, “No. 47,” which is also a favorite haunt of mine.
Mr. Gale happened to be at his door, and as we exchanged salutations, “Mr. Pinto,” I said, “will you like to see a real curiosity in this curiosity shop? Step into Mr. Gale’s little back room.”
In that little back parlor there are Chinese gongs; there are old Saxe and Sevres plates; there is Furstenberg, Carl Theodor, Worcester, Amstel, Nankin and other jimcrockery. And in the corner what do you think there is? There is an actual GUILLOTINE. If you doubt me, go and see–Gale, High Holborn, No. 47. It is a slim instrument, much slighter than those which they make now;–some nine feet high, narrow, a pretty piece of upholstery enough. There is the hook over which the rope used to play which unloosened the dreadful ax above; and look! dropped into the orifice where the head used to go–there is THE AX itself, all rusty, with A GREAT NOTCH IN THE BLADE.
As Pinto looked at it–Mr. Gale was not in the room, I recollect; happening to have been just called out by a customer who offered him three pound fourteen and sixpence for a blue Shepherd in pate tendre,–Mr. Pinto gave a little start, and seemed crispe for a moment. Then he looked steadily toward one of those great porcelain stools which you see in gardens–and–it seemed to me–I tell you I won’t take my affidavit–I may have been maddened by the six glasses I took of that pink elixir–I may have been sleep- walking: perhaps am as I write now–I may have been under the influence of that astounding MEDIUM into whose hands I had fallen– but I vow I heard Pinto say, with rather a ghastly grin at the porcelain stool,
“Nay, nefer shague your gory locks at me, Dou canst not say I did it.”
(He pronounced it, by the way, I DIT it, by which I KNOW that Pinto was a German.)
I heard Pinto say those very words, and sitting on the porcelain stool I saw, dimly at first, then with an awful distinctness–a ghost–an EIDOLON–a form–A HEADLESS MAN seated with his head in his lap, which wore an expression of piteous surprise.
At this minute, Mr. Gale entered from the front shop to show a customer some Delft plates; and he did not see–but WE DID–the figure rise up from the porcelain stool, shake its head, which it held in its hand, and which kept its eyes fixed sadly on us, and disappear behind the guillotine.
“Come to the ‘Gray’s-Inn Coffee-House,'” Pinto said, “and I will tell you how the notch came to the ax.” And we walked down Holborn at about thirty-seven minutes past six o’clock.
If there is anything in the above statement which astonishes the reader, I promise him that in the next chapter of this little story he will be astonished still more.
II
“You will excuse me,” I said to my companion, “for remarking that when you addressed the individual sitting on the porcelain stool, with his head in his lap, your ordinarily benevolent features”– (this I confess was a bouncer, for between ourselves a more sinister and ill-looking rascal than Mons. P. I have seldom set eyes on)–“your ordinarily handsome face wore an expression that was by no means pleasing. You grinned at the individual just as you did at me when you went up to the cei–, pardon me, as I THOUGHT you did, when I fell down in a fit in your chambers”; and I qualified my words in a great flutter and tremble; I did not care to offend the man–I did not DARE to offend the man. I thought once or twice of jumping into a cab, and flying; of taking refuge in Day and Martin’s Blacking Warehouse; of speaking to a policeman, but not one would come. I was this man’s slave. I followed him like his dog. I COULD not get away from him. So, you see, I went on meanly conversing with him, and affecting a simpering confidence. I remember, when I was a little boy at school, going up fawning and smiling in this way to some great hulking bully of a sixth-form boy. So I said in a word, “Your ordinarily handsome face wore a disagreeable expression,” &c.
“It is ordinarily VERY handsome,” said he, with such a leer at a couple of passers-by, that one of them cried, “Oh, crickey, here’s a precious guy!” and a child, in its nurse’s arms, screamed itself into convulsions. “Oh, oui, che suis tres-choli garcon, bien peau, cerdainement,” continued Mr. Pinto; “but you were right. That– that person was not very well pleased when he saw me. There was no love lost between us, as you say: and the world never knew a more worthless miscreant. I hate him, voyez-vous? I hated him alife; I hate him dead. I hate him man; I hate him ghost: and he know it, and tremble before me. If I see him twenty tausend years hence– and why not?–I shall hate him still. You remarked how he was dressed?”
“In black satin breeches and striped stockings; a white pique waistcoat, a gray coat, with large metal buttons, and his hair in powder. He must have worn a pigtail–only–”
“Only it was CUT OFF! Ha, ha, ha!” Mr. Pinto cried, yelling a laugh, which I observed made the policeman stare very much. “Yes. It was cut off by the same blow which took off the scoundrel’s head–ho, ho, ho!” And he made a circle with his hook-nailed finger round his own yellow neck, and grinned with a horrible triumph. “I promise you that fellow was surprised when he found his head in the pannier. Ha! ha! Do you ever cease to hate those whom you hate?”–fire flashed terrifically from his glass eye as he spoke–“or to love dose whom you once loved? Oh, never, never!” And here his natural eye was bedewed with tears. “But here we are at the ‘Gray’s-Inn CoffeeHouse.’ James, what is the joint?”
That very respectful and efficient waiter brought in the bill of fare, and I, for my part, chose boiled leg of pork, and pease pudding, which my acquaintance said would do as well as anything else; though I remarked he only trifled with the pease pudding, and left all the pork on the plate. In fact, he scarcely ate anything. But he drank a prodigious quantity of wine; and I must say that my friend Mr. Hart’s port wine is so good that I myself took–well, I should think, I took three glasses. Yes, three, certainly. HE–I mean Mr. P.–the old rogue, was insatiable: for we had to call for a second bottle in no time. When that was gone, my companion wanted another. A little red mounted up to his yellow cheeks as he drank the wine, and he winked at it in a strange manner. “I remember,” said he, musing, “when port wine was scarcely drunk in this country–though the Queen liked it, and so did Hurley; but Bolingbroke didn’t–he drank Florence and Champagne. Dr. Swift put water to his wine. ‘Jonathan,’ I once said to him–but bah! autres temps, autres moeurs. Another magnum, James.”
This was all very well. “My good sir,” I said, “it may suit YOU to order bottles of ’20 port, at a guinea a bottle; but that kind of price does not suit me. I only happen to have thirty-four and sixpence in my pocket, of which I want a shilling for the waiter, and eighteen pence for my cab. You rich foreigners and SWELLS may spend what you like” (I had him there: for my friend’s dress was as shabby as an old-clothes man’s); “but a man with a family, Mr. Whatd’you-call’im, cannot afford to spend seven or eight hundred a year on his dinner alone.”
“Bah!” he said. “Nunkey pays for all, as you say. I will what you call stant the dinner, if you are SO POOR!” and again he gave that disagreeable grin, and placed an odious crook-nailed and by no means clean finger to his nose. But I was not so afraid of him now, for we were in a public place; and the three glasses of port wine had, you see, given me courage.
“What a pretty snuff-box!” he remarked, as I handed him mine, which I am still old-fashioned enough to carry. It is a pretty old gold box enough, but valuable to me especially as a relic of an old, old relative, whom I can just remember as a child, when she was very kind to me. “Yes; a pretty box. I can remember when many ladies– most ladies, carried a box–nay, two boxes–tabatiere and bonbonniere. What lady carries snuff-box now, hey? Suppose your astonishment if a lady in an assembly were to offer you a prise? I can remember a lady with such a box as this, with a tour, as we used to call it then; with paniers, with a tortoise-shell cane, with the prettiest little high-heeled velvet shoes in the world!– ah! that was a time, that was a time! Ah, Eliza, Eliza, I have thee now in my mind’s eye! At Bungay on the Waveney, did I not walk with thee, Eliza? Aha, did I not love thee? Did I not walk with thee then? Do I not see thee still?”
This was passing strange. My ancestress–but there is no need to publish her revered name–did indeed live at Bungay St. Mary’s, where she lies buried. She used to walk with a tortoise-shell cane. She used to wear little black velvet shoes, with the prettiest high heels in the world.
“Did you–did you–know, then, my great-gr-nd-m-ther?” I said.
He pulled up his coat sleeve–“Is that her name?” he said.
“Eliza–”
There, I declare, was the very name of the kind old creature written in red on his arm.
“YOU knew her old,” he said, divining my thoughts (with his strange knack); “I knew her young and lovely. I danced with her at the Bury ball. Did I not, dear, dear Miss —-?”
As I live, he here mentioned dear gr-nny’s MAIDEN name. Her maiden name was —-. Her honored married name was —-.
“She married your great-gr-ndf-th-r the year Poseidon won the Newmarket Plate,” Mr. Pinto dryly remarked.
Merciful powers! I remember, over the old shagreen knife and spoon case on the sideboard in my gr-nny’s parlor, a print by Stubbs of that very horse. My grandsire, in a red coat, and his fair hair flowing over his shoulders, was over the mantelpiece, and Poseidon won the Newmarket Cup in the year 1783!
“Yes; you are right. I danced a minuet with her at Bury that very night, before I lost my poor leg. And I quarreled with your grandf–, ha!”
As he said “Ha!” there came three quiet little taps on the table– it is the middle table in the “Gray’s-Inn CoffeeHouse,” under the bust of the late Duke of W-ll-ngt-n.
“I fired in the air,” he continued; “did I not?” (Tap, tap, tap.) “Your grandfather hit me in the leg. He married three months afterwards. ‘Captain Brown,’ I said ‘who could see Miss Sm-th without loving her?’ She is there! She is there!” (Tap, tap, tap.) “Yes, my first love–”
But here there came tap, tap, which everybody knows means “No.”
“I forgot,” he said, with a faint blush stealing over his wan features, “she was not my first love. In Germ–in my own country– there WAS a young woman–”
Tap, tap, tap. There was here quite a lively little treble knock; and when the old man said, “But I loved thee better than all the world, Eliza,” the affirmative signal was briskly repeated.
And this I declare UPON MY HONOR. There was, I have said, a bottle of port wine before us–I should say a decanter. That decanter was LIFTED UP, and out of it into our respective glasses two bumpers of wine were poured. I appeal to Mr. Hart, the landlord–I appeal to James, the respectful and intelligent waiter, if this statement is not true? And when we had finished that magnum, and I said–for I did not now in the least doubt her presence–“Dear gr-nny, may we have another magnum?” the table DISTINCTLY rapped “No.”.
“Now, my good sir,” Mr. Pinto said, who really began to be affected by the wine, “you understand the interest I have taken in you. I loved Eliza —-” (of course I don’t mention family names). “I knew you had that box which belonged to her–I will give you what you like for that box. Name your price at once, and I pay you on the spot.”
“Why, when you came out, you said you had not six-pence in your pocket.”
“Bah! give you anything you like–fifty–a hundred–a tausend pound.”
“Come, come,” said I, “the gold of the box may be worth nine guineas, and the facon we will put at six more.”
“One tausend guineas!” he screeched. “One tausend and fifty pound dere!” and he sank back in his chair–no, by the way, on his bench, for he was sitting with his back to one of the partitions of the boxes, as I dare say James remembers.
“DON’T go on in this way,” I continued rather weakly, for I did not know whether I was in a dream. “If you offer me a thousand guineas for this box I MUST take it. Mustn’t I, dear gr-nny?”
The table most distinctly said “Yes”; and putting out his claws to seize the box, Mr. Pinto plunged his hooked nose into it, and eagerly inhaled some of my 47 with a dash of Hardman.
“But stay, you old harpy!” I exclaimed, being now in a sort of rage, and quite familiar with him. “Where is the money? Where is the check?”
“James, a piece of note paper and a receipt stamp!”
“This is all mighty well, sir,” I said, “but I don’t know you; I never saw you before. I will trouble you to hand me that box back again, or give me a check with some known signature.”
“Whose? Ha, Ha, HA!”
The room happened to be very dark. Indeed all the waiters were gone to supper, and there were only two gentlemen snoring in their respective boxes. I saw a hand come quivering down from the ceiling–a very pretty hand, on which was a ring with a coronet, with a lion rampant gules for a crest. I saw that hand take a dip of ink and write across the paper. Mr. Pinto, then, taking a gray receipt stamp out of his blue leather pocketbook, fastened it on to the paper by the usual process; and the hand then wrote across the receipt stamp, went across the table and shook hands with Pinto, and then, as if waving him an adieu, vanished in the direction of the ceiling.
There was the paper before me, wet with the ink. There was the pen which THE HAND had used. Does anybody doubt me? I have that pen now,–a cedar stick of a not uncommon sort, and holding one of Gillott’s pens. It is in my inkstand now, I tell you. Anybody may see it. The handwriting on the check, for such the document was, was the writing of a female. It ran thus:–“London, midnight, March 31, 1862. Pay the bearer one thousand and fifty pounds. Rachel Sidonia. To Messrs. Sidonia, Pozzosanto and Co., London.”
“Noblest and best of women!” said Pinto, kissing the sheet of paper with much reverence. “My good Mr. Roundabout, I suppose you do not question THAT signature?”
Indeed the house of Sidonia, Pozzosanto and Co., is known to be one of the richest in Europe, and as for the Countess Rachel, she was known to be the chief manager of that enormously wealthy establishment. There was only one little difficulty, the Countess Rachel died last October.
I pointed out this circumstance, and tossed over the paper to Pinto with a sneer.
“C’est a brandre ou a laisser,” he said with some heat. “You literary men are all imbrudent; but I did not tink you such a fool wie dis. Your box is not worth twenty pound, and I offer you a tausend because I know you want money to pay dat rascal Tom’s college bills.” (This strange man actually knew that my scapegrace Tom had been a source of great expense and annoyance to me.) “You see money costs me nothing, and you refuse to take it! Once, twice; will you take this check in exchange for your trumpery snuff-box?”
What could I do? My poor granny’s legacy was valuable and dear to me, but after all a thousand guineas are not to be had every day. “Be it a bargain,” said I. “Shall we have a glass of wine on it?” says Pinto; and to this proposal I also unwillingly acceded, reminding him, by the way, that he had not yet told me the story of the headless man.
“Your poor gr-ndm-ther was right just now, when she said she was not my first love. ‘Twas one of those banale expressions” (here Mr. P. blushed once more) “which we use to women. We tell each she is our first passion. They reply with a similar illusory formula. No man is any woman’s first love; no woman any man’s. We are in love in our nurse’s arms, and women coquette with their eyes before their tongue can form a word. How could your lovely relative love me? I was far, far too old for her. I am older than I look. I am so old that you would not believe my age were I to tell you. I have loved many and many a woman before your relative. It has not always been fortunate for them to love me. Ah, Sophronia! Round the dreadful circus where you fell, and whence I was dragged corpselike by the heels, there sat multitudes more savage than the lions which mangled your sweet form! Ah, tenez! when we marched to the terrible stake together at Valladolid–the Protestant and the J– But away with memory! Boy! it was happy for thy grandam that she loved me not.
“During that strange period,” he went on, “when the teeming Time was great with the revolution that was speedily to be born, I was on a mission in Paris with my excellent, my maligned friend, Cagliostro. Mesmer was one of our band. I seemed to occupy but an obscure rank in it: though, as you know, in secret societies the humble man may be a chief and director–the ostensible leader but a puppet moved by unseen hands. Never mind who was chief, or who was second. Never mind my age. It boots not to tell it: why shall I expose myself to your scornful incredulity–or reply to your questions in words that are familiar to you, but which you cannot understand? Words are symbols of things which you know, or of things which you don’t know. If you don’t know them, to speak is idle.” (Here I confess Mr. P. spoke for exactly thirty-eight minutes, about physics, metaphysics, language, the origin and destiny of man, during which time I was rather bored, and to relieve my ennui, drank a half glass or so of wine.) “LOVE, friend, is the fountain of youth! It may not happen to me once– once in an age: but when I love then I am young. I loved when I was in Paris. Bathilde, Bathilde, I loved thee–ah, how fondly! Wine, I say, more wine! Love is ever young. I was a boy at the little feet of Bathilde de Bechamel–the fair, the fond, the fickle, ah, the false!” The strange old man’s agony was here really terrific, and he showed himself much more agitated than when he had been speaking about my gr-ndm-th-r.
“I thought Blanche might love me. I could speak to her in the language of all countries, and tell her the lore of all ages. I could trace the nursery legends which she loved up to their Sanscrit source, and whisper to her the darkling mysteries of the Egyptian Magi. I could chant for her the wild chorus that rang in the disheveled Eleusinian revel: I could tell her and I would, the watchword never known but to one woman, the Saban Queen, which Hiram breathed in the abysmal ear of Solomon–You don’t attend. Psha! you have drunk too much wine!” Perhaps I may as well own that I was NOT attending, for he had been carrying on for about fifty-seven minutes; and I don’t like a man to have ALL the talk to himself.
“Blanche de Bechamel was wild, then, about this secret of Masonry. In early, early days I loved, I married a girl fair as Blanche, who, too, was tormented by curiosity, who, too, would peep into my closet, into the only secret guarded from her. A dreadful fate befell poor Fatima. An ACCIDENT shortened her life. Poor thing! she had a foolish sister who urged her on. I always told her to beware of Ann. She died. They said her brothers killed me. A gross falsehood. AM I dead? If I were, could I pledge you in this wine?”
“Was your name,” I asked, quite bewildered, “was your name, pray, then, ever Blueb—-?”
“Hush! the waiter will overhear you. Methought we were speaking of Blanche de Bechamel. I loved her, young man. My pearls, and diamonds, and treasure, my wit, my wisdom, my passion, I flung them all into the child’s lap. I was a fool. Was strong Samson not as weak as I? Was Solomon the Wise much better when Balkis wheedled him? I said to the king–But enough of that, I spake of Blanche de Bechamel.
“Curiosity was the poor child’s foible. I could see, as I talked to her, that her thoughts were elsewhere (as yours, my friend, have been absent once or twice to-night). To know the secret of Masonry was the wretched child’s mad desire. With a thousand wiles, smiles, caresses, she strove to coax it from me–from ME–ha! ha!
“I had an apprentice–the son of a dear friend, who died by my side at Rossbach, when Soubise, with whose army I happened to be, suffered a dreadful defeat for neglecting my advice. The Young Chevalier Goby de Mouchy was glad enough to serve as my clerk, and help in some chemical experiments in which I was engaged with my friend Dr. Mesmer. Bathilde saw this young man. Since women were, has it not been their business to smile and deceive, to fondle and lure? Away! From the very first it has been so!” And as my companion spoke, he looked as wicked as the serpent that coiled round the tree, and hissed a poisoned counsel to the first woman.
“One evening I went, as was my wont, to see Blanche. She was radiant: she was wild with spirits: a saucy triumph blazed in her blue eyes. She talked, she rattled in her childish way. She uttered, in the course of her rhapsody, a hint–an intimation–so terrible that the truth flashed across me in a moment. Did I ask her? She would lie to me. But I knew how to make falsehood impossible. And I ordered her to go to sleep.”
At this moment the clock (after its previous convulsions) sounded TWELVE. And as the new Editor* of the Cornhill Magazine–and HE, I promise you, won’t stand any nonsense–will only allow seven pages, I am obliged to leave off at THE VERY MOST INTERESTING POINT OF THE STORY.
* Mr. Thackeray retired from the Editorship of the Cornhill Magazine in March, 1862
III
“Are you of our fraternity? I see you are not. The secret which Mademoiselle de Bechamel confided to me in her mad triumph and wild hoyden spirits–she was but a child, poor thing, poor thing, scarce fifteen;–but I love them young–a folly not unusual with the old!” (Here Mr. Pinto thrust his knuckles into his hollow eyes; and, I am sorry to say, so little regardful was he of personal cleanliness, that his tears made streaks of white over his guarled dark hands.) “Ah, at fifteen, poor child, thy fate was terrible! Go to! It is not good to love me, friend. They prosper not who do. I divine you. You need not say what you are thinking–”
In truth, I was thinking, if girls fall in love with this sallow, hook-nosed, glass-eyed, wooden-legged, dirty, hideous old man, with the sham teeth, they have a queer taste. THAT is what I was thinking.
“Jack Wilkes said the handsomest man in London had but half an hour’s start of him. And, without vanity, I am scarcely uglier than Jack Wilkes. We were members of the same club at Medenham Abbey, Jack and I, and had many a merry night together. Well, sir, I–Mary of Scotland knew me but as a little hunchbacked music master; and yet, and yet, I think she was not indifferent to her David Riz–and SHE came to misfortune. They all do–they all do!”
“Sir, you are wandering from your point!” I said, with some severity. For, really, for this old humbug to hint that he had been the baboon who frightened the club at Medenham, that he had been in the Inquisition at Valladolid–that under the name of D. Riz, as he called it, he had known the lovely Queen of Scots–was a LITTLE too much. “Sir,” then I said, “you were speaking about a Miss Bechamel. I really have not time to hear all of your biography.”
“Faith, the good wine gets into my head.” (I should think so, the old toper! Four bottles all but two glasses.) “To return to poor Blanche. As I sat laughing, joking with her, she let slip a word, a little word, which filled me with dismay. Some one had told her a part of the Secret–the secret which has been divulged scarce thrice in three thousand years–the Secret of the Freemasons. Do you know what happens to those uninitiate who learn that secret? to those wretched men, the initiate who reveal it?”
As Pinto spoke to me, he looked through and through me with his horrible piercing glance, so that I sat quite uneasily on my bench. He continued: “Did I question her awake? I knew she would lie to me. Poor child! I loved her no less because I did not believe a word she said. I loved her blue eye, her golden hair, her delicious voice, that was true in song, though when she spoke, false as Eblis! You are aware that I possess in rather a remarkable degree what we have agreed to call the mesmeric power. I set the unhappy girl to sleep. THEN she was obliged to tell me all. It was as I had surmised. Goby de Mouchy, my wretched, besotted miserable secretary, in his visits to the chateau of the Marquis de Bechamel, who was one of our society, had seen Blanche. I suppose it was because she had been warned that he was worthless, and poor, artful and a coward, she loved him. She wormed out of the besotted wretch the secrets of our Order. ‘Did he tell you the NUMBER ONE?’ I asked.
“She said, ‘Yes.’
“‘Did he,’ I further inquired, ‘tell you the–‘
“‘Oh, don’t ask me, don’t ask me!’ she said, writhing on the sofa, where she lay in the presence of the Marquis de Bechamel, her most unhappy father. Poor Bechamel, poor Bechamel! How pale he looked as I spoke! ‘Did he tell you,’ I repeated with a dreadful calm, ‘the NUMBER TWO?’ She said, ‘Yes.’
“The poor old marquis rose up, and clasping his hands, fell on his knees before Count Cagl—- Bah! I went by a different name then. Vat’s in a name? Dat vich ye call a Rosicrucian by any other name vil smell as sveet. ‘Monsieur,’ he said, ‘I am old–I am rich. I have five hundred thousand livres of rentes in Picardy. I have half as much in Artois. I have two hundred and eighty thousand on the Grand Livre. I am promised by my Sovereign a dukedom and his orders with a reversion to my heir. I am a Grandee of Spain of the First Class, and Duke of Volovento. Take my titles, my ready money, my life, my honor, everything I have in the world, but don’t ask the THIRD QUESTION.’
“‘Godfroid de Bouillon, Comte de Bechamel, Grandee of Spain and Prince of Volovento, in our Assembly what was the oath you swore?’ The old man writhed as he remembered its terrific purport.
“Though my heart was racked with agony, and I would have died, aye, cheerfully” (died, indeed, as if THAT were a penalty!) “to spare yonder lovely child a pang, I said to her calmly, ‘Blanche de Bechamel, did Goby de Mouchy tell you secret NUMBER THREE?’
“She whispered a oui that was quite faint, faint and small. But her poor father fell in convulsions at her feet.
“She died suddenly that night. Did I not tell you those I love come to no good? When General Bonaparte crossed the Saint Bernard, he saw in the convent an old monk with a white beard, wandering about the corridors, cheerful and rather stout, but mad–mad as a March hare. ‘General,’ I said to him, ‘did you ever see that face before?’ He had not. He had not mingled much with the higher classes of our society before the Revolution. I knew the poor old man well enough; he was the last of a noble race, and I loved his child.”
“And did she die by–?”
“Man! did I say so? Do I whisper the secrets of the Vehmgericht? I say she died that night: and he–he, the heartless, the villain, the betrayer,–you saw him seated in yonder curiosity shop, by yonder guillotine, with his scoundrelly head in his lap.
“You saw how slight that instrument was? It was one of the first which Guillotin made, and which he showed to private friends in a hangar in the Rue Picpus, where he lived. The invention created some little conversation among scientific men at the time, though I remember a machine in Edinburgh of a very similar construction, two hundred–well, many, many years ago–and at a breakfast which Guillotin gave he showed us the instrument, and much talk arose among us as to whether people suffered under it.
“And now I must tell you what befell the traitor who had caused all this suffering. Did he know that the poor child’s death was a SENTENCE? He felt a cowardly satisfaction that with her was gone the secret of his treason. Then he began to doubt. I had MEANS to penetrate all his thoughts, as well as to know his acts. Then he became a slave to a horrible fear. He fled in abject terror to a convent. They still existed in Paris; and behind the walls of Jacobins the wretch thought himself secure. Poor fool! I had but to set one of my somnambulists to sleep. Her spirit went forth and spied the shuddering wretch in his cell. She described the street, the gate, the convent, the very dress which he wore, and which you saw to-day.
“And now THIS is what happened. In his chamber in the Rue St. Honore, at Paris, sat a man ALONE–a man who has been maligned, a man who has been called a knave and charlatan, a man who has been persecuted even to the death, it is said, in Roman Inquisitions, forsooth, and elsewhere. Ha! ha! A man who has a mighty will.
“And looking toward the Jacobins Convent (of which, from his chamber, he could see the spires and trees), this man WILLED. And it was not yet dawn. And he willed; and one who was lying in his cell in the convent of Jacobins, awake and shuddering with terror for a crime which he had committed, fell asleep.
“But though he was asleep his eyes were open.
“And after tossing and writhing, and clinging to the pallet, and saying ‘No, I will not go,’ he rose up and donned his clothes–a gray coat, a vest of white pique, black satin small-clothes, ribbed silk stockings, and a white stock with a steel buckle; and he arranged his hair, and he tied his queue, all the while being in that strange somnolence which walks, which moves, which FLIES sometimes, which sees, which is indifferent to pain, which OBEYS. And he put on his hat, and he went forth from his cell: and though the dawn was not yet, he trod the corridors as seeing them. And he passed into the cloister, and then into the garden where lie the ancient dead. And he came to the wicket, which Brother Jerome was opening just at the dawning. And the crowd was already waiting with their cans and bowls to receive the alms of the good brethren.
“And he passed through the crowd and went on his way, and the few people then abroad who marked him, said, ‘Tiens! How very odd he looks! He looks like a man walking in his sleep!’ This was said by various persons:–
“By milk women, with their cans and carts, coming into the town.
“By roysterers who had been drinking at the taverns of the Barrier, for it was Mid-Lent.
“By the sergeants of the watch, who eyed him sternly as he passed near their halberds.
“But he passed on unmoved by their halberds,
“Unmoved by the cries of the roysterers,
“By the market women coming with their milk and eggs.
“He walked through the Rue St. Honore, I say:–
“By the Rue Rambuteau,
“By the Rue St. Antoine,
“By the King’s Chateau of the Bastille,
“By the Faubourg St. Antoine.
“And he came to No. 29 in the Rue Picpus–a house which then stood between a court and garden–
“That is, there was a building of one story, with a great coach door.
“Then there was a court, around which were stables, coach-houses, offices.
“Then there was a house–a two-storied house, with a perron in front.
“Behind the house was a garden–a garden of two hundred and fifty French feet in length.
“And as one hundred feet of France equal one hundred and six feet of England, this garden, my friend, equaled exactly two hundred and sixty-five feet of British measure.
“In the center of the garden was a fountain and a statue–or, to speak more correctly, two statues. One was recumbent,–a man. Over him, saber in hand, stood a Woman.
“The man was Olofernes. The woman was Judith. From the head, from the trunk, the water gushed. It was the taste of the doctor:–was it not a droll of taste?
“At the end of the garden was the doctor’s cabinet of study. My faith, a singular cabinet, and singular pictures!–
“Decapitation of Charles Premier at Vitehall.
“Decapitation of Montrose at Edimbourg.
“Decapitation of Cinq Mars. When I tell you that he was a man of taste, charming!
“Through this garden, by these statues, up these stairs, went the pale figure of him who, the porter said, knew the way of the house. He did. Turning neither right nor left, he seemed to walk THROUGH the statues, the obstacles, the flower beds, the stairs, the door, the tables, the chairs.
“In the corner of the room was THAT INSTRUMENT, which Guillotin had just invented and perfected. One day he was to lay his own head under his own ax. Peace be to his name! With him I deal not!
“In a frame of mahogany, neatly worked, was a board with a half circle in it, over which another board fitted. Above was a heavy ax, which fell–you know how. It was held up by a rope, and when this rope was untied, or cut, the steel fell.
“To the story which I now have to relate, you may give credence, or not, as you will. The sleeping man went up to that instrument.
“He laid his head in it, asleep.”
“Asleep?”
“He then took a little penknife out of the pocket of his white dimity waistcoat.
“He cut the rope asleep.
“The ax descended on the head of the traitor and villain. The notch in it was made by the steel buckle of his stock, which was cut through.
“A strange legend has got abroad that after the deed was done, the figure rose, took the head from the basket, walked forth through the garden, and by the screaming porters at the gate, and went and laid itself down at the Morgue. But for this I will not vouch. Only of this be sure. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.’ More and more the light peeps through the chinks. Soon, amidst music ravishing, the curtain will rise, and the glorious scene be displayed. Adieu! Remember me. Ha! ’tis dawn,” Pinto said. And he was gone.
I am ashamed to say that my first movement was to clutch the check which he had left with me, and which I was determined to present the very moment the bank opened. I know the importance of these things, and that men change their mind sometimes. I sprang through the streets to the great banking house of Manasseh in Duke Street. It seemed to me as if I actually flew as I walked. As the clock struck ten I was at the counter and laid down my check.
The gentleman who received it, who was one of the Hebrew persuasion, as were the other two hundred clerks of the establishment, having looked at the draft with terror in his countenance, then looked at me, then called to himself two of his fellow clerks, and queer it was to see all their aquiline beaks over the paper.
“Come, come!” said I, “don’t keep me here all day. Hand me over the money, short, if you please!” for I was, you see, a little alarmed, and so determined to assume some extra bluster.
“Will you have the kindness to step into the parlor to the partners?” the clerk said, and I followed him.
“What, AGAIN?” shrieked a bald-headed, red-whiskered gentleman, whom I knew to be Mr. Manasseh. “Mr. Salathiel, this is too bad! Leave me with this gentleman, S.” And the clerk disappeared.
“Sir,” he said, “I know how you came by this: the Count de Pinto gave it you. It is too bad! I honor my parents; I honor THEIR parents; I honor their bills! But this one of grandma’s is too bad–it is, upon my word, now! She’ve been dead these five-and- thirty years. And this last four months she has left her burial place and took to drawing on our ‘ouse! It’s too bad, grandma; it is too bad!” and he appealed to me, and tears actually trickled down his nose.
“Is it the Countess Sidonia’s check or not?” I asked, haughtily.
“But, I tell you, she’s dead! It’s a shame!–it’s a shame!–it is, grandmamma!” and he cried, and wiped his great nose in his yellow pocket handkerchief. “Look year–will you take pounds instead of guineas? She’s dead, I tell you! It’s no go! Take the pounds– one tausend pound!–ten nice, neat, crisp hundred-pound notes, and go away vid you, do!”
“I will have my bond, sir, or nothing,” I said; and I put on an attitude of resolution which I confess surprised even myself.
“Wery veil,” he shrieked, with many oaths, “then you shall have noting–ha, ha, ha!–noting but a policeman! Mr. Abednego, call a policeman! Take that, you humbug and impostor!” and here with an abundance of frightful language which I dare not repeat, the wealthy banker abused and defied me.
Au bout du compte, what was I to do, if a banker did not choose to honor a check drawn by his dead grandmother? I began to wish I had my snuff-box back. I began to think I was a fool for changing that little old-fashioned gold for
this slip of strange paper.
Meanwhile the banker had passed from his fit of anger to a paroxysm of despair. He seemed to be addressing some person invisible, but in the room: “Look here, ma’am, you’ve really been coming it too strong. A hundred thousand in six months, and now a thousand more! The ‘ouse can’t stand it; it WON’T stand it, I say! What? Oh! mercy, mercy!
As he uttered these words, A HAND fluttered over the table in the air! It was a female hand: that which I had seen the night before. That female hand took a pen from the green baize table, dipped it in a silver inkstand, and wrote on a quarter of a sheet of foolscap on the blotting book, “How about the diamond robbery? If you do not pay, I will tell him where they are.”
What diamonds? what robbery? what was this mystery? That will never be ascertained, for the wretched man’s demeanor instantly changed. “Certainly, sir;–oh, certainly,” he said, forcing a grin. “How will you have the money, sir? All right, Mr. Abednego. This way out.”
“I hope I shall often see you again,” I said; on which I own poor Manasseh gave a dreadful grin, and shot back into his parlor.
I ran home, clutching the ten delicious, crisp hundred pounds, and the dear little fifty which made up the account. I flew through the streets again. I got to my chambers. I bolted the outer doors. I sank back in my great chair, and slept. . . .
My first thing on waking was to feel for my money. Perdition! Where was I? Ha!–on the table before me was my grandmother’s snuff-box, and by its side one of those awful–those admirable– sensation novels, which I had been reading, and which are full of delicious wonder.
But that the guillotine is still to be seen at Mr. Gale’s, No. 47, High Holborn, I give you MY HONOR. I suppose I was dreaming about it. I don’t know. What is dreaming? What is life? Why shouldn’t I sleep on the ceiling?–and am I sitting on it now, or on the floor? I am puzzled. But enough. If the fashion for sensation novels goes on, I tell you I will write one in fifty volumes. For the present, DIXI. But between ourselves, this Pinto, who fought at the Colosseum, who was nearly being roasted by the Inquisition, and sang duets at Holyrood, I am rather sorry to lose him after three little bits of Roundabout Papers. Et vous?
Bourgonef
I
AT A TABLE D’HOTE
At the close of February, 1848, I was in Nuremberg. My original intention had been to pass a couple of days there on my way to Munich, that being, I thought, as much time as could reasonably be spared for so small a city, beckoned as my footsteps were to the Bavarian Athens, of whose glories of ancient art and German Renaissance I had formed expectations the most exaggerated– expectations fatal to any perfect enjoyment, and certain to be disappointed, however great the actual merit of Munich might be. But after two days at Nuremberg I was so deeply interested in its antique sequestered life, the charms of which had not been deadened by previous anticipations, that I resolved to remain there until I had mastered every detail and knew the place by heart.
I have a story to tell which will move amidst tragic circumstances of too engrossing a nature to be disturbed by archaeological interests, and shall not, therefore, minutely describe here what I observed in Nuremberg, although no adequate description of that wonderful city has yet fallen in my way. To readers unacquainted with this antique place, it will be enough to say that in it the old German life seems still to a great extent rescued from the all- devouring, all-equalizing tendencies of European civilization. The houses are either of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, or are constructed after those ancient models. The citizens have preserved much of the simple manners and customs of their ancestors. The hurrying feet of commerce and curiosity pass rapidly by, leaving it sequestered from the agitations and the turmoils of metropolitan existence. It is as quiet as a village. During my stay there rose in its quiet streets the startled echoes of horror at a crime unparalleled in its annals, which, gathering increased horror from the very peacefulness and serenity of the scene, arrested the attention and the sympathy in a degree seldom experienced. Before narrating that, it will be necessary to go back a little, that my own connection with it may be intelligible, especially in the fanciful weaving together of remote conjectures which strangely involved me in the story.
The table d’hote at the Bayerischer Hof had about thirty visitors– all, with one exception, of that local commonplace which escapes remark. Indeed this may almost always be said of tables d’hote; though there is a current belief, which I cannot share, of a table d’hote being very delightful–of one being certain to meet pleasant people there.” It may be so. For many years I believed it was so. The general verdict received my assent. I had never met those delightful people, but was always expecting to meet them. Hitherto they had been conspicuous by their absence. According to my experience in Spain, France, and Germany, such dinners had been dreary or noisy and vapid. If the guests were English, they were chillingly silent, or surlily monosyllabic: to their neighbors they were frigid; amongst each other they spoke in low undertones. And if the guests were foreigners, they were noisy, clattering, and chattering, foolish for the most part, and vivaciously commonplace. I don’t know which made me feel most dreary. The predominance of my countrymen gave the dinner the gayety of a funeral; the predominance of the Mossoo gave it the fatigue of got-up enthusiasm, of trivial expansiveness. To hear strangers imparting the scraps of erudition and connoisseurship which they had that morning gathered from their valets de place and guide-books, or describing the sights they had just seen, to you, who either saw them yesterday, or would see them to-morrow, could not be permanently attractive. My mind refuses to pasture on such food with gusto. I cannot be made to care what the Herr Baron’s sentiments about Albert Durer or Lucas Cranach may be. I can digest my rindfleisch without the aid of the commis voyageur’s criticisms on Gothic architecture. This may be my misfortune. In spite of the Italian blood which I inherit, I am a shy man–shy as the purest Briton. But, like other shy men, I make up in obstinacy what may be deficient in expansiveness. I can be frightened into silence, but I won’t be dictated to. You might as well attempt the persuasive effect of your eloquence upon a snail who has withdrawn into his shell at your approach, and will not emerge till his confidence is restored. To be told that I MUST see this, and ought to go there, because my casual neighbor was charme, has never presented itself to me as an adequate motive.
From this you readily gather that I am severely taciturn at a table d’hote. I refrain from joining in the “delightful conversation” which flies across the table, and know that my reticence is attributed to “insular pride.” It is really and truly nothing but impatience of commonplace. I thoroughly enjoy good talk; but, ask yourself, what are the probabilities of hearing that rare thing in the casual assemblage of forty or fifty people, not brought together by any natural affinities or interests, but thrown together by the accident of being in the same district, and in the same hotel? They are not “forty feeding like one,” but like forty. They have no community, except the community of commonplace. No, tables d’hote are not delightful, and do not gather interesting people together.
Such has been my extensive experience. But this at Nuremberg is a conspicuous exception. At that table there was one guest who, on various grounds, personal and incidental, remains the most memorable man I ever met. From the first he riveted my attention in an unusual degree. He had not, as yet, induced me to emerge from my habitual reserve, for in truth, although he riveted my attention, he inspired me with a strange feeling of repulsion. I could scarcely keep my eyes from him; yet, except the formal bow on sitting down and rising from the table, I had interchanged no sign of fellowship with him. He was a young Russian, named Bourgonef, as I at once learned; rather handsome, and peculiarly arresting to the eye, partly from an air of settled melancholy, especially in his smile, the amiability of which seemed breaking from under clouds of grief, and still more so from the mute appeal to sympathy in the empty sleeve of his right arm, which was looped to the breast-button of his coat. His eyes were large and soft. He had no beard or whisker, and only delicate moustaches. The sorrow, quiet but profound, the amiable smile and the lost arm, were appealing details which at once arrested attention and excited sympathy. But to me this sympathy was mingled with a vague repulsion, occasioned by a certain falseness in the amiable smile, and a furtiveness in the eyes, which I saw–or fancied–and which, with an inexplicable reserve, forming as it were the impregnable citadel in the center of his outwardly polite and engaging manner, gave me something of that vague impression which we express by the words “instinctive antipathy.”
It was, when calmly considered, eminently absurd. To see one so young, and by his conversation so highly cultured and intelligent, condemned to early helplessness, his food cut up for him by a servant, as if he were a child, naturally engaged pity, and, on the first day, I cudgeled my brains during the greater part of dinner in the effort to account for his lost arm. He was obviously not a military man; the unmistakable look and stoop of a student told that plainly enough. Nor was the loss one dating from early life: he used his left arm too awkwardly for the event not to have had a recent date. Had it anything to do with his melancholy? Here was a topic for my vagabond imagination, and endless were the romances woven by it during my silent dinner. For the reader must be told of one peculiarity in me, because to it much of the strange complications of my story are due; complications into which a mind less active in weaving imaginary hypotheses to interpret casual and trifling facts would never have been drawn. From my childhood I have been the victim of my constructive imagination, which has led me into many mistakes and some scrapes; because, instead of contenting myself with plain, obvious evidence, I have allowed myself to frame hypothetical interpretations, which, to acts simple in themselves, and explicable on ordinary motives, render the simple-seeming acts portentous. With bitter pangs of self-reproach I have at times discovered that a long and plausible history constructed by me, relating to personal friends, has crumpled into a ruin of absurdity, by the disclosure of the primary misconception on which the whole history was based. I have gone, let us say, on the supposition that two people were secretly lovers; on this supposition my imagination has constructed a whole scheme to explain certain acts, and one fine day I have discovered indubitably that the supposed lovers were not lovers, but confidants of their passions in other directions, and, of course, all my conjectures have been utterly false. The secret flush of shame at failure has not, however, prevented my falling into similar mistakes immediately after.
When, therefore, I hereafter speak of my “constructive imagination,” the reader will know to what I am alluding. It was already busy with Bourgonef. To it must be added that vague repulsion, previously mentioned. This feeling abated on the second day; but, although lessened, it remained powerful enough to prevent my speaking to him. Whether it would have continued to abate until it disappeared, as such antipathies often disappear, under the familiarities of prolonged intercourse, without any immediate appeal to my amour propre, I know not; but every reflective mind, conscious of being accessible to antipathies, will remember that one certain method of stifling them is for the object to make some appeal to our interest or our vanity: in the engagement of these more powerful feelings, the antipathy is quickly strangled. At any rate it is so in my case, and was so now.
On the third day, the conversation at table happening to turn, as it often turned, upon St. Sebald’s Church, a young Frenchman, who was criticising its architecture with fluent dogmatism, drew Bourgonef into the discussion, and thereby elicited such a display of accurate and extensive knowledge, no less than delicacy of appreciation, that we were all listening spellbound. In the midst of this triumphant exposition the irritated vanity of the Frenchman could do nothing to regain his position but oppose a flat denial to a historical statement made by Bourgonef, backing his denial by the confident assertion that “all the competent authorities” held with him. At this point Bourgonef appealed to me, and in that tone of deference so exquisitely flattering from one we already know to be superior he requested my decision; observing that, from the manner in which he had seen me examine the details of the architecture, he could not be mistaken in his confidence that I was a connoisseur. All eyes were turned upon me. As a shy man, this made me blush; as a vain man, the blush was accompanied with delight. It might easily have happened that such an appeal, acting at once upon shyness and ignorance, would have inflamed my wrath; but the appeal happening to be directed on a point which I had recently investigated and thoroughly mastered, I was flattered at the opportunity of a victorious display.
The pleasure of my triumph diffused itself over my feelings towards him who had been the occasion of it. The Frenchman was silenced; the general verdict of the company was too obviously on our side. From this time the conversation continued between Bourgonef and myself; and he not only succeeded in entirely dissipating my absurd antipathy–which I now saw to have been founded on purely imaginary grounds, for neither the falseness nor the furtiveness could now be detected–but he succeeded in captivating all my sympathy. Long after dinner was over, and the salle empty, we sat smoking our cigars, and discussing politics, literature, and art in that suggestive desultory manner which often gives a charm to casual acquaintances.
It was a stirring epoch, that of February, 1848. The Revolution, at first so hopeful, and soon to manifest itself in failure so disastrous, was hurrying to an outburst. France had been for many months agitated by cries of electoral reform, and by indignation at the corruption and scandals in high places. The Praslin murder, and the dishonor of M. Teste, terminated by suicide, had been interpreted as signs of the coming destruction. The political banquets given in various important cities had been occasions for inflaming the public mind, and to the far-seeing, these banquets were interpreted as the sounds of the tocsin. Louis Philippe had become odious to France, and contemptible to Europe. Guizot and Duchatel, the ministers of that day, although backed by a parliamentary majority on which they blindly relied, were unpopular, and were regarded as infatuated even by their admirers in Europe. The Spanish marriages had all but led to a war with England. The Opposition, headed by Thiers and Odillon Barrot, was strengthened by united action with the republican party, headed by Ledru Rollin, Marrast, Flocon, and Louis Blanc.
Bourgonef was an ardent republican. So was I; but my color was of a different shade from his. He belonged to the Reds. My own dominant tendencies being artistic and literary, my dream was of a republic in which intelligence would be the archon or ruler; and, of course, in such a republic, art and literature, as the highest manifestation of mind, would have the supreme direction. Do you smile, reader? I smile now; but it was serious earnest with me then. It is unnecessary to say more on this point. I have said so much to render intelligible the stray link of communion which riveted the charm of my new acquaintance’s conversation; there was both agreement enough and difference enough in our views to render our society mutually fascinating.
On retiring to my room that afternoon I could not help laughing at my absurd antipathy against Bourgonef. All his remarks had disclosed a generous, ardent, and refined nature. While my antipathy had specially fastened upon a certain falseness in his smile–a falseness the more poignantly hideous if it were falseness, because hidden amidst the wreaths of amiability–my delight in his conversation had specially justified itself by the truthfulness of his mode of looking at things. He seemed to be sincerity itself. There was, indeed, a certain central reserve; but that might only he an integrity of pride; or it might be connected with painful circumstances in his history, of which the melancholy in his face was the outward sign.
That very evening my constructive imagination was furnished with a detail on which it was soon to be actively set to work. I had been rambling about the old fortifications, and was returning at nightfall through the old archway near Albert Durer’s house, when a man passed by me. We looked at each other in that automatic way in which men look when they meet in narrow places, and I felt, so to speak, a start of recognition in the eyes of the man who passed. Nothing else, in features or gestures, betrayed recognition or surprise. But although there was only that, it flashed from his eyes to mine like an electric shock. He passed. I looked back. He continued his way without turning. The face was certainly known to me; but it floated in a mist of confused memories.
I walked on slowly, pestering my memory with fruitless calls upon it, hopelessly trying to recover the place where I could have seen the stranger before. In vain memory traveled over Europe in concert-rooms, theaters, shops, and railway carriages. I could not recall the occasion on which those eyes had previously met mine. That they had met them I had no doubt. I went to bed with the riddle undiscovered.
II
THE ECHOES OF MURDER
Next morning Nuremberg was agitated with a horror such as can seldom have disturbed its quiet; a young and lovely girl had been murdered. Her corpse was discovered at daybreak under the archway leading to the old fortifications. She had been stabbed to the heart. No other signs of violence were visible; no robbery had been attempted.
In great cities, necessarily great centers of crime, we daily hear of murders; their frequency and remoteness leave us undisturbed. Our sympathies can only be deeply moved either by some scenic peculiarities investing the crime with unusual romance or unusual atrocity, or else by the more immediate appeal of direct neighborly interest. The murder which is read of in the Times as having occurred in Westminster, has seldom any special horror to the inhabitants of Islington or Oxford Street; but to the inhabitants of Westminster, and especially to the inhabitants of the particular street in which it was perpetrated, the crime assumes heart-shaking proportions. Every detail is asked for, and every surmise listened to, with feverish eagerness is repeated and diffused through the crowd with growing interest. The family of the victim; the antecedents of the assassin, if he is known; or the conjectures pointing to the unknown assassin,–are eagerly discussed. All the trivial details of household care or domestic fortunes, all the items of personal gossip, become invested with a solemn and affecting interest. Pity for the victim and survivors mingle and alternate with fierce cries for vengeance on the guilty. The whole street becomes one family, commingled by an energetic sympathy, united by one common feeling of compassion and wrath.
In villages, and in cities so small as Nuremberg, the same community of feeling is manifested. The town became as one street. The horror spread like a conflagration, the sympathy surged and swelled like a tide. Everyone felt a personal interest in the event, as if the murder had been committed at his own door. Never shall I forget that wail of passionate pity, and that cry for the vengeance of justice, which rose from all sides of the startled city. Never shall I forget the hurry, the agitation, the feverish restlessness, the universal communicativeness, the volunteered services, the eager suggestion, surging round the house of the unhappy parents. Herr Lehfeldt, the father of the unhappy girl, was a respected burgher known to almost every one. His mercer’s shop was the leading one of the city. A worthy, pious man, somewhat strict, but of irreproachable character; his virtues, no less than those of his wife, and of his only daughter, Lieschen– now, alas; for ever snatched from their yearning eyes–were canvassed everywhere, and served to intensify the general grief. That such a calamity should have fallen on a household so estimable, seemed to add fuel to the people’s wrath. Poor Lieschen! her pretty, playful ways–her opening prospects, as the only daughter of parents so well to do and so kind–her youth and abounding life–these were detailed with impassioned fervor by friends, and repeated by strangers who caught the tone of friends, as if they, too, had known and loved her. But amidst the surging uproar of this sea of many voices no one clear voice of direction could be heard; no clue given to the clamorous bloodhounds to run down the assassin.
Cries had been heard in the streets that night at various parts of the town, which, although then interpreted as the quarrels of drunken brawlers, and the conflicts of cats, were now confidently asserted to have proceeded from the unhappy girl in her death- struggle. But none of these cries had been heard in the immediate neighborhood of the archway. All the inhabitants of that part of the town agreed that in their waking hours the streets had been perfectly still. Nor were there any traces visible of a struggle having taken place. Lieschen might have been murdered elsewhere, and her corpse quietly deposited where it was found, as far as any evidence went.
Wild and vague were the conjectures. All were baffled in the attempt to give them a definite direction. The crime was apparently prompted by revenge–certainly not by lust, or desire of money. But she was not known to stand in any one’s way. In this utter blank as to the assignable motive, I, perhaps alone among the furious crowd, had a distinct suspicion of the assassin. No sooner had the news reached me, than with the specification of the theater of the crime there at once flashed upon me the intellectual vision of the criminal: the stranger with the dark beard and startled eyes stood confessed before me! I held my breath for a few moments, and then there came a tide of objections rushing over my mind, revealing the inadequacy of the grounds on which rested my suspicions. What were the grounds? I had seen a man in a particular spot, not an unfrequented spot, on the evening of the night when the crime had been committed there; that man had seemed to recognize me, and wished to avoid being recognized. Obviously these grounds were too slender to bear any weight of construction such as I had based on them. Mere presence on the spot could no more inculpate him than it could inculpate me; if I had met him there, equally had he met me there. Nor even if my suspicion were correct that he knew me, and refused to recognize me, could that be any argument tending to criminate him in an affair wholly disconnected with me. Besides, he was walking peaceably, openly, and he looked like a gentleman. All these objections pressed themselves upon me, and kept me silent. But in spite of their force I could not prevent the suspicion from continually arising. Ashamed to mention it, because it may have sounded too absurd, I could not prevent my constructive imagination indulging in its vagaries, and with this secret conviction I resolved to await events, and in case suspicion from other quarters should ever designate the probable assassin, I might then come forward with my bit of corroborative evidence, should the suspected assassin be the stranger of the archway.
By twelve o’clock a new direction was given to rumor. Hitherto the stories, when carefully sifted of all exaggerations of flying conjecture, had settled themselves into something like this: The Lehfeldts had retired to rest at a quarter before ten, as was their custom. They had seen Lieschen go into her bedroom for the night, and had themselves gone to sleep with unclouded minds. From this peaceful security they were startled early in the morning by the appalling news of the calamity which had fallen on them. Incredulous at first, as well they might be, and incapable of believing in a ruin so unexpected and so overwhelming, they imagined some mistake, asserting that Lieschen was in her own room. Into that room they rushed, and there the undisturbed bed, and the open window, but a few feet from the garden, silently and pathetically disclosed the fatal truth. The bereaved parents turned a revealing look upon each other’s whitened faces, and then slowly retired from the room, followed in affecting silence by the others. Back into their own room they went. The father knelt beside the bed, and, sobbing, prayed. The mother sat staring with a stupefied stare, her lips faintly moving. In a short while the flood of grief, awakened to a thorough consciousness, burst from their laboring hearts. When the first paroxysms were over they questioned others, and gave incoherent replies to the questions addressed to them. From all which it resulted that Lieschen’s absence, though obviously voluntary, was wholly inexplicable to them; and no clew whatever could be given as to the motives of the crime. When these details became known, conjecture naturally interpreted Lieschen’s absence at night as an assignation. But with whom? She was not known to have a lover. Her father, on being questioned, passionately affirmed that she had none; she loved no one but her parents, poor child! Her mother, on being questioned, told the same story–adding, however, that about seventeen months before, she had fancied that Lieschen was a little disposed to favor Franz Kerkel, their shopman; but on being spoken to on the subject with some seriousness, and warned of the distance between them, she had laughed heartily at the idea, and since then had treated Franz with so much indifference that only a week ago she had drawn from her mother a reproof on the subject.
“I told her Franz was a good lad, though not good enough for her, and that she ought to treat him kindly. But she said my lecture had given her an alarm, lest Franz should have got the same maggot into his head.”
This was the story now passing through the curious crowds in every street. After hearing it I had turned into a tobacconist’s in the Adlergrasse, to restock my cigar-case, and found there, as everywhere, a group discussing the one topic of the hour. Herr Fischer, the tobacconist, with a long porcelain pipe pendent from his screwed-up lips, was solemnly listening to the particulars volubly communicated by a stout Bavarian priest; while behind the counter, in a corner, swiftly knitting, sat his wife, her black bead-like eyes also fixed on the orator. Of course I was dragged into the conversation. Instead of attending to commercial interests, they looked upon me as the possible bearer of fresh news. Nor was it without a secret satisfaction that I found I could gratify them in that respect. They had not heard of Franz Kerkel in the matter. No sooner had I told what I had heard than the knitting-needles of the vivacious little woman were at once suspended.
“Ach Je!” she exclaimed, “I see it all. He’s the wretch!”
“Who?” we all simultaneously inquired.
“Who? Why, Kerkel, of course. If she changed, and treated him with indifference, it was because she loved him; and he has murdered the poor thing.”
“How you run on, wife!” remonstrated Fischer; while the priest shook a dubious head.
“I tell you it is so. I’m positive.”
“If she loved him.”
“She did, I tell you. Trust a woman for seeing through such things.”
“Well, say she did,” continued Fischer, “and I won’t deny that it may be so; but then that makes against the idea of his having done her any harm.”
“Don’t tell me,” retorted the convinced woman. “She loved him. She went out to meet him in secret, and he murdered her–the villain did. I’m as sure of it as if these eyes had seen him do it.”
The husband winked at us, as much as to say, “You hear these women!” and the priest and I endeavored to reason her out of her illogical position. But she was immovable. Kerkel had murdered her; she knew it; she couldn’t tell why, but she knew it. Perhaps he was jealous, who knows? At any rate, he ought to be arrested.
And by twelve o’clock, as I said, a new rumor ran through the crowd, which seemed to confirm the little woman in her rash logic. Kerkel had been arrested, and a waistcoat stained with blood had been found in his room! By half-past twelve the rumor ran that he had confessed the crime. This, however, proved on inquiry to be the hasty anticipation of public indignation. He had been arrested; the waistcoat had been found: so much was authentic; and the suspicions gathered ominously over him.
When first Frau Fischer had started the suggestion it flew like wildfire. Then people suddenly noticed, as very surprising, that Kerkel had not that day made his appearance at the shop. His absence had not been noticed in the tumult of grief and inquiry; but it became suddenly invested with a dreadful significance, now that it was rumored that he had been Lieschen’s lover. Of all men he would be the most affected by the tragic news; of all men he would have been the first to tender sympathy and aid to the afflicted parents, and the most clamorous in the search for the undiscovered culprit. Yet, while all Nuremberg was crowding round the house of sorrow, which was also his house of business, he alone remained away. This naturally pointed suspicion at him. When the messengers had gone to seek him, his mother refused them admission, declaring in incoherent phrases, betraying great agitation, that her son was gone distracted with grief and could see no one. On this it was determined to order his arrest. The police went, the house was searched, and the waistcoat found.
The testimony of the girl who lived as servant in Kerkel’s house was also criminatory. She deposed that on the night in question she awoke about half-past eleven with a violent toothache; she was certain as to the hour, because she heard the clock afterwards strike twelve. She felt some alarm at hearing voices in the rooms at an hour when her mistress and young master must long ago have gone to bed; but as the voices were seemingly in quiet conversation, her alarm subsided, and she concluded that instead of having gone to bed her mistress was still up. In her pain she heard the door gently open, and then she heard footsteps in the garden. This surprised her very much. She couldn’t think what the young master could want going out at that hour. She became terrified without knowing exactly at what. Fear quite drove away the toothache, which had not since returned. After lying there quaking for some time, again she heard footsteps in the garden; the door opened and closed gently; voices were heard; and she at last distinctly heard her mistress say, “Be a man, Franz. Good-night– sleep well;” upon which Franz replied in a tone of great agony, “There’s no chance of sleep for me.” Then all was silent. Next morning her mistress seemed “very queer.” Her young master went out very early, but soon came back again; and there were dreadful scenes going on in his room, as she heard, but she didn’t know what it was all about. She heard of the murder from a neighbor, but never thought of its having any particular interest for Mr. Franz, though, of course, he would be very sorry for the Lehfeldts.
The facts testified to by the servant, especially the going out at that late hour, and the “dreadful scenes” of the morning, seemed to bear but one interpretation. Moreover, she identified the waistcoat as the one worn by Franz on the day preceding the fatal night.
III
THE ACCUSED
Now at last the pent-up wrath found a vent. From the distracting condition of wandering uncertain suspicion, it had been recalled into the glad security of individual hate. Although up to this time Kerkel had borne an exemplary reputation, it was now remembered that he had always been of a morose and violent temper, a hypocrite in religion, a selfish sensualist. Several sagacious critics had long “seen through him”; others had “never liked him”; others had wondered how it was he kept his place so long in Lehfeldt’s shop. Poor fellow! his life and actions, like those of every one else when illuminated by a light thrown back upon them, seemed so conspicuously despicable, although when illuminated in their own light they had seemed innocent enough. His mother’s frantic protestations of her son’s innocence–her assertions that Franz loved Lieschen more than his own soul–only served to envelop her in the silent accusation of being an accomplice, or at least of being an accessory after the fact.
I cannot say why it was, but I did not share the universal belief. The logic seemed to me forced; the evidence trivial. On first hearing of Kerkel’s arrest, I eagerly questioned my informant respecting his personal appearance; and on hearing that he was fair, with blue eyes and flaxen hair, my conviction of his innocence was fixed. Looking back on these days, I am often amused at this characteristic of my constructive imagination. While rejecting the disjointed logic of the mob, which interpreted his guilt, I was myself deluded by a logic infinitely less rational. Had Kerkel been dark, with dark eyes and beard, I should probably have sworn to his guilt, simply because the idea of that stranger had firmly fixed itself in my mind.
All that afternoon, and all the next day, the busy hum of voices was raised by the one topic of commanding interest. Kerkel had been examined. He at once admitted that a secret betrothal had for some time existed between him and Lieschen. They had been led to take this improper step by fear of her parents, who, had the attachment been discovered, would, it was thought, have separated them for ever. Herr Lehfeldt’s sternness, no less than his superior position, seemed an invincible obstacle, and the good mother, although doting upon her only daughter, was led by the very intensity of her affection to form ambitious hopes of her daughter’s future. It was barely possible that some turn in events might one day yield an opening for their consent; but meanwhile prudence dictated secrecy, in order to avert the most pressing danger, that of separation.
And so the pretty Lieschen, with feminine instinct of ruse, had affected to treat her lover with indifference; and to compensate him and herself for this restraint, she had been in the habit of escaping from home once or twice a week, and spending a delicious hour or two at night in the company of her lover and his mother. Kerkel and his mother lived in a cottage a little way outside the town. Lehfeldt’s shop stood not many yards from the archway. Now, as in Nuremberg no one was abroad after ten o’clock, except a few loungers at the cafes and beer-houses, and these were only to be met inside the town, not outside it, Lieschen ran extremely little risk of being observed in her rapid transit from her father’s to her lover’s house. Nor, indeed, had she ever met anyone in the course of these visits.
On the fatal night Lieschen was expected at the cottage. Mother and son waited at first hopefully, then anxiously, at last with some vague uneasiness at her non-appearance. It was now a quarter past eleven–nearly an hour later than her usual time. They occasionally went to the door to look for her; then they walked a few yards down the road, as if to catch an earlier glimpse of her advancing steps. But in vain. The half-hour struck. They came back into the cottage, discussing the various probabilities of delay. Three-quarters struck. Perhaps she had been detected; perhaps she was ill; perhaps–but this was his mother’s suggestion, and took little hold of him–there had been visitors who had stayed later than usual, and Lieschen, finding the night so advanced, had postponed her visit to the morrow. Franz, who interpreted Lieschen’s feelings by his own, was assured that no postponement of a voluntary kind was credible of her. Twelve o’clock struck. Again Franz went out into the road, and walked nearly up to the archway; he returned with heavy sadness and foreboding at his heart, reluctantly admitting that now all hope of seeing her that night was over. That night? Poor sorrowing heart, the night was to be eternal! The anguish of the desolate “never more” was awaiting him.
There is something intensely pathetic in being thus, as it were, spectators of a tragic drama which is being acted on two separate stages at once–the dreadful link of connection, which is unseen to the separate actors, being only too vividly seen by the spectators. It was with some interest that I, who believed in Kerkel’s innocence, heard this story; and in imagination followed its unfolding stage. He went to bed, not, as may be expected, to sleep; tossing restlessly in feverish agitation, conjuring up many imaginary terrors–but all of them trifles compared with the dread reality which he was so soon to face. He pictured her weeping–and she was lying dead on the cold pavement of the dark archway. He saw her in agitated eloquence pleading with offended parents–and she was removed for ever from all agitations, with the peace of death upon her young face.
At an early hour he started, that he might put an end to his suspense. He had not yet reached the archway before the shattering news burst upon him. From that moment he remembered nothing. But his mother described his ghastly agitation, as, throwing himself upon her neck, he told her, through dreadful sobs, the calamity which had fallen. She did her best to comfort him; but he grew wilder and wilder, and rolled upon the ground in the agony of an immeasurable despair. She trembled for his reason and his life. And when the messengers came to seek him, she spoke but the simple truth in saying that he was like one distracted. Yet no sooner had a glimpse of light dawned on him that some vague suspicion rested on him in reference to the murder, than he started up, flung away his agitation, and, with a calmness which was awful, answered every question, and seemed nerved for every trial. From that moment not a sob escaped him until, in the narrative of the night’s events, he came to that part which told of the sudden disclosure of his bereavement. And the simple, straightforward manner in which he told this tale, with a face entirely bloodless, and eyes that seemed to have withdrawn all their light inwards, made a great impression on the audience, which was heightened into sympathy when the final sob, breaking through the forced calmness, told of the agony which was eating its fiery way through the heart.
The story was not only plausible in itself, but accurately tallied with what before had seemed like the criminating evidence of the maid; tallied, moreover, precisely as to time, which would hardly have been the case had the story been an invention. As to the waistcoat which had figured so conspicuously in all the rumors, it appeared that suspicion had monstrously exaggerated the facts. Instead of a waistcoat plashed with blood–as popular imagination pictured it–it was a gray waistcoat, with one spot and a slight smear of blood, which admitted of a very simple explanation. Three days before, Franz had cut his left hand in cutting some bread; and to this the maid testified, because she was present when the accident occurred. He had not noticed that his waistcoat was marked by it until the next day, and had forgotten to wash out the stains.
People outside shook skeptical heads at this story of the cut hand. The bloody waistcoat was not to be disposed of in that easy way. It had fixed itself too strongly in their imagination. Indeed, my belief is that even could they have seen the waistcoat, its insignificant marks would have appeared murderous patches to their eyes. I had seen it, and my report was listened to with ill- concealed disbelief, when not with open protestation. And when Kerkel was discharged as free from all suspicion, there was a low growl of disappointed wrath heard from numerous groups.
This may sympathetically be understood by whomsoever remembers the painful uneasiness of the mind under a great stress of excitement with no definite issue. The lust for a vengeance, demanded by the aroused sensibilities of compassion, makes men credulous in their impatience; they easily believe anyone is guilty, because they feel an imperious need for fastening the guilt upon some definite head. Few verdicts of “Not Guilty” are well received, unless another victim is at hand upon whom the verdict of guilty is likely to fall. It was demonstrable to all judicial minds that Kerkel was wholly, pathetically innocent. In a few days this gradually became clear to the majority, but at first it was resisted as an attempt to balk justice; and to the last there were some obstinate doubters, who shook their heads mysteriously, and said, with a certain incisiveness, “Somebody must have done it; I should very much like to know who.”
Suspicion once more was drifting aimlessly. None had pointed in any new direction. No mention of anyone whom I could identify with the stranger had yet been made; but, although silent on the subject, I kept firm in my conviction, and I sometimes laughed at the pertinacity with which I scrutinized the face of every man I met, if he happened to have a black beard; and as black beards are excessively common, my curiosity, though never gratified, was never allowed repose.
Meanwhile Lieschen’s funeral had been emphatically a public mourning. Nay, so great was the emotion, that it almost deadened the interest which otherwise would have been so powerful, in the news now daily reaching us from Paris. Blood had flowed upon her streets–in consequence of that pistol-shot, which, either by accident or criminal intent, had converted the demonstration before the hotel of the Minister of Foreign Affairs into an insurrection. Paris had risen; barricades were erected. The troops were under arms. This was agitating news.
Such is the solidarity of all European nations, and so quick are all to vibrate in unison with the vibrations of each, that events like those transacted in Paris necessarily stirred every city, no matter how remote, nor politically how secure. And it says much for the intense interest excited by the Lehfeldt tragedy that Nuremberg was capable of sustaining that interest even amid the tremendous pressure of the February Revolution. It is true that Nuremberg is at all times somewhat sequestered from the great movements of the day, following slowly in the rear of great waves; it is true, moreover, that some politicians showed remarkable eagerness in canvassing the characters and hopes of Louis Philippe and Guizot; but although such events would at another period have formed the universal interest, the impenetrable mystery hanging over Lieschen’s death threw the Revolution into the background of their thoughts. If when a storm is raging over the dreary moorland, a human cry of suffering is heard at the door, at once the thunders and the tumult sink into insignificance, and are not even heard by the ear which is pierced with the feeble human voice: the grandeurs of storm and tempest, the uproar of surging seas, the clamorous wail of sea-birds amid the volleying artillery of heaven, in vain assail the ear that has once caught even the distant cry of a human agony, or serve only as scenical accompaniments to the tragedy which is foreshadowed by that cry. And so it was amid the uproar of 1848. A kingdom was in convulsions; but here, at our door, a young girl had been murdered, and two hearths made desolate. Rumors continued to fly about. The assassin was always about to be discovered; but he remained shrouded in impenetrable darkness. A remark made by Bourgonef struck me much. Our host, Zum Bayerischen Hof, one day announced with great satisfaction that he had himself heard from the syndic that the police were on the traces of the assassin.
“I am sorry to hear it,” said Bourgonef.
The guests paused from eating, and looked at him with astonishment.
“It is a proof,” he added, “that even the police now give it up as hopeless. I always notice that whenever the police are said to be on the traces the malefactor is never tracked. When they are on his traces they wisely say nothing about it; they allow it to be believed that they are baffled, in order to lull their victim into a dangerous security. When they know themselves to be baffled, there is no danger in quieting the public mind, and saving their own credit, by announcing that they are about to be successful.”
IV
A DISCOVERY
Bourgonef’s remark had been but too sagacious. The police were hoplessly baffled. In all such cases possible success depends upon the initial suggestion either of a motive which leads to a suspicion of the person, or of some person which leads to a suspicion of the motive. Once set suspicion on the right track, and evidence is suddenly alight in all quarters. But, unhappily, in the present case there was no assignable motive, no shadow darkening any person.
An episode now came to our knowledge in which Bourgonef manifested an unusual depth of interest. I was led to notice this interest, because it had seemed to me that in the crime itself, and the discussions which arose out of it, he shared but little of the universal excitement. I do not mean that he was indifferent–by no means; but the horror of the crime did not seem to fascinate his imagination as it fascinated ours. He could talk quite as readily of other things, and far more readily of the French affairs. But on the contrary, in this new episode he showed peculiar interest. It appeared that Lehfeldt, moved, perhaps, partly by a sense of the injustice which had been done to Kerkel in even suspecting him of the crime, and in submitting him to an examination more poignantly affecting to him under such circumstances than a public trial would have been under others; and moved partly by the sense that Lieschen’s love had practically drawn Kerkel within the family–for her choice of him as a husband had made him morally, if not legally, a son-in-law; and moved partly by the sense of loneliness which had now settled on their childless home,–Lehfeldt had in the most pathetic and considerate terms begged Kerkel to take the place of his adopted son, and become joint partner with him in the business. This, however, Kerkel had gently yet firmly declined. He averred that he felt no injury, though great pain had been inflicted on him by the examination. He himself in such a case would not have shrunk from demanding that his own brother should be tried, under suspicions of similar urgency. It was simple justice that all who were suspected should be examined; justice also to them that they might for ever clear themselves of doubtful appearances. But for the rest, while he felt his old affectionate respect for his master, he could recognize no claim to be removed from his present position. Had she lived, said the heartbroken youth, he would gladly have consented to accept any fortune which her love might bestow, because he felt that his own love and the devotion of a life might repay it. But there was nothing now that he could give in exchange. For his services he was amply paid; his feelings towards Lieschen’s parents must continue what they had ever been. In vain Lehfeldt pleaded, in vain many friends argued. Franz remained respectfully firm in his refusal.
This, as I said, interested Bourgonef immensely. He seemed to enter completely into the minds of the sorrowing, pleading parents, and the sorrowing, denying lover. He appreciated and expounded their motives with a subtlety and delicacy of perception which surprised and delighted me. It showed the refinement of his moral nature. But, at the same time, it rendered his minor degree of interest in the other episodes of the story, those which had a more direct and overpowering appeal to the heart, a greater paradox.
Human nature is troubled in the presence of all mystery which has not by long familiarity lost its power of soliciting attention; and for my own part, I have always been uneasy in the presence of moral problems. Puzzled by the contradictions which I noticed in Bourgonef, I tried to discover whether he had any general repugnance to stories of crimes, or any special repugnance to murders, or, finally, any strange repugnance to this particular case now everywhere discussed. And it is not a little remarkable that during three separate interviews, in the course of which I severally, and as I thought artfully, introduced these topics, making them seem to arise naturally out of the suggestion of our talk, I totally failed to arrive at any distinct conclusion. I was afraid to put the direct question: Do you not share the common feeling of interest in criminal stories? This question would doubtless have elicited a categorical reply; but somehow, the consciousness of an arriere-pensee made me shrink from putting such a question.
Reflecting on this indifference on a special point, and on the numerous manifestations I had noticed of his sensibility, I came at last to the conclusion that he must be a man of tender heart, whose delicate sensibilities easily shrank from the horrible under every form; and no more permitted him to dwell unnecessarily upon painful facts, than they permit imaginative minds to dwell on the details of an operation.
I had not long settled this in my mind before an accident suddenly threw a lurid light upon many details noticed previously, and painfully revived that inexplicable repulsion with which I had at first regarded him. A new suspicion filled my mind, or rather, let me say, a distinct shape was impressed upon many fluctuating suspicions. It scarcely admitted of argument, and at times seemed preposterous, nevertheless it persisted. The mind which in broad daylight assents to all that can be alleged against the absurdities of the belief in apparitions, will often acknowledge the dim terrors of darkness and loneliness–terrors at possibilities of supernatural visitations. In like manner, in the clear daylight of reason I could see the absurdity of my suspicion, but the vague stirrings of feeling remained unsilenced. I was haunted by the dim horrors of a possibility.
Thus it arose. We were both going to Munich, and Bourgonef had shortened his contemplated stay at Nuremberg that he might have the pleasure of accompanying me; adding also that he, too, should be glad to reach Munich, not only for its art, but for its greater command of papers and intelligence respecting what was then going on in France. On the night preceding the morning of our departure, I was seated in his room, smoking and discussing as usual, while Ivan, his servant, packed up his things in two large portmanteaus.
Ivan was a serf who spoke no word of any language but his own. Although of a brutal, almost idiotic type, he was loudly eulogized by his master as the model of fidelity and usefulness. Bourgonef treated him with gentleness, though with a certain imperiousness; much as one might treat a savage mastiff which it was necessary to dominate without exasperating. He more than once spoke of Ivan as a living satire on physiognomists and phrenologists; and as I am a phrenologist, I listened with some incredulity.
“Look at him,” he would say. “Observe the low, retreating brow, the flat face, the surly mouth, the broad base of the head, and the huge bull-like neck. Would not anyone say Ivan was as destructive as a panther, as tenacious as a bull-dog, as brutal as a bull? Yet he is the gentlest of sluggish creatures, and as tender-hearted as a girl! That thick-set muscular frame shrouds a hare’s heart. He is so faithful and so attached that I believe for me he would risk his life; but on no account could you get him to place himself in danger on his own account. Part of his love for me is gratitude for having rescued him from the conscription: the dangers incident to a military life had no charm for him!”
Now, although Bourgonef, who was not a phrenologist, might be convinced of the absence of ferocious instincts in Ivan, to me, as a phrenologist, the statement was eminently incredible. All the appearances of his manner were such as to confirm his master’s opinion. He was quiet, even tender in his attentions. But the tyrannous influence of ideas and physical impressions cannot be set