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CHAPTER XIII. I CALL AT THE BRITISH LEGATION

Breakfast over, I took a walk through the town. Though in a measure prepared for a scene of unbustling quietude and tranquillity, I must own that the air of repose around, far surpassed all I had imagined. The streets through which I sauntered were grass-grown and untrodden; the shops were but half open; not an equipage, nor even a horseman was to be seen. In the Platz, where a sort of fruit-market was held, a few vendors of grapes, peaches, and melons sat under large crimson umbrellas, but there seemed few purchasers, except a passing schoolboy, carefully scanning the temptations in which he was about to invest his kreutzer.

The most remarkable feature of the place, however, and it is one which, through a certain significance, has always held its place in my memory, was that, go where one would, the palace of the Grand-Duke was sure to finish the view at one extremity of the street. In fact, every alley converged to this one centre, and the royal residence stood like the governor’s chamber in a panopticon jail. There did my mind for many a day picture him sitting like a huge spider watching the incautious insects that permeated his web. I imagined him fat, indolent, and apathetic, but yet, with a jailer’s instincts, ever mindful of every stir and movement of the prisoners below. With a very ordinary telescope he must be master of everything that went on, and the humblest incident could not escape his notice. Was it the consciousness of this surveillance that made every one keep the house? Was it the feeling that the “Gross Herzogliche” eye never left them, that prevented men being abroad in the streets and about their affairs as in other places? I half suspected this, and set to work imagining a state of society thus scanned and scrutinized. But that the general aspect of the town so palpably proclaimed the absence of all trade and industry, I might have compared the whole to a glass hive; but they were all drones that dwelt there, there was not one “busy bee” in the whole of them.

When I rambled thus carelessly along, I came in front of a sort of garden fenced from the street by an iron railing. The laurel and arbutus, and even the oleander, were there, gracefully blending a varied foliage, and contrasting in their luxuriant liberty so pleasantly with the dull uniformity outside. Finding a gate wide open, I strolled in, and gave myself up to the delicious enjoyment of the spot. As I was deliberating whether this was a public garden or not, I found myself before a long, low, villa-like building, with a colonnade in front. Over the entrance was a large shield, which on nearer approach I recognized to contain the arms of England. This, therefore, was the legation, the residence of our minister, Sir Shalley Doubleton. I felt a very British pride and satisfaction to see our representative lodged so splendidly. With all the taxpayer’s sentiment in my heart, I rejoiced to think that he who personated the nation should, in all his belongings, typify the wealth, the style, and the grandeur of England, and in the ardor of this enthusiasm, I hastened back to the inn for the despatch-bag.

Armed with this, and a card, I soon presented myself at the door. On the card I had written, “Mr. Pottinger presents his respectful compliments, and requests his Excellency will favor him with an audience of a few minutes for an explanation.”

I had made up my mind to state that my servant, in removing my smaller luggage from the train, had accidentally carried off this Foreign Office bag, which, though at considerable inconvenience, I had travelled much out of my way to restore in person. I had practised this explanation as I dressed in the morning, I had twice rehearsed it to an orange-tree in the garden, before which I had bowed till my back ached, and I fancied myself perfect in my part. It would, I confess, have been a great relief to me to have had only the slightest knowledge of the great personage before whom I was about to present myself, to have known was he short or tall, young or old, solemn or easy-mannered, had he a loud voice and an imperious tone, or was he of the soft and silky order of his craft. I’d have willingly entertained his “gentleman” at a moderate repast for some information on these points, but there was no time for the inquiry, and so I rang boldly at the bell. The door opened of itself at the summons, and I found myself in a large hall with a plaster cast of the Laocoon, and nothing else. I tried several of the doors on either side, but they were all locked. A very handsome and spacious stair of white marble led up from the middle of the hall; but I hesitated about venturing to ascend this, and once more repaired to the bell outside, and repeated my summons. The loud clang re-echoed through the arched hall, the open door gave a responsive shake, and that was all. No one came; everything was still as before. I was rather chagrined at this. The personal inconvenience was less offensive than the feeling how foreigners would comment on such want of propriety, what censures they would pass on such an ill-arranged household. I rang again, this time with an energy that made the door strike some of the plaster from the wall, and, with a noise like cannon, “What the hangman” – I am translating – “is all this?” cried a voice thick with passion; and, on looking up, I saw a rather elderly man, with a quantity of curly yellow hair, frowning savagely on me from the balcony over the stair. He made no sign of coming down, but gazed sternly at me from his eminence.

“Can I see his Excellency, the Minister?” said I, with dignity.

“Not if you stop down there, not if you continue to ring the bell like an alarm for fire, not if you won’t take the trouble to come upstairs.”

I slowly began the ascent at these words, pondering what sort of a master such a man must needs have. As I gained the top, I found myself in front of a very short, very fat man, dressed in a suit of striped gingham, like an over-plethoric zebra, and wheezing painfully, in part from asthma, in part from agitation. He began again, —

“What the hangman do you mean by such a row? Have you no manners, no education? Where were you brought up that you enter a dwelling-house like a city in storm?”

“Who is this insolent creature that dares to address me in this wise? What ignorant menial can have so far forgotten my rank and his insignificance?”

“I’ll tell you all that presently,” said he; “there ‘s his Excellency’s bell.” And he bustled away, as fast as his unwieldy size would permit, to his master’s room.

I was outraged and indignant There was I, Potts, – no, Pottinger, – Algernon Sydney Pottinger, – on my way to Italy and Greece, turning from my direct road to consign with safety a despatch-bag which many a less conscientious man would have chucked out of his carriage window and forgotten; there I stood to be insulted by a miserable stone-polishing, floor-scrubbing, carpet-twigging Haus-knecht? Was this to be borne? Was it to be endured? Was a man of station, family, and attainments to be the object of such indignity?

Just as I had uttered this speech aloud, a very gentle voice addressed me, saying, —

“Perhaps I can assist you? Will you be good enough to say what you want?”

I started suddenly, looked up, and whom should I see before me but that Miss Herbert, the beautiful girl in deep mourning that I had met at Milford, and who now, in the same pale loveliness, turned on me a look of kind and gentle meaning.

“Do you remember me?” said I, eagerly. “Do you remember the traveller – a pale young man, with a Glengarry cap and a plaid overcoat – who met you at Milford?”

“Perfectly,” said she, with a slight twitch about the mouth like a struggle against a smile. “Will you allow me to repay you now for your politeness then? Do you wish to see his Excellency?”

I ‘m not very sure what it was I replied, but I know well what was passing through my head. If my thoughts could have spoken, it would have been in this wise, —

“Angel of loveliness, I don’t care a brass farthing for his Excellency. It is not a matter of the slightest moment to me if I never set eyes on him. Let me but speak to you, tell you the deep impression you have made upon my heart; how, in my ardor to serve you, I have already been involved in an altercation that might have cost me my life; how I still treasure up the few minutes I passed beside you as the Elysian dream of all my life – ”

“I am certain, sir,” broke she in while I spoke, I repeat, I know not what, – “I am certain, sir, that you never came here to mention all this to his Excellency.”

There was a severe gravity in the way that she said these words that recalled me to myself, but not to any consciousness of what I had been saying; and so, in my utter discomfiture, I blundered out something about the lost despatches and the cause of my coming.

“If you ‘ll wait a moment here,” said she, opening a door into a neatly furnished room, “his Excellency shall hear of your wish to see him.” And before I could answer, she was gone.

I was now alone, but in what wild perplexity and anxiety! How came she here? What could be the meaning of her presence in this place? The Minister was an unmarried man, so much my host had told me. How then reconcile this fact with the presence of one who had left England but a few days ago, as some said, to be a governess or a companion? Oh, the agony of my doubts, the terrible agony of my dire misgivings! What a world of iniquity do we live in, what vice and corruption are ever around us! It was but a year or two ago, I remember, that the “Times” newspaper had exposed the nefarious schemes of a wretch who had deliberately invented a plan to entrap those most unprotected of all females. The adventures of this villain had become part of the police literature of Europe. Young and attractive creatures, induced to come abroad by promises of the most seductive kind, had been robbed by this man of all they possessed, and deserted here and there throughout the Continent. I was so horror-stricken by the terrors my mind had so suddenly conjured up, that I could not acquire the calm and coolness requisite for a process of reasoning. My over-active imagination, as usual, went off with me, clearing obstacles with a sweeping stride, and steeplechasing through fact as though it were only a gallop over grass land.

“Poor girl, well might you look confused and overwhelmed at meeting me! well might the flush of shame have spread over your neck and shoulders, and well might you have hurried away from the presence of one who had known you in the days of your happy innocence!” I am not sure that I did n’t imagine I had been her playfellow in childhood, and that we had been brought up from infancy together. My mind then addressed itself to the practical question, What was to be done? Was I to turn my head away while this iniquity was being enacted? was I to go on my way, forgetting the seeds of that misery whose terrible fruits must one day be a shame and an open ignominy? or was I to arraign this man, great and exalted as he was, and say to him, “Is it thus you represent before the eyes of the foreigner the virtues of that England we boast to be the model of all morality? Is it thus you illustrate the habits of your order? Do you dare to profane what, by the fiction of diplomacy, is called the soil of your country, by a life that you dare not pursue at home? The Parliament shall hear of it; the ‘Times’ shall ring with it; that magnificent institution, the common sense of England, long sick of what is called secret diplomacy, shall learn at last to what uses are applied the wiles and snares of this deceitful craft, its extraordinary and its private missions, its hurried messengers with their bags of corruption – ”

I was well “into my work,” and was going along slappingly, when a very trim footman, in a nankeen jacket, said, —

“If you will come this way, sir, his Excellency will see you.”

He led me through three or four salons handsomely furnished and ornamented with pictures, the most conspicuous of which, in each room, was a life-sized portrait of the same gentleman, though in a different costume, – now in the Windsor uniform, now as a Guardsman, and, lastly, in the full dress of the diplomatic order. I had but time to guess that this must be his Excellency, when the servant announced me and retired.

It is in deep shame that I own that the aspect of the princely apartments, the silence, the implied awe of the footman’s subdued words as he spoke, had so routed all my intentions about calling his Excellency to account that I stood in his presence timid and abashed. It is an ignoble confession wrung out of the very heart of my snobbery, that no sooner did I find myself before that thin, pale, gray-headed man, who in a light silk dressing-gown and slippers sat writing away, than I gave up my brief, and inwardly resigned my place as a counsel for injured innocence.

He never raised his head as I entered, but continued his occupation without noticing me, muttering below his breath the words as they fell from his pen. “Take a seat,” said he, curtly, at last. Perceiving now that he was fully aware of my presence, I sat down without reply. “This bag is late, Mr. Paynter,” said he, blandly, as he laid down his pen and looked me in the face.

“Your Excellency will permit me, in limine, to observe that my name is not Paynter.”

“Possibly, sir,” said he, haughtily; “but you are evidently before me for the first time, or you would know that, like my great colleague and friend, Prince Metternich, I have made it a rule through life never to burden my memory with whatever can be spared it, and of these are the patronymics of all subordinate people; for this reason, sir, and to this end, every cook in my establishment answers to the name of Honoré, my valet is always Pierre, my coach-. man Jacob, my groom is Charles, and all foreign messengers I call Paynter. The original of that appellation is, I fancy, superannuated or dead, but he lives in some twenty successors who carry canvas reticules as well as he.”

“The method may be convenient, sir, but it is scarcely complimentary,” said I, stiffly.

“Very convenient,” said he, complacently. “All consuls I address as Mr. Sloper. You can’t fail to perceive how it saves time, and I rather think that in the end they like it themselves. When did you leave town?”

“I left on Saturday last. I arrived at Dover by the express train, and it was there that the incident befell me by which I have now the honor to stand before your Excellency.”

Instead of bestowing the slightest attention on this exordium of mine, he had resumed his pen and was writing away glibly as before. “Nothing new stirring, when you left?” said he, carelessly.

“Nothing, sir. But to resume my narrative of explanation – ”

“Come to dinner, Paynter; we dine at six,” said he, rising hastily; and, opening a glass door into a conservatory, walked away, leaving me in a mingled state of shame, anger, humiliation, and, I will state, of ludicrous embarrassment, which I have no words to express.

“Dinner! No,” exclaimed I, “if the alternative were a hard crust and a glass of spring water I not if I were to fast till this time to-morrow! Dine with a man who will not condescend to acknowledge even my identity, who will not deign to call me by my name, but only consents to regard me as a pebble on the seashore, a blade of grass in a wide meadow! Dine with him, to be addressed as Mr. Paynter, and to see Pierre, and Jacob, and the rest of them looking on me as one of themselves! By what prescriptive right does this man dare to insult those who, for aught he can tell, are more than his equals in ability? Does the accident – and what other can it be than accident? – of his station confer this privilege? How would he look if one were to retort with his own impertinence? What, for instance, if I were to say, ‘I always call small diplomatists Bluebottles! You ‘ll not be offended if, just for memory’s sake, I address you as Bluebottle, – Mr. Bluebottle, of course’?”

I was in ecstasies at this thought. It seemed to vindicate all my insulted personality, all my outraged and injured identity. “Yes,” said I, “I will dine with him; six o’clock shall see me punctual to the minute, and determined to avenge the whole insulted family of the Paynters. I defy him to assert that the provocation came not from his side. I dare him to show cause why I should be the butt of his humor, any more than he of mine, I will be prepared to make use of his own exact words in repelling my impertinence, and say, ‘Sir, you have exactly embodied my meaning; you have to the letter expressed what this morning I felt on being called Mr. Paynter; you have, besides this, had the opportunity of experiencing the sort of pain such an impertinence inflicts, and you are now in a position to guide you as to how far you will persist in it for the future.’”

I actually revelled in the thought of this reprisal, and longed for the moment to come in which, indolently thrown back in my chair, I should say, “Bluebottle, pass the Madeira,” with some comment on the advantage all the Bluebottles have in getting their wine duty free. Then, with what sarcastic irony I should condole with him over his wearisome, dull career, eternally writing home platitudes for blue-books, making Grotius into bad grammar, and vamping up old Puffendorf for popular reading. “Ain’t you sick of it all, B. B.?” I should say, familiarly; “is not the unreality of the whole thing offensive? Don’t you feel that a despatch is a sort of formula in which Madrid might be inserted for Moscow, and what was said of Naples might be predicated for Norway?” I disputed a long time with myself at what precise period of the entertainment I should unmask my battery and open fire. Should it be in the drawing-room, before dinner? Should it be immediately after the soup, with the first glass of sherry? Ought I to wait till the dessert, and that time when a sort of easy intimacy had been established which might be supposed to prompt candor and frankness? Would it not be in better taste to defer it till the servants had left the room? To expose him to his household seemed scarcely fair.

These were all knotty points, and I revolved them long and carefully, as I came back to my hotel, through the same silent street.

CHAPTER XIV. SHAMEFUL NEGLECT OF A PUBLIC SERVANT

“Don’t keep a place for me at the table d’hôte to-day, Kramm,” said I, in an easy carelessness; “I dine with his Excellency. I could n’t well get off the first day, but tomorrow I promise you to pronounce upon your good cheer.”

I suppose I am not the first man who has derived consequence from the invitation it had cost him misery to accept. How many in this world of snobbery have felt that the one sole recompense for long nights of ennui was the fact that their names figured amongst the distinguished guests in the next day’s “Post”?

“It is not a grand dinner to-day, is it?” asked Kramm.

“No, no, merely a family party; we are very old chums, and have much to talk over.”

“You will then go in plain black, and with nothing but your 'decorations.’”

“I will wear none,” said I, “none; not even a ribbon.” And I turned away to hide the shame and mortification his suggestion had provoked.

Punctually at six o’clock I arrived at the legation; four powdered footmen were in the hall, and a decent-looking personage in black preceded me up the stairs, and opened the double doors into the drawing-room, without, however, announcing me, or paying the slightest attention to my mention of “Mr. Pottinger.”

Laying down his newspaper as I entered, his Excellency came forward with his hand out, and though it was the least imaginable touch, and his bow was grandly ceremonious, his smile was courteous and his manner bland.

“Charmed to find you know the merit of punctuality,” said he. “To the untravelled English, six means seven, or even later. You may serve dinner, Robins. Strange weather we are having,” continued he, turning to me; “cold, raw, and uncongenial.”

We talked “barometer” till, the door opening, the maître d’hôtel announced, “His Excellency is served;” a rather unpolite mode, I thought, of ignoring his company, and which was even more strongly impressed by the fact that he walked in first, leaving me to follow.

At the table a third “cover” was just being speedily removed as we entered, a fact that smote at my heart like a blow. The dinner began, and went on with little said; a faint question from the Minister as to what the dish contained and a whispered reply constituted most of the talk, and an occasional cold recommendation to me to try this or that entrée. It was admirable in all its details, the cookery exquisite, the wines delicious, but there was an oppression in the solemnity of it all that made me sigh repeatedly. Had the butler been serving a high mass, his motions at the sideboard could scarcely have been more reverential.

“If you don’t object to the open air, we ‘ll take our coffee on the terrace,” said his Excellency; and we soon found ourselves on a most charming elevation, surrounded on three sides with orange-trees, the fourth opening a magnificent view over a fine landscape with the Taunus mountains in the distance.

“I can offer you, at least, a good cigar,” said the Minister, as he selected with great care two from a number on a silver plateau before him. “These, I think, you will find recommendable; they are grown for myself at Cuba, and prepared after a receipt only known to one family.”

In all this there was a dignified civility, not at all like the impertinent freedom of his manner in the morning. He never, besides, addressed me as Mr. Paynter; in fact, he did not advert to a name at all, not giving me the slightest pretext for that reprisal I had come so charged with; and, as to opening the campaign myself, I ‘d as soon have commenced acquaintance with a tiger by a pull at his tail. We were now alone; the servants had retired, and there we sat, silently smoking our cigars in apparent ease, but one of us, at least, in a frame of mind the very opposite to tranquillity.

What a rush and conflict of thought was in my head! Why had not she dined with us? Was her position such as that the presence of a stranger became an embarrassment? Good heaven! was I to suppose this, that, and the other? What was there in this man that so imposed on me, that when I wanted to speak I only could sigh, and that I felt his presence like some overpowering spell? It was that calm, self-contained, quiet manner – cold rather than austere, courteous without cordiality – that chilled me to the very marrow of my bones. Lecture him on the private moralities of his life! ask him to render me an account of his actions! address him as Bluebottle! —

“With such tobacco as that, one can drink Bordeaux,” said he. “Help yourself.”

And I did help myself, – freely, repeatedly. I drank for courage, as a man might drink from thirst or fever, or for strength in a moment of fainting debility. The wine was exquisite, and my heart beat more forcibly, and I felt it.

I cannot follow very connectedly the course of events; I neither know how the conversation glided into politics, nor what I said on that subject. As to the steps by which I succeeded in obtaining his Excellency’s confidence, I know as little as a man does of the precise moment in which he is wet through in a Scotch mist. I have a dim memory of talking in a very dictatorial voice, and continually referring to my “entrance into public life,” with reference to what Peel “said,” and what the Duke “told me.”

“What’s the use of writing home?” said his Excellency, in a desponding voice. “For the last five years I have called attention to what is going on here; nobody minds, nobody heeds it. Open any blue-book you like, and will you find one solitary despatch from Hesse-Kalbbratonstadt?”

“I cannot call one to mind.”

“Of course you can’t. Would you believe it, when the Zeringer party went out, and the Schlaffdorfers came in, I was rebuked – actually rebuked – for sending off a special messenger with the news? And then came out a despatch in cipher, which being interpreted contained this stupid doggerel: —

 
“‘Strange that men difference should be
Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee.’
 

“I ask, sir, is it thus the affairs of a great country can be carried on? The efforts of Russia here are incessant: a certain personage – I will mention no names – loves caviare, he likes it fresh, there is a special estaffette established to bring it! I learned, by the most insidious researches, his fondness for English cheese; I lost no time in putting the fact before the cabinet I represented, that while timid men looked tremblingly towards France, the thoughtful politician saw the peril of Hesse-Kalbbratonstadt I urged them to lose no time: ‘The Grand-Duchess has immense influence; countermine her,’ said I, – ‘countermine her with a Stilton;’ and, would you believe it, sir, they have not so much as sent out a Cheddar! What will the people of England say one of these days when they learn, as learn they shall, that at this mission here I am alone; that I have neither secretary nor attaché, paid or unpaid; that since the Crimean War the whole weight of the legation has been thrown upon me: nor is this all; but that a systematic course of treachery – I can’t call it lies – has been adopted to entrap me, if such were possible? My despatches are unreplied to, my questions all unanswered. I stand here with the peace of Europe in my hands, and none to counsel nor advise me. What will you say, sir, to the very last despatch I have received from Downing Street? It runs thus: —

“‘I am instructed by his Lordship to inform you, that he views with indifference your statement of the internal condition of the grand-duchy, but is much struck by your charge for sealing-wax.

“‘I have, sir, &c.’

“This is no longer to be endured. A public servant who has filled some of the most responsible of official stations, – I was eleven years at Tragotà, in the Argentine Republic; I was a chargé at Oohululoo for eight months, the only European who ever survived an autumn there; they then sent me special to Cabanhoe to negotiate the Salt-sprat treaty; after that – ”

Here my senses grew muddy; the gray dim light, the soft influences of a good dinner and a sufficiency of wine, the drowsy tenor of the Minister’s voice, all conspired, and I slept as soundly as if in my bed. My next conscious moment was as his Excellency moved his chair back, and said, —

“I think a cup of tea would be pleasant; let us come into the drawing-room.”