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CHAPTER XLII. A GLIMPSE OF AN OLD FRIEND

If there be anything in our English habits upon which no difference of opinion can exist, it is our proneness to extend to a foreigner a degree of sympathy and an amount of interest that’we obstinately deny to our own people. The English artist struggling all but hopelessly against the town’s indifference has but to displace the consonants or multiply the vowels of his name to be a fashion with it and a success. Strange and incomprehensible tendency in a nation so overwhelmingly impressed with a sense of its own vast superiority! But so it is. Mr. Brady may sing to empty benches, while il Signor Bradini would “bring down the house.” What set me thinking over this was, that though Silvio Pellico was a stock theme for English pity and compassion, I very much doubted if a single tear would fall for the misfortunes of Potts. And yet there was a marvellous similarity in our suffering. In each case was the Austrian the jailer; in each case was the victim a creature of tender mould and gentle nature.

I travelled in a sort of covered cart, with a mounted gendarme at either side of me. Indeed, the one faintly alleviating circumstance of my captivity was the sight of those two heavily equipped giants, armed to the teeth, who were supposed to be essential to my safe conduct. It was such an acknowledgment of what they had to apprehend from my well-known prowess and daring, so palpable a confession that every precaution was necessary against the bold intrepidity of a man of my stamp! At times, I almost wished they had put chains upon me. I thought how well it would read in my Memoirs; how I was heavily “manacled,” – a great word that, – “orders being given to the escort to shoot me if I showed the slightest intention to escape.” It was an intense pleasure to me to imagine myself a sort of Nana Sahib, and whenever we halted at some wayside public, and the idle loungers would draw aside the canvas covering and stare in at me, I did my utmost to call up an expression of ogre-like ferocity and wildness, and it was with a thrill of ecstasy I saw a little child clasp its mother by the neck, and scream out to come away as it beheld me.

On the second night of our Journey we halted at a little village at the foot of the Arlberg, called Steuben, where, in default of a regular prison, they lodged me in an old tower, the lower part of which was used for a stable. It stood in the very centre of the town, and from its narrow and barred windows I could catch glimpses of the little world that moved about in happy freedom beneath me. I could see the Marktplatz, from which the booths were now being taken down, and could mark that preparations for some approaching ceremony were going on, but of what nature I could not guess. A large place was neatly swept out, and at last strewn with sawdust, – signs unerring of some exhibition of legerdemain or conjuring, of which the Tyrolese are warm admirers. The arrangements were somewhat more portentous than are usually observed in open-air representations, for I saw seats prepared for the dignitaries of the village, and an evident design to mark the entertainment as under the most distinguished protection. The crowd – now considerable – observed all the decorous bearing of citizens in presence of their authorities.

I nestled myself snugly in the deep recess of the window to watch the proceedings, nor had I long to wait; some half-dozen gayly dressed individuals having now pierced their way through the throng, and commenced those peculiar gambols which bespeak backbones of gristle and legs of pasteboard. It is a class of performance I enjoy vastly. The two fellows who lap over each other like the links of a chain, and the creature who rolls himself about like a ball, and the licensed freedoms of that man of the world – the clown – never weary me, and I believe I laugh at them with all the more zest that I have so often laughed at them before. It was plain, after a while, that a more brilliant part of the spectacle was yet to come, for a large bluff-looking man, in cocked-hat and jack-boots, now entered the ring and indignantly ejected the clowns by sundry admonitions with a lash-whip, which I perceived were not merely make-believes.

“Ah, here he comes! here he is!” was now uttered in accents of eager interest, and an avenue was quickly made through the crowd for the new performer. There was delay after this; and though doubtless the crowd below could satisfy their curiosity, I was so highly perched and so straitened in my embrasure that I had to wait, with what patience I might, the new arrival. I was deep in my guesses what sort of “artist” he might prove, when I saw the head of a horse peering over the shoulders of the audience, and then the entire figure of the quadruped as he emerged into the circle, all sheeted and shrouded from gaze. With one dexterous sweep the groom removed all the clothing, and there stood before me my own lost treasure, – Blondel himself! I would have known him among ten thousand. He was thinner, perhaps, certainly thinner, but in all other respects the same; his silky mane and his long tassel of a tail hung just as gracefully as of yore, and, as he ambled round, he moved his head with a courteous inclination, as though to acknowledge the plaudits he met with.

There was in his air the dignity that said, “I am one who has seen better days. It was not always thus with me. Applaud if you must, and if you will; but remember that I accept your plaudits with reserve, perhaps even with reluctance.” Poor fellow, my heart bled for him! I felt as though I saw a cathedral canon cutting somersaults, and all this while, by some strange inconsistency, I had not a sympathy to bestow on the human actors in the scene. “As for them,” thought I, “they have accepted this degradation of their own free will. If they had not shirked honest labor, they need never have been clowns or pantaloons; but Blondel – Blondel, whom fate had stamped as the palfrey of some high-born maiden, or, at least, the favorite steed of one who would know how to lavish care on an object of such perfection – Blondel, who had borne himself so proudly in high places, and who, even in his declining fortunes, had been the friend and fellow-traveller of – yes, why should I shame to say it? Posterity will speak of Potts without the detracting malice and envious rancor of contemporaries; and when, in some future age, a great philanthropist or statesman should claim the credit of some marvellous discovery, some wondrous secret by which humanity may be bettered, a learned critic will tell the world how this great invention was evidently known to Potts, how at such a line or such a page we shall find that Potts knew it all.”

The wild cheering of the crowd beneath cut short these speculations, and now I saw Blondel cantering gayly round the circle, with a handkerchief in his mouth. If in sportive levity it chanced to fall, he would instantly wheel about and seize it, and then, whisking his tail and shaking his long forelock, resume his course again. It was fine, too, to mark the haughty indifference he manifested towards that whip-cracking monster who stood in the centre, and affected to direct his motions. Not alone did he reject his suggestions, but in a spirit of round defiance did he canter up behind him, and alight with his forelegs on the fellow’s-shoulders. I am not sure whether the spectators regarded the tableau as I did, but to me it seemed an allegorical representation of man and his master.

The hard breathing of a person close behind me now made me turn my head, and I saw the jailer, who had come with my supper. A thought flashed suddenly across me. “Go down to those mountebanks, and ask if they will sell that cream-colored pony,” said I. “Bargain as though you wanted him for yourself; he is old and of little value, and you may, perhaps, secure him for eighty or ninety florins; and if so, you shall have ten more for your pains. It is a caprice of mine, nothing more, but help me to gratify it.”

He heard me with evident astonishment, and then gravely asked if I had forgotten the circumstance that I was a prisoner, and likely to remain so for some time.

“Do as I bade you,” said I, “and leave the result to me. There, lose no more time about it, for I see the performance is drawing to a close.”

“Nay, nay,” said he; “the best of all is yet to come. The pretty Moorish girl has not yet appeared. Ha! here she is.”

As he spoke, he crept up into the window beside me, not less eager for the spectacle than myself. A vigorous cheer, and a loud clapping of hands below announced that the favorite was in sight long before she was visible to our eyes.

“What can she do?” asked I, peevishly, perhaps, for I was provoked how completely she had eclipsed poor Blondel in public favor. “What can she do? Is she a rope-dancer, or does she ride in the games of the ring?”

“There, there! Look at her; yonder she goes! and there’s the young Prince – they call him a Prince, at least – who follows her everywhere.”

I could not but smile at the poor jailer’s simplicity, and would willingly have explained to him that we have outlived the age of Cinderella. Indeed, I had half turned towards him with this object, when a perfect roar of the crowd beneath me drew off my attention from him to what was going on below. I soon saw what it was that entranced the public: it was the young girl, who now, standing on Blondel’s back, was careering round the circle at full speed. It is an exercise in which neither the horse nor the rider is seen to advantage; the heavy monotonous tramp of the beast, cramped by the narrow limits, becomes a stilty, wooden gallop. The rider, too, more careful of her balance than intent upon graceful action, restricts herself to a few, and by no means picturesque attitudes. With all this, the girl now before me seemed herself so intensely to enter into the enjoyment of the scene, that all her gestures sprang out of a sort of irrepressible delight. Far from unsteadying her foot, or limiting her action, the speed of the horse appeared to assist the changeful bendings of her graceful figure, as now, dropping on one knee, she would lean over to caress him, or now, standing erect, with folded arms and leg advanced, appeared to dare him to displace her. Faultlessly graceful as she was, there was that in her own evident enjoyment that imparted a strange delight to the beholder, and gave to the spectacle the sort of magnetism by which pleasure finds its way from heart to heart throughout a multitude. At least, I suppose this must have been so, for in the joyous cheering of that crowd there was a ring of wild delight far different from mere applause.

At last, poor Blondel, blown and wearied, turned abruptly into the middle of the ring, and with panting sides and shaking tail came to a dead halt. The girl, with a graceful slide seated herself on his back and patted him playfully. And to me this was by far the most graceful movement of the whole.

It was really a picture! and so natural and so easy withal, that one forgot all about her spangles and tinsel, the golden fillet of her hair, and the tawdry fringe of her sandals; and, what was even harder still, heard not the hoarse-mouthed enthusiasm that greeted her. At length, a tall man, well-dressed and of striking appearance, pushed his way into the ring, and politely presented her with a bouquet, at which piece of courtesy the audience, noways jealous, again redoubled their applause. She now looked round her with an air of triumphant pleasure, and while, with a playful gesture, she flung back the ringlets on her neck, she lifted her face full to my view, and it was Tinte-fleck! With all my might I cried out, “Catinka! Catinka!” I know not why, but the impulse never waited to argue the question. Though I screamed my loudest, the great height at which I was placed, and the humming din of the crowd, totally drowned my words. Again and again I tried it, but to no purpose. There she sat, slowly making the round of the circus, while the stranger walked at her side, to all seeming conversing as though no busy and prying multitude stood watching and observing them. Wearied with my failure to attract notice, I turned to address the jailer; but he had already gone, and I was alone. I next endeavored by a signal to call attention to me, and, at last, saw how two or three of the crowd had observed my waving a handkerchief, and were pointing it out to others. Doubtless they wondered how a poor captive could care for the pleasant follies of a life of whose commonest joys he was to be no sharer, and still greater was their astonishment as I flung forth a piece of money, – a gold Napoleon, it was, – which they speedily caught up and gave to Catinka. How I watched her as she took it and showed it to the stranger! He, by his gesture, seemed angry, and made a motion as though asking her to throw it away; and then there seemed some discussion between them, and his petulance increased; and she, too, grew passionate, and, leaping from the horse, strode haughtily across the circus and disappeared. And then arose a tumult and confusion, the mob shouting madly for the Moorish girl to come back, and many much disposed to avenge her absence on the stranger. As for him, he pushed the mob haughtily aside and went his way; and though for a while the crowd continued to vent its expressions of displeasure and disappointment, the performance soon concluded, and all went their several roads homeward; and when I looked out upon the empty Platz, over which the dusky shadows of the old houses were now stealing to mingle together, and instead of the scene of bustle and excitement saw a few lingering townsfolk moody and purposeless, T asked myself if the whole incidents were not a vision mind-drawn and invented. There was not one single clew by which I could trace it to reality.

More than once in my life had my dreamy temperament played me such pranks; and, strangely too, even when I had assured myself of the deception, there would yet linger in my mind thoughts and impressions strong enough to influence my actions, just as we often see that our disbelief in a scandalous story is not sufficient to disabuse us of a certain power it wields over us.

Oh, what a long and dreary night was that, harassed with doubts, and worn out with speculations! My mind had been much weakened by my fever, and whenever I followed a train of thought too long, confusion was sure to ensue. The terror of this chaotic condition, where all people and lands and ideas and incidents jostle against each other in mad turmoil, can only be estimated by one who has felt it. Like the awful rush of sensations of him who is sliding down some steep descent to a tremendous precipice, one feels the gradual approach of that dreamy condition where reason is lost, and the mind a mere waif upon the waters.

“Here ‘s your breakfast,” said the jailer, as he stopped the course of my revery. “And the Brigadier hopes you ‘ll be speedy with it, for you must reach Maltz by nightfall.”

“Tell me,” said I, eagerly, “was there a circus company here yesterday evening? Did they exhibit on the Platz there?”

“You are a deep one, you are!” muttered he, sulkily to himself, and left the cell.

CHAPTER XLIII. I AM CONFINED IN THE AMBRAS SCHLOSS

I bore up admirably on my journey. I felt I was doing a very heroic thing. By my personation of Harpar, I was securing that poor fellow’s escape, and giving him ample time to get over the Austrian frontier, and many a mile away from the beaks of the Double Eagle. I had read of such things in history, and I resolved I would not derogate from the proudest records of such self-devotion. Had I but remembered how long my illness had lasted, I might have easily seen that Harpar could by this time have arrived at Calcutta; but, unfortunately for me, I had no gauge of time whatever, and completely forgot the long interval of my fever.

On reaching Innspruck, I was sent on to an old château some ten miles away, called the Ambras Schloss, and being consigned to the charge of a retired artillery officer there, they seemed to have totally forgotten all about me. I lived with my old jailer just as if I were his friend: we worked together in the garden, pruned, and raked, and hoed, and weeded; we smoked and fished, and mended our nets on wet days, and read, living exactly as might any two people in a remote out-of-the-world spot.

There is a sort of armory at the Ambras, chiefly of old Tyrolese weapons of an early period, – maces and halberds, and double-handed swords, and such-like, – and one of our pastimes was arranging and settling and cataloguing them, for which, in the ancient records of the Schloss, there was ample material. This was an occupation that amused me vastly, and I took to it with great zeal, and with such success that old Hirsch, the jailer, at last consigned the whole to my charge, along with the task of exhibiting the collection to strangers, – a source from which the honest veteran derived the better part of his means of life.

At first, I scarcely liked my function as showman, but, like all my other experiences in life, habit sufficed to reconcile me, and I took to the occupation as though I had been born to it If now and then some rude or vulgar traveller would ruffle my temper by some illiterate remark or stupid question, I was well repaid by intercourse with a different stamp. They were to me such peeps at the world as a monk might have from the windows of his cloister, tempting, perhaps, but always blended with the sense of the security that encompassed him, and defended him from the cares of existence.

Perhaps the consciousness that I could assert my innocence and procure my freedom at any moment, for the first few months reconciled me to this strange life; but certainly, after a while, I ceased to care for any other existence, and never troubled my head either about past or future. I had, in fact, arrived at the great monastic elevation, in which a man, ceasing to be human, reaches the dignity of a vegetable.

I had begun, as I have said, by an act of heroism, in accepting all the penalties of another, and, long after I ceased to revert to this sacrifice, the impulse it had once given still continued to move me. If Hirsch never alluded to my imputed crime to me, I was equally reserved towards him.

CHAPTER XLIV. A VISIT FROM THE HON. GREY BULLER

From time to time, a couple of grave, judicial-looking men would arrive and pass the forenoon at the Ambras Schloss, in reading out certain documents to me. I never paid much attention to them, but my ear at moments would catch the strangest possible allegations as to my exalted political opinions, the dangerous associates I was bound up with, and the secret societies I belonged to. I heard once, too, and by mere accident, how at Steuben I had asked the jailer to procure me a horse, and thrown gold in handfuls from the windows of my prison, to bribe the townsfolk to my rescue, and I laughed to myself to think what a deal of pleading and proof it would take to rebut all these allegations, and how little likely it was I would ever engage in such a conflict.

By long dwelling on the thought of my noble devotion, and how it would read when I was dead and gone, I had extinguished within my heart all desire for other distinction, speculating only on what strange and ingenious theories men would spin for the secret clew to my motives. “True,” they would say, “Potts never cared for Harpar. He was not a man to whom Potts would have attached himself under any circumstances; they were, as individuals, totally unlike and unsympathetic. How, then, explain this extraordinary act of self-sacrifice? Was he prompted by the hope that the iniquities of the Austrian police system would receive their death-blow from his story, and that the mound that covered him in the churchyard would be the altar of Liberty to thousands? Or was Potts one of those enthusiastic creatures only too eager to carry the load of some other pilgrim in life?”

While I used thus to reason and speculate, I little knew that I had become a sort of European notoriety. Some Englishwoman, however, some vagrant tourist, had put me in her book as the half-witted creature who showed the coins and curiosities at Ambras, and mentioned how, for I know not how many years, I was never heard to utter a syllable except on questions of old armor and antiquities. In consequence I was always asked for by my travelling countrymen, and my peculiarities treated with all that playful good taste for which tourists are famous. I remember one day having refused to perform the showman to a British family. I had a headache, or was sulky, or a fit of rebellion had got hold of me, but I sauntered out into the grounds and would not see them. In my walk through a close alley of laurels, I chanced to overhear the stranger conversing with Hirsch, and making myself the subject of his inquiries; and, as I listened, I heard Hirsch say that one entire room of the château was devoted to the papers and documents in my case, and that probably it would occupy a quick reader about twelve months to peruse them. He added, that as I made no application for a trial myself, nor any of my friends showed an inclination to bestir themselves about me, the Government would very probably leave me to live and die where I was. Thereupon the Briton broke out into a worthy fit of indignant eloquence. He denounced the Hapsburgs and praised the Habeas Corpus; he raved of the power of England, our press, our public opinion, our new frigates. He said he would make Europe ring with the case. It was as bad, it was worse than Caspar Hauser’s, for he was an idiot outright, and I appeared to have the enjoyment of certain faculties. He said it should appear in the “Times,” and be mentioned in the House; and as I listened, the strangest glow ran through me, a mild and pleasurable enthusiasm, to think that all the might, majesty, and power of Great Britain was about to interest itself in behalf of Potts!

The Briton kept his word; the time, too, favored him. It was a moment when wandering Englishmen were exhuming grievances throughout every land of Europe; and while one had discovered some case of religious intolerance in Norway, another beat him out of the field with the coldblooded atrocities of Naples. My Englishman chanced to be an M.P., and therefore he asked, “in his place,” if the Foreign Secretary had any information to afford the House with respect to the case of the man called Harper, or Harpar, he was not certain which, and who had been confined for upwards of ten months in a dungeon in Austria, on allegations of which the accused knew nothing whatever, and attested by witnesses with whom he had never been confronted.

In the absence of his chief, the Under-Secretary rose to assure the right honorable gentleman that the case was one which had for a considerable time engaged the attention of the department he belonged to, and that the most unremitting exertions of her Majesty’s envoy at Vienna were now being devoted to obtain the fullest information as to the charges imputed to Harpar, and he hoped in a few days to be able to lay the result of his inquiry on the table of the House.

It was in about a week after this that Hirsch came to tell me that a member of her Majesty’s legation at Vienna had arrived to investigate my case, and interrogate me in person. I am half ashamed to say how vain gloriously I thought of the importance thus lent me. I felt, somehow, as though the nation missed me. Waiting patiently, as it might be, for my return, and yet no tidings coming, they said, “What has become of Potts?” It was clearly a case upon which they would not admit of any mystification or deceit. “No secret tribunals, no hole-and-corner commitments with us! Where is he? Produce him. Say, with what is he charged?” I was going to be the man of the day. I knew it, I felt it; I saw a great tableau of my life unrolling itself before me. Potts, the young enthusiast after virtue, – hopeful, affectionate, confiding, giving his young heart to that fair-haired girl as freely as he would have bestowed a moss-rose; and she, making light of the gift, and with a woman’s coquetry, torturing him by a jealous levity till he resented the wrong, and tore himself away. And then, Catinka, – how I tried the gold of my nature in that crucible, and would not fall in love with her before I had made her worthy of my love; and when I had failed in that, how I had turned from love to friendship, and offered myself the victim for a man I never cared about. No matter; the world will know me at last. Men will recognize the grand stuff that I am made of. If commentators spend years in exploring the recondite passages of great writers, and making out beauties where there were only obscurities, why should not all the dark parts of my nature come out as favorably, and some flattering interpreter say, “Potts was for a long time misconceived; few men were more wrongfully judged by their contemporaries. It was to a mere accident, after all, we owe it that we are now enabled to render him the justice so long denied him. His was one of those remarkable natures in which it is difficult to say whether humility or self-confidence predominated”?

Then I thought of the national excitement to discover the missing Potts; just as if I had been a lost Arctic voyager. Expeditions sent out to track me; all the thousand speculations as to whether I had gone this way or that; where and from whom the latest tidings of me could be traced; the heroic offers of new discoverers to seek me living, or, sad alternative, restore to the country that mourned me the reliquiæ Pottsi, I always grew tender in my moods of self-compassion, and I felt my eyes swimming now in pity for my fate; and let me add in this place my protest against the vulgar error which stigmatizes as selfishness the mere fact of a man’s susceptibility. How, I would simply ask, can he feel for others who has no sense of sympathy with his own suffering nature? If the well of human kindness be dried up within him, how can he give to the parched throats the refreshing waters of compassion?

Deal with the fact how you may, I was very sorry for myself, and seriously doubted if as sincere a mourner would bewail me when I was gone.

If a little time had been given me, I would have endeavored to get up my snug little chamber somewhat more like a prison cell; I would have substituted some straw for my comfortable bed, and gracefully draped a few chains upon the walls and some stray torture implements out of the Armory; but the envoy came like a “thief in the night,” and was already on the stairs when he was announced.

“Oh! this is his den, is it?” cried he from without, as he slowly ascended the stairs. “Egad! he hasn’t much to complain of in the matter of a lodging. I only wish our fellows were as well off at Vienna.” And with these words there entered into my room a tall young fellow, with a light brown moustache, dressed in a loose travelling suit, and with the lounging air of a man sauntering into a café. He did not remove his hat as he came in, or take the cigar from his mouth; the latter circumstance imparting a certain confusion to his speech that made him occasionally scarce intelligible. Only deigning to bestow a passing look on me, he moved towards the window, and looked out on the grand panorama of the Tyrol Alps, as they enclose the valley of Innspruck.

“Well,” said he to himself, “all this ain’t so bad for a dungeon.”

The tone startled me. I looked again at him, I rallied myself to an effort of memory, and at once recalled the young fellow I had met on the South-Western line and from whom I had accidentally carried away the despatch-bag. To my beard, and my long imprisonment, I trusted for not being recognized, and I sat patiently awaiting my examination.

“An Englishman, I suppose?” asked he, turning hastily round. “And of English parents?”

“Yes,” was my reply, for I determined on brevity wherever possible.

“What brought you into this scrape? – I mean, why did you come here at all?”

“I was travelling.”

“Travelling? Stuff and nonsense! Why should fellows like you travel? What’s your rank in life?”

“A gentleman.”

“Ah! but whose gentleman, my worthy friend? Ain’t you a flunkey? There, it’s out! I say, have you got a match to light my cigar? Thanks, – all right. Look here, now, – don’t let us be beating about the bush all the day, – I believe this government is just as sick of you as you are of them. You ‘ve been here two months, ain’t it so?”

“Ten months and upwards.”

“Well, ten months. And you want to get away?”

I made no answer; indeed, his free-and-easy manner so disconcerted me that I could not speak, and he went on, —

“I suspect they have n’t got much against you, or that they don’t care about it; and, besides, they are civil to us just now. At all events, it can be done, – you understand? – it can be done.”

“Indeed,” said I, half superciliously.

“Yes,” resumed he, “I think so; not but you’d have managed better in leaving the thing to us, That stupid notion you all have of writing letters to newspapers and getting some troublesome fellow to ask questions in the House, that’s what spoils everything! How can we negotiate when the whole story is in the ‘Times’ or the ‘Daily News’?”

“I opine, sir, that you are ascribing to me an activity and energy I have no claim to.”

“Well, if you did n’t write those letters, somebody else did. I don’t care a rush for the difference. You see, here’s how the matter stands. This Mr. Brigges, or Rigges, has gone off, and does n’t care to prosecute, and all his allegations against you fall to the ground. Well, these people fancy they could carry on the thing themselves, you understand; we think not. They say they have got a strong case; perhaps they have; but we ask, 'What’s the use of it? Sending the poor beggar to Spielberg won’t save you, will it?’ And so we put it to them this way: ‘Draw stakes, let him off, and both can cry quits.’ There, give me another light Isn’t that the common-sense view of it?”