The Twins of Table Mountain, and Other Stories Part 19

Here were facts quite to Mr. Clinch's sceptical mind. He forgot himself and his surroundings.

"And that story of the Drachenfels?" he asked insinuatingly,--"the dragon, you know. Was he too--"

The baron grinned. "A boar transformed by the drunken brains of the Bauers of the Siebengebirge. Ach Gott! Ottefried had many a hearty laugh over it; and it did him, as thou knowest, good service with the nervous mother of the silly maiden."

"And the seven sisters of Schonberg?" asked Mr. Clinch persuasively.

"'Schonberg! Seven sisters!' What of them?" demanded the baron sharply.

"Why, you know,--the maidens who were so coy to their suitors, and--don't you remember?--jumped into the Rhine to avoid them."

"'Coy? Jumped into the Rhine to avoid suitors'?" roared the baron, purple with rage. "Hark ye, nephew! I like not this jesting. Thou knowest I married one of the Schonberg girls, as did thy father. How 'coy' they were is neither here nor there; but mayhap WE might tell another story. Thy father, as weak a fellow as thou art where a petticoat is concerned, could not as a gentleman do other than he did.

And THIS is his reward? Ach Gott! 'Coy!' And THIS, I warrant, is the way the story is delivered in Paris."

Mr. Clinch would have answered that this was the way he read it in a guidebook, but checked himself at the hopelessness of the explanation.

Besides, he was on the eve of historic information; he was, as it were, interviewing the past; and, whether he would ever be able to profit by the opportunity or not, he could not bear to lose it. "And how about the Lorelei--is she, too, a fiction?" he asked glibly.

"It was said," observed the baron sardonically, "that when thou disappeared with the gamekeeper's daughter at Oberca.s.sel--Heaven knows where!--thou wast swallowed up in a whirlpool with some creature. Ach Gott! I believe it! But a truce to this balderdash. And so thou wantest to know of the 'coy' sisters of Schoenberg? Hark ye, Jann, that cousin of thine is a Schonberg. Call you her 'coy'? Did I not see thy greeting?

Eh? By St. Adolph, knowing thee as she does to be robber and thief, call you her greeting 'coy'?"

Furious as Mr. Clinch inwardly became under these epithets, he felt that his explanation would hardly relieve the maiden from deceit, or himself from weakness. But out of his very perplexity and turmoil a bright idea was born. He turned to the baron,--

"Then you have no faith in the Rhine legends?"

The baron only replied with a contemptuous shrug of his shoulders.

"But what if I told you a new one?"

"You?"

"Yes; a part of my experience?"

The baron was curious. It was early in the afternoon, just after dinner.

He might be worse bored.

"I've only one condition," added Mr. Clinch: "the young lady--I mean, of course, my cousin--must hear it too."

"Oh, ay! I see. Of course--the old trick! Well, call the jade. But mark ye, Sir Nephew, no enchanted maidens and knights. Keep to thyself. Be as thou art, vagabond Jann Kolnische, knight of the road.--What ho there, scoundrels! Call the Lady Wilhemina."

It was the first time Mr. Clinch had heard his fair friend's name; but it was not, evidently, the first time she had seen him, as the very decided wink the gentle maiden dropped him testified. Nevertheless, with hands lightly clasped together, and downcast eyes, she stood before them.

Mr. Clinch began. Without heeding the baron's scornful grin, he graphically described his meeting, two years before, with a Lorelei, her usual pressing invitation, and his subsequent plunge into the Rhine.

"I am free to confess," added Mr. Clinch, with an affecting glance to Wilhelmina, "that I was not enamoured of the graces of the lady, but was actuated by my desire to travel, and explore hitherto unknown regions. I wished to travel, to visit--"

"Paris," interrupted the baron sarcastically.

"America," continued Mr. Clinch.

"What?"--"America."

"'Tis a gnome-like sounding name, this Meriker. Go on, nephew: tell us of Meriker."

With the characteristic fluency of his nation, Mr. Clinch described his landing on those enchanted sh.o.r.es, viz, the Rhine Whirlpool and h.e.l.l Gate, East River, New York. He described the railways, tram-ways, telegraphs, hotels, phonograph, and telephone. An occasional oath broke from the baron, but he listened attentively; and in a few moments Mr.

Clinch had the raconteur's satisfaction of seeing the vast hall slowly filling with open-eyed and open-mouthed retainers hanging upon his words. Mr. Clinch went on to describe his astonishment at meeting on these very sh.o.r.es some of his own blood and kin. "In fact," said Mr.

Clinch, "here were a race calling themselves 'Clinch,' but all claiming to have descended from Kolnische."

"And how?" sneered the baron.

"Through James Kolnische and Wilhelmina his wife," returned Mr. Clinch boldly. "They emigrated from Koln and Crefeld to Philadelphia, where there is a quarter named Crefeld." Mr. Clinch felt himself shaky as to his chronology, but wisely remembered that it was a chronology of the future to his hearers, and they could not detect an anachronism. With his eyes fixed upon those of the gentle Wilhelmina, Mr. Clinch now proceeded to describe his return to his fatherland, but his astonishment at finding the very face of the country changed, and a city standing on those fields he had played in as a boy; and how he had wandered hopelessly on, until he at last sat wearily down in a humble cottage built upon the ruins of a lordly castle. "So utterly travel-worn and weak had I become," said Mr. Clinch, with adroitly simulated pathos, "that a single gla.s.s of wine offered me by the simple cottage maiden affected me like a prolonged debauch."

A long-drawn snore was all that followed this affecting climax. The baron was asleep; the retainers were also asleep. Only one pair of eyes remained open,--arch, luminous, blue,--Wilhelmina's.

"There is a subterranean pa.s.sage below us to Linn. Let us fly!" she whispered.

"But why?"

"They always do it in the legends," she murmured modestly.

"But your father?"

"He sleeps. Do you not hear him?"

Certainly somebody was snoring. But, oddly enough, it seemed to be Wilhelmina. Mr. Clinch suggested this to her.

"Fool, it is yourself!"

Mr. Clinch, struck with the idea, stopped to consider. She was right. It certainly WAS himself.

With a struggle he awoke. The sun was s.h.i.+ning. The maiden was looking at him. But the castle--the castle was gone!

"You have slept well," said the maiden archly. "Everybody does after dinner at Sammtstadt. Father has just awakened, and is coming."

Mr. Clinch stared at the maiden, at the terrace, at the sky, at the distant chimneys of Sammtstadt, at the more distant Rhine, at the table before him, and finally at the empty gla.s.s. The maiden smiled. "Tell me," said Mr. Clinch, looking in her eyes, "is there a secret pa.s.sage underground between this place and the Castle of Linn?"

"An underground pa.s.sage?"

"Ay--whence the daughter of the house fled with a stranger knight."

"They say there is," said the maiden, with a gentle blush.

"Can you show it to me?"

She hesitated. "Papa is coming: I'll ask him."

I presume she did. At least the Herr Consul at Sammtstadt informs me of a marriage-certificate issued to one Clinch of Chicago, and Kolnische of Koln; and there is an amusing story extant in the Verein at Sammtstadt, of an American connoisseur of Rhine wines, who mistook a flask of Cognac and rock-candy, used for "craftily qualifying" lower grades of wine to the American standard, for the rarest Rudesheimerberg.