A Day's Ride Part 46

"Now for your pa.s.sport. Let me see it," said the corporal again.

"Just so," said he, folding it up. "Travelling on foot, and marked 'suspected.'"

Though he muttered these words to his companion, I perceived that he cared very little for my having overheard them.

"Suspected of what, or by whom?" asked I, angrily.

Instead of paying any attention to my question, the two men now conversed together in a low tone and confidentially.

"Come," said I, with an a.s.sumed boldness, "if you have quite done with that pa.s.sport of mine, give it to me, and let me pursue my journey."

So eager were they in their own converse, that this speech, too, was unheeded; and now, grown rasher by impunity and impatience, I stepped stoutly forward, and attempted to take the pa.s.sport from the soldier's hand.

"Sturm und Gewitter!" swore out the fellow, while he struck me sharply on the wrist, "do you mean to try force with us?" And the other drew his sabre, and, flouris.h.i.+ng it over his head, held the point of it within a few inches of my chest.

I cannot imagine whence came the courage that now filled my heart, for I know I am not naturally brave, but I felt for an instant that I could have stormed a breach; and, with an insulting laugh, I said, "Oh, of course, cut me down. I am unarmed and defenceless. It is an admirable opportunity for the display of Austrian chivalry."

"Bey'm Henker! It's very hard not to slice off his ear," said the soldier, seeming to ask leave for this act of valor.

"Get out your cords," said the corporal; "we 're losing too much time here."

"Am I a prisoner, then?" asked I, in some trepidation.

"L suspect you are, and likely to be for some time to come," was the gruff answer.

"On what charge--what is alleged against me?" cried I, pa.s.sionately.

"What has sent many a better-looking fellow to Spielberg," was the haughty rejoinder.

"If I _am_ your prisoner," said I, haughtily,--"and I warn you at once of your peril in daring to arrest a British subject travelling peacefully--You are not going to tie my hands! You are not going to treat me as a felon?" I screamed out these words in a voice of wildest pa.s.sion, as the soldier, who had dismounted for the purpose, was now proceeding to tie my wrists together with a stout cord, and in a manner that displayed very little concern for the pain he occasioned me.

As escape was totally out of the question, I threw myself upon the last resource of the injured. I fell back upon eloquence. I really wish I could remember even faintly the outline of my discourse; for though not by any means a fluent German, the indignation that makes men poets converted me into a greater master of prose, and I told them a vast number of curious, but not complimentary, traits of the land they belonged to. I gave, too, a rapid historical sketch of their campaigns against the French, showing how they were always beaten, the only novelty being whether they ran away or capitulated. I reminded them that the victory over _me_ would resound through Europe, being the only successful achievement of their arms for the last half-century. I expressed a fervent hope that the corporal would be decorated with the "Maria Theresa," and his companion obtain the "valor medal," for what they had done. Pensions, I hinted, were difficult in the present state of their finances, but rank and honor certainly ought to await them.

I don't know at what exact period of my peroration it was that I was literally "pulled up," each of the hors.e.m.e.n holding a line fastened to my wrists, and giving me a drag forward that nearly carried me off my feet, and flat on my face. I stumbled, but recovered myself; and now saw that, bound as I was, with a gendarme on each side of me, it required all the activity I could muster, to keep my legs.

Another whispered conversation here took place across me, and I thought I heard the words Bregenz and Feldkirch interchanged, giving me to surmise that they were discussing to which place they should repair.

My faint hope of returning to the former town was, however, soon extinguished, as the corporal, turning to me, said, "Our orders are to bring you alive to headquarters. We 'll do our best; but if, in crossing these torrents, you prefer to be drowned, it's no fault of ours."

"Do you mean by that," cried I, "that I am to be dragged through the water in this fas.h.i.+on?"

"I mean that you are to come along as best you may."

"It is all worthy of you, quite worthy!" screamed I, in a voice of wildest rage. "You reserve all your bravery for those who cannot resist you,--and you are right, for they are your only successes. The Turks beat you"--here they chucked me close up, and dashed into the stream.

"The Prussians beat you!" I was now up to my waist in water. "The Swiss beat you!" Down I went over head and ears. "The French always--thrashed you"--down again--"at Ulm--Auster--litz--Aspern"--nearly suffocated, I yelled out, "Wagrara!"--and down I went, never to know any further consciousness till I felt myself lying on the soaked and muddy road, and heard a gruff voice saying, "Come along--we don't intend to pa.s.s the night here!"

CHAPTER XLI. THE ACT OF ACCUSATION

Benumbed, bedraggled, and bewildered, I entered Feldkirch late at night, my wrists cut with the cords, my clothes torn by frequent falls, my limbs aching with bruises, and my wet rags chafing my skin. No wonder was it that I was at once consigned from the charge of a jailer to the care of a doctor, and ere the day broke I was in a raging fever.

I would not, if I could, preserve any memory of that grievous interval.

Happily for me, no clear traces remain on my mind,--pangs of suffering are so mingled with little details of the locality, faces, words, ludicrous images of a wandering intellect, long hours of silent brooding, sound of church bells, and such other tokens as cross the lives of busy men in the daily walk of life, all came and went within my brain, and still I lay there in fever.

In my first return of consciousness, I perceived I was the sole occupant of a long arched gallery, with a number of beds arranged along each side of it. In their uniform simplicity, and the severe air of the few articles of furniture, my old experiences at once recalled the hospital; not that I arrived at this conclusion without much labor and a considerable mental effort. It was a short journey, to be sure, but I was walking with sprained ankles. It was, however, a great joy and a great triumph to me to accomplish even this much. It was the recognition to myself that I was once more on the road to health, and again to feel the sympathies that make a brotherhood of this life of ours; and so happy was I with the prospect, that when I went to sleep at night my last thought was of the pleasure that morning would bring me. And I was not disappointed; the next day, and the next, and several more that followed, were all pa.s.sed in a calm and tranquil enjoyment Looking back upon this period, I have often been disposed to imagine that when we lie in the convalescence that follows some severe illness, with no demands upon our bodily strength, no call made upon our muscular energies, the very activity of digestion not evoked, as our nourishment is of the simplest and lightest, our brain must of necessity exercise its functions more freely, untrammelled by pa.s.sing cares or the worries incident to daily life, and that at such times our intellect has probably a more uncontested action than at any other period of our existence. I do not want to pursue my theory, or endeavor to sustain it; my reader has here enough to induce him to join his experience to my own, or reject the notion altogether.

I lay thus, not impatiently, for above a fortnight. I regained strength very slowly; the least effort or exertion was sure to overcome me. But I wished for none; and as I lay there, gazing for whole days long at a great coat-of-arms over the end of the gallery, where a huge double-headed eagle seemed to me screaming in the agony of strangulation, but yet never to be choked outright, I revelled in many a strange rambling as to the fate of the land of which it was the emblem and the s.h.i.+eld. Doubtless some remnant of my pa.s.sionate a.s.sault on Austria lingered in my brain, and gave this turn to its operations.

My nurse was one of that sisterhood whose charities call down many a blessing on the Church that organizes their benevolences. She was what is called a _graue Schwester_; and of a truth she seemed the incarnation of grayness. It was not her dress alone, but her face and hands, her noiseless gait, her undemonstrative stare, her half-husky whisper, and her monotonous ways, had all a sort of pervading grayness that enveloped her, just as a cloud mist wraps a landscape. There was, besides, a kind of fog-like indistinctness in her few and muttered words that made a fitting atmosphere of drowsy uniformity for the sick-room.

Her first care, on my recovery, was to supply me with a number of little religious books,--lives of saints and martyrs, accounts of miracles, and narratives of holy pilgrimages,--and I devoured them with all the zest of a devotee. They seemed to supply the very excitement my mind craved for, and the good soul little suspected how much more she was ministering to a love for the marvellous than to a spirit of piety. In the "Flowers of St. Francis," for instance, I found an adventure-seeker after my own heart To be sure, his search was after sinners in need of a helping hand to rescue them; but as his contests with Satan were described as stand-up encounters, with very hard knocks on each side, they were just as exciting combats to read of, as any I had ever perused in stories of chivalry.

Mistaking my zest for these readings for something far more praiseworthy, "the gray sister" enjoined me very seriously to turn from the evil advisers I had formerly consorted with, and frequent the society of better-minded and wiser men. Out of these counsels, dark and dim at first, but gradually growing clearer, I learned that I was regarded as a member of some terrible secret society, banded together for the direst and blackest of objects; the subversion of thrones, overthrow of dynasties, and a.s.sa.s.sination of sovereigns being all labors of love to us. She had a full catalogue of my colleagues, from Sand, who killed Kotzebue, to Orsini, and seemed thoroughly persuaded that I was a very advanced member of the order. It was only after a long time, and with great address on my part, that I obtained these revelations from her, and she owned that nothing but witnessing how the holy studies had influenced me would ever have induced her to make these avowals. As my convalescence progressed, and I was able to sit up for an hour or so in the day, she told me that I might very soon expect a visit from the Staats Procurator, a kind of district attorney-general, to examine me.

So little able was I to carry my mind back to the bygone events of my life, that I heard this as a sort of vague hope that the inquiry would strike out some clew by which I could connect myself with the past, for I was sorely puzzled to learn what and who I had been before I came there. Was I a prosecutor or was I a prisoner? Never was a knotty point more patiently investigated, but, alas! most hopelessly. The intense interest of the inquiry, however, served totally to withdraw me from my previous readings, and "the gray sister" was shocked to see the mark in my book remain for days long unchanged. She took courage at length to address me on the subject, and even went so far as to ask if Satan himself had not taken occasional opportunity of her absence to come and sit beside my bed? I eagerly caught at the suggestion, and said it was as she suspected: that he never gave me a moment's peace, now torturing me with menaces, now asking for explanations, how this could be reconciled with that, and why such a thing should not have prevented such another?

Instead of expressing any astonishment at my confession, she appeared to regard it as one of the most ordinary incidents, and referred me to my books, and especially to St Francis, to see that these were usual and every-day snares in use. She went further, and in her zeal actually showed a sort of contempt for the Evil One in his intellectual capacity that startled me; showing how St Jude always got the better of him, and that he was a mere child when opposed by the craft of St. Anthony of Pavia.

"It is the truth," said she, "always conquers him. Whenever, by any chance, he can catch you concealing or evading, trying to make out reasons that are inconsistent, or affecting intentions that you had not, then he is your master."

There was such an air of matter-of fact about all she said, that when--our first conversation on this theme over--she left the room, a cold sweat broke over me at the thought that my next visitor would be the "Lebendige Satan" himself.

It had come to this: that I had furnished my own mind with such a subject of terror that I could not endure to be alone, and lay there trembling at every noise, and shrinking at every shadow that crossed the floor. Many and many times, as the dupe of my own deceivings, did I find myself talking aloud in self-defence, averring that I wanted to be good and honest and faithful, and that whenever I lapsed from the right path, it was in moments of erring reason, sure to be followed after by sincere repentance.

It was after an access of this kind "the gray sister" found me one morning, bathed in cold perspiration, my eyes fixed, my lips livid, and my fingers fast knotted together.

"I see," said she, "he has given you a severe turn of it to-day. What was the temptation?"

For a long while I refused to answer; I was weak as well as irritable, and I desired peace; but she persisted, and pressed hard to know what subject we had been discussing together.

"I'll tell you, then," said I, fiercely, for a sudden thought, prompted perhaps by a sense of anger, flashed across me: "he has just told me that you are his sister."

She screamed out wildly, and rus.h.i.+ng to the end of the gallery, threw herself at the foot of a little altar.

Satisfied with my vengeance, I lay back, and said no more. I may have dropped into a half-slumber afterwards, for I remember nothing till, just as evening began to fall, one of the servants came up and placed a table and two chairs beside my bed, with writing-materials and a large book, and shortly after, two men dressed in black, and with square black caps on their heads, took their places at the table, and conversed together in low whispers. Resolving to treat them with a show of complete indifference, I turned away and pretended to go to sleep.

"The Herr Staats Procurator Schla.s.sel has come to read the act of accusation," said the shorter man, who seemed a subordinate; "take care that you pay proper respect to the law and the authorities."

"Let him read away," said I, with a wave of my hand; "I will listen."

In a low, sing-song, dreary tone, he began to recite the t.i.tles and dignities of the Emperor. I listened for a while; but as he got down to the Banat and Herzegovine, sleep overcame me, and I dozed away, waking up to hear him detailing what seemed his own greatness, how he was "Ober" this, and "Unter" that, till I fairly lost myself in the maze of his description. Judging from the monotonous, business-like persistence of his manner, that he had a long road before him, I wrapped myself comfortably in the bedclothes, closed my eyes, and soon slept.

There were two candles burning on the table when I next opened my eyes, and my friend the procurator was reading away as before. I tried to interest myself for a second or two; I rubbed my eyes, and endeavored to be wakeful; but I could not, and was fast settling down into my former state, when certain words struck on my ear and aroused me:

"The well-born Herr von Rigges further denounces the prisoner Harpar--"

"Read that again," cried I, aloud, "for I cannot clearly follow what you say."

"'The well-born Herr von Rigges, '" repeated he, "'further denounces the prisoner Harpar as one of a sect banded together for the darkest purposes of revolution!'"

"Forgive my importunity, Herr Procurator," said I, in my most insinuating tone, "but in compa.s.sion for the weakness of faculties sorely tried by fever, will you tell me who is Rigges?"