Chapter XXII The Cabinet Noir
“Good even, sir,
But what, in faith, make you from Wittenberg?”
(Hamlet).
Night had completely fallen. A full moon was forging up the sky, like some superb ship beating up the wind, all sail spread and defying the tumultuous seas of cloud, when the comrades emerged from the woodland and halted before the inn.
“The Three Ways,” for a poor roadside house, held unwontedly merry company to-night, to judge by the medley of shout and song that rang out from its upper windows.
The fiddler, mounting the steps that led to the door, gave a few knocks with special emphasis. To this there was no response. Laughing silently, he waited awhile, then suddenly betook himself to his violin, at its highest pitch. Too much engrossed with their own music, unhearing, perhaps, through the rolling of the wind, the first-floor revellers paid no heed to knocks or notes; but below there was immediate stirring. The bolts screeched under a hasty hand.
“Ach! you, Geiger-Onkel!” cried the hostess, as she stood revealed on the threshold. “You will have your joke!... We thought it was the police commissary’s rap! Ah, heavens, what times these are! One’s heart is in one’s throat all day, all night.”
She clasped her hands upon her flat bosom, but suddenly catching sight of the rider, forgot to pant that she might the better stare.
“’Tis but a new brother of mine,” said the fiddler, carelessly. “Send the kerl for his horse.—So you have some of the boys here? Well, I bring news for them. Come, comrade, you must be weary.”
In the kitchen, amid otherwise pleasing surroundings, their nostrils were offended by an extraordinary reek of stale wine, presently traceable, it seemed, to a postilion in dilapidated uniform, who was ensconced within the glow of the hearth.
The man’s high collar and braided jacket were open for the freer intercourse of throat and can; he winked impudently at Geiger-Hans, and had a truculent roll of the eyes for Steven.
“Interception of the King’s mail—lèse majesté—crime of the first category—punishment capital,” observed he, with some pride, in answer to the young man’s astonished look.
“The punishment includes all accessory to the act,” suggested Geiger-Hans, pleasantly.
“Not the victim of coercion,” stated the postilion, with indifference.
He turned his tankard upside down as a hint to the hostess. She, poor thing, seemed to regard these doings as a hare may the trap that clutches her pad.
“The gentlemen are upstairs,” she said, and wiped the dampness from her lip with the corner of her apron.
The gentlemen upstairs continued to make their presence uproariously patent.
“The Brotherhood are apparently having a little argument,” quoth Geiger-Hans, with a slight smile.
“For heaven’s sake, Onkel, go up and quiet them, if you can! We shall have the patrol upon us!” groaned the hostess.
“Now, comrade,” said the fiddler to Steven, one foot upon the narrow stairs, “I will now introduce you into nobler company than ever! I have made you known to one of the newest kings and to one of the oldest Burgraves in the land. To-night you shall become acquainted with the offspring of a nation in chains—heroes, my little count, no less. Patriots of the first water!”
Count Kielmansegg was conscious that the corners of his highborn lips drooped. The patriotism of Westphalia—convulsions of a tin kettle on a mere corner of the vast Napoleonic fire, pot-house heroes that roared their enthusiasm into the night to the clink of the can.... Bah!
There was a twinkle in the musician’s eye that mocked his words. He went nimbly up the stair, and his companion followed with the heavy foot of fatigue.
A drunken shout greeted the entrance of Geiger-Hans. Steven stood on the threshold, his lip curling into ever more open scorn at the sight which greeted them: three dishevelled youths, in different humours of intoxication, extravagantly costumed according to the taste of the militant Studiosus: tunics of velvet, shabby but much befrogged; jack-boots, gigantic spurs that had, doubtless, never pressed horse’s sides; poetically open collars; uncut hair; tobacco-pouch and rapier on belt; china pipes in hand, six feet long, tasselled with Fatherland colours. A squat individual, exuberantly bearded, sprawled at the head of the table and was expostulating with vehemence. He had embraced the can of wine and was defending it with drawn spadroon against the other two, who—the one with uproarious laughter, the other with tipsy solemnity—were making futile attempts to wrest it from his possession. The table was strewn with letters and papers.
No sooner did this same hirsute Bursch perceive Geiger-Hans than he abandoned both sword and can and, staggering to his feet, opened wide his arms.
“Welcome, brother—master—friend!” exclaimed he, dithyrambically.
“Salve!” then cried the laughing student, pounced upon the abandoned can and buried his impertinent sandy face in its depths. Whereupon the melancholy third, whose long black hair fell about a cadaverous countenance, sank into his chair.
“Vilis est hominis natura,” lamented he; then suddenly broke into the vernacular and shook his fist at the drinker: “Thou rag!”
“Salve, fratres!” responded the fiddler, by no means surprised, it seemed, at his reception, but neatly avoiding the threatened embrace. “How beautiful it is,” he went on, “thus to see the saviours of their country at work upon her interests, even when the rest of the world sleeps!” He pointed to the letters as he spoke.
An inflamed but exceedingly alert eye was here fixed upon Steven over the rim of the can.
“Prudentia!” cried the drinker, flung down the vessel and ran forward, “a stranger among us!”
With a bellow the bearded one lurched for his weapon.
“A stranger?... Pix intrantibus!”
The weeper profited of the excitement to seize, in his turn, upon the abandoned vessel.
“Nay,” said Geiger-Hans, arresting the double onslaught with outstretched arms. “Pax intrantibus be it: we are friends!”
Steven stood in the doorway, sneering. He would have found a pungent satisfaction in laying flat the drunken couple—and no doubt, with the science cultivated in Jackson’s London rooms, would, despite his wound, easily have put the thought into execution. He made a movement forward. But the fiddler held him at arm’s length.
“Peace, brother Peter—peace, most learned doctor in herbâ. I bring a friend, I say, a new brother, my comrade, a noble Austrian who, by the way, is half an Englishman, and as bitter a foe to the tyrant as your most Germanic selves. I introduce:—Count Waldorff-Kielmansegg—Herr Paul Oster, ‘Mossy-Head,’ emeritus swordsman, Senior of the Great Westphalic conspiracy. Behold, count, the true German garb, the type of manly beauty! Behold this Barbarossa head! Behold the sword, in short (if I may so express myself), of a great patriotic movement. And here,” turning with a fresh gesture of ceremony, “we have the brain, the tongue, the acute eye: in other words, Herr Theophilus Schmeling, legal doctor, jurist, fresh from all his honours at Goettingen—and the third...?” He looked interrogation at the black-haired student.
The jurist, surprisingly alive to the situation, answered briskly for his melancholy comrade, who was still absorbed and absorbing:
“Johannis Stempel, Sanctæ Theologiæ Studiosus. An ‘Ancient House,’ also a faithful heart—a good labourer in the vineyard—but,” he added chuckling, “apt to be weinerisch im Wein, whiny over the wine.”
He perpetrated his atrocious quip with a wink of little red eyes.
Count Waldorff-Kielmansegg found some pleasure in bowing three times with ironical ceremony.
But Geiger-Hans took up the tale again with a dry disregard of any possibility of humour.
“Here we are, I repeat, in the heart of a great conspiracy... and not one of us but risks his neck by so much as merely looking on! The Sword, the Law, the Church. ’Tis a conspiracy well headed!”
As he waved his hand, Steven’s eyes were directed towards the table, and he suddenly realized that the papers lying in such disorder were the contents of the mail-bag that hung on the arm of the theologian’s chair. His thoughts went back to the dilapidated courier downstairs: “Crime of the first category,” had said that official.
“Bah!” cried the Jurist, “Jerome does not kill; he but fleeces his little flock, as all the world knows.”
“Your pardon, doctor,” retorted the fiddler, with a fine inciseness in his tone. “The most paternal government makes an example now and again. And the head of one Carl Schill is this moment affixed, minus its body, on the toll-gate of Helmstadt. But reassure yourselves, the odious French invention of Dr. Guillotin has not yet superseded your old Germanic square-sword; your heads would be hacked off in the true heroic style. ’Tis a consolation.”
“Augh!” groaned Barbarossa, and sank into his seat at the head of the table, clasping his middle as if a sober sickness had fallen upon him. His very beard seemed to turn pale. But presently it flamed again with a revulsion of anger:
“What the hangman! How is one to manage these fools? They sit, and soak, and sop, and suck, and enough to snick twenty necks on the table before them. I told them so, just now, when I wished to put the wine away.”
“The can is empty,” here intoned the theologic Studiosus, after the manner of one giving out a psalm. “Nunc est bibendum—Aut bibe aut abi!”
From behind his beard the Senior growled like a dog. But the Jurist intervened.
“Content ye,” he said softly. “I’ll to the letters; and here’s a cool head will help me. Will you not, Geiger-Hans—good Geiger-Hans? And we shall but crack a bottle between us, just to clear our brains. Shall we not, musician of my heart?”
“Yes; aut bibe aut abi—sauf oder lauf—drink or slink,” chanted the divine, afresh.
“Doctorlein,” said the musician, suavely, “I am with you. And the devil’s own head you must have,” he pursued, looking at the Jurist with a kind of admiration; “for I’ll be sworn you’ve drunk as much as the other two put together—but I pray you, a word first: wherefore the King’s mail?”
“Your question is reasonable,” responded the other with renewed verbosity. “Providus, homo sagax.... The defendant’s request is allowable, worthy Senior.... Are you defendant, by the way, or pursuer?”
“Accomplice,” said the fiddler, sitting down and gathering a sheaf of letters into his hand. “To the point again, brother: why the King’s mail?”
“Two warrants, we are informed, are out against the Brotherhood. And here”—the student slapped his greasy tunic—“you behold equity contravening judgments: legal sagacity tripping up edicts; the true principle—for if your lawyer is not the antidote to the law, what is he? Answer me that! Ah, here comes the wine! No more cans, but bottles! Our landlady knows how to treat gentlemen. Nay, nay, Pastorlein, get you to sleep again, and dream of your first sermon. There is work to be accomplished here. Mrs. Hostess, give him small-beer in the can—he will never know the difference!”
Geiger-Hans, who had rapidly sorted the letters in his hand, raised his eyes and cast a look about him. The Senior, sunk in a heap upon his chair, was staring straight before him with a glowering eye, unmistakably in the first stage of drunken stupefaction. The aspirant divine was whimpering over the strangely inferior taste of his tipple. Steven, leaning against the whitewashed walls with folded arms, stood looking upon the scene, weary, arrogant, detached.
“Hey, Sir Count,” said the fiddler then to him with one of his rare sweet smiles, “what say you—a glass of wine? No? Why, then, what will your lordship do while we manipulate affairs of State... in this Cabinet Noir?”
For the life of him, Steven could not display haughtiness to Geiger-Hans, however dubious might seem his proceedings. Too much he knew of him by this time, yet too little.
“Nay,” said he, giving him back a faint smile. “I see a couch yonder. I will try a sleep, till the State of Westphalia is secured, or undone, for I am woefully tired.”
“The couch? Right,” said the fiddler, nodding. “Yes, go to sleep, comrade, and dream.—Here with that heap, brother conspirer. And now, listen: the wise commit no unnecessary crimes. We have no business with the private correspondence of the good folks of Cassel. But here is a document with an official seal, addressed to the Commissary of Police, Goettingen.”
He tossed the letter across the table. There was a shout of triumph from the Jurist.
The horsehair couch was hard enough, but Steven had flung himself on it with a whole-souled desire to shut out a sordid, unsatisfactory world. Sleep, however, the jade, is not to be had for the wooing. The whines of the Theologian, the stertorous breathing of Barbarossa, the Jurist’s flow of rhetoric, the crackling of the papers, the fiddler’s very mutism, were all so many goads to drive him into ever more feverish wakefulness. Against the rigid bolster his heart-beats resounded in his brain. “Sidonia, Sidonia!” they said, in maddening persistence. And then, as in a sort of vision, he would see the paltry Don Juan, King Jerome, with his flickering eyes, and start, with a spasm of anger, back to a glaring consciousness of the mean room, the guttering lights, the reek of wine and smoke, the insufferable company.
“Herr Jurist, halt, halt!” came the fiddler’s voice suddenly. “Leave that alone, if you please. That is, beyond any doubt, private.”
“’Tis addressed to the Arch-Enemy, and no correspondence with tyrants is private,” retorted the lawyer. “Besides”—with a grin—“it’s one of those new-fashioned French envelopes, and everything French is damned and doomed! See, the wafer has come unsealed in my very hand. The wise man—hic—neglects no hint of Providence. Hey da! what have we here?... O thou little son of Venus, what a sweet slip of rosy paper! What a darling little claw of a hand!... (The King has a fine taste in doves, I’ll grant him that!) Bah, Sardanapalus! It is enough to turn any man republican. I am for the rights of man. Tyrants shall have no monopoly of dovecotes. Hum! neither date nor place: a cautious dove! Chirp, chirp!” The creature pressed the sheet to his tipsy lips with disgusting lushness. “Would I held the pretty flutterer here! Hark! what does she say? ‘Sir’ (A cold beginning: her feathers seem ruffled), ‘I ought to be very angry with you; but, alas! anger is not to be commanded any more than love. How well it would be for us women were it otherwise!’ (Pretty dear! Ambiguous as any lawyer’s statement!) ‘Yet I feel that you must be forgiven, if but for the sake of duty—for I should be indeed disloyal to persist in rebellion against one who is my lawful lord.—Betty! P.S.’ (Aha! now we shall come to the true meaning, to the kernel, medulla, medululla esculenta, of the rosy note.) ‘Understand: I promise nothing. But understand also: you may come and receive your pardon—if no more!’”
The reader’s mouth was opened upon fresh dithyrambics when the fiddler’s voice rose peremptorily: “Pass me that letter!”
There fell a silence between the two. Geiger-Hans, his lean jaws propped upon his hands, sat staring at the pink sheet. The lawyer fell upon a new pile of letters with monkey-like mischief and activity. The supposed director of the Cabinet Noir was now snoring lustily. Its religious guide and philosopher was still pondering over the perversity of his liquor.
“Ha!” cried the Jurist, with a sudden shout, “another missive from the pink dove—same hand, same paper and cover, and addressed to no less a person than the great Chancellor Wellenshausen! Also at Heiligenstadt. Never draw such angry brows upon me, Minnesinger mine. I tell you, this woman positively cannot seal a letter!”
Steven lifted his head from the pillow. He heard the rustle of the opening sheet in the student’s hands; then came another crow:
“Excellent, upon my cerevies, excellent! Listen, man. Whatever your faults are, you can laugh:
“‘Palais de Bellevue, ‘“Cassel.
“‘NEVER! “‘Betty, Burgravine of Wellenshausen.’
“Thunder! ’Tis his wife! It is a whole story à la Kotzebue. Do you hear, Geiger-Hans? ’Tis his wife. ‘Never!’ she writes to him. Oh, the dove has claws and beak, and she can peck!”
Without betraying any of the exuberant mirth expected of him, Geiger-Hans leaned over and, with neat decision, plucked the letter from the other’s hands. And as the Jurist stared, wavering confusedly upon offence: “Go on with your work, friend,” said the musician, smiling. “That second warrant has not yet been discovered. The night is waning. It may be well to be fairly on your road to Goettingen before the hue and cry.”