Chapter IV Parting of the Ways
“Come like shadows, so depart.”
{Macbeth}.
“Forest-mother,” said the fiddler, dryly, “you know a great deal about sturdy forest lads, and you make the best pickles in the country: but you know nothing at all about little maids.”
And, as the honest woman stared at him open-mouthed, he took her genially by the shoulders and turned her towards the door.
“Everything the child has done to-night has been right and becoming,” he went on, half regretfully, half smilingly, “even because she was a child. But, mark me, from to-night she is child no longer. And all that her heart prompts her to do now will be wrong. Go to bed, mother,” he added in a different tone; “and if you hear my fiddle speaking by-and-by and a rumble of carriage-wheels thereafter, why, turn you over on the other ear and think you have dreamed a strange dream.”
On her limp slippers the forest-mother trotted a few steps forward, obediently; then she halted, hesitated, and turned back. Her shrewd, kindly face was all puckered in the moonlight.
“Geiger-Hans,” she called solemnly. Her tone was so full of mystery and import that he came to her in two steps. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder in the direction of the open window, whence the voice and the soft laughter still crept out upon the forest stillness. “Yonder—in there”—she whispered—“him!”
He interrupted her. “I know: I saw him come, little mother; and I have spoken with Friedel.”
“He looked at her a great deal,” she insisted.
“At whom? At little Sidonia?”
“Ay; and he took her by the chin.”
“Did he so?” said Geiger-Hans. His low voice had a tremor of anger. Then he was silent; and the forest-mother stood waiting, her eyes confidently on him. A fantastic figure in the moonshine, yet this solid peasant woman seemed to leave her anxieties with confidence in his hands.
“I can rid you of your unexpected honours for to-night,” said the vagrant musician at last. “But who can guard the fawn in the forest from the cunning hunter? Fritz must take back Mamzell Sidonia home before he goes his rounds to-morrow.”
“And she only just come, and so happy, poor lamb!”
But she made no further protest, and went with her vinegar softly back to the house.
The fiddler returned to the barn, and cast once more a look at him who slept so deeply. Thence his light, long, striding step brought him to the shed where the patched coach stood. From its recesses he took the traveller’s cloak, and, returning, cast it over the inanimate figure. And, having shifted the shade of the lantern, his restlessness took him back into the night. He was nursing his fiddle as he went.
“What things,” he said, addressing it as the court fool of old his bauble (after that singular fashion which led people to call him crazy)—“what things, beloved, could we not converse upon to-night, were we not constrained by sinners? What a song of the call of the spring to last year’s fawn—of the dream that comes to the dreamer but once in his life’s day, and that before the dawn! Chaste and still as the night, and yet tremulous; shadows, mere shadows, and yet afire—voiceless, formless, impalpable, and yet something more lovely than all the sunshine can show, than all the beauty arms can hold hereafter, than all the music ears shall hear. A prescience not yet a presence, a yearning not yet a desire.... O youth! O love!” sighed the fiddler, and drew from his fiddle a long echo to the sigh. “But when we deal with rascals we must play rascally tunes.”
The rapscallion air, to which poor Steven’s wits had danced away from him, broke shrilly, almost indecently, upon the beautiful calmness of the midnight hour.
Big Mr. Forester Schmidt, seated comfortably in mother Friedel’s elbow-chair, his feet upon the table and a long glass of the straw-coloured wine at his elbow, was aroused from an agreeable somnolence by the sudden screech. Friedel, frankly asleep in a corner, woke with a start, and muttered a not ill-natured curse on the mad fiddler.
At the same time the door leading from the kitchen to the lady’s parlour was quickly opened, and the head of Herr Inspector Meyer was thrust through the aperture. This gentleman’s good-looking countenance seemed sadly discomfited, his airs of blatant importance shaken.
“Diavolo!... Do you hear that?” he cried to his burly friend. “There it is again! I tell you it means something. It always means something! Remember Brest... and remember Smolensk!”
“It means that I’ll go and throttle him with his own catgut,” cried Schmidt, letting his heavy-booted feet fall upon the floor with a stamp. “Look here, you fellow, you Friedel, here, with your gun, and let us see how you Germans can shoot! Down with that caterwauler... and his Majesty will make you a present of the hide.”
Friedel had gathered his sleepy carcase together upon the appearance of the inspector. He now stood very respectfully at attention. But there was nothing respectful in the small, fierce blue eyes he fixed upon Mr. Schmidt.
“May it please your Excellency,” he began. But Mr. Meyer, interrupting him irritably, came down into the room, snapping his fingers, stamping his little feet.
“Hark, hark! Do you hear that?” he cried, and seized Schmidt by the arm. “I tell you, man, you are a fool. Will you say now that this is no warning, no menace? Hark!”
He flung up his head, and his own intentness of listening, something also of his mysterious agitation, seemed to communicate itself to his irate lieutenant. They stood holding their breath; and bewildered Friedel hearkened too.
The fiddler’s mocking tune had merged into another theme. The night was vibrating to a deeper sonority, a more noble rhythm. Friedel thought he must be still dreaming, for he seemed suddenly to see serried ranks of soldiers marching down a dusty road, tall fellows, with hollow, tanned cheeks and towering bearskins, their long white legs swinging by him as they tramped. It was not the thin sound of strings that was in his ears, but the bugle’s call and the rattle of drums.
“Thunder! It is the chaunt of the Old Guard!” He was scarce aware he had spoken aloud, until the inspector caught up his words in a high key of excitement.
“There,” he cried, turning with a sort of feminine frenzy upon his friend, “even that blockhead hears it! I tell you, General, we must out of this. And the woman must go too. ’Tis his will, the big tyrant.”
He paused for a moment; and then resumed, well-nigh dancing in his exasperation:
“The carriage, the carriage at once! D’Albignac! Leave that gun alone!” he shrieked. “I won’t have the fellow touched. Last time, last time——” he paused again and shook his head.
“I dare not,” he said in a low voice. “It is not wholesome!”
Steven opened heavy eyes and stared vacantly at the creeping light, indigo between the wisps of yellow straw; at the large square of shimmering mists and flickering leaves where the barn door stood open to the dawn. He turned his head and found that it lay on a fragrant linen pillow, and also that it ached vaguely in spite of this luxury.
A vulgar, absurd tune was still dancing in his brain. Then he caught within his range of vision the figure of a man sitting cross-legged, putting a fresh string to a fiddle. And memory came back slowly.
“It was the fault of the music, you know,” he said.
Geiger-Hans shot a look at him from under his quizzical eyebrows.
“You never got that kiss in after all.”
“Ah, but I got in my slap!”
The young man sat up, quite inspirited by the recollection, and discovered that, with the exception of some dizziness and stiffness, there was nothing much amiss with him.
“But some one very nearly got his hunting-knife into you,” said Geiger-Hans, dryly, “and there would have been an end of your learning to be young. Nevertheless, you have capabilities—yes, some capabilities.” He wound up his string, twanged it, and nodded over it.
A cock crew in the forest farmyard. A robin was singing somewhere amid a babel of chirping birds. The breeze, balm-scented, flew straight in from the pines and fanned Stephen’s head and throat. He lifted his hand to his open shirt and looked inquiringly at the musician, who nodded again.
“You were stunned by the fall,” said Geiger-Hans, “with that brute on the top of you. Fortunate for you that I caught his hand at the right moment! And thereupon the little man, the Herr Inspector, you know, ran out screaming, ‘No bloodshed, d’Albignac!’... It is his one good point: he is merciful of life.”
“The little man?... D’Albignac?” Steven echoed the words in wonder.
“You measured his cheek charmingly—I mean d’Albignac’s,” said the fiddler. “We two might do great things together yet. Ay, that was the d’Albignac. I dare say you have heard the name, in Cassel. Chouan once, then renegade, now Grand-Veneur (and Great Pandar) to his Majesty of Westphalia. Such is d’Albignac.”
“Majesty?... King Jerome?”
“Did you think,” said Geiger-Hans, compassionately, “that Meyer and Schmidt were usual names for Frenchmen? Why, the precious incognito would not have deceived a cat.”
The dawn was growing softly outside, but there was sudden vivid light in Steven’s brain.
“Then—then,” he stammered, struggling to his feet—“the lady——”
“The lady, my poor young friend, is naught but a dancing girl from Genoa, whom that wise and powerful man, the Emperor Napoleon, sent two emissaries to remove—it is not the first time he has had to attend to such matters—from her charming apartments in ‘Napoleonshöhe,’ where her presence conduced neither to the King’s dignity, nor to the Queen’s. The great Napoleon is mighty particular about her Westphalian Majesty’s dignity. Our ardent little sovereign, however, determined to snatch a last meeting; hence the romantic attack and rescue—the casual meeting!”
“O Lord!” said Steven, and passed his hand across his mouth, as if the shadow of the yearned-for kiss polluted it.
“And so that Meyer fellow is——”
“Our brother Jerome—yes.”
The fiddler lifted a sweet, worn voice, while his bow danced lightly on the strings and chanted to the absurd lilt—
“Nous allons chercher un royaume
Pour not’ p’tit frère Jérome.”
“’Twas the song of the soldiers before Jena,” he explained. “Pardi! a taking ragamuffin tune! When our friends last night heard it, comrade, they took to their heels.”
And as Steven stared with ever-increasing wonder, Geiger-Hans proceeded, in his mocking voice:
“‘The wicked flee when none pursueth!’ If there is one person the kinglet here is afraid of, ’tis of the great Emperor. Many a merry prank have I played on King Jerome’s nerves! He holds to his high gilt throne, and knows that the mighty hand that placed him on it can pick him off it again. Big brother, on his side, knows how to punish too, when little brother passes the bounds. And the small man thinks the big man has spies on him at every corner. He has his own way of knowing things, has Cæsar... if not the ways yonder gingerbread monarch fancies.”
“And he thought you were the Emperor’s spy?” hazarded Steven, and looked with some doubt at his companion. A mystery the man certainly was!
“Many things have I been, comrade,” said the fiddler, answering the look, “but never in any man’s pay, be assured of that. Nevertheless, the Kingmaker keeps an eye on his puppets from the midst of victory—many eyes on him, indeed. And Jerome has taken into his head that your humble servant is the most cunning of Napoleon’s eyes. The mistake is amusing enough, and I make it serve my own use at times. I had but to play such a simple air, you see, and his Majesty of Westphalia—his choice circle——” He made a wide gesture and a sound mimicking a flutter of wings: “Phew! Gone, scared like frightened sparrows!”
“Gone?” echoed Steven; and though she was but a dancing-girl from Genoa, and a baggage at that, his heart sank.
“Gone,” said the fiddler—“gone before the dawn. So is Sidonia! Aha, Sir Count, short skirts, it seems to you, make the peasant, and fine jewels, no doubt, the great lady! Ha, ha! to see your lordship draw away from the touch of her tresses! She brought you her own pillow last night, and wept over you and thought you were dead—till I bid her put her hand over your heart and feel its solid beating. ’Tis a noble child—and a greater race you will never meet in your travels. Why, ’tis the heiress of the country. Oh, there were no lies about her! The girl visits her foster-mother for a holiday and a treat now and then. You never looked at her foot or her delicate eyebrow: she was but a peasant girl, pardi! Jerome has a keener eye——”
“Jerome!” echoed Steven, and, he knew not why, the fiercest spasm of anger he had yet felt seized him then.
“Jerome pinched her chin, as you saw,” said the fiddler, “and, therefore, back we packed her, Friedel and I, to her own castle, for safety.... Meanwhile you slept. Come, come, never look so downcast,” he went on with sudden change of tone. “Is it not instructive to know how the ruler of Westphalia passes his time while all the best manhood of his country is warring for the Empire—burnt in Spain, frozen in Russia? And, at any rate, have you not had a night you will remember out of all your dull, regulated youth? Come forth and I will show you something I warrant me you have never seen before—sunrise in the forest.”
The yard seemed very silent and empty. They were all gone—gone like a dream!
“Come,” said the musician, “look up. Have you ever seen so limpid a blue? Look at the trees enveloped in mystery; see the silver shine of the dew over every blade; hark to it as it drips from leaf to leaf. ’Tis every day a new creation! Oh, I could make you Dawn-music, if there were not such music already for you to hear! Hark to the whispering, the lisping, the murmurs! Do you mark the birds—that is your last night’s robin at the top of the larch tree; he is singing under his breath now, watching the horizon; he will pipe when the sun leaps up. Do you hear the humming of the bees? There is thyme in mother Friedel’s garden; and that is the sharp tinkle of the brook over the stones. Eh, my soul, what a symphony! The breath of the forest—do you feel it?—cool and living; the savour of the crushed, dew-drenched moss under your feet—do you taste it? And the smell of the beech leaves and the incense of the pines? And now watch. Behold how the forest is lit up as with some inner fire! Dark and colourless stand the trees nearest to us. Look within, how the flame grows, how it spreads—live gold, live emerald! And see there—oh, the scarlet on those fir trunks! The sun has risen!...”
The fiddler stopped speaking. Looking back upon it, Steven afterwards wondered if he had spoken at all, or had only made his thoughts felt. But here his strange companion came to a standstill in their slow wandering and took off his battered old hat and waved it.
“Farewell!” said he. “Mother Friedel will give you breakfast, and son Friedel is already on the look-out for your lost retinue. Farewell, noble Count... remember to be young!”
“Shall I never meet you again?” cried Steven, suddenly. His heart sank unaccountably, and he added with hesitation: “Comrade?”
Geiger-Hans, moving away into the forest with light, fantastic step, paused and smiled mysteriously.
“Who knows?” said he, over his shoulder. “If you know how to seek—why—who knows?”
He plunged down an opening in the trees, where the sun made a golden path before him through the yellowing oak trees; and the larches on either side were on fire with green flame.