Read Ebook: Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15 No. 85 January 1875 by Various

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FOLLOWING THE TIBER TWO PAPERS.--1.

THE PARADOX by CHARLOTTE F. BATES.

THE LEADEN ARROW by EDWARD C. BRUCE.

TWO MIRRORS by F.A. HILLARD.

THE STAGE IN ITALY by R. DAVEY.

ON THE VIA SAN BASILIO by EARL MARBLE.

A CHRISTMAS HYMN by T. BUCHANAN READ.

THE PARSEES by FANNIE ROPER FEUDGE.

THE NEW HYPERION.

FROM PARIS TO MARLY BY WAY OF THE RHINE.

In leaving Cologne for Aix-la-Chapelle you turn your back to the river--a particular which suited my mood well enough. The railway bore us away from the Rhine-shore at an abrupt angle, and in my notion the noble Germanic goddess or image seemed at this point to recede with grand theatric strides, like a divinity of the stage backing away from her admirers over the billowy whirlpool of her own skirts. As I dreamed we penetrated the tunnel of K?nigsdorf, which is fifteen hundred yards long, and which seemed to me sufficiently protracted to contain the slumber of Barbarossa. The thought gave me a useful hint, and I fell into a light sleep, while Charles and Hohenfels pervaded the darkness merely by their perfumes--the former with whiffs at a concealed bottle of Farina, the latter with a pastille counterfeiting the incense of the cathedral. In a couple of hours from the H?tel de Hollande we reached Aachen, as the fond natives call the burgh so dear to Charlemagne. Deprived of that magnificent mirror, the Rhine, the pretty towns throughout this part of Germany seem but like country belles. We should hardly have paused at Aix but for the sake of affording a rest to Charles, who grew worse whenever lunch-time competed with railway-time. As for the dull little city, for us it was a wilderness, with the blank cleanliness of the desert, except in so far as it was informed and populated by the memory of Charlemagne.

I thought Hohenfels would have sunk to the ground with disgust. He colored deeply and dragged me into the air. "I am ashamed of every drop of German blood in my veins," he cried. "What are we to think of the commerce of these wretches, for whom the very wounds of Caesar are the lips of a money-box?"

I had given back the skull, as Hamlet returns the skull of Yorick to the grave-digger, and was dusting my fingers with a handkerchief, as hundreds of Hamlets have dusted theirs. I said, "'Thrift, thrift, Horatio.'"

"At Kreutzberg there are twenty monks on the counter! This morning, at St. Ursula's, it was the eleven thousand virgins, their skulls ranged like Dutch cheeses above our heads or in rows around the walls, with a battery-full of them in the neighboring apartment, like a cheesemonger's reserved magazine. Here, the very leader of modern ideas, the creator of our form of civilization, is shown for so many pennies to any grocer who wants to weigh the head of a king! Profanation! Barbarians! Philistines!"

Hohenfels interrupted me, complaining that my monologue was uninteresting and diffuse, and was interfering with the railway time-table. But I finished it in the car: "And the railway! What has a person of fixed and independent habits to do with railways but to growl at them? Before I was tempted upon the railway by that impertinent engineer at Noisy, I got up and sat down when I liked, ate wholesome food at my own hours, and was contented at home. Confusion to him who made me the victim of his engineering calculations! Confusion to Grandstone and his nest of serpents at ?pernay! Did they not introduce me to Fortnoye, who has doubly destroyed my peace? Where are the conspirators, that I may pulverize them with my maledictions?"

This question--which Hohenfels called peevish as he buried himself in his book--was not answered until we had passed Verviers, Chaudfontaine and Li?ge. I was aroused from a sulky slumber in the station at Brussels by Hohenfels, who said, in his musical scolding way, like the busy wheeze of a clicking music-box, "You may say what you like, with your left-handed flatteries, in regard to Fortnoye, and you may praise Ariadnes and widows to the end of the chapter. You are sorry at this moment not to be at ?pernay to see the destroyer of your peace married: you had rather assist at the making of a wife than at the making of a widow."

I was just sending Fortnoye to the gloomiest shades of Acheron when a strong hand entered the carriage-door, helped me handsomely down the steps, and then began warmly to shake my own. Fortnoye!--Fortnoye in flesh and blood was before me. While my mouth was yet filled with maledictions he began to pour out a storm of thanks with all his own particular warmth, expressing the most effusive gratitude for the trouble I had taken in forsaking my route to be his wife's bridesmaid. That is what he called it. "She has but one other," said Fortnoye. At the same time I began to recognize other faces not unknown to me, crudely illuminated by the raw colors of the railway-lights. They all had black wedding-suits and enormous buttonhole nosegays of orange-flowers. I picked them out, with a particular recognition for each: 'twas the civil engineer of Noisy; the short gentleman named Somerard; James Athanasius Grandstone, with his saintly aureole upon him in the shape of a Yankee wide-awake; the nameless mutes, or rather chorus, of the champagne-crypt; in short, my nest of serpents in all its integrity. Still entangled with my slumbers, I hesitated to respond to the friendly hands that were everywhere thrust centripetally toward me.

I looked blackly at Hohenfels. He was chuckling.

At Heidelberg, making the acquaintance of M. Fortnoye contemporaneously with my departure, he had become more enthralled than he ever confessed to this radiant traveler--whom he called a packman, but regarded as a Mercury--and his pretty scheme of matrimony in motion. Even now, if I can believe my eyes, he goes up to the "vintner" and "peddler" of his objurgations, and meekly whispers into his ear with the air of a conspirator reporting a plot to his chief. Having engaged to produce me at the wedding of Fortnoye, and finding me unexpectedly recusant, he had adopted a little stratagem for bringing me to the scene while thinking to escape from it.

"Thou too, Brutus!" I said, and gave it up. It only remained for me to return all round, after five minutes of petrified stupidity, the hand-grasps that had been offered from every quarter of the compass-box.

Next morning, at an early hour, I was interrupted by a knock, just as Charles had buttoned my gaiters and the young man from the perruquier's had lathered me. A nick he gave my chin at the shock made my countenance all argent and gules, and the visitor entering saw me thus emblazoned, while the barber and Charles, "like two wild men supporters of a shield," could only stare at the untimely apparition.

"Do you know him, Charles?" I asked, not recognizing my guest, and putting over my painted face a mask of wet toweling.

"I know him intimately," replied my jester-in-ordinary: "I would thank Monsieur Paul just to tell me his name. Do you remember, monsieur, a sort of beggar, with a wagon and a stylish horse and a pretty wife, who limped a bit with his right hand, or perhaps his left hand? Does monsieur know what I mean? He used to come and see us at Passy; and monsieur even had some traffic with him in a little matter of two chickens."

"Father Joliet!" I cried.

"Present!" shouted the personage thus designated at my appeal to his name. I turned round, toweled, and he grasped my hands. The unusual hour, appropriate as I supposed only to some porter or other stipendiary visitor of my hotel, caused to shine out with startling refulgence the morning splendors in which Papa Joliet had arrayed himself. He wore a courtly dress, appropriate to the most formal possible ceremony; his black suit was glossy; his hat was glossy; his varnished pumps were more than glossy--they were phosphorescent. Gloves only were wanting to his honest hands.

Soaped, napkined and generally extinguished, I could only stammer, "You here in Brussels? What a droll meeting!"

"Wherefore droll?" asked Joliet, with a huge surprise, which lasted him all through his next sentence. "I come here to marry my daughter. Everything is ready; we count on your presence at the wedding; the lawyer has drawn up the contract; and the breakfast is now cooking at the best restaurant in the place."

"Francine's wedding, my dear Joliet!" I exclaimed. And, going back to my apprehensions at her furtive disappearance from Carlsruhe, and to my conjectures of some amorous mystery between her and her Yankee traducer, Kraaniff, I added gravely, "It is very creditable!"

"How, creditable--and droll?" repeated the honest man, evidently much surprised at my own accumulating surprises. "Did not you hear?"

"Not the faintest word," I said, "but I am none the less gratified to find this affair ending, as it should, in the presence of a lawyer. As for your wedding-invitation, my good friend, you are a little tardy in delivering it, for it is exactly to-day that I am obliged to attend at the marriage of one of my friends, M. Fortnoye."

"Ah, that is a good joke!" cried Joliet, breaking into an explosion of laughter and clapping me pleasantly on the shoulder--an action which caused a slight frown on the part of Charles. "You always would have your jest, Monsieur the American! Tease me and scare me as much as you like: I like these hoaxes better before a wedding than after. Hold that," he added, extending his hand as if it were a piece of merchandise.

I "held" it, and he went on, dwelling slowly on his words: "If you are at Henri Fortnoye's wedding you will be at Francine Joliet's also, for both of these persons are to be married at one church."

"Impossible!" I exclaimed, dropping the hand and stepping back.

"What! again?" said Joliet, his manly face visibly darkening. "Droll! and creditable! and impossible! Why impossible?" Then he dropped his head and looked angrily at the floor. "Ah, yes, even you," he said, his eyes still fixed on the boards, "believed that a French girl, trained as French girls are trained, would flirt and expose herself to remark; and all on account of such a man as your compatriot, the other American! Well! well! you ought to know your countrymen best."

"I know of no harm," I interposed hastily. "I should always have thought Kraaniff hard to swallow as a mere matter of taste. I can but recollect, Father Joliet," I went on more seriously, "that the last time I met you you begged me not to talk of Francine if I would not break your heart. I have to add to this the news brought me from Heidelberg, that this Kraaniff was a serpent who had fascinated some young girl for an approaching meal.--How dare you, Charles," I cried suddenly, recalled to the consciousness of his presence by this souvenir of his oratory, "stand here staring? Show the young man out directly, and pay him."

I will not answer for Charles's having got much farther away than the door. Joliet continued: "But his aunt knows him now for what he is. Kraaniff, say you? I call him Kranich, though he had better change his baptismal record than disgrace one of the best names in Brussels."

"Frau Kranich, then, my old friend, is really his aunt?"

"Madame Kranich, whom I have known in your parlor, is really Francine's godmother. Did you never know of all her secret kindness? That rigid lady would commit a perjury to deny one of her own good actions. Young Kranich has written her a letter confessing his lies. Don't you know? The very same day when you were determined to fight him in a duel--"

"Certainly, certainly," I said, a little confused. "We will change the subject and leave my ferocity alone. Let us understand one another. In regard to Fortnoye's marriage, was there not some talk of a Madame Ashburleigh?"

"I believe you. Madame Ashburleigh is the very key of the manoeuvre. Madame Ashburleigh--don't you perceive?--lost a child."

"For that matter, she has lost four. I know the lady confidentially, and she told me their histories and present address. Lucia lies in Glasgow, Hannibal at Nice, and Waterloo sleeps somewhere hereabout, as well as another nameless little dear."

"She is a good woman. She has collected all her proofs, and has come hither with them voluntarily--has perhaps already arrived. Brussels, where two of her marmots rest, is one of her most frequent stations. That censorious Madame Kranich made a scene, but she had to yield to conviction."

"A censorious Madame Kranich! Is the young duelist married?"

"What? No, no! It is Francine's guardian I speak of. Of late years she has become a sort of Puritan abbess, seeking the Protestant society which abounds in Belgium, and lamenting her husband, whom they say she used to drug with opium."

"Then is she not Kranich's aunt?"

"Oh yes, an aunt by marriage; but he is not her nephew: I will die before I call him so."

"Listen," said I, "Father Joliet. You are as full of information as an oracle, but you are not coherent. This month past I have been hunting down a chimaera, a hydra with a dozen heads: each head shows me by turn the portrait of Fortnoye, or Francine, or yourself, or Kranich, or Mrs. Ashburleigh. Ever since Noisy I have been meandering through the folds of a mystery. My head is turning with it. If you want to save me from distraction, sit down in this chair and answer me a long catechism, without saying a word but in reply to my questions."

"I am sure I talk as plain as a professor. Look! You frightened me at first with your doubts and your impossibilities. You have only to make Kranich's aunt agree with Francine's guardian, and at the same time forgive Francine's husband for having assumed the undertaker's bill for Madame Ashburleigh's baby."

"Yes, yes, my dear Joliet, you are clearer than Euclid." And I administered a category of questions. Joliet, with his fatherly joy bursting out of him in the longest of parentheses, kept quiet in his refulgent shoes and answered as well as he could.

Has my reader forgotten the dim, tear-swollen story which I heard--not at all improved in the telling--from my generous young friend Grandstone--how an impulsive Frenchman had laid to rest, in flowers and evergreens, the unnamed baby of a woman he had never seen? Jealous as I was of Fortnoye, I never could think without tenderness of this singular action. To make the tomb of this helpless Innocence the young man braved the curiosity of his comrades--despised the rumor, the obloquy, and, hardest of all, the jests. Well has the wise dramatist decided that Ophelia must needs be laid in Yorick's bed!

Poor Francine, gay, frivolous, innocently vain of her little travesty of English behavior, found her accomplishments and graces received by her guardian's circle with incomprehensible coldness. Hurt and humiliated, she asked to pay a visit to her father. The honest rustic received her with a miserable confusion of doubt and severity, for her escapade to England had never pleased him, and her return from her godmother's home wore to him the air of a repudiation. At her father's house, however, she was discovered by Fortnoye, who had never heard the ingenious Kranich's theory of his own private wedding with Francine, and who thought to find in her the veiled unknown of the cemetery. He saw for the first time, in the flowery home at Noisy, that fresh ingenuous beauty, a little over-cast with disappointment. His generous nature was touched; and, with his talent for administration and planning, he conceived the idea of establishing Francine in the pretty bird's nest at Carlsruhe, distant alike from the strongholds of her calumniators, Belgium and France.

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