A RAP IN THE EARLY MORNING AWAKENS ME AND I START IN A GLASS COACH UPON THE ODDEST OF JOURNEYS
It was the last, for many months, I was to see of my countrywoman. Before the crow of the cock next morning I was on the unending roads, trundling in a noisy vehicle through pitch darkness, my companion snoring stertorous at my side, his huge head falling every now and then upon my shoulder, myself peering to catch some revelation of what manner of country-side we went through as the light from the swinging lanthorn lit up briefly passing banks of frosted hedge or sleeping hamlets on whose pave the hoofs of our horses hammered as they had been the very war-steeds of Bellona.
But how came I there? How but by my master's whim, that made him anticipate his departure by three days and drag me from my bed incontinent to set out upon his trip over Europe.
I had been sleeping soundly, dreaming I heard the hopper of the mill of Driepps at home banging to make Jock Alexander's fortune, when I awakened, or rather half-wakened, to discover that 'twas no hopper but a nieve at my door, rapping with a vigour to waken the dead.
“Come out! Sir Secretary, come out! or I shall pull thy domicile about thine ears,” cried the voice of Father Hamilton.
He stood at the door when I opened, wrapped over the chin in a muffler of multitudinous folds, and covered by a roquelaure.
“Pax!” he cried, thrusting a purple face into the room, “and on with thy boots like a good lad. We must be off and over the dunes before the bell of St. Eloi knocks another nail in the coffin of time.”
“What!” I said, dumbfoundered, “are we to start on our journey to-day?”
“Even so, my sluggardly Scot; faith! before the day even, for the day will be in a deuce of a hurry an' it catch up on us before we reach Pont-Opoise. Sop a crust in a jug of wine—I've had no better petit déjeuner myself—put a clean cravat and a pair of hose in thy sack, and in all emulate the judicious flea that wastes no time in idle rumination, but transacts its affairs in a succession of leaps.”
“And no time to say good-bye to anyone?” I asked, struggling into my toilet.
“La! la! la! the flea never takes a congé that I've heard on, Master Punctilio. Not so much as a kiss o' the hand for you; I have had news, and 'tis now or never.”
Twenty minutes later, Thurot's landlord (for Thurot himself was from home) lit me to the courtyard, and the priest bundled me and my sack into the bowels of an enormous chariot waiting there.
The clocks began to strike the hour of five; before the last stroke had ceased to shiver the darkness we were thundering along the sea front and my master was already composed to sleep in his corner, without vouchsafing me a sentence of explanation for so hurried a departure. Be sure my heart was sore! I felt the blackest of ingrates to be thus speeding without a sign of farewell from a place where I had met with so much of friendship.
Out at the window of the coach I gazed, to see nothing but the cavernous night on one side, on the other, lit by the lanthorn, the flashing past of houses all shuttered and asleep.
It was dry and pleasant weather, with a sting of frost in the air, and the propinquity of the sea manifest not in its plangent voice alone but in the odour of it that at that hour dominated the natural smells of the faubourgs. Only one glimpse I had of fellow creatures; as we passed the fort, the flare of flambeaux showed an enormous body of soldiers working upon the walls of Risebank; it but added to the poignance of my melancholy to reflect that here were my country's enemies unsleeping, and I made a sharp mental contrast of this most dauntening spectacle with a picture of the house of Hazel Den dreaming among its trees, and only crying lambs perhaps upon the moor to indicate that any life was there. Melancholy! oh, it was eerie beyond expression for me that morning! Outside, the driver talked to his horses and to some one with him on the boot; it must have been cheerier for him than for me as I sat in that sombre and close interior, jolted by my neighbour, and unable to refrain from rehabilitating all the past. Especially did I think of my dark home-coming with a silent father on the day I left the college to go back to the Mearns. And by a natural correlation, that was bound to lead to all that followed—even to the event for which I was now so miserably remote from my people.
Once or twice his reverence woke, to thrust his head out at the window and ask where we were. Wherever we were when he did so, *twas certain never to be far enough for his fancy, and he condemned the driver for a snail until the whip cracked wickedly and the horses laboured more strenuously than ever, so that our vehicle swung upon its springs till it might well seem we were upon a ship at sea.
For me he had but the one comment—“I wonder what's for déjeuner.” He said it each time solemnly as it were his matins, and then slid into his swinish sleep again.
The night seemed interminable, but by-and-by the day broke. I watched it with eagerness as it gradually paled the east, and broke up the black bulk of the surrounding land into fields, orchards, gardens, woods. And the birds awoke—God bless the little birds!—they woke, and started twittering and singing in the haze, surely the sweetest, the least sinless of created things, the tiny angels of the woods, from whom, walking in summer fields in the mornings of my age as of my youth, I have borrowed hope and cheer.
Father Hamilton wakened too, and heard the birds; indeed, they filled the ear of the dawn with melodies. A smile singularly pleasant came upon his countenance as he listened.
“Pardieu!” said he, “how they go on! Has't the woodland soul, Sieur Croque-mort? Likely enough not; I never knew another but myself and thine uncle that had it, and 'tis the mischief that words will not explain the same. 'Tis a gift of the fairies”—here he crossed himself devoutly and mumbled a Romish incantation—“that, having the said woodland spirit—in its nature a Pagan thing perchance, but n'importe!—thou hast in the song of the tiny beings choiring there something to make the inward tremor that others find in a fiddle and a glass of wine. No! no! not that, 'tis a million times more precious; 'tis—'tis the pang of the devotee, 'tis the ultimate thrill of things. Myself, I could expire upon the ecstasy of the thrush, or climb to heaven upon the lark's May rapture. And there they go! the loves! and they have the same ditty I heard from them first in Louvain. There are but three clean things in this world, my lad of Scotland—a bird, a flower, and a child's laughter. I have been confessor long enough to know all else is filth. But what's the luck in waiting for us at Azincourt? and what's the pot-au-feu to-day?”
He listened a little longer to the birds, and fell asleep smiling, his fat face for once not amiss, and I was left again alone as it were to receive the day.
We had long left the dunes and the side of the sea, though sometimes on puffs of wind I heard its distant rumour. Now the land was wooded with the apple tree; we rose high on the side of a glen, full of a rolling fog that streamed off as the day grew. A tolerable land enough; perhaps more lush than my own, with scarce a rood uncultivated, and dotted far and wide by the strangest farm steadings and pendicles, but such steadings and pendicles as these eyes never before beheld, with enormous eaves of thatch reaching almost to the ground, and ridiculous windows of no shape; with the yokings of the cattle, the boynes, stoups, carts, and ploughs about the places altogether different from our own. We passed troops marching, peasants slouching with baskets of poultry to market towns, now and then a horseman, now and then a caleche. And there were numerous hamlets, and at least two middling-sized towns, and finally we came, at the hour of eleven, upon the place appointed for our déjeuner. It was a small inn on the banks of the only rivulet I had seen in all the journey. I forget its name, but I remember there was a patch of heather on the side of it, and that I wished ardently the season had been autumn that I might have looked upon the purple bells.
“Tis a long lane that has no tavern,” said his reverence, and oozed out of his side of the coach with groanings. The innkeeper ran forth, louted, and kissed his hand.
“Jour, m'sieu jour!” said Father Hamilton hurriedly. “And now, what have you here that is worth while?”
The innkeeper respectfully intimated that the church of Saint-Jean-en-Grève was generally considered worth notice. Its vestments, relics, and windows were of merit, and the view from the tower—
“Mort de ma vie!” cried the priest angrily, “do I look like a traveller who trots up belfrys in strange villages at the hour of déjeuner? A plague on Saint-Jean-en-Grève! I said nothing at all of churches; I spoke of déjeuner, my good fellow. What's for déjeuner?”
The innkeeper recounted a series of dishes. Father Hamilton hummed and hawed, reflected, condemned, approved, all with an eagerness beyond description. And when the meal was being dished up, he went frantically to the kitchen and lifted pot-lids, and swung a salad for himself, and confounding the ordinary wine for the vilest piquette ordered a special variety from the cellar. It was a spectacle of gourmandise not without its humour; I was so vastly engaged in watching him that I scarce glanced at the men who had travelled on the outside of the coach since morning.
What was my amazement when I did so to see that the servant or valet (as he turned out to be) was no other than the Swiss, Bernard, who had been in the service of Miss Walkinshaw no later than yesterday morning!
I commented on the fact to Father Hamilton when we sat down to eat.
“Why, yes!” he said, gobbling at his vivers with a voracity I learned not to wonder at later when I knew him more. “The same man. A good man, too, or I'm a Turk. I've envied Miss Walkinshaw this lusty, trusty, secret rogue for a good twelvemonth, and just on the eve of my leaving Dunkerque, by a very providence, the fellow gets drunk and finds himself dismissed. He came to me with a flush and a hiccough last night to ask a recommendation, and overlooking the peccadillo that is not of a nature confined to servants, Master Greig, let me tell thee, I gave him a place in my entourage. Madame will not like it, but no matter! she'll have time to forget it ere I see her again.”
I felt a mild satisfaction to have the Swiss with us just because I had heard him called “Bernard” so often by his late employer.
We rested for some hours after déjeuner, seated under a tree by the brink of the rivulet, and in the good humour of a man satisfied in nature the priest condescended to let me into some of his plans.
We were bound for Paris in the first place. “Zounds!” he cried, “I am all impatience to clap eyes again on Lutetia, the sweet rogue, and eat decent bread and behold a noble gown and hear a right cadenza. And though thou hast lost thy Lyrnessides—la! la! la! I have thee there!—thou canst console thyself with the Haemonian lyre. Paris! oh, lad, I'd give all to have thy years and a winter or two in it. Still, we shall make shift—oh, yes! I warrant thee we shall make shift. We shall be there, at my closest reckoning, on the second day of Holy Week, and my health being so poorly we shall not wait to commence de faire les Pâques an hour after. What's in a soutane, anyhow, that it should be permitted to mortify an honest priest's oesophagus?”
I sighed in spite of myself, for he had made me think of our throwing of Easter eggs on the green at Hazel Den.
“What!” he cried. “Does my frugal Scot fancy we have not enough trinkgeld for enjoyment. Why, look here!—and here!—and here!”
He thrust his hand into his bosom and drew forth numerous rouleaux—so many that I thought his corpulence might well be a plethora of coin.
“There!” said he, squeezing a rouleau till it burst and spreading out the gold upon the table before him. “Am I a poor parish priest or a very Croesus?”
Then he scooped in the coins with his fat hands and returned all to his bosom. “Allons!” he said shortly; we were on the road again!
That night we put up at the Bon Accueil in a town whose name escapes my recollection.
He had gone to bed; through the wall from his chamber came the noise of his sleep, while I was at the writing of my first letter to Miss Walkinshaw, making the same as free and almost affectionate as I had been her lover, for as I know it now, I was but seeking in her for the face of the love of the first woman and the last my heart was given to.
I had scarcely concluded when the Swiss came knocking softly to my door, and handed me a letter from the very woman whose name was still in wet ink upon my folded page. I tore it open eagerly, to find a score of pleasant remembrances. She had learned the night before that the priest was to set out in the morning: “I have kept my word,” she went on. “Your best friend is Bernard, so I let you have him, and let us exchange our billets through him. It will be the most Discreet method. And I am, with every consideration, Ye Ken Wha.”