Under False Pretences: A Novel

by Adeline Sergeant

It was in this state that he found himself one day upon a Rhine boat, bound for Mainz. He had a very vague notion of how he had managed to get there; he had no notion at all of his reason for travelling in that direction. It dawned upon him by degrees that he had chosen the very same route, and made the same stoppages, as he had done when he was a mere boy, travelling with his father upon the Continent. Richard and his mother had not been there; Brian and Mr. Luttrell had spent a particularly happy time together, and the remembrance of it soothed his troubled brain, and caused his eye to rest with a sort of dreamy pleasure upon the scene around him.

It was rather late for a Rhine expedition, and the boat was not at all full. Brian rather thought that the journey with his father had been taken at about the same time of the year—perhaps even a little later. He had a special memory of the wealth of Virginian creeper which covered the buildings near Coblentz. He looked out for it when the boat stopped at the landing-stage, and thought of the time when he had wandered hand-in-hand with his father in the pleasant Anlagen on the river banks, and gathered a scarlet trail of leaves from the castle walls. The leaves were in their full autumnal glory now; he must have been there at about the same season when he was a boy.

After determining this fact to his satisfaction, Brian went back to the seat that he had found for himself at the end of the boat, and began once more to watch the gliding panorama of "castled crag" and vine-clad slope, which was hardly as familiar to him as it is to most of us. But, after all, Drachenfels and Ehrenbreitstein had no great interest for him. He had no great interest in anything. Perhaps the little excitement and bustle at the landing-places pleased him more than the scenery itself—the peasants shouting to each other from the banks, the baskets of grapes handed in one after another, the patient oxen waiting in the roads between the shafts; these were sights which made no great claim upon his attention and were curiously soothing to his jaded nerves. He watched them languidly, but was not sorry from time to time to close his eyes and shut out his surroundings altogether.

The worst of it was, that when he had closed his eyes for a little time, the scene in the wood always came back to him with terrible distinctness, or else there rose up before his eyes a picture of that darkened room, with Richard's white face upon the pillow and his mother's dark form and outstretched hand. These were the memories that would not let him sleep at night or take his ease in the world by day. He could not forget the past.

There was another passenger on the boat who passed and repassed Brian several times, and looked at him with curious attention. Brian's face was one which was always apt to excite interest. It had grown thin and pallid during the past fortnight; the eyes were set in deep hollows, and wore a painfully sad expression. He looked as if he had passed through some period of illness or sorrow of which the traces could never be wholly obliterated. There was a pathetic hopelessness in his face which was somewhat remarkable in so young a man.

The passenger who regarded him with so much interest was also a young man, not more than Brian's own age, but apparently not an Englishman. He spoke English a little, though with a foreign accent, but his French was remarkably good and pure. He stopped short at last in front of Brian and eyed him attentively, evidently believing that the young man was asleep. But Brian was not asleep; he knew that the regular footstep of his travelling companion had ceased, and was hardly surprised, when he opened his eyes, to find the Frenchman—if such he were—standing before him.

Brian looked at him attentively for a moment, and recognised the fact that the young foreigner wore an ecclesiastical habit, a black soutane or cassock, such as is worn in Roman Catholic seminaries, not necessarily denoting that the person who wears it has taken priest's vows upon him. Brian was not sufficiently well versed in the subject to know what grade was signified by the dress of the young ecclesiastic, but he conjectured (chiefly from its plainness and extreme shabbiness) that it was not a very high one. The young man's face pleased him. It was intellectual and refined in contour, rather of the ascetic type; with that faint redness about the heavy eyelids which suggests an insufficiency of sleep or a too great amount of study; large, penetrating, dark eyes, underneath a broad, white brow; a firm mouth and chin. There was something about his face which seemed vaguely familiar to Brian; and yet he could not in the least remember where he had seen it before, or what associations it called up in his mind.

The young man courteously raised his broad, felt hat.

"Pardon me," he said, "you are ill—suffering—can I do nothing for you?"

"I am not ill, thank you. You are very good, but I want nothing," said Brian, with a feeling of annoyance which showed itself in the coldness of his manner. And yet he was attracted rather than repelled by the stranger's voice and manner. The voice was musical, the manner decidedly prepossessing. He was not sorry that the young ecclesiastic did not seem ready to accept the rebuff, but took a seat on the bench by his side, and made a remark upon the scenery through which they were passing. Brian responded slightly enough, but with less coldness; and in a few minutes—he did not know how it happened—he was talking to the stranger more freely than he had done to anyone since he left England. Their conversation was certainly confined to trivial topics; but there was a frankness and a delicacy of perception about the young foreigner which made him a very attractive companion. He gave Brian in a few words an outline of the chief events of his life, and seemed to expect no confidence from Brian in return. He had been brought up in a Roman Catholic seminary, and was destined to become a Benedictine monk. He was on his way to join an elder priest in Mainz; thence he expected to proceed to Italy, but was not sure of his destination.