I see it all, said I to myself. Foreign women can never forgive English for being so much their superior in beauty and loveliness. Meanwhile our game came to a close, and we gathered around the buffet.
There we found the old colonel, with a large silver tankard of mulled wine, holding forth over some campaigning exploit, to which no one listened for more than a second or two—and thus the whole room became joint-stock hearers of his story. Laura stood eating her ice with the Comte d’Espagne, the black-whiskered cavalier already mentioned, beside her. The Americans were prosing away about Jefferson and Adams; the Belgians talked agriculture and genealogy; and the French collecting into a group of their own, in which nearly all the pretty women joined, discoursed the ballet, the Chambre, the court, the coulisses, the last mode, and the last murder, and all in the same mirthful and lively tone. And truly, let people condemn as they will this superficial style of conversation, there is none equal to it; it avoids the prosaic flatness of German, and the monotonous pertinacity of English, which seems more to partake of the nature of discussion than dialogue. French chit-chat takes a wider range—anecdotic, illustrative, and discursive by turns; it deems nothing too light, nothing too weighty for its subject; it is a gay butterfly, now floating with gilded wings above you, now tremulously perched upon a leaf below, now sparkling in the sunbeam, now loitering in the shade; embodying not only thought, but expression, it charms by its style as well as by its matter. The language, too, suggests shades and nuances of colouring that exist not in other tongues; you can give to your canvas the precise tint you wish, for when mystery would prove a merit, the equivoque is there ready to your hand—meaning so much, yet asserting so little. For my part I should make my will in English; but I’d rather make love in French.
While thus digressing, I have forgotten to mention that people are running back and forward with bedroom candles; there is a confused hum of bonsoir on every side; and, with many a hope of a fine day for the morrow, we separate for the night.
I lay awake some hours thinking of Laura, and then of the baronne—they were both arch ones; the abbé too crossed my thoughts, and once or twice the old colonel’s roguish leer; but I slept soundly for all that, and did not wake till eight o’clock the next morning. The silence of the house struck me forcibly as I rubbed my eyes and looked about. Hang it, thought I, have they gone off to the chasse without me? I surely could never have slept through the uproar of their trumpets. I drew aside the window-curtains, and the mystery was solved: such rain never fell before; the clouds, actually touching the tops of the beech-trees, seemed to ooze and squash like squeezed sponges. The torrent came down in that splashing stroke as if some force behind momentarily propelled it stronger; and the long-parched ground seethed and smoked like a heated caldron.
Pleasant this, was reflection number one, as I endeavoured to peer through the mist, and beheld a haze of weeping foliage—pleasant to be immured here during Heaven knows how many days, without the power to escape. Lucky fellow, Arthur, was my second thought; capital quarters you have fallen into. Better far the snug comforts of a Flemish chateau than the chances of a wayside inn. Besides, here is a goodly company met together; there will needs be pleasant people among them. I wish it may rain these three weeks; château life is the very thing I ‘m curious about. How do they get through the day? There’s no Times in Flanders; no one cares a farthing about who’s in and who’s out. There’s no Derby, no trials for murder. What can they do? was the question I put to myself a dozen times over. No matter; I have abundant occupation; my journal has never been posted up since—since—alas, I can scarcely tell!
It might be from reflections like these, or perhaps because I was less of a sportsman than my companions, but certainly, whatever the cause, I bore up against the disappointment of the weather with far more philosophy than they, and dispersed a sack of proverbs about patience, hope, equanimity, and contentment which Sancho Panza himself might have envied, until at length no one ventured a malediction on the day in my presence, for fear of eliciting a hailstorm of moral reflections. The company dropped down to breakfast by detachments, the elated looks and flashing eyes of the night before saddened and overcast at the unexpected change. Even the elders of the party seemed discontented; and except myself and an old gentleman with the gout, who took an airing about the hall and the drawing-room in a wheel-chair, all seemed miserable.
Each window had its occupant posted against the glass, vainly endeavouring to catch one bit of blue amid the dreary waste of cloud. A little group, sulky and silent, were gathered around the weather-glass; a literary inquirer sat down to con over the predictions of the almanac. You might as well have looked for sociability among the inhabitants of a private madhouse as here. The weather was cursed in every language from Cherokee to Sanskrit; all agreed that no country had such an abominable climate. The Yankee praised the summers of America, the Dane upheld his own, and I took a patriotic turn, and vowed I had never seen such rain in Ireland. The master of the house could scarcely show himself amid this torrent of abusive criticism; and when he did by chance appear, he looked as much ashamed as though he himself had pulled out the spigot, and deluged the whole land with water.
Meanwhile, none of those I looked for appeared. Neither the colonel’s daughter nor the baronne came down; the abbé too, did not descend to the breakfast room, and I was considerably puzzled and put out by the disappointment.
After then enduring a good hour’s boredom from the old colonel on the subject of my late lamented parent, Mark O’Leary; after submitting to a severe cross-examination from the Yankee gentleman as to the reason of my coming abroad, what property and expectations I had, my age and birthplace, what my mother died of, and whether I did not feel very miserable from the abject slavery of submitting to an English Government—I escaped into the library, a fine, comfortable old room, which I rightly conjectured I should find unoccupied.
Selecting a quaint-looking quarto with some curious illuminated pages for my companion, I drew a great deep leather chair into a recess of one window, and hugged myself in my solitude. While I listlessly turned over the leaves of my book, or sat lost in reflection, time crept along, and I heard the great clock of the château strike three; at the same moment a hand fell lightly on my shoulder; I turned about—it was the abbé.