One more fact remains to be mentioned in this sad story. The old tower still stands, bleak and desolate, on the mountains of the Vesdre; but it is now uninhabited save by the sheep that seek shelter within its gloomy walls, and herd in that spacious chimney. There is another change, too, but so slight as scarcely to be noticed: a little mound of earth, grass-grown and covered with thistles, marks the spot where ‘Lazare the shepherd’ takes his last rest. It is a lone and dreary spot, and the sighing night-winds as they move over the barren heath seem to utter his last consigne, and his requiem—‘Silence! silence à la mort!’
CHAPTER XIX. THE TOP OF A DILIGENCE
‘Summa diligentia,’ as we used to translate it at school, ‘on the top of the diligence,’ I wagged along towards the Rhine. A weary and a lonely way it is; indeed, I half believe a frontier is ever thus—a kind of natural barrier to ambition on either side, where both parties stop short and say, ‘Well, there’s no temptation there, anyhow!’
Reader, hast ever travelled in the banquette of a diligence? I will not ask you, fair lady; for how could you ever mount to that Olympus of trunks, carpet-bags, and hat-boxes; but my whiskered friend with the cheroot yonder, what says he? Never look angry, man—there was no offence in my question; better men than either of us have done it.
First, if the weather be fine, the view is a glorious thing; you are not limited, like your friends in the coupé, to the sight of the conductor’s gaiters, or the leather disc of the postillion’s ‘continuations.’ No; your eye ranges away at either side over those undulating plains which the Continent presents, unbroken by fence or hedgerow—one stretch of vast cornfields, great waving woods, interminable tracts of yellowish pasture-land, with here and there a village spire, or the pointed roof of some château rising above the trees. A yellow-earthy byroad traverses the plain, on which a heavy waggon plods along, the eight huge horses, stepping as free as though no weight restrained them; their bells are tinkling in the clear air, and the merry chant of the waggoner chimes in pleasantly with them. It is somewhat hard to fancy how the land is ever tilled; you meet few villages; scarcely a house is in sight—yet there are the fragrant fields; the yellow gold of harvest tints the earth, and the industry of man is seen on every side. It is peaceful, it is grand, too, from its very extent; but it is not homelike. No; our own happy land alone possesses that attribute. It is the country of the hearth and home. The traveller in France or Germany catches no glances as he goes of the rural life of the proprietors of the soil. A pale white château, seemingly uninhabited, stands in some formal lawn, where the hot sun darts down his rays unbroken, and the very fountain seems to hiss with heat. No signs of life are seen about; all is still and calm, as though the moon were shedding her yellow lustre over the scene. Oh how I long for the merry schoolboy’s laugh, the clatter of the pony’s canter, the watch-dog’s bark, the squire breathing the morning air amid his woods, that tell of England! How I fancy a peep into that large drawing-room, whose windows open to the greensward, letting in a view of distant mountains and far-receding foreground, through an atmosphere heavy with the rose and the honeysuckle! Lovely as is the scene, with foliage tinted in every hue, from the light sprayey hazel to the dull pine or the dark copper beech—how I prefer to look within where they are met who call this ‘home!’ And what a paradise is such a home!——
But I must think no more of these things. I am a lone and solitary man; my happiness is cast in a different mould, nor shall I mar it by longings which never can be realised.
While I sat thus musing, my companion of the banquette, of whom I had hitherto seen nothing but a blue-cloth cloak and a travelling-cap, came ‘slap down’ on me with a snort that choked him, and aroused me.
‘I ask your pardon, sir,’ said he in a voice that betrayed Middlesex most culpably. ‘Je suis—that is, j’ai——’
‘Never mind, sir; English will answer every purpose,’ cried I. ‘You have had a sound sleep of it.’