Chattering of indifferent matters, we arrived at the hotel; and after accepting an invitation to accompany the baron the next day to Wilhelms Höhe, I wished him good-night and retired.
CHAPTER XXXI. THE BARON’S STORY
Every one knows how rapidly acquaintance ripens into intimacy when mere accident throws two persons together in situations where they have no other occupation than each other’s society; days do the work of years, confidences spring up where mere ceremonies would have been interchanged before, and in fact a freedom of thought and speech as great as we enjoy in our oldest friendships. Such in less than a fortnight was the relation between the baron and myself. We breakfasted together every morning, and usually sallied forth afterwards into the country, generally on horseback, and only came back to dinner—a ramble in the Park concluding our day.
I still look back to those days as amongst the pleasantest of my life; for although the temper of my companion’s mind was melancholic, it seemed rather the sadness induced by some event of his life than the depression resulting from a desponding temperament—a great difference, by the way; as great as between the shadow we see at noonday and the uniform blackness of midnight. He had evidently seen much of the world, and in the highest class; he spoke of Paris as he knew it in the gorgeous time of the Empire—of the Tuileries, when the salons were crowded with kings and sovereign princes; of Napoleon, too, as he saw him, wet and cold, beside the bivouac fire, interchanging a rude jest with some grognard of the Garde, or commanding, in tones of loud superiority, the marshals who stood awaiting his orders. The Emperor, he said, never liked the Germans; and although many evinced a warm attachment to his person and his cause, they were not Frenchmen, and he could not forgive it. The Alsatians he trusted, and was partial to; but his sympathies stopped short at the Rhine; and he always felt that if fortune turned, the wrongs of Germany must have their recompense.
While speaking freely on these matters, I remarked that he studiously avoided all mention of his own services—a mere passing mention of ‘I was there,’ or, ‘My regiment was engaged in it,’ being the extent of his observations regarding himself. His age and rank, his wound itself, showed that he must have seen service in its most active times; and my curiosity was piqued to learn something of his own history, but which I did not feel myself entitled to inquire.
We were returning one evening from a ramble in the country, when stopping to ask a drink at a wayside inn, we found a party of soldiers in possession of the only room, where they were regaling themselves with wine; while a miserable-looking object, bound with his arms behind his back, sat pale and woe-begone in one corner of the apartment, his eyes fixed on the floor, and the tears slowly stealing along his cheeks.
‘What is it?’ asked I of the landlord, as I peeped in at the half-open door.
‘A deserter, sir——‘’
The word was scarcely spoken when the colonel let fall the cup he held in his hand, and leaned, almost fainting, against the wall.