‘I should go further, my dear friend, and say, none,’ added he. ‘Your uniform is the only tint of “blue” about you.’ And thus chatting, we reached the fortress, and said good-night.
I have been particular, perhaps tiresomely so, in retelling these broken phrases and snatches of conversation; but they were the first matches applied to a train that was long and artfully laid.
CHAPTER XXXIX. A SORROWFUL PARTING
The general was as good as his word, and I now enjoyed the most unrestricted liberty; in fact, the officers of the garrison said truly, that they were far more like prisoners than I was. As regularly as evening came, I descended the path to the village, and, as the bell tolled out the vespers, I was crossing the little grass-plot to the cottage. So regularly was I looked for, that the pursuits of each evening were resumed as though only accidentally interrupted. The unfinished game of chess, the half-read volume, the newly-begun drawing, were taken up where we had left them, and life seemed to have centred itself in those delightful hours between sunset and midnight.
I suppose there are few young men who have not, at some time or other of their lives, enjoyed similar privileges, and known the fascination of intimacy in some household, where the affections became engaged as the intellect expanded, and, while winning another’s heart, have elevated their own. But to know the full charm of such intercourse, one must have been as I was—a prisoner—an orphan—almost friendless in the world—a very ‘waif’ upon the shore of destiny. I cannot express the intense pleasure these evenings afforded me. The cottage was my home, and more than my home. It was a shrine at which my heart worshipped—for I was in love! Easy as the confession is to make now, tortures would not have wrung it from me then!
In good truth, it was long before I knew it; nor can I guess how much longer the ignorance might have lasted, when General Urleben suddenly dispelled the clouds, by informing me that he had just received from the Minister of War at Vienna a demand for the name, rank, and regiment of his prisoner, previous to the negotiation for his exchange.
‘You will fill up these blanks, Tiernay,’ said he, ‘and within a month, or less, you will be once more free, and say adieu to Kuffstein.’
Had the paper contained my dismissal from the service, I shame to own it would have been more welcome! The last few months had changed all the character of my life, suggested new hopes and new ambitions. The career I used to glory in had grown distasteful; the comrades I once longed to rejoin were now become almost repulsive to my imagination. The marquise had spoken much of emigrating to some part of the new world beyond seas, and thither my fancy alike pointed. Perhaps my dreams of a future were not the less rose-coloured that they received no shadow from anything like a ‘fact.’ The old lady’s geographical knowledge was neither accurate nor extensive, and she contrived to invest this land of promise with old associations of what she once heard of Pondicherry—with certain features belonging to the United States. A glorious country it would indeed have been, which, within a month’s voyage, realised all the delights of the tropics, with the healthful vigour of the temperate zone, and where, without an effort beyond the mere will, men amassed enormous fortunes in a year or two. In a calmer mood, I might, indeed must, have been struck with the wild inconsistency of the old lady’s imaginings, and looked with somewhat of scepticism on the map for that spot of earth so richly endowed; but now I believed everything, provided it only ministered to my new hopes. Laura evidently, too, believed in the ‘Canaan’ of which, at last, we used to discourse as freely as though we had been there. Little discussions would, however, now and then vary the uniformity of this creed, and I remember once feeling almost hurt at Laura’s not agreeing with me about zebras, which I assured her were just as trainable as horses, but which the marquise flatly refused ever to use in any of her carriages. These were mere passing clouds: the regular atmosphere of our wishes was bright and transparent. In the midst of these delicious daydreams, there came one day a number of letters to the marquise by the hands of a courier on his way to Naples. What their contents I never knew, but the tidings seemed most joyful, for the old lady invited the general and myself to dinner, when the table was decked out with white lilies on all sides; she herself, and Laura also, wearing them in bouquets on their dresses.
The occasion had, I could see, something of a celebration about it. Mysterious hints to circumstances I knew nothing of were constantly interchanged, the whole ending with a solemn toast to the memory of the ‘Saint and Martyr’; but who he was, or when he lived, I knew not one single fact about.