"That is not enough to give me a thousand livres," said the man; "but the three horses are worth something. That one you ride is a good one, and so is the young lady's,—the page's, I mean. Give me five hundred, and write me a promise of the horses in payment of the rest of the sums I have advanced,—the horses to be given up to me when you get to the end of your journey, which will be here, I suppose, but which they will understand as Nantes. That will give me a right to claim them."
Now, it is quite possible that one, if not more, of my sagacious readers will be inclined to think that I have been drawing an inconsistent character. It is very true the soldier was a right generous and a kind-hearted fellow. He liked to do a good turn. He liked especially to help two young lovers,—by-the-way, he had been crossed in love himself, though his history would be too long to tell here,—and yet he was not unwilling to take money out of their pockets when they had little enough, and to secure their horses for his own advantage. It was very inconsistent,—very inconsistent indeed. But I have now lived a tolerable number of years in the world, and all my life I have been looking for consistent men, and have not found more than six at the utmost. The fact is, man is a bundle,—a bundle of very contrary qualities,—to say nothing of the mere absolute opposition of body and soul in the mass. There are packages of good feelings and packages of bad feelings; rolls of wit and rolls of dullness; papers full of sense and papers full of nonsense; a lump of generosity here and a lump of selfishness there; and all tied up so tightly together that in a damp and foggy world they sooner or later mould and mildew each other. Thus, if I hear of a great man doing a little action, or a wise man committing a foolish one, instead of crying out, "How inconsistent!" I say, "It is very natural." Now, if it be very natural everywhere, it is still more natural in France; for, having inhabited that beautiful country and lived amongst her gallant and intellectual people a great part of my life, I have come to the conclusion that the most varied creature upon the face of the earth per se—in himself, in his own nature and composition—is a Frenchman.
While the soldier has been making all his arrangements with Master Ned, and while we have been discussing the knotty point of his inconsistency, &c., the old monk, with the lantern in his hand, has been getting ready two cells at the farther end of the long corridor, and the troopers and Pierrot, together with the driver of the coach, have been taking care of the horses. But the monk, having the least to do,—for the furniture of a cell is not usually superabundant, nor its bed difficult to make,—returns first, and conducts Lucette to her sleeping-place, without the slightest idea that she is any thing but a very pretty boy; for his eyes are not very clear, and the lantern dimmer than his eyes, and the lamp upon the table duller than the lantern. Edward Langdale accompanied them to see her cell. It was next to his own,—a pleasant proximity; and, telling her he would presently bring her some refreshment, he left her. As he walked slowly back with the monk, he came upon the subject of some stronger liquor than water,—at which the old man looked shocked; but, upon Edward alluding to the stains upon the table, and bestowing a donation,—entirely for the abbey,—the ferocity of his temperance abated, and he ran to the refectory-man, or some other competent officer, with whom he shared his gains, and informed him what a generous young gentleman they had got under their roof. The supper did not suffer in consequence; but, while it was preparing, Edward and the soldier accompanied the old man through church and cloisters, passages and corridors. Neither gained much knowledge of architecture, or of the particular Abbey of Moreilles. I would advise no one who wishes to criticize that of Westminster to go there at night with nothing but a bad tallow candle in a dirty lantern; and, though I have it upon good authority that before the conflagration Moreilles was decorated with the most beautiful flamboyant arches, mouldings hardly surpassed in richness, and, moreover, twenty-six cluster-columns of prodigious height, each with an exquisite capital totally different from all the others, Edward saw nothing but dark vaults, masses of stone, and a door. But that door was all he wanted to see; and as he passed it the soldier gave him a good hard pressure on the arm. It was, luckily, within about ten paces of Lucette's cell.
However, on reaching the strangers' parlor, the little party found the troopers and Pierrot and the driver, and three more monks, and, what was more to the purpose, a table laid with several large pies and a quantity of barley-bread. The means of potation had not yet appeared, but tarried not long; and a meal ensued which I need not further describe than by saying that the pies comprised rabbits and wild ducks; and none of the unlearned can imagine what an excellent thing a wild-duck pie can be made by the mere process of skinning the ducks.
After a few mouthfuls, the leader of the guard rose and left the room, saying he must go and see his cousin, who, "as they all knew, lived hard by;" and the rest of the troopers set to serious work first upon some sour wine, and then upon some of that good or bad spirit which has crowned the name of Nantes with a certain sort of immortality. Poor Pierrot! it was a sore temptation for him, especially when his young master was gone to carry some refreshment to the page; but he resisted during the very short period of Edward's absence, and Master Ned's eye was a strong corroborative of resolution after his return. The monks tasted, at first shyly, and then more boldly; and Edward drew from them the important fact that there were very few brethren in the convent, some of them being absent on quête, some on leave. Moreover the abbey, he said, had never been very full, since the abbacy—as was so common in France—had been bestowed upon a well-known painter of Paris, a layman.
There was some deep drinking that night; but still Pierrot, though he could have emptied the most capacious flagon there at an easy draught, maintained the combat against habit gloriously, till at length, just as the leader of the party returned, at the end of two hours, the good Rochellois, finding himself weak with the labor of resistance, retired to rest, after having received a hint from his master, which happily he was in a state to profit by,—happily indeed for him. "The primrose path to the everlasting bonfire" men have strewed in their imaginations with all sorts of sweet things; but, take my word for it, it is paved by Example,—that most slippery and dangerous of all asphalts. Luckily for him, the troopers did not care a fig whether he drank or not, and thus all he had to resist was the sight of outstretched arms and full cups; but he had something better on the other side: he had the warning of rolling eyes, and hiccoughing throats, and maudlin faces, and embarrassed tongues, which he had never seen before when he was himself sober enough to appreciate them fully. "Well, drunkenness," he thought, as he left the room, "is a very beastly thing, it is true."
The monks withdrew nearly at the same time; and I am well pleased to say that, although they had shown during that night, amongst the pies and the pottles, no narrow objection to either those carnal or those spiritual things which some castes of Hindoos call the "creature comforts of life," not one of them had an uneven step or an unsteady head. Probably they drank seldom; for those who drink often deprive themselves of the power of drinking at all,—soberly.
The coach-driver was soon under the table; and the troopers, though most of them, when the last drop provided was emptied from the flask, could make their way by diagonals to the dormitory assigned to them, were in a state which promised no early rising on the following day; and Edward and his friendly soldier parted about eleven o'clock, the latter merely saying, "We shall have a heavy storm to-night. The clouds are rolling up like distant mountains. But all the better for your purpose. Remember three!"
The consequences! Good God! How frightful a thing it is to consider what—under an overruling hand and will omnipotent—may be the consequences of the smallest deed we do. The consequences immediate, proximate, future! How many lives, what an amount of misery, how much damnation, may depend upon a light word, an idle jest, a sportive trick!
Should such a consideration forbid us to act and do, to resolve and to perform? Far from it. Man is an active being, and his life is deeds. Each moment must have its thought or its action, or the whole is sleep; but the consideration of that strange thing, CONSEQUENCE,—that overruling of our deeds to ends that we see not,—should teach us so to frame thought, word, and act, that, be the consequences what they may, we may be able at the great end of all to say, boldly, "I did it in an honest heart." God himself is responsible for the result if man acts with purity of intent.