Dariel: A Romance of Surrey

by R. D. Blackmore

I could not quite see what his wits were driving at; but Strogue, who had very little reverence for anything, from seeing too much of all things, sang out, "Signor Nicolo?" and Kobaduk took it to his heart (which works much longer than the brain does), and came up to us, and touched both of us, with a shrivelled finger, upon either chest. "It is the name of the happy time; the time of the beautiful lady, and the noble lord, and the lovely babes; and nothing to do but to laugh and eat."

"And sleep," I suggested in his own language; and that completed his round of perfection, for he sent up the roots of his beard in a grin, and said, "Thou hast hit the mark." And then he sat down upon a swab to do it.

"Very fine, old codger, but beyond his time." Strogue gave him a tender poke with a stick, to make sure that he was not shamming; "we used to have faithful stuff like this in England; but education has vanquished it. He is sure to have a wife about twenty years old. Let us go in and stir her up. The wives are nothing but head-servants here. They are not sentimental, but they can cook, which is the highest duty of the female."

My feelings were shocked; but I left them so, because victuals alone could relieve them. The faithful retainer had overdone himself by that sudden outburst of decrepit hope. But he had got a young wife, which I thought too bad, until she proved the contrary by making us very comfortable, with a number of hot little barley-cakes, and some grilled kid flesh, which put a shine upon our faces. Then she poked her ancient husband up, and he came and fed, and played the host, and made runaway knocks at the time-worn gates of his memory.

The worst of it was that we could not be sure how much truth, and how much fiction, or at any rate confusion, issued from that antique repository. The older the thing was, the more it might be trusted—a truth which holds good with the bulk of modern work. Whenever we brought him to recent affairs, and the state of things now existing, he shook the silver tissue over his bright black eyes, and stared at us. "Kobaduk forgets, too long ago," was his chief perception of yesterday. However, we fetched him nearer date, by speaking of the Princess Marva.

Then the old man trembled, and turned his head away; and his fingers (which looked like empty bean-pods) fiddled at the cartridge loops which hung, like the smocking of a Surrey parish-clerk, on the quivering of his sunken breast.

"For the sake of God, who made us all," he mumbled; and although he had been feeding well, his wife offered him some brown bits in vain. "Let him be," said Strogue, "perhaps he'll have more pluck to-morrow."

But it did not seem to be so at all. He went up a ladder to bed that night in a loft that reeked of onions, and he dragged his old gun after him; but how he got his crooked knees up the rungs, and how he failed to shoot himself in the stomach, were difficulties not to be explained even by the miraculous powers of habit. "The old cock will come down like a lark to-morrow," Strogue prophesied, as the trap-door banged. But larks are more famous for going up, and the Captain's prediction was about as correct as his reference to natural history.

"What a set of funks these people are! Is there no one here to tell us anything?" we exclaimed almost with one accord, on the evening of the following day, the only one we spent at Karthlos. We had asked at the post-house, where Sûr Imar used to keep his horses, and we had tried Mrs. Kobaduk the fourth, and a grandson of the steward who hung about the house, and a woodcutter who came home sometimes, and a fellow called the huntsman, and everybody else we could come across. Most of them sat down and stared at us, and feigned not to understand what we meant; and then when we put the interpreter at them, all they would do was to shake their heads, and stretch their lazy hands westward. As for old Kobaduk, if he was like a lark, it was one who has a skewer through him; and all we could get him to do was to show us where the Princess Oria and her baby lay.

Alas, what an end for the loving and lovely, the passion of a warm life cold in dust, and the sad shadows creeping along the sadder grave. But I knew a heart in which she lived still, and a life as lovely as her own—were these to share her fate, or have a doom yet worse, and not even be restored to her in the silent home of death?