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It was then with considerable regret I learned that I should see the family en gala; that I had fallen upon a time of feasting and entertainment. Had it not been too late, I should have beaten my retreat, and taken up my abode for another day with the curé of Givet; as it was, I resolved to make my visit as brief as possible, and take to the road with all convenient despatch.
As we neared the château, the Walloon remembered a number of apologies with which the count charged him to account for his not having gone himself to fetch me, alleging the claims of his other guests, and the unavoidable details which the forthcoming ouverture de la chasse demanded at his hands. I paid little attention to the mumbled and broken narrative, interrupted by imprecations on the road and exhortations to the horses; for already we had entered the precincts of the demesne, and I was busy in noting down the appearance of the place. There was, however, little to remark. The transition from the wide forest to the park was only marked by a little improvement in the road; there was neither lodge nor gate – no wall, no fence, no inclosure of any kind. The trim culture, which in our country is so observable around the approach of a house of some consequence, was here totally wanting; the avenue was partly of gravel, partly of smooth turf; the brushwood of prickly holly was let grow wild, and straggled in many places across the road; the occasional views that opened seemed to have been made by accident, not design; and all was rank vegetation and rich verdure, uncared for – uncultivated, but like the children of the poor, seeming only the healthier and more robust, because left to their own unchecked, untutored impulses. The rabbits played about within a few paces of the carriage tracks; the birds sat motionless on the trees as we passed, while here and there through the foliage I could detect the gorgeous colouring of some bright peacock’s tail, as he rested on a bough and held converse with his wilder brethren of the air, just as if the remoteness of the spot and its seclusions led to intimacies which in the ordinary routine of life had been impossible. At length the trees receded farther and farther from the road, and a beautiful expanse of waving lawn, dotted with sheep, stretched before the eye. In the distance, too, I could perceive the château itself – a massive pile in the shape of a letter L, bristling with chimneys, and pierced with windows of every size and shape; clumps of flowering shrubs and fruit-trees were planted about, and little beds of flowers spangled the even turf like stars in the expanse of heaven. The Meuse wound round the château on three sides, and perhaps thus saved it from being inflicted by a ditch, for without water a Dutchman can no more exist than a mackerel.
‘Fine! isn’t it?’ said the Walloon, as he pointed with his finger to the scene before me, and seemed to revel with delight in my look of astonishment, while he plied his whip with renewed vigour, and soon drew up at a wide flight of stone steps, where a row of orange-trees mounted guard on each side, and filled the place with their fragrance.
A servant in the strange mélange of a livery, where the colours seemed chosen from a bed of ranunculuses just near, came out to let down the steps and usher me into the house. He informed me that the count had given orders for my reception, but that he and all his friends were out on horseback, and would not be back before dinner-time. Not sorry to have a little time to myself, I retired to my room, and threw myself down on a most comfortable sofa, excessively well satisfied with the locality and well disposed to take advantage of my good fortune. The little bed, with its snow-white curtains and gilded canopy; the brass dogs upon the hearth, that shone like gold; the cherry-wood table, that might have served as a mirror; the modest book-shelf, with its pleasant row of volumes; but, better than all, the open window, from which I could see for miles over the top of a dark forest, and watch the Meuse as it came and went, now shining, now lost in the recesses of the wood – all charmed me; and I fully confessed what I have had very frequently to repeat in life, that ‘Arthur O’Leary was born under a lucky planet.’
CHAPTER XII. CHATEAU LIFE
Stretched upon a large old-fashioned sofa, where a burgomaster might have reclined with ‘ample room and verge enough,’ in all the easy abandonment of dressing-gown and slippers; the cool breeze gently wafting the window-blind to and fro, and tempering the lulling sounds from wood and water; the buzzing of the summer insects and the far-off carol of a peasant’s song – I fell into one of those delicious sleeps in which dreams are so faintly marked as to leave us no disappointment on waking: flitting shadowlike before the mind, they live only in a pleasant memory of something vague and undefined, and impart no touch of sorrow for expectations unfulfilled, for hopes that are not to be realised. I would that my dreams might always take this shape. It is a sad thing when they become tangible; when features and looks, eyes, hands, words, and signs, live too strongly in our sleeping minds, and we awake to the cold reality of our daily cares and crosses, tenfold less endurable from very contrast. No! give me rather the faint and waving outline, the shadowy perception of pleasure, than the vivid picture, to end only in the conviction that I am but Christopher Sly after all; or what comes pretty much to the same, nothing but – Arthur O’Leary.
Still, I would not have you deem me discontented with my lot; far from it. I chose my path early in life, and never saw reason to regret the choice. How many of you can say as much? I felt that while the tender ties of home and family, the charities that grow up around the charmed circle of a wife and children, are the great prizes of life, there are also a thousand lesser ones in the wheel, in the kindly sympathies with which the world abounds; that to him who bears no ill-will at his heart – nay, rather loving all things that are lovable, with warm attachments to all who have been kind to him, with strong sources of happiness in his own tranquil thoughts – the wandering life would offer many pleasures.
Most men live, as it were, with one story of their lives, the traits of childhood maturing into manly features; their history consists of the development of early character in circumstances of good or evil fortune. They fall in love, they marry, they grow old, and they die – each incident of their existence bearing on that before and that after, like link upon link of some great chain. He, however, who throws himself like a plank upon the waters, to be washed hither and thither as wind or tide may drive him, has a very different experience. To him life is a succession of episodes, each perfect in itself; the world is but a number of tableaux, changing with climate and country – his sorrows in France having no connection with his joys in Italy; his delights in Spain living apart from his griefs on the Rhine. The past throws no shadow on the future; his philosophy is to make the most of the present; and he never forgets La Bruyère’s maxim – ‘Il faut rire avant d’être heureux, de peur de mourir sans avoir ri.’
Now, if you don’t like my philosophy, set it down as a dream, and here I am awake once more.
And certainly I claim no great merit on the score of my vigilance; for the tantararara that awoke me would have aroused the Seven Sleepers themselves. Words are weak to convey the most distant conception of the noise; it seemed as though ten thousand peacocks had congregated beneath my window, and with brazen throats were bent on giving me a hideous concert; the fiend-chorus in Robert le Diable was a psalm-tune compared to it. I started up and rushed to the casement; and there, in the lawn beneath, beheld some twenty persons costumed in hunting fashion, their horses foaming and splashed, their coats stained with marks of the forest. But the uproar was soon comprehensible, owing to some half-dozen of the party who performed on that most diabolical of all human inventions, the cor de chasse.
Imagine, if you can, and thank your stars that it is only a work of imagination, some twenty feet of brass pipe, worn belt-fashion over one shoulder and under the opposite arm, one end of the aforesaid tube being a mouth-piece, and the other expanding itself into a huge trumpet-mouth; then conceive a Fleming – one of Rubens’s cherubs, immensely magnified, and decorated with a beard and moustaches – blowing into this with all the force of his lungs, perfectly unmindful of the five other performers, who at five several and distinct parts of the melody are blasting away also – treble and bass, contralto and soprano, shake and sostenuto, all blending into one crash of hideous discord, to which the Scotch bagpipe in a pibroch is a soothing, melting melody. A deaf-and-dumb institution ‘would capitulate in half an hour. Truly, the results of a hunting expedition ought to be of the most satisfactory kind, to make the ‘Retour de la Chasse’ (it was this they were blowing) at all sufferable to those who were not engaged in the concert. As for the performers, I can readily believe they never heard a note of the whole.
Even Dutch lungs grow tired at last. Having blown the establishment into ecstasies, and myself into a furious headache, they gave in; and now an awful bell announced the time to dress for dinner. While I made my toilette, I endeavoured, as well as my throbbing temples would permit me, to fancy the host’s personal appearance, and to conjecture the style of the rest of the party. My preparations over, I took a parting look in the glass, as if to guess the probable impression I should make below-stairs, and sallied forth.
Cautiously stealing along over the well-waxed floors, slippery as ice itself, I descended the broad oak stairs into a great hall, wainscoted with dark walnut and decorated with antlers’ and stags’ heads, cross-bows and arquebuses, and, to my shuddering horror, with various cors de chasse, now happily, however, silent on the walls. I entered the drawing-room, conning over to myself a little speech in French, and preparing myself to bow for the next fifteen minutes; but, to my surprise, no one had yet appeared. All were still occupied in dressing, and probably taking some well-merited repose after their exertions on the wind-instruments. I had now time for a survey of the apartment; and, generally speaking, a drawing-room is no bad indication of the tastes and temperament of the owners of the establishment.
The practised eye speedily detects in the character and arrangement of a chamber something of its occupant. In some houses, the absence of all decoration, the simple puritanism of the furniture, bespeaks the life of quiet souls whose days are as devoid of luxury as their dwellings. You read in the cold grey tints the formal stiffness and unrelieved regularity around the Quaker-like flatness of their existence. In others, there is an air of ill-done display, a straining after effect, which shows itself in costly but ill-assorted details, a mingling of all styles and eras without repose or keeping. The bad pretentious pictures, the faulty bronzes, meagre casts of poor originals, the gaudy china, are safe warranty for the vulgarity of their owners; while the humble parlour of a village inn can be, as I have seen it, made to evidence the cultivated tastes and polished habits of those who have made it the halting-place of a day. We might go back and trace how much of our knowledge of the earliest ages is derived from the study of the interior of their dwellings; what a rich volume of information is conveyed in a mosaic; what a treatise does not lie in a frescoed wall!
The room in which I now found myself was a long, and for its length a narrow, apartment; a range of tall windows, deeply sunk in the thick wall, occupied one side, opposite to which was a plain wall covered with pictures from floor to cornice, save where, at a considerable distance from one another, were two splendidly carved chimney-pieces of black oak, one representing ‘The Adoration of the Shepherds,’ and the other ‘The Miraculous Draught of Fishes’ – the latter done with a relief, a vigour, and a movement I have never seen equalled. Above these were some armorial trophies of an early date, in which, among the maces and battle-axes, I could recognise some weapons of Eastern origin, which by the family, I learned, were ascribed to the periods of the Crusades.
Between the windows were placed a succession of carved oak cabinets of the seventeenth century – beautiful specimens of art, and for all their quaintness far handsomer objects of furniture than our modern luxury has introduced among us. Japan vases of dark blue-and-green were filled with rare flowers; here and there small tables of costly buhl invited you to the window recesses, where the downy ottomans, pillowed with Flemish luxury, suggested rest if not sleep. The pictures, over which I could but throw a passing glance, were all by Flemish painters, and of that character which so essentially displays their chief merits of richness of colour and tone – Gerard Dow and Ostade, Cuyp, Van der Meer, and Terburg – those admirable groupings of domestic life, where the nation is, as it were, miniatured before you; that perfection of domestic quiet, which bespeaks an heirloom of tranquillity derived whole centuries back. You see at once, in those dark-brown eyes and placid features, the traits that have taken ages to bring to such perfection; and you recognise the origin of those sturdy burgomasters and bold burghers, who were at the same time the thriftiest merchants and the haughtiest princes of Europe.
Suddenly, and when I was almost on my knees to examine a picture by Memling, the door opened, and a small, sharp-looking man, dressed in the last extravagance of Paris mode, resplendent in waistcoat and glistening in jewellery, tripped lightly forward. ‘Ah, mi Lor O’Leary!’ said he, advancing towards me with a bow and a slide.
It was no time to discuss pedigree; so gulping the promotion, I made my acknowledgments as best I could; and by the time that we met, which on a moderate calculation might have been two minutes after he entered, we shook hands very cordially, and looked delighted to see each other. This ceremony, I repeat, was only accomplished after his having bowed round two tables, an ottoman, and an oak armoire, I having performed the like ceremony behind a Chinese screen, and very nearly over a vase of the original ‘green dragon,’ which actually seemed disposed to spring at me for my awkwardness.
Before my astonishment – shall I add, disappointment? – had subsided, at finding that the diminutive, overdressed figure before me was the representative of those bold barons I had been musing over (for such he was), the room began to fill. Portly ladies of undefined dates sailed in and took their places, stiff, stately, and silent as their grandmothers on the walls; heavy-looking gentlemen, with unpronounceable names, bowed and wheeled and bowed again; while a buzz of votre serviteur, madame, or monsieur, swelled and sank amid the murmur of the room, with the scraping of feet on the glazed parquet, and the rustle of silk, whose plenitude bespoke a day when silkworms were honest.
The host paraded me around the austere circle, where the very names sounded like an incantation; and the old ladies shook their bugles and agitated their fans in recognition of my acquaintance. The circumstances of my adventure were the conversation of every group; and although, I confess, I could not help feeling that even a small spice of malice might have found food for laughter in the absurdity of my durance, yet not one there could see anything in the whole affair save a grave case of smuggled tobacco, and a most unwarrantable exercise of authority on the part of the curé who liberated me. Indeed, this latter seemed to gain ground so rapidly, that once or twice I began to fear they might remand me and sentence me to another night in the air, ‘till justice should be satisfied.’ I did the worthy Maire de Givet foul wrong, said I to myself; these people here are not a whit better.
The company continued to arrive at every moment; and now I remarked that it was the veteran battalion who led the march, the younger members of the household only dropping in as the hour grew later. Among these was a pleasant sprinkling of Frenchmen, as easily recognisable among Flemings as is an officer of the Blues from one of the new police; a German baron, a very portrait of his class, fat, heavy-browed, sulky-looking, but in reality a good-hearted, fine-tempered fellow; two Americans; an English colonel, with his daughters twain; and a Danish chargé d’ affaires– the minor characters being what, in dramatic phrase, are called premiers and premieres, meaning thereby young people of either sex, dressed in the latest mode, and performing the part of lovers; the ladies, with a moderate share of good looks, being perfect in the freshness of their toilette and in a certain air of ease and gracefulness almost universal abroad; the men, a strange mixture of silliness and savagery (a bad cross), half hairdresser, half hero.
Before the dinner was announced, I had time to perceive that the company was divided into two different and very opposite currents – one party consisting of the old Dutch or Flemish race, quiet, plodding, peaceable souls, pretending to nothing new, enjoying everything old, their souvenirs referring to some event in the time of their grandfathers; the other section being the younger portion, who, strongly imbued with French notions on dress and English on sporting matters, attempted to bring Newmarket and the Boulevards des Italiens into the heart of the Ardennes.
Between the two, and connecting them with each other, was a species of pont du diable, in the person of a little, dapper, olive-complexioned man of about forty. His eyes were black as jet, but with an expression soft and subdued, save at moments of excitement, when they flashed like glow-worms; his plain suit of black with deep cambric ruffles, his silk shorts and buckled shoes, had in them something of the ecclesiastic; and so it was. He was the Abbé van Praet, the cadet of an ancient Belgian family, a man of considerable ability, highly informed on most subjects; a linguist, a musician, a painter of no small pretensions, who spent his life in the far niente of château existence – now devising a party of pleasure, now inventing a madrigal, now giving directions to the chef how to make an omelette à la curé, now stealing noiselessly along some sheltered walk to hear some fair lady’s secret confidence; for he was privy counsellor in all affairs of the heart, and, if the world did not wrong him, occasionally pleaded his own cause when no other petitioner offered. I was soon struck by this man, and by the tact with which, while he preserved his ascendency over the minds of all, he never admitted any undue familiarity, yet affected all the ease and insouciance of the veriest idler. I was flattered, also, by his notice of me, and by the politeness of his invitation to sit next him at table.
The distinctions I have hinted at already, made the dinner conversation a strange medley of Flemish history and sporting anecdotes; of reminiscences of the times of Maria Theresa, and dissertations on weights and ages; of the genealogies of Flemish families, and the pedigrees of English racehorses. The young English ladies, both pretty and delicate-looking girls, with an air of good-breeding and tone in their manner, shocked me not a little by the intimate knowledge they displayed on all matters of the turf and the stable – their acquaintance with the details of hunting, racing, and steeplechasing, seeming to form the most wonderful attraction to the moustached counts and whiskered barons who listened to them. The colonel was a fine, mellow-looking old gentleman, with a white head and a red nose, and with that species of placid expression one sees in the people who perform those parts in Vaudeville theatres called pères nobles. He seemed, indeed, as if he had been daily in the habit of bestowing a lovely daughter on some happy, enraptured lover, and invoking a blessing on their heads; there was a rich unction in his voice, an almost imperceptible quaver, that made it seem kind and affectionate; he finished his shake of the hand with a little parting squeeze, a kind of ‘one cheer more,’ as they say nowadays, when some misguided admirer calls upon a meeting for enthusiasm they don’t feel. The Americans were (and one description will serve for both, so like were they) sallow, high-boned, silent men, with a species of quiet caution in their manner, as if they were learning, but had not yet completed, a European education as to habits and customs, and were studiously careful not to commit any solecisms which might betray their country.
As dinner proceeded, the sporting characters carried the day. The ouverture de la chasse, which was to take place the following morning, was an all-engrossing topic, and I found myself established as judge on a hundred points of English jockey etiquette, of which as my ignorance was complete I suffered grievously in the estimation of the company, and, when referred to, could neither apportion the weight to age, nor even tell the number of yards in a ‘distance.’ It was, however, decreed that I should ride the next day – the host had the ‘very horse to suit me’; and, as the abbé whispered me to consent, I acceded at once to the arrangement.
When we adjourned to the drawing-room, Colonel Muddleton came towards me with an easy smile and an outstretched snuff-box, both in such perfect keeping: the action was a finished thing.
‘Any relation, may I ask, of a very old friend and brother officer of mine, General Mark O’Leary, who was killed in Canada?’ said he.
‘A very distant one only,’ replied I.
‘A capital fellow, brave as a lion, and pleasant. By Jove, I never met the like of him! What became of his Irish property? – he was never married, I think?’
‘No, he died a bachelor, and left his estates to my uncle; they had met once by accident, and took a liking to each other.’
‘And so your uncle has them now?’
‘No; my uncle died since. They came into my possession some two or three years ago.’
‘Eh – ah – upon my life!’ said he, with something of surprise in his manner; and then, as if ashamed of his exclamation, and with a much more cordial vein than at first, he resumed: ‘What a piece of unlooked-for good fortune to be sure! Only think of my finding my old friend Mark’s nephew!’
‘Not his nephew. I was only – ’
‘Never mind, never mind; he was kind of an uncle, you know – any man might be proud of him. What a glorious fellow! – full of fun, full of spirit and animation. Ah, just like all your countrymen! I’ve a little Irish blood in my veins myself; my mother was an O’Flaherty or an O’Neil, or something of that sort; and there’s Laura – you don’t know my daughter?’ ‘I have not the honour.’
‘Come along, and I’ll introduce you to her; a little reserved or so,’ said he, in a whisper, as if to give me the carte du pays– ’ rather cold, you know, to strangers; but when she hears you are the nephew of my old friend Mark – Mark and I were like brothers. – Laura, my love,’ said he, tapping the young lady on her white shoulder as she stood with her back towards us; ‘Laura, dear – the son of my oldest friend in the world, General O’Leary.’
The young lady turned quickly round, and, as she drew herself up somewhat haughtily, dropped me a low curtsy, and then resumed her conversation with a very much whiskered gentleman near. The colonel seemed, despite all his endeavours to overcome it, rather put out by his daughter’s hauteur to the son of his old friend; and what he would have said or done I know not, but the abbé came suddenly up, and with a card invited me to join a party at whist. The moment was so awkward for all, that I would have accepted an invitation even to écarté to escape from the difficulty, and I followed him into a small boudoir where two ladies were awaiting us. I had just time to see that they were both pleasing-looking, and of that time of life when women, without forfeiting any of the attractions of youth, are much more disposed to please by the attractions of manner and esprit than by mere beauty, when we sat down to our game. La Baronne de Meer, my partner, was the younger and the prettier of the two; she was one of those Flemings into whose families the race of Spain poured the warm current of southern blood, and gave them the dark eye and the olive skin, the graceful figure and the elastic step, so characteristic of their nation.
‘A la bonne heure,’ said she, smiling; ‘have we rescued one from the enchantress?’
‘Yes,’ replied the abbé, with an affected gravity; ‘in another moment he was lost.’
‘If you mean me,’ said I, laughing, ‘I assure you I ran no danger at all; for whatever the young lady’s glances may portend, she seemed very much indisposed to bestow a second on me.’
The game proceeded with its running fire of chitchat, from which I could gather that Mademoiselle Laura was a most established man-killer, no one ever escaping her fascinations save when by some strange fatality they preferred her sister Julia, whose style was, to use the abbé’s phrase, her sister’s ‘diluted.’ There was a tone of pique in the way the ladies criticised the colonel’s daughters, which I have often remarked in those who, accustomed to the attentions of men themselves, without any unusual effort to please on their part, are doubly annoyed when they perceive a rival making more than ordinary endeavours to attract admirers. They feel as a capitalist would, when another millionaire offers money at a lower rate of interest. It is, as it were, a breach of conventional etiquette, and never escapes being severely criticised.
As for me, I had no personal feeling at stake, and looked on at the game of all parties with much amusement.
‘Where is the Comte d’Espagne to-night?’ said the baronne to the abbé. ‘Has he been false?’
‘Not at all; he was singing with mademoiselle when I was in the salon.’
‘You’ll have a dreadful rival there, Monsieur O’Leary,’ said she laughingly; ‘he is the most celebrated swordsman and the best shot in Flanders.’
‘It is likely he may rust his weapons if he have no opportunity for their exercise till I give it,’ said I.
‘Don’t you admire her, then?’ said she.
‘The lady is very pretty, indeed,’ said I.
‘The heart led,’ interrupted the abbé suddenly, as he touched my foot beneath the table – ‘play a heart.’
Close beside my chair, and leaning over my cards, stood Mademoiselle Laura herself at the moment.
‘You have no heart,’ said she, in English, and with a singular expression on the words, while her downcast eye shot a glance – one glance – through me.
‘Yes, but I have though,’ said I, discovering a card that lay concealed behind another; ‘it only requires a little looking for.’
‘Not worth the trouble, perhaps,’ said she, with a toss of her head, as I threw the deuce upon the table; and before I could reply she was gone.
‘I think her much prettier when she looks saucy,’ said the baronne, as if to imply that the air of pique assumed was a mere piece of acting got up for effect.
I see it all, said I to myself. Foreign women can never forgive English for being so much their superior in beauty and loveliness. Meanwhile our game came to a close, and we gathered around the buffet.
There we found the old colonel, with a large silver tankard of mulled wine, holding forth over some campaigning exploit, to which no one listened for more than a second or two – and thus the whole room became joint-stock hearers of his story. Laura stood eating her ice with the Comte d’Espagne, the black-whiskered cavalier already mentioned, beside her. The Americans were prosing away about Jefferson and Adams; the Belgians talked agriculture and genealogy; and the French collecting into a group of their own, in which nearly all the pretty women joined, discoursed the ballet, the Chambre, the court, the coulisses, the last mode, and the last murder, and all in the same mirthful and lively tone. And truly, let people condemn as they will this superficial style of conversation, there is none equal to it; it avoids the prosaic flatness of German, and the monotonous pertinacity of English, which seems more to partake of the nature of discussion than dialogue. French chit-chat takes a wider range – anecdotic, illustrative, and discursive by turns; it deems nothing too light, nothing too weighty for its subject; it is a gay butterfly, now floating with gilded wings above you, now tremulously perched upon a leaf below, now sparkling in the sunbeam, now loitering in the shade; embodying not only thought, but expression, it charms by its style as well as by its matter. The language, too, suggests shades and nuances of colouring that exist not in other tongues; you can give to your canvas the precise tint you wish, for when mystery would prove a merit, the equivoque is there ready to your hand – meaning so much, yet asserting so little. For my part I should make my will in English; but I’d rather make love in French.
While thus digressing, I have forgotten to mention that people are running back and forward with bedroom candles; there is a confused hum of bonsoir on every side; and, with many a hope of a fine day for the morrow, we separate for the night.
I lay awake some hours thinking of Laura, and then of the baronne – they were both arch ones; the abbé too crossed my thoughts, and once or twice the old colonel’s roguish leer; but I slept soundly for all that, and did not wake till eight o’clock the next morning. The silence of the house struck me forcibly as I rubbed my eyes and looked about. Hang it, thought I, have they gone off to the chasse without me? I surely could never have slept through the uproar of their trumpets. I drew aside the window-curtains, and the mystery was solved: such rain never fell before; the clouds, actually touching the tops of the beech-trees, seemed to ooze and squash like squeezed sponges. The torrent came down in that splashing stroke as if some force behind momentarily propelled it stronger; and the long-parched ground seethed and smoked like a heated caldron.
