George Meredith
The Adventures of Harry Richmond. Complete
I testified to them briefly.
The captain said a curious thing: ‘I’ll make an appointment with you in leviathan’s jaws the night of a storm, my lad.’
‘With pleasure,’ said Temple.
‘The Lord send it!’ exclaimed the captain.
His head was bent forward, and he was gazing up into his eyebrows.
Before we knew that anything was coming, he was out on a narrative of a scholar of one of the Universities. Our ears were indifferent to the young man’s career from the heights of fortune to delirium tremens down the cataract of brandy, until the captain spoke of a dark night on the Pool of the Thames; and here his voice struggled, and we tried hard to catch the thread of the tale. Two men and a girl were in the boat. The men fought, the girl shrieked, the boat was upset, the three were drowned.
All this came so suddenly that nothing but the captain’s heavy thump of his fist on the table kept us from laughing.
He was quite unable to relate the tale, and we had to gather it from his exclamations. One of the men was mate of a vessel lying in the Pool, having only cast anchor that evening; the girl was his sweetheart; the other man had once been a fine young University gentleman, and had become an outfitter’s drunken agent. The brave sailor had nourished him often when on shore, and he, with the fluent tongue which his college had trimmed for him, had led the girl to sin during her lover’s absence. Howsoever, they put off together to welcome him on his arrival, never suspecting that their secret had been whispered to Robert Welsh beforehand. Howsoever, Robert gave them hearty greeting, and down to the cabin they went, and there sat drinking up to midnight.
‘Three lost souls!’ said the captain.
‘See how they run,’ Temple sang, half audibly, and flushed hot, ashamed of himself.
‘‘Twas I had to bear the news to his mother,’ the captain pursued; ‘and it was a task, my lads, for I was then little more than your age, and the glass was Robert’s only fault, and he was my only brother.’
I offered my hand to the captain. He grasped it powerfully. ‘That crew in a boat, and wouldn’t you know the devil’d be coxswain?’ he called loudly, and buried his face.
‘No,’ he said, looking up at us, ‘I pray for no storm, but, by the Lord’s mercy, for a way to your hearts through fire or water. And now on deck, my lads, while your beds are made up. Three blind things we verily are.’
Captain Welsh showed he was sharp of hearing. His allusion to the humming of the tune of the mice gave Temple a fit of remorse, and he apologized.
‘Ay,’ said the captain, ‘it is so; own it: frivolity’s the fruit of that training that’s all for the flesh. But dip you into some o’ my books on my shelves here, and learn to see living man half skeleton, like life and shadow, and never to living man need you pray forgiveness, my lad.’
By sheer force of character he gained the command of our respect. Though we agreed on deck that he had bungled his story, it impressed us; we felt less able to cope with him, and less willing to encounter a storm.
‘We shall have one, of course,’ Temple said, affecting resignation, with a glance aloft.
I was superstitiously of the same opinion, and praised the vessel.
‘Oh, Priscilla’s the very name of a ship that founders with all hands and sends a bottle on shore,’ said Temple.
‘There isn’t a bottle on board,’ said I; and this piece of nonsense helped us to sleep off our gloom.
CHAPTER XIV. I MEET OLD FRIENDS
Notwithstanding the prognostications it pleased us to indulge, we had a tolerably smooth voyage. On a clear cold Sunday morning we were sailing between a foreign river’s banks, and Temple and I were alternately reading a chapter out of the Bible to the assembled ship’s crew, in advance of the captain’s short exhortation. We had ceased to look at ourselves inwardly, and we hardly thought it strange. But our hearts beat for a view of the great merchant city, which was called a free city, and therefore, Temple suggested, must bear certain portions of resemblance to old England; so we made up our minds to like it.
‘A wonderful place for beer cellars,’ a sailor observed to us slyly, and hitched himself up from the breech to the scalp.
At all events, it was a place where we could buy linen.
For that purpose, Captain Welsh handed us over to the care of his trusted mate Mr. Joseph Double, and we were soon in the streets of the city, desirous of purchasing half their contents. My supply of money was not enough for what I deemed necessary purchases. Temple had split his clothes, mine were tarred; we were appearing at a disadvantage, and we intended to dine at a good hotel and subsequently go to a theatre. Yet I had no wish to part with my watch. Mr. Double said it might be arranged. It was pawned at a shop for a sum equivalent in our money to about twelve pounds, and Temple obliged me by taking charge of the ticket. Thus we were enabled to dress suitably and dine pleasantly, and, as Mr. Double remarked, no one could rob me of my gold watch now. We visited a couple of beer-cellars to taste the drink of the people, and discovered three of our men engaged in a similar undertaking. I proposed that it should be done at my expense. They praised their captain, but asked us, as gentlemen and scholars, whether it was reasonable to object to liquor because your brother was carried out on a high tide? Mr. Double commended them to moderation. Their reply was to estimate an immoderate amount of liquor as due to them, with profound composure.
‘Those rascals,’ Mr. Double informed us, ‘are not in the captain’s confidence they’re tidy seamen, though, and they submit to the captain’s laws on board and have their liberty ashore.’
We inquired what the difference was between their privileges and his.
‘Why,’ said he, ‘if they’re so much as accused of a disobedient act, off they ‘re scurried, and lose fair wages and a kind captain. And let any man Jack of ‘em accuse me, and he bounds a india-rubber ball against a wall and gets it; all he meant to give he gets. Once you fix the confidence of your superior, you’re waterproof.’
We held our peace, but we could have spoken.
Mr. Double had no moral hostility toward theatres. Supposing he did not relish the performance, he could enjoy a spell in the open air, he said, and this he speedily decided to do. Had we not been bound in honour to remain for him to fetch us, we also should have retired from a representation of which we understood only the word ja. It was tiresome to be perpetually waiting for the return of this word. We felt somewhat as dogs must feel when human speech is addressed to them. Accordingly, we professed, without concealment, to despise the whole performance. I reminded Temple of a saying of the Emperor Charles V. as to a knowledge of languages.
‘Hem!’ he went critically; ‘it’s all very well for a German to talk in that way, but you can’t be five times an Englishman if you’re a foreigner.’
We heard English laughter near us. Presently an English gentleman accosted us.
‘Mr. Villiers, I believe?’ He bowed at me.
‘My name is Richmond.’
He bowed again, with excuses, talked of the Play, and telegraphed to a lady sitting in a box fronting us. I saw that she wrote on a slip of paper; she beckoned; the gentleman quitted us, and soon after placed a twisted note in my hand. It ran:
‘Miss Goodwin (whose Christian name is Clara) wishes very much to know how it has fared with Mr. Harry Richmond since he left Venice.’
I pushed past a number of discontented knees, trying, on my way to her box, to recollect her vividly, but I could barely recollect her at all, until I had sat beside her five minutes. Colonel Goodwin was asleep in a corner of the box. Awakened by the sound of his native tongue, he recognized me immediately.
‘On your way to your father?’ he said, as he shook my hand.
I thought it amazing he should guess that in Germany.
‘Do you know where he is, sir?’ I asked.
‘We saw him,’ replied the colonel; ‘when was it, Clara? A week or ten days ago.’
‘Yes,’ said Miss Goodwin; ‘we will talk of that by-and-by.’ And she overflowed with comments on my personal appearance, and plied me with questions, but would answer none of mine.
I fetched Temple into the box to introduce him. We were introduced in turn to Captain Malet, the gentleman who had accosted me below.
‘You understand German, then?’ said Miss Goodwin.
She stared at hearing that we knew only the word ja, for it made our presence in Germany unaccountable.
‘The most dangerous word of all,’ said Colonel Goodwin, and begged us always to repeat after it the negative nein for an antidote.
‘You have both seen my father?’ I whispered to Miss Goodwin; ‘both? We have been separated. Do tell me everything. Don’t look at the stage-they speak such nonsense. How did you remember me? How happy I am to have met you! Oh! I haven’t forgotten the gondolas and the striped posts, and stali and the other word; but soon after we were separated, and I haven’t seen him since.’
She touched her father’s arm.
‘At once, if you like,’ said he, jumping up erect.
‘In Germany was it?’ I persisted.
She nodded gravely and leaned softly on my arm while we marched out of the theatre to her hotel—I in such a state of happiness underlying bewilderment and strong expectation that I should have cried out loud had not pride in my partner restrained me. At her tea-table I narrated the whole of my adventure backwards to the time of our parting in Venice, hurrying it over as quick as I could, with the breathless termination, ‘And now?’
They had an incomprehensible reluctance to perform their part of the implied compact. Miss Goodwin looked at Captain Malet. He took his leave. Then she said, ‘How glad I am you have dropped that odious name of Roy! Papa and I have talked of you frequently—latterly very often. I meant to write to you, Harry Richmond. I should have done it the moment we returned to England.’
‘You must know,’ said the colonel, ‘that I am an amateur inspector of fortresses, and my poor Clara has to trudge the Continent with me to pick up the latest inventions in artillery and other matters, for which I get no thanks at head-quarters—but it ‘s one way of serving one’s country when the steel lies rusting. We are now for home by way of Paris. I hope that you and your friend will give us your company. I will see this Captain Welsh of yours before we start. Clara, you decided on dragging me to the theatre to-night with your usual admirable instinct.’
I reminded Miss Goodwin of my father being in Germany.
‘Yes, he is at one of the Courts, a long distance from here,’ she said, rapidly. ‘And you came by accident in a merchant-ship! You are one of those who are marked for extraordinary adventures. Confess: you would have set eyes on me, and not known me. It’s a miracle that I should meet my little friend Harry—little no longer my friend all the same, are you not?’
I hoped so ardently.
She with great urgency added, ‘Then come with us. Prove that you put faith in our friendship.’
In desperation I exclaimed, ‘But I must, I must hear of my father.’
She turned to consult the colonel’s face.
‘Certainly,’ he said, and eulogized a loving son. ‘Clara will talk to you. I’m for bed. What was the name of the play we saw this evening? Oh! Struensee, to be sure. We missed the scaffold.’
He wished us good-night on an appointment of the hour for breakfast, and ordered beds for us in the hotel.
Miss Goodwin commenced: ‘But really I have nothing to tell you, or very little. You know, Papa has introductions everywhere; we are like Continental people, and speak a variety of languages, and I am almost a foreigner, we are so much abroad; but I do think English boys should be educated at home: I hope you’ll go to an English college.’
Noticing my painful look, ‘We saw him at the Court of the Prince of Eppenwelzen,’ she said, as if her brows ached. ‘He is very kindly treated there; he was there some weeks ago. The place lies out in the Hanover direction, far from here. He told us that you were with your grandfather, and I must see Riversley Grange, and the truth is you must take me there. I suspect you have your peace to make; perhaps I shall help you, and be a true Peribanou. We go over Amsterdam, the Hague, Brussels, and you shall see the battlefield, Paris, straight to London. Yes, you are fickle; you have not once called me Peribanou.’
Her voluble rattling succeeded in fencing off my questions before I could exactly shape them, as I staggered from blind to blind idea, now thinking of the sombre red Bench, and now of the German prince’s Court.
‘Won’t you tell me any more to-night?’ I said, when she paused.
‘Indeed, I have not any more to tell,’ she assured me.
It was clear to me that she had joined the mysterious league against my father. I began to have a choking in the throat. I thanked her and wished her good-night while I was still capable of smiling.
At my next interview with Colonel Goodwin he spoke promptly on the subject of my wanderings. I was of an age, he said, to know my own interests. No doubt filial affection was excellent in its way, but in fact it was highly questionable whether my father was still at the Court of this German prince; my father had stated that he meant to visit England to obtain an interview with his son, and I might miss him by a harum-scarum chase over Germany. And besides, was I not offending my grandfather and my aunt, to whom I owed so much? He appealed to my warmest feelings on their behalf. This was just the moment, he said, when there was a turning-point in my fortunes. He could assure me most earnestly that I should do no good by knocking at this prince’s doors, and have nothing but bitterness if I did in the end discover my father. ‘Surely you understand the advantages of being bred a gentleman?’ he wound up. ‘Under your grandfather’s care you have a career before you, a fine fortune in prospect, everything a young man can wish for. And I must tell you candidly, you run great risk of missing all these things by hunting your father to earth. Give yourself a little time: reflect on it.’
‘I have,’ I cried. ‘I have come out to find him, and I must.’
The colonel renewed his arguments and persuasions until he was worn out. I thanked him continually for his kindness. Clara Goodwin besought me in a surprising manner to accompany her to England, called herself Peribanou, and with that name conjured up my father to my eyes in his breathing form. She said, as her father had done, that I was called on now to decide upon my future: she had a presentiment that evil would come to me of my unchecked, headstrong will, which she dignified by terming it a true but reckless affection: she believed she had been thrown in my path to prove herself a serviceable friend, a Peribanou of twenty-six who would not expect me to marry her when she had earned my gratitude.
They set Temple on me, and that was very funny. To hear him with his ‘I say, Richie, come, perhaps it’s as well to know where a thing should stop; your father knows you’re at Riversley, and he’ll be after you when convenient; and just fancy the squire!’ was laughable. He had some anxiety to be home again, or at least at Riversley. I offered him to Miss Goodwin.
She reproached me and coaxed me; she was exceedingly sweet. ‘Well,’ she said, in an odd, resigned fashion, ‘rest a day with us; will you refuse me that?’
I consented; she knew not with what fretfulness. We went out to gaze at the shops and edifices, and I bought two light bags for slinging over the shoulder, two nightshirts, toothbrushes, and pocket-combs, and a large map of Germany. By dint of vehement entreaties I led her to point to the territory of the Prince of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld. ‘His income is rather less than that of your grandfather, friend Harry,’ she remarked. I doated on the spot until I could have dropped my finger on it blindfold.
Two or three pitched battles brought us to a friendly arrangement. The colonel exacted my promise that if I saw my father at Sarkeld in Eppenwelzen I would not stay with him longer than seven days: and that if he was not there I would journey home forthwith. When I had yielded the promise frankly on my honour, he introduced me to a banker of the city, who agreed to furnish me money to carry me on to England in case I should require it. A diligence engaged to deliver me within a few miles of Sarkeld. I wrote a letter to my aunt Dorothy, telling her facts, and one to the squire, beginning, ‘We were caught on our arrival in London by the thickest fog ever remembered,’ as if it had been settled on my departure from Riversley that Temple and I were bound for London. Miss Goodwin was my post-bag. She said when we had dined, about two hours before the starting of the diligence, ‘Don’t you think you ought to go and wish that captain of the vessel you sailed in goodbye?’ I fell into her plot so far as to walk down to the quays on the river-side and reconnoitre the ship. But there I saw my prison. I kissed my hand to Captain Welsh’s mainmast rather ironically, though not without regard for him. Miss Goodwin lifted her eyelids at our reappearance. As she made no confession of her treason I did not accuse her, and perhaps it was owing to a movement of her conscience that at our parting she drew me to her near enough for a kiss to come of itself.
Four-and-twenty German words of essential service to a traveller in Germany constituted our knowledge of the language, and these were on paper transcribed by Miss Goodwin’s own hand. In the gloom of the diligence, packed between Germans of a size that not even Tacitus had prepared me for, smoked over from all sides, it was a fascinating study. Temple and I exchanged the paper half-hourly while the light lasted. When that had fled, nothing was left us to combat the sensation that we were in the depths of a manure-bed, for the windows were closed, the tobacco-smoke thickened, the hides of animals wrapping our immense companions reeked; fire occasionally glowed in their pipe-bowls; they were silent, and gave out smoke and heat incessantly, like inanimate forces of nature. I had most fantastic ideas,—that I had taken root and ripened, and must expect my head to drop off at any instant: that I was deep down, wedged in the solid mass of the earth. But I need not repeat them: they were accurately translated in imagination from my physical miseries. The dim revival of light, when I had well-nigh ceased to hope for it, showed us all like malefactors imperfectly hanged, or drowned wretches in a cabin under water. I had one Colossus bulging over my shoulder! Temple was blotted out. His face, emerging from beneath a block of curly bearskin, was like that of one frozen in wonderment. Outside there was a melting snow on the higher hills; the clouds over them grew steel-blue. We were going through a valley in a fir-forest.
CHAPTER XV. WE ARE ACCOSTED BY A BEAUTIFUL LITTLE LADY IN THE FOREST
Bowls of hot coffee and milk, with white rolls of bread to dip in them, refreshed us at a forest inn. For some minutes after the meal Temple and I talked like interchangeing puffs of steam, but soon subsided to our staring fit. The pipes were lit again. What we heard sounded like a language of the rocks and caves, and roots plucked up, a language of gluttons feasting; the word ja was like a door always on the hinge in every mouth. Dumpy children, bulky men, compressed old women with baked faces, and comical squat dogs, kept the villages partly alive. We observed one young urchin sitting on a stone opposite a dog, and he and the dog took alternate bites off a platter-shaped cake, big enough to require both his hands to hold it. Whether the dog ever snapped more than his share was matter of speculation to us. It was an education for him in good manners, and when we were sitting at dinner we wished our companions had enjoyed it. They fed with their heads in their plates, splashed and clattered jaws, without paying us any hospitable attention whatever, so that we had the dish of Lazarus. They were perfectly kind, notwithstanding, and allowed a portion of my great map of Germany to lie spread over their knees in the diligence, whilst Temple and I pored along the lines of the rivers. One would thrust his square-nailed finger to the name of a city and pronounce it; one gave us lessons in the expression of the vowels, with the softening of three of them, which seemed like a regulation drill movement for taking an egg into the mouth, and showing repentance of the act. ‘Sarkeld,’ we exclaimed mutually, and they made a galloping motion of their hands, pointing beyond the hills. Sarkeld was to the right, Sarkeld to the left, as the road wound on. Sarkeld was straight in front of us when the conductor, according to directions he had received, requested us to alight and push through this endless fir-forest up a hilly branch road, and away his hand galloped beyond it, coming to a deep place, and then to grapes, then to a tip-toe station, and under it lay Sarkeld. The pantomime was not bad. We waved our hand to the diligence, and set out cheerfully, with our bags at our backs, entering a gorge in the fir-covered hills before sunset, after starting the proposition—Does the sun himself look foreign in a foreign country?
‘Yes, he does,’ said Temple; and so I thought, but denied it, for by the sun’s favour I hoped to see my father that night, and hail Apollo joyfully in the morning; a hope that grew with exercise of my limbs. Beautiful cascades of dark bright water leaped down the gorge; we chased an invisible animal. Suddenly one of us exclaimed, ‘We ‘re in a German forest’; and we remembered grim tales of these forests, their awful castles, barons, knights, ladies, long-bearded dwarfs, gnomes and thin people. I commenced a legend off-hand.
‘No, no,’ said Temple, as if curdling; ‘let’s call this place the mouth of Hades. Greek things don’t make you feel funny.’
I laughed louder than was necessary, and remarked that I never had cared so much for Greek as on board Captain Welsh’s vessel.
‘It’s because he was all on the opposite tack I went on quoting,’ said Temple. ‘I used to read with my father in the holidays, and your Rev. Simon has kept you up to the mark; so it was all fair. It ‘s not on our consciences that we crammed the captain about our knowledge.’
‘No. I’m glad of it,’ said I.
Temple pursued, ‘Whatever happens to a fellow, he can meet anything so long as he can say—I ‘ve behaved like a man of honour. And those German tales—they only upset you. You don’t see the reason of the thing. Why is a man to be haunted half his life? Well, suppose he did commit a murder. But if he didn’t, can’t he walk through an old castle without meeting ghosts? or a forest?’
The dusky scenery of a strange land was influencing Temple. It affected me so, I made the worst of it for a cure.
‘Fancy those pines saying, “There go two more,” Temple. Well; and fancy this—a little earth-dwarf as broad as I’m long and high as my shoulder. One day he met the loveliest girl in the whole country, and she promised to marry him in twenty years’ time, in return for a sack of jewels worth all Germany and half England. You should have seen her dragging it home. People thought it full of charcoal. She married the man she loved, and the twenty years passed over, and at the stroke of the hour when she first met the dwarf, thousands of bells began ringing through the forest, and her husband cries out, “What is the meaning of it?” and they rode up to a garland of fresh flowers that dropped on her head, and right into a gold ring that closed on her finger, and—look, Temple, look!’
‘Where?’ asked the dear little fellow, looking in all earnest, from which the gloom of the place may be imagined, for, by suddenly mixing it with my absurd story, I discomposed his air of sovereign indifference as much as one does the surface of a lake by casting a stone in it.
We rounded the rocky corner of the gorge at a slightly accelerated pace in dead silence. It opened out to restorative daylight, and we breathed better and chaffed one another, and, beholding a house with pendent gold grapes, applauded the diligence conductor’s expressive pantomime. The opportunity was offered for a draught of wine, but we held water preferable, so we toasted the Priscilla out of the palms of our hands in draughts of water from a rill that had the sound of aspen-leaves, such as I used to listen to in the Riversley meadows, pleasantly familiar.
Several commanding elevations were in sight, some wooded, some bare. We chose the nearest, to observe the sunset, and concurred in thinking it unlike English sunsets, though not so very unlike the sunset we had taken for sunrise on board the Priscilla. A tumbled, dark and light green country of swelling forest-land and slopes of meadow ran to the West, and the West from flaming yellow burned down to smoky crimson across it. Temple bade—me ‘catch the disc—that was English enough.’ A glance at the sun’s disc confirmed the truth of his observation. Gazing on the outline of the orb, one might have fancied oneself in England. Yet the moment it had sunk under the hill this feeling of ours vanished with it. The coloured clouds drew me ages away from the recollection of home.
A tower on a distant hill, white among pines, led us to suppose that Sarkeld must lie somewhere beneath it. We therefore descended straight toward the tower, instead of returning to the road, and struck confidently into a rugged path. Recent events had given me the assurance that in my search for my father I was subject to a special governing direction. I had aimed at the Bench—missed it—been shipped across sea and precipitated into the arms of friends who had seen him and could tell me I was on his actual track, only blindly, and no longer blindly now.
‘Follow the path,’ I said, when Temple wanted to have a consultation.
‘So we did in the London fog!’ said he, with some gloom.
But my retort: ‘Hasn’t it brought us here?’ was a silencer.
Dark night came on. Every height stood for a ruin in our eyes, every dip an abyss. It grew bewilderingly dark, but the path did not forsake us, and we expected, at half-hour intervals, to perceive the lights of Sarkeld, soon to be thundering at one of the inns for admission and supper. I could hear Temple rehearsing his German vocabulary, ‘Brod, butter, wasser, fleisch, bett,’ as we stumbled along. Then it fell to ‘Brod, wasser, bett,’ and then, ‘Bett’ by itself, his confession of fatigue. Our path had frequently the nature of a waterway, and was very fatiguing, more agreeable to mount than descend, for in mounting the knees and shins bore the brunt of it, and these sufferers are not such important servants of the footfarer as toes and ankles in danger of tripping and being turned.
I was walking on leveller ground, my head bent and eyes half-shut, when a flash of light in a brook at my feet caused me to look aloft. The tower we had marked after sunset was close above us, shining in a light of torches. We adopted the sensible explanation of this mysterious sight, but were rather in the grip of the superstitious absurd one, until we discerned a number of reddened men.
‘Robbers!’ exclaimed one of us. Our common thought was, ‘No; robbers would never meet on a height in that manner’; and we were emboldened to mount and request their help.
Fronting the tower, which was of white marble, a high tent had been pitched on a green platform semicircled by pines. Torches were stuck in clefts of the trees, or in the fork of the branches, or held by boys and men, and there were clearly men at work beneath the tent at a busy rate. We could hear the paviour’s breath escape from them. Outside the ring of torchbearers and others was a long cart with a dozen horses harnessed to it. All the men appeared occupied too much for chatter and laughter. What could be underneath the tent? Seeing a boy occasionally lift one of the flapping corners, we took licence from his example to appease our curiosity. It was the statue of a bronze horse rearing spiritedly. The workmen were engaged fixing its pedestal in the earth.
Our curiosity being satisfied, we held debate upon our immediate prospects. The difficulty of making sure of a bed when you are once detached from your home, was the philosophical reflection we arrived at, for nothing practical presented itself. To arm ourselves we pulled out Miss Goodwin’s paper. ‘Gasthof is the word!’ cried Temple. ‘Gasthof, zimmer, bett; that means inn, hot supper, and bed. We’ll ask.’ We asked several of the men. Those in motion shot a stare at us; the torchbearers pointed at the tent and at an unseen height, muttering ‘Morgen.’ Referring to Miss Goodwin’s paper we discovered this to signify the unintelligible word morning, which was no answer at all; but the men, apparently deeming our conduct suspicious, gave us to understand by rather menacing gestures that we were not wanted there, so we passed into the dusk of the trees, angry at their incivility. Had it been Summer we should have dropped and slept. The night air of a sharp season obliged us to keep active, yet we were not willing to get far away from the torches. But after a time they were hidden; then we saw one moving ahead. The holder of it proved to be a workman of the gang, and between us and him the strangest parley ensued. He repeated the word morgen, and we insisted on zimmer and bett.
‘He takes us for twin Caspar Hausers,’ sighed Temple.
‘Nein,’ said the man, and, perhaps enlightened by hearing a foreign tongue, beckoned for us to step at his heels.
His lodging was a woodman’s hut. He offered us bread to eat, milk to drink, and straw to lie on: we desired nothing more, and were happy, though the bread was black, the milk sour, the straw mouldy.
Our breakfast was like a continuation of supper, but two little girls of our host, whose heads were cased in tight-fitting dirty linen caps, munched the black bread and drank the sour milk so thankfully, while fixing solemn eyes of wonder upon us, that to assure them we were the same sort of creature as themselves we pretended to relish the stuff. Rather to our amazement we did relish it. ‘Mutter!’ I said to them. They pointed to the room overhead. Temple laid his cheek on his hand. One of the little girls laid hers on the table. I said ‘Doctor?’ They nodded and answered ‘Princess,’ which seemed perfectly good English, and sent our conjectures as to the state of their mother’s health astray. I shut a silver English coin in one of their fat little hands.
