"That I will, pet.i.te, I have at least a dozen more boxes full of slides."
"And--and you said I should see your sketches, Monsieur Maurice."
"All in good time, little Gretchen," he said, smiling. "All in good time.
See--those are the sketches, in yonder folio; that mahogany case under the couch contains a collection of gems in gla.s.s and paste; those red books in the bookcase are full of pictures. You shall see them all by degrees; but only by degrees. For if I did not keep something back to tempt my little guest, she would not care to visit the solitary prisoner."
I felt myself colour crimson.
"But--but indeed I would care to come, Monsieur Maurice, if you had nothing at all to show me," I said, half hurt, half angry.
He gave me a strange look that I could not understand, and stroked my hair caressingly.
"Come often, then, little one," he said. "Come very often; and when we are tired of pictures and microscopes, we will sit upon the floor, and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings."
Then, seeing my look puzzled, he laughed and added:--
""Tis a great English poet says that, Gretchen, in one of his plays."
Here a shrill trumpet-call in the court-yard, followed by the prolonged roll of many drums, warned me that evening parade was called, and that as soon as it was over my father would be home and looking for me. So I started up, and put out my hand to say good-bye.
Monsieur Maurice took it between both his own.
"I don"t like parting from you so soon, little Madchen," he said. "Will you come again to-morrow?"
"Every day, if you like!" I replied eagerly.
"Then every day it shall be; and--let me see--you shall improve my bad German, and I will teach you French."
I could have clapped my hands for joy. I was longing to learn French, and I knew how much it would also please my father; so I thanked Monsieur Maurice again and again, and ran home with a light heart to tell of all the wonders I had seen.
4
From this time forth, I saw him always once, and sometimes twice a day--in the afternoons, when he regularly gave me the promised French lesson; and occasionally in the mornings, provided the weather was neither too cold nor too damp for him to join me in the grounds. For Monsieur Maurice was not strong. He could not with impunity face snow, and rain, and our keen Rhenish north-east winds; and it was only when the wintry sun shone out at noon and the air came tempered from the south, that he dared venture from his own fire-side. When, however, there shone a sunny day, with what delight I used to summon him for a walk, take him to my favourite points of view, and show him the woodland nooks that had been my chosen haunts in summer! Then, too, the unwonted colour would come back to his pale cheek, and the smile to his lips, and while the ramble and the sunshine lasted he would be all jest and gaiety, pelting me with dead leaves, chasing me in and out of the plantations, and telling me strange stories, half pathetic, half grotesque, of Dryads, and Fauns, and Satyrs--of Bacchus, and Pan, and Polyphemus--of nymphs who became trees, and shepherds who were transformed to fountains, and all kinds of beautiful wild myths of antique Greece--far more beautiful and far more wild than all the tales of gnomes and witches in my book of Hartz legends.
At other times, when the weather was cold or rainy, he would take down his "Musee Napoleon," a n.o.ble work in eight or ten volumes, and show me engravings after pictures by great masters in the Louvre, explaining them to me as we went along, painting in words the glow and glory of the absent colour, and steeping my childish imagination in golden dreams of Raphael and t.i.tian, and Paulo Veronese.
And sometimes, too, as the dusk came on and the firelight brightened in the gathering gloom, he would take up his guitar, and to the accompaniment of a few slight chords sing me a quaint old French chanson of the feudal times; or an Arab chant picked up in the tent or the Nile boat; or a Spanish ballad, half love-song, half litany, learned from the lips of a muleteer on the Pyrenean border.
For Monsieur Maurice, whatever his present adversities, had travelled far and wide at some foregone period of his life--in Syria, and Persia; in northernmost Tartary and the Siberian steppes; in Egypt and the Nubian desert, and among the perilous wilds of central Arabia. He spoke and wrote with facility some ten or twelve languages. He drew admirably, and had a profound knowledge of the Italian schools of art; and his memory was a rich storehouse of adventure and anecdote, legend and song.
I am an old woman now, and Monsieur Maurice must have pa.s.sed away many a year ago upon his last long journey; but even at this distance of time, my eyes are dimmed with tears when I remember how he used to unlock that storehouse for my pleasure, and ransack his memory for stories either of his own personal perils by flood and field, or of the hairbreadth "scapes of earlier travellers. For it was his amus.e.m.e.nt to amuse me; his happiness to make me happy. And I in return loved him with all my childish heart.
Nay, with something deeper and more romantic than a childish love--say rather with that kind of pa.s.sionate hero-worship which is an attribute more of youth than of childhood, and, like the quality of mercy, blesseth him that gives even more than him that takes.
"What dreadful places you have travelled in, Monsieur Maurice!" I exclaimed one day. "What dangers you have seen!"
He had been showing me a little sketchbook full of Eastern jottings, and had just explained how a certain boat therein depicted had upset with him on a part of the Upper Nile so swarming with alligators that he had to swim for his life, and even so, barely scrambled up the slimy bank in time.
"He who travels far courts many kinds of death," replied Monsieur Maurice; "but he escapes that which is worst--death from ennui."
"Suppose they had dragged you back, when you were half way up the bank!"
said I, shuddering.
And as I spoke, I felt myself turn pale; for I could see the brown monsters crowding to sh.o.r.e, and the red glitter of their cruel eyes and the hot breath steaming from their open jaws.
"Then they would have eaten me up as easily as you might swallow an oyster," laughed Monsieur Maurice. "Nay, my child, why that serious face? I should have escaped a world of trouble, and been missed by no one--except poor Ali."
"Who was Ali?" I asked quickly.
"Ali was my Nubian servant--my only friend, then; as you, little Gretchen, are my only friend, now," replied Monsieur Maurice, sadly. "Aye, my only little friend in the wide world--and I think a true one."
I did not know what to say; but I nestled closer to his side; and pressed my cheek up fondly against his shoulder.
"Tell me more about him, Monsieur Maurice," I whispered. "I am so glad he loved you dearly."
"He loved me very dearly," said Monsieur Maurice "so dearly that he gave his life for me."
"But is Ali dead?"
"Ay--Ali is dead. Nay, his story is brief enough, pet.i.te. I bought him in the slave market at Cairo--a poor, sickly, soulless lad, half stupid from ill-treatment. I gave him good food, good clothes, and liberty. I taught him to read. I made him my own servant; and his soul and his strength came back to him as if by a miracle. He became stalwart and intelligent, and so faithful that he was ten times more my slave than if I had held him to his bondage. I took him with me through all my Eastern pilgrimage. He was my body-guard; my cook; my dragoman; everything. He slept on a mat at the foot of my bed every night, like a dog. So he lived with me for nearly four years--till I lost him."
He paused.
I did not dare to ask, "what more?" but waited breathlessly.
"The rest is soon told," he said presently; but in an altered voice. "It happened in Ceylon. Our way lay along a bridle-path overhanging a steep gorge on the one hand and skirting the jungle on the other. Do you know what the jungle is, little Gretchen? Fancy an untrodden wilderness where huge trees, matted together by trailing creepers of gigantic size, shut out the sun and make a green roof of inextricable shade--where the very gra.s.s grows taller than the tallest man--where apes chatter, and parrots scream, and deadly reptiles swarm; and where nature has run wild since ever the world began. Well, so we went--I on my horse; Ali at my bridle; two porters following with food and baggage; the precipice below; the forest above; the morning sun just risen over all. On a sudden, Ali held his breath and listened. His practised ear had caught a sound that mine could not detect. He seized my rein--forced my horse back upon his haunches--drew his hunting knife, and ran forward to reconnoitre. The turn of the road hid him for a moment from my sight. The next instant, I had sprung from the saddle, pistol in hand, and run after him to share the sport or the danger. My little Gretchen--he was gone."
"Gone!" I echoed.
Monsieur Maurice shook his head, and turned his face away.
"I heard a crashing and crackling of the underwood," he said; "a faint moan dying on the sultry air. I saw a s.p.a.ce of dusty road trampled over with prints of an enormous paw--a tiny trail of blood--a shred of silken fringe--and nothing more. He was gone."
"What was it?" I asked presently, in an awestruck whisper.
Monsieur Maurice, instead of answering my question, opened the sketch-book at a page full of little outlines of animals and birds, and laid his finger silently on the figure of a sleeping tiger.
I shuddered.
"_Pauvre pet.i.te_!" he said, shutting up the book, "it is too terrible a story. I ought not to have told it to you. Try to forget it."
"Ah, no!" I said. "I shall never forget it, Monsieur Maurice. Poor Ali!
Have you still the piece of fringe you found lying in the road?"
He unlocked his desk and touched a secret spring; whereupon a small drawer flew out from a recess just under the lock.