Lippincott\'s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. written by Various
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Various >> Lippincott\'s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875.
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19 LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE
OF
_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE_.
VOLUME XV., No. 85.
PHILADELPHIA:
J. B. LIPPINCOTT AND CO.
January, 1875.
CONTENTS
THE NEW HYPERION.
FROM PARIS TO MARLY BY WAY OF THE RHINE.
XIX.--TYING UP THE CLEWS.
FOLLOWING THE TIBER
TWO PAPERS.--1.
THE PARADOX by CHARLOTTE F. BATES.
THE LEADEN ARROW by EDWARD C. BRUCE.
TWO MIRRORS by F.A. HILLARD.
MALCOLM.
CHAPTER LXIV. THE LAIRD AND HIS MOTHER.
CHAPTER LXV. THE LAIRD'S VISION.
CHAPTER LXVI. THE CRY FROM THE CHAMBER.
CHAPTER LXVII. FEET OF WOOL.
CHAPTER LXVIII. HANDS OF IRON.
CHAPTER LXIX. THE MARQUIS AND THE SCHOOLMASTER.
CHAPTER LXX. END OR BEGINNING?
THE STAGE IN ITALY by R. DAVEY.
THREE FEATHERS BY WILLIAM BLACK.
CHAPTER XX. TINTAGEL'S WALLS.
CHAPTER XXI. CONFESSION.
CHAPTER XXII. ON WINGS OF HOPE.
ON THE VIA SAN BASILIO by EARL MARBLE.
A CHRISTMAS HYMN by T. BUCHANAN READ.
THE PARSEES by FANNIE ROPER FEUDGE.
OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP
A SWEDISH PROVINCIAL THEATRE.
VENETIAN CAFFES.
A NEW MEXICAN CHRISTMAS EVE.
ENGLISH BIBLE TRANSLATIONS.
LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
_Books Received._
ILLUSTRATIONS
CAESAR'S PENNY.
THE THRONED CORPSE.
THE SKELETON IN ARMOR.
BRUSSELS.
FATHER JOLIET.
THE CATECHISM.
FRAU KRANICH.
"TO MY ARMS."
THE FUTURE OF FFARINA.
HOHENFELS' FAILURE.
READING THE CONTRACT.
INTERRUPTED REPOSE.
COALS vs. COATS
THE JESTER AT THE FEAST.
ST. GUDOLE, BRUSSELS.
SQUARE OF THE HOTEL DE VILLE, BRUSSELS.
DIVERS DIVERSIONS.
THE MIMIC HUNT.
HOMEWARD BOUND.
CHARLES AND JOSEPHINE.
ARGUS AND ULYSSES.
"HAND IT OVER TO ART."
NEAR THE SOURCE OF THE TIBER.
CAPRESE.
LAKE THRASIMENE.
THE TIBER NEAR PERUGIA.
TODI.
CHURCH AND CONVENT OF SAINT FRANCIS, AT ASSISI.
THE NEW HYPERION.
FROM PARIS TO MARLY BY WAY OF THE RHINE.
XIX.--TYING UP THE CLEWS.
[Illustration: CAESAR'S PENNY.]
In leaving Cologne for Aix-la-Chapelle you turn your back to the
river--a particular which suited my mood well enough. The railway bore
us away from the Rhine-shore at an abrupt angle, and in my notion the
noble Germanic goddess or image seemed at this point to recede with
grand theatric strides, like a divinity of the stage backing away
from her admirers over the billowy whirlpool of her own skirts. As
I dreamed we penetrated the tunnel of Koenigsdorf, which is fifteen
hundred yards long, and which seemed to me sufficiently protracted to
contain the slumber of Barbarossa. The thought gave me a useful hint,
and I fell into a light sleep, while Charles and Hohenfels pervaded
the darkness merely by their perfumes--the former with whiffs at a
concealed bottle of Farina, the latter with a pastille counterfeiting
the incense of the cathedral. In a couple of hours from the Hotel de
Hollande we reached Aachen, as the fond natives call the burgh so dear
to Charlemagne. Deprived of that magnificent mirror, the Rhine, the
pretty towns throughout this part of Germany seem but like country
belles. We should hardly have paused at Aix but for the sake of
affording a rest to Charles, who grew worse whenever lunch-time
competed with railway-time. As for the dull little city, for us it was
a wilderness, with the blank cleanliness of the desert, except in so
far as it was informed and populated by the memory of Charlemagne.
[Illustration: THE THRONED CORPSE.]
Here he died, and entered his tomb in the church himself had founded.
Into this sepulchre the emperor Otho III. dared to penetrate in the
year 997, impelled by a motive of vile and varlet-like curiosity. They
say the dead monarch confronted his living visitor in the great marble
chair in which he had been seated at his own command, haughty and
inflexible as in life, the ivory sceptre in his ivory fingers, his
white skull crowned with the diadem of gold. The peeping emperor
looked upon him with awe, half afraid of the mysterious and
penetrating shadows that reached forth out of his rayless eyes. Before
he left, however, he peered about, touched the sceptre and the throne,
fingered this and that, and having, as it were, trimmed the nails and
combed the beard of the great spectre, retired with a valet's bow.
Observing that Charlemagne had lost most of his nose, he caused it
to be replaced in gold very delicately chiseled and enchased. The
sacrilege was repeated by Frederick Barbarossa in 1165, who went
farther and forced Charlemagne to get up from his chair before him.
The corpse, in rising, fell in pieces, which have been dispersed
through Europe as relics. We saw such of them as remain here at the
Chapelle. I was allowed, for about the equivalent of an American
dollar, to measure the Occidental emperor's leg--they call it his arm.
And then, as a makeweight in the bargain, the venal sacristan placed
in my hands the head of Charlemagne.
I thought Hohenfels would have sunk to the ground with disgust. He
colored deeply and dragged me into the air. "I am ashamed of every
drop of German blood in my veins," he cried. "What are we to think of
the commerce of these wretches, for whom the very wounds of Caesar are
the lips of a money-box?"
I had given back the skull, as Hamlet returns the skull of Yorick to
the grave-digger, and was dusting my fingers with a handkerchief,
as hundreds of Hamlets have dusted theirs. I said, "'Thrift, thrift,
Horatio.'"
"At Kreutzberg there are twenty monks on the counter! This morning, at
St. Ursula's, it was the eleven thousand virgins, their skulls ranged
like Dutch cheeses above our heads or in rows around the walls, with
a battery-full of them in the neighboring apartment, like a
cheesemonger's reserved magazine. Here, the very leader of modern
ideas, the creator of our form of civilization, is shown for so
many pennies to any grocer who wants to weigh the head of a king!
Profanation! Barbarians! Philistines!"
[Illustration: THE SKELETON IN ARMOR.]
I turned rather hastily, while my hands were yet clammy with the
skull, thinking that this accusation of Philistinism was aimed at me.
But Hohenfels thought of nothing less than of a personality, being
in his cloudiest mood of generalization. So I only concealed the
handkerchief, while I said, as easily as I might, "You need not accuse
your German blood, for I have lived long enough in my American's
Paradise to know that civilized Paris is considerably worse in this
particular respect, with the addition of a certain goblin levity
particularly French. How often have I seen babies frightened by the
skulls in the dentists' windows, with their cynical chewing action!
It is said that a child sat next a dentist's apprentice once in an
omnibus, and was observed to turn rigid, fixed and white, but unable
to speak: he had sat on one of these skulls, and it had bitten him.
Silver-mounted skulls set as goblets, in imitation of Byron, are to
be seen at any of the china-shops rubbing against the chaste cheeks
of the old maid's teacup. Skeletons are sold, bleached and with gilded
hinges, to the medical students, who buy the pale horrors as openly
as meerschaum pipes. Have I not often found young Grandstone
supping among his doctors' apprentices of the Ober restaurant after
theatre-hours, a skeleton in the corner filled with umbrellas like
a hall-rack, and crowned with the triple or quintuple tiara of the
girls' best bonnets? Ay, Mimi Pinson's cap has known what it is to
perch on the bony head of Death. The juxtaposition is but an emblem.
The sewing-girl, like Hood's shirtmaker, scarcely fears the
'phantom of grisly bone.' Poor Francine! where have you taken _your_
artisanne's cap to, I wonder? Are you left alone, all alone again, and
thinking of the pretty solitude you have left behind you at Carlsruhe?
Who uses those polished keys now?"
Hohenfels interrupted me, complaining that my monologue was
uninteresting and diffuse, and was interfering with the railway
time-table. But I finished it in the car: "And the railway! What has
a person of fixed and independent habits to do with railways but
to growl at them? Before I was tempted upon the railway by that
impertinent engineer at Noisy, I got up and sat down when I liked, ate
wholesome food at my own hours, and was contented at home. Confusion
to him who made me the victim of his engineering calculations!
Confusion to Grandstone and his nest of serpents at Epernay! Did they
not introduce me to Fortnoye, who has doubly destroyed my peace? Where
are the conspirators, that I may pulverize them with my maledictions?"
[Illustration: BRUSSELS.]
This question--which Hohenfels called peevish as he buried himself in
his book--was not answered until we had passed Verviers, Chaudfontaine
and Liege. I was aroused from a sulky slumber in the station at
Brussels by Hohenfels, who said, in his musical scolding way, like the
busy wheeze of a clicking music-box, "You may say what you like, with
your left-handed flatteries, in regard to Fortnoye, and you may praise
Ariadnes and widows to the end of the chapter. You are sorry at
this moment not to be at Epernay to see the destroyer of your peace
married: you had rather assist at the making of a wife than at the
making of a widow."
I was just sending Fortnoye to the gloomiest shades of Acheron when a
strong hand entered the carriage-door, helped me handsomely down the
steps, and then began warmly to shake my own. Fortnoye!--Fortnoye
in flesh and blood was before me. While my mouth was yet filled with
maledictions he began to pour out a storm of thanks with all his own
particular warmth, expressing the most effusive gratitude for the
trouble I had taken in forsaking my route to be his wife's bridesmaid.
That is what he called it. "She has but one other," said Fortnoye.
At the same time I began to recognize other faces not unknown to me,
crudely illuminated by the raw colors of the railway-lights. They
all had black wedding-suits and enormous buttonhole nosegays of
orange-flowers. I picked them out, with a particular recognition for
each: 'twas the civil engineer of Noisy; the short gentleman named
Somerard; James Athanasius Grandstone, with his saintly aureole upon
him in the shape of a Yankee wide-awake; the nameless mutes, or rather
chorus, of the champagne-crypt; in short, my nest of serpents in
all its integrity. Still entangled with my slumbers, I hesitated
to respond to the friendly hands that were everywhere thrust
centripetally toward me.
I looked blackly at Hohenfels. He was chuckling.
At Heidelberg, making the acquaintance of M. Fortnoye
contemporaneously with my departure, he had become more enthralled
than he ever confessed to this radiant traveler--whom he called a
packman, but regarded as a Mercury--and his pretty scheme of matrimony
in motion. Even now, if I can believe my eyes, he goes up to the
"vintner" and "peddler" of his objurgations, and meekly whispers into
his ear with the air of a conspirator reporting a plot to his chief.
Having engaged to produce me at the wedding of Fortnoye, and finding
me unexpectedly recusant, he had adopted a little stratagem for
bringing me to the scene while thinking to escape from it.
"Thou too, Brutus!" I said, and gave it up. It only remained for me
to return all round, after five minutes of petrified stupidity,
the hand-grasps that had been offered from every quarter of the
compass-box.
Next morning, at an early hour, I was interrupted by a knock, just
as Charles had buttoned my gaiters and the young man from the
perruquier's (who had stolen in with that air of delicacy and of
almost literary refinement which belongs to his gentle profession) had
lathered me. A nick he gave my chin at the shock made my countenance
all argent and gules, and the visitor entering saw me thus emblazoned,
while the barber and Charles, "like two wild men supporters of a
shield," could only stare at the untimely apparition.
"Do you know him, Charles?" I asked, not recognizing my guest, and
putting over my painted face a mask of wet toweling.
"I know him intimately," replied my jester-in-ordinary: "I would thank
Monsieur Paul just to tell me his name. Do you remember, monsieur, a
sort of beggar, with a wagon and a stylish horse and a pretty wife,
who limped a bit with his right hand, or perhaps his left hand? Does
monsieur know what I mean? He used to come and see us at Passy; and
monsieur even had some traffic with him in a little matter of two
chickens."
"Father Joliet!" I cried.
"Present!" shouted the personage thus designated at my appeal to his
name. I turned round, toweled, and he grasped my hands. The unusual
hour, appropriate as I supposed only to some porter or other
stipendiary visitor of my hotel, caused to shine out with startling
refulgence the morning splendors in which Papa Joliet had arrayed
himself. He wore a courtly dress, appropriate to the most formal
possible ceremony; his black suit was glossy; his hat was glossy;
his varnished pumps were more than glossy--they were phosphorescent.
Gloves only were wanting to his honest hands.
[Illustration: PERRUQUIER.]
Soaped, napkined and generally extinguished, I could only stammer,
"You here in Brussels? What a droll meeting!"
"Wherefore droll?" asked Joliet, with a huge surprise, which lasted
him all through his next sentence. "I come here to marry my daughter.
Everything is ready; we count on your presence at the wedding; the
lawyer has drawn up the contract; and the breakfast is now cooking at
the best restaurant in the place."
"Francine's wedding, my dear Joliet!" I exclaimed. And, going back to
my apprehensions at her furtive disappearance from Carlsruhe, and
to my conjectures of some amorous mystery between her and her Yankee
traducer, Kraaniff, I added gravely, "It is very creditable!"
"How, creditable--and droll?" repeated the honest man, evidently much
surprised at my own accumulating surprises. "Did not you hear?"
[Illustration: FATHER JOLIET.]
"Not the faintest word," I said, "but I am none the less gratified to
find this affair ending, as it should, in the presence of a lawyer. As
for your wedding-invitation, my good friend, you are a little tardy in
delivering it, for it is exactly to-day that I am obliged to attend at
the marriage of one of my friends, M. Fortnoye."
"Ah, that is a good joke!" cried Joliet, breaking into an explosion of
laughter and clapping me pleasantly on the shoulder--an action which
caused a slight frown on the part of Charles. "You always would have
your jest, Monsieur the American! Tease me and scare me as much as
you like: I like these hoaxes better before a wedding than after.
Hold that," he added, extending his hand as if it were a piece of
merchandise.
I "held" it, and he went on, dwelling slowly on his words: "If you are
at Henri Fortnoye's wedding you will be at Francine Joliet's also, for
both of these persons are to be married at one church."
"Impossible!" I exclaimed, dropping the hand and stepping back.
"What! again?" said Joliet, his manly face visibly darkening. "Droll!
and creditable! and impossible! Why impossible?" Then he dropped his
head and looked angrily at the floor. "Ah, yes, even you," he said,
his eyes still fixed on the boards, "believed that a French girl,
trained as French girls are trained, would flirt and expose herself to
remark; and all on account of such a man as your compatriot, the other
American! Well! well! you ought to know your countrymen best."
"I know of no harm," I interposed hastily. "I should always have
thought Kraaniff hard to swallow as a mere matter of taste. I can but
recollect, Father Joliet," I went on more seriously, "that the last
time I met you you begged me not to talk of Francine if I would not
break your heart. I have to add to this the news brought me from
Heidelberg, that this Kraaniff was a serpent who had fascinated some
young girl for an approaching meal.--How dare you, Charles," I cried
suddenly, recalled to the consciousness of his presence by this
souvenir of his oratory, "stand here staring? Show the young man out
directly, and pay him."
I will not answer for Charles's having got much farther away than the
door. Joliet continued: "But his aunt knows him now for what he is.
Kraaniff, say you? I call him Kranich, though he had better change his
baptismal record than disgrace one of the best names in Brussels."
[Illustration: THE CATECHISM.]
"Frau Kranich, then, my old friend, is really his aunt?"
"Madame Kranich, whom I have known in your parlor, is really
Francine's godmother. Did you never know of all her secret kindness?
That rigid lady would commit a perjury to deny one of her own good
actions. Young Kranich has written her a letter confessing his lies.
Don't you know? The very same day when you were determined to fight
him in a duel--"
"Certainly, certainly," I said, a little confused. "We will change the
subject and leave my ferocity alone. Let us understand one another.
In regard to Fortnoye's marriage, was there not some talk of a Madame
Ashburleigh?"
"I believe you. Madame Ashburleigh is the very key of the manoeuvre.
Madame Ashburleigh--don't you perceive?--lost a child."
"For that matter, she has lost four. I know the lady confidentially,
and she told me their histories and present address. Lucia lies in
Glasgow, Hannibal at Nice, and Waterloo sleeps somewhere hereabout, as
well as another nameless little dear."
"She is a good woman. She has collected all her proofs, and has come
hither with them voluntarily--has perhaps already arrived. Brussels,
where two of her marmots rest, is one of her most frequent stations.
That censorious Madame Kranich made a scene, but she had to yield to
conviction."
"A censorious Madame Kranich! Is the young duelist married?"
"What? No, no! It is Francine's guardian I speak of. Of late years she
has become a sort of Puritan abbess, seeking the Protestant society
which abounds in Belgium, and lamenting her husband, whom they say she
used to drug with opium."
"Then is she not Kranich's aunt?"
"Oh yes, an aunt by marriage; but he is not her nephew: I will die
before I call him so."
"Listen," said I, "Father Joliet. You are as full of information as an
oracle, but you are not coherent. This month past I have been hunting
down a chimaera, a hydra with a dozen heads: each head shows me by
turn the portrait of Fortnoye, or Francine, or yourself, or Kranich,
or Mrs. Ashburleigh. Ever since Noisy I have been meandering through
the folds of a mystery. My head is turning with it. If you want to
save me from distraction, sit down in this chair and answer me a long
catechism, without saying a word but in reply to my questions."
[Illustration: FRAU KRANICH.]
"I am sure I talk as plain as a professor. Look! You frightened me at
first with your doubts and your impossibilities. You have only to make
Kranich's aunt agree with Francine's guardian, and at the same time
forgive Francine's husband for having assumed the undertaker's bill
for Madame Ashburleigh's baby."
"Yes, yes, my dear Joliet, you are clearer than Euclid." And I
administered a category of questions. Joliet, with his fatherly joy
bursting out of him in the longest of parentheses, kept quiet in his
refulgent shoes and answered as well as he could.
[Illustration: "TO MY ARMS."]
Francine, he protested, had never been a flirt (I have met no
Frenchmen who were ignorant of that one English word, to which they
give a new value by pronouncing it in a very orotund manner, as
_flort_). When she came to be ten or twelve, Frau Kranich--until then
a well-preserved lioness with an appetite for society--ceased to give
her dolls and promised to give her an education. At the same time, the
banker's widow left Paris, and repaired with her charge to Brussels,
where the little girl received some good half-Jesuitical, half-English
schooling, of the kind suggested in the Bronte novels. Her diploma
attained, Francine begged to accompany her English teacher back to
London: she wished to become a _meess_, she said, and be competent to
teach like a new Hypatia. She had hardly bidden her kind protectress
adieu when Frau Kranich's nephew arrived at Brussels, exceedingly
dissatisfied with his American business in the bar-rooms of the grand
duke of Mississippi. A sordid jealousy of Mademoiselle Joliet's claims
upon his aunt took possession of this prudent spirit. He took up a
watch-post at a university town on the Rhine. He began to whisper
vague exaggerations of her coquetries and liveliness, which the
Protestant circle that revolved about Madame Kranich did not fail to
bear in to her. This lady admired her nephew, sure that his want of
manners was the sign of a noble frankness. She wrote to Francine,
bidding her come immediately from London. The girl not replying, the
hopeful nephew was put upon her track. He went away. His letters from
England reported that Francine was no longer in that country, but was
probably come back to Belgium, "I know not in what suburb of Brussels
our very independent miss may this instant be hiding," he wrote.
About the same time, in the circle of French exiles at Brussels,
a young _romantique_ named Fortnoye was reported as weeping and
lavishing statues over the grave of an unknown infant in the
churchyard at Laaken. It was a delicious mystery. Kind meddlers
approached the sexton, who said that all he knew of the babe's mother
was that she was a beautiful lady from London. Kranich carried the
story dutifully to his aunt, adding his own ingenious surmise: "Can
Francine have become sufficiently Anglicised to contract secret
marriages with roving revolutionists, and scamper about the country
with ardent young Frenchmen in the style of Gretna Green?" In fact, it
was really from London that Mrs. Ashburleigh was proceeding, for the
purpose of taking care, in the Rhenish city where he was dying, of
her handsome, dissipated, worthless husband. Taken suddenly ill at
Brussels, she left her infant to the unequaled chill of a strange,
unknown cemetery, hastening thence with tears and despair to the
bedside where duty called her.
Has my reader forgotten the dim, tear-swollen story which I heard--not
at all improved in the telling--from my generous young friend
Grandstone--how an impulsive Frenchman had laid to rest, in flowers
and evergreens, the unnamed baby of a woman he had never seen? Jealous
as I was of Fortnoye, I never could think without tenderness of this
singular action. To make the tomb of this helpless Innocence the young
man braved the curiosity of his comrades--despised the rumor, the
obloquy, and, hardest of all, the jests. Well has the wise dramatist
decided that Ophelia must needs be laid in Yorick's bed!
Poor Francine, gay, frivolous, innocently vain of her little travesty
of English behavior, found her accomplishments and graces received
by her guardian's circle with incomprehensible coldness. Hurt and
humiliated, she asked to pay a visit to her father. The honest rustic
received her with a miserable confusion of doubt and severity, for
her escapade to England had never pleased him, and her return from her
godmother's home wore to him the air of a repudiation. At her father's
house, however, she was discovered by Fortnoye, who had never heard
the ingenious Kranich's theory of his own private wedding with
Francine, and who thought to find in her the veiled unknown of the
cemetery. He saw for the first time, in the flowery home at Noisy,
that fresh ingenuous beauty, a little over-cast with disappointment.
His generous nature was touched; and, with his talent for
administration and planning, he conceived the idea of establishing
Francine in the pretty bird's nest at Carlsruhe, distant alike from
the strongholds of her calumniators, Belgium and France.
Fortnoye now had an object in life. "There is a very young person in
the cemetery of Laaken who is much in need of a chaperone," he said.
The frank proofs of his own relations with this churchyard would
not only do credit to his own reputation, but would gratify the best
friends of Mademoiselle Joliet and at least one other lady. To attain
these proofs he had to step over the coiling, writhing bodies of
a whole nest of rumors. When he seized by the throat the especial
slander that he himself was the husband of the babe's mother, he found
written on its crest the signature of John Kranich. He sought the
aunt. This lady gave him several interviews, the Lutheran prayer-book
for ever in her hand. "Why does the dear girl not come to me?"
she would say, weeping, but she refused to hear a word against her
precious nephew, the personification of bluff frankness. As if to make
crushing him impossible, young Kranich had now withdrawn to America,
leaving his reputation in that best possible protection, the chivalry
that is extended toward the absent. Fortnoye was baffled. "I will ask
the baby at its tomb for its mother's and father's name," he cried.
In the pretty God's Acre he found a fresh harvest of flowers and a
new statue over the well-known grave. It was a pretty miniature of
Thorwaldsen's Psyche, on which the proud copyist had inscribed his
name. A respectful correspondence with Mrs. Ashburleigh, to whom
he was guided by the sculptor, and who was now taking the waters at
Wildbad, soon put the whole tangled story to rights. Fortnoye had the
happiness of conducting Francine, by this time his affianced wife, to
the good Frau Kranich, who, convinced that she had wrongly judged
her, threw her arms ardently around her recovered jewel, letting the
eternal little book fly from her hand like a projectile.
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