Consuelo, page 63
"We are forced to admit, reverend canon," replied Joseph, "that chance alone brought us here, and that we were far from reckoning on this good fortune."
"The good fortune is mine," said the amiable canon, "for you are going to sing for me. But, no; it would be selfish in me to press you. You are tired—hungry, perhaps. You shall first sup, next have a good night's rest, and then tomorrow for music! And, then, such music! We shall have it all day long! André, you will conduct these young people to the housekeeper's room, and pay them every attention. But, no—let them remain and sup with me. Lay two covers at the foot of the table."
André zealously obeyed, and even evinced the utmost satisfaction; but Dame Bridget displayed quite an opposite feeling. She shook her head, shrugged her shoulders, and deprecatingly muttered between her teeth.
"Pretty people to eat at your table!—strange companions truly for a man of your rank!"
"Hold your peace, Bridget!" replied the canon, calmly; "you are never satisfied with any one, and when you see others enjoying a little pleasure you become quite violent."
"You are at a loss how to pass your time," said she, without heeding his reproaches. "By flattering you and tickling your ears you are as easily led as a child."
"Be silent!" repeated the canon, raising his voice a little, but without losing his good humor. "You are cross as a weasel, and if you go on scolding you will lose your wits and spoil the coffee."
"Great pleasure and great honor, forsooth; to make coffee for such guests!"
"Oh! you must have great people, must you? You love grandeur, it would seem; nothing short of princes, and bishops, and canonesses, with sixteen quarterings in their coats of arms, will serve your turn! To me all that sort of nonsense is not worth a song well sung."
Consuelo was astonished to hear so exalted a personage disputing, with a kind of childish pleasure, with his housekeeper, and during the whole evening she was surprised at the puerile nature of his pursuits. He incessantly uttered silly remarks upon every subject, just to pass the time, and to keep himself in good humor. He kept calling to the servants continually—now seriously discussing with them the merits of a fish sauce, anon the arrangement of a piece of furniture! He gave contradictory orders, entering into the most trifling details with a gravity worthy of more serious affairs; listening to one, reproving another, holding his ground against the unruly Bridget, yet never without a pleasant word for question or reply. One would have thought, that, reduced by his secluded and simple habits of life to the society of his domestics, he tried to keep his wit alive, and to promote his digestion, by a moderate exercise of thought.
The supper was exquisite, and the profusion of the viands unparalleled. Between the removes the cook was summoned, praised for some of his dishes, and gently reprimanded and learnedly instructed with respect to others. The travelers felt as if they had fallen from the clouds, and looked at each other as though all they saw around them were an amusing dream, so incomprehensible did such refinements appear.
"Come, come; it is not so bad," said the good canon, dismissing the culinary artist; "I see I shall make something of you, if you only show a desire to please and attend to your duty."
"One would fancy," thought Consuelo, "that all this was paternal advice or religious exhortation."
At the dessert, after the canon had given the housekeeper her share of praise and admonition, he at length turned from these grave matters and began to talk of music. His young guests then saw him in a more favorable point of view. On this subject he was well-informed; his studies were solid, his ideas just, and his taste was refined. He was a good organist, and having seated himself at the harpsichord after the removal of the cloth, played for them fragments from the old German masters, which he executed with purity and precision of style. Consuelo listened with interest; and having found upon the harpsichord a collection of this ancient music, she began to turn over the leaves, and forgetting the lateness of the hour, she requested the canon to play in his own free and peculiar style several pieces which had arrested her attention. The canon felt extremely flattered by this compliment to his performance. The music with which he was acquainted being long out of fashion, he rarely found an audience to his mind. He therefore took an extraordinary liking to Consuelo in particular; for Joseph, tired out, had fallen asleep in a huge arm-chair, which, deliciously alluring, invited to repose.
"Truly," exclaimed the canon in a moment of enthusiasm, "you are a most wonderful child, and your precocious genius promises a brilliant career. For the first time in my life I now regret the celibacy which my profession imposes on me."
This compliment made Consuelo blush and tremble lest her sex should have been discovered, but she quickly regained her self-possession when the canon naïvely added:
"Yes, I regret that I have no children, for Heaven might perhaps have given me a son like you, who would have been the happiness of my life—even if Bridget had been his mother. But tell me, my friend, what do you think of that Sebastian Bach, with whose compositions our professors are so much enraptured nowadays? Do you also think him a wonderful genius? I have a large book of his works which I collected and had bound, because, you know, one is expected to have every thing of that kind. They may be beautiful for aught I know; but there is great difficulty in reading them, and I confess to you that the first attempt having repelled me, I have been so lazy as not to renew it; moreover, I have so little time to spare. I can only indulge in music at rare intervals, snatched from more serious avocations. You have seen me much occupied with the management of my household, but you must not conclude from that that I am free and happy. On the contrary, I am enslaved by an enormous, a frightful task, which I have imposed upon myself. I am writing a book on which I have been at work for thirty years, and which another would not have completed in sixty—a book which requires incredible study, midnight watchings, indomitable patience, and profound reflection. I think it is a book that will make some noise in the world."
"But is it nearly finished?" asked Consuelo.
"Why, not exactly," replied the canon, desirous to conceal from himself the fact that he had not commenced it. "But we were observing just now that the music of Bach is terribly difficult, and that, for my own part, I consider it peculiar."
"If you could overcome your repugnance I think you would perceive that his is a genius which embraces, unites, and animates all the science of the past and the present."
"Well," returned the canon, "if it be so, we three will tomorrow endeavor to decipher something of it. It is now time for you to take some rest and for me to betake myself to my studies. But tomorrow you will pass the day with me; that is the understanding, is it not?"
"The whole day? that is asking too much, sir—we must hasten to reach Vienna; but for the morning we are at your service."
The canon protested—nay, insisted—and Consuelo pretended to yield, promising herself that she would hurry the adagios of the great Bach a little, and leave the priory about eleven o'clock, or by noon at furthest. When they intimated a wish to retire, an earnest discussion arose on the staircase between Dame Bridget and the principal valet-de-chambre. The zealous Joseph, desirous of pleasing his master, had prepared for the young musicians two pretty cells situated in the newly restored building occupied by the canon and his suite. Bridget, on the contrary, insisted on sending them to sleep in the desolate and forsaken rooms of the old priory, because that part of the mansion was separated from the new one by good doors and solid bolts. "What!" said she, elevating her shrill voice on the echoing staircase, "do you mean to lodge these vagabonds next door to us? Do you not see from their looks, their manners, and their profession, that they are gypsies, adventurers, wicked little rogues, who will make off before morning with our knives and forks. Who knows but they may even cut our throats?"
"Cut our throats? those children!" returned Joseph, laughing; "you are a fool, Bridget; old and feeble as you are, you would yourself put them to flight, merely by showing your teeth."
"Old and worn out indeed! Keep such language for yourself!" cried the old woman in a fury. "I tell you they shall not sleep here; I will not have them. Sleep, indeed? I should not close my eyes the whole night!"
"Don't be so silly. I am sure that those children have no more intention than I have to disturb your respectable slumbers. Come, let us have an end of this nonsense. My master ordered me to treat his guests well, and I am not going to shut them up in that old ruin, swarming with rats and open to every breeze. Would you have them sleep in the court-yard?"
"I would have had the gardener make up two good beds of straw for them there; do you imagine that those barefooted urchins are accustomed to beds of down?"
"They shall have them tonight at least, since it is my master's desire; I obey no orders but his, Dame Bridget. Let me go about my business; and recollect that it is your duty as well as mine to obey, and not to command."
"Well said! Joseph," exclaimed the canon, who, from the half-open door of the ante-chamber, had, much to his amusement, heard the whole dispute. "Go get my slippers, Bridget, and have mercy on our ears. Goodnight, my little friends. Follow Joseph. Pleasant dreams to you both! Long live music, and hey for tomorrow!"
Long, however, after our travelers had taken possession of their snug bed-rooms, they heard the scolding of the housekeeper, shrill as the whistling of the wintry wind, along the corridors. When the movement which announced the ceremony of the canon's retiring to bed had ceased, Dame Bridget stole on tip-toe to the doors of his young guests, and, quickly turning the key in each lock, shut them in. Joseph, buried to the ears in the most luxurious bed he had ever met with in his life, had already fallen asleep, and Consuelo followed his example, after having laughed heartily to herself at Bridget's terrors. She who had trembled almost every night during her journey, now made others tremble in their turn! She might have applied to herself the fable of the hare and the frogs, but I cannot positively assert that Consuelo was acquainted with La Fontaine's fables. Their merit was disputed at that epoch by the most noted wits of the universe; Voltaire laughed at them, and the Great Frederick, to ape his philosopher, despised them profoundly.
CHAPTER LXXIX
AT break of day, Consuelo, seeing the sun shining, and feeling invited to a walk by the joyous warblings of a thousand birds, which were already making good cheer in the garden, endeavored to leave her chamber. But the embargo was not yet raised, and Dame Bridget still held her prisoners under lock and key. Consuelo at first thought that it was perhaps an ingenious idea of the canon's, who wished to secure the musical enjoyment of the day and had thought it prudent in the first place to make certain of the persons of the musicians. The young girl, rendered hardy and agile by her masculine costume, examined the window, and saw that the descent was rendered easy by a large vine supported by a massive trellis which covered the whole wall. Descending slowly and carefully, so as not to injure the magnificent grapes of the priory, she reached the ground and buried herself in the recesses of the garden, laughing inwardly at Bridget's surprise and disappointment when she should find her precautions frustrated.
Consuelo now saw the superb flowers and magnificent fruits which she had admired by moonlight under another aspect. The breath of morning and the oblique rays of the rosy and smiling sun invested these beautiful productions of the earth with a new poetry. A robe of velvet-like satin enveloped the fruits, the dew hung in pearls of crystal from every branch, and the turf, frosted with silver, exhaled that light vapor which seems the breath of earth aspiring once more to ascend to heaven, and unite itself with the blue and cloudless firmament.
But nothing could exceed the freshness and beauty of the flowers, still loaded as they were with the moisture of the night, at this mysterious and shadowy hour of dawn, when they open as if to display those treasures of purity, and to shed those sweetest perfumes, which the earliest and purest of the sun's rays are alone worthy to behold and to possess for an instant. The canon's garden was in truth a paradise for a lover of horticulture. To Consuelo's eyes, indeed, it seemed somewhat too symmetrical and too carefully tended; but the fifty species of roses which adorned its parterres, the rare and charming hibiscus, the purple sage, the geraniums varied almost to infinity, the perfumed daturas, with their deep opal cups, impregnated with nectar worthy of the gods, the graceful asclepiades, in whose subtle poison the insect finds a voluptuous death, the splendid cactuses, displaying their scarlet effulgence on their strangely rugged stems—a thousand curious and superb plants which Consuelo had never seen, and of whose names and origin she was alike ignorant, long riveted her attention.
Examining their various attitudes and the sentiments which their several peculiarities seemed to convey, she endeavored to seize and define the analogy existing between music and flowers, and sought to explain their joint influence on the temperament of her host. The harmony of sounds had long appeared to her related in some way to the harmony of colors; but the harmony of both these harmonies seemed to her perfume. Plunged at this instant in a soft and dreamy reverie, she fancied she heard a voice issue from each of these painted chalices, and tell her their poetic mysteries in a language hitherto unknown. The rose spoke of her burning loves, the lily of her chaste delight; the superb magnolia told of pure enjoyments and lofty pride, and the lovely little hepatica related all the pleasures of a simple and retired existence. Some flowers spoke with strong and powerful voices, which proclaimed in accents trumpet-tongued, "I am beautiful and I rule." Others murmured in tones scarcely audible, but exquisitely soft and sweet, "I am little and I am beloved." And they all waved gracefully together in the breath of morning, and united their voices in an aërial choir which died away gently amid the listening herbs and beneath the foliage that drank in with greedy ears its mystic meaning.
All at once amid these ideal harmonies and ecstatic reveries, Consuelo heard piercing cries proceed from behind the trees which hid the wall. To these cries, which died away in the silence of the surrounding country, succeeded the rolling of carriage wheels; then the carriage appeared to stop, and blows were heard on the iron railing which inclosed the garden on that side. But whether it was that all the household was still asleep, or that no person cared to reply, they knocked in vain, and the shrill exclamation of a female voice, joined to the oaths of a man calling for help, fell upon the walls of the priory without awaking in the senseless stones any more echo than in the hearts of those whom they sheltered. All the windows which looked out on this side of the building were so firmly closed in order to protect the canon's repose, that no noise could penetrate the oaken window-shutters garnished with leather and stuffed with hair. The servants, busied in the green behind the house, did not hear the application for admittance, and there were no dogs in the priory, as the canon had no fancy for those importunate guardians, who, under the pretext of keeping thieves at a distance, ruffle the repose of their masters. Consuelo endeavored to obtain an entrance into the house, in order to acquaint the inmates that there were travelers in distress, but every door was carefully shut; so, yielding to the impulse of the moment, she ran to the wicket whence the noise proceeded. A traveling carriage, loaded with packages and covered with dust from the journey, had drawn up at the principal entrance of the garden. The postilions had alighted and vainly tried to shake the inhospitable gate, while groans and cries issued from the carriage. "Open!" cried they to Consuelo, "if you are Christians! There is a lady dying here."
"Open!" cried a woman, leaning out of the door, whose features were unknown to Consuelo, but whose Venetian accents impressed her vividly, "My mistress will die if you do not immediately grant her hospitality. Open if you are men."
Consuelo, without reflecting on the consequences of her first impulse, endeavored to open the gate; but it was closed by an enormous padlock, the key of which was probably in Dame Bridget's pocket. The bell was also fastened by a secret spring. In that quiet and honest country such precautions had not been taken against evil doers, but merely against the noise and inconvenience of unseasonable visitors. It was impossible for Consuelo to gratify her kind wishes on the poor woman's behalf, and she listened in melancholy silence to the reproaches of the maid, who, speaking Venetian to her mistress, cried with impatience, "The stupid creature! the awkward little fellow! he does not know how to open a gate." The German postilions, more patient and phlegmatic, were endeavoring to assist Consuelo, but without success, when the suffering lady, appearing in her turn at the window of the carriage, cried with a commanding voice in bad German, "Go this minute, you miserable little wretch, and find some person to open the gate!"
This energetic apostrophe reassured Consuelo respecting the imminent danger of the lady. "If she be near dying," thought she, "it is at least by a violent death;" and addressing herself in Venetian to the traveler, whose accent was as plainly marked as the maid's:
"I do not belong to this house," said she; "I was merely received as a guest here last night; I will go and try to awaken the inmates, which will be neither a quick nor an easy matter. Are you in such danger, madam, that you cannot wait here a little while without disparing?"
"I expect my confinement immediately, you stupid creature!" cried the traveler; "I have not a moment to wait; run, shout, break every thing, bring somebody and procure me admittance—you shall be well paid for your trouble."
