Time Travel Omnibus, page 18
One evening the good baron sat alone in the great hall of Weinstein, in a particularly happy mood. He had dined well, as was his habit, and twenty empty bottles stood before him in a row upon the table, like a train of delightful memories of the recent past. But the baron had another reason to be satisfied with himself and with the world. The consciousness that he had that day become a parent lit up his countenance with a tender glow that mere wine cannot impart.
“What ho! Without! Hi! Seneschal!” he presently shouted, in a tone that made the twenty empty bottles ring as if they were musical glasses, while a score of suits of his ancestors’ armor hanging around the walls gave out in accompaniment a deep metallic bass. The seneschal was speedily at his side.
“Seneschal,” said Old Twenty Flasks, “you gave me to understand that the baroness was doing finely?”
“I am told,” replied the seneschal, “that her ladyship is doing as well as could be expected.”
The baron mused in silence for a moment, absently regarding the empty bottles. “You also gave me to understand,” he continued, “that there were—”
“Four,” said the seneschal, gravely. “I am credibly informed that there are four, all boys.”
“That,” exclaimed the baron, with a glow of honest pride, bringing a brawny fist down upon the table—“That, in these days, when the abominable doctrines of Malthus are gaining ground among the upper classes, is what I call creditable—creditable, by Saint Christopher. If I do say it!” His eyes rested again upon the empty bottles. “I think, Seneschal,” he added, after a brief pause, “that under the circumstances we may venture—”
“Nothing could be more eminently proper,” rejoined the seneschal. “I will fetch another flask forthwith, and of the best. What says Your Excellency to the vintage of 1304, the year of the comet?”
“But,” hesitated the baron, toying with his mustache, “I understood you to say that there were four of ’em—four boys?”
“True, my lord,” replied the seneschal, snatching the idea with the readiness of a well-trained domestic. “I will fetch four more flasks.”
As the excellent retainer deposited four fresh bottles upon the table within the radius of the baron’s reach, he casually remarked, “A pious old man, a traveler, is in the castle yard, my lord, seeking shelter and a supper. He comes from beyond the Alps, and fares toward Cologne.”
“I presume,” said the baron, with an air of indifference, “that he has been duly searched for plunder.”
“He passed this morning,” replied the retainer, “through the domain of your well-born cousin, Count Conrad of Schwinkenfels. Your lordship will readily understand that he has nothing now save a few beggarly Swiss coins of copper.”
“My worthy cousin Conrad!” exclaimed the baron, affectionately. “It is the one great misfortune of my life that I live to the leeward of Schwinkenfels. But you relieved the pious man of his copper?”
“My lord,” said the seneschal, with an apologetic smile, “it was not worth the taking.”
“Now by my soul,” roared the baron, “you exasperate me! Coin, and not worth the taking! Perhaps not for its intrinsic value, but you should have cleaned him out as a matter of principle, you fool!”
The seneschal hung his head and muttered an explanation. At the same time he opened the twenty-first bottle.
“Never,” continued the baron, less violently but still severely, “if you value my esteem and your own paltry skin, suffer yourself to be swerved a hair’s breadth from principle by the apparent insignificance of the loot.
A conscientious attention to details is one of the fundamental elements of a prosperous career—in fact, it underlies all political economy.”
The withdrawal of the cork from the twenty-second bottle emphasized this statement.
“However,” the baron went on, somewhat mollified, “this is not a day on which I can consistently make a fuss over a trifle. Four, and all boys!
This is a glorious day for Weinstein. Open the two remaining flasks, Seneschal, and show the pious stranger in. I fain would amuse myself with him.”
II
Viewed through the baron’s twenty-odd bottles, the stranger appeared to be an aged man—eighty years, if a day. He wore a shabby gray cloak and carried a palmer’s staff, and seemed an innocuous old fellow, cast in too commonplace a mold to furnish even a few minutes’ diversion. The baron regretted sending for him, but being a person of unfailing politeness, when not upon the rampage, he bade his guest be seated and filled him a beaker of the comet wine.
After an obeisance, profound yet not servile, the pilgrim took the glass and critically tasted the wine. He held the beaker up athwart the light with trembling hand, and then tasted again. The trial seemed to afford him great satisfaction, and he stroked his long white beard.
“Perhaps you are a connoisseur. It pleases your palate, eh?” said the baron, winking at the full-length portrait of one of his ancestors.
“Proper well,” replied the pilgrim, “though it is a trifle syrupy from too long keeping. By the bouquet and the tint, I should pronounce it of the vintage of 1304, grown on the steep slope south southeast of the castle, in the fork of the two pathways that lead to under the hill. The sun’s rays reflected from the turret give a peculiar excellence to the growth of that particular spot. But your rascally varlets have shelved the bottle on the wrong side of the cellar. It should have been put on the dry side, near where your doughty grandsire Sigismund von Weinstein, the Hairy Handed, walled up his third wife in preparation for a fourth.”
The baron regarded his guest with a look of amazement. “Upon my life!”
said he, “but you appear to be familiar with the ins and outs of this establishment.”
“If I do,” rejoined the stranger, composedly sipping his wine, “ ‘tis no more than natural, for I lived more than sixty years under this roof and know its every leak. I happen to be a Von Weinstein myself.”
The baron crossed himself and pulled his chair a little further away from the bottles and the stranger.
“Oh no,” said the pilgrim, laughing; “quiet your fears. I am aware that every well-regulated castle has an ancestral ghost, but my flesh and blood are honest. I was lord of Weinstein till I went, twelve years ago, to study metaphysics in the Arabic schools, and the cursed scriveners wrote me out of the estate. Why, I know this hall from infancy! Yonder is the fireplace at which I used to warm my baby toes. There is the identical suit of armor into which I crawled when a boy of six and hid till my sainted mother—heaven rest her!—nigh died of fright. It seems but yesterday. There on the wall hangs the sharp two-handed sword of our ancestor, Franz, the One-Eared, with which I cut off the mustaches of my tipsy sire as he sat muddled over his twentieth bottle. There is the very casque—but perhaps these reminiscences weary you. You must pardon the garrulity of an old man who has come to revisit the home of his childhood and prime.”
The baron pressed his hand to his forehead. “I have lived in this castle myself for half a century,” said he, “and am tolerably familiar with the history of my immediate progenitors. But I can’t say that I ever had the pleasure of your acquaintance. However, permit me to fill your glass.”
“It is good wine,” said the pilgrim, holding out his glass. “Except, perhaps, the vintage of 1392, when the grapes—”
The baron stared at his guest. “The grapes of 1392,” said he dryly, “lack forty years of ripening. You are aged, my friend, and your mind wanders.”
“Excuse me, worthy host,” calmly replied the pilgrim. “The vintage of 1392 has been forty years cellared. You have no memory for dates.”
“What call you this year?” demanded the baron.
“By the almanacs, and the stars, and precedent, and common consent, it is the year of grace 1433.”
“By my soul and hope of salvation,” ejaculated the baron, “it is the year of grace 1352.”
“There is evidently a misunderstanding somewhere,” remarked the venerable stranger. “I was born here in the year 1352, the year the Turks invaded Europe.”
“No Turk has invaded Europe, thanks be to heaven,” replied Old Twenty Flasks, recovering his self-control. “You are either a magician or an imposter. In either case I shall order you drawn and quartered as soon as we have finished this bottle. Pray proceed with your very interesting reminiscences, and do not spare the wine.”
“I never practice magic,” quietly replied the pilgrim, “and as to being an imposter, scan well my face. Don’t you recognize the family nose, thick, short, and generously colored? How about the three lateral and two diagonal wrinkles on my brow? I see them there on yours. Are not my chaps Weinstein chaps? Look closely. I court investigation.”
“You do look damnably like us,” the baron admitted.
“I was the youngest,” the stranger went on, “of quadruplets. My three brothers were puny, sickly things, and did not long survive their birth.
As a child I was the idol of my poor father, who had some traits worthy of respectful mention, guzzing old toper and unconscionable thief though he was.”
The baron winced.
“They used to call him Old Twenty Flasks. It is my candid opinion, based on memory, that Old Forty Flasks would have been nearer the truth.”
“It’s a lie!” shouted the baron, “I rarely exceeded twenty bottles.”
“And as for his standing in the community,” the pilgrim went on, without taking heed of the interruption, “it must be confessed that nothing could be worse. He was the terror of honest folk for miles around. Property rights were extremely insecure in this neighborhood, for the rapacity of my lamented parent knew no bounds. Yet nobody dared to complain aloud, for lives were not much safer than sheep or ducats. How the people hated his shadow, and roundly cursed him behind his back! I remember well that, when I was about fourteen—it must have been in ‘66, the year the Grand Turk occupied Adrianople—tall Hugo, the miller, called me up to him, and said: ‘Boy, thou has a right pretty nose.’ ‘It is a pretty nose, Hugo,’ said I, straightening up. ‘Is it on firm and strong?’ asked Hugo, with a sneer. ‘Firm enough, and strong enough, I dare say,’ I answered; ‘but why ask such a fool’s question?’ ‘Well, well, boy,’ said Hugo, turning away, gook sharp with thine eyes after thy nose when thy father is unoccupied, for he has just that conscience to steal the nose off his son’s face in lack of better plunder.’ ”
“By St. Christopher!” roared the baron, “tall Hugo, the miller, shall pay for this. I always suspected him. By St. Christopher’s burden, I’ll break every bone in his villainous body.”
“ ‘Twould be an ignoble vengeance,” replied the pilgrim, quietly, “for tall Hugo has been in his grave these sixty years.”
“True,” said the baron, putting both hands to his head, and gazing at his guest with a look of utter helplessness. “I forget that it is now next century—that is to say, if you be not a spectre.”
“You will excuse me, my respected parent,” returned the pilgrim, “if I subject your hypothesis to the test of logic, for it touches me upon a very tender spot, impugning, as it does, my physical verity and my status as an actual individualized ego. Now, what is our relative position? You acknowledge the date of my birth to have been the year of grace 1352.
That is a matter in which your memory is not likely to be at fault. On the other hand, with a strange inconsistency, you maintain, in the face of almanacs, chronologies, and the march of events, that it is still the year of grace 1352. Were you one of the seven sleepers, your hallucination [to use no harsher term] might be pardoned, but you are neither a sleeper nor a saint. Now, every one of the eighty years that are packed away in the carpet bag of my experience protests against your extraordinary error. It is I who have a prima facie right to question your physical existence, not you mine. Did you ever hear of a ghost, spectre, wraith, apparition, eldolon, or spook coming out of the future to haunt, annoy, or frighten individuals of an earlier generation?”
The baron was obliged to admit that he never had.
“But you have heard of instances where apparitions, ghosts, spooks, call them what you will, have invaded the present from out the limbo of the past?”
The baron crossed himself a second time and peered anxiously into the dark corners of the apartment. “If you are a genuine Von Weinstein,” he whispered, “you already know that this castle is overrun with spectres of that sort. It is difficult to move about after nightfall without tumbling over half a dozen of them.”
“Then,” said the placid logician, “you surrender your case. You commit what, my revered preceptor in dialectics, the learned Arabian Ben Dusty, used to style syllogistic suicide. For you allow that, while ghosts out of the future are unheard of, ghosts from the past are not infrequently encountered. Now I submit to you as a man, this proposition: That it is infinitely more probable that you are a ghost than that I am one!”
The baron turned very red. “Is this filial,” he demanded, “to deny the flesh and blood of your own father?”
“Is it paternal,” retorted the pilgrim, not losing his composure, “to insinuate the unrealness of the son of your own begetting?”
“By all the saints!” growled the baron, growing still redder, “this question shall be settled, and speedily. Halloo, there, Seneschal!” He called again and again, but in vain.
“Spare your lungs,” calmly suggested the pilgrim. “The best-trained domestic in the world will not stir from beneath the sod for all your shouting.”
Twenty Flasks sank back helplessly in his chair. He tried to speak, but his tongue and throat repudiated their functions. They only gurgled.
“That is right,” said his guest, approvingly. “Conduct yourself as befits a venerable and respectable ghost from the last century. A well-behaved apparition neither blusters nor is violent. You can well afford to be peaceable in your deportment now; you were turbulent enough before your death.”
“My death?” gasped the baron.
“Excuse me,” apologized the pilgrim, “for referring to that unpleasant event.”
“My death!” stammered the baron, his hair standing on end. “I should like to hear the particulars.”
“I was hardly more than fifteen at the time,” said the pilgrim musingly; “but I shall never forget the most trifling circumstances of the great popular arising that put an end to my worthy sire’s career. Exasperated beyond endurance by your outrageous crimes, the people for miles around at last rose in a body, and, led by my old friend tall Hugo, the miller, flocked to Schwinkenfels and appealed to your cousin, Count Conrad, for protection against yourself, their natural protector. Von Schwinkenfels heard their complaints with great gravity. He replied that he had long watched your abominable actions with distress and consternation; that he had frequently remonstrated with you, but in vain; that he regarded you as the scourge of the neighborhood; that your castle was full of blood-stained treasure and shamefully acquired booty; and that he now regarded it as the personal duty of himself, the conservator of lawful order and good morals, to march against Weinstein and exterminate you for the common good.”
“The hypocritical pirate!” exclaimed Twenty Flasks.
“Which he proceeded to do,” continued the pilgrim, “supported not only by his retainers but by your own. I must say that you made a sturdy defense.
Had not your rascally seneschal sold you out to Schwinkenfels and let down the drawbridge one evening when you were as usual fuddling your brains with your twenty bottles, perhaps Conrad never would have gained an entrance, and my young eyes would have been spared the horrid task of watching the body of my venerated parent dangling at the end of a rope from the topmost turret of the northwest tower.”
The baron buried his face in his hands and began to cry like a baby.
“They hanged me, did they?” he faltered.
“I am afraid no other construction can be put on it,” said the pilgrim.
“It was the inevitable termination of such a career as yours had been.
They hanged you, they strangled you, they choked you to death with a rope; and the unanimous verdict of the community was Justifiable Homicide. You weep! Behold, Father, I also weep for the shame of the house of Von Weinstein! Come to my arms.”
Father and son clasped each other in a long, affectionate embrace and mingled their tears over the disgrace of Weinstein. When the baron recovered from his emotion he found himself alone with his conscience and twenty-four empty bottles. The pilgrim had disappeared.
III
Meanwhile, in the aparilnents consecrated to the offices of maternity, all had been confusion, turmoil, and distress. In four huge armchairs sat four experienced matrons, each holding in her lap a pillow of swan’s-down. On each pillow had reposed an infinitesimal fraction of humanity, recently added to the sum total of Von Weinstein. One experienced matron had dozed over her charge; when she awoke the pillow in her lap was unoccupied. An immediate census taken by the alarmed attendants disclosed the startling fact that, although there were still four armchairs, and four sage women, and four pillows of swan’s-down, there were but three infants. The seneschal, as an expert in mathematics and accounts, was hastily summoned from below. His reckoning merely confirmed the appalling suspicion. One of the quadruplets was gone.
Prompt measures were taken in this fearful emergency. The corners of the rooms were ransacked in vain. Piles of bedclothing and baskets of linen were searched through and through. The hunt extended to other parts of the castle. The seneschal even sent out trusted and discreet retainers on horseback to scour the surrounding country. They returned with downcast countenances; no trace of the lost Von Weinstein had been found.
During one terrible hour the wails of the three neglected infants mingled with the screams of the hysterical mother, to whom the attention of the four sage women was exclusively directed. At the end of the hour her ladyship had sufficiently recovered to implore her attendants to make a last, though hopeless count. On three pillows lay three babies howling lustily in unison. On the fourth pillow reposed a fourth infant, with a mysterious smile upon his face, but cheeks that bore traces of recent tears.
