I bore up admirably on my journey. I felt I was doing a very heroic
thing. By my personation of Harpar, I was securing that poor fellow's
escape, and giving him ample time to get over the Austrian frontier, and
many a mile away from the beaks of the Double Eagle. I had read of such
things in history, and I resolved I would not derogate from the proudest
records of such self-devotion. Had I but remembered how long my illness
had lasted, I might have easily seen that Harpar could by this time have
arrived at Calcutta; but, unfortunately for me, I had no gauge of time
whatever, and completely forgot the long interval of my fever.
On reaching Innspruck, I was sent on to an old château some ten miles
away, called the Ambras Schloss, and being consigned to the charge of a
retired artillery officer there, they seemed to have totally forgotten
all about me. I lived with my old jailer just as if I were his friend:
we worked together in the garden, pruned, and raked, and hoed, and
weeded; we smoked and fished, and mended our nets on wet days, and read,
living exactly as might any two people in a remote out-of-the-world
spot.
There is a sort of armory at the Ambras, chiefly of old Tyrolese weapons
of an early period,--maces and halberds, and double-handed swords,
and such-like,--and one of our pastimes was arranging and settling and
cataloguing them, for which, in the ancient records of the Schloss,
there was ample material. This was an occupation that amused me vastly,
and I took to it with great zeal, and with such success that old Hirsch,
the jailer, at last consigned the whole to my charge, along with the
task of exhibiting the collection to strangers,--a source from which the
honest veteran derived the better part of his means of life.
At first, I scarcely liked my function as showman, but, like all my
other experiences in life, habit sufficed to reconcile me, and I took to
the occupation as though I had been born to it If now and then some rude
or vulgar traveller would ruffle my temper by some illiterate remark
or stupid question, I was well repaid by intercourse with a different
stamp. They were to me such peeps at the world as a monk might have from
the windows of his cloister, tempting, perhaps, but always blended with
the sense of the security that encompassed him, and defended him from
the cares of existence.
Perhaps the consciousness that I could assert my innocence and procure
my freedom at any moment, for the first few months reconciled me to this
strange life; but certainly, after a while, I ceased to care for any
other existence, and never troubled my head either about past or future.
I had, in fact, arrived at the great monastic elevation, in which a man,
ceasing to be human, reaches the dignity of a vegetable.
I had begun, as I have said, by an act of heroism, in accepting all
the penalties of another, and, long after I ceased to revert to this
sacrifice, the impulse it had once given still continued to move me. If
Hirsch never alluded to my imputed crime to me, I was equally reserved
towards him.