“'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 Mädchen,” 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
“Musée Napoléon,” a noble 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 Titian, 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 passed 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 amusement 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 passionate 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 shore, 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, petite. 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.