It was the opening of the season of eighteen hundred and thirty-two, at
the Baths of Wildbad.
The evening shadows were beginning to gather over the quiet little
German town, and the diligence was expected every minute. Before the
door of the principal inn, waiting the arrival of the first visitors
of the year, were assembled the three notable personages of Wildbad,
accompanied by their wives--the mayor, representing the inhabitants;
the doctor, representing the waters; the landlord, representing his own
establishment. Beyond this select circle, grouped snugly about the trim
little square in front of the inn, appeared the towns-people in general,
mixed here and there with the country people, in their quaint German
costume, placidly expectant of the diligence--the men in short black
jackets, tight black breeches, and three-cornered beaver hats; the women
with their long light hair hanging in one thickly plaited tail behind
them, and the waists of their short woolen gowns inserted modestly
in the region of their shoulder-blades. Round the outer edge of the
assemblage thus formed, flying detachments of plump white-headed
children careered in perpetual motion; while, mysteriously apart from
the rest of the inhabitants, the musicians of the Baths stood collected
in one lost corner, waiting the appearance of the first visitors to play
the first tune of the season in the form of a serenade. The light of
a May evening was still bright on the tops of the great wooded hills
watching high over the town on the right hand and the left; and the
cool breeze that comes before sunset came keenly fragrant here with the
balsamic odor of the first of the Black Forest.
“Mr. Landlord,” said the mayor’s wife (giving the landlord his title),
“have you any foreign guests coming on this first day of the season?”
“Madame Mayoress,” replied the landlord (returning the compliment), “I
have two. They have written--the one by the hand of his servant, the
other by his own hand apparently--to order their rooms; and they
are from England, both, as I think by their names. If you ask me to
pronounce those names, my tongue hesitates; if you ask me to spell them,
here they are, letter by letter, first and second in their order as
they come. First, a high-born stranger (by title Mister) who introduces
himself in eight letters, A, r, m, a, d, a, l, e--and comes ill in his
own carriage. Second, a high-born stranger (by title Mister also), who
introduces himself in four letters--N, e, a, l--and comes ill in the
diligence. His excellency of the eight letters writes to me (by his
servant) in French; his excellency of the four letters writes to me in
German. The rooms of both are ready. I know no more.”
“Perhaps,” suggested the mayor’s wife, “Mr. Doctor has heard from one or
both of these illustrious strangers?”
“From one only, Madam Mayoress; but not, strictly speaking, from the
person himself. I have received a medical report of his excellency of
the eight letters, and his case seems a bad one. God help him!”
“The diligence!” cried a child from the outskirts of the crowd.
The musicians seized their instruments, and silence fell on the whole
community. From far away in the windings of the forest gorge, the ring
of horses’ bells came faintly clear through the evening stillness. Which
carriage was approaching--the private carriage with Mr. Armadale, or the
public carriage with Mr. Neal?
“Play, my friends!” cried the mayor to the musicians. “Public or
private, here are the first sick people of the season. Let them find us
cheerful.”
The band played a lively dance tune, and the children in the square
footed it merrily to the music. At the same moment, their elders near
the inn door drew aside, and disclosed the first shadow of gloom that
fell over the gayety and beauty of the scene. Through the opening made
on either hand, a little procession of stout country girls advanced,
each drawing after her an empty chair on wheels; each in waiting (and
knitting while she waited) for the paralyzed wretches who came helpless
by hundreds then--who come helpless by thousands now--to the waters of
Wildbad for relief.
While the band played, while the children danced, while the buzz of many
talkers deepened, while the strong young nurses of the coming cripples
knitted impenetrably, a woman’s insatiable curiosity about other women
asserted itself in the mayor’s wife. She drew the landlady aside, and
whispered a question to her on the spot.
“A word more, ma’am,” said the mayor’s wife, “about the two strangers
from England. Are their letters explicit? Have they got any ladies with
them?”
“The one by the diligence--no,” replied the landlady. “But the one by
the private carriage--yes. He comes with a child; he comes with a nurse;
and,” concluded the landlady, skillfully keeping the main point of
interest till the last, “he comes with a Wife.”
The mayoress brightened; the doctoress (assisting at the conference)
brightened; the landlady nodded significantly. In the minds of all three
the same thought started into life at the same moment--“We shall see the
Fashions!”
In a minute more, there was a sudden movement in the crowd; and a chorus
of voices proclaimed that the travelers were at hand.
By this time the coming vehicle was in sight, and all further doubt was
at an end. It was the diligence that now approached by the long street
leading into the square--the diligence (in a dazzling new coat of yellow
paint) that delivered the first visitors of the season at the inn door.
Of the ten travelers released from the middle compartment and the back
compartment of the carriage--all from various parts of Germany--three
were lifted out helpless, and were placed in the chairs on wheels to be
drawn to their lodgings in the town. The front compartment contained
two passengers only--Mr. Neal and his traveling servant. With an arm
on either side to assist him, the stranger (whose malady appeared to
be locally confined to a lameness in one of his feet) succeeded in
descending the steps of the carriage easily enough. While he steadied
himself on the pavement by the help of his stick--looking not
over-patiently toward the musicians who were serenading him with the
waltz in “Der Freischutz”--his personal appearance rather damped the
enthusiasm of the friendly little circle assembled to welcome him. He
was a lean, tall, serious, middle-aged man, with a cold gray eye and a
long upper lip, with overhanging eyebrows and high cheek-bones; a man
who looked what he was--every inch a Scotchman.
“Where is the proprietor of this hotel?” he asked, speaking in the
German language, with a fluent readiness of expression, and an icy
coldness of manner. “Fetch the doctor,” he continued, when the landlord
had presented himself, “I want to see him immediately.”
“I am here already, sir,” said the doctor, advancing from the circle of
friends, “and my services are entirely at your disposal.”
“Thank you,” said Mr. Neal, looking at the doctor, as the rest of us
look at a dog when we have whistled and the dog has come. “I shall be
glad to consult you to-morrow morning, at ten o’clock, about my own
case. I only want to trouble you now with a message which I have
undertaken to deliver. We overtook a traveling carriage on the road here
with a gentleman in it--an Englishman, I believe--who appeared to be
seriously ill. A lady who was with him begged me to see you immediately
on my arrival, and to secure your professional assistance in removing
the patient from the carriage. Their courier has met with an accident,
and has been left behind on the road, and they are obliged to travel
very slowly. If you are here in an hour, you will be here in time to
receive them. That is the message. Who is this gentleman who appears to
be anxious to speak to me? The mayor? If you wish to see my passport,
sir, my servant will show it to you. No? You wish to welcome me to the
place, and to offer your services? I am infinitely flattered. If you
have any authority to shorten the performances of your town band, you
would be doing me a kindness to exert it. My nerves are irritable, and
I dislike music. Where is the landlord? No; I want to see my rooms. I
don’t want your arm; I can get upstairs with the help of my stick. Mr.
Mayor and Mr. Doctor, we need not detain one another any longer. I wish
you good-night.”
Both mayor and doctor looked after the Scotchman as he limped upstairs,
and shook their heads together in mute disapproval of him. The ladies,
as usual, went a step further, and expressed their opinions openly in
the plainest words. The case under consideration (so far as _they_ were
concerned) was the scandalous case of a man who had passed them over
entirely without notice. Mrs. Mayor could only attribute such an outrage
to the native ferocity of a savage. Mrs. Doctor took a stronger view
still, and considered it as proceeding from the inbred brutality of a
hog.
The hour of waiting for the traveling-carriage wore on, and the creeping
night stole up the hillsides softly. One by one the stars appeared, and
the first lights twinkled in the windows of the inn. As the darkness
came, the last idlers deserted the square; as the darkness came,
the mighty silence of the forest above flowed in on the valley, and
strangely and suddenly hushed the lonely little town.
The hour of waiting wore out, and the figure of the doctor, walking
backward and forward anxiously, was still the only living figure left in
the square. Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes, were counted out
by the doctor’s watch, before the first sound came through the night
silence to warn him of the approaching carriage. Slowly it emerged into
the square, at the walking pace of the horses, and drew up, as a hearse
might have drawn up, at the door of the inn.
“Is the doctor here?” asked a woman’s voice, speaking, out of the
darkness of the carriage, in the French language.
“I am here, madam,” replied the doctor, taking a light from the
landlord’s hand and opening the carriage door.
The first face that the light fell on was the face of the lady who had
just spoken--a young, darkly beautiful woman, with the tears standing
thick and bright in her eager black eyes. The second face revealed was
the face of a shriveled old negress, sitting opposite the lady on the
back seat. The third was the face of a little sleeping child in the
negress’s lap. With a quick gesture of impatience, the lady signed to
the nurse to leave the carriage first with the child. “Pray take them
out of the way,” she said to the landlady; “pray take them to their
room.” She got out herself when her request had been complied with.
Then the light fell clear for the first time on the further side of the
carriage, and the fourth traveler was disclosed to view.
He lay helpless on a mattress, supported by a stretcher; his hair, long
and disordered, under a black skull-cap; his eyes wide open, rolling
to and fro ceaselessly anxious; the rest of his face as void of all
expression of the character within him, and the thought within him, as
if he had been dead. There was no looking at him now, and guessing what
he might once have been. The leaden blank of his face met every question
as to his age, his rank, his temper, and his looks which that face might
once have answered, in impenetrable silence. Nothing spoke for him now
but the shock that had struck him with the death-in-life of paralysis.
The doctor’s eye questioned his lower limbs, and Death-in-Life answered,
_I am here_. The doctor’s eye, rising attentively by way of his hands
and arms, questioned upward and upward to the muscles round his mouth,
and Death-in-Life answered, _I am coming_.
In the face of a calamity so unsparing and so dreadful, there was
nothing to be said. The silent sympathy of help was all that could be
offered to the woman who stood weeping at the carriage door.
As they bore him on his bed across the hall of the hotel, his wandering
eyes encountered the face of his wife. They rested on her for a moment,
and in that moment he spoke.
“The child?” he said in English, with a slow, thick, laboring
articulation.
“The child is safe upstairs,” she answered, faintly.
“My desk?”
“It is in my hands. Look! I won’t trust it to anybody; I am taking care
of it for you myself.”
He closed his eyes for the first time after that answer, and said no
more. Tenderly and skillfully he was carried up the stairs, with his
wife on one side of him, and the doctor (ominously silent) on the other.
The landlord and the servants following saw the door of his room open
and close on him; heard the lady burst out crying hysterically as soon
as she was alone with the doctor and the sick man; saw the doctor come
out, half an hour later, with his ruddy face a shade paler than usual;
pressed him eagerly for information, and received but one answer to all
their inquiries--“Wait till I have seen him to-morrow. Ask me nothing
to-night.” They all knew the doctor’s ways, and they augured ill when he
left them hurriedly with that reply.
So the two first English visitors of the year came to the Baths of
Wildbad in the season of eighteen hundred and thirty-two.