CHAPTER XIV

TRAVELS OF THE COVERED CART

My companions were aroused with difficulty: the Colonel, poor old

gentleman, to a sort of permanent dream, in which you could say of him

only that he was very deaf and anxiously polite; the Major still maudlin

drunk. We had a dish of tea by the fireside, and then issued like

criminals into the scathing cold of the night. For the weather had in

the meantime changed. Upon the cessation of the rain, a strict frost had

succeeded. The moon, being young, was already near the zenith when we

started, glittered everywhere on sheets of ice, and sparkled in ten

thousand icicles. A more unpromising night for a journey it was hard to

conceive. But in the course of the afternoon the horses had been well

roughed; and King (for such was the name of the shock-headed lad) was

very positive that he could drive us without misadventure. He was as

good as his word; indeed, despite a gawky air, he was simply invaluable

in his present employment, showing marked sagacity in all that concerned

the care of horses, and guiding us by one short cut after another for

days, and without a fault.

The interior of that engine of torture, the covered cart, was fitted

with a bench, on which we took our places; the door was shut: in a

moment, the night closed upon us solid and stifling; and we felt that we

were being driven carefully out of the courtyard. Careful was the word

all night, and it was an alleviation of our miseries that we did not

often enjoy. In general, as we were driven the better part of the night

and day, often at a pretty quick pace and always through a labyrinth of

the most infamous country lanes and by-roads, we were so bruised upon

the bench, so dashed against the top and sides of the cart, that we

reached the end of a stage in truly pitiable case, sometimes flung

ourselves down without the formality of eating, made but one sleep of it

until the hour of departure returned, and were only properly awakened by

the first jolt of the renewed journey. There were interruptions, at

times, that we hailed as alleviations. At times the cart was bogged,

once it was upset, and we must alight and lend the driver the assistance

of our arms; at times, too (as on the occasion when I first encountered

it), the horses gave out, and we had to trail alongside in mud or frost

until the first peep of daylight, or the approach to a hamlet or a

high-road, bade us disappear like ghosts into our prison.

The main roads of England are incomparable for excellence, of a

beautiful smoothness, very ingeniously laid down, and so well kept that

in most weathers you could take your dinner off any part of them without

distaste. On them, to the note of the bugle, the mail did its sixty

miles a day; innumerable chaises whisked after the bobbing post-boys; or

some young blood would flit by in a curricle and tandem, to the vast

delight and danger of the lieges. On them the slow-pacing waggons made a

music of bells, and all day long the travellers on horseback and the

travellers on foot (like happy Mr. St. Ives so little a while before!)

kept coming and going, and baiting and gaping at each other, as though a

fair were due, and they were gathering to it from all England. No,

nowhere in the world is travel so great a pleasure as in that country.

But unhappily our one need was to be secret; and all this rapid and

animated picture of the road swept quite apart from us, as we rumbled up

hill and down dale, under hedge and over stone, among circuitous byways.

Only twice did I receive, as it were, a whiff of the highway. The first

reached my ears alone. I might have been anywhere. I only knew I was

walking in the dark night and among ruts, when I heard very far off,

over the silent country that surrounded us, the guard's horn wailing

its signal to the next post-house for a change of horses. It was like

the voice of the day heard in darkness, a voice of the world heard in

prison, the note of a cock crowing in the mid-seas--in short, I cannot

tell you what it was like, you will have to fancy for yourself--but I

could have wept to hear it. Once we were belated: the cattle could

hardly crawl, the day was at hand, it was a nipping, rigorous morning,

King was lashing his horses, I was giving an arm to the old Colonel, and

the Major was coughing in our rear. I must suppose that King was a

thought careless, being nearly in desperation about his team, and, in

spite of the cold morning, breathing hot with his exertions. We came, at

last, a little before sunrise to the summit of a hill, and saw the

high-road passing at right angles through an open country of meadows and

hedgerow pollards; and not only the York mail, speeding smoothly at the

gallop of the four horses, but a post-chaise besides, with the post-boy

titupping briskly, and the traveller himself putting his head out of the

window, but whether to breathe the dawn, or the better to observe the

passage of the mail, I do not know. So that we enjoyed for an instant a

picture of free life on the road, in its most luxurious forms of

despatch and comfort. And thereafter, with a poignant feeling of

contrast in our hearts, we must mount again into our wheeled dungeon.

We came to our stages at all sorts of odd hours, and they were in all

kinds of odd places. I may say at once that my first experience was my

best. Nowhere again were we so well entertained as at Burchell Fenn's.

And this, I suppose, was natural, and indeed inevitable, in so long and

secret a journey. The first stop, we lay six hours in a barn standing by

itself in a poor, marshy orchard, and packed with hay; to make it more

attractive, we were told it had been the scene of an abominable murder,

and was now haunted. But the day was beginning to break, and our fatigue

was too extreme for visionary terrors. The second or third, we alighted

on a barren heath about midnight, built a fire to warm us under the

shelter of some thorns, supped like beggars on bread and a piece of cold

bacon, and slept like gipsies with our feet to the fire. In the

meanwhile, King was gone with the cart, I know not where, to get a

change of horses, and it was late in the dark morning when he returned

and we were able to resume our journey. In the middle of another night

we came to a stop by an ancient, whitewashed cottage of two stories; a

privet hedge surrounded it; the frosty moon shone blankly on the upper

windows; but through those of the kitchen the firelight was seen

glinting on the roof and reflected from the dishes on the wall. Here,

after much hammering on the door, King managed to arouse an old crone

from the chimney-corner chair, where she had been dozing in the watch;

and we were had in, and entertained with a dish of hot tea. This old

lady was an aunt of Burchell Fenn's--and an unwilling partner in his

dangerous trade. Though the house stood solitary, and the hour was an

unlikely one for any passenger upon the road, King and she conversed in

whispers only. There was something dismal, something of the sick-room,

in this perpetual, guarded sibilation. The apprehensions of our hostess

insensibly communicated themselves to every one present. We ate like

mice in a cat's ear; if one of us jingled a teaspoon, all would start;

and when the hour came to take the road again, we drew a long breath of

relief, and climbed to our places in the covered cart with a positive

sense of escape. The most of our meals, however, were taken boldly at

hedge-row alehouses, usually at untimely hours of the day, when the

clients were in the field or the farmyard at labour. I shall have to

tell presently of our last experience of the sort, and how unfortunately

it miscarried; but as that was the signal for my separation from my

fellow-travellers I must first finish with them.

I had never any occasion to waver in my first judgment of the Colonel.

The old gentleman seemed to me, and still seems in the retrospect, the

salt of the earth. I had occasion to see him in the extremes of

hardship, hunger, and cold; he was dying, and he looked it; and yet I

cannot remember any hasty, harsh, or impatient word to have fallen from

his lips. On the contrary, he ever showed himself careful to please; and

even if he rambled in his talk, rambled always gently--like a humane,

half-witted old hero, true to his colours to the last. I would not dare

to say how often he awoke suddenly from a lethargy, and told us again,

as though we had never heard it, the story of how he had earned the

Cross, how it had been given him by the hand of the Emperor, and of the

innocent--and, indeed, foolish--sayings of his daughter when he returned

with it on his bosom. He had another anecdote which he was very apt to

give, by way of a rebuke, when the Major wearied us beyond endurance

with dispraises of the English. This was an account of the _braves gens_

with whom he had been boarding. True enough, he was a man so simple and

grateful by nature, that the most common civilities were able to touch

him to the heart, and would remain written in his memory; but from a

thousand inconsiderable but conclusive indications, I gathered that this

family had really loved him, and loaded him with kindness. They made a

fire in his bedroom, which the sons and daughters tended with their own

hands; letters from France were looked for with scarce more eagerness by

himself than by these alien sympathisers; when they came, he would read

them aloud in the parlour to the assembled family, translating as he

went. The Colonel's English was elementary; his daughter not in the

least likely to be an amusing correspondent; and, as I conceived these

scenes in the parlour, I felt sure the interest centred in the Colonel

himself, and I thought I could feel in my own heart that mixture of the

ridiculous and the pathetic, the contest of tears and laughter, which

must have shaken the bosoms of the family. Their kindness had continued

till the end. It appears they were privy to his flight; the camlet cloak

had been lined expressly for him, and he was the bearer of a letter from

the daughter of the house to his own daughter in Paris. The last

evening, when the time came to say good-night, it was tacitly known to

all that they were to look upon his face no more. He rose, pleading

fatigue, and turned to the daughter, who had been his chief ally: "You

will permit me, my dear--to an old and very unhappy soldier--and may God

bless you for your goodness!" The girl threw her arms about his neck and

sobbed upon his bosom; the lady of the house burst into tears; "_et je

vous le jure, le pere se mouchait_!" quoth the Colonel, twisting his

moustaches with a cavalry air, and at the same time blinking the water

from his eyes at the mere recollection.

It was a good thought to me that he had found these friends in

captivity: that he had started on this fatal journey from so cordial a

farewell. He had broken his parole for his daughter: that he should ever

live to reach her sick-bed, that he could continue to endure to an end

the hardships, the crushing fatigue, the savage cold, of our pilgrimage,

I had early ceased to hope. I did for him what I was able,--nursed him,

kept him covered, watched over his slumbers, sometimes held him in my

arms at the rough places of the road. "Champdivers," he once said, "you

are like a son to me--like a son." It is good to remember, though at the

time it put me on the rack. All was to no purpose. Fast as we were

travelling towards France, he was travelling faster still to another

destination. Daily he grew weaker and more indifferent. An old rustic

accent of Lower Normandy reappeared in his speech, from which it had

long been banished, and grew stronger; old words of the _patois_, too:

_Ouistreham_, _matrasse_, and others, the sense of which we were

sometimes unable to guess. On the very last day he began again his

eternal story of the Cross and the Emperor. The Major, who was

particularly ill, or at least particularly cross, uttered some angry

words of protest. "_Pardonnez-moi, monsieur le commandant, mais c'est

pour monsieur_," said the Colonel; "monsieur has not yet heard the

circumstance, and is good enough to feel an interest." Presently after,

however, he began to lose the thread of his narrative; and at last:

"_Que que j'ai? Je m'embrouille!_" says he. "_Suffit: s'm'a la donne, et

Berthe en etait bien contente._" It struck me as the falling of the

curtain or the closing of the sepulchre doors.

Sure enough, in but a little while after, he fell into a sleep as gentle

as an infant's, which insensibly changed into the sleep of death. I had

my arm about his body at the time and remarked nothing, unless it were

that he once stretched himself a little, so kindly the end came to that

disastrous life. It was only at our evening halt that the Major and I

discovered we were travelling alone with the poor clay. That night we

stole a spade from a field--I think near Market Bosworth--and a little

farther on, in a wood of young oak trees, and by the light of King's

lantern, we buried the old soldier of the Empire with both prayers and

tears.

We had needs invent Heaven if it had not been revealed to us; there are

some things that fall so bitterly ill on this side Time! As for the

Major, I have long since forgiven him. He broke the news to the poor

Colonel's daughter: I am told he did it kindly; and sure, nobody could

have done it without tears! His share of purgatory will be brief; and in

this world, as I could not very well praise him, I have suppressed his

name. The Colonel's also, for the sake of his parole. _Requiescat._