A Day's Ride: A Life's Romance

“Well, then, set about the repairs at once. Ask for what you want, – they 'll bring it.”

Deeming it better not to occasion any shock whatever to a man in his state, I forbore declaring who I was, and set about my office with what skill I could.

With the aid of a Russian surgeon, who spoke German well, I managed to dress the wounds and bandage the fractured arm, during which the patient never spoke once, nor, indeed, seemed to be at all concerned in what was going on.

“You can stay here, I hope,” said he to me, when all was finished. “At least, you ‘ll see me through the worst of it I can afford to pay, and pay well.”

“I ‘ll stay,” said I, imitating his own laconic way; and no more was said.

Now, though it was not my intention to pass myself off for a physician, or derive any, even the smallest advantage from the assumption of such a character, I saw that, remote as the poor sufferer was from his friends and country, and totally destitute of even companionship, it would have been cruel to desert him until he was sufficiently recovered to be left with servants.

From his calm composure, and the self-control he was able to exercise, I had formed a far too favorable opinion of his case. When I saw him first the inflammatory symptoms had not yet set in; so that at my next visit I found him in a high fever, raving wildly. In his wanderings he imagined himself ever directing some gigantic enterprise, with hundreds of men at his command, whose efforts he was cheering or chiding alternately. The indomitable will of a most resolute nature was displayed in all he said; and though his bodily sufferings must have been intense, he only alluded to them to show how little power they had to arrest his activity. His ever-recurring cry was, “It can be done, men! It can be done! See that we do it!”

I own that, even though stretched on a sick-bed and raving madly, this man’s unquenchable energy impressed me greatly; and I often fancied to myself what must have been the resources of such a bold spirit in sad contrast to a nature pliant and yielding like mine. To the violence of the first access, there soon succeeded the far more dangerous state of low fever, through which I never left him. Care and incessant watching could alone save him, and I devoted myself to the last with the resolve to make this effort the first of a new and changed existence.

Day and night in the sick-room, I lost appetite and strength, while an unceasing care preyed upon me and deprived me even of rest. The very vacillations of the sick man’s malady had affected my nerves, rendering me overanxious, so that just as he had passed the great crisis of the malady, I was stricken down with it myself.

My first day of convalescence, after seven weeks of fever, found me sitting at a little window that looked upon the sea, or rather the harbor of Sebastopol, where two frigates and some smaller vessels were at anchor. A group of lighters and such unpicturesque craft occupied another part of the scene, engaged, as it seemed, in operations for raising other vessels. It was in gazing for a long while at these, and guessing their occupation, that I learned to trace out the past, and why and how I had come to be sitting there. Every morning the German servant who tended me through my illness used to bring me the “Herr Baron’s” compliments to know how I was, and now he came to say that as the “Herr Baron” was able to walk so far, he begged that he might be permitted to come and pay me a visit I was aware of the Russian custom of giving titles to all who served the Government in positions of high trust, and was therefore not astonished when the announcement of the “Herr Baron” was followed by the entrance of Harpar, who, sadly reduced, and leaning on a crutch, made his way slowly to where I sat. I attempted to rise to receive him, but he cried out, half sternly, – “Sit still! we are neither of us in good trim for ceremony.”

He motioned to the servants to leave us alone; then laying his wasted hand in mine, for we were each too weak to’ grasp the other, he said, —

“I know all about it It was you saved my life, and risked your own to do it.”

I muttered out some unmeaning words – I know not well what – about duty and the like.

“I don’t care a brass button for the motive. You stood to me like a man.” As he said this, he looked hard at me, and, shading the light with his hand, peered into my face. “Have n’t we met before this? Is not your name Potts?”

“Yes, and you’re Harpar.”

He reddened, but so slightly that but for the previous paleness of his sickly cheek it would not have been noticeable.

“I have often thought about you.” said he, musingly. “This is not the only service you have done me; the first was at Lindau, – mayhap you have forgotten it. You lent me two hundred florins, and, if I ‘m not much mistaken, when you were far from being rich yourself.”

He leaned his head on his hand, and seemed to have fallen into a musing fit.

“And, after all,” said I, “of the best turn I ever did you, you have never heard in your life, and, what is more, might never hear, if not from myself. Do you remember an altercation on the road to Feldkirch, with a man called Rigges?”

“To be sure I do; he smashed the small-bone of this arm for me; but I gave worse than I got. They never could find that bullet I sent into his side, and he died of it at Palermo. But what share in this did you bear?”

“Not the worst nor the best; but I was imprisoned for a twelvemonth in your place.”

“Imprisoned for me?”

“Yes; they assumed that I was Harpar, and as I took no steps to undeceive them, there I remained till they seemed to have forgotten all about me.”

Harpar questioned me closely and keenly as to the reasons that prompted this act of mine, – an act all the more remarkable, as, to use his own words, “We were men who had no friendship for each other, actually strangers; and,” added he, significantly, “the sort of fellows who, somehow, do not usually ‘hit it off’ together. You a man of leisure, with your own dreamy mode of life; I, a hard worker, who could not enjoy idleness; and in this sense, far more likely to hold each other cheaply than otherwise.”

I attempted to account for this piece of devotion as best I might, but not very successfully, since I was only endeavoring to explain what I really did not well understand myself. Nor could a vague desire to do something generous, merely because it was generous, satisfy the practical intelligence of him who heard me.

“Well,” said he, at last, “all that machinery you have described is so new and strange to me, I can tell nothing as to how it ought to work; but I’m as grateful to you as a man can be for a service which he could not have rendered himself, nor has the slightest notion of what could have prompted you to do. Now, let me hear by what chance you came here?”

“You must listen to a long story to learn that,” said I; and as he declared that he had nothing more pressing to do with his time, I began, almost as I have begun with my reader. On my first mention of Crofton, he asked me to repeat the name; and when I spoke of meeting Miss Herbert at the Milford station, he slightly moved his chair, as if to avoid the strong light from the window; but from that moment till I finished, he never interrupted me by a word, nor interposed a question.

“And it was she gave you that old seal-ring I see on your finger?” said he, at last.

“Yes,” said I. “How came you to guess that?”

“Because I gave it to her the day she was sixteen! I am her father.”

I drew a long breath, and could only clutch his arm with astonishment, without being able to speak.

“It’s all well-known in England, now. Everybody has been paid in full, my creditors have met in a body, and signed a request to me to come back and recommence business. They have done more; they have bought up the lease of the Foundry, and sent it out to me. Ay, and old Elkanah’s mortgage, too, is redeemed, and I don’t owe a shilling.”

“You must have worked hard to accomplish all this?”

“Pretty hard, no doubt. You remember those little boats with the holes in 'em at Lindau. They did the business for me. I was fool enough at that time to imagine that you had got a clew to my discovery, and were after me to pick up all the details. I ought to have known better! It was easy enough to see that you could have no head for anything with a 'tough bone’ in it. Light, thoughtless creatures of your kind are never dangerous anywhere!”

I was not quite sure whether I was expected to return thanks for this speech in my favor, and therefore only made some very unintelligible mutterings.

“There’s only one liner now to be raised, and all the guns are already out of her, but I can return to-morrow. I am free; my contract is completed; and the ‘Ignatief’ sloop-of-war is at my orders at Balaklava to convey me to any port I please in Europe.”

He said this so boastfully and so vaingloriously that I really felt Potts in his humility was not the smaller man of the two. Nor, perhaps, was my irritation the less, at seeing how little surprise our singular meeting had caused him, and how much he regarded all I had done in his behalf as being ordinary and commonplace services. But, perhaps, the coup de grace of my misery came as he said, —

“Though I forwarded that ten-pound note you lent me to Rome, perhaps you 'll like to have it now. If you need any more, say so.”

My heart was in my mouth, and I felt that I ‘d have died of starvation rather than accept the humblest benefit at his hands.

“Very well,” said he to my refusal; “all the better that you ‘ve no need of cash, for, to tell the truth, Potts, you ‘re not much of a doctor, nor are you very remarkable as a man of genius; and it is a kind thing of Providence when such fellows as you are born with even a ‘pewter spoon’ in their mouths.”

I nearly choked, but I said nothing.

“If you ‘d like me to land you anywhere in the Levant, or down towards the Spanish coast, only tell me.”

“No, nothing of the kind. I ‘m going north; I ‘m going to Moscow, to Tobolsk; I ‘m going to Persia and Astrakhan,” said I, in wildest confusion.

“Well, I can give you a capital travelling-cloak – it’s one of those buntas they make in the Banat, and you ‘ll need it, for they have fearfully severe cold in those countries.”

With this, and not waiting my resolute refusal, he rose, hobbled out of the room, and I – ay, there’s no concealing it – burst out a-crying!

Weak and sick as I was, I procured an “araba” that night, and, without one word of adieu, set out for Krim.

It was about two years after this – my father had died in the interval, leaving me a small but sufficient fortune to live on, and I had just arrived in Paris, after a long desultory ramble through the east of Europe – I was standing, one morning early in one of the small alleys of the Champs Élysées, watching with half-listless curiosity the various grooms as they passed to exercise their horses in the Bois de Boulogne. Group after group passed me of those magnificent animals in which Paris is now more than the rival of London, and at length I was struck by the appearance of a very smartly dressed groom, who led along beside him a small-sized horse, completely sheeted and shrouded from view. Believing that this must prove some creature of rare beauty, an Arab of purest descent, I followed them as they went, and at last overtook them.

The groom was English, and by my offer of a cigar, somewhat better than the one he was smoking, he was very willing to satisfy my curiosity.

“I suppose he has Arab blood in him,” said he, half contemptuously; “but he’s forty years old now if he’s a day. What they keep him for I don’t know, but they make as much work about him as if he was a Christian; and as for myself, I have nothing else to do than walk him twice a day to his exercise, and take care that his oats are well bruised and mixed with linseed, for he hasn’t a tooth left.”

“I suppose his master is some very rich man, who can afford himself a caprice like this.”