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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Anthony Adverse," Hervey Allen crafts an epic historical novel that intricately weaves together themes of adventure, romance, and the quest for identity against the backdrop of 18th-century Europe and America. The narrative follows the life of Anthony Adverse, an orphan brought to life with vivid characterizations and rich detail, reflecting Allen's masterful prose and command of period language. The story, unfolding through thrilling escapades and personal transformations, engages with broader cultural and historical contexts, including the tumultuous age of exploration and the sociopolitical dynamics of the time. Hervey Allen, an American novelist and poet born in 1889, was heavily influenced by the tumult of his contemporaneous society and advanced literary movements. His own experiences in various cultural landscapes, augmented by a scholarly background in literature and his passion for history, culminated in the writing of "Anthony Adverse." This work, originally published in 1933, not only reflects his extensive research but also Allen's desire to merge fiction with historical authenticity, revealing his engagement with the artistic trends of romanticism. "Anthony Adverse" is a must-read for anyone interested in richly layered narratives that combine historical fidelity with the expansive scope of personal ambition and desire. Allen's lyrical storytelling and profound character development invite readers into a world of passion and exploration, making it a timeless piece that echoes the complexities of human experience. Dive into this masterwork and discover an unforgettable journey that will resonate with you long after the last page. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Anthony Adverse
Table of Contents
Introduction
At its heart, this novel follows a restless soul who must navigate the shifting tides of fortune to discover whether character or circumstance ultimately governs a life.
Anthony Adverse, by Hervey Allen, is a sweeping historical novel first published in 1933, set largely in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries across Europe, Africa, and the Americas. It belongs to the grand tradition of the historical epic, blending adventure, romance, and social observation within a vast geographical canvas. Readers encounter port cities, courts, and caravans as the narrative moves through the transatlantic world of commerce and empire. Written by an American author during the interwar years, the book looks backward to an age of sail and colonies while measuring the private costs of public forces in motion.
The premise is disarmingly simple and classically shaped: an orphaned boy of obscure origins grows into a man whose path crosses traders, travelers, and dreamers in a world where opportunity and peril are seldom far apart. The early chapters establish his uncertain footing and the apprenticeship of survival, from counting ledgers to learning the codes of ships, salons, and marketplaces. Without tipping the story’s turns, the novel promises a journey of reversals and self-revision, propelled by desire, ambition, and the stubborn need to belong. The experience is one of immersion—steady, cumulative, and richly textured—rather than a mere string of exploits.
Allen’s narrative is animated by enduring themes: the tension between fate and free will, the ethical price of prosperity, attachment and loss, and the fragile architecture of identity built under pressure. The book considers how social rank, money, and power entice and entrap, and how love—romantic or filial—can clarify motives or cloud judgment. It threads questions of conscience through scenes of deal-making and danger, inviting readers to weigh the cost of choices in a world of unequal odds. The result is less a moral thesis than an invitation to watch character emerge through repeated tests of loyalty, courage, and restraint.
Stylistically, the novel favors amplitude: long arcs, patient scene-setting, and a sensibility attuned to period textures of dress, speech, and custom. The voice balances romantic intensity with observational detail, keeping one eye on the glitter of adventure and the other on the ledger of consequence. Landscapes and interiors are rendered with an eye for atmosphere—harbors bustling at dawn, roadways and drawing rooms alive with distinctive rhythms. Its episodic construction allows for shifts in tempo and locale, yet the through line remains the protagonist’s evolving judgment. The narrative’s breadth is matched by a steady emotional undertow, giving grandeur a human pulse.
For contemporary readers, the book’s questions feel timely: How does one maintain integrity amid vast, impersonal systems of trade and governance? What does success mean when it requires compromise, and what forms of belonging are possible for a person formed in motion? The novel’s global sweep resonates with present-day mobility and the entanglements of distant markets and intimate lives. It examines the inheritance of power and the responsibilities that come with it, without reducing the era to simple lessons. Its appeal lies in the way it frames big historical currents around a single consciousness searching for purpose.
This is, finally, an invitation to read for scope and depth: a capacious story driven by a central figure whose flaws and resilience make the expansive world feel navigable. Hervey Allen offers a narrative that rewards patience with cumulative insight, melding momentum with reflection. Readers who relish historical sagas will find adventure and romance, but also the quieter satisfactions of moral inquiry and hard-won self-knowledge. The book’s enduring strength is the sense that history is not merely backdrop but an active medium through which a person learns who he is—and what he is willing to pay to remain so.
Synopsis
Anthony Adverse opens in late eighteenth-century Europe with a clandestine romance and an ill-fated marriage that set the stage for a child born under a cloud of secrecy. A chain of events forces the infant’s fate into the hands of strangers, and he is placed with a benefactor who shields the truth of his origins. The child receives the name Anthony Adverse, an emblem of the circumstances that shaped his first days. The narrative establishes a world of courtly obligations, religious guardianship, and mercantile ambition, where personal choices are constrained by social rank, reputation, and the unseen consequences of hidden acts.
Raised in a bustling Italian seaport, Anthony grows under the tutelage of an aging merchant whose stern discipline masks genuine concern. He learns languages, ledgers, and the discipline of trade while observing the ceaseless traffic of ships and fortunes. His childhood curiosity blends with early lessons in duty and restraint, and hints of his mysterious beginnings surface in whispers and sealed letters. The rhythms of the countinghouse shape his habits, yet his temperament—restless, probing, bold—suggests a path beyond routine. The story emphasizes mentorship and apprenticeship, laying the foundation for decisions that will soon pull him far from familiar streets and orderly accounts.
As Anthony matures, he becomes indispensable at the countinghouse, navigating complex contracts and far-flung correspondence. He falls in love with a young woman of talent and promise, and their plans grow quietly in the shadow of practical constraints. The firm’s affairs press on him, demanding choices between stability and risk. Shifts in ownership, inheritance questions, and external pressures reshape the business, thrusting Anthony into responsibilities that exceed his years. The prospect of travel, once romantic, becomes unavoidable. With hope tempered by uncertainty, he takes leave of what he knows, carrying a private vow to return and a professional mandate to safeguard a wavering enterprise.
Anthony’s first major journey carries him across the Atlantic trade routes, where idealism collides with the realities of colonial commerce. In West African ports and Caribbean harbors, he confronts the mechanisms of a system built on human suffering and the ruthless arithmetic of profit. He negotiates with agents, contends with rival firms, and weighs the cost of decisions measured in both coin and conscience. The sea itself becomes a participant—storms, calms, and chance encounters altering plans. Amid calculations and cargo manifests, the narrative marks a turning point: the recognition that prosperity is shadowed by moral peril, and that survival may demand more than clever bookkeeping.
The New World intensifies these pressures. Managing estates and shipments, Anthony becomes entangled with allies whose loyalties shift with the wind and adversaries who study his every move. Communications falter across distances; letters arrive late or not at all, and misunderstandings calcify into painful separations. Violence—implicit in the markets and occasional in the streets—pushes him to rely on judgment rather than luck. Yet ambition and hope persist. He refines his skills, expands his network, and seeks to reconcile duty with a private longing to reclaim lost connections. The narrative sustains suspense around these ties while tracking his ascent through a trading sphere rife with hazard and compromise.
Returning to Europe, Anthony enters a continent in flux, with revolutions concluded and empires rising. In France and Italy, salons, theaters, and ministries intersect, and the arts highlight new forms of influence. The figure of a rising military leader and the shifting legal frameworks of the era complicate commerce and personal life alike. Anthony pursues threads from his past—faces once familiar, names on old documents—finding that time has altered expectations on both sides. Negotiations carry the chill of formal rooms, yet private occasions reopen the wounds of memory. The book maintains momentum by measuring political pageantry against the quieter reckonings of individuals navigating changed worlds.
Gradually, revelations about Anthony’s birth and early custodians come to light, not as sudden shocks but through dossiers, testimonies, and careful admissions. Questions of inheritance, legitimacy, and responsibility draw him into courtrooms and private chambers where oaths carry lasting consequence. The closer he comes to answers, the more he must consider what ownership and belonging truly mean. The story refrains from simplifying his choices; each path has debts to honor and loyalties to preserve. Turning points arrive as decisions, rather than spectacles, underscoring a theme that agency grows from understanding the past without letting it dictate the future.
Anthony’s later travels reveal an inward redirection. Success measured in shipments and tallies yields to a search for a steadier compass. He seeks counsel in places removed from trade—houses of learning and reflection—testing whether reconciliation is possible between what he has done and what he now values. Encounters with old acquaintances and new dependents challenge him to translate insight into action. The narrative balances movement with contemplation, allowing external achievements to recede while ethical commitments come forward. What emerges is not withdrawal but recalibration: a way of living that prizes discernment, restitution where possible, and fidelity to obligations that transcend contract or custom.
By its conclusion, Anthony Adverse presents a life measured across continents and crises, linking private histories to public currents. The central message emphasizes resilience, accountability, and the cost of prosperity when separated from conscience. Without resolving every strand overtly, the book situates purpose in choices that prioritize human dignity over advantage. It portrays love as both motive and trial, and identity as something fashioned through deeds as much as blood. The synopsis highlights key turns without disclosing their final shape, reflecting a narrative that moves from accident to intention, and from survival toward a considered, responsible engagement with the world.
Historical Context
Hervey Allen’s Anthony Adverse unfolds across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period of global upheaval that knit together the Mediterranean, Atlantic Africa, the Caribbean, and the burgeoning United States. The narrative moves through Genoa and Livorno (Leghorn) in Italy, Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, the West African slaving coast, Havana in Spanish Cuba, and New Orleans on the Mississippi. The time frame—roughly the 1770s to the 1810s—captures the collapse of ancien régimes, the rise of imperial warfare, and the explosive growth of plantation capitalism. Allen uses a picaresque itinerary to embed his protagonist within the everyday mechanisms of trade, credit, and coercion that powered these interconnected worlds.
The French Revolution (1789–1799) and its Mediterranean repercussions reshape the novel’s initial European milieu. In 1796–1797, Napoleon Bonaparte’s Italian campaign dismantled old structures, occupied Livorno to seize British goods, and reorganized Genoa into the Ligurian Republic (1797) after the Treaty of Campo Formio (October 1797). These events disrupted neutral port privileges, rerouted commerce, and imposed new administrative regimes across northern Italy. Anthony’s early training in mercantile houses of Genoa and Livorno is repeatedly interrupted by requisitions, embargoes, and the volatility introduced by French occupation, mirroring the real pressure that revolutionary policy and war placed on Mediterranean trade corridors and on the apprentices and clerks who kept them running.
The Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) intensified economic warfare through the Continental System. After Trafalgar (October 21, 1805) confirmed British naval dominance, Napoleon answered with the Berlin Decree (November 1806) and Milan Decree (1807), attempting to seal Europe from British goods while Britain issued Orders in Council (1807) to blockade French-controlled ports. Smuggling, neutral flags, and complex financing became essential. The Peninsular War (1808–1814) further destabilized Iberian trade networks. In the novel, Anthony’s moves between ports and financial centers evoke this climate: he navigates blockades, shifting currencies, and gray-market routes that triangulate the Mediterranean, Atlantic islands, and the Americas—typical strategies merchants used to survive the era’s sanctions and seizures.
The transatlantic slave trade reached a late eighteenth-century peak, moving an estimated 12.5 million captives from Africa to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, with roughly 10.7 million disembarking alive. The Bight of Benin and Bight of Biafra—ports such as Ouidah (Whydah) and Bonny—were key embarkation points, where European textiles, liquor, and firearms were exchanged for people, often held in barracoons before the Middle Passage, which saw mortality rates commonly between 10 and 15 percent. Anthony Adverse stages a slaving venture to the West African coast, depicting barter, coastal forts, and shipboard suffering; this episode aligns with documented practices and lays bare the brutal commercial logic sustaining Atlantic empires.
The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) destroyed France’s richest colony, Saint-Domingue, and transformed the Caribbean economy. Under leaders including Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, enslaved people defeated French, Spanish, and British forces, culminating in independence (January 1, 1804). The revolution precipitated a dramatic expansion of Cuban sugar: Havana and Matanzas saw plantation growth as refugees, capital, and techniques shifted. By the 1820s Cuba had become a leading sugar producer, relying on massive new slave imports despite the 1807 British ban. The novel’s Havana passages present ingenios (sugar mills), consulado merchants, and the coercive plantation regime, highlighting how geopolitical upheaval redirected labor, investment, and violence into Spanish Cuba.
The Louisiana Purchase (1803) reconfigured North American commerce. Following the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso (1800), France briefly regained Louisiana from Spain, then sold it to the United States; formal transfers occurred in 1803 at New Orleans. Control of the Mississippi River and its tributaries accelerated an export boom in cotton and provisions, while New Orleans became a multilingual entrepôt where civil law traditions, Catholic institutions, and Anglo-American finance intersected. The domestic slave trade expanded sharply after 1808. In the novel, Anthony’s time in New Orleans places him within riverine markets, banks, and auction spaces, reflecting the city’s role as a hinge between Atlantic capitalism and the plantation interior of the new republic.
Spanish imperial policy framed the Cuban world Anthony encounters. The Bourbon reform of comercio libre (Royal Decree of 1778) loosened trade restrictions among select Spanish ports, invigorating legal commerce through Havana. The Crown’s measures in 1789–1790 liberalized slave importation to Cuba, and although Spain signed a treaty with Britain in 1817 to abolish the transatlantic trade north of the equator, clandestine shipments continued for decades. Havana, seat of the Captaincy General of Cuba and a principal naval base, coordinated customs, defense, and credit networks. The novel mirrors how these legal frameworks and loopholes fostered rapid plantation expansion, underwriting fortunes while entrenching coerced labor and a militarized, bureaucratic apparatus to protect it.
Anthony Adverse operates as a critique of the social order that linked European war finance to colonial extraction and slavery. By embedding its protagonist in mercantile offices, slaving voyages, and plantation countinghouses, the book exposes the commodification of human beings, the complicity of credit and insurance in violence, and the way class mobility often depended on moral compromise. It implicates imperial policy and commercial elites in creating systemic precarity for sailors, apprentices, and captives alike. The juxtaposition of metropolitan salons with barracoons and auction blocks underscores a period whose prosperity rested on dispossession, inviting readers to question the legitimacy of wealth amassed under blockades, seizures, and coerced labor.
Anthony Adverse
VOLUME ONE
THE ROOTS OF THE TREE
BOOK I--IN WHICH THE SEED FALLS IN THE ENCHANTED FOREST
I. The Coach
II. The Little Madonna
III. At the "Golden Sheaf"
IV. The Enchanted Forest
V. A Pastoral Interlude
VI. The Muse of Tragedy
VII. The Fly Walks In
VIII. A Hole in the Wall
BOOK II--IN WHICH THE ROOTS OF THE TREE ARE EXPOSED
IX. The Convent of Jesus the Child
X. The Chick Emerges
XI. Between Two Worlds
XII. Casa da Bonnyfeather
XIII. The Evidence of Things Unseen
XIV. Reality Makes a Bid
XV. The Shadows of Faith
XVI. Pagan Mornings
XVII. Philosophical Afternoons
XVIII. Bodies in the Dark
XIX. The Numbers of the Virgin
BOOK III--IN WHICH THE ROOTS OF THE TREE ARE TORN LOOSE
XX. Apples and Ashes
XXI. Adventures of a Shepherdess
XXII. Icons and Iconoclasts
XXIII. Farewells and Epitaphs
VOLUME TWO
THE OTHER BRONZE BOY
BOOK IV--IN WHICH SEVERAL IMAGES TRAVEL TOGETHER
XXIV. The Table of the Sun
XXV. The Villa Brignole
XXVI. The Street of the Image Makers
XXVII. The Pillars of Hercules
XXVIII. The Seed of a Miracle
BOOK V--IN WHICH THE NECESSARY ALLOY IS ADDED
XXIX. The House of Silenus
XXX. The Miracle in the Chapel of St. Paul, Regla
XXXI. A Decent Mammalian Philosophy
XXXII. Honour Among Thieves
XXXIII. A Mantilla Intrudes
XXXIV. Through a Copy of Velasquez
XXXV. The Temporary Sequestration of the Ariostatica
BOOK VI--IN WHICH THE BRONZE GOES INTO THE FIRE
XXXVI. A Gradual Approach to Africa
XXXVII. The Crew Go Ashore
XXXVIII. A Whiff of Grapeshot
XXXIX. Viewed from Gallegos
XL. The Master of Gallegos
XLI. A Glimpse into the Furnace
XLII. The Vision of Light
XLIII. The Image Begins to Melt
XLIV. The Hard Metal Runs
XLV. The Bronze Is Sublimed
XLVI. The Unicorn Charges Home
VOLUME THREE
THE LONELY TWIN
BOOK VII--IN WHICH A WORLDLY BROTHER IS ACQUIRED
XLVII. Reverberations
XLVIII. Old Friends Grown Older
XLIX. What Banking Is About
L. Don Luis Reflects by Candlelight
LI. The Coach and the Berlin
LII. Over the Crest
LIII. The Force of Gravity
LIV. The Plains of France
LV. The Little Man at Great Headquarters
BOOK VIII--IN WHICH PROSPERITY ENFORCES LONELINESS
LVI. A Metallic Standard Is Resumed
LVII. Your Humble Obedient Servant
LVIII. Gloria Mundi
LIX. The Swan-song of Romance
LX. Panem et Circenses
LXI. Shoes and Stockings
LXII. The Prince of the Peace Beyond the Pyrenees
BOOK IX--IN WHICH THE TREE IS CUT DOWN
LXIII. By the River of Babylon
LXIV. The Snake Changes Its Skin
LXV. The People of the Bear
LXVI. The Pilgrimage of Grace
LXVII. The Prison of St. Lazarus
LXVIII. The Stone in the Heart of the Tree
VOLUME ONE
THE ROOTS OF THE TREE
BOOK ONE
In Which the Seed Falls in the Enchanted Forest
CHAPTER ONE
THE COACH
Between the villages of Aubière and Romagnat in the ancient Province of Auvergne there is an old road that comes suddenly over the top of a high hill. To stand south of this ridge looking up at the highway flowing over the skyline is to receive one of those irrefutable impressions from landscape which requires more than a philosopher to explain. In this case it is undoubtedly, for some reason, one of exalted expectation.
From the deep notch in the hillcrest where the road first appears, to the bottom of the valley below it, the fields seem to sweep down hastily for the express purpose of widening out and waiting by the way. From the low hills for a considerable distance about, the stone farm buildings all happen to face toward it, and although most of them have stood thus for centuries their expressions of curiosity remain unaltered.
Somewhat to the east the hill of Gergovia thrusts its head into the sky, and continually stares toward the notch as if speculating whether Celtic pedlars, Roman legionaries, Franks, crusaders, or cavaliers will raise the dust there.
In fact in whatever direction a man may look in this particular vicinity his eyes are led inevitably by the seductive tracery of the skyline to the most interesting point in all that countryside, the place where the road surmounts the hill. Almost anything might appear there suddenly against the empty sky, fix itself upon the memory, and then move on to an unknown destination.
Perhaps the high hill of Gergovia where heroic events have taken place in the remote past now misses a certain epic grandeur in the rhythms of mankind. For ages past tribes have ceased to migrate and armies to march over the highway it looks down upon. Cavalcades, or companies of pilgrims have rarely been seen upon it for some centuries now. Individual wayfaring has long been the rule. Even by the last quarter of the eighteenth century it had long been apparent what the best way of travelling the roads of this world is when one has a definite, personal object in view. Such, indeed, was then the state of society that the approach of a single individual, if he happened to belong to a certain class, might cause as much consternation to a whole countryside as the advance of a hostile army.
It was this condition of affairs, no doubt, that accounted for the alarm upon the faces of several peasants as they stood waiting uneasily in the late afternoon sunshine one spring day in the year 1775. They were gazing apprehensively at the deep notch in the hill just above them where the road, which they had been mending, surmounted the ridge. Indeed, a grinding sound of wheels from the farther side of the crest had already reached the ears of the keenest some moments before.
Presently there was the loud crack of a whip, the shouts of a postilion, and the heads of two horses made their appearance prick-eared against the sky. The off-leader, for there were evidently more horses behind, was ridden by a squat-bodied little man with abnormally short legs. A broad-brimmed felt hat with the flap turned up in front served, even at considerable distance, to accentuate under its dingy green cockade an unusual breadth of countenance. The ridge at the apex is very steep. The first team had already begun to descend before immediately behind it appeared the second straining hard against the breast straps. Then the coach, a "V"-shaped body with the powdered heads of two footmen in cocked hats peering over its slightly curved roof, outlined itself sharply in the bright notch of the road and seemed for an instant to pause there.
As soon as it hove in full sight a babble of relieved exclamation arose from the group of watching peasants. It was not the coach of M. de Besance[1].
As to whose coach it might be, there was small time for speculation. The problem rapidly began to solve itself. The coach was heavy and the hill was steep. Suddenly, at a cry from the little postilion, who began to use his whip like a demon, the horses stretched themselves out. An immense cloud of dust arose and foamed about the wheels.
The black body of the coach was now seen coming down the road like a log over a waterfall. Oaths, cries, shouts from the white-faced footmen, the squall and moan of brakes, and a frantic drumming of hoofs accompanied its descent. Four horses and the carriage flashed as one object through the spray of a little stream at the foot of the hill. There was a nautical pitch as the vehicle mounted violently upon a brief length of causeway that led to the ford. But so great was the momentum which it had accumulated and the terror of the horses that the postilion was unable to check them even with the attempted assistance of the peasants.
A large hole full of water on one side of the little causeway now became horribly apparent to him. With a quick jerk on the bridle and a firm hand the clever little driver dragged his horses around it. The front wheels missed it by a fraction. But there had not been time to turn the trick entirely. For an instant the left hind wheel hung spinning. Then to the accompaniment of a shrill feminine scream from the interior of the coach it sank with a sickening jar and gravelly crunch into the very centre of the pit. Nevertheless, the rear of the carriage finally rose to the level of the causeway as the horses once more struggled forward. A high water mark showed itself upon the yellow stockings of the petrified footmen. The coach lurched again violently, rocked, and stopped.
Scarcely had the coach body ceased to oscillate in its slings when from the window projected a claret-coloured face surmounted by a travel-stained wig much awry. A hand like a lion's paw flourished a gold-headed cane furiously, and from the mouth of its entirely masculine owner, which vent can only be described as grim, proceeded in a series of staccato barks and lion-like roars a masterpiece of Spanish profanity. It began with God the Father and ranged through the remainder of the Trinity. It touched upon the apostles, not omitting Judas; skipped sulphurously through a score or two of saints, and ended with a few choked bellows caused by twinges of violent pain, on Santiago of Compostela. During the entire period of this soul-shaking address, and for several speechless seconds after, a small, intensely black, forked beard continued to flicker like an adder's tongue through the haze of words surrounding it. Somewhat exhausted, its owner now paused.
Those who thought his vocabulary exhausted, however, were sadly mistaken.
The gentleman looking out of the coach window owned estates both in Spain and in Italy. From both he drew copious revenues not only of rents but of idiom. He was of mixed Irish, Spanish, and Tuscan ancestry, and his fluency was even thrice enhanced. He now gripped his cane more firmly and lapsed into Italian.
"You mule's bastard," roared he, twisting his head around with an obvious grin of pain to address the little man sitting astride the lead horse, "Come here, I say. Come here till I break your back. I'll . . ." The rest was cut short by a second grimace of agony and a whistling sound from the cane.
The recipient of this alluring invitation climbed down from his saddle rather slowly, but with no further signs of hesitation walked imperturbably past his four quivering horses toward the door of the coach. His legs, which already appeared small when astride a horse, were now seen to be shorter than ever and crooked. Yet he moved with a certain feline motion that was somehow memorable. As he turned to face the door of the coach and removed his cocked hat, two tufts of mouse-coloured hair just over his ears, and a long, black whip thrust through his belt till it projected out of his coat tails behind, completed for the peasants, who were now crowding as close as they dared, the illusion that they were looking, not at a man, but at an animal vaguely familiar.
The door of the coach was now pushed open by the gold-headed cane revealing to those by the roadside a glimpse of the sumptuous interior of a nobleman's private carriage. Its owner had been riding with his back to the horses. As the door opened wider a long, white object projecting across the aisle toward the rear disclosed itself as a human leg disguised by a plethora of bandages and resting upon a "T"-shaped stand contrived out of a couple of varnished boards. On this couch the ill member with its swathed foot seemed to repose like a mummy. On the rear seat could be caught a glimpse of a brocaded skirt the folds of which remained motionless.
The claret-coloured face now appeared again and the cane was once more flourished as if about to descend upon the back of the unfortunate postilion waiting hat in hand just beyond its reach. But the gentleman had now reached the limit of his field of action. He was the owner of the mummified limb on the "T"-shaped stand, a fact of which he was just then agonizingly reminded, and a torrent of several languages that seemed to start at his waist literally leapt out of his mouth.
To the surprise of all but the footmen, who were thoroughly inured to such scenes, the little man in the road ventured to reply. He purred in a soft Spanish patois accompanied by gestures that provided a perfect pantomime. Due to his eloquent motions towards the peasants in the ditch and the hole in the road, it was not necessary to understand his dialect in order to follow his argument. With this the gentleman, who had meanwhile violently jerked his wig back into place, seemed inclined to agree.
Seeing how things were going, a tall fellow somewhat more intelligent than his companions now stepped forward.
"It is to be hoped that monsieur will overlook the existence of the terrible hole which has caused him such discomfort . . ."
"Overlook its existence, you scoundrel, when it nearly bumped me into purgatory!" roared the gentleman. "What do you mean?"
"Ah, if we had only known monsieur was coming this way so soon it should have been filled in before this. It is very difficult now to get these rascals to come to the corvée[2]. We were informed you would not arrive until day after tomorrow. I can tell you, sir," continued he, turning an eye on his miserable companions which they did not seem to appreciate, "I can tell you they were just now in a fine sweat when they heard monsieur's coach ascending the hill. If it had been that of M. le Comte de Besance . . . oh, if it had been M. le Comte himself!"
"M. de Besance? Ah, then we are already upon his estates!" interrupted the gentleman in the coach. "Do you hear that, my dear?" Seemingly placated, and as if the incident were drawing to a close, he began to close the door. Noticing the crest on the outside panel for the first time, the man by the road licked his lips and hastened to correct himself.
"But yes, monseigneur," he gasped, "the Château de Besance is scarcely half an hour's drive. One goes as far as the cross-roads at Romagnat and then turns to the left by the little wood. And the road from here on monseigneur will find in excellent shape. For a week now we have laboured upon it even in wheat sowing time."
Mollified at finding himself so near the end of a long and painful journey the gentleman's face relaxed somewhat from its unrelenting scowl. A few pale blotches began to appear through its hitherto uniform tint of scarlet. Encouraged by this the unfortunate bailiff essayed further.
"By special order we have smoothed the road from Romagnat for the illustrious guest expected at the château; but not until day after tomorrow." Here he bowed. "Yet an hour later and this accurséd hole would have been filled. A little more willingness on the part of these"--a grim smile of understanding on the face of the nobleman here transported the bailiff--"a little more skill on the part of monseigneur's coachman . . ."
Scarcely had these words left the man's mouth, however, before a hail of rocks and mud set him dodging and dancing. The small postilion who had all this time been waiting in the road hat in hand was galvanized into instant action. On all fours, he dashed about snatching up every clod and stone that came ready to his paws. The whip flickered tail-like over his back, his grey-green eyes blazed brilliantly, and he spat and squalled out a stream of curses that might have done credit to his master. One of the peasants began to mutter something about the evil eye, and all began to draw back from the coach.
"Are we all right?" shouted the master to his footmen.
"Yes, Your Excellency," they replied as if with one voice.
"Drive on then, Sancho, you devil's cat," roared the gentleman now grinning with enjoyment at the grotesque scene before him and with satisfaction at finding that neither his leg nor his coach was irreparably damaged.
But at the word "cat" the little postilion fairly bounded into the air. His hair seemed to stand on end. Those outside the coach appeared to be fascinated. They continued to stand and stare until with an impatient gesture the gentleman on the inside pulled a tasselled cord. A small bell hung in a yoke on the roof tinkled musically, and the horses long accustomed to the signal moved forward.
Finding himself about to be left alone on the highroad in a hopeless minority, the postilion with a final snarl turned, picked up his hat, clapped it on his head, and in a series of panther-like leaps, for his legs were far too short to run, gained the lead horse already some yards ahead and vaulted into the saddle.
"A cat! A cat!" shrieked the peasants. The four horses broke into a trot, and the coach and its passengers rocked and rolled along the road that had been so carefully "smoothed" to the Château de Besance.
But rumour preceded it in the person of a peasant runner who took a short cut across the fields. The servants at the château were warned of the unexpectedly sudden approach of visitors. Even before the coach reached the cross-roads at Romagnat that entire village was agog. For nothing except scandal spreads so fast as an apt nickname. The two indeed are frequently related, and in this case as long as he remained in that part of Auvergne Don Luis Guzman Sotoymer y O'Connell, conde de Azuaga in Estremadura, Marquis da Vincitata in Tuscany, and Envoy Extraordinary to the Court of France from that grand duchy, was invariably associated with his feline postilion, Sancho, and referred to over the entire countryside as Monsieur le Marquis de Carabas and his cat.
Compared with the surface of the royal highway the recently smoothed road upon the estates of M. de Besance was as a calm harbour to the Bay of Biscay. Both Don Luis and his leg thus began to experience considerable benefit from the comparative ease with which the coach now rolled along. The end of a ten days' journey from Versailles was almost in sight, and the marquis began to contemplate the bandages in the vicinity of his big toe--from which only a faint, blue light now seemed to emanate--if not with entire satisfaction at least with considerable relief. As he did so his eyes happened to stray past his carefully cherished foot into the deep recess formed by the rear seat, thus serving to remind him of what he was at times somewhat prone to forget.
The ample rear seat of the coach upholstered in a smooth velvet of a light rose colour was deep enough to form, with its painted side panels and the arched roof above it, what seemed from the front seat, where the marquis was now leaning back, to be a deep alcove. Sunk in the luxurious cushions of the seat, and reclining against the back of the coach with her head directly under an oval window was what appeared to be the body of a young girl scarcely eighteen years of age. Her form was completely relaxed. Her long sensitive hands, upon one finger of which was a wedding ring, lay with startling and web-like whiteness against the rose of the cushions. Two waxen arms disappeared at the elbows into the folds of a grey silk travelling scarf wrapped about her shoulders like a Vigée-Lebrun drapery. She sat with one leg crossed over the other so that her skirt, stiffly brocaded in a heavy heliotrope and gold pattern, fell in a sharp-edged fold that might have been moulded in porcelain to one white-slippered foot.
Used as he was to an almost selfless yielding in his girl-wife which constantly expressed itself in his presence in her relaxed physical attitudes, there was, as he now looked at her across the aisle of the coach, something in her posture which caused Don Luis to glance hastily and uneasily at her face. Her small, rather neat head lay drooped to one side. Since Bourges, which they had left hastily after the death of her maid by plague, she had been unable to accomplish an elaborate powdered coiffure. Consequently her own hair of a pure saffron colour seldom seen in the south of Europe, burst, rather than was combed back, into a high Grecian knot held precariously by one gold-knobbed pin. Across her wide, clear forehead, above carefully pencilled and minutely pointed arcs of eyebrows, and blowing out from the temples before and around two finely chiselled ears, sprang a delightful hedge of ringlets and tiny silken wires. These in the rays of the western sun, which darted now and again through the oval window behind, were touched along with a thousand dust motes that danced in the semi-darkness of the coach, into a sudden blaze and aura of golden glory. A straight nose, and a rather small, pursed mouth, whose corners were nevertheless drawn out enough to be turned down toward an obstinate little chin, completed a countenance with a bisque complexion like that of a miniature. It needed only that the eyes should be wide open and staring directly at you out of the shadows to give the impression that you were actually in the presence of some dream-like and helpless doll. But her eyes were now closed, or almost so. As her husband looked at them with their long, brown lashes disclosing only a blue polished glimmer of the pupils beneath, while the lids remained perfectly motionless, it calmly occurred to him that she might have fainted.
Yet this realization even when it became a certainty did not suggest to Don Luis any necessity for immediate action. Before everything else the marquis was a connoisseur, an appreciator of rare and accidental patterns of beauty in nature, and of their successful imitation or creation in art. The picture before him was a combination of both. The wide-flung frame of the upholstered seat, the delicate rose-leaf tint of the background, the perspective of the alcove, and the unusual arrangement of its lights and shadows were, so it happened, in exact harmony with the central and somewhat tragic figure of the portrait. There was even a high light in precisely the proper place, for a large emerald breast pin concentrated the stray beams of sunlight and deflected them in a living grey-green shaft across the folds of the girl's scarf.
Don Luis was delighted. For the time being he felt that his condescension and his trouble in marrying this young woman had been rewarded. And where had he seen that exact arrangement of headdress and features, accidental to be sure, but quite purely classic in effect? Ah, it was on a coin of Faustine; or was it Theodora? Perhaps a combination of both. One's mind played tricks like that. His artistic imagination no doubt! Yes, there was something a little Byzantine here, and yet quite Grecian behind with the knot, of course. Well, he would look again in that cabinet in the Pitti next time he was in Florence. He knew the exact spot where it stood. Just next to that vile medallion of Guido. . . . But a slight trembling of his wife's eyelids reminded him that some more direct attention to the subject of so admirable a reverie was now in order.
"Maria," said he, leaning forward and feeling along her arms as if she were a doll whose limbs might have been accidentally broken, "listen, I am speaking to you."
Recalled thus from somewhere else by a command not to be disregarded, she slowly opened her eyes, wide, and very blue, upon him. Scarcely had full consciousness returned to her look before she hastened to disengage her arms from his grasp and to whisper, "Better now. It was that last jolt. I was sure we should all be killed. I prayed to her all the way down the hill. I dreamed I was with her now." A haze suffused itself over her eyes as if she had been looking at the little hills of a child's paradise with the morning mist still gathered upon them.
For a moment he remained silent. There was one crack, however, in his otherwise turtle-like armour. Glancing toward a statuette of the Madonna, which at his wife's entreaty had been set in a niche in the side of the coach, he crossed himself fervently. The upholstery had been cut away to allow the insertion of this figure and its little shrine, and for some time he kept his eyes fixed in its direction with an expression at once conventionally pious and fearfully sincere. Only a boyhood in Spain could have achieved it. But while it lasted and his lips moved, the girl remained still. A look of mixed jealousy and chagrin as if she were loath to share some personal possession with him hardened her eyes and brought her chin a little further forward while his devotions went on. At last, seeing that his gaze had shifted to the window again, she ventured to ask, "What happened?"
"Nothing," said he. The coach rolled on a short distance.
Settling back he pulled up a square flap in the cushion and produced from a locker in the seat a bottle and a small, silver travelling mug. "Nothing, fortunately," he repeated, "but drink this and you will soon feel better. Shall I tell you now? It was a deep hole in the road. A few minutes later and it would have been filled. No doubt it did jar you badly sitting directly over the wheel, but the coach of monseigneur is undoubtedly a good one. We shall not be delayed."
Without spilling any of the wine which he offered her, she managed to sip it down and wipe the scarlet stain from her lips with a wisp of a handkerchief. Seeing how steady were her hands, Don Luis congratulated her and proceeded to follow up his panacea for all earthly ills, as he put the bottle back in the seat, with a little cheering chat.
"It is really too bad that both of the mishaps of the journey have fallen upon you, my dear," said he, wiping his own lips. "I could complain to M. de Besance about this last one and make it lively for those lazy peasants. He is said to prefer the high justice to the low, but it is not quite so easy in these disturbed times to take the high hand as it used to be. Hanging or driving away a tenant is not to be thought of nowadays, especially when one's luck at cards has been of the sorriest. They say some of these fellows in the country are getting impatient at sending all their rents to Versailles. The fields here look in condition though," he exclaimed, "fine, well-tilled acres!"
She nodded wearily.
"So they didn't expect us so soon," he chuckled, "otherwise that hole would not have 'existed.' Well, Sancho paid them back in their own loose dirt." He proceeded to relate the incident, at which she succeeded in smiling faintly.
"No, we are decidedly before-hand with them. If you had not insisted on delaying at Bourges to be sure that maid would die, we might have been here two days sooner. That delay was a sheer waste of time. Oh! it has been difficult with your hair, I am sure. But do you know I admire you as you are. There is a certain classic air about you. They told me you were quite the rage at the Petit Trianon[3] in a milkmaid's smock. It was really clever of you to manage that. To be commanded to the dairy by the queen herself, twice!"
A slight tinge of colour began to suffuse her cheeks.
"Still you should never have let them find out that you really did know how to milk," he went on. "That was a faux pas, a decidedly peculiar accomplishment for the wife of an envoy extraordinary. It is not real simplicity they want. You should have merely pretended to be learning rapidly. But to have finished milking before Madame! It was fatal! I can tell you our stock dropped after that. I felt like M. Law himself. If it had not been for my luck in the Œil-de-Bœuf and that night at de Guémené's soirée we should have been nowhere, nowhere at all. Even the mission might have failed. But when I won M. d'Orléans' new coach from him at écarté, and drove off in it with the lilies on the door! Ha! That was something, even if one's wife did know how to milk." He looked at her, stroking his beard with satisfaction.
The coach rolled on while the shadows deepened. In the depths of the seat he could not see the tears in the eyes of his young wife. The world outside glimmered before her.
A red ray of sunset dashed itself against the rose-coloured cushions and glanced into the shimmering pools of her eyes. Reflected there she saw the Palace of Love at the Petit Trianon; the torchlight on the pool before it. A dust mote became a boat gliding past in the red glow. Ghosts of music began to sound in her ears. The trees whispered outside like the park forest.
Suddenly the vision became intensely clear. Up the little steps of the temple sprang a young soldier in a white and gold uniform. He was putting roses on the altar before the god of love. She leaned forward now to see his face--and found herself gazing directly into the eyes of her husband.
His lips parted slowly in a completely self-possessed smile. She gasped slightly. The vision had been so clear! She was almost afraid he must have seen it, too. But Don Luis was not given to visions. The gouty leg had unaccountably stopped pulsing and its owner now felt inclined to talk.
"M. le Comte de Besance did not come off so well in his bets with me either." His smile widened. "Five hundred louis against my living on his estates till my leg is cured! All of these fellows are so sure of their provincial springs. No one can dispute with them. It is like arguing with a country priest about a local miracle. Por Dios, how he leered over that fine hand he held. I almost believe he wanted to lose just to have me try his spa. Else how could he have played so ill? So I shall take my time here. It is due my good luck. And I like the air already. None the less that there are no handsome Irish captains of the guard to breathe it. Mark that! O'Connell was my great-grandfather's name. That is all the Irish you will get. We shall say no more about that fellow, but"--and he leaned forward clutching her knee--"remember!"
Having delivered this ultimatum he sat back again for some time in silence. At last one of the footmen absent-mindedly began to drum upon the roof. "Leave off that," roared his master. Outside the man snatched his hand back as if he had suddenly found it resting on a hot stove. Don Luis continued.
"You can rest here and forget all about it. They say the Château de Besance is a pleasant enough place. The last M. de Besance but one spent some time in Italy and even journeyed to see the Grand Turk. The rugs are said to be remarkable, and there are some good Venetian pieces. Besides, the place is not too large to be comfortable. I shall get you another maid, somehow, and you can indulge your cursed English taste for driving about the country."
"Scotch, you mean," the girl said softly, "my father . . ."
"It is all the same," said he, a little impatient at the interruption. "Doubtless there is a small carriage in the count's stables. But no jaunting about in peasants' carts! That was bad enough at Livorno when you were a girl. Remember!"
He had an unpleasant way of trilling the phrase in Italian, an accent that might have accompanied a sneer. She always felt it and winced. Yet seldom was he so talkative or so amiable as now. Despite an occasional sardonic fall in his tones, without which he could scarcely have expressed himself, for the first time in her married life of about a year he was verging upon the affable. Sensing the state of his feelings as well as their ephemeral nature, she decided to pick flowers while the sun shone.
"At the château--could I have a dog?" she asked. Her quick reading of the human barometer and her instant grasp of opportunity tickled his shrewd fancy. In the mood he was in he consented with an ease that astonished himself.
"At the château, yes. But it must not come into the coach. I will not be having the cushions made for royalty itself ruined."
She laughed. The very thought of a companion who could give and receive affection revived her. Leaning forward she looked out of the window and let the breeze play on her forehead. They were just approaching a village.
Presently the coach and four wheeled sharply around a well-curb at the forks of the road. A weather-beaten cross stood above the town fountain, and the usual crowd of women drawing water at that time of day put their pitchers down or slipped the bucket yokes from their shoulders at the sound of horses. Almost everyone in the village who could find an excuse to be away, and there were few who could not, stood waiting to stare curiously but silently at the coach. The only sound was the clopping of hoofs and the occasional snarl of the more vicious village curs carefully held back from barking. Dogs which barked at guests on the estates of M. le Comte de Besance invariably failed to return to their owners.
"To the château?" cried Sancho, drawing up and nourishing his whip.
One of the horses began to crane its neck and sniff toward the fountain. The crowd gaped and began to murmur something among themselves about a cat. "But, yes, certainly, a cat!" There seemed a humorous difference of opinion. Sancho began to jabber. The bell on the top of the coach tapped twice with unusual emphasis, and he swung the horses to the left.
"That fool!" exclaimed the marquis, "he would stop at every village well to start a brawl. An end must be put to that! If he fights with everyone who howls 'cat' after him between here and the Alps, I shall be needing a new coachman long before we get to Italy. Besides, the man does look like a cat! You can see, my love, it would never do to have a dog in the coach with Puss-in-Boots on the box, never!" Don Luis actually leaned out of the window and laughed at his own joke. In town he would never have thought of doing so. It was the first time she had ever heard him laugh heartily and something in the tone of it startled her.
They were ascending a long rise now between a pleasant park-like wood on one side and a carefully pruned vineyard on the other. A few bunches of grapes smaller than berries as yet showed here and there. An all but imperceptible perfume was in the air. Maria breathed deeply and lay back with her eyes closed. The scent was delightfully familiar, suggestive even in its intangibility, and she allowed herself, as she relaxed into the cushions, the unexpected boon of indulging to the full an overpowering illusion that she was returning home.
After all, perhaps the Château de Besance might have its compensations. She would play that she was coming home anyway. It would make the arrival at another strange place more bearable. The faint tinge of colour brightened in her cheeks. Even the illusion made her heart beat faster.
Her husband was looking out over the vineyards, wide and peculiarly mellow in the last, long rays of full daylight. If only that countenance with its pointed beard, the cheeks forever a dark wine colour, the hard black eyes, and the mouth like a trap,--if only he were not here now to spoil her dream! A small breeze blowing across the aisle of the coach fanned her cheeks and brought a more pungent whiff as of the vineyards about Livorno. Shutting her eyes tight she breathed more deeply, then she turned away from him and opened them wide.
From the little niche in the side of the coach the madonna was looking at her. The girl began to pray to her silently. The face of the Virgin was very familiar. The little statuette was the one memento which she had been allowed to keep that still reminded her of home. Her lips moved imperceptibly, her nostrils widened to the breeze, her eyes remained fixed upon the face of the statue. For a few wretched and blessed moments she was back again in her own room in her father's house.
Don Luis had no idea of what was going on in his wife's mind. He saw that she was praying and that seemed natural enough. But he did not care how, when, where, or to what a woman prayed. Just now he was nowhere in particular himself. His leg had stopped hurting and left him pleasantly vacant of mind; in an easy, almost garrulous mood. He leaned out of the window still farther and noticed they were nearly at the top of the hill. Hadn't the bailiff in charge of the peasants said the château was just over the top of the rise? The memory of that unfortunate fleeing in a hail of mud again caused Don Luis to laugh aloud.
The little postilion turned about in his saddle and looked back at his master. An amused grin spread from his whiskers along his jaws. A knowing wink passed between the master and his man. Just then the horses began to descend.
"What can you see ahead?" shouted the marquis.
But the reply of the postilion was lost in the sudden grinding of brakes.
CHAPTER TWO
THE LITTLE MADONNA
The peasants working on the corvée of M. de Besance had just completed filling the hole in the causeway and were gathering up their tools to depart for a well-earned night's rest, when the sound of galloping hoofs once more fell upon their ears.
There was a short cessation of the sound. Then without any further warning a man mounted on a spirited bay horse darkened the notch at the top of the hill. Picking his way rapidly down the steep slope, he splashed at a sharp clip through the ford and cantered onto the causeway. A certain military precision lurked in the folds of a blue cloak that fell from his shoulders in trim, straight lines. As he came opposite the group of peasants he reined up his horse sharply, and at the first glance as if his judgment was seldom at a loss, picked out the bailiff in charge of the work although the man's clothes were still bespattered by the dirt with which his friend the postilion had recently favoured him. The stranger beckoned to him, but somewhat suspicious from his recent experience the man hesitated to step forward as smartly as before. Nor did two large pistols in the holsters of a military saddle, and the brass clover of a rapier scabbard projecting below the newcomer's riding cloak add to the bailiff's sense of self-possession.
"Come here," said the horseman, seeing how matters stood, in a voice that was not to be denied. With some visible hesitation the bailiff advanced.
"Have you seen a gentleman on a black gelding pass this way recently?"
"No, sir, he has not come by this road," replied the man.
The stranger's horse refreshed from its recent plunge in the ford danced about uneasily and pawed the dust. "Ha, Solange, you witch you, ho, girl!" he cried, reining her about in a semi-circle with a sure hand and bringing her back again as he called over one shoulder, "How do you know that?"
"Because, monsieur," replied his informant, "we have been working here all day and no one has passed southward except the coach of monsieur . . . pardon, I mean monseigneur[4], the guest of M. le Comte."
"Monseigneur!" said the stranger raising his eyebrows. "Why do you say that?"
"The crest, sir, the lilies were on the door!"
"Are you sure of it?"
"Am I likely to forget it? Dieu! am I not covered from head to foot by the filth which that devil, his cat of a postilion, threw at me. Look!" and the bailiff turned to exhibit the state of his back.
He was immediately struck by another missile, but this time of a more welcome kind. As he stooped to pick up the coin, he saw the limbs of the mare suddenly gathered under her as she felt the spur. By the time he had picked up the money and bitten it, both horse and rider were fifty yards away.
"Monsieur is in a hurry," he muttered, as he pocketed the piece and prepared to go home.
It was easy enough to follow the coach. In the newly smoothed highway the broad wheel tracks of the great vehicle were as plainly to be seen as if it had just been driven over a field of virgin snow. Yet the coach itself was nowhere visible. Behind the top of a little rise above the village the stranger dismounted and made sure of this before urging his mount onto the level open ground below. He was about to gallop on when a low cloud of dust at the top of a hill across the valley caught his eye.
The coach was just emerging from a patch of woodland and going over the skyline. From where he stood he could even see someone lean from the window to speak to the postilion while the latter turned in his saddle to reply. Then the whole equipage disappeared over the ridge.
Clapping spurs to his horse the stranger galloped down the road, leaped over a low hedge, and taking an open short cut across some meadows, found himself in a trice back on the road again. The village, which he had thus avoided, lay between the highways at the "V" of the cross-roads, and he was now passing rapidly uphill with a wood on one hand and vineyards on the other. Just short of the hillcrest he again dismounted suddenly and threw the reins over the mare's neck. She stood patiently, precisely where she had been left. Muffling his cloak well about him, he strode rapidly forward a few yards, stooping low. He then left the road, and taking shelter behind a convenient shrub, looked down into the valley beyond.
Before him lay a low valley, a wide, cultivated landscape stretching away in the softly brilliant afterglow of a French sunset. In the foreground was the park of Besance. A statue gleamed here and there amid the wide-armed trees like an ivory high light. The road wound through the groves in a vague "S"-shaped curve up to the château itself, an old building with candle snuffer towers. But there was a new wing in front with high, arched renaissance windows and a row of conical trees in tubs. It was one of those minor Versailles which during the last two reigns had sprung up all over Europe. As he watched, a fountain began to play on the terrace and the downstairs windows gleamed with a saffron light as someone flitted from room to room lighting chandeliers. The coach now emerged from between a wall of hedges, made the half-circle before the entrance, and drew up before the door. In the lens-like air, as the footmen leaped to let down the steps, he could even see their brass buttons. After some little delay the coach moved out and trotted around to the rear.
