Charles James Lever

“ Fritz had, several hours before, shared his last morsel of black bread with his companion; and the bird, as if sympathising with his sorrow, sat moody and silent on his perch, nor even by a note or sound broke the stillness.
“Poor Jacob!”* said Fritz, with tears in his eyes, “my hard luck should not fall on thee! If no one comes to hire me before the shadow closes across the street, I’ll open the cage and let thee go!”
* Every Starling in Germany is called Jacob. ”

“ You men have an immense advantage in your affairs of the heart; you can always begin as freshly with each new affection, and be as youthful in sentiment with each new love, as we are with our only passion. Now I see it all; you have been getting up a ‘tendre’ here for somebody or other:—not Taglioni, I hope, for I see that is her Villa yonder,—There, don’t look indignant. This same Lake of Como has long been known to be the paradise of danseuses and opera-singers; and I thought it possible you might have dramatised a little love-story to favour the illusion. ”

“ Every day seems to gain something over the malady she laboured under. She is no longer faint and easily wearied, but able to take even severe exercise without fatigue; her cheek has grown fuller, and its rosy tint is no longer hectic, but the true dye of health; and instead of that slow step and bent-down head, her walk is firm and her air erect; while her spirits, no longer varying from high excitement to deep depression, are uniformly good and animated. Life is opening in all its bloom to her, as rapidly as its shadows are closing and gathering around me. ”

“ In one, you find a collection of ancient armour the greatest Ritter Saal would be proud to choose from:—weapons of every age and country—the chain-mail of Milan—the plate-armour of Venice—the heavy double-nailed suits of Regens-bourg—the small conical helmet of the East—the massive but beautifully fashioned casque of Spanish mould—the blade of Damascus—the double-handled sword of Appenzell—the jereed—the Crusader’s lance—the old pike of the Tyrol, with daggers and poniards of every shape, that luxury or cruelty ever invented. ”

“ Many an hour did Fritz sit upon the little bench before the shrine, in unconscious worship of that picture. Heaven knows what fancies he may have had of its origin; it never occurred to him to think that human skill could have achieved any thing so lovely.
He had often remarked that the villagers, as they passed, would kneel down before it, and with bowed heads and crossed arms seem to do it reverence; and he himself, when they were gone, would try to imitate their gestures, some vague sentiment of worship struggling for utterance in his heart. ”

“ Fritz never entered the village church—he never said a prayer; he knew nothing of the Power that had created him, and all that he saw around him. If he thought on these things, it was with the vague indecision of a mind without guidance or direction. Why, or how, and to what end, he and others like him, lived or died, he could not, by any effort, conceive. Fritz was a bondman—as much a slave as many who are carried away in chains across the seas, and sold to strange masters. There was no bodily cruelty in his servitude; he endured no greater hardships than poverty entails on millions ”

“ Hunger, cold, and fatigue, every privation of a long and weary journey, was unregarded by him; and although it was now late in the autumn, and snow was beginning to fall on the mountain passes, Fritz, poorly clad, and scarcely fed, trudged on, day after day, his own heart supplying the courage which his weak frame denied.
As winter drew near the days grew shorter; and the atmosphere, loaded with snow ready to drop, darkened the earth, and made night come on, as it seemed, many hours before sunset. ”

“ Looking out from this window, beneath which, not three paces distant, the blue lake is plashing—the music of its waves the only sound heard—great mountains rise grandly from the water to the very skies, the sides one tangled mass of olive, vine, and fig-tree. The dark-leaved laurel, the oleander, the cactus and the magnolia cluster around each rugged rocky eminence, and hang in graceful drapery over the glassy water. Palaces, temples, and villas are seen on every side; some, boldly standing out, are reflected in the calm lake, their marble columns tremulous as the gentle wind steals past ”

“ And as Fritz sobbed louder, so were the Starling’s cries of “Potztausend!” more shrill and piercing.
There were few people passing at the moment, but such as were, stopped; some to gaze with interest on the poor little boy—more, far more, to wonder at the bird; when suddenly a venerable old man, with a wide-leaved bat, and a silken robe reaching down to his feet, crossed over towards the fountain. It was the Curate of Lenz, a pious and good man, universally respected in Inspruck. ”

“ Wherever birds had fanciers, wherever men cared for the tints of plumage or the warbling mellowness of their notes, there an Engadiner was sure to be found. And who has ever studied their nature like one of these mountaineers, who knows all their habits and their tastes, their seasons of migrating and returning, how they build their nests, and all their likings and their antipathies—the causes which influence their selection and abandonment of a peculiar locality, the meaning of their songs—ay, and they are full of meaning—of welcome, of sorrow, of love, and of despair? ”

“ Each day a new episode of life—but of life over which Poverty has thrown its shadow.
Fritz was now to experience all this; now, travelling with a company of wandering apprentices; now, keeping company with a group of peasants on the way to market; sometimes, partaking of a seat in a Bauer’s waggon—often, alone and weary, thinking over his future—a future, that each day seemed to render more doubtful and gloomy. ”

“ How I dread the persiflage of the beauty “en vogue;” the heartless raillery that is warmed by no genial trait; the spiritless levity that smacks neither of wit nor buoyant youth, but is the mere coinage of the salons! How I dread, too, lest Lucy should imitate her! she so prone to catch up a trait of manner, or a trick of gesture! And Lady Blanche can make herself fascinating enough to be a model. To hear once more the dull recital of that world’s follies that I have left, its endless round of tiresome vice, would be a heavy infliction. ”

“ We rowed along past Melzi till we came under the tall cliffs near Bellagio; and there, in a little bay, land-locked and shaded by olive-trees, we dined. I had never seen Sir Gordon so thoroughly happy. When Lucy’s spirits have been higher, and her fancy has taken wilder and bolder wings, he has usually worn a look of anxiety through all his admiring fondness. To-day, she was less animated than she generally is—almost grave at times—but not sad; and I think that “Grandpapa” loved her better in this tranquil mood, than in those of more eager enjoyment. ”

“ Poor child! how many in this world live upon one single gleam of hope—ay, and even cling to it when a mere twilight, fast fading before them!
The Bauer was silent for some minutes; his look wandered from the child to the cage, and back again from the cage to the child. At last he stooped down and peeped in at the bird, which, with a sense of being in disgrace, sat with his head beneath his wing.
“Come, my little man,” said he, laying a hand on Fritz’s shoulder, “I’ll take thee home with me! ‘Tis true I have no cattle—nothing save a few goats—but thou shalt herd these. ”

“ I never heard that Fritz was struck—as he might possibly, with reason, have been—that, as he came into Bavaria, where the wide-stretching plains teem with yellow corn and golden wheat, the peasants seemed far poorer than among the wild mountains of his own Tyrol; neither have I any recollection that he experienced that peculiar freedom of respiration, that greater expansion of the chest, travellers so frequently enumerate as among the sensations whenever they have passed over the Austrian frontier, and breathed the air of liberty, so bounteously diffused through the atmosphere of other lands. ”

“ Fritz mistook these indications altogether—and who can blame him? What the world calls dignity is not unfrequently mere sulk. How should poor Fritz make distinctions great Ministers and Princes are sometimes incapable of?
The end of all this was a struggle, a long and violent struggle, on each side for the ascendancy. Fritz, however, had the advantage, for he could starve out the enemy—a harsh measure, no doubt, but greater folks have adopted even more severe ones to enforce their principles. Fritz, besides, had all the stern enthusiasm of a fanatic in the cause. ”

“ They witnessed, then, with sincere satisfaction, the seeming indolence of his present life. They watched him in those soirées which Madame Buonaparte gave, enjoying his repose with such thorough delight—those delightful evenings, the most brilliant for all that wit, intellect, and beauty can bestow; which Talleyrand and Sieyes, Fouché, Carnot, Lemercier, and a host of others frequented; and they dreamed that his hour of ambition was over, and that he had fallen into the inglorious indolence of the retired soldier. ”

“ CHAPTER III. Varenna, Lake of Como.
Italy at last! I have crossed the Alps and reached my goal, and now I turn and look at that winding road which, for above two thousand feet, traverses the steep mountain-side, and involuntarily a sadness steals over me—that I am never to re-cross it! These same “last-times” are very sorrowful things, all emblems as they are of that one great “last-time” when the curtain falls for ever! ”

“ The sovereign was not only the fount of honour, but of wealth! Through his household flowed the only channel by which industry was nurtured: it was his court and his dependants whose wants employed the active heads and hands of the entire city. The Duke is gone—the palace closed—the courtyard even already half grass-grown! Not an equipage is to be heard or seen; not even a footman in a court livery rides past; and all the recompense for this is the newly conferred privileges of liberty, to a people who recognise in freedom, not a new bond of obligation, but an unbridled license of action. ”

“ If you pass a village, or a solitary farmhouse, at sunset, the same accents meet your ears, or else you hear them singing some hymn in concert. Few “Bauer” houses, of any pretension, are without the effigy of a patron saint above the door, and even the humblest will have a verse of a psalm, or a pious sentence, carved in the oaken beam. Their names are taken from the saintly calendar, and every thing, to the minutest particular, shews that their faith is an active working principle, fashioning all their actions, and mingling with all their thoughts. ”

“ We frequently hear of the hard-heartedness of the poor—how steeled they are against the finer affections and softer feelings of the world; but it might be as well to ask if the daily business of life—which to them is one of sheer necessity—does not combat more powerfully against the indulgence of sorrow than all the philosophy that mere wisdom ever taught?
Poor Fritzerl awoke with a heart almost weighed down with affliction, but still he went forth with his goats to the pasture, and tended and watched after them as carefully as ever. ”

“ Such was he who stopped to listen to the bird, and who, stealing round to the end of the hut, lay down beneath some scattered branches of firewood to delight his ear to the uttermost.
It may be doubted whether a connoisseur ever listened to Orisi or Jenny Lind with more heartfelt rapture than did the Engadiner to the Starling; for while the bird, from time to time, would break forth with its newly acquired invocation, the general tenor of its song was a self-taught melody—one of those wild and delicious voluntaries in which conscious power displayed itself ”

“ A uniformity, that tells rather of security than sameness, pervades every thing in this well-ordered household, where all come and go as if under the guidance of some ruling genius, unseen and unheard. Sir Gordon, too, is like a father; at least as I can fancy a father to be, for I was too early left an orphan to preserve my memory of either parent. His kindness is even more than what we call friendship. It is actually paternal. He watches over my health with all the unobtrusive solicitude of true affection ”

“ So long as the winter lasted, and the deep snow lay on the hills, Fritz always herded his goats near the village, seeking out some sheltered spot where the herbage was still green, or where the thin drift was easily scraped away. In summer, however, the best pasturages lay further away among the hills near Steingaden, a still and lonely tract, but inexpressibly dear to poor Fritz, since there the wild flowers grew in such abundance, and from thence he could see the high mountains above Reute and Paterkirchen, lofty and snow-clad like the “Jochs” in his own Tyrol land. ”

“ Fritz was now to reap the benefit of this graceful charity; and scarcely had his wan features appeared at the window, than a sign from the chief Bauer invited him to partake. Happily for poor Fritz—happily for all who give and all who accept such aid—there is no sense of humiliation in doing so. It is, in fact, less an alms-giving than a remnant of the ancient hospitality which made the stranger welcome beneath every roof—a custom that dates before rail-roads and giant hotels. ”

“ Some, ruddy and stout-looking, seem to relish the enterprise, and actually enjoy the career so promising in its vicissitudes; others, sad and care-worn, bear with them the sorrows of their last leave-taking, and are only comforted by the thought that autumn will come at last, and then the cattle must be housed for the winter: and then they shall be free to wend their way over mountain and plain, far, far away beyond Maltz—high in the wild peaks of the Stelvio, or deep in the lovely glens below Meran. ”