Part 2

“And a good thing it was that we did attack him in that way; for, although he was hardly awake, he managed, while he was wrestling with us, to break one of Oulid Sekrad’s legs, and to put out one of Ali Oud Ama’s eyes. He smashed in five or six of poor Bou Senan’s teeth, and bit Otsman Oud Messassit’s back savagely.”

“Justice of the Master of the World! is it possible to lie in this way? On the contrary, I have been half killed by you. Don’t you see my face is covered with blood?”

“Son of a dog! you well know the blood is from poor Oud Messassit’s body.”

“Sidi Abd-Allah!” exclaimed Ben Serraq. But it was of no use invoking the saints. Djilali called for a towel and a basin of water, and with them washed Ben Serraq’s face. The experiment established the fact that that interesting individual had not received the slightest scratch, and that the bite on the unfortunate Oud Messassit’s back must have been the only source of the stains.

“Well, Ben Serraq,” said the president; “although I cannot entertain any reasonable doubt of your guilt, you are, nevertheless, at liberty to speak--let us hear what you have to say in justification.”

“Ah! I am allowed to explain! Well; you will soon see! In the first place, my wife is a she-vagabond--everybody knows it--don’t they, Djilali?”

But Djilali, who was particularly anxious to conceal all cognisance of the defendant’s affairs, only replied,--“May your tent catch fire! Pray, what connection have I ever had with you, that I should know how your wife employs herself?”

“Very well; ’tis of no consequence. But the fact is notorious and incontestable--the she-dog betrays my honour.”

“I will take your word for it,” said the court; “and then?--”

“She has taken a fancy to Oud Raï, whose people’s shepherds have treated me so shamefully. I have often said to her, ‘Fatma, my darling, things cannot go on in this manner; your improper conduct sets everybody talking, and a modest and virtuous man, like myself, will soon be the laughing-stock of the whole country, and that on your account. Mind what you are about, else I shall be obliged to beat you; and you are aware, my beloved, that, when I do hit, I hit rather hard.’”

“But I do not see what reference your matrimonial tribulations can have to the business now before us.”

“I beg your pardon--you will see directly. I admonished her, therefore, with the utmost gentleness, in accordance with my natural disposition. But it was a waste of time and breath. She persevered in her infamous conduct till I was obliged, as a gentleman, to administer to her and to Oud Raï one day, a considerable number of kicks and thumps.”

“But, again I ask, what have these details to do with the theft of which you stand accused? Explain yourself, more clearly.”

“What! cannot a man of your great genius see, now, how things have been managed?”

“I have an idea I can; but probably not in the same light as you do.”

“What! don’t you see that Oud Raï and my wretch of a wife, to be avenged of the beating I gave them, have subtracted the bullock in question without my knowledge, and have cut it up in my tent, in order to compromise me with the authorities? Sidi Bou Krari! it is as clear as the sun, that. Don’t you see that I am a virtuous husband calumniated by a criminal wife?”

A subdued murmur, mingled with stifled laughter arose in the assembly at the victim air which Ben Serraq tried hard to assume, and also at listening to the singular pleading which he had improvised.

“Ben Serraq,” said the magistrate, in a sceptical tone, “your case must be a very bad one, to compel you to employ such poor arguments for its defence. How could your wife play you such a trick as you describe without your knowledge, since your accusers found your tent filled with the animal’s remains, the head particularly being so conspicuous and recognisable an object?”

“What is there extraordinary in that?” asked Ben Serraq, not in the slightest degree disconcerted. “My wife is so artful, and I am so simple and innocent, that she could easily contrive to conceal the matter.”

“Come; these are wretched arguments. For a man like you, who has had so many transactions with the authorities, it is not a clever way of getting out of the scrape.”

“I invoke Allah and his justice!” screamed Ben Serraq with the throat of a wild boar. “I am a poor persecuted innocent; there is nothing proved against me, absolutely nothing. The case at least is doubtful,--that is incontestable,--and in cases of doubt the law requires me to take an oath. Put me on my oath; I will swear on the Koran, on Sidi Bou Krari, on whatever book you please, I am as innocent as a suckling.”

“No doubt. You will take a hundred oaths as readily as one. But, unfortunately for you, I have not forgotten your previous character, and must consider the charge as completely established.”

“Allah! Lord of the Universe! Justice is not to be had in this country.”

“Honest men will say the contrary, when they hear you are caught, and especially when they see you transported to France: whither I intend requesting you to be sent.”

“That’s the reward people get for serving the French!” swaggered Ben Serraq, as Coriolanus might have done when banished by ungrateful Rome.

“Not bad, by my faith! You doubtless consider you are rendering people a service by easing them of their purses.”

“I have been of service to you in time of warfare, by marching constantly at the head of your columns.”

“True; you have sometimes marched at the head of our columns as a guide; but most assuredly you insisted upon heavy wages, as far as I can recollect. Besides, that is no reason why you should be allowed, in recompense, to plunder the whole human race. You ought to have reformed, as you promised you would, and then we should have forgotten the past.”

“I am slandered! I am a victim!”

“Retain that idea for your consolation, and hold your tongue. Djilali, take some of the men on guard and lead this fellow to prison.”

“Sidi, Sidi!” pleaded Ben Serraq, “can you not deliver me from these bonds, which give me horrible pain?”

“Very well; I will. Djilali, unfasten the ropes, which, in fact, are a little too tight. It is impossible for him to make his escape now; only, take some of the cavalry with you, and keep a sharp eye on him on the way to prison.”

“O, Sidi! such precautions are unnecessary. I am as gentle as a lamb.” And Ben Serraq made his exit escorted by a numerous suite of mekrazenis, at the head of whom was Djilali, and who, feeling the greatness of his responsibility, marched as if he were carrying the world. But an Arab chief in alliance with the French, named Ben Safi, whispered to the president as soon as the prisoner had disappeared,

“Perhaps you were wrong to let his arms be untied.”

“That is rather too good,” the magistrate replied. “How, do you suppose, can he contrive to escape from the custody of ten soldiers, and in the midst of the town?”

“I have seen him escape,” Ben Safi explained, “under circumstances that would make one believe there was something diabolical in his composition. One night, when he had the impudence to come and rob in my own smala, we contrived to seize him by killing the horse he had stolen from us, and under which it chanced that he was caught as it fell. I had his hands tied behind his back, and I ordered one of my men to kill him like a dog, from behind, with a pistol-shot. The shot was fired; but my gentleman, instead of dropping down dead, as he ought to have done, jumped up as lively as a grasshopper, and disappeared as if a flash of lightning had carried him off. The bullet had only cut the cords which bound him, and had been flattened on the palm of his hand. We were stupefied with astonishment.”

“And well you might be!” said the official head of the Arab bureau, beginning to feel a little fidgety. “I now believe I should have acted more prudently if I had forbidden his being unpinioned till he was safely lodged in prison.”

“I am sure you would;” interposed Ben Tekrouide, a second friendly chief. “I have always been told that this fellow is a perfect demon, in human shape. At the market of Kremis, he once robbed a man of his ass, without his being aware of the theft, although he was sitting on its back at the time.”

“Indeed!” said the magistrate, in a fidget. “I should be very glad to know that he was definitely in custody under lock and key.”

“He has the strength of twenty men,” observed Ben Maoudj, a third philo-Gallic chieftain. “He once stole a camel laden with wheat from a caravan proceeding to the south; and, as the animal was unable to travel over the rocky road by which he wanted to pass, he took it on his back, wheat and all, and carried it in that way for half-a-night’s march.”

“That must be a slight exaggeration,” remarked the president, now feeling horribly uncomfortable. “Nevertheless, I should like to be quite sure that he had reached the inside of the prison walls. They are very long about it; they ought to be back by this time.”

“Do you wish that I should go and see?” asked Ben Safi, pitying his friend’s uneasiness.

“I shall be much obliged to you.”

At the moment when Ben Safi was leaving the court, a distant clamour was heard from without, followed by several successive gunshots. A sound of many footsteps was audible, as if a crowd of men were approaching. The doors were thrown open violently, and Djilali made his appearance. His clothes were torn and soiled with dirt, and his right eye seemed to have suffered severely.

“Ouf!” he puffed out, “my back is broken! May Sidi Abd-Allah burn me, if he is a man.”

“Explain yourself. Tell me!” said the court, on thorns. “Ben Serraq?--”

“Ben Serraq, indeed? If ever you contrive to get him into prison, I will consent to be roasted alive.”

“He has escaped, then?”

“How should it be otherwise: he is the devil in person?”

“Have the goodness to tell me how you could have been so stupid as to let a single man break away from ten of you.”

“The thing was very simple, and he was not long about it. When we got to the prison, at the instant when they opened the door, he unceremoniously seized the sentinel’s gun; he twisted it round like the sails of a windmill, and threw down three-fourths of our number flat on our backs. I immediately rushed upon him; together with the rest who were still on their legs, and you see”--here he exhibited his exterior, including his black and swollen eye--“what I got by it. After having nearly felled me by putting his doubled fist into my eye, he seized me by the skin, and threw me, like a bundle of old clothes, on the top of my comrades. We were all left rolling pell-mell together; and, when I got up, I saw that demon already landed on the other side of the river. The guard came out and fired more than thirty musket-shots at him while he was climbing up the bank; but, bless me! they might just as well have dusted his back with pepper and salt. The bullets were flattened without hurting him.”

“The thing is prodigious!”

“After he got to the other side of the river, no one knows what became of him. Some say that he burrowed into the ground, whilst others declare that he took flight with a couple of great black wings that suddenly grew out of his sides and unfolded wide. The soldiers belonging to the guard will have it that he laid hold of a horse that was grazing there, that he jumped on its back, and set off at full gallop.”

LANGTHWAITE.

Langthwaite was in a state of excitement; its morals were perturbed, and its ideas confused; its old landmarks were being swept away, and it did not approve of its new landmarks. Langthwaite notions were being assaulted, and Langthwaite’s morality was put to shame. Madame Floriani, the Italian widow, had dared to defy the authority and disturb the influence of Mr. Bentley, the young incumbent. Was Langthwaite to be ruled over by a strange woman who introduced foreign customs, and upset the existing institutions, or was its government to be a virtuous hierarchy as before? Was the cousin of a dean, or the widow of an Italian count, to be considered the first personage of the vale? This grave question was what Langthwaite was called on to decide; and the quiet valley in the heart of the mountains lashed itself into a state of perturbation, strongly suggestive of the famous tempest that was brewed in a teapot.

The origin of the evil was this:--

When old Jacob White the miser, who built Whitefield House of stone and marble, and furnished it with painted deal and calico--died, he left all his wealth to a certain niece of his, his sister’s child, who had been born and bred and married in Rome, and who was now Count Floriani’s widow. She was his only relative; and, although it went sorely against him to leave his wealth to one who was more than half a foreigner, yet family pride at last conquered national prejudice, and Madame la Comtessa Floriani was made the heiress of Whitefield House and the lands circumjacent. This good fortune brought that Romanised young Englishwoman from the blue skies and rich light of Italy, to a remote village in the heart of the Cumberland mountains.

The society of Langthwaite was peculiar, and beyond measure dull. Dull, because bigoted. The ideas of the denizens ran in the narrowest of all narrow gauges, out of which not a mind dared to move. The peculiarity of Langthwaite was its power of condemnation. Everything was wicked in its more than puritanic eyes. Life was a huge snare; the affections were temptations; amusements were sins; pleasure was a crime; novel-writers “had much to answer for,” and novel-readers were next door to iniquity; an actor was a being scarcely less reprehensible than a murderer; and an artist was lost to all moral sense--if, indeed, it ever chanced that artists were spoken of at all, for the Langthwaite intellect did not penetrate far into the regions of art. No one “living in the world” had a conscience, and no foreigners had the faintest notion of virtue. Langthwaite was the centre of salvation, and outside its sphere revolved desolation and ruin.

There was a national school at Langthwaite, where all the ladies went on different days and at different hours, to superintend, some the work, and some the spelling; and there was a Sunday school where everyone fought for a class. It was the cordon bleu of Langthwaite to have a class in the Sunday school. There were a great many dissenting chapels, and a great many missionary meetings. Religious excitement being the principal dissipation at Langthwaite, school feasts, Dorcas meetings, district visitings, missionary sermons, awakening preachings, and prayer meetings, were infinite. The parish clergyman, Mr. Bentley, said that the parish was well-worked; and so it was. It was worked until its mental condition was in such a state of turmoil and unrest that no one knew exactly what to believe.

To this society came Rosa Floriani, the widow of an Italian artist-count, certainly, and the semi-papistical latitudinarian, perhaps. Why she came to Langthwaite seemed a mystery to many. But it was in truth no mystery:--she thought it was only right to live among her tenants, and to do her best to the society which gave her her fortune.

She was a beautiful woman, about twenty-eight or thirty years of age, with fine blue eyes, and light auburn hair, as soft and shining as silk, braided in two thick wavy masses of imprisoned curls. She was very pale, as if she had lived much in darkened rooms; but her lips were red, and so were her nostrils. She was about the middle size; one of those women with small bones and soft outlines who keep young and supple to the last. She was negligent but coquettish in her dress; with such taste in all her arrangements, that, when she received her visitors in a white muslin dressing-gown and small morning-cap, clinging, like trellis-work against flowers, to the curling hair, she seemed to be far better dressed than the Miss Grandvilles in their silks and satins, and jewellery and lace, and grander than their grand carriage with a footman six feet high. She was excessively indolent in her habits; at least the Langthwaite world said so; never, by any chance, “dressed” at eleven or twelve o’clock, which was the general time for paying morning visits in that part of the world; and always receiving her _monde_, as she called them, upstairs in her dressing-room, in this kind of pretty negligence--very often wearing slippers, not shoes; little slippers of blue, or rose, or brown satin, trimmed round with lace and ribbon, clacking on the ground as she walked, for they had no heels. And indeed it was said that Madame Floriani had been seen in the middle of the day, and even in the evening, in the same undress, which was very near to a crime in Langthwaite. But her abode was worse than her attire. She had fitted up Whitefield House with all her Roman treasures, and they scandalised Langthwaite. The Miss Grandvilles said they were quite shocked, and Mr. Bentley spoke through his nose, and sighed as he called the pretty woman “heathenish.” She had casts of many of the best statuary set about her apartments--Saint Catherine’s Marriage, the Madonna, Saint Sebastian, the Judgment of Paris, a Venus or two, and a few martyrdoms. All this was like fire to stubble among the people of Langthwaite. But Madame Floriani, totally unconscious of the effect she was producing, only thought the Langthwaitians very cold in matters of art, and strangely ignorant of real merit.

She was an artist herself; and sometimes when they came in their grand, stiff, expensive, and ungraceful toilettes, they found her dressed in a man’s brown holland blouse, girded with a broad leathern band: while a little blue velvet cap, with a long tassel, was stuck jauntily on the top of her graceful head, just above those curly handfuls of bright auburn hair. Whereat they were doubly shocked; and the Miss Grandvilles, very tall, bony and desiccated gladiators, said she was really very unfeminine, and that it positively was not proper.

Madame Floriani’s worst enemy was Mr. Bentley. Mr. Bentley was the young incumbent of Langthwaite. He was not more than thirty as it was, and he looked like twenty. He was a tall, round, boyish person, with a round face, and round cheeks highly coloured, an innocent little snub nose, with those wide flat nostrils that make a greybeard look a youth, light-grey eyes, narrow shoulders, red hands--very red--with the fingers always swollen, as if from chronic chilblains, and a full, unformed mouth, swollen, too, like a boy’s. But in spite of this round face, with its ludicrous boyishness, Mr. Bentley had taken up the condemnatory and ascetic side. His sermons breathed more than Judaic severity; hatred of pleasure, hatred of art, hatred of liberation, hatred of everything but extreme Calvinistic tenets, church-going, and missionary meetings. This was Mr. Bentley’s profession of faith as far as he dare utter it even in Langthwaite. Yet his solemn looks and severe words were in such ludicrous contrast to that round, red, apple-face of his, which nature intended to express jollity, that more than once Madame Floriani looked up and laughed, saying, with her sweet voice and foreign accent, “But, Monsieur l’Abbé, assuredly you do not believe in yourself when you speak so!”

Which words used to make Mr. Bentley furious. As he said to the Miss Grandvilles, his fast allies, it was very painful to see Madame Floriani’s unconverted state of mind. Thus the war between the pretty foreign woman and the grave young clergyman went on, and Langthwaite stood aghast.

Madame Floriani thought she must do something for the place; so, after every one had called, she began to give parties. Everyone went to the first out of curiosity. Even Mr. Bentley who disapproved of her so much that he called nearly every day at Whitefield--to try and convert her--even he went. Though in general he was never seen at any evening party, where the object was not to sing hymns and hear a chapter expounded. But he made an exception. Madame Floriani had arranged her rooms very prettily. She had brought in all the flowers from the greenhouse, and placed them about the hall and drawing-room. She had wreathed the chandeliers with evergreens mixed in with flowers; while large baskets of flowers, evergreens, and moss, were placed on pedestals all about, and brilliantly lighted. The rooms were a flood of light, all excepting the little room off the drawing-room, which old Jacob White had called the study, and which Madame Rosa said was her boudoir; and this was dark. One candelabrum of two wax-lights only, placed on a beautiful little buhl table, reflected by two large mirrors set in deep gold frames of grapes and vine leaves, and falling on a marble statue of Ariadne, set within a draperied recess--this was all the light which Madame Floriani allowed in her boudoir. Many objects of art were about; there were models of the Coliseum and the Tower of Pisa, of the Lion in the Rock of Lucerne, of the Parthenon at Athens, and there were busts of famous men--Dante, and Petrarch, and Tasso--and pictures; a Magdalen by Giorgione, a Venus by Correggio, and views of Italy and Greece; and there was a carved book-case full of splendidly bound books, one was clasped with ivory and one had precious stones upon the cover; these, with curtains and draperies of rich rose-coloured silk, made up the furniture of Madame Rosa’s boudoir. A new style of room in Langthwaite. They could not understand it. The soft dim light, the living beauty on the walls, the wealth, the art, the management of effect, all perplexed the worthy mountaineers, and went far to convict Madame Floriani of some undesirable characteristics. The Miss Grandvilles, who led public opinion on matters of taste and propriety, peered into it curiously, but stepped back again immediately, as if it had been a sorcerer’s cave; and by way of being facetiously condemnatory, spoke to Madame Floriani of the “great white woman in the corner” as something they did not understand, nor quite approve of.

The widow looked at them with the surprised open-eyed look that had become familiar to her since she came to Langthwaite, and then with her silvery good-humoured laugh cried out, “Why, my dear mademoiselle, that is Ariadne!”

“I wonder how you can like those horrible Greek stories!” said the eldest Miss Grandville severely. “We who know so much better things, to encourage those dreadful superstitions and idolatries in any way--it is shocking!”

“But, my dear demoiselle, you don’t think that I believe in Ariadne as the Greeks did!” said Madame Rosa. “It’s the art, not the goddess one loves!”