Debit and Credit Part 69

"My comfort is," said Lenore, somewhat confused, "that it is not I who occasion these ideas, but the pleasure you take in the ideas themselves.

I only chance to be the unworthy subject of your fancy. You are a poet."

"Fie!" cried Fink; "how can you detract from me so much! I a poet!

Except a few merry sailors' songs, I do not know a single piece of poetry by heart. The only lines I care for are some fragments of the old school; for example, 'Hurrah! Hurrah! hop, hop, hop,' in a poem which, if I am not mistaken, bears your name. And even to these cla.s.sic lines I have to object that they rather represent the material trot of a cart-horse than the course of a phantom steed. But we must not be too exact with these pen-and-ink gentry. Well, then, with this single exception, you will find no poetry in me, except a few of the great Schiller's striking lines: Potz Blitz, das ist ja die Gustel von Blasewitz. There's much truth in that pa.s.sage."

"You are making fun of me," said Lenore, somewhat offended.

"Indeed I am not," a.s.severated Fink. "How can any one make or read poems in these days of ours, when we are constantly living them? Since I have been back in the old country, scarce an hour pa.s.ses without my seeing or hearing something that will be celebrated by knights of the pen a hundred years hence. Glorious material here for art of every kind! If I had the misfortune to be a poet, I should now be obliged to rush out in a fit of inspiration, hide myself in the kennel, and, at a safe distance from all exciting causes, write a pa.s.sionate sonnet, while the fox kept biting my heels. But, as I am no poet, I prefer to enjoy the beautiful when it is before me, to putting it into rhyme." And again he looked admiringly at the lady.

"Lenore!" cried a harsh voice from a corner of the room. Lenore and Fink looked in amazement at each other.

"He has learned it," said the forester, pointing to the raven; "in a general way he has left off learning, and sits there sulking with every one, but still he has learned that."

The raven sitting on the stove bent down his head, cast a shrewd glance at both the guests, kept moving his beak as though speaking to himself, and alternately nodding and shaking his head.

"The birds already begin to speak," cried Fink, going up to the raven; "the ceiling will soon fly off, and I shall be left alone with Hector and Bergmann. Now, sorcerer, does the water boil?"

The forester looked into the stove. "It boils famously," he said; "but what is to be done next?"

"We will ask the lady to help us," replied Fink. "I have," said he, turning to Lenore, "already been with your family trapper as far as the distillery and back, and I have brought what always serves me on my travels for breakfast and dinner." He took out a few tablets of chocolate. "We will concoct something like a beverage with this, if you do not disdain to lend us your aid. I propose that we try to mix this with water as well as we can. It would be charming of you to vouchsafe an opinion as to how we ought to set about it."

"Have you a grater or a mortar?" inquired Lenore, laughing.

"I have neither of those machines," replied the forester.

"A hammer, then," suggested Fink, "and a clean sheet of paper."

The hammer was soon brought, but the paper was only found after a long search. Fink undertook to pound the chocolate, the forester brought fresh water from the spring, Lenore washed out some cups, and Fink hammered away with all his heart. "This is antediluvian paper," said he, "thick as parchment; it must have lain for some centuries in this magic hut." Lenore shook the chocolate powder into the saucepan, and stirred it. Then they all three sat down, and much enjoyed the result of their handiwork.

The golden sunbeams shone fuller into the room, lighting up the bright form of the beautiful girl, and the fine face of the man opposite her; then they fell upon the wall, and decked the head of the heron and the wings of the hawk. The raven came to the end of his soliloquy, and fluttered from his seat, hopping about the lady's feet, and croaking out again, "Lenore! Lenore!"

Lenore now conversed at her ease with the stranger, and the forester every now and then threw in a suitable remark. They spoke of the district and its inhabitants.

"Wherever I have met Poles in foreign lands, I have got on very well with them," said Fink. "I am sorry that these disturbances prevent one visiting them in their own homes; for, certainly, one best learns to know men from seeing them there."

"It must be delightful to see so many different scenes and people,"

cried Lenore.

"It is only at first that the difference strikes you. When one has observed them a while, one comes to the conclusion that they are every where much alike: a little diversity in the color of the skin and other details; but love and hate, laughter and tears, these the traveler finds every where, and every where these are the same. About twenty weeks ago I was half a hemisphere off, in the log hut of an American, on a barren prairie. It was just the same as here. We sat at a stout rustic table like this, and my host was as like this old gentleman as one egg is to another, and the light of the winter sun fell in just the same way through the small window. But if men have so little to distinguish them, women are still more alike in essentials. They only differ in one trifling particular."

"And what is that?" asked the forester.

"They are rather more or less neat," said Fink, carelessly; "that is the whole difference."

Lenore rose, offended at his tone more than at his words.

"It is time that I should return," said she, coldly, tying on her straw hat.

"When you rose, all the brightness left the room," cried Fink.

"It is only a cloud pa.s.sing over the sun," said the forester, going to the window; "that causes the shadow."

"Nonsense," replied Fink; "it is the straw hat hiding the lady's hair that does it; the light comes from those golden locks."

They left the house, the forester locked the door, and each went off in different directions.

Lenore hurried home; the linnet sang, the thrush whistled, but she did not heed them. She blamed herself for having crossed the threshold of the forester's house, and yet she could not turn away her thoughts from it. The stranger made her feel uneasy and insecure. Was he thus daring because nothing was sacred to him, or was it only through his extreme self-possession and self-dependence? Ought she to be angry with him, or did her sense of awkwardness only arise from the folly of an inexperienced girl? These questions she kept constantly asking herself, but, alas! she found no answer.

When Anton wanted to send a message that evening to the shepherd, neither Karl nor any other messenger was to be found, so he went himself. He was not a little surprised to see in one of the farthest fields through which he had to go his friend Fink on horseback, and the German farmer and Karl busily occupied near him. Fink was galloping along short distances, the others placing black and white pegs in the ground, and taking them out again. And then Karl looked through a small telescope that he rested on his peg. "Five-and-twenty paces," cried Fink.

"Two inches fall," screamed back Karl.

"Five-and-twenty, two," said the farmer, making an entry in his pocket-book.

"So you have come, have you?" cried Fink, laughing, to his friend. "Wait a moment; we shall soon have done." Again a certain number of leaps, observations through the telescope, and entries in the pocket-book; then the men collected their pegs, and Fink rapidly cast up the figures in the farmer's book. Then giving it back with a smile, he said, "Come on with me, Anton, I have something to show you. Place yourself by the brook, with your face to the north. There the brook forms a straight line from west to east, the border of the wood a semicircle. Wood and brook together define the segment of a circle."

"That is evident," said Anton.

"In olden times the brook ran differently," continued Fink. "It swept along the curve of the wood, and its old bed is still visible. If you walk along the ancient water-course toward the west, you come to the point where the old channel diverges from the new. It is the point where a wretched bridge crosses the brook, and the water in its present bed has a fall of more than a foot, strong enough to turn the best mill going. The ruins of some buildings stand near it."

"I know the place well enough," said Anton.

"Below the village, the old channel bends down to the new. It encompa.s.ses a wide plain, more than five hundred acres, if I can trust the paces of this horse. The whole of this ground slopes down from the old channel to the new. There are a few acres of meadow, and some tolerable arable land. The most part is sand and rough pasture, the worst part of the estate, as I hear."

"I allow all that," said Anton, with some curiosity.

"Now mark me. If you lead back the brook to its old channel, and force it to run along the bow instead of forming the arc of that bow, the water that now runs to waste will irrigate the whole plain of five hundred acres, and change the barren sand into green meadows."

"You are a sharp fellow," cried Anton, excited at the discovery.

"These acres, well irrigated, would yield a ton of hay an acre; consequently, each acre would bring in a clear profit of five dollars, or, in other words, the five hundred acres would give a yearly income of two thousand five hundred, and to bring this about would require an outlay of fifteen thousand dollars at the very outside. This, Anton, was what I had to say to you."

Anton stood there amazed. There was no doubt that Fink's calculations were not made at random either as to outlay or return, and the advantageous prospect which such a measure opened out occupied him so much that he walked on for some time in silence. "You show me water and pastures in the desert," said he, at length. "This is cruel of you, for the baron is not in a condition to carry out this improvement. Fifteen thousand dollars!"

"Perhaps ten might do," said Fink, sarcastically. "I have drawn this castle in the air for you, to punish you for your stiff-neckedness the other evening. Now let us speak of something else."

At night the baron, with an important air, summoned his wife and Lenore to a conference in his room. He sat up in his arm-chair, and said, with a greater degree of satisfaction than he had for a long time evinced, "It was easy to discover that this visit of Fink's was not exactly accidental, nor occasioned by his friendship for Mr. Wohlfart, as the young men both made it appear: you two pretended to be wiser than I; but I was right after all, and the visit concerns us more nearly than our agent."

The baroness cast a terrified glance at her daughter, but Lenore's eyes were so fully fixed on her father that her mother was comforted.

"And what do you suppose has brought this gentleman here?" continued the baron.

Lenore shook her head, and said at last, "Father, Herr von Fink has long been most intimate with Wohlfart, and they have not seen each other for some years. How natural that Fink should take advantage of his slight acquaintance with us to spend a few weeks with his dearest friend! Why should we seek any other reason for his presence?"

"You speak as young people always do. Men are less influenced by ideal impressions, and more ruled by their own interest, than your juvenile wisdom apprehends."

"Interest!" said the baroness.