The Dodd Family Abroad Volume I Part 7

"With all my heart; but what's _my_ cause?--what do you mean by _my_ cause?"

"It's no time for explanation," said he, hurrying me along; "the judges are in chamber,--you'll soon hear all about it."

He said truly; it was neither the fitting time nor place for much converse, for we had to fight our way through a crowd that was every moment increasing; and it took at least twenty minutes of struggle and combat to get out, my coat being slit up to the collar, and my friend's gown being reduced to something like bell-ropes.

He did n't seem to think much about his damaged costume, but still dragged me along, across a courtyard, up some very filthy stairs, down a dark corridor, then up another flight, and, pa.s.sing into a large ante-room, where a messenger was seated in a kind of gla.s.s cage, he pushed aside a heavy curtain of green baize, and we found ourselves in a court, which, if not crowded like that below, was still sufficiently filled, and by persons of respectable exterior. There was a dead silence as we entered. The three judges were examining their notes, and handing papers back and forward to each other in dumb show. The procureur was picking his teeth with a paper-knife, and the clerk of the court munching a sandwich, which he held in his hat. Vanhoegen, however, brushed forward to a prominent place, and beckoned me to a seat beside him. I had but time to obey, when the clerk, seeing us in our places, bolted down an enormous mouthful, and, with an effort that nearly choked him, cried ont, "L'affaire de Dodd fils est en audience." My heart drooped as I heard the words. The "affaire de Dodd fils" could mean nothing but that confounded duel of which I have already told you. All the misfortune and all the criminality seemed to fall upon us. For at least four times a week I was summoned somewhere or other, now before a civil, now a military auditor; and though I swore repeatedly that I knew nothing about the matter till it was all over, they appeared to think that if I was well tortured, I might make great revelations. They were not quite wrong in their calculations. I would have turned "approver"

against my father rather than gone on in this fashion. But the difficulty was, I had really nothing to tell. The little I knew had been obtained from others. Lord George had told me so much as I was acquainted with; and, from my old habits of the bench at home, I was well aware that such could not be admitted as evidence.

Still it was their good pleasure to pursue me with warrants and summonses, and there was nothing for it but to appear when and wherever they wanted me.

"Is this confounded affair the cause of my pa.s.sport being detained?"

whispered I to Van.

"Precisely," said he; "and if not very dexterously handled, the expense may be enormous."

I almost lost all self-possession at these words. I had been a mark for legal pillage and robbery from the first moment of my arrival, and it seemed as if they would not suffer me to leave the country while I had a Napoleon remaining. Stung nearly to madness, I resolved to make one desperate effort at rescue, and, like some of those woebegone creatures in our own country who insist on personal appeals to a Chief Justice, I called, "Monsieur le Prsident--" There, however, my French left me, and, after a terrible struggle to get on, I had to continue my address in the vernacular.

"Who is this man?" asked he, sternly.

"Dodd pre, Monsieur le Prsident," interposed my lawyer, who seemed most eager to save me from the consequences of my rashness.

"Ah! he is Dodd pre," said the president, solemnly; and now he and his two colleagues adjusted their spectacles, and gazed at me long and attentively; in fact, with such earnestness did they stare that I began to feel my character of Dodd pre was rather an imposing kind of performance. "Enfin," said the president, with a faint sigh, as though the reasoning process had been rather a fatiguing one,--"enfin! Dodd pre is the father of Dodd fils, the respondent."

Vanhoegen bowed submissive a.s.sent, and muttered, as I thought, some little flattery about the judicial acuteness and perspicuity.

"Let him be sworn," said the president; and accordingly I held up my hand, while the clerk recited something with a humdrum rapidity that I guessed must mean an oath.

"You are called Dodd pre?" said the Attorney-General, addressing me.

"I find I am so called here, but I never was so before," said I, tartly.

"He means that the appellation is not usual in his own country," said one of the judges,--a small, red-eyed man, with pock-marks.

"Put it down," observed the president, gravely. "The witness informs us that he is only called Dodd."

"Kenny James Dodd, Monsieur," cried I, interrupting.

"Dodd--dit Kenny James," dictated the small judge; and the amanuensis took it down.

"And you swear you are the father of Dodd fils?" asked the president.

I suppose that the adage of a wise child knowing his own father cuts both ways; but I answered boldly, that I 'd swear to the best of my belief,--a reservation, however, that excited a discussion of three-quarters of an hour, the point being at last ruled in my favor.

I am bound to say that there was a great deal of legal learning displayed in the controversy,--a vast variety of authorities cited, from King David downwards; and although at one time matters seemed going against me, the red-eyed man turned the balance in my favor, and it was agreed that I was the father of my own son. If I knew but all, it might have been better for me there had been a hitch in the case. But I am antic.i.p.ating.

There now arose another dispute, on a point of law, I believe, and which was, what degree of responsibility--there were fourteen degrees, it seems, in the Pandects--I stood in as regarded the present suit. From the turn the debate took, I began to suspect we might all of us have to plead to our responsibilities in the other world ere it could be finished; but the red-eyed man, who seemed the shrewdest of them all, cut the matter short by proposing that I should be invited--that's the phrase--to say so much as I pleased in the question before the Court.

"Yes, yes," a.s.sented the president. "Let him relate the affair." And the whole bar and the audience seemed to reecho the words.

You know me well, Tom, and you can vouch for it that I never had any objection to telling a story. It was, in truth, a kind of weakness with me, and some used to say that I was getting into the habit of telling the same ones too often. Be that as it may, I never was accused of relating a garbled, broken, and disjointed tale, and for the honor of my anecdotic powers, I resolved not to do so.

"My Lord," said I, "I 'm like the knife-grinder,--I have no story!"

Bad luck to my ill.u.s.tration, it took half an hour to show that my ident.i.ty was not somehow mixed up with a wheel and a grinding-stone!

"Let him relate the affair," said the president, once more; and this time his voice and manner both proclaimed that his patience was not to be trifled with.

"Relate what?" asked I, tartly.

"All that you know,--anything you have heard," whispered Van, who was trembling for my rashness.

"My Lord," said I, "of myself I know nothing; I was in bed all the time."

"He was in bed all the time," said the president to the others.

"In bed," said red eyes; "let us see;" and he turned over a file of doc.u.ments before him for several minutes. "Dodd pre swears that he was in bed from the 7th of February, which is the first entry here, to the 19th of May, inclusive."

"I swear no such thing, my Lord," cried I.

"What does he swear, then?" asked the small judge.

"Let us hear his own version; tell us unreservedly all that you know," said the president, who really spoke as if he compa.s.sionated my embarra.s.sment.

"My Lord," said I, "there is nothing would give me more pleasure than to display the candor you require; but when I a.s.sure you that I actually know nothing--"

"Know nothing, sir!" interposed the president. "Do you mean to tell this Court that you are, and were, in total ignorance of every part of your son's conduct,--that you never heard of his difficulties, nor of his efforts to meet them?"

"If hearsay be sufficient, then," said I, "you shall have it;" and so, taking a long breath, for I saw a weary road before me, I began thus, the amanuensis occasionally begging of me a slight halt to keep up:--

"It was about five or six weeks ago, my Lord, we--that is, Mrs. D., the girls, James, and myself--made an excursion to the field of Waterloo, filled by the very natural desire to see a spot so intimately a.s.sociated with our country's glory. I will not weary you with any detail of disappointment, nor deplore the total absence of everything that could revive recollections of that great day. In fact, except the big lion with his tail between his legs, there is nothing symbolic of the nations engaged."

I waited a moment here, Tom, to see how they took this; but they never winced, and so I perceived my sh.e.l.l exploded harmlessly.

"We prowled about, my Lord, for two or three hours, and at last reached Hougoumont, in time to take shelter against a tremendous storm which just then broke over us; and there it was that James accidentally came in contact with the young gentleman whom I may not wrongfully call the cause of all our misfortunes. It would appear that they began discussing the battle, with all the natural prejudices of the two conflicting sides. I will not affirm that James was very well read on the subject; indeed, my impression is that his stock of information was princ.i.p.ally derived from a representation he had witnessed by an equestrian troop at home, and where Bony, after galloping twice round the circus, throws himself on his knees and begs for mercy,--a fact so strongly impressed upon his memory that he insisted the Frenchman should receive it as historical. The dispute, it would seem, was not conducted within the legitimate limits of debate; they waxed angry, and the Frenchman, after a fierce provocation, set off into the thickest of the storm rather than endure the further discussion."

"This seems to me, sir," interposed the president, "to be perfectly irrelevant to the matter before us. The Court accords the very widest lat.i.tude to explanations, but if they really have no bearing on the case in hand,--if, as it appears to my learned brethren and myself, this polemic on a battle has no actual connection with your son's difficulties--"

"It's the very source and origin of them, my Lord," broke I in. "He has no embarra.s.sment which does not date from that incident and that hour."

"In that case you may proceed, sir," said he, blandly; and I went on.

"I do not mean to say, my Lord, that all that followed was inevitable; nor that, with cooler heads and calmer tempers, the whole affair could not have been arranged; but James is hot, mighty hot,--the Celt is strong in him. He really likes a 'shindy,' not like some chaps for the notoriety of it,--not because it gets into the newspapers, and makes a noise,--but he likes it for itself, and for its own intrinsic merits, as one might say. And I may remark here, my Lord, that the Irishman is, perhaps, the only man in Europe that understands fighting in this sense; and this trait, if rightly considered, will give a strong clew to our national character, and will explain the general failure of all our attempts at revolution. We take so much diversion in a row that we quite forget it's only the means to an end. We have, so to say, so much fun on the road that we lose sight of the place we were going to.

"I don't know, Tom, how much further I might have gone on in my a.n.a.lytical researches into our national character; but the interpreter cut me short, by a.s.suring the Court that he was totally unable to follow me. In the narrative parts of my discourse he was good enough; but it seemed that my reflections, and my general remarks on men and manners, were a cut above him. I was therefore warned to 'try back' to the line of my story, which I did accordingly.

"As for the affair itself, my Lord," resumed I, "I understand from eyewitnesses that it was most respectably and discreetly conducted.

James was put up with his face to the west, so that Roger had the sun on him. The tools were beauties. It was a fine May morning, mellow, and not too bright. There was nothing wanting to make the scene impressive, and, I may add, instructive. Roger's friend gave the word--one, two, three--bang went both pistols together, and poor James received the other's fire just here,--between the bone and the artery, so Seutin described it,--a critical spot, I'm sure."