The Luck of Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray (good english books to read TXT) 📕

the wagon; it began to bleed afresh: I became almost lightheaded. I only recollect having a draught of water here and there; once stopping at a fortified town, where an officer counted us:⁠—all the rest of the journey was passed in a drowsy stupor, from which, when I awoke, I found myself lying in a hospital bed, with a nun in a white hood watching over me.

“They are in sad spiritual darkness,” said a voice from the bed next to me, when the nun had finished her kind offices and retired: “they are in the night of error, and yet there is the light of faith in those poor creatures.”

It was my comrade of the crimp wagon, his huge broad face looming out from under a white nightcap, and ensconced in the bed beside.

“What! you there, Herr Pastor?” said I.

“Only a candidate, sir,” answered the white nightcap. “But, praised be Heaven! you have come to. You have had a wild time of it. You have been talking in the English language (with which I am acquainted) of Ireland, and a young lady, and Mick, and of another young lady, and of a house on fire, and of the British Grenadiers, concerning whom you sung us parts of a ballad, and of a number of other matters appertaining, no doubt, to your personal history.”

“It has been a very strange one,” said I; “and, perhaps, there is no man in the world, of my birth, whose misfortunes can at all be compared to mine.”

I do not object to own that I am disposed to brag of my birth and other acquirements; for I have always found that if a man does not give himself a good word, his friends will not do it for him.

“Well,” said my fellow-patient, “I have no doubt yours is a strange tale, and shall be glad to hear it anon; but at present you must not be permitted to speak much, for your fever has been long, and your exhaustion great.”

“Where are we?” I asked; and the candidate informed me that we were in the bishopric and town of Fulda, at present occupied by Prince Henry’s troops. There had been a skirmish with an out-party of French near the town, in which a shot entering the wagon, the poor candidate had been wounded.

As the reader knows already my history, I will not take the trouble to repeat it here, or to give the additions with which I favoured my comrade in misfortune. But I confess that I told him ours was the greatest family and finest palace in Ireland, that we were enormously wealthy, related to all the peerage descended from the ancient kings, etc.; and, to my surprise, in the course of our conversation, I found that my interlocutor knew a great deal more about Ireland than I did. When, for instance, I spoke of my descent⁠—

“From which race of kings?” said he.

“Oh!” said I (for my memory for dates was never very accurate), “from the old ancient kings of all.”

“What! can you trace your origin to the sons Japhet?” said he.

“ ’Faith, I can,” answered I, “and farther too⁠—Nebuchadnezzar, if you like.”

“I see,” said the candidate, smiling, “that you look upon those legends with incredulity. These Partholans and Nemedians, of whom your writers fondly make mention, cannot be authentically vouched for in history. Nor do I believe that we have any more foundation for the tales concerning them, than for the legends relative to Joseph of Arimathea and King Bruce which prevailed two centuries back in the sister island.”

And then he began a discourse about the Phoenicians, the Scyths or Goths, the Tuath de Danans, Tacitus, and King MacNeil; which was, to say the truth, the very first news I had heard of those personages. As for English, he spoke it as well as I, and had seven more languages, he said, equally at his command; for, on my quoting the only Latin line that I knew, that out of the poet Homer, which says⁠—

“As in praesenti perfectum fumat in avi,”

he began to speak to me in the Roman tongue; on which I was fain to tell him that we pronounced it in a different way in Ireland, and so got off the conversation.

My honest friend’s history was a curious one, and it may be told here in order to show of what motley materials our levies were composed:⁠—

“I am,” said he, “a Saxon by birth, my father being pastor of the village of Pfannkuchen, where I imbibed the first rudiments of knowledge. At sixteen (I am now twenty-three), having mastered the Greek and Latin tongues, with the French, English, Arabic, and Hebrew; and having come into possession of a legacy of a hundred rixdalers, a sum amply sufficient to defray my University courses, I went to the famous academy of Gottingen, where I devoted four years to the exact sciences and theology. Also, I learned what worldly accomplishments I could command; taking a dancing-tutor at the expense of a groschen a lesson, a course of fencing from a French practitioner, and attending lectures on the great horse and the equestrian science at the hippodrome of a celebrated cavalry professor. My opinion is, that a man should know everything as far as in his power lies: that he should complete his cycle of experience; and, one science being as necessary as another, it behoves him.

“I am not of a saving turn, hence my little fortune of a hundred rixdalers, which has served to keep many a prudent man for a score of years, barely sufficed for five years’ studies; after which my studies were interrupted, my pupils fell off, and I was obliged to devote much time to shoe-binding in order to save money, and, at a future period, resume my academic course. During this period I contracted an attachment” (here the candidate sighed a little) “with a person, who, though not beautiful, and forty years of age, is yet likely to sympathise