George Bertram had promised himself that the moment in which he first saw Jerusalem should be one of intense mental interest; and when, riding away from the orange gardens at Jaffa, he had endeavoured to urge his Arab steed into that enduring gallop which was to carry him up to the city of the sepulchre, his heart was ready to melt into ecstatic pathos as soon as that gallop should have been achieved. But the time for ecstatic pathos had altogether passed away before he rode in at that portal. He was then swearing vehemently at his floundering jade, and giving up to all the fiends of Tartarus the accursed saddle which had been specially contrived with the view of lacerating the nether Christian man.
"Where on earth is this d—— hotel?" said he, when he and his dragoman and portmanteau had been floundering for about five minutes down a steep, narrow, ill-paved lane, with a half-formed gully in the middle, very slippery with orange-peel and old vegetables, and crowded with the turbans of all the Eastern races. "Do you call this a street?" After all his sentiment, all his emotions, all his pious resolves, it was thus that our hero entered Jerusalem! But what piety can withstand the wear and tear of twelve hours in a Turkish saddle?
"Is this a street?" said he. It was the main street in Jerusalem. The first, or among the first in grandeur of those sacred ways which he had intended hardly to venture to pass with shoes on his feet. His horse turning a corner as he followed the dragoman again slipped and almost fell. Whereupon Bertram again cursed. But then he was not only tired and sore, but very hungry also. Our finer emotions should always be encouraged with a stomach moderately full.
At last they stopped at a door in a wall, which the dragoman pronounced to be the entrance of Z——'s hotel. In fact they had not yet been full ten minutes within the town; but the streets certainly were not well paved. In five minutes more, George was in his room, strewing sofas and chairs with the contents of his portmanteau, and inquiring with much energy what was the hour fixed for the table d'hôte. He found, with much inward satisfaction, that he had just twenty minutes to prepare himself. At Jerusalem, as elsewhere, these after all are the traveller's first main questions. When is the table d'hôte? Where is the cathedral? At what hour does the train start to-morrow morning? It will be some years yet, but not very many, before the latter question is asked at Jerusalem.
Bertram had arrived about a fortnight before Easter, and the town was already full of pilgrims, congregated for that ceremony, and of English and Americans who had come to look at the pilgrims.
The inn was nearly full, and George, when he entered the public room, heard such a Babel of English voices, and such a clatter of English spoons that he might have fancied himself at the top of the Righi or in a Rhine steamboat. But the subjects under discussion all savoured of the Holy Land.
"Mrs. Rose, we are going to have a picnic on Monday in the Valley of Jehoshaphat; will you and your young ladies join us? We shall send the hampers to the tomb of Zachariah."
"Thank you, Miss Todd; we should have been so happy; but we have only three days to do Bethlehem, the Dead Sea, and Jericho. We must be off to-morrow."
"Mamma, I lost my parasol somewhere coming down the Mount of Offence. Those nasty Arab children must have stolen it."
"They say the people in Siloam are the greatest thieves in Syria; and nobody dares to meddle with them."
"But I saw it in your hand, my dear, at the Well of Enrogel."
"What, no potatoes! there were potatoes yesterday. Waiter, waiter; who ever heard of setting people down to dinner without potatoes?"
"Well, I didn't know what to say to it. If that is the tomb of Nicodemus, that seems to settle the question. May I trouble you for the salt?"
"Mr. Pott, I won't have anything more to say to you; you have no faith. I believe it all."
"What, all? from Calvary upstairs in the gallery down to the dark corner where the cock crew?"
"Yes, all, Mr. Pott. Why should not a cock crow there as well as anywhere else? It is so beautiful to believe."
George Bertram found himself seated next to a lady-like well-dressed Englishwoman of the middle age, whom he heard called Miss Baker; and next to her again sat—an angel! whom Miss Baker called Caroline, and whom an odious man sitting on the other side of her called Miss Waddington.
All my readers will probably at different times have made part of a table-d'hôte assemblage; and most of them, especially those who have travelled with small parties, will know how essential it is to one's comfort to get near to pleasant neighbours. The young man's idea of a pleasant neighbour is of course a pretty girl. What the young ladies' idea may be I don't pretend to say. But it certainly does seem to be happily arranged by Providence that the musty fusty people, and the nicy spicy people, and the witty pretty people do severally assemble and get together as they ought to do.
Bertram's next-door neighbour was certainly of the nicy spicy order; but this did not satisfy him. He would have been very well pleased to talk to Miss Baker had it not been for the close contiguity of Miss Waddington; and even her once-removed vicinity would not have made him unhappy had not that odious man on her left had so much to say about the village of Emmaus and the Valley of Ajalon.
Now, be it known to all men that Caroline Waddington is our donna primissima—the personage of most importance in these pages. It is for her that you are to weep, with her that you are to sympathize, and at her that you are to wonder. I would that I could find it compatible with my duty to introduce her to this circle without any minute details of her bodily and mental charms; but I have already been idle in the case of Adela Gauntlet, and I feel that a donna primissima has claims to description which I cannot get over. Only not exactly now; in a few chapters hence we shall have Miss Waddington actively engaged upon the scene, and then she shall be described.
It must suffice now to say that she was an orphan; that since her father's death she had lived with her aunt, Miss Baker, chiefly at Littlebath; that Miss Baker had, at her niece's instance, been to Egypt, up the Nile, across the short desert—(short!) having travelled from Cairo to Jerusalem—and that now, thoroughly sick of the oriental world, she was anxious only to get back to Littlebath; while Caroline, more enthusiastic, and much younger, urged her to go on to Damascus and Lebanon, to Beyrout and Smyrna, and thence home, merely visiting Constantinople and Athens on the way.
Had Bertram heard the terms in which Miss Waddington spoke of the youth who was so great about Ajalon when she and her aunt were in their own room, and also the words in which that aunt spoke of him, perhaps he might have been less provoked.
"Aunt, that Mr. M'Gabbery is an ass. I am sure he has ears if one could only see them. I am so tired of him. Don't you think we could get on to Damascus to-morrow?"
"If we did I have no doubt he'd come too." Mr. M'Gabbery had been one of the party who crossed the desert with them from Cairo.
"Impossible, aunt. The Hunters are ready to start to-morrow, or, if not, the day after, and I know they would not have him."
"But, my dear, I really am not equal to Damascus. A few more days on a camel—"
"But, aunt, you'll have a horse."
"That's worse, I'm sure. And, moreover, I've found an old friend, and one that you will like very much."
"What, that exceedingly ugly young man that sat next to you?"
"Yes. That exceedingly ugly young man I remember as the prettiest baby in the world—not that I think he is ugly. He is, however, no other than the nephew of Mr. Bertram."
"What, papa's Mr. Bertram?"
"Yes; your father's Mr. Bertram. Therefore, if old Mr. Bertram should die, and this young man should be his heir, he would have the charge of all your money. You'd better be gracious to him."