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When morning came, very early I ran and woke Offenloch and sent him to the count. Passing down the corridor I noticed that there was no torch in the first ring, and I came down and found it near the narrow path to the Schwartzwald; there it is!" And the good woman took from under her apron the end of a torch, which she threw upon the table. I was confounded.
Then came Tobias Offenloch, so red that you would have thought he had bathed his face in the red wine, leaning back with his wig upon the chair-back and his wooden leg extended under the table. Farther on loomed the melancholy long face of Sébalt, who was peeping with a sickly smile into the bottom of his wine-glass.
He turned now to the right and now to the left, and I followed him breathless. At last he stopped on a spacious landing, and said to me "Now, Fritz, I will leave you for a minute with the people of the castle to inform the young Countess Odile of your arrival." "Do just what you think right." "Then you will find the head butler, Tobias Offenloch, an old soldier of the regiment of Nideck.
As it seemed expected of me, I expressed my surprise, on which Tobias Offenloch came to sit at my right hand, and said "Doctor, take my advice; order him a bottle a day of Marcobrunner." "And," chimed in Marie Lagoutte, "a wing of a chicken at every meal. The poor man is frightfully thin."
"What do you mean by pretending to forget what breakfast? Are not you and I to breakfast this very morning with Doctor Fritz?" "Aha! so we are! I had forgotten all about it." And Offenloch burst into a great laugh which divided his jolly face from ear to ear. "Ha, ha! this is rather beyond a joke. And I was afraid of being too late! Come, let us be moving. Kasper is upstairs waiting.
We were going down the stairs which led into the hall, when, at a turn in the corridor, we found ourselves face to face with Tobias Offenloch, the worthy major-domo, in a great state of palpitation. "Halloo!" he cried, closing our way with his stick right across the passage; "where are you off to in such a hurry? What about our breakfast?" "Breakfast! which breakfast do you mean?" asked Sperver.
Monseigneur had his second attack yesterday; it was an awful attack, was it not, Monsieur Offenloch?" "Furious indeed," answered the head butler gravely. "It is not surprising," she continued, "when a man takes no nourishment. Fancy, monsieur, that for two days he has never tasted broth!" "Nor a glass of wine," added the major-domo, crossing his hands over his portly, well-lined person.
At that moment a noise outside reached our ears. The door opened, and the fat honest countenance of Tobias Offenloch with his lantern in one hand and his stick in the other, his three-cornered hat on his head, appeared, smiling and jovial, in the opening. "Salut! l'honorable compagnie!" he cried as he entered; "what are you doing here?" "It was that rascal Lieverlé who made all that row.
He campaigned in France under the count; and you will see his wife, a Frenchwoman, Marie Lagoutte, who pretends that she comes of a high family." "And why should she not?" "Of course she might; but, between ourselves, she was nothing but a cantinière in the Grande Armée. She brought in Tobias Offenloch upon her cart, with one of his legs gone, and he has married her out of gratitude.
"Well," the good woman resumed, "last night, between nine and ten, just as I was going to bed, Offenloch came in and said to me, 'Marie, you will have to sit up with the count to-night. At first I felt surprised.
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