Act IV

THE CLOCK-LOCK

The pleasant scene was Neuchatel; the pleasant month was April; the
pleasant place was a notary's office; the pleasant person in it was the
notary: a rosy, hearty, handsome old man, chief notary of Neuchatel,
known far and wide in the canton as Maitre Voigt. Professionally and
personally, the notary was a popular citizen. His innumerable kindnesses
and his innumerable oddities had for years made him one of the recognised
public characters of the pleasant Swiss town. His long brown frock-coat
and his black skull-cap, were among the institutions of the place: and he
carried a snuff-box which, in point of size, was popularly believed to be
without a parallel in Europe.

There was another person in the notary's office, not so pleasant as the
notary. This was Obenreizer.

An oddly pastoral kind of office it was, and one that would never have
answered in England. It stood in a neat back yard, fenced off from a
pretty flower-garden. Goats browsed in the doorway, and a cow was within
half-a-dozen feet of keeping company with the clerk. Maitre Voigt's room
was a bright and varnished little room, with panelled walls, like a toy-
chamber. According to the seasons of the year, roses, sunflowers,
hollyhocks, peeped in at the windows. Maitre Voigt's bees hummed through
the office all the summer, in at this window and out at that, taking it
frequently in their day's work, as if honey were to be made from Maitre
Voigt's sweet disposition. A large musical box on the chimney-piece
often trilled away at the Overture to Fra Diavolo, or a Selection from
William Tell, with a chirruping liveliness that had to be stopped by
force on the entrance of a client, and irrepressibly broke out again the
moment his back was turned.

"Courage, courage, my good fellow!" said Maitre Voigt, patting Obenreizer
on the knee, in a fatherly and comforting way. "You will begin a new
life to-morrow morning in my office here."

Obenreizer--dressed in mourning, and subdued in manner--lifted his hand,
with a white handkerchief in it, to the region of his heart. "The
gratitude is here," he said. "But the words to express it are not here."

"Ta-ta-ta! Don't talk to me about gratitude!" said Maitre Voigt. "I
hate to see a man oppressed. I see you oppressed, and I hold out my hand
to you by instinct. Besides, I am not too old yet, to remember my young
days. Your father sent me my first client. (It was on a question of
half an acre of vineyard that seldom bore any grapes.) Do I owe nothing
to your father's son? I owe him a debt of friendly obligation, and I pay
it to you. That's rather neatly expressed, I think," added Maitre Voigt,
in high good humour with