"If Youth but Knew!"
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Title: "If Youth but Knew!"
Creator: Agnes Castle
Egerton Castle
Illustrator: Lancelot Speed
Release date: November 25, 2013 [eBook #44286]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44286
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK "IF YOUTH BUT KNEW!" ***
Produced by Al Haines.
[Illustration: Cover art]
[Illustration: _Her child eyes were still upon him and seemed to ask for
something yet. And, at this, he bent and kissed her gently, as he would
have kissed a child, and did not guess that, at the touch of his lips,
Sidonia's woman's soul was born_. (See page 196.)]
"IF YOUTH BUT KNEW!"
BY
AGNES & EGERTON CASTLE
AUTHORS OF
"ROSE OF THE WORLD," "FRENCH NAN,"
ETC., ETC.
"_Si jeunesse savait..._
_Si vieillesse pouvait!_"
(_Old French Song_)
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY LANCELOT SPEED
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1906
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1906,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1906.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
*CONTENTS*
CHAPTER
I. The Vagabond
II. The Forest House
III. Green Adventure
IV. Parting of the Ways
V. The Invitation of the Road
VI. The Burg
VII. Guests of Chance
VIII. Roses of Trianon
IX. Home-Coming
X. The Burgrave's Welcome
XI. Tangled Tales
XII. The Burgrave's Farewell
XIII. The *Oubliette*
XIV. Love among the Ruins
XV. *Furens quid Femina Possit*
XVI. 'Twixt Cup and Lip
XVII. The Skirt of War
XVIII. The Raid
XIX. The Melody in the Violets
XX. The True Reading of a Letter
XXI. At the Mock Versailles
XXII. The *Cabinet Noir*
XXIII. The King's Mail
XXIV. Portents
XXV. The Perverseness of Words
XXVI. The Ways of Little Courts
XXVII. The Song of the Woods
XXVIII. A Treacherous Haven
XXIX. The Homing Bird
XXX. Dawn Music
*LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS*
Her child eyes were still upon him and seemed to ask for something yet.
And, at this, he bent and kissed her gently, as he would have kissed a
child . . . _Frontispiece_
"The something that lived on, the miserable carcass, the old man--call
it myself, if you will"
But, as the oncomer drew nearer, the glimmer of hope died in the
discontented gentleman's heart
As she bent, offering him the green goblet of wine, her heavy plait fell
against his shoulder
Wellenshausen
"Look, look, do you see? ... There are two men coming up the road with a
pack-horse!"
"The high-born, my mistress, had not expected you before to-morrow,"
said the butler with a deep bow
Meanwhile, up in his chamber, the Burgrave sat in sodden brooding
Steven almost called aloud, as he heard their heavy plunge into the
ambushed waters
Sidonia stood, shaking and pruning herself like a bird, her hair
glinting in the light
"Spread your dark wings, obscene birds! ... the scent of Death is in the
air. In a little while you may gorge! ... caw--caw!"
"Hurl down the Guard, and the field is ours! ... Hurl down the Guard,
aha!"
"She always loved violets. These have no scent, ... but hers--oh, they
were sweet!"
They spread him beside the Jurist in the moonlight--with a certain
effect of symmetry
... the great bag on his back, undiminished, save for two warrants and
one private missive
What she was saying was sufficiently remarkable: "Your Majesty mistakes"
"Positively, a bird from the tyrant's aviary," he cried. "A foreign,
French bird!"
His child-wife! ... The watchman was chanting the tale of the first
morning hour
The End
TO
"MARIE-LOUISE"
*FOREWORD*
_"Is it not," remarks Fiddler Hans the wanderer, somewhere in these
pages, "instructive to see how the ruler of Westphalia passes his time
while the best manhood of his country is warring for the Empire--burnt
in Spain, frozen in Russia?"_
_Few people have cared, it would seem, to study that little chapter of
history, the rule of Jerome in Westphalia; yet it is curious enough--as
a record of human folly, if for no other reason._
_That incredible Westphalia of Napoleon's making! Harlequin's coat
contrived out of Hesse, Brunswick, and a score of smaller
principalities, hemmed with a shred or two of Prussian province;
incongruous rag torn from the map of the old Germanic Empire and flung
by the conqueror, between two victories, to his "little brother
Jerome"!_
_A strangely pusillanimous character was the amiable Jerome. His annals
include, in the days of his youth, flight from his ship, within sight of
an English blockading squadron (not through cowardice, be it said: there
was pluck enough in the little man, but because of his thirst for the
pleasures of land), and, in more mature years, desertion from the Grand
Army at a crucial moment, upon the mere impulse of wounded vanity. How
so grotesque a potentate was allowed, for seven years, to lord over, to
plunder and demoralize, some three millions of sturdy Germans, to
discredit the name of Bonaparte and weaken the fabric of the new Empire,
remains one of the enigmas of history._
_But, then, the new Emperor must ever be a maker of kings; carve new
kingdoms out of old. For his "Beau Sabreur," Murat, there is Naples and
the Two Sicilies; for his infant son, nothing less than Rome; for his
younger brothers, Holland, Spain, ... Westphalia! What is there to
restrain great Caesar? Hark to his mighty insolence:_
_"The Emperor of the French"_ (_so M. Walckenaer, in his official work,_
La Geographic Moderne, _brings to a conclusion the chapter on_ la France
allemande), "_possesses likewise in Germany the principality of Erfurth
and the county of Katzenellenbogen:_ mais Sa Majeste n'a pas encore
decide sur leur sort."
_His Majesty has not yet decided upon their fate!_
_About the fate of Westphalia there had been no indecision. From one day
to another, "little brother Jerome" acknowledged failure in every other
career, naval, civil, or military, found himself seated upon a German
throne. And thus we have him, inconceivable fop, strutting and ogling,
upon the scene.--A king whose life energies, when the cracking of his
brother's empire may be heard on every side, are divided between the
devising of new costumes, the planning of revels, and the discovery of
fresh favourites. A scamp, fascinating enough, but incapable of a
single strong or noble thought. A cynic and a libertine; withal a gull,
in his way. A man who could repudiate without a pang of regret the fair
young Virginian wife of his youth, to marry without love a "suitable
German princess." A man who flaunted his debauchery and his barefaced
improbity, yet could be scared to distraction by the imaginary threat of
a little haunting tune; the tune which, with its twang of mockery and
warning, was as ill an omen to his superstitious fancy as the shadow of
"the little red man," or the date of Christmas, to his great Imperial
brother._
_And under him, that hasty patchwork of old German lands: his
incongruous kingdom. His people, grave religious dwellers of the
mountain and of the wood, unconvinced subjects of the godless Welsch,
dumbly chafing under his insensate taxation. His new-fangled court,
aping the vanished Versailles of Louis XV., yet combining with the
reckless frivolity of the Old Order all the ill-breeding of
revolutionary_ parvenus. _Over all, a government so incompetent, so
corrupt, as to stupefy or demoralize all that had dealings with
it--friend or foe, high or low, French official or German landowner; the
magistrates, the very students; the old rulers of the soil themselves,
nervously awaiting the inevitable_ debacle, _stretching, the while, both
hands towards the plunder._
_In these topsy-turvy days no man rightly knows whether he belong to
ancient Teutonic duchy or to French_ departement; _whether the accepted
rule be_ code Napoleon _or hoary feudal law. And thus, up in his
ancestral_ Burg, _an old lord of the land (such an one as the Burgrave
of Wellenshausen) may well assume that he still holds the right of "high
and low justice" on his own territory; whereas, down at Cassel, the mock
Versailles, this same out-of-date character would naturally fall in with
the new views of marriage and divorce, or "annulment by decree," brought
so conclusively into fashion by the Bonapartes, royal or Imperial._
_Above all this confusion, the cloud of war, gathering heavier and
heavier. And from the mines of the Harz, from the deeps of the
Thuringian forests, from the lanes of the old town, up into the very
anterooms of the palace, conspiracy busy at work: conspiracy in the
barracks, conspiracy in the universities, exploding on all sides, futile
squibs as yet, but ominous. The King closes his eyes, seals his ears to
all but sights and sounds of pleasure. So dancing, the harlequin kingdom
goes to its death._
_And it is through the mazes of this carnival, unique in the lenten
gravity of nations, that wander the footsteps of the singer of youth,
and of the lovers of this story._
O hear me sing:--If youth but knew
The glory of his April day,
Would he not cast the year away
For one more dawn of dream and dew?
Would he the fevered moons pursue,
Not rather with the spring delay,
Crowned with its leaf? If youth but knew
The glory of his April day!
For what shall unto age accrue,
If youth from joyance turn and stray?
Autumn is but the Spring grown grey,
Its harvest roses mixed with rue....
If youth but knew--if youth but knew!
(_The Singer of Youth_)
ELINOR SWEETMAN
[Illustration: "_The something that lived on, the miserable carcass, the
old man--call it myself, if you will--it took the violets and began to
walk away.... And it has walked ever since!_"]
*IF YOUTH BUT KNEW*
*CHAPTER I*
*THE VAGABOND*
"_Wealth I seek not, hope nor love,_
_Nor a friend to know me;_
_All I seek, the heaven above_
_And the road below me._"
R. L. STEVENSON.
The traveller sat upon the milestone just where the road, skirting the
brow of the hill, branched off into the forest. At his feet lay the
detached wheel; further away, in pathetic attitude, the remainder of the
chaise itself. A stout bay, seemingly unconscious of as handsome a pair
of broken knees as ever horse displayed, was tethered to a stump of
tree, browsing such tender grass or leafage as grew within his reach.
The situation spoke for itself; and the young traveller's face spoke for
the situation as eloquently as Nature (who had bestowed upon him a
markedly disdainful and somewhat impassive set of features) would
permit.
Behind him rose the cool gloom of the forest. Below lay the plain,
gold-powdered by the level rays of a sinking sun. Between the edge of
the road and the forest margin ran a stream. A robin sang to the
glowing west from the topmost branch of a fir tree. But he on the
milestone was blind to the gold of the valley, deaf to the gold of the
song. "Now, here's a pretty kettle of fish!" was the burden of his
thoughts.
To have been stuck a whole hour upon a stone, while a postilion ranged
the country on horseback in one direction, and a valet a-foot in the
other, and no help as yet forthcoming; not to have had himself within
hail, all those weary minutes, one single human being--between intervals
of drowsiness he cursed the peaceful valley land, with its fair fields
and orchards, as the most God-forsaken of countries!
Presently his moody eye quickened. On the road below a moving object
was approaching. Only a pedestrian, alas! Nevertheless, he might prove
of use for succour or advice.
But, as the oncomer drew nearer and began to foot the ascent, the
glimmer of hope died in the discontented gentleman's heart. Here was no
sturdy native, likely guide to smithy or village inn. 'Twas a mere
ambulant musician, as strange, doubtless, to the country as himself: the
sun-rays were even now glinting back, roseate, from the varnish of a
fiddle.--The traveller relapsed into moodiness.
[Illustration: _But, as the oncomer drew nearer, the glimmer of hope
died in the discontented gentleman's heart._]
At the steep curve of the hillside, man and fiddle vanished from view.
Nevertheless, that he was still climbing, the advance (in interrupted
measure) of a singular little tune, half sourdine, half pizzicato, soon
proclaimed. It seemed at first so woven in with the babble of the
brook, the deep choiring of the forest and the song of the robin, that
the youth on the milestone hardly realized its separate existence. But,
as it hovered ever closer, he was forced to listen and even to follow.
It seemed the very song of the rover; of the rover on foot, humble and
yet proud; without a penny, without a bond; glad of the free water to
drink and the hunk of bread by the roadside--a song of the nodding grass
and the bird in the hedge, of the dancing leaf, the darting swallow, the
wide kindly skies. Oh, the road is full of gay things, and tender
things, of sweetness and refreshment, of wholesome fatigue and glorious
sleep, for those that know its secrets!
"Good evening to you, young sir."
The little tune had stopped. A man's figure, exaggeratedly thin, black
against the sunset, had emerged over the knuckle of the hill and, with a
wide sweep of the arm, was saluting.
The gesture of the black silhouette seemed so courtly, the voice that
came from it so refined, that the young gentleman almost rose to return
the salutation: but, in time, he caught sight of the violin curves....
Pooh, it was the fiddling vagabond! Ashamed of his impulse, he drew
forth a florin and flung it.
The musician skipped nimbly on one side; the coin fell, flashing in the
red sun-shafts. He looked from it to the imperious donor, whose face he
scanned keenly for a moment, then smiled; and his teeth shone as white
as a wolf's in the deep tan of his face. Then off went his battered hat
again and out was stretched a sinewy leg in dusty blue stocking, to
accompany a bow such as twenty years ago might have roused the envy of
your finest Versailles marquis.
"I greet you! I salute you, my young lord!" The fiddler rose from his
inclination and burst out laughing. "Oh, cease fondling those pistols
in your pocket, worthy sir," cried he, "for by Calliope, daughter of
Jove and Mnemosyne, 'tis not your money-bags I covet just now, but, oh!
your golden youth!"
"The fellow has a wild eye," thought the gentleman. Now, it is a
question whether even a highway robber were not more agreeable to
encounter on a lonely road than a madman.
"If it be madness to honour in you such a gift of the gods," said the
singular vagrant, reading the thought, "why then, yes, I am mad,
sir--stark, staring."
He fell back on one foot and bent the advanced knee, tucked his
instrument under his chin, where it settled like a bird to its nest, and
drew his bow across the strings with a long plaint.
"O youth!" he intoned between two sighs of the catgut. "O spring! O
wings of the soul! O virginity of the heart, expectation, unknown
mysteries of life! O wealth of strength and yearning!--See, now, how
you sit," he cried, dropping into speech again, "on the fringe of the
forest, in a strange land, with the sunset valley at your feet, and the
stream running you know not where beside you, and the bird over your
head singing the desires of your soul. Why, by Apollo, young man, here
are you in your youth, in the spring of your world, in the very middle
of an adventure, and----"
Again limber fingers moved along the strings; and, with a sense of
wonder, the traveller felt within his being some answering outcry. But
he stiffened himself against it.
"Harkee, my man," said he, trying to frown, "I am in no mood for
fooling. Take up your florin, and begone.--Or, stay, earn another by
telling me, if you can, where I am, and how far lies the nearest
village?"
"Sir," replied the other, urbanely, "fellow-travellers should assist
each other without any sordid consideration. (Ah, had you offered me of
your youth, now!) You are, an it please you, just between the border of
that old, steady-going principality of Schwarzburg and the new-fangled,
patchwork kingdom which appertaineth to his Majesty King Jerome--himself
one of the crowning products of the Great Revolution!"
"Faugh!" said the gentleman.
The fiddler's restless eye lighted.
"My lord is an Englishman? In verity and beyond doubt, none but an
Englishman could wear so lofty a front. I need scarce have asked."
The young man stared haughtily. The other considered him awhile in
silence with a sort of grave mockery, and pursued then reflectively--
"This English aloofness, 'tis an excellent prescription for pride and
disdain and such-like high essences. Only be careful, my
brother-wayfarer, that you be not above your own fair youth, and contemn
not its splendid opportunities.
'Singula de nobis annipraedantur euntes'
O young man! ...
'Eripuere jocos, Venerem, convivia, ludum'
think of it!"
So saying, he shouldered his instrument, and with a valedictory wave of
his bow seemed about to take his departure; but, as if upon a second
thought, stood still, and once again observed the young man.
Now it struck the stranded traveller that there was a dignity in the
vagrant's gaze, a refinement about his person, which scarce accorded
with the gipsy appearance, the shabby clothes; that it was not usual for
beggars to quote Horace with delicate accents of culture; that his
salutation had been a pattern of courtliness; above all, that he was not
the least impressed by a young nobleman's most noble demeanour. And he,
on his milestone, began to feel slightly foolish--an ingenuous blush,
indeed, crept to his cheeks.
The player hitched round his fiddle till it lay across his breast, and
pinched a couple of strings as a man might pinch the cheek of the wench
he loved.
"Pardi," he said, speaking into its curved ear, "that flag of crimson
would proclaim that there's hope for the youth yet.--Sir," proceeded he
then, gaily, "I think I can be of use to you. I place myself at your
service. May I crave to know whom I have the honour of addressing?"
"You address," responded the other, "Steven Lee, Graf zu
Waldorff-Kielmansegg, an Austrian gentleman (if you must know)
travelling towards his estate in the south." He had an irrepressible
satisfaction in the recital.
"Austrian?" echoed the listener, with a cock of one of his expressive
eyebrows. "'Tis a safer nationality to proclaim than the English, for
travellers in great Caesar's dominions nowadays. Oh, you are right,
quite right! 'Twould be the height of rashness to proclaim even a drop
of English blood, these days, where Monsieur Buonaparte rules!"
The taunt struck home. Red mantled again on the gentleman's smooth
cheek.
"Despite an Austrian father, I have by my dead mother enough English
blood in these veins," cried he, hotly, "to hate the usurper and despite
his upstart brothers--if that is what you mean; and I care not who knows
it!"
The fiddler's smile grew broader. "Youth," whispered he to his violin,
"may pretend to abjure itself, but it will out. The stripling has
spirit, though it be but the spirit of scorn.--But the ceremony is not
complete," pursued he. "I have now to return your compliment. Above
all things, let us be polite. Here, then, comrade, you see before you
an individual known all over the country as the crazy musician,
sometimes more tersely as Geiger-Hans--what in your English you might
call Fiddle-John. Some call me the Scholar Vagabond, and some, the
children (bless them), Onkel. Like your own, my nationality is a matter
of indecision. Some say I am French, some German, some from over the
Alps--take your choice; your choice, too, of my title: Geiger-Hans,
Fiddle-John, or Geiger-Onkel. Or you may dub me, if you please, the
Singer of Youth."
But by this time, Steven Lee, Count Kielmansegg, was disgusted with
himself for having betrayed so much of his feelings to a beggar vagrant.
"Doubtless," remarked he, with infinite arrogance, "it may prove more
convenient for you, at times, to hide your name, good fellow. Reassure
yourself, I have no curiosity to learn it."
Whereupon Geiger-Hans gathered his brows into so deep a frown that the
whole hillside seemed to grow black. He struck the strings of his
instrument, and they called out as with anger.
"My name," he said under his breath, "my name, boy, is dead--as dead as
my youth." Then he grew calm as suddenly as he had stormed. "Some
happy ones there are who die and whose names live: I live, and my name
is dead. Let that suffice to you. Why, see," he cried next, with
another swift change of tone, while Count Steven stared at him, his slow
Austrian blood, his deliberate English wits, unable to keep pace with
such vivacity of mood, "it is getting dark ... the sun has dropped
behind the valley line ... the forest is full of night already! Do not
the lights of unknown shelter beckon you--the chimney-corner, the
strange hospitality? Why, Heaven knows what sweet hostess may not greet
your youthship to-night! And if your soul cries not out for fair
adventure in forest depth, there, at least, is a poor dumb thing that
craves stable and corn." As he spoke, he stepped nimbly to the injured
horse and unhitched the reins from the tree. "Might you not have bathed
those cut knees?" he exclaimed, shooting a look of rebuke over the
animal's meek head. "And the kindly brook running charity at your
elbow!"
He led the creature to the stream; and the deed of compassion
accomplished, again turned to his companion with a smile, which seemed
to show knowledge of all the latter's vacillating thoughts of vexation
and shame.
"Lend me a hand with the wheel, comrade, and let us see if we cannot
improvise a linchpin. And then, if you push behind, this forgiving
beast will do his best to draw your goods into safety."
But it was the musician who mended the wheel, while the traveller
watched in wonder the work of the brown hands. And then, in the falling
dusk, they set upon their slow way: Steven Lee, Graf zu
Waldorff-Kielmansegg, pushing behind even as bid, the fiddler marching
ahead with the reins slung over his arm and humming a hunting song under
his breath.
Leaving the stones and dust of the high-road, he led the way along a
wide path that seemed to cut the forest in two and run downhill into the
horizon. Beneath their feet was now an elastic carpet of pine-needles.
On each side of them the serried ranks of trees held the night already
in a thousand arms and murmured to it with a voice as of the sea. Before
them, at the end of the nave, and set like a cathedral window, shone a
span of sky, primrose and green, with one faint star. And presently
Steven saw, to one side far ahead, an orange square of light, and knew
it for the unknown forest shelter beckoning to him.
"But what," cried he, struck by a sudden thought, "of my postilion and
my valet?"
Geiger-Hans looked back at him over his shoulder and grinned. He slid
the reins above his elbow and grasped his violin.
"To the devil," it sang mockingly, through the glade, "to the devil with
postilions and valets! to the devil with prudence and forethought! O
youth, enjoy your youth! O youth, be young!"
*CHAPTER II*
*THE FOREST HOUSE*
"Diesen liebenswuerd'gen Juengling
Kann man nicht genug verehren..."
HEINE.
"Heaven knows," had said the musician, "what sweet hostess may not greet
your youthship to-night."
To their knock the door was opened by a slip of a peasant girl. The
light from within shone on her long yellow plaits of hair and her small
brown face.
Steven was conscious of a distinct shock of disappointment. What folly
had this fantastic chance companion fiddled into his mind that he should
have found himself expecting something meet for his high-born fancy in
this lonely forest house?
"Geiger-Onkel!" cried the girl, in surprise.
And "Geiger-Onkel!" was echoed joyfully indoors. An old peasant woman
came waddling forward, hands outstretched.
"Be kind to my comrade, Forest-mother," said the player, "while I see to
this brother beast."
He led the horse towards the back yard. And Steven stepped into the
great kitchen, glad at least of its prosaic aroma of pot-herbs, since
romance had fallen silent with the fiddle.
It was a long room, panelled with age-polished oak which reflected the
light of the hanging brass lamp and of the ruddy hearth as jonquil
flamelets and poppy glow. A black oaken table, running nearly from end
to end, was covered half-way with a snowy cloth, red-hemmed and
flowered. There were presses, laden with crockery and pewter. There was
a tall clock, with a merry painted face and a solemn tick. There were
stags' horns and grinning boars' heads above the presses. Not that
Steven had any interest to bestow on these things: he was glad that the
place was clean. He thought the oaken chair hard sitting for his noble
person, but it was better than the milestone. The Forest-mother seemed
a decent sort of body; with a due sense, too, of the quality of her
guest. As for the peasant child, he did not notice her at all--not even
the pretty foot in buckled shoe and scarlet stocking, of which the short
peasant skirt gave such a generous display.
Yet it was to her that Geiger-Hans made his courtly bow as he entered in
his turn.
"Mamzell Sidonia!" said he, his old hat clapped over his heart.
She gave him a smile, half tender, half mischievous. And her teeth were
as white as his own in her sunburnt face. There was a whole host of
dimples, too, which a young man might have remarked. But what mattered
the dimples of a peasant girl?
Then the fiddler took the old woman round the neck and kissed her plump,
wholesome cheek with a smack.
"Supper, supper!" cried he. "And if it's good, you shall have such
music that your hearts shall sing."
The girl laughed out loud, and ran to the hearth, where she seized a
pot.
"In Heaven's name," cried the woman, "leave that, child! 'Tis not fit
for you."
"Oh, please," urged Sidonia of the yellow plaits, "please, little
foster-mother!"
Forest-mother to the fiddler, foster-mother to the girl. Steven had
supposed her grandmother. Bah! As if, indeed, it were worth a thought!
"Get the wine, then," said the matron, with a jolly, unctuous chuckle.
And while, swinging long tails of hair and scarlet ankles flashing, the
girl darted round the table, what must this fantastic fellow Geiger-Hans
do but introduce guest and hostess with one of his absurd flourishes.
"Here, dear comrade, is Dame Friedel, mother of the great King Jerome's
own Head Forester. And here, mother, is a most noble Austrian count,
whom the accidents of travel have forced to condescend to the shelter of
your humble roof this evening."
Deep curtsied Dame Friedel. Steven inclined his head; and, feeling the
fiddler mock him behind his back, grew red and angry.
"A glass in welcome, gracious sir!" tittered Sidonia, at his elbow.
She was so close to him that his cheek was fanned by her breath of
clover and the fragrance of a little bunch of violets in her white
kerchief rose to his nostrils. As she bent, offering him the green
goblet of wine, her heavy plait fell against his shoulder. He drew back
haughtily.
[Illustration: _As she bent, offering him the green goblet of wine, her
heavy plait fell against his shoulder. He drew back haughtily._]
"_Peste!_" cried Geiger-Hans, "how my fingers itch for the strings. But
never mind, you shall lose nothing by waiting. _Tarteifel!_ mother, as
I live, venison stew! What feasts you good people make in your forest
house!"
"My son is hungry when he comes home of nights, and so are his lads.--My
little love, will you sit and entertain the gentlemen?"
Sidonia, pouting, drew her chair with great clatter round by that of
Geiger-Hans and turned a shoulder on the count, who thus remained
isolated, as became his rank. The fiddler drank to her and she filled
his glass again. And, as she stretched across him to do so, the violets
at her breast fell upon his hand.
"Violets!" cried he, and sat as if turned to stone. His brown face grew
ashen. Then he pushed his plate away, took up the flowers and pressed
them against his lips, inhaling the scent of them with long deep
breaths. Presently the tears ran down his cheeks; his slow-drawn sighs
were cut short by a kind of sob. The girl started to the old woman's
side and stood, flushed and downcast, while the Forest-mother beat her
omelet with a grave countenance. Neither of them looked at the fiddler.
Steven, who had stared, suddenly dropped his glance, too, ashamed and
uncomfortable. Geiger-Hans got up from his seat.
"I can eat no more to-night," he said, in a broken voice. He walked
over to the bench where he had left his fiddle, and, hugging it, went
out into the forest.
"Have you ever seen him like that before?" whispered Sidonia of mother
Friedel.
"Once," said she, "and it was over the violet-bed in the garden. I
doubt he has seen trouble, poor soul! Who has not?"
Sidonia returned to her seat, propped her chin on her hands and fixed
the young count absently. Her eyes were not black as he had thought:
they were grey and green, green and golden brown, like the waters of the
brook in the shadow of the trees.
"Heavens, sir, how you stare!" she said after a while, pettishly.
The young aristocrat, whose thoughts had been all engrossed by this new
eccentricity of his road acquaintance, raised his disdainful eyebrows.
He stare at a country wench? Then into their sullen silence mother
Friedel exclaimed joyfully.
"Hark!" cried she, "here comes my son!"
From far away stole the faint blast of hunting-horns; a dog bayed answer
from the kennels, then the call of the horns arose again in the
whispering forest depths, closer and louder.
"Yes, yes, it's the 'return home' they're winding," said the old woman,
bending her ear.
Without, there now rose a fine clamour: barking and yelping of hounds,
tramping of horses, blasting of horns, cheerful shouting of men. The
head forester shot half his stalwart figure in at the door and nodded
with some mystery to his mother. What could be seen of his green
uniform was very grand indeed, with vast display of gilt buttons and
royal crowns, frogs and braid. His square, freckled face, made for
jollity, was puckered into anxious lines; his eyes roamed uneasily from
Sidonia to the stranger. He strode to his mother's side and whispered
in her ear.
"Be good to us!" she ejaculated, clapping her hands, all dismay.
"Hush, mother!" warned the forester, finger on lip, and turned towards
the door.
Count Steven had finished his plate of venison stew, and was
condescending to enjoy a crust of bread with a glass of the tart wine.
The sense of expectation about him made him now likewise turn round in
his chair--languidly, for the high-born are never openly curious.
Outside, in the night, against a background of flickering leaves and
under the glare of a couple of torches, he saw a picturesque group of
hounds and huntsmen; two of these last laden each with a murdered
roebuck, whose pretty, innocent head hung trailing on the ground.
Suddenly the scene dissolved. A man came from the midst of the foresters
into the kitchen. The rest disappeared with their booty; hounds and
horses were led away towards the distant kennel premises; the woodland
glade resumed its peace.
As the new-comer passed him, the head forester made a spasmodic
movement, arrested midway, of hand to forehead. His mother swept a
dignified curtsey. The peasant girl, her hands clasped at the back of
her neck, stared with frank curiosity, her mouth open so that all who
cared to look might wonder upon the doubled splendour of her young
teeth.
He stood and glanced round upon them all: a slight young man of somewhat
low stature and dark, fine-cut face, with hair cropped short at back and
side to come down in a curly wave in the middle of his forehead. He had
large eyes under thick, straight eyebrows; and his forester's uniform,
though ostensibly of the same cut as Friedel's, was of finer cloth and
obviously brand new. The collar of the coat rose very high on each side
of his chin, which in the centre rested on folds of delicate cambric.
"Positively," thought Steven Lee, Count Waldorff-Kielmansegg, etc., "a
gentleman like myself!"
But the hunter's first word dispelled the illusion.
"My friend," said the new-comer to the old dame--he spoke German with a
strong foreign accent--"my fellow-forester there, Friedel, has assured
me that you would give his brother woodsman hospitality to-night."
Now, as he smiled, his handsome face assumed a trivial, almost inane,
expression, which destroyed its look of breeding and caused Count Steven
to return to his bread and wine with a mental shrug.
"Any friend of my son is welcome here," said the old lady, smiling
doubtfully.
Friedel himself grew suddenly scarlet, gulped, blinked and looked as
uncomfortable as any fish out of water.
"I see I must introduce myself," cried the little man, laughing heartily
and clapping him on the shoulder. "I am Mr. Forester--ahem!--Meyer, at
your service, madame."
"I wish," said Steven, "that you would shut the door behind my back,
good people."
"Hey la!" said Mr. Forester Meyer, with a sudden imperious note in his
voice, "whom have we here?"
"A guest, sir, like yourself," said the hostess somewhat dryly, hieing
to her pans; while the young nobleman in question turned his heavy chair
round again to supplement her inadequate description.
"An Austrian gentleman, my man, if it imports you to know," said he.
"You are yourself, perhaps," he went on with more friendliness, struck
by an obvious explanation of certain signs about the new-comer that had
puzzled him, "the inspector of these forests on your rounds. I notice
you speak with authority, and your accent is not of the country--a
countryman of this King Jerome?"
Mr. Forester Meyer broke again into loud laughter.
"Hey! what perspicacity has the gentleman!" cried he, jovially.
"(Friend Friedel, shut the door!) Nay, truly, sir, you are perfectly
right. I see it would be quite hopeless to maintain an _incognito_
before you. It is true, sir, I do inspect for this King Jerome
occasionally. Ha, ha!"
"Ha, ha!" echoed Sidonia, catching the infection of mirth, as a child
will, without reason.
"Hey la! And whom have we there?"
Mr. Forest-Inspector repeated the phrase in very different tones. There
came a curious flicker into his eye as he ran it up and down the girl's
figure, from crown of yellow head to scarlet ankle and back again, with
appreciative pauses on the way.
"Eh, eh!" said he, meaningly. He took her chin between his finger and
thumb, and chuckled as he raised the crimsoning face to the light.
"We do not hold with French ways here," said Dame Friedel, rebukingly,
over her pan.
Steven, catching the gesture of warning which her son instantly
addressed to her, felt a vast contempt for the fellow's slavish fear of
his little superior.
The wine, thin and fragrant, must have gone somewhat fantastically to
the young nobleman's brain. He began to feel defiant, in a humorous sort
of way, and to wish the fiddler back with his music. With his violin to
accompany the song of the amber drink, it seemed as if that youthship of
his (on which yonder fantastic rogue laid such stress) might find some
zest in a quarrel with Master Forester Meyer, whose eyes danced so
unpleasantly as they looked at this peasant child; who had so irritating
a French shrug and so mean a smile.
Now, if he had an eye to a pretty girl, the inspector seemed to have
also an ear for a poacher. The distant crack of shots, reverberating
from the forest, now made him start and listen acutely. Yet as Friedel,
with a frowning countenance, made a lurch for his gun in the corner, Mr.
Meyer smiled and restrained him. Then he himself went to the door, set
it ajar and hearkened. His smile widened as he closed it again and
returned to the table.
"Doubtless he has plans of his own for trapping the trespassers,"
thought Steven. It was the obvious explanation. And yet he felt a kind
of mystery brooding around him, almost as if that adventure which the
fiddler's music had boded were about to take place. And, in the long
silence which succeeded, the impression deepened. The Frenchman seemed
overcome by an uncontrollable restlessness. He paced the room from end
to end, compared the merry-faced clock with his watch, stared out of the
window and drummed on the pane. He was evidently keenly on the alert
for something: and, as Steven vainly cudgelled his not very quick wits
to conjecture, behold, it was at hand!
Shouts without, steps ... a tremendous rat-tat at the door!...
"'Tis not possible," cried mother Friedel, with some distress, "that
Heaven has sent us more guests?"
This was, in truth, precisely what Heaven was doing, if, indeed, it were
fair to hold Heaven responsible. Two new visitors walked into the
forest home without so much as a word of parley. A hulking man, also in
forester's uniform ("By Saint Hubert," said Steven Lee to himself, "his
Westphalian Majesty's rangers seem thick as leaves hereabouts!"), and a
lady clinging to his arm.... Yes, a lady, and a fair! Steven rose to
his feet.
The inspector and the burly new-comer interchanged a rapid glance.
Then, cracking the whip he held in his hand, the latter burst into the
most execrable German, interspersed by volleys of French oaths. It was
evident that King Jerome held to servants of his own nationality.
_Morbleu!_ quoth he, it was a mercy to see decent shelter! Devil take
all, he had thought that he and the lady would have had to spend the
night in the forest!
Here the lady, in spite of very pink cheeks and bright eyes, became so
faint that she had to be assisted to a chair by mother Friedel and her
foster-child. Steven darted to present a glass of water, but was
arrogantly forestalled by Mr. Meyer.
"Such a scandal on his Majesty's high-road!" went on he of the whip:
"this lady's coach attacked by ruffians!"
"His Majesty will be exceedingly displeased," said Mr. Meyer, gravely,
sitting down by the side of the distressed one and stripping off her
glove to consult a delicate wrist.
"Her escort shot at---- By all the devils!"
"Monstrous," quoth the inspector, in quiet indignation. "A little wine,
madam?"
"The escort--sacred swine, confound them!--took flight and basely
abandoned their charge."
"Shocking--shocking!" said Mr. Meyer, relinquishing one pretty hand to
receive the empty glass from the other.
"If I had not happened to hear the shots and rush to the spot, what
might not have happened?"
"It makes me shiver to contemplate it," asserted the inspector.
"My brave deliverer," murmured the lady, in a dulcet voice.
"Single-handed, he----"
She suddenly buried her face in her hands and quivered from head to
foot.
The inspector looked up at mother Friedel with an air of grave
compassion.
"Hysterical," said he; "ah, no wonder!"
Dame Friedel began to loosen the lady's handsome claret-coloured
travelling-mantle, whilst Sidonia drew a velvet, white-plumed hat from
the loveliest dark head in all the world.
"Well ... ah!--Schmidt," said Inspector Meyer, "his Majesty will hear of
your conduct."
"Thank you, Mr.--ah!--Meyer," rejoined the burly Schmidt, with an
unaccountably waggish grin.
"Ah, ha, ha!" cried the lady. She flung back her head and flung down
her hands; the tears were streaming upon her uncovered cheeks. It might
be hysterics, but Steven thought it was the most becoming combination of
emotions he had ever beheld.
She wiped her eyes and sprang up as lightly as a bird. Emerging from
the folds of her cloak, she displayed a clinging robe of pale blue,
fastened under the bust by a belt of amethysts set in gold. She had an
exquisite roundness of form; an open, smiling mouth. Her eyes were
innocent and dark and deep. She was (Steven felt) a revelation. And
withal, what a great lady! What an air of breeding! What elegance! An
Austrian gentleman knows the value of jewels. Heavens, what rings on
her fingers! What pearls in her ears!
"_Ah, Dio mio!_" she cried, "but I am hungry!"
Italian, then. There was a strange medley of nationalities in this
German forest corner.
The fixity of the young man's gaze suddenly drew the lady's attention.
She looked at him: surprise, interest, then an adorable smile appeared
on her countenance. It was almost an invitation. Besides, was it not
meet that the only gentleman of the party should entertain the only
lady? With his heart beating in his throat, he took two steps forward.
The three foresters had drawn apart and were whispering together with
furtive glances in his direction; but he was not likely to notice this
when such lovely eyes were upon him. She dropped her handkerchief. He
rushed to pick it up. As she took it from his fingers, he gave them
ever so slight a pressure.
(Oh, Geiger-Hans, Singer of Youth, hadst thou foreseen this rapturous
moment?)
"A thousand graces," murmured she. The graces! they were all her own.
"Permit me to introduce myself," he stammered.
But the inspector cut him short with a strident voice.
"The gentleman must be fatigued," he cried.
Steven started angrily. To one side of him stood Forester Schmidt, to
the other, Forester Friedel.
"I will show the gracious gentleman the way to his repose," said the
latter in his ear, with subdued, yet warning tone.
"And I will give you my help to the door, _tonnerre de Brest!_"
exclaimed the other, and caught the Count's arm under his with a grip of
iron.
Steven wrenched himself free. Yet a man has not sober English blood in
him for nothing. Humiliating as was the position, a moment's reflection
convinced him that resistance and futile struggle would but render him
ridiculous. Ridiculous, in the light of those dark eyes!
"Lead, then, fellow," said he to Friedel; and, after bowing low to the
lady, followed his escort with what dignity he could muster towards the
door opening on the forest.
There was such a seething of rage in his brain, such an itching in his
palm to feel it against yonder insolent Schmidt's full cheek, that it
was not till he found himself on the threshold of a dimly lighted wooden
building, gazing blankly in upon heaps of straw, that he realized that a
barn was considered good enough for the night's lodging of a Count
Waldorff-Kielmansegg.
"May you rest you sweetly, sir," said Friedel, and tramped away.
*CHAPTER III*
*GREEN ADVENTURE*
"_Non ego hoc ferrem, calidus juventa,_
_Consule Planco._"
HORACE.
"Comrades again!"
Turning round with a start, Steven beheld the crazy musician at his
elbow.
"Comrades on the straw--eh! What a bed for his lordship. _Miserables!_
they have no conception of the importance of rank, these benighted
forest folk. Yet give me the clean, yellow straw, smelling in the dark
of sunshine and whispering of the fields, rather than your stuffy German
mountains of feathers."
"Geiger-Onkel! Geiger-Onkel!" came a shrill cry into the night.
The fiddler turned with a bound and ran into the middle of the moonlit
yard, staring up at the house that stood outlined against the pale sky.
From some distant regions, where Friedel's underlings kennelled near
their hounds, rose shouts of boorish laughter and the chorus of a
drinking song.
A yellow tongue of flame appeared in a wooden balcony, hanging under the
roof. Sidonia bent over, shielding her candle from the forest airs.
"Are you there, Geiger-Onkel?"
"Yes, child."
"Oh, I am glad.... Geiger-Onkel"--she leaned over still further; her
tresses hung down, one shone ruddy with the candle-gleam and one silver
in the moonlight; her voice was broken with angry tremors--"he tried to
kiss me!"
"_Mort de ma vie_--who?"
"The big man with the whip. He caught me by the waist. I had nothing
to hit him with but my plaits. I lashed him in the face. They caught
him across the eyes----"
"Caught him across the eyes," cried the fiddler, clapping his hands.
"Ah, brava, little mamzell!"
"They whistled like a rope"--the girl was laughing and crying
together--"I think I have half-blinded him. Mayn't I come down to you,
Onkel? I want to talk ... and I want music."
"Better not," said fiddler Hans, after a moment's reflection; and then
from the shadow Steven stepped out beside him. (It was terrible to
think of the dark-eyed lady in the company of such ruffians!) Sidonia,
with a cry, drew back at sight of the new shadow.
"Nay, never be afraid of him. It is my comrade. As for the others--why,
go in, child; bolt your door," said the fiddler. "Go to bed and sleep
in peace. I shall watch."
"But you will play for me?" she asked over her shoulder.
"Presently, I may," said he; "such a tune, little mamzell, that will
make some people dance! But to you it shall give sweet sleep."
As the girl disappeared, Geiger-Hans turned upon Steven. He laughed as
he addressed the young man, but his eyes were fierce as some wild
beast's in the dim light.
"Did you hear?" said he. "The maid struck him; but you--oh you--you let
yourself be turned out! Oh, to see you trot away like a lamb. Steven
Lee, Graf zu Waldorff-Kielmansegg, turned out of doors by two low-bred
foresters! What, then, runs in your veins? What, turnip-juice instead
of blood? The fellow, Schmidt so-called, laid hands on you, did he not?
And you a youth! By the blood of my fathers, had the creature touched
me, old man as I am, he had felt the weight of his own whip! But the
fellow has muscles. Nay, you were right, sir, right. Let us be
prudent, by all means. Only that mask of yours lies, that smooth cheek,
that crisp curl--all lies. Young, yes. Only your heart is not young.
'Tis like the kernel of a blind nut--dry dust. While I--there is more
of God's youth left in my worn and waning body----"
"Confusion!" interrupted Steven, trembling in every limb, hurt to the
marrow of his pride; "it was before the lady."
"Oh, the lady...!" echoed the other, with a mocking trail of laughter.
During the vehemence of his speech the musician had advanced on the lad,
who had unconsciously drawn back until he stood against the wall of the
house. Now a window close to him was unlatched; and the sound of a
sigh, rather than a voice, was breathed forth into the night.
"_Ah, Dio!_"
"Your cue!" mocked the fiddler into his ear, and melted away into the
darkness.
The window was that of a room on the ground floor; the lady leaned out,
her elbows on the sill; her face caught a slanting ray of moonlight. Was
it possible for anything mortal to be so beautiful?
"Madam!" cried Steven, and that heart of his which was supposed to be
but dry dust began to thump in hitherto unknown fashion.
"Hush, hush!" she whispered, a taper finger on her lip. "Ah, is it you,
sir?"
He advanced into the ray that held her. He was not aware that he also
looked goodly and romantic. Somewhere, in the darkness close by, the
fiddler's bow crept over the strings. It was a sound so attenuated that
it seemed to have no more substance than the light of the moon itself;
it stole upon their ears so gently that it was as if they heard it not.
His hand met her warm fingers--the fragrance from her curls mounted to
his nostrils; she looked up at him and her eyes glistened.
Oh, fiddler, what bewitching music is this? What sweetness does it
insinuate, what mysterious audacity counsel? There were those parted
lips of hers, with white teeth gleaming through, and here was this youth
who had never touched a woman's lips in love. Such a little way between
his bent head and her upturned face...!
A door crashed behind her. She started from his timid hand. The thread
of the music was broken like a floating gossamer.
Steven thought that the fiddler laughed. There was a faint exclamation.
Heavens! did she also laugh? He saw--yes, he saw the inspector's hated
outline over hers. She was drawn from the window by the shoulders, the
shutters were clapped to in his face and bolted noisily. The yard
billowed under his feet. All went red before his eyes. That was her
room, and the man had followed her to it! Had he no youth in him, no
blood in his veins? ... Why, he could taste it on his tongue! He
pivoted round upon himself, made a blind rush for the entrance door, and
dashed headlong against Ranger Schmidt's broad chest.
A French oath rang out. Then broken German: "Can the kerl not see where
he is going?" Then, in the dark, the fiddler laughed again. Or was it
his music? or were there lurking devils taunting, jeering, inciting?
The young man never knew exactly what happened till a crack like a
pistol-shot sprang upon the night, and he realized that his hand had
found the broad, insolent face at last. The sound of that slap cleared
the confusion in his own brain as a puff of wind clears a hanging mist.
Schmidt gave a roar like a furious bull, but Steven met the onslaught of
the uplifted whip with the science learned in London of Gentleman
Jackson and there was a grip on either side which began for him in
glorious defiance and ended in a struggle of life and death.
The fiddler worked his bow like one possessed. It was a fierce song of
fight that now rose, ever shriller, louder, and faster, up towards the
placid sky. The air was thick with the curses, blue with the profanity,
of Forester Schmidt. But Steven fought like a gentleman, in silence.
To his dying day he maintained that he was getting the better of the
hulking bully, when his heel caught in an upstanding root, and he fell
with a crash, his opponent over him. There was a moment's agony of
suffocation, then the gleam before his eyes of a bared blade, gilt-blue
in the moonlight, two echoing shouts, a woman's scream. And then Count
Waldorff-Kielmansegg lost consciousness, his wits marching away at
double-quick time to the lilt of an extraordinarily joyous vulgar little
tune.
* * * * *
"Oh, Geiger-Onkel, is he dead?"
The girl with the yellow plaits stood in the light of the lantern; her
wide eyes seemed to devour her face, white even in that uncertain
glimmer; her parted lips quivered. From the forest house came the sound
of loud wrangling voices, dominated presently by rhythmic feminine
screams. In the kennels the dogs were barking furiously: it was a
distracting clamour.
Yet the stillness of the young man's comely figure, relaxed at its
length on the straw, the pallor of his head, thrown back like a sleeping
child's against the fiddler's knee, seemed to make its own circle of
silence.
"Dead?" echoed the vagrant. "Dead for a crack on the skull!" His tone
was contemptuous. Yet his lean hands shook as they busied themselves in
loosening Count Steven's very fine stock; and there was concern in his
attitude as he bent over the youth's face, cruelly beautiful in its
white unconsciousness.
Now Sidonia, the forest-mother's foster-child, remembered Geiger-Hans as
far back as she could remember anything, and knew every shade of that
sardonic visage. Dark she had often seen it, with a far-away
melancholy--a melancholy, it seemed, beyond anything that life could
touch. She had known it alight with mockery, softened into a wonderful
tenderness that was for her alone, of all human beings, and for all sick
or helpless animals. But moved to anxiousness as now, never before.
She clasped her hands across the fluttering of her heart. Geiger-Hans
glanced at her again and laughed gently. The traveller's befrogged coat
was loose at last, the column of his young throat bare, and the musician
had slipped a hand between the folds of a shirt finer than the girl's
own snowy bodice.
"Why, little Sidonia," said he, as if she was once again the child, "you
look as scared as a rabbit in a trap. Dead, this lad? Nay, his English
mother, whoever she was, has built him too well for that. Why, here's a
heart for you! With decent luck, it should make him swing into his
nineties as steadily as the drums of the Old Guard."
As he spoke, he shifted the burden of the languid head to a convenient
pile of straw, sprang to his feet and stood laughing again.
"Our wits are not the strongest part of us," he mocked. "They're always
like to be the first things we lose." His lips twisted as he glanced
downward. "A knock on our pate, and it is all away with them."
"For shame, Geiger-Onkel!" cried the girl. The colour flamed into her
face: upon the reaction of her relief, she was glad to find anger, else
she must have burst into tears. She knelt down by her ungracious guest,
and, on a nearer view, misgiving once more crept upon her. Her little
hands hovered. "Oh, Onkel," she cried, "yet he looks like death!"
"Nay, satisfy yourself, then," said the fiddler, encouragingly; "women
are all cousins, even to Mamzell Sidonia."
His tone seemed scornful, but there was something genial, something
almost of hope and pleasure, in his eyes as he watched the maid bend
over the comely youth, watched her lay a timid touch over his heart.
"It beats," said Sidonia, in a whisper, "it beats." She spoke as of a
wonderful thing. A smile came like a dream across her face. Her touch
lingered. "How strong!" she said.
"The heart of a young man should be strong," quoth the fiddler.
"And how steady," went on the girl.
And the fiddler answered: "Strength is waste without steadiness."
She crouched, looking up at him, the smile of wonder on her lips. Then
she looked down again at the pale face.
"His heart beats beautifully, but when will he wake again?"
"It is to be hoped, not till to-morrow morning. And," added the other
more gravely, "he must not be awaked. Nature knows what she is about,
and she is rocking her young friend to the tune of her own remedy. Nay,
never fear, little mamzell, the lad is but stunned. He will sleep till
morning, and wake scarce the worse. Leave him, child, he lies well
enough."
"He lies very ill," flashed she. "You were kinder to the old white
horse. A pillow he shall have," she scolded, and was gone on her light
foot.
The wrangling sounds were now stilled within and without the forest
house. The cries of the hounds had fallen into silence. As for the
rhythmic hysterics of the travelling lady, they had given place to soft
gurgles of laughter. These punctuated the more continuous rumble of a
bass undertone; her window was evidently once more open to the night.
The musician gazed down at the youth's upturned face.
"What dreams you could have had, you dog, had your foolish wits not
taken leave of absence," he murmured. With an unconscious gesture he
reached for his fiddle, as if to clothe the thought in its own tune.
But he paused before touching a string. "No, sweet friend," he muttered,
"thou must be put to baser uses before dawn. And till then thy fancies
and mine must sleep."
A twig cracked sharply. With heavy tread, yet noiselessly, in her list
slippers, the forest-mother waddled into the barn. There was the gleam
of a white basin in her hand, whence arose a sour pungency.
"The good God and His holy mother preserve us this night!" she
ejaculated in a creaking whisper. "I have brought a compress for the
poor young gentleman's head. Eh, but the gracious one was haughty, and
pride will have a fall! But there, my heart goes out to lads, be they
high or low. Hey, jeminy," she clacked her tongue, "it's enough to give
one a turn to see him lying there!"
Though the words were rueful the tone was almost cheery. She had been
witness of many hard knocks in her day; and she knew--none better--the
stuff of which solid Kerls are made.
"Keep your vinegar for little gherkins, mother," said the musician,
gaily. "We want no more pickle here to-night."
Further gibing was silenced on his lips, for Sidonia came back upon them
like a small whirlwind, clasping her pillow by the middle, heedless that
one corner of it should knock off the fiddler's hat, the other all but
upset the vinegar lotion. But her impetuosity gave place to fairy
gentleness as she knelt beside Steven and drew his head into her lap,
spreading meanwhile the pillow into its proper place.
"Save us and bless us!" exclaimed the forest-mother. "Sidonia! Here,
Geiger-Onkel, take the vinegar!" And, quite flustered, she thrust her
basin upon him.
"Foster-mother," said Sidonia, looking up rebukingly, "he must not be
awakened." She laid her hand protectingly upon the crisp brown curls.
"But, child," groaned the forest-mother, "this is no work for a--no work
for you. _Himmel!_ the strange gentleman's head on your lap; and
you--what you are! It is not fitting. It is not maidenly!"
"Tscha!" said the fiddler, testily, and forced back the bowl upon the
irate old woman. "Good mother, leave the child alone. See, she has
laid the young gentleman's head quite prettily on the pillow, and now
she is going straight to bed. It is late, for good children."
Sidonia had leaped to her feet. She came slowly towards the two who
were watching her, tossing her head. But, with all her pride, she could
not conceal that she was blushing to tears. Suddenly she darted past
them into the night, and her feet could be heard pattering up the
outside wooden stairs that led to her gable room.
*CHAPTER IV*
*PARTING OF THE WAYS*
"_Come like shadows, so depart._"
{_Macbeth_}.
"Forest-mother," said the fiddler, dryly, "you know a great deal about
sturdy forest lads, and you make the best pickles in the country: but
you know nothing at all about little maids."
And, as the honest woman stared at him open-mouthed, he took her
genially by the shoulders and turned her towards the door.
"Everything the child has done to-night has been right and becoming," he
went on, half regretfully, half smilingly, "even because she was a
child. But, mark me, from to-night she is child no longer. And all that
her heart prompts her to do now will be wrong. Go to bed, mother," he
added in a different tone; "and if you hear my fiddle speaking by-and-by
and a rumble of carriage-wheels thereafter, why, turn you over on the
other ear and think you have dreamed a strange dream."
On her limp slippers the forest-mother trotted a few steps forward,
obediently; then she halted, hesitated, and turned back. Her shrewd,
kindly face was all puckered in the moonlight.
"Geiger-Hans," she called solemnly. Her tone was so full of mystery and
import that he came to her in two steps. She jerked her thumb over her
shoulder in the direction of the open window, whence the voice and the
soft laughter still crept out upon the forest stillness. "Yonder--in
there"--she whispered--"him!"
He interrupted her. "I know: I saw him come, little mother; and I have
spoken with Friedel."
"He looked at her a great deal," she insisted.
"At whom? At little Sidonia?"
"Ay; and he took her by the chin."
"Did he so?" said Geiger-Hans. His low voice had a tremor of anger.
Then he was silent; and the forest-mother stood waiting, her eyes
confidently on him. A fantastic figure in the moonshine, yet this solid
peasant woman seemed to leave her anxieties with confidence in his
hands.
"I can rid you of your unexpected honours for to-night," said the
vagrant musician at last. "But who can guard the fawn in the forest
from the cunning hunter? Fritz must take back Mamzell Sidonia home
before he goes his rounds to-morrow."
"And she only just come, and so happy, poor lamb!"
But she made no further protest, and went with her vinegar softly back
to the house.
* * * * *
The fiddler returned to the barn, and cast once more a look at him who
slept so deeply. Thence his light, long, striding step brought him to
the shed where the patched coach stood. From its recesses he took the
traveller's cloak, and, returning, cast it over the inanimate figure.
And, having shifted the shade of the lantern, his restlessness took him
back into the night. He was nursing his fiddle as he went.
"What things," he said, addressing it as the court fool of old his
bauble (after that singular fashion which led people to call him
crazy)--"what things, beloved, could we not converse upon to-night, were
we not constrained by sinners? What a song of the call of the spring to
last year's fawn--of the dream that comes to the dreamer but once in his
life's day, and that before the dawn! Chaste and still as the night,
and yet tremulous; shadows, mere shadows, and yet afire--voiceless,
formless, impalpable, and yet something more lovely than all the
sunshine can show, than all the beauty arms can hold hereafter, than all
the music ears shall hear. A prescience not yet a presence, a yearning
not yet a desire.... O youth! O love!" sighed the fiddler, and drew
from his fiddle a long echo to the sigh. "But when we deal with rascals
we must play rascally tunes."
The rapscallion air, to which poor Steven's wits had danced away from
him, broke shrilly, almost indecently, upon the beautiful calmness of
the midnight hour.
Big Mr. Forester Schmidt, seated comfortably in mother Friedel's
elbow-chair, his feet upon the table and a long glass of the
straw-coloured wine at his elbow, was aroused from an agreeable
somnolence by the sudden screech. Friedel, frankly asleep in a corner,
woke with a start, and muttered a not ill-natured curse on the mad
fiddler.
At the same time the door leading from the kitchen to the lady's parlour
was quickly opened, and the head of Herr Inspector Meyer was thrust
through the aperture. This gentleman's good-looking countenance seemed
sadly discomfited, his airs of blatant importance shaken.
"_Diavolo_! ... Do you hear that?" he cried to his burly friend. "There
it is again! I tell you it means something. It always means something!
Remember Brest ... and remember Smolensk!"
"It means that I'll go and throttle him with his own catgut," cried
Schmidt, letting his heavy-booted feet fall upon the floor with a stamp.
"Look here, you fellow, you Friedel, here, with your gun, and let us see
how you Germans can shoot! Down with that caterwauler ... and his
Majesty will make you a present of the hide."
Friedel had gathered his sleepy carcase together upon the appearance of
the inspector. He now stood very respectfully at attention. But there
was nothing respectful in the small, fierce blue eyes he fixed upon Mr.
Schmidt.
"May it please your Excellency," he began. But Mr. Meyer, interrupting
him irritably, came down into the room, snapping his fingers, stamping
his little feet.
"Hark, hark! Do you hear that?" he cried, and seized Schmidt by the
arm. "I tell you, man, you are a fool. Will you say now that this is
no warning, no menace? Hark!"
He flung up his head, and his own intentness of listening, something
also of his mysterious agitation, seemed to communicate itself to his
irate lieutenant. They stood holding their breath; and bewildered
Friedel hearkened too.
The fiddler's mocking tune had merged into another theme. The night was
vibrating to a deeper sonority, a more noble rhythm. Friedel thought he
must be still dreaming, for he seemed suddenly to see serried ranks of
soldiers marching down a dusty road, tall fellows, with hollow, tanned
cheeks and towering bearskins, their long white legs swinging by him as
they tramped. It was not the thin sound of strings that was in his
ears, but the bugle's call and the rattle of drums.
"Thunder! It is the chaunt of the Old Guard!" He was scarce aware he
had spoken aloud, until the inspector caught up his words in a high key
of excitement.
"There," he cried, turning with a sort of feminine frenzy upon his
friend, "even that blockhead hears it! I tell you, General, we must out
of this. And the woman must go too. 'Tis his will, the big tyrant."
He paused for a moment; and then resumed, well-nigh dancing in his
exasperation:
"The carriage, the carriage at once! D'Albignac! Leave that gun alone!"
he shrieked. "I won't have the fellow touched. Last time, last
time----" he paused again and shook his head.
"I dare not," he said in a low voice. "It is not wholesome!"
* * * * *
Steven opened heavy eyes and stared vacantly at the creeping light,
indigo between the wisps of yellow straw; at the large square of
shimmering mists and flickering leaves where the barn door stood open to
the dawn. He turned his head and found that it lay on a fragrant linen
pillow, and also that it ached vaguely in spite of this luxury.
A vulgar, absurd tune was still dancing in his brain. Then he caught
within his range of vision the figure of a man sitting cross-legged,
putting a fresh string to a fiddle. And memory came back slowly.
"It was the fault of the music, you know," he said.
Geiger-Hans shot a look at him from under his quizzical eyebrows.
"You never got that kiss in after all."
"Ah, but I got in my slap!"
The young man sat up, quite inspirited by the recollection, and
discovered that, with the exception of some dizziness and stiffness,
there was nothing much amiss with him.
"But some one very nearly got his hunting-knife into you," said
Geiger-Hans, dryly, "and there would have been an end of your learning
to be young. Nevertheless, you have capabilities--yes, some
capabilities." He wound up his string, twanged it, and nodded over it.
A cock crew in the forest farmyard. A robin was singing somewhere amid
a babel of chirping birds. The breeze, balm-scented, flew straight in
from the pines and fanned Stephen's head and throat. He lifted his hand
to his open shirt and looked inquiringly at the musician, who nodded
again.
"You were stunned by the fall," said Geiger-Hans, "with that brute on
the top of you. Fortunate for you that I caught his hand at the right
moment! And thereupon the little man, the Herr Inspector, you know, ran
out screaming, 'No bloodshed, d'Albignac!' ... It is his one good point:
he is merciful of life."
"The little man? ... D'Albignac?" Steven echoed the words in wonder.
"You measured his cheek charmingly--I mean d'Albignac's," said the
fiddler. "We two might do great things together yet. Ay, that was the
d'Albignac. I dare say you have heard the name, in Cassel. Chouan once,
then renegade, now Grand-Veneur (and Great Pandar) to his Majesty of
Westphalia. Such is d'Albignac."
"Majesty? ... King Jerome?"
"Did you think," said Geiger-Hans, compassionately, "that Meyer and
Schmidt were usual names for Frenchmen? Why, the precious _incognito_
would not have deceived a cat."
The dawn was growing softly outside, but there was sudden vivid light in
Steven's brain.
"Then--then," he stammered, struggling to his feet--"the lady----"
"The lady, my poor young friend, is naught but a dancing girl from
Genoa, whom that wise and powerful man, the Emperor Napoleon, sent two
emissaries to remove--it is not the first time he has had to attend to
such matters--from her charming apartments in 'Napoleonshoehe,' where
her presence conduced neither to the King's dignity, nor to the Queen's.
The great Napoleon is mighty particular about her Westphalian Majesty's
dignity. Our ardent little sovereign, however, determined to snatch a
last meeting; hence the romantic attack and rescue--the casual meeting!"
"O Lord!" said Steven, and passed his hand across his mouth, as if the
shadow of the yearned-for kiss polluted it.
"And so that Meyer fellow is----"
"Our brother Jerome--yes."
The fiddler lifted a sweet, worn voice, while his bow danced lightly on
the strings and chanted to the absurd lilt--
"_Nous allons chercher un royaume_
_Pour not' p'tit frere Jerome._"
"'Twas the song of the soldiers before Jena," he explained. "_Pardi!_ a
taking ragamuffin tune! When our friends last night heard it, comrade,
they took to their heels."
And as Steven stared with ever-increasing wonder, Geiger-Hans proceeded,
in his mocking voice:
"'The wicked flee when none pursueth!' If there is one person the
kinglet here is afraid of, 'tis of the great Emperor. Many a merry
prank have I played on King Jerome's nerves! He holds to his high gilt
throne, and knows that the mighty hand that placed him on it can pick
him off it again. Big brother, on his side, knows how to punish too,
when little brother passes the bounds. And the small man thinks the big
man has spies on him at every corner. He has his own way of knowing
things, has Caesar ... if not the ways yonder gingerbread monarch
fancies."
"And he thought you were the Emperor's spy?" hazarded Steven, and looked
with some doubt at his companion. A mystery the man certainly was!
"Many things have I been, comrade," said the fiddler, answering the
look, "but never in any man's pay, be assured of that. Nevertheless,
the Kingmaker keeps an eye on his puppets from the midst of
victory--many eyes on him, indeed. And Jerome has taken into his head
that your humble servant is the most cunning of Napoleon's eyes. The
mistake is amusing enough, and I make it serve my own use at times. I
had but to play such a simple air, you see, and his Majesty of
Westphalia--his choice circle----" He made a wide gesture and a sound
mimicking a flutter of wings: "Phew! Gone, scared like frightened
sparrows!"
"Gone?" echoed Steven; and though she was but a dancing-girl from Genoa,
and a baggage at that, his heart sank.
"Gone," said the fiddler--"gone before the dawn. So is Sidonia! Aha,
Sir Count, short skirts, it seems to you, make the peasant, and fine
jewels, no doubt, the great lady! Ha, ha! to see your lordship draw
away from the touch of her tresses! She brought you her own pillow last
night, and wept over you and thought you were dead--till I bid her put
her hand over your heart and feel its solid beating. 'Tis a noble
child--and a greater race you will never meet in your travels. Why, 'tis
the heiress of the country. Oh, there were no lies about her! The girl
visits her foster-mother for a holiday and a treat now and then. You
never looked at her foot or her delicate eyebrow: she was but a peasant
girl, _pardi_! Jerome has a keener eye----"
"Jerome!" echoed Steven, and, he knew not why, the fiercest spasm of
anger he had yet felt seized him then.
"Jerome pinched her chin, as you saw," said the fiddler, "and,
therefore, back we packed her, Friedel and I, to her own castle, for
safety.... Meanwhile you slept. Come, come, never look so downcast," he
went on with sudden change of tone. "Is it not instructive to know how
the ruler of Westphalia passes his time while all the best manhood of
his country is warring for the Empire--burnt in Spain, frozen in Russia?
And, at any rate, have you not had a night you will remember out of all
your dull, regulated youth? Come forth and I will show you something I
warrant me you have never seen before--sunrise in the forest."
The yard seemed very silent and empty. They were all gone--gone like a
dream!
"Come," said the musician, "look up. Have you ever seen so limpid a
blue? Look at the trees enveloped in mystery; see the silver shine of
the dew over every blade; hark to it as it drips from leaf to leaf.
'Tis every day a new creation! Oh, I could make you Dawn-music, if
there were not such music already for you to hear! Hark to the
whispering, the lisping, the murmurs! Do you mark the birds--that is
your last night's robin at the top of the larch tree; he is singing
under his breath now, watching the horizon; he will pipe when the sun
leaps up. Do you hear the humming of the bees? There is thyme in
mother Friedel's garden; and that is the sharp tinkle of the brook over
the stones. Eh, my soul, what a symphony! The breath of the forest--do
you feel it?--cool and living; the savour of the crushed, dew-drenched
moss under your feet--do you taste it? And the smell of the beech
leaves and the incense of the pines? And now watch. Behold how the
forest is lit up as with some inner fire! Dark and colourless stand the
trees nearest to us. Look within, how the flame grows, how it
spreads--live gold, live emerald! And see there--oh, the scarlet on
those fir trunks! The sun has risen!..."
The fiddler stopped speaking. Looking back upon it, Steven afterwards
wondered if he had spoken at all, or had only made his thoughts felt.
But here his strange companion came to a standstill in their slow
wandering and took off his battered old hat and waved it.
"Farewell!" said he. "Mother Friedel will give you breakfast, and son
Friedel is already on the look-out for your lost retinue. Farewell,
noble Count ... remember to be young!"
"Shall I never meet you again?" cried Steven, suddenly. His heart sank
unaccountably, and he added with hesitation: "Comrade?"
Geiger-Hans, moving away into the forest with light, fantastic step,
paused and smiled mysteriously.
"Who knows?" said he, over his shoulder. "If you know how to
seek--why--who knows?"
He plunged down an opening in the trees, where the sun made a golden
path before him through the yellowing oak trees; and the larches on
either side were on fire with green flame.
*CHAPTER V*
*THE INVITATION OF THE ROAD*
"_A vagrant's morning wide and blue,_
_In early fall, when the wind walks, too;_
_A lengthening highway, cool and brown,_
_Alluring up and enticing down...._"
BLISS CARMAN.
There never yet had been question of a maiden in the life of Steven Lee,
up to this September day. With his Austrian tradition, Austrian pride of
race and estate, he had some very clear notions of the noble blood and
the territorial importance that would have to be hers who should be
honoured some day as the choice of Waldorff-Kielmansegg.
Yet your young patrician, as a rule, is not chary of granting himself
that interlude of amusement, dissipation--experience of life before
marriage--commonly known as "sowing his wild oats." It was, perhaps,
because of his English education, hearty, wholesome, sporting; by reason
too, no doubt, of the English deliberation inherited from his mother,
joined to his own fastidious self-sufficiency, that he had never felt
the want of a woman's share in his life. The pretty chin of a peasant
girl had never tempted his fingers. Little Sidonia of the forest house,
had she been ten times more beautiful, had never needed to wield her
plaits as flails to beat down his enterprise. Had not the fiddler's
music got into his veins, that strange night; had not the insidious
white wine mounted to his head, he had surely never succumbed so rapidly
to the fascination of the young Italian. Yet her chief attraction, in
his eyes, had been, not the parted, dewy lips, not the violet gaze of
her eyes, but the false attribution to her of birth and breeding, born
of his own imagination. The moonlight kiss he had suddenly yearned for
was to have been snatched from a great lady--faugh! not from a
_ballerina_! Here had, indeed, been a lesson, a humiliation--all the
more deep-felt because the punishment seemed disproportionate to the
single lapse. His mind went back to it sullenly, once and again. There
were men, he knew, to whom the true character of the fair traveller
would have been an additional allurement. He was not of them.
His fastidiousness revolted, almost as a woman's might, no less from the
thought of any inferiority of status, than from the knowledge that where
he condescended to favour, others had already carried their easy
victories.
Yet, although the image of the dancer lingered no more pleasantly in his
fancy than did that of the little patrician--disdainfully unnoticed in
her peasant garb--that night of adventure in the forest had left a deep
stamp upon the young man; but the chief memory for him, the one
personality towards which his thoughts constantly reverted, was that of
the grey-haired roadside fiddler. He had met a king yonder night, but
it was the vagrant he longed to see again. He had fought for his life
with one of the most notorious rufflers in Europe, but the scenes he
re-lived, with the fond dalliance of a slow-thinking youth, was the
meeting on the road in the rosy sunset and the parting in the green
forest dawn. He was haunted by the man's smile, by his voice, by the
way of his hands--above all, his music.
The taunting music, with its yearning, its suggestion, ever alluring and
ever elusive, played to him by night and day. It seemed as if he should
come to his old self again, could he but encounter that strange
companion once more and test the emptiness of his fascination, the folly
and absurdity of it! At least, this was what he told himself, to excuse
his own inconceivable action. For here was he actually ranging the
country, in search of what? A sort of fiddling vagabond. A fellow,
moreover, who had rated his nobility at such insolent cheapness; had
slighted him; had mocked, chided; had treated him as no one, since
childhood, had presumed to treat the important young nobleman.
But it was an obsession: idle to try and reason it away. No, he would
never rest till his desire was accomplished.
So he wandered along the Thuringian ways, making stealthy inquiries here
and there; fruitlessly, but always lured on from village to village,
round and about the great forest district, where, he was credibly
informed, the fiddler was wont to roam about this time of year;
constantly met with the tidings that, but the day before, but last
night, but two hours ago, the wanderer had been seen to pass along that
very road. The gracious gentleman would surely catch him on the highway
to Helmstadt; at the farmhouse of Groenfeld, where he always lingered;
at the fair in the next hamlet, where he was absolutely promised!
Sometimes it seemed as if the very trail of his music hung in the air;
there was something fantastic in the constant presence, always escaping
him.
Steven, fully conscious of the absurdity of the situation, set his teeth
in still more dogged determination, as the days went by. And the
pursuit, started at first half idly, now became a thing of earnestness,
a chase almost passionate.
"I told Geiger-Hans about the fine young nobleman that was always
looking for him," called out a sunburnt girl one morning, as he passed
for the second time through her green-embowered village.
Steven halted. He was on foot, after his fashion, tired with his
fruitless tramp, out of temper.
"That was very kind of you," retorted he, sarcastically. "And what said
the fellow?"
The girl's teeth flashed in her tanned face. She poised her bucket on
the rim of the well, and shrugged her shoulder archly.
"Geiger-Hans said to me," she giggled: "'If one wants to be followed,
one must first retire--remember that, Maedel,' he said. He said that to
me," she went on, "because of the lad I'm after."
Steven turned away with a "pish!" of scorn for such low dallying, and an
uneasy sense of doubt that the fiddler's avoidance of him was
deliberate. As he swung away from her, the girl called after him
good-naturedly:
"If the gracious gentleman will go to Wellenshausen, he will surely find
Geiger-Hans sooner or later. He is never far from the Burg, this time
of year."
"Pah!" thought Steven, "shall I waste more time in running down this
beggar? The folk here-abouts must think me as crazy as himself! They
are all in league to make me tramp. I vow this is some trick of the
vagabond. I think I see myself squatting at a wretched village, humbly
waiting Master Fiddler's pleasure."
And yet, to Wellenshausen, he next day found his way.
Thus Steven Lee, Count Waldorff-Kielmansegg, a young man of usually
epicurean tastes, chose to linger in God-forsaken, out-of-the-way
corners of Westphalia, this September in the year of wars, 1813.
In the eyes of his valet this was incomprehensible; seriously annoying;
indeed, a matter for much head-shaking. Instead of making for the gay
capital of King Jerome and enjoying himself "like a gentleman," he hung
about the outskirts of the Thuringian Forest and haunted the inns of
half-deserted townships, of poverty-stricken villages on the high
imperial road. While the postilions and the above-mentioned valet
cursed the thin wine and the gross fare, while the horses of the
travelling-chaise fretted the hours away in unworthy stables, their lord
and master took solitary rambles on foot, as if in search of no one knew
what, only to return, haughty as usual, weary and discontented.
When a halt was ordered for the night in the hamlet of Wellenshausen,
instead of pushing on to the decent town of Halberstadt, as he had
expected, valet Franz felt the situation more than his lively Viennese
spirit could endure and vowed he would resign. He tapped his forehead
significantly as his master strolled out of the vine-grown guest-house,
looking up and down the street in his singular, expectant fashion.
"There's question of a maiden," said postilion Peter, grimacing over his
mug, "or else the devil's in it."
Further than this their diagnosis of the master's state of mind could
not go.
* * * * *
Albeit on the skirt of the low lands, the village of Wellenshausen was
yet still of the mountain. It rode, so to speak, a bold buttress of the
distant wooded range, and was sheltered to the north by an imposing
crag, that rose, pinnacle-like, so detached and huge that it would have
seemed inaccessible but for the testimony of the castle perched on its
summit--the far-famed Burg of Wellenshausen. From the flank of this
mount, a torrent of black waters, strangely cold at all times, born in
some mysterious and dreaded cavern of the rocks, rushed, foaming brown;
and, on its way to the plain, cut the village in two.
Steven Lee gazed upwards at the old Burg, frowning of aspect at most
times, but just now, as it caught on its narrow windows the rays of a
sinking sun, shining rosily upon the valleys. His fancy was wafted up
for a moment to the height on a wing of airy romance, when a clamour of
children's voices turned his attention in a new direction. A string of
ragged urchins was rushing in the direction of the torrent. Over the
bridge a man's figure was approaching at a swinging pace. It stopped
for a moment on the summit of the rough stone arch; and the notes of a
fiddle, in lively measure, rose above the children's shouts and the roar
of the waters. Dancing, singing, leaping, catching at his coattails,
they surrounded the musician and followed him. He advanced like the
magic piper of the legend.
Steven stood still in the middle of the way; a gleam in his eye, the
sunset radiance on his smiling face. The player came up to him and
greeted him with a bow, his fiddle still at his chin the while he
finished his stave.
"Good evening, my lord Count. We have met before," said he. His tone
was placidly courteous, if his glance mocked.
"And I well-nigh despaired of our meeting again," returned the young
man, with some show of emotion. "Your music has been running in my
head--implacably--all these days. I think you must have bewitched me!"
There was a note almost of reproach in his voice; and yet he blushed as
he spoke, ashamed of his own eagerness in such a quarter.
"Why," said the other, cruelly, "I fear you're but a dull lad. Great
Apollo, could we change places, I would need no old man's company!--Nay,
now, children, let a gentleman speak to a gentleman." He paused in a
moment's meditation, looked through the inn gateway, then glanced up
swiftly at the distant towering strong house. "Is it possible your
lordship has chosen this barren village for a stage? I see your
attendants supping--right sadly--in the arbour yonder. Will you bid me
to supper also, comrade?"
He looped his threadbare sleeve into Steven's fine broadcloth. The
urchins shouted with laughter.
The young aristocrat frowned, started; then, with sudden sweetness,
submitted, and presently found himself sitting in front of his guest in
the darkening bin room, to the respectful astonishment of mine host of
"The Three Storks." Had the grinding struggle for existence, in such
precarious war times, left a spark of imagination in the few plain wits
with which Nature had gifted this honest man, he might have found
something beyond mere amazement in the contrast between his two
patrons--something of the old romance of which the German roads had once
been full, before the cruel realities of foreign subjection, the flat
prose of poverty, had driven legend and fancy from the land.
The fiddler's attire had more pretensions to neatness than on that other
sunset hour when Steven had first met him, bare-breasted to the evening
airs and powdered with the dust of the long way. His garments were
distinctive enough, for all their poverty, and set off the fine line,
the close muscle, of a figure lean to emaciation yet a model of alert
strength. Breeches of home-spun clung to thigh and knee; thick knitted
hose and brass-buckled shoes of country make could not conceal the
elegance of leg and foot. The shirt-collar carelessly open, the
abundant grey hair, quaintly tied up in the cue of twenty years bygone,
emphasized a symmetry of head and throat which, in a higher walk of
life, would doubtless have been termed noble. The tan of the clear-cut,
ascetic face was singular against the silver of the hair. The whole
personality was indeed made of anomalies:--the wild fire of the eyes
under brows melancholy and philosophic; the air at once of recklessness
and of self-command, of indifference and fierceness; the geniality and
the illimitable scorn; the weariness of all things, the utter worn
distaste which was written in every line of his countenance and might
have belonged to the pitiless disillusion of old age; the swift energy
of the delicate impulsive hands, the quick turn of the head and the
flashing glance which made him half as young again at times than that
middle-age which yet was unmistakably his. Here was a creature who
seemed to know too much and to despise everything; who read the yet
unspoken thought, and did not hide his scorn of it; who yet drew
confidence as a woman might, and could lay his touch on the sources of
tears and laughter. If angels or demons walked in human guise, this
Geiger-Hans might have passed for one or the other, according to the
mood of his company or according, rather, to the candour of their souls.
Against so strange a being the personality of his young entertainer
stood clear as light of day. No mystery there! Four words could sum it
up: pride, youth, strength, and comeliness.
The innocence of his youth looked out through his full grey eyes; the
pride of his birth sat on his eyebrow, drooped in his eyelid, quivered
in his nostrils; the joy of his untried strength smiled unconsciously in
his red lips; there was life in the very wave of his brown hair. The
healthy pallor of the cheek only emphasized how generous was the quick
blood, and how ingenuous the nature that sent it rushing with every
passing emotion. Scarcely conscious yet of the value of the power he
wielded, the young man nevertheless gave his orders in careless tones,
as one to whom wealth had always been an attribute of existence. The
sober richness of his garb, the sable of the travelling cloak that hung
over his chair, became his youthful nobility. And there he sat and
pressed the vagrant musician to sour wine and harsh fare with the airs
of a magnate at his own luxurious table.
The fiddler was unwontedly silent. He had assumed, in his sardonic way,
an attitude of exceeding propriety. He addressed mine host and his
unkempt daughter mincingly; so that, between laughter, wonder, and a
little fear, their service became complicated. And Steven, feeling
himself subtly mocked, felt the scarlet burn in his cheeks, but became
only the grander and the more high-born, because of his own
embarrassment.
Yet, now and again, the musician's gaze would rest upon his entertainer
not unkindly. Nay, more, there was pleasure, almost caress, in the look
with which the bright eyes would sweep from Count Steven's blushing face
down the long limbs that still held the grace and something of the
delicacy of adolescence in spite of their unmistakable vigour.
The slattern girl put a dish of hard green pears between the two, with a
slam. The fiddler raised melancholy orbs upon Steven:
"Well, sir," he said, "I cannot congratulate you. The bread is sour.
Sour is not the word for the wine. It is scarcely of such stuff that
our Ovid sang in his 'Art of Love'--
"'Vina parant animos, faciuntque caloribus aptos.'
I have good teeth, but truly this sausage baffled them. I am
unappeased." He struck his lean middle. "I shall have no spirit to
play another note to-night. (Keep your curses for better uses, friend;
they will not sweeten the cup.) Now," said he, luxuriously stretching
out his legs and gazing at them with a musing air, "I could have done
with a capon, methinks, and a beaker of ripe old Burgundy. What say
you? Have _you_ supped? Nay? Neither have I. Come, Sir Count, I
invite your High Seriousness to an entertainment where nothing short of
the best cellar and the fairest lady of the countryside will satisfy
us." Then, regarding Steven's bewildered face for a while in silence,
he went on with sudden earnestness. "The highborn English lady and the
estimable Austrian nobleman, who are jointly responsible (as I
understand) for your existence, have spoilt the dish for want of a
little spice. Heavens, sir! have you never a smile in you, never a
spark for the humorous side of things? Why, youth should itself be the
laughter of life. Come with me--you have much to learn."
And leaving the pears further unheeded, he took the young man by the arm
and led him to the door. The village was now steeped in grey shadow, but
the strong house on the height still glowed like a ruby. Pointing to
it:
"I brought you once," said the vagrant, "into somewhat low company.
That was the story of our first meeting. To-night, if you will, I shall
bring you into high."
"O Jemine!" exclaimed the landlord, who had been hanging open-mouthed,
ready for the roar at Geiger-Hans' humour. "Yonder, where the Lord
Burgrave locks up his lady?"
"Even so," said the hungry fiddler, imperturbably. "And you must lend
your donkey and little Georgi, and see that this gentleman's valise is
safely conveyed upwards. For yonder we spend the night."
Yonder, where the sullen lord of the district reigned in traditional
terror, even in absence; where (it was whispered) he had immured a
six-months' bride--jealous as any Bluebeard. Yonder in the old Burg,
where ancient horrible legends of fierce dogs to devour unwelcome
guests, of bottomless oubliettes, of rayless dungeons, of torture
chambers (no doubt based on truth enough in bygone centuries), still
lived in significance with tenants and vassals. Nay, was it not well
known that none were allowed ingress or egress to the castle but the
Baroness Sidonia, the Burgrave's niece, who had lived all her life with
him and, being of his own blood, and little better than a child, could
not be said to count? The innkeeper looked doubtfully at Geiger-Hans,
compassionately at his guest. Vague memories flitted through his mind
of some fantastic tale, heard to the murmurous accompaniment of his
mother's spinning wheel, wherein the devil met ingenuous youths on their
wanderings and tempted them to their doom.
All knew, of course, that the musician was a man of humour; still, the
freak seemed beyond a joke. And yet, on an imperial gesture, the host of
"The Three Storks" withdrew without further parley to carry out the
crazy vagrant's order.
"Don't make a fool of me," whispered Steven, in his singular adviser's
ear.
"Why, it is the wisdom of youth to be foolish and it is its privilege to
be foolish with grace.--O, could you but learn that!" interrupted the
other, impatiently. "No, not to-night, dear children, but to-morrow ...
to-morrow you shalt dance your feet off. I am a great person to-night:
I am supping in the old Burg."
"Oh!" said the children, who had gathered like sparrows on their
fiddler's reappearance. "Oh!" And awestruck they scattered.
"That Geiger-Hans...!" said the landlord, as by-and-by he watched his
guests depart. "He bewitches all, great and small. But this is a
strong one.... There they go. Maybe they'll never come back!" He had
to the utmost the village terror of the menace of the Burg, inherited
through centuries of high and low justice dispensed by Burgraves of
Wellenshausen. "Dungeons, up there, and trapdoors, and none ever the
wiser. _Herr Jemine_!"
[Illustration: Wellenshausen]
*CHAPTER VI*
*THE BURG*
"_I will be master of what is my own;_
_She is my goods, my chattels, she is my house;_
_And here she stands, touch her whoever dare!_"
(_Taming of the Shrew_).
"Sidonia," said the lady up in the turret-room, "I will not endure it!"
As this remark was made at least five times a day, the hearer was less
impressed than the desperate air of the speaker demanded.
"I will throw myself from the window," continued the Burgravine,
carefully propping her plump elbows on the stone sill to gaze down with
safety.
"If you'd only come out sometimes, and walk with me!" said little
Sidonia, smiling.
"Walk, child? Your uncle knew well what he was doing when he stuck me
up on this diabolic crag. I have not a pair of shoes that would last me
half-way down. And merely to look at the road that leads to this place!
Oh!"--she covered her eyes with her hand and shuddered--"it makes me
reel with giddiness!"
"It was very lovely in the forest," said Sidonia. "The wild raspberries
are nearly ripe, and----"
"Raspberries! Alas! is that what you ought to think of at your age?
You, too--'tis monstrous cruelty!"
"The fawns are growing and are so sweet----"
"Fawns! Fawns? 'Tis a lover should be sweet to you. As for me--oh
woe!"
Sidonia, slight, slim, and sun-kissed as a young woodland thing herself,
grew crimson behind her aunt's dejected head.
"Why--why, then, does Uncle Ludovic keep us here?" she queried.
Uncle Ludovic's lady flounced round in her chair, her eyes darting
flames, a flood of words rising to her cherry lips--
"Why? Because, my love, the creature is a _Barbe-Bleue_. And to be a
Bluebeard, child, means that if a wretched woman has been fool enough to
trust you, you think you have a right to chop her head off if she
disobeys; and meanwhile to shut her up to prevent her having so much as
a chance."
"I wonder why you married Uncle Ludo?" mused the girl. Her eyes were
dreaming, across the fair plain-land, into the distance. To give your
life to some one quite old and quite stout, with a grizzled double chin
and veins that swell on a red forehead (ran the fleeting thought), when,
about the ways of the forest, a young knight might be met wandering ...
a knight with hair that crisped back from forehead of ivory, with eyes
that were scornful and full of fire!
"Why did I marry him?" returned the Burgravine, sharply. "Ah, he was
very different then, my dear! The monster! how he deceived me! Do you
think I should ever have consented if I had not known that he was King
Jerome's minister; if he had not promised me that we should live at
Cassel; if I had not been told that one was more gay at Cassel now than
at Paris itself? And honourably I was served, was I not? Ten days at
Cassel, while there was scarce a cat stirring, the King called away by
the Emperor, then snatched off to this place, this bald, hateful eagle's
crag, at the first hint of any gaiety. Men talk of their honour, my
love--a big word behind which they can play any trick upon us poor women
their humour may prompt." Her voice broke shrilly. Then she added,
with sudden calmness: "And if I had had a silver groschen to my name,
you may imagine 'tis not old Wellenshausen's second wife that I should
be--but some fine young man's first one. Sidonia, how unfair is fate!"
She looked enviously at the girl. "There are you, with all your money,
who will never have a suitable notion of what to do with it, while
I--I----" She snapped two taper fingers together sharply and twisted a
dear little plump shoulder well-nigh free of the fashionable Viennese
robe, which looked so oddly out of place in the mediaeval severity of
the tower room.
There was silence, while Sidonia reflected. The Burgravine had a way of
opening strange perspectives before the young mind that had hitherto
known but the simplest and straightest outlook on life. Wonderful
customs had the new mistress brought to the old Burg--odd fads of
fashion, new hours of meals, new liveries and unknown demands on the
servants' attention. A prisoner, she assumed supreme authority within
the limits of her prison. It sometimes seemed as if the very stones in
the old wall were echoing surprise. Sidonia, who had run wild within
them, near seventeen years of happy unexacting childhood, found herself
frequently marvelling at a code of morality so startling in its novelty
as to range beyond her judgment. She felt that she could as little fit
herself to this new aunt's view of existence, as her modest country
limbs to one of those outrageous garments of Viennese mode, over which
the Burgravine could sigh a whole morning through in rapture and
regret--lamenting, with the voluble aid of Mademoiselle Eliza, her
French maid, the opportunities lost in this God-forsaken corner of the
world.
"And pray," said Bluebeard's wife, after a pause (never a very long one
with her, for, if Sidonia had the gift of silence which belongs to all
creatures who have lived much with nature, her Aunt Betty possessed it
not at all), "and pray, how many days is it since your uncle took the
road for Cassel, a-bursting with hypocritical sighs of farewell?"
"I don't know," said Sidonia, starting from her dream. "Ten days?"
"Ten days!" The words were echoed in a high pitch of indignation.
"Three weeks, then," amended the girl, hastily. "I really don't know;
time goes so fast."
"Time goes so fast! Oh, you--you...!" Cherry lips of scorn babbled
vainly in search of fitting epithet. "You--you're his own niece!"
Yet as life would have been distinctly duller were she to quarrel
outright with Sidonia, the Burgravine quickly turned the batteries of
her wrath to the old direction.
"Little did I think on that day, when my father, away in our dear
Austrian home, bade me hasten to the great salon and pour out coffee for
the gentleman from Hanover who had come to buy our horses--little did I
think what lay in store for me! 'You must smile on him, child,' said my
mother; 'he is an old nobleman, very rich; and if your father sells
well, it may mean a month in Vienna for you!' Ach, heavens!" said the
Burgravine, "think of me, my Sidonia, smiling, in my innocence, on
him--on him! And who was bought and sold? It was poor Betty!"
"I think it is very wrong of Uncle Ludo," asserted Sidonia, severely, a
flush rising to her sunburnt cheek. "Why, since he has married you,
will he not trust you?"
"Why? Because, having spent most of his life studying our sex, the man
now flatters himself upon a wide experience of our frailties. Because,
having so often proved how easy it is to break the marriage vow, he can
put no confidence in another's keeping it. Because," and her bosom
heaved with indignation, "Cassel is the most amusing spot at this moment
in the whole of Europe--they say it is gayer than Paris itself--and no
husband who respects himself can take his pleasure with any comfort, if
he does not feel that his wife is correspondingly bored."
"But uncle has his Chancellor's duty," resumed Sidonia, after pondering
upon these enlightening remarks.
"Chancellor's duties!" The lady drummed on the diamond panes. "Oh,
yes, my love, King Jerome requires onerous duties of his ministers, and
I've no doubt that Ludovic performs his _con amore_.--How soon will you
be eighteen?" she cried suddenly.
"In four months," said Sidonia.
"Four months--an eternity! Alas, my love, long before that I shall have
been laid in that hateful chapel of yours; in that very vault, no doubt,
where lies my predecessor--that fool of a woman who resisted such a life
as this for twenty years, and yet had the inconceivable want of tact to
die at the very moment when I was ripe to fall a prey to the monster."
"Poor Aunt Hedwige!" said Sidonia, reflectively; "she was very fat and
never unkind, and I don't think she was unhappy."
"Ha!" muttered the Burgravine, vindictively, "I'll warrant he might have
brought her to Cassel with impunity."
"He didn't, though," said Sidonia.
"No, child," pursued the other, with much rancour, "woman's place is at
home, you see, while the man is abroad--aha!" She set her teeth and
growled behind them like an angry Persian kitten. Then she snapped at
her niece: "And you haven't even the intelligence to be eighteen yet,
and be of some use for once in your life! Yes, never look so
astonished; you're not a fool, child; you know that when you are
eighteen, you will be free, and the richest woman in Thuringia--owner of
half the wretched little province; free, girl, free to do as you like,
to live where you like, to have your own establishment, to spend your
own money--and then there'd be a chance for me! Ah, but you would not
give it to me. You would let dear uncle manage as he's always managed,
and dole you out a thaler here and a louis there, and let him choose you
a nice husband ... who would not look too much into the accounts, I'll
warrant."
"Aunt Betty!" panted Sidonia. The Burgravine stopped, slightly abashed
by the fire that flashed in the child's glance. "If you can't forgive
Uncle Ludo for being your husband, don't forget that he is a man of
honour...."
"Oh, patatata!" said the lady, with a shrug, "here's mighty fine talk!
Manage your own affairs, my dear. I'll say no more."
She leaned her plump arms on the window-sill again and turned her back
on her niece with an air of determined sullenness.
Sidonia was very angry. She sat down on the high-backed chair and set
the ancient spinning wheel whirring with a hand that trembled.
"One thing is certain," she resumed in a choked voice, "if I ever do
marry, Aunt Betty, I shall choose my own husband."
"Of course, among the crowds that besiege the gay Burg of Wellenshausen,
up in the clouds, my sweet creature," said the Burgravine, without
turning her head, "you will have only _l'embarras du choix_ and
then----" But here she interrupted herself with a sharp ejaculation.
Her fingers ceased their angry tune. She swung back the window a trifle
wider and leaned out further than she had ventured upon her threat of
suicide. "Look, look!" she cried in altered tones. "Do you see? There
are two men coming up the road with a pack-horse. No, 'tis a donkey!"
[Illustration: "_Look, look, do you see? ... There are two men coming up
the road with a pack-horse. No, 'tis a donkey._"]
Sidonia sprang up and leaned out eagerly across her aunt's shoulder.
They were but a pair of children of different ages, when all was said
and done.
"It can only be the miller's boy and the gardener ... or the shepherd,"
opined she.
"Oh, yes, the very outline of humpback John and the swing of bandy
Peperl!" (This was sarcastic.) "To the hangman with these evening mists!
Now, now, see! a gentleman, or I'm a goose-girl ... a young man, or I'm
a grandmother! Poor things, how they toil!"
"Why, 'tis Geiger-Hans!" exclaimed the lady's niece, in amazement. But
it was not, surely, the sight of Geiger-Hans which brought such crimson
to her cheek.
"And who may Geiger-Hans be?" cried the Burgravine.
"My dear friend, everybody's friend, Geiger-Hans the roadside player,"
said the girl. "Why, you have heard me speak of him many a time. If he
were young and wore a plume and a dagger, people would call him a
minnesinger. And his music--ah! it moves the heart like----"
"Why, the creature's a beggar, child!" interrupted the lady, peering
down. "But the other----"
She drew back from the window in great fluster. "It's quite clear that
you and I have company at last. Oh, for once I will be mistress here!
They shall be admitted, _maugre_ my ogre! Call Eliza! Get you into a
decent gown, for Heaven's sake! My rose taffeta--it shall be my rose
taffeta. And you?--Wear anything but white at your peril!"
*CHAPTER VII*
*GUESTS OF CHANCE*
"_'Twould be a wildish destiny_
_If we, who thus together roam_
_In a strange land and far from home,_
_Were in this place the Guests of Chance!_
_Yet who would stop or fear to advance...?_"
WORDSWORTH.
"The Lord Burgrave is not at the castle. The gracious Lady Burgravine
never receives visitors."--Thus Martin the gatekeeper, thrusting his
ugly head out of the _vasistas_ of the great nail-studded door.
The last of the sunlight had faded. Grey and sheer rose the Burg walls
and turrets above the visitors' heads; sheer and grey fell the
mountainside away at their feet.
"Mark now, comrade, for here are we back in the Middle Ages," whispered
Geiger-Hans to his companion. Aloud he cried to the porter, who was
slowly withdrawing his countenance: "Half a minute, friend, and let us
examine your statement. That the Lord Burgrave is away, I am aware; but
that your lady does not receive has still to be proved. How if we two
come upon the invitation of His Excellency himself? Consider me that."
Through the gathering gloom Steven peered at the musician's mocking
features. Martin the doorward stared in silence for a moment; then,
with a great groaning of bars and grinding of keys, set the heavy door
ajar--not to admit them, indeed, but that he might stare the closer.
"Martin," pursued the fiddler, gravely, "your name had better have been
Thomas: you were born an unbeliever."
"My orders are," said Martin, in surly tones, "to admit no one."
"Fellow," said the fiddler, "a servant's orders, I take it, are not like
the Ten Commandments, but subject to variations according to another's
pleasure. What if I tell you that, knowing your master----"
"You? Know my master!" The doorward's teeth showed like an old dog's
in a grin, half scorn, half doubt.
"Aye, we have but recently parted. By the same token, friend, he is now
at Halberstadt and may be here to-morrow. Meanwhile, as it is damp and
night falls, admit us to your stone hall and let us sit, for you will be
wise to gaze at us a while longer before you take upon yourself to drive
off the lord Burgrave's friend and the lady Burgravine's kinsman from
doors to which they have been invited. Look at that gentleman. There is
a gentleman for you, from the crown of his noble head to the sole of his
high-born foot! And look at me! Ah, you know me! Geiger-Hans, am I
not? Beware, Martin, great people have their disguises."
Martin showed signs of agitation and yielding. Geiger-Hans, keeping him
under the raillery of his glance, pursued his argumentative advantage:
"Now, cease scratching that grey stubble, and I will tell thee what to
do to save thee from a false step. Go thou to the gracious lady, and
ask her if her lord has not advised her of the probable visit of two
travellers, and request of her whether (these two gentlemen having
presented themselves) it is not her wish, in obedience to her lord, that
they should be admitted. Meanwhile, we shall sit on this bench, and I
shall beguile my noble companion's weariness with a little air of
music."
The porter withdrew slowly, without another word, but not without
casting backward glances of doubt upon the new-comers.
"How do you dare?" asked Steven, fixing almost awestruck eyes upon
Geiger-Hans, who, nursing his instrument upon one knee, was coolly
winding up the strings.
"Dare, I?" He twanged the cord, shook his head, and fell to screwing
again. "Why should I not dare? What have I to fear? What have I to
lose? We are sure of a welcome, I tell you--of a supper, and of a good
joke."
"Your magnificent audacity!" said Steven, sitting gingerly down at the
end of the bench, and looking at the other's lean figure as if it had
been that of the Prince of Lies himself. "Positively, I myself could
hardly believe you were not speaking the truth."
"And so I was," said the other, composedly. "Not one word but was solemn
verity."
"Oh, but stay! How come I to be kinsman to the Burgravine?"
"You are Austrian," quoth the musician. "So is she, as I happen to
know. Both the finest flower of the Empire's aristocracy. If you're
not related somewhere ... I'll eat my fiddle."
"Upon my word!" ejaculated Steven, opening his eyes very wide. "I
suppose it is on the same kind of plea that you have your acquaintance
with the Burgrave. An intimate acquaintance?"
"Intimate. I have said so. The Burgrave of Wellenshausen is a type
that is true to itself."
"And he has invited us to visit the Burg?" Steven's tones broke into
mirth.
"Indubitably." The player raised his fiddle and drew a long note from
it that was a musical mockery of the young man's high key. "The husband
who locks up a light-hearted wife alone in a solitary tower invites in
terms most positive every gentleman of heart and spirit in the country
to come and console her. M. de Wellenshausen is at Halberstadt, on the
King's business--I was playing at the Crown Hotel. He will be here
to-morrow. And he said to me: 'Friend'--mark you, _friend_ (the
Burgrave had dined satisfactorily; the wine is excellent at the Crown),
'you must come and play that tune at my castle.' He's fond of music,
you see. 'Twas a promise. And the only person who will lie in the
whole matter to-day is the noble lady Burgravine. She is dying by inches
of _ennui_, and she will--be quite certain of it!--she will assure the
porter that our visit has indeed been announced to her. 'Tis to be
regretted, but such is the way of women who eat their hearts away in
lonely strong houses."
He caught his fiddle to his breast: liquid melody flowed out into the
empty hall, and went echoing down long passages and up into vaulted
roofs. Like rabbits from a warren, now a scullion popped a head out of
some dark corner, now a rosy wench half opened a side door and peeped,
smiling. There awoke all about the sleepy castle a sound of skirmishing
and tittering; now a patter of bare feet; now the tramp of boots that no
precautions could hush. At length the majestic form of the major-domo
himself appeared before the vagrants, magnificent in his silver chain
and silk stockings and buckle shoes. Geiger-Hans hushed his music and
leaned over to Steven to whisper in his ear:
"See, he has been putting on his grand garb of ceremony to deliver his
lady's little lie."
"The high-born, my mistress, had not expected you before to-morrow,"
said the butler, with a deep bow to Steven. He cast a fish-like eye of
astonishment upon the fiddler, but, nevertheless, pursued: "Will your
honour follow me to your apartment?" Again he stared at the musician,
who nimbly rose and bowed.
[Illustration: "_The high-born, my mistress, had not expected you before
to-morrow,_" _said the butler, with a deep bow to Steven._]
"My honour will also follow," he said blandly. "Our valise is on the
donkey's back, at the door; see to it, my man."
* * * * *
If Geiger-Hans were surprised at his own success, it was only the
humorous twitch of his eyebrows that betrayed the fact. He was of
those, apparently, whose talent for seizing opportunities generally
evoke the belief that they have created them.
"Comrades should share and share alike," said he presently, laying down
Steven's brush, which he had been wielding dexterously on his own
locks--"lend me a black ribbon for my queue--it is out of mode, but I am
of the old stock. I have been shaved _a velours_ to-day--'twas an
inspiration! A cloud of powder would complete me, but you new-century
bucks know not of these refinements. Nay, but here is a pot of the
finest Parma, as I live! For the chin and cheek of _milord_ after the
razor, no doubt? Now shall you see how it became the countenance of a
better-looking generation.--I think that black suit of yours so neatly
folded in the corner of our valise is, perhaps, what would best grace my
gravity. Yes. And a ruffle shirt.... Thank you. Ah! ... And those
violet silk stockings."
Steven stood hypnotized.
"Your eyes will positively drop out," said the fiddler, "if you stare
any more." He drew a snuff-box from his discarded coat, and tapped it
with his finger. "A pinch is but a poor thing, if a man has not a frill
to his wrist," he said. And he was apparently not ill-pleased to see
how Steven marvelled at the grace with which he swung his borrowed
laces, the air with which he flipped an invisible atom from his cuff.
He took a step, as though his legs had never known but silk. Steven's
suit, if a little large, hung on his figure with a notable fitness.
"As I live!" cried Count Waldorff-Kielmansegg, with a loud laugh of
discovery, "a gentleman, after all!"
Geiger-Hans drew his black brows together with his swift frown.
"Your equal, you mean, doubtless?" said he, dryly. "You do me too great
honour." Then his eyes softened again, as in his turn he surveyed his
companion. "Come," said he, "I would give all my superior years for
some of your youthful disabilities. I cherish no illusions as to which
of us the fair Burgravine will deem the better worth her notice."
And, indeed, when the two were ushered into the long, dim, tapestry-hung
saloon, the bright eyes of the lady of the castle merely swept
Geiger-Hans, amazingly distinguished as he was in his borrowed plumes,
to rest with complacency on the youth who followed him.
Steven held his head high, after the fashion of your shy, self-conscious
fellow. But his head being one upon which Nature had set a noble stamp,
this became it well. If there was pride in the arch of his eyebrow and
the curl of his lip, there was, likewise, race to justify it. Betty,
the Burgravine, could note as much between two flickers of her long
eyelashes; note, too, that (thank goodness!) he wore none of those new,
odious Cossack trousers, but kept to the fashion which made it worth
while for a man to have a good line to his limb; note, furthermore, that
plum-colour frac, maize waistcoat, and dove-grey kerseymeres make
excellent harmony with rose taffeta. The lady had been created for
courts, and even now, perched like a humming bird in the eyrie of a
mountain eagle, moved in a gay, trifling atmosphere of her own. And, as
he returned her gaze, Count Steven, who had also been constructed for
the high places of life, felt that he was in his element once more.
"The--the gentlemen!" announced Niklaus, with a nervous giggle. He knew
Geiger-Hans--as who did not that belonged to the country-side? But
familiarity had not so far bred contempt, and neither he nor his
compeers would have ventured to question anything the mysterious being
chose to do. Had the fiddler desired himself to be announced as the
Archangel Michael, or Prince Lucifer, or the Emperor Napoleon, or the
Wandering Jew, Niklaus would scarcely have been surprised.
The rose-red lady advanced a sweet little sandal and made a profound
curtsey. Her classic top-knot of curls was richly dark, and so was the
olive velvet of her cheek; but as she looked up slowly from her
inclination, Steven was quite startled to find that her eyes opened blue
as forget-me-nots.
"Gentlemen!" ejaculated she, translating Niklaus' clumsy Saxon German
into tripping French--it being the tone of German Courts to speak
French. The blue flowers of her eyes widened in surprise upon
Geiger-Hans. She had not known there were two _gentlemen_ when she
looked forth from the window; only the goodly youth and his roadside
guide. But this elderly person was a gentleman, no doubt about that, and
a fine one, too.... Only, so old!
And now he took the lead, as became his years.
"Madame la Comtesse," responded he; and even Steven, in spite of his
Anglo-Austrian ear, could note the exquisite purity of his Gallic
accent, "permit two travellers to express their gratitude for the
generous alacrity with which you have granted them hospitality. We had
lost our way----"
"Lost your way!" interrupted the lady; and an irrepressible smile curved
her lips upwards.
"Yes, madam," pursued the other, imperturbably; "and, with the night
coming on, in this wild and mountainous district, Heaven knows what
might not have happened to us!"
"I know not what your destination may be, sir," answered she, drawing
back with a faint air of haughtiness, "but surely yours is a strange
itinerary that took an isolated crag on the road."
"Madame," said he, "we gave ourselves infinite pains to attain this
height."
The glance towards herself, the touch at his heart, the bow, made of
these words a delicate compliment. The line of her mouth began once more
to waver.
"To have gone down again, madam, would have been impossible. Our
itinerary, as you say, is perhaps difficult to explain. If I were to
tell you that we took a wrong turning, my friend here would correct me,
for he is convinced, madam, it was the right turning, since it brought
him to your feet."
Here Steven could do nothing but bow in his turn. This he did, however,
with such youthful grace and so ardent a look, that his hostess melted
outright into smiles.
"Sir--!" said she, coyly; and the young man felt he had been eloquent
indeed.
"Count Steven Lee zu Waldorff-Kielmansegg," introduced Geiger-Hans, with
a wave of his arm.
"Lee? ... Waldorff?" quoth she, surprised.
"Steven Lee in England, Waldorff-Kielmansegg in Austria," said the
fiddler, blandly.
"_O du mein lieber Oesterreich!_" she exclaimed, singing; and the
forget-me-not eyes became suffused with the tear of sensibility.
"Waldorff-Kielmansegg of Waldeck," enumerated the master of ceremonies;
while Steven stood in dignity, conscious of his honours.
"Then we are cousins!" She clapped her soft palms; the rising emotion
was forgotten in laughter. "Positively we are cousins. I am
Schwartzenberg--Betty von Schwartzenberg--and my mother's second cousin,
Rezy Luetzow, married Tony Kielmansegg. You are welcome, my cousin."
She held out her hand. He kissed it ceremoniously; and she, bending
forward, sketched a butterfly salute on his forehead. It was the custom
in his father's country; but he had lived long enough in England for it
to have grown unfamiliar. His heart contracted with a delicious spasm,
and the blood sang in his ears. Before he knew what he was doing, he
found himself holding the taper fingers close, found his lips upon them
again.
Perhaps the lady was displeased; but, if so, she cloaked the fact with a
very pretty blush, and, as they drew apart, there could be no doubt but
that the young visitor's position was established. She now looked
expectantly towards the elder of her guests.
He stood watching them with quizzical gaze, tapping his snuff-box, one
leg becomingly advanced. She waited to hear a no less fine-sounding
introduction. But as the waiting was prolonged to almost a hint of
awkwardness:
"Will you not," said she, "Cousin Kielmansegg, return Monsieur's good
offices?"
It was Count Steven's turn to blush.
"My friend," said the fiddler, after enjoying the poor youth's agony
with a relentless eye for a second or two, "has been content to accept
my companionship as entertaining and useful to himself without inquiring
into my ancestry. But such indulgence, my gracious hostess, I cannot
claim of you. Through all the noble blood that flows in your veins,
there mingles, of course, still a drop of Mother Eve's. Permit me to
make myself known to you as Jean, Seigneur de la Viole, Marquis de
Grand-Chemin.... I lay but a couple of my poor titles at your feet."
She pondered awhile, nibbling her little finger, her delicate eyebrows
wrought as if in effort of memory. Then she said with gravity:
"Your name, sir, has an ancient sound."
"Madam," he responded, "I would not boast, but there is none more
ancient in our world."
Over again she pondered, looking down at the tip of her sandal. The
blue eyes took stock afresh, and, thereupon, sunshine chased the
gathering cloud from her face. With the air of one making up her mind
to be amused without questioning:
"You are welcome, too," she said, "Monsieur My Guest."
"Ah, madam," responded he, "pity that this, the fairest of my titles,
must needs be the most fleeting!"
Tying a blue riband into a hasty knot as she came, entered Sidonia,
almost at a run. All this time she had been striving to turn her heavy
fair tresses into the fashionable top-knot, as demonstrated by Countess
Betty--with what result her aunt's first glance of pity told her but too
clearly. She halted in her rapid advance, and stood, blushing like a
school-girl, unable to lift her eyes.
"Child," said the Burgravine, "here is my cousin, Count Kielmansegg, who
could not pass by his kinswoman in exile without personally inquiring
after her well-being." When Sidonia ventured a stealthy look, it was to
find--oh, bitter moment!--that she was unrecognized. "And this
gentleman----" pursued her aunt, with a small, sarcastic smile.
The girl, bewildered, had begun her second curtsey, when she stopped
herself with a cry of utter amazement--
"Thou, Geiger-Onkel!"
"Madam," intervened the fiddler, gravely, addressing the Burgravine,
"that is yet another of my honours--to young people who love my music, I
am the Geiger-Onkel."
"We are decidedly _en famille_ to-night," said the Burgravine, with a
trace of acidity. "But here, child," she proceeded in a meaning tone,
"your friend had better be known as Monsieur de la Viole."
"Marquis de Grand-Chemin," insistently added the vagrant, with his
courtly bow.
"Marquis de Grand-Chemin," admitted the lady. Nevertheless, it was the
arm of her cousin, the mere Count, that she took to conduct her to the
dining apartment.
*CHAPTER VIII*
*ROSES OF TRIANON*
"_As for the girl, she turned to her new being--_
_Loved, if you will: she never named it so:_
_Love comes unseen--we only see it go._"
AUSTIN DOBSON.
The servants had retired: Master Geiger-Hans' promised supper-party was
over. It had been to the full as succulent and as elegant as he had
foretold. And now, holding the stem of a long cut-glass beaker between
his second and third fingers, he was gazing abstractedly at the noble
wine. Where were his thoughts, and why was he so dull all at once, with
flower and silver before him, crystal and fine porcelain? With the ruby
waiting in his cup, too--the ruby of that noble "Clos Vougeot" before
which Bonaparte, the republican, on his way to Italy, had made his
soldiers halt and present arms as to the prince of vintages!
Geiger-Hans, who could sing over a hard crust by the dusty roadside and
give thanks for the water of the mountain stream, had he had his violin
in his hand now, its music would have been of tears.
His eye moved. It rested first on the fresh briar-rose face of the girl
with a strange look of tenderness; then it fell upon the Burgravine.
Her plump, olive shoulders half out of her gown, her exquisite little
doll face thrust forward--the whole of her an altar to admiration--she
was offering herself in eagerness, in ecstasy, to the fire that was
beginning to kindle in the hitherto decorous countenance of the youth
opposite to her. And as the musician noted this, he frowned and his
lips curled into contempt. Then his gaze sought Steven. He saw the
flush upon the boy's cheek and the light in his eye; and his frown grew
deeper. This trivial flame was none of his kindling.
He turned in his chair and looked again keenly at the silent girl.
There was something austere in the mantle of pride and shyness in which
she had wrapped herself.
"Little Mamzell Sidonia!" said he, softly. She flashed a glance at him
and her eyes filled. "Shall I make you some music?" His face relaxed
into tenderness again as he spoke.
She nodded. The corners of her mouth quivered; if she had said a word,
she must have burst into sobs.
"She but put a pillow under his head," thought the fiddler, "and that
was enough to make the flower of love blossom! Ah, youth! Poor heart!"
Once more he regarded the other pair, who were now whispering.
"After the feast, the dance. What say you?" he cried.
"Oh, the dance, the dance!" exclaimed the Burgravine, leaping to her
feet.--What a woman, what a puppet!
"Then I will play to you," went on Geiger-Hans. And grinning Niklaus was
despatched for his violin.
"It shall be a minuet," said the player after a pause, on the echo of a
sigh.
Then the Marquis de Grand-Chemin waved his bow with a flourish. The
ruffles at his wrists flew, he took a step with a grace: it was as if a
fragrance from dead Trianon roses were wafted in between the barbarous
Gothic tapestries of the Burg.
"It is the dance of great ladies and fine gentlemen," he said, beginning
a melody of bygone days, mingled with archness and subtle melancholy.
And playing, he went on, his words winding themselves with a kind of
lilt of their own into the garland of sounds: "You, sir, bow with your
hand on your heart. You take her hand and you look into her eyes.
'Ah!' say you, eloquent though silent, 'to hold those delicate
finger-tips, madam, through life ... to have the rapture of your sweet
company ... then, indeed, would every step be music!' 'Oh, sir' (says
she in the same language), 'you overpower me!' And with this she sinks
from you into a curtsey that is all dignity, all grace. Again you
bow--'of a verity you did not deserve her!' But what is this? Her hand
is in yours again. Oh, this time you draw closer to her ... you hold her
little hand aloft! The satin of her gown whispers to your damask--her
shoulder for one instant touches yours--you lead her from right to
left--with what pride, heavens! what respect! You turn her lovely form,
by the merest hint of your adoring fingers, from that side to this, that
all may see, and see again, the prize that has fallen to your lot...."
"We do not dance the minuet in our days," interrupted Steven, with
bashful resentment.
John of the Viol's delicate measures, that had rung half humorous, half
pathetic, wholly sweet, as memories of past delights must ever be,
ceased abruptly. He gave the young man a dark look as he held his bow
aloft.
"No," said he, "you are right. The minuet has gone to the guillotine.
France has brought new dances into fashion: _Ca ira, Ca ira ... Dansons
la carmagnole_!" His face grew terrible as he struck the notes of the
blood-stained gutter-song into his strings. "New dances for France,
that she may dance to her death!..."
"Fie, the ugly tune!" said Countess Betty. No shadow of the musician's
tragic passion was reflected upon her face. "Monsieur le Marquis, play
us a valse!" She caught joyfully at her own suggestion as a child its
ball. "A valse, a valse! Beau Cousin of Kielmansegg, they tell me 'tis
the rage. A pin for your old minuets!"
"A valse be it!" said Geiger-Hans. Anger was upon him, and he made his
violin chant it, setting it and the brutal irony of the "_Ca ira_" to
the rhythm of a fantastic valse. "Twirl, vapid heart and empty head!
Hold her, prance round with her, feel your goat's legs growing, you who
might have lifted your head with the gods and known the matchless
rapture of the heights! Is it for this that you are young?"
Faster and faster went the music, fevered, with mad, shrill skirl; and
faster the whirling. Beau Cousin began to pant. He held Belle Cousine
so close to him that she, too, scarce could breathe. Loose flew her
hair--one little sleeve almost broke across the heaving shoulder.
Sidonia could look no longer; she turned to the window and leaned her
hot cheek against the pane, staring at the stars with burning eyes.
Something clutched at her heart and throat with a fierce grip.
Without warning, Geiger-Hans brought his bow across his strings with a
tearing sound, and, as if a sharp sword had fallen between them, the
dancers fell apart, astonished and not a little confused.
Steven staggered and caught at the chair behind him. The Burgrave's
lady put a hand to her dishevelled tresses, then to the laces at her
bosom and grew scarlet: brow and cheek, throat and shoulder.
"You no longer dance the minuet?" said Geiger-Hans, with a little laugh,
picking at his now placid strings; and Steven thought that the man had
the laugh of a devil and that it was echoed by his instrument. "Oh, you
have a thousand reasons, sir, and so has madame, for the valse is a
fuller measure. Gracious lady, you are out of breath. May I sit beside
you awhile? And you, sir, will you not expound the first principles of
this--this graceful and elegant pastime to mademoiselle yonder, whose
youth has yet to learn the new fashion? Is it not right, Burgravine,
that these young things, after all, should foregather, while you and I
look on--you, the staid, married woman; I, the old man?"
She answered him not, save by a look of wondering offence.
"Ah, madam," he went on, as he sat down beside her, "and you are angry
with your lord and master because he shuts you up in this strong-house?
But, good heavens, it is the proof of his loving appreciation of your
value."
"Oh, ay!" she answered in high contempt, "it is a sign of strong
affection, doubtless."
"Madam, he lays his treasure where thieves cannot attain it. At least,
poor man, so he fondly trusts!"
"And therefore the unhappy treasure is to be consumed by moth and rust,"
retorted the lady.
"Madam," said the fiddler, in a low voice, "I imagine that the owner of
the treasure had reason to fear a more indelible stain----"
"How dare you!" she flashed upon him.
But he was picking his violin with a pensive air. Then he suddenly
looked up at her and smiled.
"Ah! most gracious one, if I were the happy possessor of a bird of such
brilliant plumage as yourself, I would----" He paused.
"You would what? Pray proceed." She was waiting for her triumph.
"I would open wide all the doors and bid it fly."
And then she called to him again, "How dare you!" And so insulted was
she that there came a sob into her throat.
"You see," said he, drawing an accompaniment of whispering notes to his
words, "that, after all, it is monsieur your husband's point of view
that you think the more complimentary."
"He should trust me," she whimpered.
"Madam, who knows?" he responded; "stranger things have come to pass.
Some day, perhaps, the bird will not crave for flight; it may cling to
the nest."
His fingers moved delicately; the bow swung with the gentle pliancy of
some green bough of spring--it was a measure of engaging rhythm and
playfulness; yet soft, soft as, under the eaves, the swallow's note at
dawn.
Fascinated, she cried, under her breath: "What is it?"
He answered her, "A cradle song----" and stopped.
His own face had altered indescribably. His restless eye had grown
fixed and wistful. Little Madame de Wellenshausen hung her head,
and--wonderful indeed--a tear gathered and fell!
* * * * *
Whilst Geiger-Hans thus engaged his hostess, Steven Lee, with slow
steps, had gone across the room to the girlish figure by the window. He
had grown to believe that the wanderer had some uncanny power by which
he enforced his will, after the fashion of that Mesmer of whom one had
heard so much. Sidonia turned upon him, with a sudden jerk of her chin,
a flash of her eye, as he halted beside her. Upon which he exclaimed in
amazement:
"Why, great heavens, you are the girl of the forest house!"
"You have not, I think, sir," she answered him, "eyes that see quick or
far; it is, no doubt, your town breeding."
The colour was slowly fading from her cheeks. She held herself very
stiff and proud. But he was still all eager over his discovery.
"Geiger-Hans told me how you brought me your pillow," said he, "when I
lay hurt in the forest."
"I would have done the same to a sick dog," said she.
"You cried over me when you thought I was dead, he said," exclaimed
Steven, stung by her contempt.
"Had I known you better, sir----"
Her eyes were bright and hard, her lip was a curve of scorn and her chin
a tilted defiance. But all at once he saw that, under the
close-clinging fabric of her short-waisted gown, her heart was beating
like a madly frightened bird in the fowler's net. The knot of blue
ribands upon her bosom danced with its fluttering. And there came upon
him a desire, at once tender and cruel, to feel that beating heart
beneath his hand. He gave a short laugh.
"Shall I teach you the valse?" he said, leaning forward. "It is quite
easy--just my arm about you, and the music does the rest."
She shrank back with a look that would have blasted him.
"Do not dare to touch me!" Though her heart palpitated into her very
voice, she held her head high as the hind in the forest and went on: "I
might have danced that minuet, as Geiger-Onkel put it into music. But I
don't like your manner of dancing, sir--nor your English manners at all.
It would be best if people stayed in their own country." And then,
while he stood, as if her childish hand had struck him, she passed from
him, paused for a moment before her aunt and the fiddler, who were still
sitting together in silence: "I am going to sleep," she said, and went
proudly out of the room.
Geiger-Hans had shaken off his musing fit. He laughed out loud.
"What, comrade, won't mademoiselle learn the valse from you, after so
pretty a display?"
Madame gazed down at her feet, as they peeped side by side from the hem
of her garment, looking, the little humbugs, the pink of innocent
propriety. She was subdued, even frightened, and her small heart was
unwontedly stirred within her.
"Our evening is finished," said the Marquis de Grand-Chemin, rising with
his great air. "Madam, this gentleman and I must march out with the
dawn. Permit us now to offer you our very respectful gratitude, and to
retire."
She held out her hand, and he took the tips of her fingers, bowing low.
She curtseyed. They might have been in his minuet now, but it was with
the music left out.
"Good-bye, my cousin," she said timidly. And "Good-bye" said he. They
stood stiffly before each other, like two children found at fault. She
was longing to tell him that it must not be "good-bye" between her and
him. But the fiddler's eye was upon them.
* * * * *
Steven felt the world very flat, even on a mountain strong-house, as he
sat down in the state bedroom and began with a yawn to unwind the folds
of his stock. Next door Geiger-Hans had locked himself in. He had not
spoken to his companion since they had entered their apartment. Count
Waldorff-Kielmansegg felt that he was in disgrace with the roadside
fiddler, and the sensation was curiously uncomfortable. Suddenly the
door was opened and his companion walked in. He was clad once more in
his own shabby suit, and across his arms carried the borrowed garments.
One by one he laid them down neatly in the valise, rolling up the violet
silk stockings at the last.
"Continue," said he, "my friend, to develop the growth of those goat
legs of yours; it will save you in hosiery.--_Pulchrum ornatum, turpes
mores_.... Need I quote further?"
"Upon my soul!" cried the young man, "I don't understand what you mean!"
But his cheek crimsoned.
"You disgraced me to-night," said Geiger-Hans. "What, sir! I have the
kindness to bring you up here that you may snatch a delicate, courtlike
comedy from a lost century, and you turn it into a gross latter-day
romp. I bring you from an alehouse into a castle, but you must needs
drag up your Teniers with you and spoil my Watteau! I play you a
minuet, but what appeals to you is to clutch and to gambade and----"
"You made the music, man," interrupted Steven, sulky as a schoolboy.
"And it was she who asked for a valse."
"_Mon Dieu!_" went on the fiddler, passionately; "it may be that we were
no better as to morals, in my youth, than you are nowadays, but at least
we took our pleasure like gentlemen. If we plucked a rose, we did it
with a grace--between two fingers; we did not tear it with the fist. We
did not seize a lady round the body and prance with her like hind and
milkmaid; what favours we took we bent the knee to receive. Oh, sir,
how little fragrance remains in the flower you mangle thus in your
grasp! Three things there are, young man, that he who understands life
must touch with fingers of gossamer--a subtle pleasantry, a lady's
discretion, the illusions of a maiden's heart. You have laid brute
hands on all three to-night.--Fie! you have spoiled my evening."
The contrast between the man in his humble clothes and the arrogant
culture of his speech suddenly struck Steven to such a degree that he
forgot to be angry in his eagerness to catch further self-betrayal from
the fantastic enigma. Become aware of his eye and smile, the fiddler
broke off abruptly and, for the first time in their acquaintance, looked
disconcerted. Then he gave a good-humoured laugh, and his brow cleared.
"Blind, blind!" he resumed. "Why, was she not worthy of one look, the
child in her virginal grace? When I came across you again to-day, under
the shadow of the Burg, my heart leaped like a little hare. 'Here is
one now,' I told myself, 'who is learning worthily the value of his
youth. He shall yet learn of a better than I: for youth must to
youth--the creatures of spring to each other.' I resolved, God willing,
that the fair romance that fortune had brought across your path in the
forest should not, after all, close at the first page. It was but
cloud-building; it was but a spring fancy in an autumn dream--fancy of
an old fool! Why, you did not even recognize her! Yet she held your
head on her knees, when you were hurt. You were a knight to her, all
gallant--and now!"
"She seems an ill-mannered child," said Steven, sullenly.
"She is as lovely as the woods at dawn--young, reluctant, mysterious,
chill. When I approach her, it is with my hat in my hand. If I were
young like you, I should kneel to her. The set of her head, the line of
her little throat----" His voice grew suddenly husky. "Her little
throat----" he repeated.
And Steven, he knew not why, had an impression of a sadness so piercing
that he dropped his eyes and dared not look at Geiger-Hans again.
After a while, with a change of voice: "I will wake you at sunrise,"
said the musician. "I have promised the children to play for them
before school. Besides, I must see you safely to the foot of the hill,
ere we part, Count Comrade, having brought you up so high, else heaven
knows what fall might not be in store for you!"
And on this he left the room once more.
* * * * *
The crescent moon, very delicate and soul-satisfying, hung in a wreath
of watery mist, high in the sky; far down, the plain was wrapt away in
white vapour. The rugged walls of the Burg, even its rocky foundations,
seemed poised between heaven and earth amid these floating wreaths of
immateriality. It was a strange sight. The fiddler sat on the sill of
the deep window embrasure, his knees drawn towards his chin, for it was
but a narrow space, and his eyes wandered out through the open casement
over the unsubstantial world. He looked forth. Downward the gleaming
rock emerged into stern reality, out of a dream of vapour. He looked
up: the shredded mists were scudding over a faint sky, carrying the moon
along, it seemed, with incredible swiftness.
The wanderer sighed. Sorrow went with him in all his ways, though he
held so mocking a front to life. It was luxury now and then in the hour
of solitude to fall into that deep embrace, and give his very soul to
those bitter lips.
* * * * *
Very unwilling was Steven Lee to rise after a poor night. And very
ill-humoured was he as they set out at last, with their donkey,
breakfastless, together. There was no joy or mystery in the morn; it
granted them but white mists that wet like rain and clung close as they
descended.
The fiddler was silent, absorbed in his own thought, and paid small heed
to his companion's moodiness.
As they crossed the bridge, a travelling-chaise, escorted by three
dragoons, came through the haze towards them, passed them at full
thunder, and drew up with a clatter some hundred yards beyond.
Geiger-Hans smiled sardonically.
"There goes the lord of Wellenshausen to surprise his fond little wife!
He is a trifle earlier on the road than I expected. Did I not do well
to hurry your toilet? Who knows, you might have been hurried in still
more disagreeable fashion.... Well, the episode is over; and though you
have much disappointed me, young sir----"
"But what will she tell him about our visit?" interrupted Steven, with
some anxiety.
Geiger-Hans remained silent for a few paces.
"That," he answered at last, "is a matter for illimitable fancy."
*CHAPTER IX*
*HOME-COMING*
"_And then he thought, 'In spite of all my care,_
_For all my pains, poor man, for all my pains,_
_She is not faithful to me....'_"
(_The Marriage of Geraint_).
"The visitors are but just gone," said Martin, the doorward.
He stood, his hand still on the fallen bolt, with expressionless gaze
fixed upon the Burgrave, not without secret dismay and misgivings. In
truth he had but half believed the fiddler's announcement, had scarce
expected his master at all that day--certainly not so early. But, now,
one would know whether that mad fellow Geiger-Hans had spoken truth
about the invitation to Wellenshausen. If he had not, why, honest
Martin might well suffer for his credulity. For Martin knew his lord.
It were idle to try and hide from him the blatant fact that there had
been visitors at the Burg: idle indeed in a house full of silly
servants; idle, above all, with a prying fellow like Kurtz, the Jaeger,
who had his nose into every pot and his ear at every door.
That he, the door-keeper, had admitted a beggar-man to his lord's castle
was, however, an exaggeration of the offence which old Martin thought
might safely be withheld. Ambrosius, the butler, Niklaus, the valet,
and the rest were equally incriminated by having attended upon him,
having served him at their master's very table. They would be glad
enough to hold their peace on the subject for their own sakes. At the
worst, they could all plead ignorance of the visitors' identity. For
the rest, had not the Gracious Lady herself given her orders? If the
thunderbolt of wrath was to fall on the castle of Wellenshausen, it
would fall first and heaviest in the upper chambers.
So Martin had settled his treatment of the situation with a certain
dogged philosophy; and his first greeting was the blurting forth of the
truth.
"Your Graciousness has just missed the visitors."
The Burgrave, rolling past, still puffing from the arduousness of the
mount--for though a vigorous man, he was of heavy build--turned with a
grunt of astonishment as the words fell upon his ear. He flung back his
military cloak--even a chancellor was military at the Court of
Jerome--dashed his lace travelling cap from his head and took two steps
upon old Martin. His large unshorn chin shone with myriad grey
bristles, which had caught the mist in tiny points of moisture. The
grizzled, bushy eyebrows, that nearly met across the large fleshy nose
(jealous eyebrows), were similarly beaded. Now they were drawn together
in a portentous frown.
A fine-looking man enough in an elderly, hulking way, but scarcely, even
in his best moments, an amiable-looking man. Certainly not at his best
now, after a night of hard travelling. And as for amiability, that
thunder cloud upon his brow was enough to wilt the very conception of it
from the thought of man.
Yet it was no unamiable passion that had spurred him along the
interminable night-road and up the impossible crags in the wet morn. He
was but a six months' husband to his Betty, and he loved her very
dearly--after his own Teutonic and rather mediaeval fashion.
"Visitors!" repeated the Burgrave. His voice rang out, echoing and
reverberating.
Martin's little eyes blinked: that rogue of a Geiger-Hans had lied! So,
then, had the noble lady Burgravine herself.
"Two gentlemen, yes. The Gracious Lady bade me admit them. She said
that it was by your Excellency's orders;" here the door-keeper risked a
sly glance at his master and had, perhaps, an inward chuckle at the
sight of his discomposure.
"Scamp, had you not my orders?" roared the Burgrave.
"The Gracious Lady bade me admit them," reasseverated Martin; "the young
gentleman being the Gracious Lady's cousin----"
"The young gentleman! The----"
The echoes called out the words again and died into silence. The
Burgrave reeled, then steadied himself. Martin saw the empurpled
countenance turn to an unwholesome grey.
"The young gentleman," repeated the husband to himself, in a sort of
whisper. Then he wheeled round and, without another word, went,
ponderous and slow, up the stone steps, his shoulders bent like those of
an old man.
* * * * *
Betty was seated before her toilet table, in a very ill humour: the
while her woman twisted glossy black ringlets to the tune of familiar
lamentations, enlivened by spirits of a petulance unwontedly shrewish.
Betty had dragged her pretty person from the billows of quilt and
feather-bed at an astonishingly early hour, in the hope of carelessly
intercepting a farewell from her charming young guest. Mademoiselle
Eliza, justly irritated at being aroused from those dreams which, she
vowed, were now the only tolerable portion of her existence in this
dungeon, had purposely withheld from her mistress, until the
psychological moment when she could watch her countenance in the mirror,
the news of the departure of the guest. And then she had delivered it
with all the gusto of the self-respecting servant who has unpleasant
information to impart.
"Madame has a very sensitive head this morning; it is doubtless the
fatigue of last night. Madame is so unaccustomed now to the least
excitement. It is hardly worth while to put madame to the pains of much
of a coiffure this morning, since there is no one to see her--but the
crows. If, indeed, the young gentleman could have remained: strange how
anxious he was to leave! Up and away before the dawn! And slinking out
of the castle, one might say. Ho, have I hurt madame again? Did Madame
la Comtesse say that he was truly her cousin? A singular story, not
even a valet with him--nothing but that old beggar tramp, who dined with
madame, also, dressed up in the gentleman's clothes----"
"Hold your tongue!" cried the exasperated lady. She whisked round in her
seat, blindly menacing with a brush caught up at haphazard.
At this moment the gate bell clanged; the stone hollows of the castle
growled to a loud knocking; and then came the groaning of the great bar.
"Merciful heavens, more visitors!" exclaimed the mistress of
Wellenshausen, a lovely geranium flushed into her cheek. Last night's
guests back again, perchance. Beau Cousin was too gallant a gentleman,
after all, to leave her hospitality in this abrupt fashion.... Perhaps
he was wishing to see her again, as much as she was wishing to see him.
The little hand with the brush dropped to her side. "Quick, Eliza, who
is it?"
Even as she spoke the rich cheek faded; her bright eyes grew round in
horror. To one man only in the world could belong the raucous tones
that granite wall and roof now gave back in pulsating vibration, rolling
up even to the turret room.
"The Burgrave!" she gasped.
Eliza's black eyes glinted joyfully: the Burgrave! Not only fresh
discomfiture for the mistress; but, for the maid, unexpected comfort:
Kurtz the Jaeger was quite a smart young man.
"Heavens, the Burgrave!" cried Betty again; and she began to tremble.
Her husband, upon the very stroke of her escapade! What to do, now,
what to say?--What indeed!
"Eliza," she cried breathlessly--she snatched a gold brooch from her
wrapper as she spoke, and thrust it into the girl's hand--"you knew I
was expecting my cousin's visit ... by news brought by the last courier
from Vienna ... you heard me mention the fact ... you heard me regret my
husband's absence from Wellenshausen."
There was no time to lose. The Burgrave's step, weighty and ominous as
fate itself, was already on the stairs.
"_Bien, Madame la Comtesse,_" returned Eliza, calmly, even as the latch
clicked under her master's hand.
Betty von Wellenshausen was a woman of too clever instincts to receive,
in this dilemma, her elderly lord and master with exuberant expression
of delight. She was not of those who fall into the vulgar error of
protesting too much. She settled herself in her chair again and became
deeply absorbed in the exact position of a curl. He stood glowering on
the threshold. He had to call out in his great voice, before she would
condescend to notice him at all. And then it was but a glance over her
shoulder.
"_Tiens_, it is you? Eliza, decidedly this is not successful."
Eliza, deeply enjoying the situation, full of professional admiration
for her mistress's handling of the same, was also all solicitude over
the rebellious lock.
"Ten thousand devils, madam!" at last exploded the Burgrave. "I would
point out to you that I am returned from a journey."
"So I see," said the lady, with another fugitive glance. "And so I
hear, too, my friend! Heavens, you make noise enough!"
It was such a wonderfully pretty face, of which the husband was given
this glimpse; his reception was so cool, so unexpected, that the
Burgrave's first murderous rage began to give way to a perplexity not
unmixed in some strange way with softer feelings. He closed the door
behind him, and then stood, hesitating.
"It is a pity," said the Burgravine, boldly, "that you do not consider
it worth your while, comte, to keep me informed of your movements. Had
I but known that we were to have the rapture of your company to-day, I
would have kept my cousin Kielmansegg to make your acquaintance."
The Burgrave eyed her between rage and amazement.
"Your cousin!" he echoed huskily. Then his fury, on a sudden gust of
jealousy, got the upper hand. "Pray, madam," he thundered, "when did
you communicate to me the interesting fact of your relative's proposed
visit? And when did I authorize you to receive him?"
It was the lady's turn to be astonished; for a moment her quick wits
failed to follow his drift.
"When?" she queried, raising a delicate eyebrow. "This is sheer
delirium! And if you must rave, my friend, need you shout? I begin to
think that my never-sufficiently-to-be-regretted predecessor must have
suffered from deafness in addition to the other trials of her
existence."
The pupils of the Burgrave's pale eyes contracted to pins' points. He
fixed his disobedient spouse with a scarcely human glare.
"Martin is not wandering in his mind, I take it, when he tells me that
you bade him admit your friends in my name! By my wish, madam--by my
wish!"
The bellow with which, in spite of his Betty's protest, he had begun
this indictment, died into a sort of strangled whisper. He struck his
palm with his hairy fist. The Burgravine was unpleasantly enlightened.
"Oh, sir," she exclaimed with biting scorn, and shrugged her shoulders,
"how well you are served; I make you my compliments!" Underneath her
impertinent airs there was fluttering terror. But, like a bird, she
would peck to the last. "And did Martin indeed tell you that I bade him
admit my kinsman and his companion in your name?" she pursued, drawing a
long breath. Then superbly, "It is true, M. de Wellenshausen. Do you
mean me to understand that you would have wished me to refuse the
hospitality of your house?"
The wave of wrath was again ebbing from the Burgrave's huge frame. He
stared blankly at the little creature. Her words had a singular
plausibility. She saw her advantage and flew to it.
"My cousin, Count Waldorff-Kielmansegg, is travelling through this
country," said she. "My dear mother announced his arrival in her last
letter."
"The courier came on Wednesday," interpolated Eliza, pinning the brooch
in a slightly less conspicuous position amid the folds of her kerchief.
"She is most anxious to have personal news of my health ... knowing the
delicacy of my chest, and how much I am likely to suffer in these harsh
airs where it is your pleasure to immure me."
The Burgravine wheeled her chair round to face her lord.
"It is perhaps dull of me," she went on more boldly still, "not to have
understood that I am not the mistress of these barren walls, but rather
their prisoner. When I heard that my cousin was below, I had no
hesitation in ordering him to be admitted. Yes, sir, I even said that
it would be your wish.--Ach, Eliza, what a stupid mistress you have!
You heard me actually lament, I believe, your master's absence on the
occasion!"
"_Madame la Comtesse_, indeed, made the remark to me," quoth Eliza,
"that it was of the last annoyance that Monsieur le Comte should be
absent that evening. It was so trying for Madame la Comtesse to have to
receive alone!"
"And indeed, my poor girl," said the lady, picking up the thread
herself, "I could regret that we should thus innocently have infringed
the rules of the castle of--I should say the prison of
Wellenshausen--for it was to very poor results. Yes, we should have
allowed M. de Wellenshausen's doorkeeper--turnkey, I mean--to send the
gentlemen down the hill again. My people would have wondered. But,
_mon Dieu_, will they wonder less when my kinsman tells them of these
dismal walls, these rude surroundings, this savage solitude? Poor young
man! in spite of his affection for me he could not bring himself to
face another day of it.--Eliza, my shoe!"
"Indeed, madame," commented the maid, pursuing the theme from where she
knelt to fit each little foot, "the gentlemen would not even tarry for
breakfast, so hurried were they to be gone!"
The Burgrave listened, was half convinced, then a fresh spasm of
suspicious misgiving came over him.
"Yet, doubtless," he sneered, "not without a satisfying farewell from
the hostess! You are strangely early this morning, madame."
The Burgravine raised her blue eyes from the contemplation of her foot.
"You mistake," she said innocently; "our adieux took place last night,
shortly after supper. You see, I am not even dressed. And, as to early
rising, _mon Dieu_, my friend, the nights are of such lengths here, that
there are times when I think it cannot soon enough be day."
"And _ma foi_," put in the maid pertly, "then it is the days that are so
long, up here in the clouds, that it cannot soon enough be night."
The two women laughed. He stood between them, a miserable clumsy man;
conscious of their subtler wits and quicker tongues, a prey to dark
doubts and slowly shaping his own resolve.
Betty now jumped to her feet and shook her loose silks and laces about
her as a bird shakes its plumage.
"Eliza, inform the Baroness Sidonia of the Herr Graf's return," she bade
in an off-hand tone.
The Burgrave thought to catch a meaning glance between mistress and
maid. No doubt Sidonia would lie with the other--all women were jades
alike. Well! he knew what he had to do; meanwhile Betty was
distractingly alluring with all those fal-lals of ribbons and lace, and
it was three weeks since he had kissed her. The door had scarcely
closed on Mademoiselle Eliza before the Burgrave caught his wife in his
arms.
"Ah, _mon Dieu_," cried she, pettishly, "and pray, sir, when have you
shaved last?"
*CHAPTER X*
*THE BURGRAVE'S WELCOME*
"_I tempted his blood and his flesh,_
_Hid in roses my mesh,_
_Choicest cates and the flagon's best spilth...._"
ROBERT BROWNING.
"So you have had visitors, Sidonia, my dove? Eh?" said the Burgrave.
His tone was good-humoured, but the glance he fixed upon the girl was
cold. He had very pale grey eyes that could stare by the minute
together without blinking, a power somewhat disconcerting (he flattered
himself) to those who thought to keep secrets from him. Sidonia had
just entered the room and was hastening to greet her uncle, for whom she
had a certain placid affection. But instinctively she drew back,
affronted, upon meeting that gaze. The words of welcome died on her
lips.
"Yes, we've had visitors," she answered defiantly, tilting back her
head.--Did Uncle Ludo think to frighten her?
"That was delightful," said the Burgrave, his unwinking stare upon her.
"It was delightful," said Betty. She stood behind her husband's chair,
ministering to him after the right Germanic fashion he loved; and small
scornful remarks on the number of rummers she was called upon to fill
with the yellow wine, on the size of the slices of smoked ham he dealt
himself, she did not spare him. Nevertheless she watched his appetite
with satisfaction. Surely so large a meal and much jealousy could
scarce find room in the same frame. "It was delightful, for me at
least," said Betty, glibly. "I, who had not seen my cousin, my
favourite cousin, for so long."
Her blue eyes rolled warningly at Sidonia, over the top of the
Burgrave's stubble head. The girl gave her aunt a quick look, then
walked up to the table.
"Good morning, uncle. I hope you are well," she said, demurely now, and
laid a light kiss on his temple.
The Burgrave burst into a roar of laughter.
"Come, come, one kisses one's uncle better than that, I hope!"
He caught her by the lobe of her pretty ear, stretched out the other
hand and drew his spouse forward by the waist.
"So, here I am, once more, with both my little doves. Aha, what a happy
man!--This fine young cousin now, your aunt's old play-fellow ... you'd
heard of him before, eh, Sidonia?"
"Yes, I had," said the child, sturdily. "I knew he was in the country.
And you need not pinch my ear like that, Uncle Ludo, I don't like it."
"But it was such a little visit," said the Burgrave. "That was the pity
of it. And to think of my having missed the pleasure of so agreeable an
acquaintance! Your favourite cousin it was, that's understood, my Betty.
And his companion, the old gentleman, who might he be?"
"His companion? Oh, he seemed to be a kind of tutor," returned Betty,
with a charming sense of satisfaction to be able to say something at
last approaching to the truth.
"Well, my darlings," said the Burgrave, still more jovially--he had
slipped his great arm round Sidonia's waist now and held them both
embraced--"it is early in the morning yet, and I am sure you will be
charmed to hear that there is every chance of my letter finding the
distinguished travellers still in the village." Each little figure in
the Burgrave's grasp started. "Quite a surprise for you, eh? Come,
this gaoler (aha, Betty!) is not such a bear after all! Not so
inhospitable as to allow his wife's dear relations to leave the district
without discharging his duties of politeness. Yes, I have sent Kurtz,
hot foot, hot foot, with an invitation to your cousin, my love, to
return, with his companion, to the hospitality of Wellenshausen....
What, not a word of joy from either of you? My little doves, one would
think you were displeased. Have I not interpreted your wishes, sweetest
Betty? I would fain do so, for you who are so clever in interpreting
mine."
"Let me go," cried the little lady, of a sudden goaded to fury. "You
are squeezing me to death. Please to remember that, if I am married to a
bear, it does not follow that I enjoy his hug!"
The Burgrave released his victims and looked searchingly from one to the
other. Both were pale.
"What a festive time we are going to have in the old Burg!" cried he
then, with an ugly laugh, and fell to upon the ham and ryebread with
fresh gusto.
* * * * *
It was a great folded sheet, and bore, on a huge seal, a spreading
coat-of-arms. It was addressed as follows: "To the High-born Graf zu
Waldorff-Kielmansegg, at the Silver Stork Inn, Wellenshausen," and
contained a brief but courteous message:
"HONOURED SIR,
"I have just returned to my house and hear, with desolation, that I have
missed the amiable visit which you have vouchsafed to it. Hoping that
you and your tutor may not yet have left the neighbourhood, I send this
in haste. Will you not both retrace your steps--if you think our poor
hospitality still worth acceptance--and give me the exceeding
gratification of calling myself your host for at least a week?
"CHARLES LUDOVIC,
"Burgrave of Wellenshausen."
The young traveller, who, warmed into better spirits by his early walk,
had been looking back on his stolen visit to the castle on the peak, and
his evening with the ladies sheltered behind its forbidding walls, as an
adventure of some spice (though, in its integrity, harmless enough) was
seized with disappointment. So much for latter-day romance; so much for
the Bluebeard of Wellenshausen; for the husband so ferociously jealous,
report said, that he must shut up his Fatima in a tower as tight as St.
Barbara's! Why, so far from striking off Fatima's head, he sends in
haste to recall the audacious visitor, and craves to be allowed to
expend upon him the treasures of an amiable disposition.
"Ah, fiddler, my friend," thought Count Steven, sagely, "you and your
music have discoursed much wild nonsense anent the surprises of life,
anent the golden rose of youth; ... but the world is a workaday place,
drab and dull of hue; and the dreams with which your words have filled
my thoughts are but the children of my own fantasy and your own
fiddle-bow."
He looked across the inn-yard, through a screen of vine leaves, to where
the fiddler was seated on a bench, playing away with a will, eyes
beaming upon a ring of dancing children. The heaviness of the morning
was clearing; shafts of sunlight pierced the mists. Steven hesitated.
The messenger from the castle, a smart Jaeger in a green-and-mulberry
uniform, stood on one side with the decorous indifference of his
condition, his lips pursed for a voiceless whistle to the tune that made
gay the poor inn-yard. A little further away, the young nobleman's
travelling-chaise was even now being packed, under the supervision of
his lordship's body-servant.... The Burgrave's invitation was banality
itself, almost trivial; yet was not the programme for the day's journey
more everyday still?
A phrase in the letter, that had escaped notice on his first surprised
perusal, now brought an angry flush to his cheek.
"His tutor----" And he, full twenty-three and practically his own
master these many years! Was it possible that he could have made no
stronger impression upon the Burgravine than that of a kind of
schoolboy? As for Sidonia, since she knew the musician so well, she
must also have known that he was but a chance acquaintance! Yes, it was
evident that he had placed himself in an awkward position by this
consorting with a person of inferior degree.
This decided the matter. He owed it to his own dignity, to that of his
family. Was not the pretty mistress of yon castle, by her own showing,
a kinswoman? He would go back and redress the ridiculous
misapprehension.
* * * * *
A bell began to jangle, ugly and persistent. The fiddler drew a long
last note, whereat the children raised a shout of protest.
"Schooltime!" cried the musician. He got up and nodded across to
Steven. "Has my Lord of the Burg invited you back upon his
height?--Don't go."
The man's intuition was positively diabolic.
"How did you know?" gasped Steven.
"Know? Do I not know the candid countenance of my lord Burgrave's
Jaeger? Did I not see him accost you? Do you not hold a letter in your
hand? O, I thank my Maker that, crazy as my brains are, they can still
add one and two and make it three. And, had I not the simple figures
before me, the Burgrave's course would still lie plain."
He came near to the young man, and dropping his voice:
"The poor Burgrave," he went on, "must be slightly befogged in the mist
of his lady's diaphanous explanations. He must sorely want to see for
himself what there is between you."
"Between us!" Steven stared and then blushed. "Good heavens, what can
he think?" he asked.
"Certainly not the truth," answered the fiddler; "it would be too
innocent."
He twanged a string, and it seemed to mock. Too innocent...! His smile,
too, was mocking, Steven thought. Innocence savoured unpleasantly of
that state of tutelage which no mature man of three and twenty could
endure to admit. And yet, last night, had he not been rated for
something approaching to an immoral tendency? Confound the fellow,
there was no pleasing him! Now and again, like the peasant folk, Steven
could almost think the vagrant was possessed.
"Don't go," repeated the fiddler, gravely. "Leave the Burgrave and his
lady in their fog."
"You advise me not to go!" cried the young man, pettishly. This sober
counsel, certes, was quite the last thing he had expected from lips that
hitherto had suggested the out-of-the-way step, the fantastic resolve;
urged them passionately, in the name of Youth and Opportunity.
"Write a pretty note," continued the other, unmoved. "Send it back by
our friend yonder, and make your servants happy by taking the road for
Cassel.--Cassel is full of Betties and you can prance there in good
company."
He looked familiarly over Steven's shoulder as he spoke, and gave a
mirthful ejaculation--
"_Sarpejeu_! I am invited also, I see."
Kurtz, the dapper Jaeger, who had swaggered up for a critical inspection
of the traveller's horses, here flung a quick glance at the speaker.
Furtive as it was, the musician caught it, and smiled back:
"What," said he, raising his voice and addressing the count, "your
tutor, my young friend? Heavens forbid! The counsellor of your
youthship, for a brief occasion, I grant it; but for the rest I trust I
have more grateful work in the world."
"I do not press you to accompany me. I can quite well go alone," said
Steven. "You need not return with me--unless you wish it."
The other made an ironical bow, and the young man dropped his eyelid
under the gaze that read his thought as in a written page. Certainly,
keen as he had been but the day before for the fiddler's company, it was
the last thing he now desired.
"Oh," retorted Geiger-Hans, "never fear, our ways now diverge. Yours is
too lofty for me, comrade. You are for the peak, I am for leveller
roads. Beware how you fall." He was shaken with laughter--laughter
that somehow left Steven more uncomfortable than angry.
Then the wanderer cocked his instrument and set up a wild skirling air,
to the rhythm of which he turned and marched out of the courtyard. Ill
at ease, Steven watched him go, go.
* * * * *
Count Kielmansegg drove in state to the foot of the crag; and, while his
box and valise were loaded upon the mule that was again to climb the
rocky path to the feudal nest of granite, he paused to look down at the
waters that rushed past the road, so swift and dark, so cruelly cold,
from unexplored caverns on the flanks of the mount. As he stood the
travelling fiddler overtook him and swung by on the highway.
"We shall meet soon again, I trust, friend," Steven cried after him as
he himself turned to ascend the path.
"Who knows?" said the fiddler over his shoulder, even as on their first
parting by the edge of the forest, but this time in a grave voice.
The young man glanced up at his destination, black and grim against a
pale sky, and a chill came upon him like a sudden shadow.
*CHAPTER XI*
*TANGLED TALES*
"_One lie needs seven to wait upon it._"
(_Wisdom of Nations_).
Steven was scarcely observant by nature: your important, self-centred
youth is rarely like to prove so. Yet the Burgrave's welcome at
Wellenshausen, cordial to effusion as it was, left upon him a further
impression of discomfort.
Jerome's Chancellor had very fine manners, when he chose, and was
altogether a finer personality than, somehow, Steven had expected. His
joviality was certainly hard to reconcile with that character of tyrant
that seemed to be universally ascribed to him. Moreover, Steven had no
more reasonable ground of complaint as to the quality of the hospitality
proffered to him than as to that of the wines served during the heavy
midday meal, for which they soon assembled. His irritable self-esteem,
ruffled by the thought of having passed for a young gentleman under
control, ought to have been thoroughly soothed by the attentions, the
deference, the honours that the Burgrave lavished upon him. And yet----
When he was once more left alone in the great apartments that he had
shared with the fiddler on the previous evening, he found himself
heartily wishing again for his singular comrade--nay, wishing that he
had followed the latter's advice and were still hobnobbing with him,
along the wide valley roads or in some vine-hung inn arbour, in safety
and independence.
He went discontentedly to the window and flung it wide; it was sunk in
some eight feet of solid masonry, and, high as the castle stood, the
honest airs of heaven seemed to have no free access into the chamber.
How was it that the vault-like oppression of the place had not struck
him yesterday? He stood, pondering, for a while; then gathered himself
into the window recess, even as Geiger-Hans had done during last night's
watches.
The evening shades were rising apace. Night birds were beginning to
circle round the lonely towers; distant lights to twinkle in the village
below. How far off lay those comfortable glimmers yonder; how sheer the
depth that separated him from them! An owl hooted, and the chill of the
stone pressing about him seemed to creep into his marrow. He heard a
great clang somewhere beneath and the grinding of iron-bolts. "Pah--the
place is like a prison-house!" he cried to himself angrily and scrambled
back into the gloomy room.
Then his valet entered with candles. The fellow's face bore a smirk;
he, at least, found the Burg (with the fascination of Mademoiselle
Eliza) an incomparably more agreeable spot than the Silver Stork.
After him came a rosy-cheeked, bare-footed girl, with a huge faggot in
her arms--and presently the great gaping hearth was filled with a
roaring blaze. And Steven, in a wadded dressing gown, stretching his
limbs to the warmth, began to feel able to review the events of the day
with a more settled spirit.
... No doubt there had been several instances at dinner, when he had
felt himself in an outrageously false position--allowing (he thought
severely) to that mist of lies with which the Burgravine had undoubtedly
filled the atmosphere. Triumphantly as her beauty had stood the morning
light, exquisitely as her elegance, her fashion, her youth, might have
struck any impartial observer by contrast with the gloom of the
mediaeval castle, Steven, on the second meeting, had found himself cold
to her, ashamed in the recesses of his heart of his previous surrender.
He wished women would not think it necessary to deceive.... Why, in the
name of common sense, could not the creature have told the simple truth?
His visit had been a mere freak--an intrinsically harmless one. She
must needs give it an aspect of guilt by an unnecessarily complicated
farrago of explanation. It had taken him all his time indeed (and no
wonder he could not look back upon that endless repast without a
shudder) to parry the Burgrave's point-blank questions concerning people
of whose very existence he had no knowledge, and to respond airily to
the Burgravine's feverish hints, finding himself, meanwhile, further and
further involved in myths and inventions. And, throughout, the
Burgrave--what a deuced uncomfortable way of staring was his!--had an
eye and a laugh that matched each other very ill.... And the child,
Sidonia, with now that look of scorn, now that air of grave rebuke,
under which his already irate feelings in regard to her almost merged
into active dislike....
Cross-purposes had in truth begun on the very threshold.
"Welcome, Herr Graf," had cried the Burgrave--"welcome both as my wife's
kinsman and as a distinguished traveller in my own country!" He had
been clasped by two genial hands. So far so good!
"But--your companion, your worthy tutor, where is he?" (His tutor! The
man meant Geiger-Hans. This was awkward.)
Steven had no answer ready, nothing but a foolish obvious statement:
"He has not come."
How lame it sounded! The Burgrave had instantly dropped the subject.
Now that he came to think of it, Steven realized that it was here his
discomfort took birth. Why had his host dropped the subject? It was a
procedure that harmonized neither with the relentless scrutiny of his
eyes, nor the ultra-joviality of his manner. And all through the dinner
it had been simply variations on the same _motif_. A straight question,
an unsatisfactory answer, the complication of the Burgravine's
embroidery and over-clever suggestion--and the subject dropped.
Thereupon an access of hilarity on the part of his entertainer ... such
loud laughter, such unmirthful eyes!
As Steven, staring unseeingly into the fire, repassed the little scenes
in his mind, his cheeks flushed.
"Your tutor, Count--by the way, what is his name?"
"Well, he's hardly my tutor, you see."
Here cries from the Burgravine: "A French gentleman!--so charming a
person! Nay, Cousin Kielmansegg, I flatter myself I have a good memory,
especially for anything French. M. de la Viole, wasn't it?"
"Yes," from Steven, grunting uneasily, "something of that sort."
"Quite an elderly man," hastens to add the Burgravine, with a quick look
at her husband.
"Try this Burgundy, Clos-Vougeot, the Emperor's favourite," says the
Burgrave, and laughs.
He drinks a good deal of Burgundy himself, does the Chancellor; and gets
a fiery countenance: but not a sparkle into the little grey eyes.
"How long may it be since you left Austria, my dear young friend?"
"Oh--years," blurts Steven.
Of course he ought to have looked to the Burgravine for his cue. But,
the devil fly away with it, he does not take kindly to these deceits!
The Burgrave's gaze shifts suddenly to his wife. The glass trembles in
her little hand. She is obliged to lay it down; but her voice does not
falter, she is quite ready: "Years? Is it possible? Nay, cousin, have
we both grown so old since last we met? But no doubt, in that cold,
dull England, the time hung mighty heavy with you. It seems years to
you, but--then we corresponded--at least, when I say we, I mean my
mother, who loves you as a son."
And, "Oh yes--yes!" says Steven, in miserable acquiescence.
... What will the Burgrave ask next? The merest insistence on his side,
and the whole despicable scaffolding of taradiddles must fall to the
ground. And then----? Then--no man in his senses would believe the
truth. But the Burgrave presses nothing. The stone roof echoes to his
huge "Ha-ha's." 'Tis as if the thought of the love of his mother-in-law
for his guest was quite a remarkable jest!...
The sweat of shame and anger broke on Steven's forehead as he sat before
the fire, immersed in this review of the day's doings.
Two days went by, the heaviest Steven had ever passed in his life. He
would have given a year of his life to be able to invent some fitting
excuse to take a decent leave. But his tongue, forced to so much petty
falseness, could frame here no tale that carried conviction. He had
gone so far as to send his servant down into the village, with orders to
bring back an imaginary courier. But, at the first hint of intended
flight, the Burgrave broke into protestations; his voice was so loud and
his gimlet eye so boring, that the plea of urgency withered away from
the guest's speech, and he found himself wretchedly concurring in his
host's hearty announcement that Wellenshausen had him and Wellenshausen
would hold him at least for the allotted week.
He had the further misery of noting that here joy flashed at him from
the blue depths of the Burgravine's eyes, and anger from the brown
limpidity of Sidonia's. Indeed, he, the least fatuous of youths, had
begun to find something disconcerting in the persistence with which the
blue eyes were given to seeking him: now in veiled languor, now with a
meaning that seemed to claim complicity. Glib in speech and airily
indifferent to him in the Burgrave's presence, in the moments when they
were alone together--and these were rare, for Steven avoided them;
though it would almost seem as if the Burgrave himself fostered the
occasions--she was prodigal of sighs, of interrupted sentences capable
of strange endings, of little fluttering movements towards him, all of
which added supremely to his discomposure; all of which, also after the
fashion of man, he felt almost as much ashamed to admit as significant
as to repel.
On the morning of the third day, Steven, invited to inspect the view
from the battlements in an exceptionally clear light, found himself
alone with Burgravine Betty on the topmost turret of the Burg. The
Burgrave had sent them forward; his laugh was echoing up to them from
the inner recesses of the winding stairs.
"O heavens!" said the lady, suddenly.
Steven turned. The cry was tragic; and it answered acutely to his own
sensations. The Burgravine's eyes were dry, but there was real terror
on her pretty face.
"Why did you come?" she whispered. "In the name of mercy! was it not
evident that it was a trap?"
"A trap!" he stammered.
"Yes, yes! Oh, do you not feel it? He is watching us like a cat, a cat
going to spring; and I am the wretched mouse waiting--waiting. O, I can
stand it no longer! I shall go mad. If only you had not come! What
did I tell him? There was nothing to tell, say you; we had done no
harm. That is just it! I told him a lie, of course, and he found out it
was a lie--that is of course, too. A man who has spies all about his
place! And now we are doing nothing but lie, you and I. He knows we
are lying, and he is waiting to pounce on us in his own time. O, sir,
you might have known! A man who shuts up his wife for jealousy is not
seized with such effusive hospitality towards a handsome young stranger
without reasons of his own."
The warm olive crept back to her cheek as she spoke. Her eyes beamed.
She seemed to sway towards him.
"Then, madam," he cried, quickly stepping back--if there were indeed
danger for him between the Burgrave and the Burgravine, he would rather
choose to battle with the man--"you are right, I ought not to be here.
I will go now. To-day ... this hour!"
"Go?" she echoed in scorn. "Aye, go if you can," she proceeded with a
change of tone. "He has got you well in his meshes; you are clogged,
sir, and bound. And if you think he will let you go before he has
carried out his purpose with us, you little know the Burgrave."
Carried out his purpose with us!--The very vagueness of the suggestion
added to its unpleasantness. Steven jerked his head indignantly.
"And what may that be, pray?" he asked.
She glanced at him a second, uplifting lip and eyebrow. To a lady who
had graduated in the Court of Vienna, this big young man, with his
English stolid simplicity, was a trifle irritating.
"_Mon Dieu!_" she said then, turning aside with a shrug of her shoulder,
"how embarrassing you are! Do you know your poets? Well, then, he
would like to find us playing at Paolo and Francesca, if you please,
that he might play the Malatesta!"
"Great heavens!" cried the horrified youth. He watched the lady hang her
head and droop a modest eyelid--it was Scylla and Charybdis! Beyond any
doubt, he must walk out of these mad-house precincts at the very
earliest opportunity.
They were perched high up in the blue; and, down below, the country lay
spread like a green cloth on which a child has set its toys. Yonder
white ribbon wandering so far below--there ran his road. Would he were
on it! He turned to her, took her soft hand, bent and kissed it.
"Madam," said he, "it is best it should be 'good-bye'--for both of us,
it is best."
He spoke very truly, poor young man, but into the touch of his lips and
the pathos of his speech her vanity read another meaning.
"Cousin!" she cried suddenly, and clutched at his hands with both of
hers. "O, take me with you! Take me back to my own people! If I stay
here, he will kill me, or I shall kill myself!"
And, as his troubled face and involuntarily repelling fingers were far
from giving her the response they craved, she rushed across and bent
over the crumbling parapet.
"Refuse your help," she cried desperately, "and I throw myself down!"
(Had little Sidonia but been at hand, to tell him how well accustomed
she was to such threats!)
Steven was quite pale as he caught her back against his shoulders.
"Mercy!" he shivered, thinking of those giddy deeps. She clung to him,
her scented head against his shoulders.
"Surely, surely, it is not much I ask!" she murmured faintly. "See how
I trust you, kinsman! Only your protection, your escort back to our own
people. It is not much to ask!"
It meant his whole life, and he knew it. But what can a young man do
with a woman's arms about him and a woman's whisper pleading in his
ears?
"Ha-ha-ha!" came the Burgrave's laugh from below. Countess Betty slid
out of "Beau Cousin's" arms. She lifted a warning finger. "I will
arrange," she whispered, nodding. "Now we must be seen no more alone
together."
Sidonia's voice also rang up towards them. "I will write," whispered
Betty again, finger on lip.
O heavens! how could she look arch and smile at such a moment?
"My friend, I have been showing our cousin how far your estate extends,"
said the lady, gaily, tripping across to take the Burgrave's arm with
more ease than she had yet displayed with him since his return.
"I trust our cousin has profited by your instruction, and that he
realizes the boundaries of my property," said the Burgrave of
Wellenshausen, with his genial smile and his icy eye.
Steven's heavy conscience read a hateful significance in the remark. As
he turned, his glance fell upon the Baroness Sidonia's pure child face
and he felt miserable and ashamed to the core.
* * * * *
The Burgrave's jaunty Jaeger stood and saluted in military fashion. The
Burgrave wheeled round in his chair and bent his brows. It was dark in
the great stone room but for the single shaded lamp on the
writing-table, which flung a pallid circle of light upon his intent
countenance. So might some ancestor of his have looked, four hundred
years before, as he planned with his henchmen the treachery that should
rid him of an enemy.
"I have to report, my lord," said the fellow, "that the Count
Kielmansegg's travelling carriage is ordered to be in readiness at the
foot of the hill to-night."
"So!" The exclamation was almost triumph.
Kurtz pulled a slip of paper from the breast of his tunic and held it
out.
"Will your lordship open it with care?" he remarked imperturbably, as
the Burgrave's eye shot flames and he stretched out an eager hand. "The
gracious lady has not yet seen it. And I have promised Eliza that it
should not be crushed."
The Burgrave held the note to the light. It was in French, and very
terse:
"All is arranged. I will wait for you at the entrance of the east tower
at nine o'clock."
The Burgrave stared at the words for an appreciable time. An apoplectic
wave of blood rushed to his forehead, and the veins thereon swelled like
cords. Then he folded the paper again with minute precaution and handed
it back.
"Return it to the wench, and bid her deliver it," he said briefly.
"Well, what now?"
"I beg pardon, my lord, but this has cost me my watch-chain to-day. And
I took upon myself to promise her further two gold pieces."
"Fool!" said the Burgrave, harshly. "Could you not have done as much by
love-making and never cost me a kreutzer? Young men like you are scarce
in these parts."
The Jaeger shrugged his shoulders. "She took the kisses as well," he
said cynically. "What would his lordship have? Women are like that!"
The other flung the coins across the table with an oath. Those were
better days, of old, when a man could have his bidding done in his own
castle without any such bargainings. But, as the servant wheeled and
swung towards the door, his master recalled him.
"You have left my orders in the village? If that fiddling beggar dares
present himself near my doors again, I shall have him flogged till the
skin hangs in strips, and then ... and then set the dogs upon him. The
miserable rapscallion; the impudent cur, to dare to play his tricks as
high as my very table, to dare to break bread with my wife!"
The Burgrave struck the table so that the rummer of Burgundy at his
elbow splashed red upon his hand; the Jaeger glanced at the empty bottle
and then at his lord's inflamed countenance, and gave his soldierly
response:
"_Zu Befehl._" Then he added, the insolence of the servant who feels
superior to his employer in coolness and clear-headedness piercing
through his well-drilled air of subordination: "May it please your
Excellency, the folk about here believe the fiddler to be some great
person in disguise."
The Burgrave's eyes were bloodshot this evening; the Jaeger was minded
of the glare of an old boar at bay.
"It is quite likely," he proceeded jauntily, "that the gentleman was
similarly deceived."
"The gentleman--the gentleman? What gentleman, you rascal?"
"The gracious young gentleman, the cousin of her Excellency."
The Burgrave gave a savage growl:
"Out of my sight!"
With some additional briskness of gait, Kurtz drew the solid oak door
between himself and the Chancellor.
Alone, Betty's husband yielded himself to a convulsion of rage. Again
he beat the table with his hands, anon tore at his bristling hair;
suffocating, he wrenched the stock from his throat; broken words,
curses, threats, ejaculations of self-pity escaped him. When at length
he recovered his senses in some fashion, he was shaking as if from an
ague. He caught up the last glassful of wine and drained it at a
draught. Then he subsided heavily into his chair, and drawing unmeaning
signs with his fingers through the spilt wine upon the polished oak,
began slowly to repeat, half aloud, the words of the letter Kurtz had
brought him.
"The entrance of the east tower, at nine o'clock."
Suddenly a shout of laughter escaped him.
"The entrance of the east tower. You have chosen well, my turtle
doves!"
He let his head drop between his hands and sat in sodden brooding.
*CHAPTER XII*
*THE BURGRAVE'S FAREWELL*
"_--What means this, my lord?_
_--Marry, this is miching mallecho; it means mischief._"
(_Hamlet_).
Countess Betty had the megrims and declined to appear at supper. For a
sufferer, however, she had a bright eye, and she moved about her room
with the alacrity of a busy bird. She was alone, some belated notion of
prudence having bade her dismiss her handmaiden during the final
preparation. Her eyes were taking in wistfully the dimensions of the
small travelling-bag (which was all that, in conscience, she could allow
herself, since Cousin Kielmansegg would have to carry it himself down
the precipitous roads) and the numberless objects which, at the last
moment, seemed to her indispensable, when there came a tap at her
window. She started--and only the sense of unacknowledged guilt weighing
on her soul kept her from screaming aloud for help--when she perceived,
pressed against the uncurtained pane, a man's face. The next instant,
however, she had recognized the wandering fiddler. She hurried towards
him.
"A message?" she cried eagerly, as she opened the casement.
The man swung himself in and sat on the deep window-seat. His face was
wet with rain. He gazed upon her for a second, quizzically, and when he
spoke it was not in reply.
"Here I come," said he, "by the ivy, at the risk of my neck, I, whom
your worthy lord and master threatened to have flogged and thrown to the
dogs, if he caught me up here again! What a foolish plight should I be
in, had I counted upon your tender heart sparing a tremor for my perils!
It is enough to make a man desire to walk in by the door for the rest of
his life!"
"But, in heaven's name," she exclaimed, having but a matter-of-fact
spirit, in spite of its dainty envelope, "you did climb up all the way
to tell me something. Was it not a message?"
He bowed.
"From him?"
He laid his hand on his heart. "From myself," he answered.
She glanced at him and then at her bolted door in renewed alarm. He
read her thought.
"God forbid!" quoth he, smiling with an air that put him, in his poor
raiment, at an extraordinary distance above her. "I should not so
presume, madam.--Are you aware," he pursued in another tone, "that your
husband's confidential Jaeger was in intimate conversation with Count
Kielmansegg's postilion in the village to-day?"
"Mercy!" she cried, reading the portent.
"After which, my dear madam, he climbed the hill in a company that
lightened the way for him, having, in fact, his arm round the trim waist
of your own handmaiden."
Countess Betty sank on a couch, white to her lips.
"Your trusted handmaiden," repeated the fiddler, emphatically.
"Alas! if I had hesitated," said the lady, piously turning up her eyes
to the vaulted ceiling, "this would decide it; I dare not risk another
night in this castle."
"Taking risk for risk," said the musician, carelessly, "if I were timid,
I should prefer the waiting hazard."
"You mean?" she panted, round-eyed, in quick apprehension.
"I mean," said he, "that it is raining exceedingly hard, and that
between this and the foot of the crag you will get wet, madam; so wet as
to extinguish for ever the most ardent flame."
The Burgravine rose with dignity. "I will have you know, sir, that I am
merely accepting Count Kielmansegg's protection back to my own family,
because I know I can trust to his honour."
"Quite so," said Geiger-Hans, in a soothing voice. "And it is, of
course, infinitely preferable to set forth by night in secret, with a
handsome young man, than to summon any more aged or nearer relative to
your help! A father, maybe--or a brother? But it is raining, as I say,
madam, very hard. So much for the start. And I am afraid when you
arrive in Austria your noble family may consider your journey
ill-managed."
Her bosom heaved.
"It is very unjust," she moaned, "that you men can do everything,
whereas we poor women----" She paused on the brink of tears.
"Ah!" he retorted, "you women are the crystal cups that hold the honour
of the house! That is why we must set you in a shrine, madam. To-night
it is still sanctuary in your presence, and I can still kneel before
you. To-morrow----?"
The colour rushed into her face. She tried to speak with haughtiness,
but her voice faltered.
"To-morrow--what then?"
"It is inconceivable how much wiser it would be for you to remain under
a husband's roof on such a night!"
There came a knock at the door. With squirrel nimbleness the fiddler
twisted round and vanished. The Burgravine took a rapid survey of the
room, whisked the bag into a cupboard, the jewel-cases on the top of it,
and went to the window to close it.
"One moment, one moment!" she called, as the knocking was discreetly
repeated, and paused with her hand on the casement. Certainly it was
most uncomfortable weather! Then she opened the door. Sidonia entered.
"Little aunt, is your head better?"
"Yes, child, yes. You have supped? Is it so late?" Before the girl
could answer, the bell of the castle clock began to boom nine strokes.
"Nine o'clock!" shrieked the Burgravine. "What's to be done?" She
struck her forehead with a distraught air. "I dare not trust that false
Eliza," she murmured in her mind. Then her eye met Sidonia's candid
gaze, and she caught her hand. "Listen, child; you shall do something
for me. Count Kielmansegg is going away to-night."
The girl's pupils widened, her face grew paler, but she did not speak.
"'Twas I bade him leave. Your uncle's causeless jealousy ..."
The girl nodded. The Burgrave, in truth, had been no pleasant companion
that night. He had drunk heavily, and alternated between glowering
spells of silence and loud and almost offensive pleasantries aimed at
his guest, both of which had, not unnaturally, considerably embarrassed
Count Kielmansegg.
"'Twas my duty!" (Oh, how virtuous felt the Burgravine of
Wellenshausen!) "I had promised him (poor youth, he is my cousin!) that
I would bid him 'Good-bye.' But now"--(positively Countess Betty
thought her niece must perceive the halo growing round her head)--"now
it has struck me that if your uncle heard of it, he might
misconstrue---- My dear, you must go and tell Count Steven from me----"
"I?" cried Sidonia, and started.
"You must," insisted the lady, harshly. "He is waiting in the east
tower. Tell him this: 'My aunt has sent me to say "Good-bye" for her;
it is better so.... It is better so.' Do not forget to say that. What
are you waiting for, girl? Go! Perhaps you are afraid of the rain!"
cried the Burgravine, scornfully, and seized the travelling-cloak that
was lying ready on the bed. "Here, put this on; wrap the hood over your
head. Now run, there is not a moment to be lost."
There was, perhaps, more urgency, more fear, in her voice and manner
than she had been aware of, for Sidonia, after a quick look at her,
gathered the folds of the cloak about her and fled upon her errand. The
Burgravine drew a long sigh of relief, then rang her hand-bell sharply.
"Eliza," said she to the responsive damsel, and, on the spot, froze her
with a glance for the impertinent air of confederacy with which she had
entered, "light up a fire and serve supper to me. My head is better.
Trim the candles and give me '_La Nouvelle Heloise_? How you stare,
wench! Have you fallen in love, perhaps, that you do your work so ill
to-day?"
Steven's reflections, as he waited in the best-sheltered corner of the
deserted tower, listening to the beat and gurgle of the rain, were of an
unsatisfactory description. The folly of weakness is the worst of
follies, the realization of it the most galling. He was about--no use in
trying to blink the fact--he was about to ruin his own life; to take
upon himself an intolerable burden; to commit, technically at least, a
crime against hospitality; to put a stain upon his ancient name; and all
without receiving in return the slightest gratification or being able to
proffer, even to himself, the exoneration of any approach to passion.
The mere thought of the long, intimate drive was a bore; the prospect of
a possible life-long companionship with the Burgravine intolerable.
Geiger-Hans, mysterious wretch that he was, had much to answer for. And
yet, had Steven followed his advice (he had, in honesty, to admit this)
things would not be at this pass.
* * * * *
She came in upon him with a rapid step and a rustle of wet garments,
stopped at the mouth of the passage, and said in a loud whisper:
"Are you there, _Herr Graf_?"
As he went forward, she clutched his wrist with a cold hand.
"Hush," she cried, "I think I heard steps behind me!"
Both listened, not daring to breathe. Oh, what a situation for a youth
whose pride it had been to hold his head high in the world!
Nothing was heard, however, save the wild, dismal murmur of the rain
over the land, and the nearer drip and patter.
"No, there is nothing," he said, and reluctantly passed a limp arm round
her shoulders. To his surprise, they were jerked from his touch with
resentment. The next moment, however, by a mutual movement, they caught
at each other; for there came an unaccountable grinding about their
ears, and almost immediately the solid ground gave way under their feet.
"Gracious Powers! is the tower falling?" cried he.
Even as he clasped the figure beside him, with the instinctive,
protecting action of man for woman, he was aware that the slender thing
in his arms could not be the Burgravine. But at the same instant they
were sliding; and before he could do aught but throw himself backwards
to avoid crushing her, they were shot with giddy swiftness down a steep
incline. With a shock, his feet struck level ground; he lay dazed and
breathless, her weight across his breast. Stars danced before his eyes.
Vaguely, as from a great distance, he heard overhead the echo of a
laugh; then a thud, and once more the grinding sound, as of heavy, rusty
bars. It was the laugh that brought him to his senses; too often,
lately, had that laugh rung in his ears!
She raised herself in his arms.
"Are you hurt?" he cried as he lay.
"No," she answered quickly. "Don't get up!" He knew by the sudden
change in her voice that she had flung the muffling hood from her head.
"Don't get up! don't stir! I must find out where we are."
He recognized now the young, clear tones. It was Sidonia, but he was
past surprise. One thing alone stood clear out of his confusion:
whatever it might be that had brought this about, he was glad, to the
heart of him he was glad, it was not Countess Betty.
He felt the girl struggle to her
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