CHAPTER XIVA STRONG MEASURE

CHAPTER XIVA STRONG MEASURE

DUKE THEODOR wore a troubled face next morning, and its cause stood before him, insistent, uncompromising, in the person of his terrible Chancellor. The pains which his Highness was at to remain wrapped in the cloak of his pompous dignity, in spite of the determined wind of a strong will which kept now fluttering the thin material, now blowing it aside and, occasionally, with a fierce gust threatening to tear it into ribbons, were quite as pitiable as amusing. The measure which Rollmar was, with his usual dogged persistence, forcing upon his sovereign was more than strong. It was startling, and indeed, from the Duke’s point of view, heroic. For it amounted, put plainly—and, after but little courtly preamble, the stern old minister so put it—to the imprisonment of his daughter, with a view to keeping her safe till Prince Ludwig should think proper to come and claim her.

“It is preposterous,” exclaimed the Duke. “I cannot do it.”

“It is essential,” retorted Rollmar. “Your Highness must do it.”

“The girl will come to her senses without that,” said his highness.

“I doubt whether she will come to her senses with it,” returned the Chancellor. “Only, once under lock and key, her state of mind will not so much matter.”

“I could not consent to such a severe measure,” the Duke maintained weakly, “except under the stress of absolute necessity.”

“Which necessity has arisen,” Rollmar insisted calmly.

“You will convince me of that, Excellency.”

“Readily, your Highness. If the facts of these clandestine meetings with this young officer are not sufficient proof of the necessity.”

“Why not take—ah’m—preventive measures against him, Baron?” said the Duke, brightening with a plausible argument.

“Your Highness may rest assured that we are doing so,” Rollmar answered a little testily.

“You are a long time about it,” rejoined the Duke with a suggestion of malicious satisfaction at the idea of his infallible minister’s discomfiture. “Surely, Baron, you are not withheld by any scruples on account of the transgressor being a foreigner and a guest?”

There was a very obvious and cheap sneer in this, since it was notorious that Chancellor Rollmar was the last man in Europe to be influenced by such considerations.

But a weak man does not as a rule gain much satisfaction from sneering at a strong one. It would have taken a more masterly brain and a sharper tongue than Duke Theodor’s to put Rollmar out of countenance. He simply replied—

“I am quite confident that in such a case any act of punishment which it might be expedient to inflict would be covered by the cloak of your Highness’s gracious approval. But, to return to facts, I regret to say I am unable to inform you, sir, at this moment with absolute certainty that my orders have been duly executed.”

The Duke raised his eyebrows, still hugging the idea of his master-servant’s failure. “How is that, Baron? You have as a rule, I understand, but to point your finger.”

The Baron greatly resented the way in which he was being cross-examined about his discomfiture; it was bad enough to realise it, without being worried into confessing it. He had expected the Duke to fall in with his views without opposition or even protest, but as he did not seem inclined to do so, the wily old diplomatist told himself that he must weight his proposal with the story which would force it through as imperative.

“Your Highness knows my aversion to a blunder,” he replied impressively. “It was necessary to make quite certain that the finger could point to the right man. It was only last night that I became sure of that. The agent whom I employed to—to put any further scandal out of the question executed his orders to the satisfaction of certain witnesses. But it was with as much astonishment as regret that I learnt this morning that the culprit’s body had mysteriously disappeared.”

“Indeed!” There was enough sensation in the story to interest the shallow mind of the royalpococurante.

“On my way to the palace just now,” Rollmar proceeded, in the cold tone of one who drives home an unassailable argument, “I was informed that one of my agents, to whom I had given certain particular instructions, had been found stabbed to death outside the park wall.”

“Horrible! Atrocious!” cried the Duke, thinking of his own safety.

“This news,” continued the Chancellor, in the same dry voice, “tends to confirm my suspicion of treachery in the person I employed. Your Highness will comprehend,” he broke off to interpolate the explanation as a teacher might elucidate a stiff passage in a pupil’s reading, “that we cannot command men of unimpeachable integrity to do work of this sort. We rely on their interest rather than their honesty.”

“Quite so,” said his Highness. “No doubt twoknaves are more useful for certain purposes than one honest man.”

“At least they are more available,” Rollmar said dryly. “Now, this second episode points to the possibility of our lieutenant being still alive. I say it is possible, though not probable. Still, considering the high interests involved, we cannot afford to ignore the chance. If we have failed, most unexpectedly, to put an end to the affair on one side we are bound to resort to the other. That, your Highness, is the reason why I have every confidence in proposing to you a measure which I feel must be distasteful to your Highness’s affection.”

The Duke shook his head vaguely. “A doubtful remedy and a great risk, Baron.”

“Pardon me, sire. A very certain remedy and a removal of risk.”

“Surely not of scandal?” the Duke argued. “A pretty thing to be said that we could only keep our Princess to the match by locking her away from every other man. And a fine prospect for their married happiness.”

“Such a state of affairs is not uncommon in royal circles,” Rollmar observed, with a little cynical grin. “Where policy of state is concerned small considerations must give way to great. Princess Ruperta will not be the first royal bride who has had to be caged. She represents the price of a kingdom; surely it is wise to keep our treasure under lock and key, away from irresponsible pilferers. But I do not propose, Highness, that our precautions should become known. The Princess’s health needs change of air. A few weeks’ residence in the Castle of Krell has been prescribed.”

The Duke winced. “Krell has an ominous sound,” he said smiling feebly. “It need not be Krell.”

The minister had evidently made up his mind. “Krell has a dark history,” he agreed casually, “which renders it not the liveliest abode in the world, for which reason, your Highness, it seems exactly the place to bring awayward young lady to her senses. Moreover, its natural situation renders it an ideal retreat from undesirable Philanders. May I take it that your Highness will give the necessary orders for the Princess’s journey to-morrow?”

His Highness seemed, notwithstanding his wise old counsellor’s persistence, to have a flat refusal on his lips. However, he checked it, and, rising, took a turn across the room in considerable discomposure. Rollmar stood watching him from beneath his knit brows with a smile of mingled confidence and contempt. The Duke came back. “I cannot consent to this,” he declared with a prodigious effort to be and, what was more to the point, to seem resolute; “at least not at this moment. So severe, so drastic a measure must not be taken in a hurry.”

“It is,” replied the Chancellor with calm sententiousness, “almost invariably, without loss of time that drastic measures have to be taken. The need of such argues urgency.”

“That may be,” the Duke returned loftily. “But this is a matter wherein my daughter’s welfare and happiness are concerned.”

“Wherein the welfare and glory of your duchy are involved.”

“I am not so sure,” said the Duke, abandoning direct argument, “that it is, after all, so great a matter.”

“But I am,” the minister retorted. “You must pardon me, Highness, if I insist that this alliance is of the very highest consequences. An importance not to be weighed for an instant against the young lady’s few days of discontent or even discomfort.”

He had changed his tone now and spoke with almost peremptory insistence. The man’s strong will and character came out and seemed to beat down in a moment the feeble faculties arrayed against them.

“I repeat,” said the Duke, visibly weakening, “there is no such great hurry.”

“I regret to take an entirely opposite view to your Highness.”

He was firm, and his master knew by experience what his firmness meant. In spite of a long series of abject failures Duke Theodor still persisted in trying an occasional mental fall with the Samson who clasped the pillars of his royal house.

“Prince Ludwig is behaving cavalierly,” said the Duke, fishing about for an argument, as a man will prolong a hopeless game of chess. “I have reason to suppose my daughter resents it. He cannot complain, and we may.”

“It is not our policy to complain or to give the Beroldsteiners cause for dissatisfaction,” the Chancellor returned shortly, as declining to do more than suggest that his view was not to be traversed.

The royal temper began to give way under the minister’s somewhat contemptuous persistence. “It simply amounts to this then, Baron. That while Prince Ludwig chooses to prolong his rustication, my daughter is, like Andromeda, to be chained to the rock of Krell to await his pleasure.”

“That,” said Rollmar, “is one way of describing the position. But the simile scarcely holds good, since our Minotaur comes not to destroy but to enrich.”

“And therefore,” said the Duke, following out the idea with a weak mind’s love of trivialities, “it becomes necessary in our case to slay, not the Minotaur, but Perseus.”

Rollmar gave an assenting bow. “Since the Minotaur is assuredly the better match. Andromeda will be chained for her advantage, not against her destruction.”

“I do not like chains,” the Duke protested.

“They are,” said Rollmar, “the unseen insignia ofroyalty. I have done my best for many years to keep them from galling your Highness. But if you persist in feeling for them, I can do no more. Perhaps it is as well; I may have done too much already.”

There was in this, as the Duke knew well, a covert threat of retirement; and, much as he would have liked to take at his word the determined and exacting old minister, who constituted the most galling of all his fetters, yet for the safety of his kingdom and, what touched him nearer, his own personal security, he dared not. Cold-blooded, cruel, relentless, false when expediency called for deceit, overbearing and contemptuous to the master whom he led by the nose, Chancellor Rollmar was yet honest enough of purpose in his patriotism and his schemes for the aggrandisement of the little kingdom he ruled with so strong a hand.

So Duke Theodor had in the end to give in—which, to save time and trouble, he might well have done at the beginning—and consent that Princess Ruperta should from that very hour be placed under surveillance, and that the next day she should be conducted to the fortress-castle of Krell which had been the prison, and occasionally the grave, of certain persons who from time to time had had the temerity to oppose or offend the implacable Chancellor. The name of Krell had become almost a terror, and Rollmar was wise in choosing it as a retreat eminently adapted to bring the perverse Princess to a sense of obedience to his will.

The Duke had, with an ill grace, given a forced and grudging consent to the arrangement, and the Chancellor, having gained his point by what he considered an exorbitant expenditure of time and patience, was proceeding to mention other and less personal business of state, when word was brought that a despatch-rider had just arrived with important news from Beroldstein.

With an unusual show of eagerness, Rollmar had the despatch brought in.

“Has Prince Ludwig come to light?” the Duke inquired.

“No. But he will,” Rollmar answered. “King Josef is dead.”

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