CHAPTER IIIWhenI reached the Schloss Graben I stood a moment to reconnoitre, and found myself in the same still, cobble-paved road where I had met Anna a few hours before. On my left rose the high garden-walls overtopped by a web of bare interlacing branches, and over that again the palace windows and its mansard roof; on my right the row of silent brown or red stone houses, well-to-do and snugly private, with beaten iron bars to the low windows and great scallop shells over the doors. This was the house down the stone steps of which my wife’s servant had come this morning, and this was number ten. Of course! How clear it was all becoming to me! I dashed the sweat from my brow, for I had come like a lamplighter. Then I tramped up the three steps and again halted a second. How quiet the house was!But I should soon put some bustle into it, I said to myself, and smiled. I plied the knocker till the sleeping echoes awoke, and I hung on the iron rope of the bell till the shrill protest of the jingling peal rang out into the street. There came othersounds from within as of a flutter in a dovecot. Doors were opened and shut precipitately. A window was thrown back above my head; there was a vision of a white-capped face thrust forward and withdrawn; and, indeed, like rabbits from a warren, most, I believe, of the idle servants in the street were popping out to see whence could proceed such unholy clangour.The door before me was at length cautiously and slowly opened, and through the aperture the frightened, rose-red face of a maid looked out at me.I saw that I had been incautious, and therefore addressed her with a suave mock courtesy. Indeed, now that the actual moment had come I felt stealing over me a very deadly calm.“Forgive me,” said I, “my wench, for disturbing you thus rudely. I see I have alarmed you. These are, however, but old soldiers’ ways, which I trust your good mistress will pardon to an old friend. Your mistress is, if I mistake not, now the doctor’s lady. But when I knew her she was Fräulein Ottilie Pahlen.”The girl’s mouth had, during this long speech, which in my new mood came glibly enough to my lips, become broadened into a grin. There are very few girls in the Empire, I have been told, that will not feel mollified towards a soldier.“Is your mistress within?” I pursued.She dropped a curtsey, and after a comprehensive glance over my person threw open the door. Would the gentleman walk in? She brought me through a brick-paved hall into a long low oak-panelled room, all dark and yet all shining with polish. It was very hot from a high china stove.“What visitor shall I announce to the gracious lady?” she asked, sidling towards me, and thrusting her apple face as forward as she dared.“I am so old a friend, in fact, I may say so near a connection, that I should like to give your gracious lady a pleasant surprise,” said I; “I will not therefore give my name.” As a propitiatory after-thought, I pinched the hard red cheek and dropped a coin into her apron pocket. I tried to make my smile very sweet, but it felt stiff upon my lips. She, however, saw nought amiss, and pattered out well content.Then followed a few minutes’ waiting; all had grown still again around me. Through the deep recessed windows I looked forth into a little courtyard with one bare tree. This, then, was the home Ottilie had chosen instead of an English estate, instead of Tollendhal, instead of all I could offer her in courtly Vienna or great London! How she must love this man! Or was it only the plebeianinstinct reasserting itself in spite of all?... The Court doctor’s lady!I heard a footfall on the bare-boarded stair, and with a smile that was this time the natural expression of the complicated bitterness of my soul, I moved a few steps so as to place myself in the best light.My wife was, perhaps, still in ignorance of my escape from death. Anna had not yet carried her grievous news of the failure of their endeavours. Indeed, this was evident from the general placidity of the household, as well as the staid regularity of the approaching steps. To witness her joy at the discovery was sufficient revenge for the moment. After that the reckoning would be with—well, with my successor.Such was the state of my thoughts at the crucial moment of my strange story.I have said that I was calm, but during the little pause that took place between the cessation of the footsteps and the turning of the lock I could hear the beating of my own heart like the measured roar of a drum in battle.Then was the door opened, and before me stood—-not Ottilie, who had been my Ottilie, but the other Ottilie, the Princess! She was advancing upon me with the old well-remembered gracioussmile, when all at once she halted with much the same terror-stricken look with which Anna earlier in the day had recognised me, and clasped her hands, crying:“God be merciful to us, M. de Jennico!” and seemed the next instant ready to burst into tears.In the first confusion of my thoughts, in the rage created by this eternalquid pro quo—that I should ever find the lady-in-waiting when I wanted the Princess, and the Princess when I wanted the lady-in-waiting,—I might have been inclined to think that Anna had after all spread her tidings, and that my wife’s former mistress had come to her aid at this awkward moment; but the surprise and consternation on this woman’s countenance were too genuine to have been counterfeit.Whatever reason brought the Princess here I was in no humour to inquire.“I came to see my wife, Madam,” said I, “and not to presume upon your Highness’s condescension. I am determined to see my wife,” I insisted; “that Ottilie Pahlen, who was your maid of honour, and lived with me as my wife for a month, as your Highness well knows, and who was in such haste to wed this Court doctor of yours at the first rumour of her husband’s death.”I spoke in a very uncourtier-like rage. But shewhom I addressed showed neither anger nor astonishment, but sank into the nearest chair, a mere heap of soft distressed womanhood, wringing her plump dimpled hands, while tears of extraordinary size suffused her eyes and overflowed upon her cheeks.At sight of this my heat fell away; I threw myself on my knees beside her, and, all forgetful of the distance between us, took one of her hands in mine and poured forth an appeal.“You were always kind to me; be kind now. I must see my wife. I have been cruelly treated; I am surrounded with enemies; be you my friend!”She leant forward and looked at me earnestly with swimming eyes.“Is it possible,” she exclaimed—“is it possible, M. de Jennico, that you have not found out yet?... that you do not suspect?...”Even as she spoke, and while I knelt looking up at her, the scales fell from my eyes. I needed no further word. I knew. How was it possible, indeed, that I should not have known before? I saw as in a flash that this comely burgher woman was not, had never been, never could have been, the Princess. I saw that the hand I still unconsciously held bore marks of household toil, that on the third finger glittered a new weddingring. Then a thousand memories rushed into my mind, a thousand confirmatory details. Oh, blind—blind—blind that I had been—fool, and worse than fool! The mystery of my wife’s mocking smile; the secret that had so often hung unspoken on her lips; her careless pretty ways; the depth of her injured pride; and then the manner in which she had been guarded from me, the force employed against me, the secret diplomatic attempts to free her, followed, on their failure, by the relentless determination to do away with me altogether! Before my reeling brain it all rose into towering conviction—a joy, a sorrow, both too keen for humanity to bear, seized upon my weakened frame. I heard as if in the far distance the words the woman near me was saying:“It all began by a freak of her Highness, ...” and with the echo of them whirling as it were in a mad dance through my brain to the sound of thundering cataracts, a whirlpool of flame spreading before my eyes, I fell with a crash, as it seemed, into a yawning black abyss.When I again came to myself the cold air was blowing in upon me through the open casement, and I was stretched full length on a hard floor, in what seemed a perfect deluge of the very strongest vinegar I have ever smelt. At one sideof me knelt my hostess, her healthy face blanched almost beyond recognition. On the other, between my wandering gaze and the window, swam the visage of the maid, eyes and mouth as round as horror could make them, but with cheeks the ruddiness of which, it seemed, no emotion could mitigate.Both my kind attendants gave a cry as I opened my eyes.“He is recovering, Trude,” said Madam Lothner (to call her now by her proper name).“Ah! gracious lady,” answered the wench in an unctuous tone of importance; “his face is still as red as the beet I was pickling when I heard you scream—would God the master were here to bleed him. Shall I send into the town to seek him?”“God forbid!” cried her mistress, in a hasty and peremptory tone. “No, I tell you, Trude, he is recovering, and I have not been a doctor’s wife these six weeks for nothing. The flush is fading even as I look at him. See thee here, fetch me some of the cordial water.”I do not know how far her six weeks’ association with the medical luminary, her husband, had profited Madam Lothner. I have since been told that her administration of cordial, immediatelyupon such a blood stroke to the head as mine, ought really to have finished me off. But as it happened it did me a vast deal of good, and I was soon able to shake off the giddiness, the sickness, and the general confusion of my system.With recovered wits it gradually became apparent to me that while Madam Lothner continued to ply me with every assistance she could think of, regarding me with eyes in which shone most kindly and womanly benevolence, her chief anxiety nevertheless was to get rid of me with all possible despatch.But I was not likely to give up such an opportunity. The chaos in my mind consequent upon the unexpected revelation, and its disastrous physical effect, was such as to render me no very coherent inquisitor. Nevertheless, the determination to learn all that this woman could tell me about my wife rose predominant above the seething of my thoughts.Ottilie, my wife, was Ottilie the Princess after all! I had felt the truth before it had been told me. But whilst they removed an agonising supposition, these struck me nevertheless as strange unhomely tidings which opened fresh difficulties in my path—difficulties the full import of which were every second more strongly borne upon me.Ottilie the Princess!... Everything was changed, and the relentless attitude of the Princess bore a very different aspect to the mere resentment of the injured wife. When my letters had been flung back in my face, when I had been kidnapped and expelled the country, it had been then by her orders. She had sent to demand the divorce. Who had set the bravo on my track? By whose wish had my life been so basely, so persistently, attempted? By hers—Ottilie, the Princess? A Princess who had repented of her freak, whose pride, whose reputation, had suffered from the stigma of an unequal match.The man whose sword had twice passed through my body had called out, “Ha! Ottilie!” Who dare call on a Princess thus save her kinsman or—her lover?I felt the blood surge through me again, but this time in my anger it brought a sense of courage and strength. I interrupted Madam Lothner as, with a joyful exclamation that I was now quite restored, she was about to issue an order for the summary fetching of a hired coach.“Let your maid go,” said I authoritatively, “but not for a coach. I have yet much to say to you.”I was without pity for the distress this demand occasioned, deaf to the hurried whisper:“For pity’s sake, go now that you can. You are in danger here. Think of yourself, if you will not think of me!”“I can think of but one person,” said I harshly. “I have come a thousand miles to learn things which I know you can tell me, and here I remain until I have heard them. Any delay on your side will only prolong the danger, since danger there be.”She looked up in tearful pleading, met my obstinate gaze, and instantly submitted—a woman born to be ruled.“Go, Trude,” she said faintly, “and warn me if you see your master coming. What will she think of me?” sighed the poor lady as the door closed upon an awe-struck but evidently suspicious Trude. “But no matter, better that just now than the truth. Now, sir, for God’s sake, what is it you would have of me?”“Let me go back,” said I, “to the beginning. When I married ... my wife at Tollendhal, she was then, for a freak as you say, acting the lady-in-waiting, while you assumed her rôle of Princess?”“It is so,” said Madam Lothner, “but I neverknew till the deed was accomplished to what length her Highness had chosen to push her folly. I could not then attempt to interfere or advise, still less could I be the person to send tidings to the Court.”“So?” said I, as she paused.“So,” said she, “in great fear and trembling, I deemed it best to obey her Highness’s strict command, and await events at the Castle of Schreckendorf, still in my assumed part.”“But when my wife returned to you,” I said, and my voice shook, “returned to you in a peasant’s cart,—oh, I know all about it, Madam, I know that I drove her forth through the most insensate pride that ever lost soul its paradise,—when she returned, the truth must have already been known?”“Ach, yes,” murmured the sentimental Saxon, her eyes watering with very sympathy at the sight of my bitter self-reproach. “Yes, it was because of rumours which had already reached the residence (from your friends in England, I believe), that his Serene Highness the Duke sent in such haste to recall us. He would not come himself for fear of giving weight to the scandal. But it was her Highness who chose to confirm the report.”“How?” cried I eagerly.“Why, sir,” answered the doctor’s lady, flowing on not unwillingly in her soft guttural, though visibly perturbed nevertheless, and now and again anxiously alive to any sound without—“why, sir, her Highness having returned to Schreckendorf before the arrival of the ladies and gentlemen from Lausitz, and being, it seemed, determined”—here she hesitated and glanced at me timidly—“determined not to return to Tollendhal ever again, her Highness might easily, had she wished, have denied the whole story. And indeed,” continued the speaker with a shrewdness I would not have given her credit for, “had she so behaved it would have best pleased her relations. But she was not so made.”“Ah, no indeed,” said I, “her pride would not stoop to that.”“You are right,” said Madam Lothner, with a sigh, “she is very proud. She was calm and seemed to have quite made up her mind. ’I will give no explanation to any one,’ she said to me, ’and I recognise in no one the right to question me. But my father shall know that I am married, and that I am separated from my husband for ever. I am not the first woman of my rank on whom such a fate has fallen.’ That was her attitude.”And here the good creature broke forth as if in spite of herself with passionate expostulation.“Ah, M. de Jennico, but she suffered! Oh, if you would atone, leave her now, leave her at least in peace! You have brought enough sorrow already into her life. Ach! I do not know how it has been between you; but now that she thinks you dead, for God’s sake let it be!”“By Heaven, Madam,” cried I, half mad, I believe, between pain, remorse, and fury, “these are strange counsels! Do you forget that we are man and wife, and this by her own doing? But truly I need not be surprised, for you do not hesitate before crime at the Court of Lausitz, and if murder be so lightly condoned, sure it is that bigamy must seem a very peccadillo.”Madam Lothner stared at me with startled eyes and dropping jaw.“Murder,” she whispered, “M. de Jennico! what terrible thing do you say?”Then she put her hand to her head, ejaculating: “True, it was the Margrave himself who brought us news of your death on his return from England. It was in the English papers. I feared I know not what, but this—this—God save us!”I looked at her in fresh bewilderment. She was as one seized by overwhelming terror. I feltthat her emotion had its origin in causes still unknown to me.“And who is the Margrave?” I cried quickly.She lowered her voice to the barest breath of sound, and glanced fearfully over her shoulder as if afraid of eavesdroppers even in this retired room.“Prince Eugen, as they call him,” she said, “one of her Highness’s cousins. He has, I do not quite know how, hopes of sovereignty in Poland, and they were to have been married: it was her father’s wish, and it is so still.”I sprang up with an imprecation, but the lady almost flung herself upon me, and clapped her hand over my mouth.“In the name of God,” she said, “be still, or you will ruin us! My husband is his most devoted adherent. In this house he rules, and we bow to the earth before him.”I sank back into my seat, docile, in spite of myself, impressed by the strength of her fear. New trains of revelations crowded upon me. Eugen of Liegnitz-Rothenburg—Rothenburg—Ville-Rouge—I saw it all!She went on, bringing her mouth close to my ear:“The Princess hated him, and indeed he hasgrown into a strange and terrifying man, so oddly impulsive, cruel, wilful, vindictive. He always professed to love the Princess, but I cannot but think that it was the love of taming—he would dearly love to break her, just as he loves to break the proudest-spirited horse. His grey eye makes me grow cold. As I said, from a child she hated him, and it was for that—having seen one whom she thought she could love....” Here she paused, and glanced at me, and hesitated.It was for that. I remembered. She had told me of the unhappy fate that threatened “the Princess” that evening when we met under the fir-trees to decide upon my crazy match, and when, as I had deemed, she had fooled me to the top of my bent. She had spoken in tones of scathing contempt and hatred of some cavalier. And now? Suddenly gripped by the old devil of doubt and jealousy, I cried out, “And now, after all, the fate of being wedded to an obscure gentleman seems to her more dreadful than that of sharing her place with her cousin, and the peculiar qualities of the hated relative have been very usefully employed in ridding her of the inconvenient husband? Oh, Madam, of course you know your Court of Lausitz, and I think I begin to see your drift: you think, in your amiability, that it would bepreferable to see your mistress bigamously united, than that she should legitimise her position by yet another and more successful attempt at assassination.”“I fail to understand you, sir,” drawing back from me, nevertheless, with a glance of mistrust and indignation.“I will be plain,” said I: “when the Princess, who is my wife, left me,—I will own I bear some blame, but then I had been strangely played with,—she had doubtless already begun to repent what you call her freak. When I followed her and implored her forgiveness,—you yourself know all about it, Madam, for you must have acted under her orders,—she flung back my letters, through your agency, with a contemptuous denial of any knowledge of such a person as M. de Jennico. When I wrote to her, her whom I believed to bear your name, a pleading, abject letter, for I was still but a poor loving fool, her only answer was to have me seized and driven from the country like a criminal. Later on, when I refused to be a party to her petition for divorce, she thought, no doubt, she had given me chances enough, and this time she deputed the noble bully, her cousin, to manage the matter in his own fashion. My life was attempted five times,Madam. And when it all failed,—your Prince Eugen, you tell me, he was in England, and there was a certain great bulky Chevalier de Ville-Rouge, who particularly sought my acquaintance—’tis he, is it not?—your Prince Eugen honoured me by seeking a duello, and by running his august sword through my common body, and that more often, be it said, than custom sanctions in honourable encounters. I was given for dead. No wonder! It seems to be the sport of hell to keep me alive. I can scarce think it is the will of Heaven.”Madam Lothner had followed my tirade with what appeared the most conflicting sentiments: blank astonishment, horror, indignation. It was the last, however, that predominated. Her countenance became suffused with crimson; her blue eyes flashed a fire I had not deemed them capable of harbouring; she forgot the precautions she herself had so strenuously enjoined.“And do you dare, sir,” cried she, “accuse my mistress of these things—you, whom she loved? You knew her as your wife for four weeks, and yet you know her so little as to believe her plotting your death! Those letters, sir, you speak of, she never received, nor did I, nor did she nor I ever hear of your presence in this land. ’Tistrue that after you had left,—foryouleft her first, remember,—after well-nigh a year without tidings of you, she did herself send to you to request the annulment of the marriage. It wasto free youbecause she believed you repented of it, and she felt she had entrapped you into it. And when, sir, you refused, she had hope again in her heart, for she loved you. And she suffered persecution on your account, and was kept and watched like a state prisoner—she that had always lived for the free air, and for her own way. They were cruel to her, and put dreadful pressure upon her that she should make her appeal alone to the Pope. But she held firm, and bore it all in silence, and lived surrounded by spies, her old friends and old servants banished from her sight, until the news came that you were dead. Then ... ah, then, she mourned as never a woman mourned yet for her first and only love! As to marriage—what dreadful things have you been saying? Her Highness will never marry again. She will be faithful as long as she lives to you, whom she believes dead. And God forbid it should be otherwise, for Prince Eugen would wed her from no love, I believe, but solely to punish her for resisting him so long, to break her to his will at last, and triumph over her. Oh, no, she would neverwed again! You must believe me, for I have been with her through it all, and though she would mock me and laugh at me once, she turned to me afterwards as to her only friend——Get up, M. de Jennico, get up! Ach Gott! what a coil this is! My good sir, get up; think if the doctor were to come in! Ach Gott! what is that you say? Nay, I have been a fool, and this is the worst of all. My poor friend, there is no room for happiness here!”For I had fallen at her feet again, and was covering her hand with kisses, blessing her with tears, I believe, for the happiness of this moment.She ended, good soul, by weeping with me, or rather, over the pity of the joy that was doomed, as she thought, to such brief duration.“Oh, you are mad, you are mad!” she said, as I poured forth I know not what extravagant plans. Ottilie loved me, cried I in the depths of my exultant soul: what could be difficult now? “You are mad! Have you not yet learned your lesson? Do you not understand that they will never,neverlet you have her? Go back to your home, sir, and if you love her never let her know you are still alive, for if they heard it here, God knows what she would be put to bear; and if she knew they had tried to murder you, it would kill her.I tell you, sir, a Court is a dreadful place, and Prince Eugen, you know what he is, and his Serene Highness himself, he is hard as the stones of the street. You have seen what they have done—no law can reach them! They will not fail again. And if a second scandal——” she paused, hesitated, shuddered, then bending over to me she whispered, half inarticulately, “if a second scandal came to pass, who knows what forfeit she might not have to pay!”But I rose, clasped her two hands, and looked into her eyes with all the bold joy that filled my heart.“My kind friend,” I said, “you cannot frighten me now. Keep you but our secret, and you will yet see your mistress happy.” I wrung her hands, and hurried to the door, as eager now to be gone as I had been to enter. I must act, and act at once, and there was much to do.She followed me, lamenting and entreating, to the steps, where stood faithful Trude, with garments blown about in the cold wind. But, as I turned to take a last farewell, my hostess caught me by the sleeve.“Keep close,” she said, “keep close; and if you are hurt, if you are ill——” she hesitated a second, then leaned forward and breathed into my ear, “do not send for the Court doctor.”
CHAPTER IIIWhenI reached the Schloss Graben I stood a moment to reconnoitre, and found myself in the same still, cobble-paved road where I had met Anna a few hours before. On my left rose the high garden-walls overtopped by a web of bare interlacing branches, and over that again the palace windows and its mansard roof; on my right the row of silent brown or red stone houses, well-to-do and snugly private, with beaten iron bars to the low windows and great scallop shells over the doors. This was the house down the stone steps of which my wife’s servant had come this morning, and this was number ten. Of course! How clear it was all becoming to me! I dashed the sweat from my brow, for I had come like a lamplighter. Then I tramped up the three steps and again halted a second. How quiet the house was!But I should soon put some bustle into it, I said to myself, and smiled. I plied the knocker till the sleeping echoes awoke, and I hung on the iron rope of the bell till the shrill protest of the jingling peal rang out into the street. There came othersounds from within as of a flutter in a dovecot. Doors were opened and shut precipitately. A window was thrown back above my head; there was a vision of a white-capped face thrust forward and withdrawn; and, indeed, like rabbits from a warren, most, I believe, of the idle servants in the street were popping out to see whence could proceed such unholy clangour.The door before me was at length cautiously and slowly opened, and through the aperture the frightened, rose-red face of a maid looked out at me.I saw that I had been incautious, and therefore addressed her with a suave mock courtesy. Indeed, now that the actual moment had come I felt stealing over me a very deadly calm.“Forgive me,” said I, “my wench, for disturbing you thus rudely. I see I have alarmed you. These are, however, but old soldiers’ ways, which I trust your good mistress will pardon to an old friend. Your mistress is, if I mistake not, now the doctor’s lady. But when I knew her she was Fräulein Ottilie Pahlen.”The girl’s mouth had, during this long speech, which in my new mood came glibly enough to my lips, become broadened into a grin. There are very few girls in the Empire, I have been told, that will not feel mollified towards a soldier.“Is your mistress within?” I pursued.She dropped a curtsey, and after a comprehensive glance over my person threw open the door. Would the gentleman walk in? She brought me through a brick-paved hall into a long low oak-panelled room, all dark and yet all shining with polish. It was very hot from a high china stove.“What visitor shall I announce to the gracious lady?” she asked, sidling towards me, and thrusting her apple face as forward as she dared.“I am so old a friend, in fact, I may say so near a connection, that I should like to give your gracious lady a pleasant surprise,” said I; “I will not therefore give my name.” As a propitiatory after-thought, I pinched the hard red cheek and dropped a coin into her apron pocket. I tried to make my smile very sweet, but it felt stiff upon my lips. She, however, saw nought amiss, and pattered out well content.Then followed a few minutes’ waiting; all had grown still again around me. Through the deep recessed windows I looked forth into a little courtyard with one bare tree. This, then, was the home Ottilie had chosen instead of an English estate, instead of Tollendhal, instead of all I could offer her in courtly Vienna or great London! How she must love this man! Or was it only the plebeianinstinct reasserting itself in spite of all?... The Court doctor’s lady!I heard a footfall on the bare-boarded stair, and with a smile that was this time the natural expression of the complicated bitterness of my soul, I moved a few steps so as to place myself in the best light.My wife was, perhaps, still in ignorance of my escape from death. Anna had not yet carried her grievous news of the failure of their endeavours. Indeed, this was evident from the general placidity of the household, as well as the staid regularity of the approaching steps. To witness her joy at the discovery was sufficient revenge for the moment. After that the reckoning would be with—well, with my successor.Such was the state of my thoughts at the crucial moment of my strange story.I have said that I was calm, but during the little pause that took place between the cessation of the footsteps and the turning of the lock I could hear the beating of my own heart like the measured roar of a drum in battle.Then was the door opened, and before me stood—-not Ottilie, who had been my Ottilie, but the other Ottilie, the Princess! She was advancing upon me with the old well-remembered gracioussmile, when all at once she halted with much the same terror-stricken look with which Anna earlier in the day had recognised me, and clasped her hands, crying:“God be merciful to us, M. de Jennico!” and seemed the next instant ready to burst into tears.In the first confusion of my thoughts, in the rage created by this eternalquid pro quo—that I should ever find the lady-in-waiting when I wanted the Princess, and the Princess when I wanted the lady-in-waiting,—I might have been inclined to think that Anna had after all spread her tidings, and that my wife’s former mistress had come to her aid at this awkward moment; but the surprise and consternation on this woman’s countenance were too genuine to have been counterfeit.Whatever reason brought the Princess here I was in no humour to inquire.“I came to see my wife, Madam,” said I, “and not to presume upon your Highness’s condescension. I am determined to see my wife,” I insisted; “that Ottilie Pahlen, who was your maid of honour, and lived with me as my wife for a month, as your Highness well knows, and who was in such haste to wed this Court doctor of yours at the first rumour of her husband’s death.”I spoke in a very uncourtier-like rage. But shewhom I addressed showed neither anger nor astonishment, but sank into the nearest chair, a mere heap of soft distressed womanhood, wringing her plump dimpled hands, while tears of extraordinary size suffused her eyes and overflowed upon her cheeks.At sight of this my heat fell away; I threw myself on my knees beside her, and, all forgetful of the distance between us, took one of her hands in mine and poured forth an appeal.“You were always kind to me; be kind now. I must see my wife. I have been cruelly treated; I am surrounded with enemies; be you my friend!”She leant forward and looked at me earnestly with swimming eyes.“Is it possible,” she exclaimed—“is it possible, M. de Jennico, that you have not found out yet?... that you do not suspect?...”Even as she spoke, and while I knelt looking up at her, the scales fell from my eyes. I needed no further word. I knew. How was it possible, indeed, that I should not have known before? I saw as in a flash that this comely burgher woman was not, had never been, never could have been, the Princess. I saw that the hand I still unconsciously held bore marks of household toil, that on the third finger glittered a new weddingring. Then a thousand memories rushed into my mind, a thousand confirmatory details. Oh, blind—blind—blind that I had been—fool, and worse than fool! The mystery of my wife’s mocking smile; the secret that had so often hung unspoken on her lips; her careless pretty ways; the depth of her injured pride; and then the manner in which she had been guarded from me, the force employed against me, the secret diplomatic attempts to free her, followed, on their failure, by the relentless determination to do away with me altogether! Before my reeling brain it all rose into towering conviction—a joy, a sorrow, both too keen for humanity to bear, seized upon my weakened frame. I heard as if in the far distance the words the woman near me was saying:“It all began by a freak of her Highness, ...” and with the echo of them whirling as it were in a mad dance through my brain to the sound of thundering cataracts, a whirlpool of flame spreading before my eyes, I fell with a crash, as it seemed, into a yawning black abyss.When I again came to myself the cold air was blowing in upon me through the open casement, and I was stretched full length on a hard floor, in what seemed a perfect deluge of the very strongest vinegar I have ever smelt. At one sideof me knelt my hostess, her healthy face blanched almost beyond recognition. On the other, between my wandering gaze and the window, swam the visage of the maid, eyes and mouth as round as horror could make them, but with cheeks the ruddiness of which, it seemed, no emotion could mitigate.Both my kind attendants gave a cry as I opened my eyes.“He is recovering, Trude,” said Madam Lothner (to call her now by her proper name).“Ah! gracious lady,” answered the wench in an unctuous tone of importance; “his face is still as red as the beet I was pickling when I heard you scream—would God the master were here to bleed him. Shall I send into the town to seek him?”“God forbid!” cried her mistress, in a hasty and peremptory tone. “No, I tell you, Trude, he is recovering, and I have not been a doctor’s wife these six weeks for nothing. The flush is fading even as I look at him. See thee here, fetch me some of the cordial water.”I do not know how far her six weeks’ association with the medical luminary, her husband, had profited Madam Lothner. I have since been told that her administration of cordial, immediatelyupon such a blood stroke to the head as mine, ought really to have finished me off. But as it happened it did me a vast deal of good, and I was soon able to shake off the giddiness, the sickness, and the general confusion of my system.With recovered wits it gradually became apparent to me that while Madam Lothner continued to ply me with every assistance she could think of, regarding me with eyes in which shone most kindly and womanly benevolence, her chief anxiety nevertheless was to get rid of me with all possible despatch.But I was not likely to give up such an opportunity. The chaos in my mind consequent upon the unexpected revelation, and its disastrous physical effect, was such as to render me no very coherent inquisitor. Nevertheless, the determination to learn all that this woman could tell me about my wife rose predominant above the seething of my thoughts.Ottilie, my wife, was Ottilie the Princess after all! I had felt the truth before it had been told me. But whilst they removed an agonising supposition, these struck me nevertheless as strange unhomely tidings which opened fresh difficulties in my path—difficulties the full import of which were every second more strongly borne upon me.Ottilie the Princess!... Everything was changed, and the relentless attitude of the Princess bore a very different aspect to the mere resentment of the injured wife. When my letters had been flung back in my face, when I had been kidnapped and expelled the country, it had been then by her orders. She had sent to demand the divorce. Who had set the bravo on my track? By whose wish had my life been so basely, so persistently, attempted? By hers—Ottilie, the Princess? A Princess who had repented of her freak, whose pride, whose reputation, had suffered from the stigma of an unequal match.The man whose sword had twice passed through my body had called out, “Ha! Ottilie!” Who dare call on a Princess thus save her kinsman or—her lover?I felt the blood surge through me again, but this time in my anger it brought a sense of courage and strength. I interrupted Madam Lothner as, with a joyful exclamation that I was now quite restored, she was about to issue an order for the summary fetching of a hired coach.“Let your maid go,” said I authoritatively, “but not for a coach. I have yet much to say to you.”I was without pity for the distress this demand occasioned, deaf to the hurried whisper:“For pity’s sake, go now that you can. You are in danger here. Think of yourself, if you will not think of me!”“I can think of but one person,” said I harshly. “I have come a thousand miles to learn things which I know you can tell me, and here I remain until I have heard them. Any delay on your side will only prolong the danger, since danger there be.”She looked up in tearful pleading, met my obstinate gaze, and instantly submitted—a woman born to be ruled.“Go, Trude,” she said faintly, “and warn me if you see your master coming. What will she think of me?” sighed the poor lady as the door closed upon an awe-struck but evidently suspicious Trude. “But no matter, better that just now than the truth. Now, sir, for God’s sake, what is it you would have of me?”“Let me go back,” said I, “to the beginning. When I married ... my wife at Tollendhal, she was then, for a freak as you say, acting the lady-in-waiting, while you assumed her rôle of Princess?”“It is so,” said Madam Lothner, “but I neverknew till the deed was accomplished to what length her Highness had chosen to push her folly. I could not then attempt to interfere or advise, still less could I be the person to send tidings to the Court.”“So?” said I, as she paused.“So,” said she, “in great fear and trembling, I deemed it best to obey her Highness’s strict command, and await events at the Castle of Schreckendorf, still in my assumed part.”“But when my wife returned to you,” I said, and my voice shook, “returned to you in a peasant’s cart,—oh, I know all about it, Madam, I know that I drove her forth through the most insensate pride that ever lost soul its paradise,—when she returned, the truth must have already been known?”“Ach, yes,” murmured the sentimental Saxon, her eyes watering with very sympathy at the sight of my bitter self-reproach. “Yes, it was because of rumours which had already reached the residence (from your friends in England, I believe), that his Serene Highness the Duke sent in such haste to recall us. He would not come himself for fear of giving weight to the scandal. But it was her Highness who chose to confirm the report.”“How?” cried I eagerly.“Why, sir,” answered the doctor’s lady, flowing on not unwillingly in her soft guttural, though visibly perturbed nevertheless, and now and again anxiously alive to any sound without—“why, sir, her Highness having returned to Schreckendorf before the arrival of the ladies and gentlemen from Lausitz, and being, it seemed, determined”—here she hesitated and glanced at me timidly—“determined not to return to Tollendhal ever again, her Highness might easily, had she wished, have denied the whole story. And indeed,” continued the speaker with a shrewdness I would not have given her credit for, “had she so behaved it would have best pleased her relations. But she was not so made.”“Ah, no indeed,” said I, “her pride would not stoop to that.”“You are right,” said Madam Lothner, with a sigh, “she is very proud. She was calm and seemed to have quite made up her mind. ’I will give no explanation to any one,’ she said to me, ’and I recognise in no one the right to question me. But my father shall know that I am married, and that I am separated from my husband for ever. I am not the first woman of my rank on whom such a fate has fallen.’ That was her attitude.”And here the good creature broke forth as if in spite of herself with passionate expostulation.“Ah, M. de Jennico, but she suffered! Oh, if you would atone, leave her now, leave her at least in peace! You have brought enough sorrow already into her life. Ach! I do not know how it has been between you; but now that she thinks you dead, for God’s sake let it be!”“By Heaven, Madam,” cried I, half mad, I believe, between pain, remorse, and fury, “these are strange counsels! Do you forget that we are man and wife, and this by her own doing? But truly I need not be surprised, for you do not hesitate before crime at the Court of Lausitz, and if murder be so lightly condoned, sure it is that bigamy must seem a very peccadillo.”Madam Lothner stared at me with startled eyes and dropping jaw.“Murder,” she whispered, “M. de Jennico! what terrible thing do you say?”Then she put her hand to her head, ejaculating: “True, it was the Margrave himself who brought us news of your death on his return from England. It was in the English papers. I feared I know not what, but this—this—God save us!”I looked at her in fresh bewilderment. She was as one seized by overwhelming terror. I feltthat her emotion had its origin in causes still unknown to me.“And who is the Margrave?” I cried quickly.She lowered her voice to the barest breath of sound, and glanced fearfully over her shoulder as if afraid of eavesdroppers even in this retired room.“Prince Eugen, as they call him,” she said, “one of her Highness’s cousins. He has, I do not quite know how, hopes of sovereignty in Poland, and they were to have been married: it was her father’s wish, and it is so still.”I sprang up with an imprecation, but the lady almost flung herself upon me, and clapped her hand over my mouth.“In the name of God,” she said, “be still, or you will ruin us! My husband is his most devoted adherent. In this house he rules, and we bow to the earth before him.”I sank back into my seat, docile, in spite of myself, impressed by the strength of her fear. New trains of revelations crowded upon me. Eugen of Liegnitz-Rothenburg—Rothenburg—Ville-Rouge—I saw it all!She went on, bringing her mouth close to my ear:“The Princess hated him, and indeed he hasgrown into a strange and terrifying man, so oddly impulsive, cruel, wilful, vindictive. He always professed to love the Princess, but I cannot but think that it was the love of taming—he would dearly love to break her, just as he loves to break the proudest-spirited horse. His grey eye makes me grow cold. As I said, from a child she hated him, and it was for that—having seen one whom she thought she could love....” Here she paused, and glanced at me, and hesitated.It was for that. I remembered. She had told me of the unhappy fate that threatened “the Princess” that evening when we met under the fir-trees to decide upon my crazy match, and when, as I had deemed, she had fooled me to the top of my bent. She had spoken in tones of scathing contempt and hatred of some cavalier. And now? Suddenly gripped by the old devil of doubt and jealousy, I cried out, “And now, after all, the fate of being wedded to an obscure gentleman seems to her more dreadful than that of sharing her place with her cousin, and the peculiar qualities of the hated relative have been very usefully employed in ridding her of the inconvenient husband? Oh, Madam, of course you know your Court of Lausitz, and I think I begin to see your drift: you think, in your amiability, that it would bepreferable to see your mistress bigamously united, than that she should legitimise her position by yet another and more successful attempt at assassination.”“I fail to understand you, sir,” drawing back from me, nevertheless, with a glance of mistrust and indignation.“I will be plain,” said I: “when the Princess, who is my wife, left me,—I will own I bear some blame, but then I had been strangely played with,—she had doubtless already begun to repent what you call her freak. When I followed her and implored her forgiveness,—you yourself know all about it, Madam, for you must have acted under her orders,—she flung back my letters, through your agency, with a contemptuous denial of any knowledge of such a person as M. de Jennico. When I wrote to her, her whom I believed to bear your name, a pleading, abject letter, for I was still but a poor loving fool, her only answer was to have me seized and driven from the country like a criminal. Later on, when I refused to be a party to her petition for divorce, she thought, no doubt, she had given me chances enough, and this time she deputed the noble bully, her cousin, to manage the matter in his own fashion. My life was attempted five times,Madam. And when it all failed,—your Prince Eugen, you tell me, he was in England, and there was a certain great bulky Chevalier de Ville-Rouge, who particularly sought my acquaintance—’tis he, is it not?—your Prince Eugen honoured me by seeking a duello, and by running his august sword through my common body, and that more often, be it said, than custom sanctions in honourable encounters. I was given for dead. No wonder! It seems to be the sport of hell to keep me alive. I can scarce think it is the will of Heaven.”Madam Lothner had followed my tirade with what appeared the most conflicting sentiments: blank astonishment, horror, indignation. It was the last, however, that predominated. Her countenance became suffused with crimson; her blue eyes flashed a fire I had not deemed them capable of harbouring; she forgot the precautions she herself had so strenuously enjoined.“And do you dare, sir,” cried she, “accuse my mistress of these things—you, whom she loved? You knew her as your wife for four weeks, and yet you know her so little as to believe her plotting your death! Those letters, sir, you speak of, she never received, nor did I, nor did she nor I ever hear of your presence in this land. ’Tistrue that after you had left,—foryouleft her first, remember,—after well-nigh a year without tidings of you, she did herself send to you to request the annulment of the marriage. It wasto free youbecause she believed you repented of it, and she felt she had entrapped you into it. And when, sir, you refused, she had hope again in her heart, for she loved you. And she suffered persecution on your account, and was kept and watched like a state prisoner—she that had always lived for the free air, and for her own way. They were cruel to her, and put dreadful pressure upon her that she should make her appeal alone to the Pope. But she held firm, and bore it all in silence, and lived surrounded by spies, her old friends and old servants banished from her sight, until the news came that you were dead. Then ... ah, then, she mourned as never a woman mourned yet for her first and only love! As to marriage—what dreadful things have you been saying? Her Highness will never marry again. She will be faithful as long as she lives to you, whom she believes dead. And God forbid it should be otherwise, for Prince Eugen would wed her from no love, I believe, but solely to punish her for resisting him so long, to break her to his will at last, and triumph over her. Oh, no, she would neverwed again! You must believe me, for I have been with her through it all, and though she would mock me and laugh at me once, she turned to me afterwards as to her only friend——Get up, M. de Jennico, get up! Ach Gott! what a coil this is! My good sir, get up; think if the doctor were to come in! Ach Gott! what is that you say? Nay, I have been a fool, and this is the worst of all. My poor friend, there is no room for happiness here!”For I had fallen at her feet again, and was covering her hand with kisses, blessing her with tears, I believe, for the happiness of this moment.She ended, good soul, by weeping with me, or rather, over the pity of the joy that was doomed, as she thought, to such brief duration.“Oh, you are mad, you are mad!” she said, as I poured forth I know not what extravagant plans. Ottilie loved me, cried I in the depths of my exultant soul: what could be difficult now? “You are mad! Have you not yet learned your lesson? Do you not understand that they will never,neverlet you have her? Go back to your home, sir, and if you love her never let her know you are still alive, for if they heard it here, God knows what she would be put to bear; and if she knew they had tried to murder you, it would kill her.I tell you, sir, a Court is a dreadful place, and Prince Eugen, you know what he is, and his Serene Highness himself, he is hard as the stones of the street. You have seen what they have done—no law can reach them! They will not fail again. And if a second scandal——” she paused, hesitated, shuddered, then bending over to me she whispered, half inarticulately, “if a second scandal came to pass, who knows what forfeit she might not have to pay!”But I rose, clasped her two hands, and looked into her eyes with all the bold joy that filled my heart.“My kind friend,” I said, “you cannot frighten me now. Keep you but our secret, and you will yet see your mistress happy.” I wrung her hands, and hurried to the door, as eager now to be gone as I had been to enter. I must act, and act at once, and there was much to do.She followed me, lamenting and entreating, to the steps, where stood faithful Trude, with garments blown about in the cold wind. But, as I turned to take a last farewell, my hostess caught me by the sleeve.“Keep close,” she said, “keep close; and if you are hurt, if you are ill——” she hesitated a second, then leaned forward and breathed into my ear, “do not send for the Court doctor.”
WhenI reached the Schloss Graben I stood a moment to reconnoitre, and found myself in the same still, cobble-paved road where I had met Anna a few hours before. On my left rose the high garden-walls overtopped by a web of bare interlacing branches, and over that again the palace windows and its mansard roof; on my right the row of silent brown or red stone houses, well-to-do and snugly private, with beaten iron bars to the low windows and great scallop shells over the doors. This was the house down the stone steps of which my wife’s servant had come this morning, and this was number ten. Of course! How clear it was all becoming to me! I dashed the sweat from my brow, for I had come like a lamplighter. Then I tramped up the three steps and again halted a second. How quiet the house was!
But I should soon put some bustle into it, I said to myself, and smiled. I plied the knocker till the sleeping echoes awoke, and I hung on the iron rope of the bell till the shrill protest of the jingling peal rang out into the street. There came othersounds from within as of a flutter in a dovecot. Doors were opened and shut precipitately. A window was thrown back above my head; there was a vision of a white-capped face thrust forward and withdrawn; and, indeed, like rabbits from a warren, most, I believe, of the idle servants in the street were popping out to see whence could proceed such unholy clangour.
The door before me was at length cautiously and slowly opened, and through the aperture the frightened, rose-red face of a maid looked out at me.
I saw that I had been incautious, and therefore addressed her with a suave mock courtesy. Indeed, now that the actual moment had come I felt stealing over me a very deadly calm.
“Forgive me,” said I, “my wench, for disturbing you thus rudely. I see I have alarmed you. These are, however, but old soldiers’ ways, which I trust your good mistress will pardon to an old friend. Your mistress is, if I mistake not, now the doctor’s lady. But when I knew her she was Fräulein Ottilie Pahlen.”
The girl’s mouth had, during this long speech, which in my new mood came glibly enough to my lips, become broadened into a grin. There are very few girls in the Empire, I have been told, that will not feel mollified towards a soldier.
“Is your mistress within?” I pursued.
She dropped a curtsey, and after a comprehensive glance over my person threw open the door. Would the gentleman walk in? She brought me through a brick-paved hall into a long low oak-panelled room, all dark and yet all shining with polish. It was very hot from a high china stove.
“What visitor shall I announce to the gracious lady?” she asked, sidling towards me, and thrusting her apple face as forward as she dared.
“I am so old a friend, in fact, I may say so near a connection, that I should like to give your gracious lady a pleasant surprise,” said I; “I will not therefore give my name.” As a propitiatory after-thought, I pinched the hard red cheek and dropped a coin into her apron pocket. I tried to make my smile very sweet, but it felt stiff upon my lips. She, however, saw nought amiss, and pattered out well content.
Then followed a few minutes’ waiting; all had grown still again around me. Through the deep recessed windows I looked forth into a little courtyard with one bare tree. This, then, was the home Ottilie had chosen instead of an English estate, instead of Tollendhal, instead of all I could offer her in courtly Vienna or great London! How she must love this man! Or was it only the plebeianinstinct reasserting itself in spite of all?... The Court doctor’s lady!
I heard a footfall on the bare-boarded stair, and with a smile that was this time the natural expression of the complicated bitterness of my soul, I moved a few steps so as to place myself in the best light.
My wife was, perhaps, still in ignorance of my escape from death. Anna had not yet carried her grievous news of the failure of their endeavours. Indeed, this was evident from the general placidity of the household, as well as the staid regularity of the approaching steps. To witness her joy at the discovery was sufficient revenge for the moment. After that the reckoning would be with—well, with my successor.
Such was the state of my thoughts at the crucial moment of my strange story.
I have said that I was calm, but during the little pause that took place between the cessation of the footsteps and the turning of the lock I could hear the beating of my own heart like the measured roar of a drum in battle.
Then was the door opened, and before me stood—-not Ottilie, who had been my Ottilie, but the other Ottilie, the Princess! She was advancing upon me with the old well-remembered gracioussmile, when all at once she halted with much the same terror-stricken look with which Anna earlier in the day had recognised me, and clasped her hands, crying:
“God be merciful to us, M. de Jennico!” and seemed the next instant ready to burst into tears.
In the first confusion of my thoughts, in the rage created by this eternalquid pro quo—that I should ever find the lady-in-waiting when I wanted the Princess, and the Princess when I wanted the lady-in-waiting,—I might have been inclined to think that Anna had after all spread her tidings, and that my wife’s former mistress had come to her aid at this awkward moment; but the surprise and consternation on this woman’s countenance were too genuine to have been counterfeit.
Whatever reason brought the Princess here I was in no humour to inquire.
“I came to see my wife, Madam,” said I, “and not to presume upon your Highness’s condescension. I am determined to see my wife,” I insisted; “that Ottilie Pahlen, who was your maid of honour, and lived with me as my wife for a month, as your Highness well knows, and who was in such haste to wed this Court doctor of yours at the first rumour of her husband’s death.”
I spoke in a very uncourtier-like rage. But shewhom I addressed showed neither anger nor astonishment, but sank into the nearest chair, a mere heap of soft distressed womanhood, wringing her plump dimpled hands, while tears of extraordinary size suffused her eyes and overflowed upon her cheeks.
At sight of this my heat fell away; I threw myself on my knees beside her, and, all forgetful of the distance between us, took one of her hands in mine and poured forth an appeal.
“You were always kind to me; be kind now. I must see my wife. I have been cruelly treated; I am surrounded with enemies; be you my friend!”
She leant forward and looked at me earnestly with swimming eyes.
“Is it possible,” she exclaimed—“is it possible, M. de Jennico, that you have not found out yet?... that you do not suspect?...”
Even as she spoke, and while I knelt looking up at her, the scales fell from my eyes. I needed no further word. I knew. How was it possible, indeed, that I should not have known before? I saw as in a flash that this comely burgher woman was not, had never been, never could have been, the Princess. I saw that the hand I still unconsciously held bore marks of household toil, that on the third finger glittered a new weddingring. Then a thousand memories rushed into my mind, a thousand confirmatory details. Oh, blind—blind—blind that I had been—fool, and worse than fool! The mystery of my wife’s mocking smile; the secret that had so often hung unspoken on her lips; her careless pretty ways; the depth of her injured pride; and then the manner in which she had been guarded from me, the force employed against me, the secret diplomatic attempts to free her, followed, on their failure, by the relentless determination to do away with me altogether! Before my reeling brain it all rose into towering conviction—a joy, a sorrow, both too keen for humanity to bear, seized upon my weakened frame. I heard as if in the far distance the words the woman near me was saying:
“It all began by a freak of her Highness, ...” and with the echo of them whirling as it were in a mad dance through my brain to the sound of thundering cataracts, a whirlpool of flame spreading before my eyes, I fell with a crash, as it seemed, into a yawning black abyss.
When I again came to myself the cold air was blowing in upon me through the open casement, and I was stretched full length on a hard floor, in what seemed a perfect deluge of the very strongest vinegar I have ever smelt. At one sideof me knelt my hostess, her healthy face blanched almost beyond recognition. On the other, between my wandering gaze and the window, swam the visage of the maid, eyes and mouth as round as horror could make them, but with cheeks the ruddiness of which, it seemed, no emotion could mitigate.
Both my kind attendants gave a cry as I opened my eyes.
“He is recovering, Trude,” said Madam Lothner (to call her now by her proper name).
“Ah! gracious lady,” answered the wench in an unctuous tone of importance; “his face is still as red as the beet I was pickling when I heard you scream—would God the master were here to bleed him. Shall I send into the town to seek him?”
“God forbid!” cried her mistress, in a hasty and peremptory tone. “No, I tell you, Trude, he is recovering, and I have not been a doctor’s wife these six weeks for nothing. The flush is fading even as I look at him. See thee here, fetch me some of the cordial water.”
I do not know how far her six weeks’ association with the medical luminary, her husband, had profited Madam Lothner. I have since been told that her administration of cordial, immediatelyupon such a blood stroke to the head as mine, ought really to have finished me off. But as it happened it did me a vast deal of good, and I was soon able to shake off the giddiness, the sickness, and the general confusion of my system.
With recovered wits it gradually became apparent to me that while Madam Lothner continued to ply me with every assistance she could think of, regarding me with eyes in which shone most kindly and womanly benevolence, her chief anxiety nevertheless was to get rid of me with all possible despatch.
But I was not likely to give up such an opportunity. The chaos in my mind consequent upon the unexpected revelation, and its disastrous physical effect, was such as to render me no very coherent inquisitor. Nevertheless, the determination to learn all that this woman could tell me about my wife rose predominant above the seething of my thoughts.
Ottilie, my wife, was Ottilie the Princess after all! I had felt the truth before it had been told me. But whilst they removed an agonising supposition, these struck me nevertheless as strange unhomely tidings which opened fresh difficulties in my path—difficulties the full import of which were every second more strongly borne upon me.Ottilie the Princess!... Everything was changed, and the relentless attitude of the Princess bore a very different aspect to the mere resentment of the injured wife. When my letters had been flung back in my face, when I had been kidnapped and expelled the country, it had been then by her orders. She had sent to demand the divorce. Who had set the bravo on my track? By whose wish had my life been so basely, so persistently, attempted? By hers—Ottilie, the Princess? A Princess who had repented of her freak, whose pride, whose reputation, had suffered from the stigma of an unequal match.
The man whose sword had twice passed through my body had called out, “Ha! Ottilie!” Who dare call on a Princess thus save her kinsman or—her lover?
I felt the blood surge through me again, but this time in my anger it brought a sense of courage and strength. I interrupted Madam Lothner as, with a joyful exclamation that I was now quite restored, she was about to issue an order for the summary fetching of a hired coach.
“Let your maid go,” said I authoritatively, “but not for a coach. I have yet much to say to you.”
I was without pity for the distress this demand occasioned, deaf to the hurried whisper:
“For pity’s sake, go now that you can. You are in danger here. Think of yourself, if you will not think of me!”
“I can think of but one person,” said I harshly. “I have come a thousand miles to learn things which I know you can tell me, and here I remain until I have heard them. Any delay on your side will only prolong the danger, since danger there be.”
She looked up in tearful pleading, met my obstinate gaze, and instantly submitted—a woman born to be ruled.
“Go, Trude,” she said faintly, “and warn me if you see your master coming. What will she think of me?” sighed the poor lady as the door closed upon an awe-struck but evidently suspicious Trude. “But no matter, better that just now than the truth. Now, sir, for God’s sake, what is it you would have of me?”
“Let me go back,” said I, “to the beginning. When I married ... my wife at Tollendhal, she was then, for a freak as you say, acting the lady-in-waiting, while you assumed her rôle of Princess?”
“It is so,” said Madam Lothner, “but I neverknew till the deed was accomplished to what length her Highness had chosen to push her folly. I could not then attempt to interfere or advise, still less could I be the person to send tidings to the Court.”
“So?” said I, as she paused.
“So,” said she, “in great fear and trembling, I deemed it best to obey her Highness’s strict command, and await events at the Castle of Schreckendorf, still in my assumed part.”
“But when my wife returned to you,” I said, and my voice shook, “returned to you in a peasant’s cart,—oh, I know all about it, Madam, I know that I drove her forth through the most insensate pride that ever lost soul its paradise,—when she returned, the truth must have already been known?”
“Ach, yes,” murmured the sentimental Saxon, her eyes watering with very sympathy at the sight of my bitter self-reproach. “Yes, it was because of rumours which had already reached the residence (from your friends in England, I believe), that his Serene Highness the Duke sent in such haste to recall us. He would not come himself for fear of giving weight to the scandal. But it was her Highness who chose to confirm the report.”
“How?” cried I eagerly.
“Why, sir,” answered the doctor’s lady, flowing on not unwillingly in her soft guttural, though visibly perturbed nevertheless, and now and again anxiously alive to any sound without—“why, sir, her Highness having returned to Schreckendorf before the arrival of the ladies and gentlemen from Lausitz, and being, it seemed, determined”—here she hesitated and glanced at me timidly—“determined not to return to Tollendhal ever again, her Highness might easily, had she wished, have denied the whole story. And indeed,” continued the speaker with a shrewdness I would not have given her credit for, “had she so behaved it would have best pleased her relations. But she was not so made.”
“Ah, no indeed,” said I, “her pride would not stoop to that.”
“You are right,” said Madam Lothner, with a sigh, “she is very proud. She was calm and seemed to have quite made up her mind. ’I will give no explanation to any one,’ she said to me, ’and I recognise in no one the right to question me. But my father shall know that I am married, and that I am separated from my husband for ever. I am not the first woman of my rank on whom such a fate has fallen.’ That was her attitude.”
And here the good creature broke forth as if in spite of herself with passionate expostulation.
“Ah, M. de Jennico, but she suffered! Oh, if you would atone, leave her now, leave her at least in peace! You have brought enough sorrow already into her life. Ach! I do not know how it has been between you; but now that she thinks you dead, for God’s sake let it be!”
“By Heaven, Madam,” cried I, half mad, I believe, between pain, remorse, and fury, “these are strange counsels! Do you forget that we are man and wife, and this by her own doing? But truly I need not be surprised, for you do not hesitate before crime at the Court of Lausitz, and if murder be so lightly condoned, sure it is that bigamy must seem a very peccadillo.”
Madam Lothner stared at me with startled eyes and dropping jaw.
“Murder,” she whispered, “M. de Jennico! what terrible thing do you say?”
Then she put her hand to her head, ejaculating: “True, it was the Margrave himself who brought us news of your death on his return from England. It was in the English papers. I feared I know not what, but this—this—God save us!”
I looked at her in fresh bewilderment. She was as one seized by overwhelming terror. I feltthat her emotion had its origin in causes still unknown to me.
“And who is the Margrave?” I cried quickly.
She lowered her voice to the barest breath of sound, and glanced fearfully over her shoulder as if afraid of eavesdroppers even in this retired room.
“Prince Eugen, as they call him,” she said, “one of her Highness’s cousins. He has, I do not quite know how, hopes of sovereignty in Poland, and they were to have been married: it was her father’s wish, and it is so still.”
I sprang up with an imprecation, but the lady almost flung herself upon me, and clapped her hand over my mouth.
“In the name of God,” she said, “be still, or you will ruin us! My husband is his most devoted adherent. In this house he rules, and we bow to the earth before him.”
I sank back into my seat, docile, in spite of myself, impressed by the strength of her fear. New trains of revelations crowded upon me. Eugen of Liegnitz-Rothenburg—Rothenburg—Ville-Rouge—I saw it all!
She went on, bringing her mouth close to my ear:
“The Princess hated him, and indeed he hasgrown into a strange and terrifying man, so oddly impulsive, cruel, wilful, vindictive. He always professed to love the Princess, but I cannot but think that it was the love of taming—he would dearly love to break her, just as he loves to break the proudest-spirited horse. His grey eye makes me grow cold. As I said, from a child she hated him, and it was for that—having seen one whom she thought she could love....” Here she paused, and glanced at me, and hesitated.
It was for that. I remembered. She had told me of the unhappy fate that threatened “the Princess” that evening when we met under the fir-trees to decide upon my crazy match, and when, as I had deemed, she had fooled me to the top of my bent. She had spoken in tones of scathing contempt and hatred of some cavalier. And now? Suddenly gripped by the old devil of doubt and jealousy, I cried out, “And now, after all, the fate of being wedded to an obscure gentleman seems to her more dreadful than that of sharing her place with her cousin, and the peculiar qualities of the hated relative have been very usefully employed in ridding her of the inconvenient husband? Oh, Madam, of course you know your Court of Lausitz, and I think I begin to see your drift: you think, in your amiability, that it would bepreferable to see your mistress bigamously united, than that she should legitimise her position by yet another and more successful attempt at assassination.”
“I fail to understand you, sir,” drawing back from me, nevertheless, with a glance of mistrust and indignation.
“I will be plain,” said I: “when the Princess, who is my wife, left me,—I will own I bear some blame, but then I had been strangely played with,—she had doubtless already begun to repent what you call her freak. When I followed her and implored her forgiveness,—you yourself know all about it, Madam, for you must have acted under her orders,—she flung back my letters, through your agency, with a contemptuous denial of any knowledge of such a person as M. de Jennico. When I wrote to her, her whom I believed to bear your name, a pleading, abject letter, for I was still but a poor loving fool, her only answer was to have me seized and driven from the country like a criminal. Later on, when I refused to be a party to her petition for divorce, she thought, no doubt, she had given me chances enough, and this time she deputed the noble bully, her cousin, to manage the matter in his own fashion. My life was attempted five times,Madam. And when it all failed,—your Prince Eugen, you tell me, he was in England, and there was a certain great bulky Chevalier de Ville-Rouge, who particularly sought my acquaintance—’tis he, is it not?—your Prince Eugen honoured me by seeking a duello, and by running his august sword through my common body, and that more often, be it said, than custom sanctions in honourable encounters. I was given for dead. No wonder! It seems to be the sport of hell to keep me alive. I can scarce think it is the will of Heaven.”
Madam Lothner had followed my tirade with what appeared the most conflicting sentiments: blank astonishment, horror, indignation. It was the last, however, that predominated. Her countenance became suffused with crimson; her blue eyes flashed a fire I had not deemed them capable of harbouring; she forgot the precautions she herself had so strenuously enjoined.
“And do you dare, sir,” cried she, “accuse my mistress of these things—you, whom she loved? You knew her as your wife for four weeks, and yet you know her so little as to believe her plotting your death! Those letters, sir, you speak of, she never received, nor did I, nor did she nor I ever hear of your presence in this land. ’Tistrue that after you had left,—foryouleft her first, remember,—after well-nigh a year without tidings of you, she did herself send to you to request the annulment of the marriage. It wasto free youbecause she believed you repented of it, and she felt she had entrapped you into it. And when, sir, you refused, she had hope again in her heart, for she loved you. And she suffered persecution on your account, and was kept and watched like a state prisoner—she that had always lived for the free air, and for her own way. They were cruel to her, and put dreadful pressure upon her that she should make her appeal alone to the Pope. But she held firm, and bore it all in silence, and lived surrounded by spies, her old friends and old servants banished from her sight, until the news came that you were dead. Then ... ah, then, she mourned as never a woman mourned yet for her first and only love! As to marriage—what dreadful things have you been saying? Her Highness will never marry again. She will be faithful as long as she lives to you, whom she believes dead. And God forbid it should be otherwise, for Prince Eugen would wed her from no love, I believe, but solely to punish her for resisting him so long, to break her to his will at last, and triumph over her. Oh, no, she would neverwed again! You must believe me, for I have been with her through it all, and though she would mock me and laugh at me once, she turned to me afterwards as to her only friend——Get up, M. de Jennico, get up! Ach Gott! what a coil this is! My good sir, get up; think if the doctor were to come in! Ach Gott! what is that you say? Nay, I have been a fool, and this is the worst of all. My poor friend, there is no room for happiness here!”
For I had fallen at her feet again, and was covering her hand with kisses, blessing her with tears, I believe, for the happiness of this moment.
She ended, good soul, by weeping with me, or rather, over the pity of the joy that was doomed, as she thought, to such brief duration.
“Oh, you are mad, you are mad!” she said, as I poured forth I know not what extravagant plans. Ottilie loved me, cried I in the depths of my exultant soul: what could be difficult now? “You are mad! Have you not yet learned your lesson? Do you not understand that they will never,neverlet you have her? Go back to your home, sir, and if you love her never let her know you are still alive, for if they heard it here, God knows what she would be put to bear; and if she knew they had tried to murder you, it would kill her.I tell you, sir, a Court is a dreadful place, and Prince Eugen, you know what he is, and his Serene Highness himself, he is hard as the stones of the street. You have seen what they have done—no law can reach them! They will not fail again. And if a second scandal——” she paused, hesitated, shuddered, then bending over to me she whispered, half inarticulately, “if a second scandal came to pass, who knows what forfeit she might not have to pay!”
But I rose, clasped her two hands, and looked into her eyes with all the bold joy that filled my heart.
“My kind friend,” I said, “you cannot frighten me now. Keep you but our secret, and you will yet see your mistress happy.” I wrung her hands, and hurried to the door, as eager now to be gone as I had been to enter. I must act, and act at once, and there was much to do.
She followed me, lamenting and entreating, to the steps, where stood faithful Trude, with garments blown about in the cold wind. But, as I turned to take a last farewell, my hostess caught me by the sleeve.
“Keep close,” she said, “keep close; and if you are hurt, if you are ill——” she hesitated a second, then leaned forward and breathed into my ear, “do not send for the Court doctor.”