Probably no more terrifying a figure could have presented itself at the Persepolitan Hotel than the major of cavalry, and he looked the type of his class, insolent with aristocratic hauteur, martial to the point of arrogance, and domineering and as blustering toward inferiors as he would have been bland and meek to his superiors. The landlord, one of the hybrid Levantines in whose blood that of a dozen races flowed, was as alarmed as the maid, whom he sent up the stairs to announce the visitor to Herr Daniels. Strange to say, the officer, who had taken a seat in the sitting-room, unasked, with his heavy sabre held upright between his knees, bore the somewhat lengthy delay with patience. The girl returned to say that Herr Daniels would be honored with the visit, although, he had said, he had not a pleasant remembrance of the gentleman. In fact, before his assault in the street upon La Belle Stamboulane, the major had persecuted her and deserved the reproof from her father which it was too dangerous, as Munich society was ruled, for him to utter.
But, contrary to all precedent, the military Lovelace quietly walked into the room where Claudius was restored to health and whence he had been removed to the inmost chamber vacated by the young singer. The major's accident might account for his meekness, but his manners and voice accorded with his speech so that one attributed the change to an altogether different cause than a purely physical one.
He approached the Jew with open countenance, wearing a chastened and subdued expression, and extended his hand as to a brother officer. Daniels accepted it, struck by the unexpected mien, although he could not, in his astonishment and inveterate prudence, return the pressure. The major spoke an apology for his outrageous conduct, in a faltering voice and with moist eyes, spacing the apparently unstudied phrases with a cough as if to master tearfulness unbecoming even an invalid soldier. He laid the blame on the surpassing charms of the songstress who had enflamed him beyond his self-control and, partly, on the infernal French wine in which he had imprudently over-indulged at the evening's garrison officer's dinner. Had he but patriotically stuck to the beer! But that was not worth lamenting now. He tendered his regrets to the father of the young lady and promised to use his poor influence—here he smiled at the disparagement as if he knew his power and that his hearer was sure of it—for her professional advancement as long as she rejoiced Munich with her beauty and accomplishments.
The night in the dead-house, on the very brink of the deathpit, had transformed him, he freely acknowledged. He hardly recognized his own voice in communicating the sentiments that carried him into new directions, so strange was it all, but he was eager to show by deeds that his conversion was great and sincere. He had engaged his protection for the distinguished turkophone-player and his unparalleled daughter, but he felt that was enough.
"Ample," said Daniels, at last able to speak a word on the torrent of glib language momentarily pausing; "but we are going away to fulfill an engagement in Paris."
"One moment," said the major, politely lifting his hand from which he kept the buckskin gauntlet as if he meant again to shake hands with the Ishmael at their farewell. "Perhaps I cannot, then, be of service to you, but there is another to whom my assistance is of other value—nay, of the highest consequence. I am not referring to the young lady—whom Munich will be so sorry to part with and whom I do not expect to see again even to accept my excuses—but the student from the Polish University who deservedly corrected me and brought me to my sober senses—although, perhaps, he had a heavy hand." He spoke with an assumption of manly regret, which enchanted the hearer and completed his revocation of the bad opinion of the rough suitor of his daughter. Still the Jew had not laid aside all his habitual caution and he did not by word or movement betray that he had an acquaintance with his champion.
"I see that I must drop all flourishes and speak unfettered," went on the major, bluntly. "In two words, our brawl has got to the ears of the provost-marshal as well as those of the town guardians, and the search is going to be thorough for that young gentleman. I know it is absurd, and I protested against it, but the idea has penetrated their wooden heads that he is one of those tramp-students who are permeating the masses—worse, the dangerous classes—with seditious ideas, and they think he and Baboushka's gang too long lording it in the poor quarter, are hand and glove. In fact, in a day or two—perhaps now—the forces will be a-foot in uniform and in disguise to make a keen and searching inspection of the dwellings suspected of harboring the liberal-minded; and God knows that you have, Herr Daniels, chosen a veritable hot-bed! Two months ago, we arrested a Nihilist with a portmanteau full of glass bombs, luckily uncharged, in the attic upstairs; not three weeks since, two Hungarian malcontents were stopped at the door—but why enter into these details, fitter for the police than a soldier to relate? You, of course, were not told of these blots on this hotel's fame or you would have selected it as the last roof to shelter your talented daughter. It is one thing to cross swords—I mean staves—with a man, and another to guide the watchmen to clap their coarse paws on his shoulder. I have made honorable amends, I hope, to the lady and yourself, for my rudeness; as for the gallant fellow, I bear him no ill will—on the contrary! since I could wish to meet with him again, and tell him that the Great Prison of Munich is not badly constructed and promises little chance of an escape. I beg you to convey the warning to him that he must lose not one instant if he can escape beyond the walls."
Still Daniels believed it prudent, if not polite, to make no compromising admission. But the speaker was not offended. He smiled wisely, not without good humor, and offered his hand so frankly that the Jew again took it and this time slightly returned the generous pressure.
But on the way to the door, he was stopped by the entrance of Rebecca. Although she was clad in the plain garments affected by the Jewess in ordinary days, and they were in the most striking contrast with the stage flippery in which the officer had previously seen her, her loveliness was as manifest as the stars when even a fleecy cloud veils them on an autumnal eve. In her anxiety as regarded her father—or, perhaps, the student, who can tell?—she must have stooped to listening to some portion of the singular and one-sided dialogue. For she said, without any prelude:
"Herr Officer, you have acted a noble part and it would be a grief if I had not taken the occasion to accept your apology and thank you for the warning which may save the life of one who—believe me—is no longer your foe, if he had been one. I am not able to judge the greatness and loftiness of your act from your people's point of view, but I shall no longer have a mean opinion of the creed which can perform such a conversion as yours—that is, making you a true gentleman instead of leading one to believe you a heartless libertine."
She held out her hand and he took it so reverently, without haste and with tenderness, and kissed it so respectfully that her last doubt vanished—although she scarcely had the ghost of one.
He had triumphed completely, and he retired with an airy step and a heart replete with gratification.
"If he is dragged into the prison and locked up to rot in the dungeon, they will blame me the last of all," he muttered. "Heavens, how supernally beautiful she is! There are times when I think that if she and her rival occupied the scales of the balance, a butterfly's wing would turn them. My heart would be divided in their mutual favor."
With the same aerial step, he passed two or three men in threadbare suits and shabby hats, who were hovering about the Persepolitan, and who carefully exchanged glances of understanding with him. He went straight to the superintendent-inspector of police, and sat down in his cabinet to concert with him on the best way to suppress, without scandal, the dangerous emissary from ever-restless Poland, lodged in consultation with the Jew, the bugbear of the monarchies of Europe.
"Tut, tut! tell not the official that Daniels and his daughter, for the paltry lucre of the drink-halls or for artistic satisfaction, made the tour of the capitals!"
In the meantime, the "suspects," not themselves suspicious, commenced, with Rebecca a listener, upon the move counseled by the chivalrous major. It was one they had almost settled upon and they determined to put it all the sooner into execution. The post chaise was kept in a state of readiness, alike with the horse that drew it on these important occasions, a surefooted nag whose pace was better than her appearance. Claudius, to be sure, rested under the disadvantage of being a stranger to the roads, as he had traveled only upon one to enter this city—commonly accounted dull, but so far crammed with serious adventures. This blank in his topographical lore was easily filled: the bright-eyed Hedwig was to meet him at the first corner, mount into the vehicle of which the capacious hood of enameled cloth would hide her, and there pilot him in steering to the SendlingThuror gate. Once in the open country, the road was plainer—in fact, he could be guided by the locomotive's smoke and whistle till he reached the little station. Even twenty miles out, the Persepolitan's landlord had acquaintances—perhaps they were brothers in some occult league—and the vehicle could be left without misgivings at any of the inns which he named.
There was nothing in this plan, so simple as to promise success, to trouble the brain, but, all the same, Claudius had a sleepless night, though he retired early to be prepared for the probably eventful morrow.
He wished to think only of Rebecca, who had added sound hints to her father's and the host's experienced advice; but, do what he could, it was another's image that haunted him. It was the winning one of the aristocratic singer. Again he beheld her matchless shape, her caressing and enthralling eyes, her supple undulations in the waltz and her shimmering golden curls. And whatever the sounds in the street, where there seemed more footfalls than before that evening, all though actual, were overpowered and formed the burden to the ghostly but delightful strains from that silvery voice. He was not only at the age to be impressionable, but he had not known one of those college amorettes which may be as innocent as a page of a scientific text-book. No woman even in the poetry had caused him to vibrate in the untouched heart-chords like this unexpected star in the firmament of beer fumes and tobacco smoke! But it was not joyous to muse upon this vision for he had no doubt that she marked a new starting-point in his life.
Did he love her, or Rebecca? They had appeared to him so closely together that he was confused. He viewed them as a double-star, without yet having the coolness to separate them. He was a man to love once only, and there is but one love. There are different phases of it as there are different lodgers in the same house; they do not know each other, but they come in and go forth by the same staircase-way.
Of this he was instinctively certain that if he loved Kaiserina, she would guide him in altogether another direction than he had looked and whither his proud and admiring professors had pointed. Enormous wealth in our days is to the monopolist, immense fame to the specialist. To rise above contestants, one must be patient, resigned, long toiling and abhorrent of the social ties which fetter one when most of the time is demanded to solve a problem, and pester one to recite the two or three letters he has learnt when he ought to study till he masters the entire alphabet. A man must immolate himself.
Oh, he had been so happy at whiles with the thought, accounted providential, that he stood alone, with no one to distract him, to impose burdens on him and to claim a right to make inroads on his precious hours. He loved the loneliness in which he sank when he stepped out of the lecture-room and the amphitheatre. He had not felt the need, which others confessed, of some one with whom to share griefs, debate enigmas and communicate projects. Since he saw Rebecca, he had, indeed, had an almost momentary glimpse of a home where a dashing woman, moving silently and airily, guarded his meditations from the external plagues. Such a woman was created to comfort, cheer and encourage if he flagged. But the love she inspired was ideal, perceived hazily during the hours when he was out of health, and divined rather than watched her tender ministrations.
The courtships are long when love is based on respect. She gave repose to the soul, not excitement to the spirit. He saw that she admired him for his courage in daring so much—more than he had fully realized—for the despised and trampled-upon, and she pitied one before whom yawned the dreadful prison which rarely lets out the political prisoner with enough life in his wrecked frame to be worth living out. But he did not see that she was truth and that he should follow her. As the sailors drive the ship toward the false beacon, near them and garish and flaring, so he thought the erratic orb brighter than the serene fixed star.
He felt ungrateful. This sneaking out of the town was ridiculous after the heroic introduction to La Belle Stamboulane. He examined a pair of pistols which the host had generously presented him with, when, after the restless night, he rose with the dawn, and he determined to use them if assailed. It is the inoffensive, quiet man who works most mischief when roused—nothing so terrible even to the wolves as the sheep gone mad. The student, having dipped his hand in blood, was now eager to be attacked on the highway by a company of unrepentant Von Sendlingens.
This was no mood, however, in which to start on a journey of possible peril. Rebecca did not appear at the breakfast table. She, too, had passed a wakeful night, but it was in prayer for the safety of the first real friend she had so far met among the Gentiles. The host looked in at the conclusion of the meal. Nothing could wear a fairer aspect. Even the hovering figures which he, for good reason, set down as spies, had become tired of their useless quest, and disappeared with the fog that floated amid the smoke of the numerous brewery chimneys.
The sun was well up, showing a jolly red face, which indicated that he had been passing the night in the tropics, when Claudius, having said his farewell within the hospitable house where his bill had been obstinately withheld from him, took the reins in the chaise. The grinning ostler held the unbarred door of the yard ready to open it quickly and slam it behind him. At least, he had not the host's delicacy and he had accepted his gratuity.
"Good speed, master!" he had hastily cried out as the equipage rolled out into the street.
It was deserted. The horse and vehicle aroused no curiosity where odder animals and more curiously antiquated rattletraps were also out. He traversed the town as unimpeded as a Czar environed by secret guards. The officer at the gate, yawning behind the passport which he did not trouble to read, wished him a good dinner at the rural friend's, where it was hinted he would put up, and returned into the guardroom to resume telling a dream which he wished interpreted. Since Joseph, these functionaries at the gate and in prison seem to be tormented with puzzling visions.
All had gone well but for one serious omission: Hedwig had not appeared to be taken up; yet he had not mistaken the streets laid down in the itinerary. But once outside the walls, he was forced to go slowly and foresaw the moment when he must stop. It was hazardous to inquire, for, while he was dressed, by the hotel-keeper's provision, like a citizen of Munich, he had not the speech of the residents.
In his quandary he was greatly relieved when the horse pricked up his ears and gave a whinny in a kind of recognition. Claudius glanced to the roadside gladly and hopefully, as a young, feminine figure stepped out from the cover of a post painted in stripes to indicate parish, township and other boundary marks. But although the short frock, coarse woolen stockings, cap and velvet bodice were Hedwig's Sunday clothes, sure enough, in which the student had once seen the pretty maid, this girl was no rustic slightly polished by the hotel experience.
He felt his heart melt like wax in a cast when the bronze rushes within the clay—it was Kaiserina von Vieradlers!
A strange feeling nearly mastered him! Instinct bade him run and, whipping the horse, flee at the top of speed anywhere beyond the charm of this unexpected apparition. And yet she came forward so brightly, and so frankly, and her first words were so reassuring that he was ashamed of the impulse which—he was yet to know—had all the worth of heavenly inspired suggestions.
"Herr Student!" she said sweetly, "it is fated that I shall be of service to you. Do not go farther in this course. They lie in wait for you. Luckily, I know of a cross-country lane—if you will only let me accompany you to set you right, and help me to roll some stones and logs from the mouth. It saves time, and you will baffle your foes. Oh, I know all. The faithful Hedwig, whose clothes I have borrowed, is a daughter of a tenant on my father's estate. She means well, but she has no brains for these steps out of her even tenor, and she was glad to have me replace her in her mission. Help me up!"
There was no denying her anything. The horse had appeared to greet her with pleasure, though it was probably the clothes of Hedwig that he recognized with the whinny after a sonorous sniff.
As she held out her hand, he offered his and, like a fawn clearing a hedge, she bounded up, just touched with a winged foot the iron step, and cleared the seat with a second leap. Crouching down within the hood, she began merrily but spoke with gravity before she had finished:
"Drive on after turning."
He turned the horse and vehicle. At the same moment a shrill whistle sounded in the opposite direction.
"That's the gendarmes," she said. "The watchman's horn in the old town; the military whistle without. They are keeping good guard for you—but we shall cheat them, I tell you again!"
She laughed that purely feminine laugh at the prospect of somebody being deceived.
"Take the northern fork, although you would seem to be going very different to your aim. At the lane I spoke of, stop—but I shall be at your elbow to prompt you."
The drive was resumed in this singular way; there was something piquant in not seeing his companion, her presence manifested only by her sweet breath, the slight rustling of the glazed cloth which afforded her such scanty room, and the prattle which flowed from her lips.
She was happy to serve him again; she had liked him from the first sight in the hall; they did not seem to be strangers; he was like she knew not whom, but she could swear the resemblance was perfect! She had been read such a lecture by her manager and the police sub-chief, but, pooh! what were such men but the knob on a post—the post remained and the knob was unscrewed for another to be put on every now and then. They had threatened but she was not a strolling player who feared the lock-up and the House of Correction. They would think twice before they sent a child of the Vieradlers into the Home of the Unrepentant Magdalens! and all this intermixed with snatches of song and flashes of original wit at the expense of the police and soldiers and the citizens.
And the flight into Italy with the Marchioness famous for protégés as other old ladies for keeping cats or parrots? It was true she had made her an offer and she had connived at the police being made to think she had accompanied the eccentric dame. But she had remained in Munich to help the man who was endeared to her.
Not a word about Baboushka and a fear to break the spell kept Claudius quiet on that point.
Eight minutes passed like one, when—"Stop!" she exclaimed, and was out beside him without a helping hand and upon the dusty road.
The walls had a gap here, roughly choked up by a higgledy-piggledy heap of rubbish. Fraulein von Vieradlers had attacked it before her astonished companion, also alighting, came to her aid. There was witchery in the creature, for her delicate, ungloved hands, covered with rings, tugged at the roughly hewn tree-trunks and misshapen blocks of stone without a scratch and, as her frame offered no suggestion of strength, the swiftness with which they were moved, confirmed the idea of the supernatural. As soon as he recovered from his amazement, he aided her energetically, and in an incredibly short space the two cleared a passage for the horse to scramble over and the wheels to be lifted clean across. Without pausing, they replaced the beams and boulders, and made good the breach.
"Excellent!" ejaculated the vocalist, contemplating the work. "But I am wrong to delay. We are not out of the vale of tribulation. Help me in and tan the horse's hide well! We must, without farther delay, reach the farmhouse whose red-tiled roof gleams under the lindens. Help me in, and lay on the whip!"
This drive, at redoubled speed, despite its being in broad daylight, had to the student the fascination of the gallop of the returned dead lover and Lenore in the ballad. Though never cruel before, he now spared the horse not a stroke or impatient shout, however imprudent the latter was. On the rutty, ill-kept lane the wheels bounded unevenly and the driver had hard work to keep his seat; but the girl, by a miracle of balancing, held her half-crouching, half-standing position in thecalash, and only now and then, flung forward by a jolt, rested her hands on Claudius' shoulders. At this contact—at the sight of those roseate, dimpled hands—he was electrified and in the headlong rush he pictured himself as Phaeton, careering behind the glancing tails of the steeds of the solar chariot.
Such a pace overtasked the poor mare. At any moment now her sudden collapse after a stumble might be expected. On the other hand, the farm-house, winning-post of the race, loomed up clearly, and, luckily, the road improved a little by becoming harder and descending gradually. On one side rose a willow coppice, in the trailing branches of which a musically rippling brook was running; on the other, the ruins of a barn, which a flood had demolished.
On the knoll beyond, the haven stood, and Kaiserina smiled as she leaned her head forward so that her cheek was next his.
Again she had saved him!
No; not yet!
From both sides of the road at the hollow, three horsemen came solemnly forth, two from the right, one from the ruins.
The girl turned pale and shrank back. Claudius flung down the broken whip, and, taking the reins in his teeth, held a pistol in each hand. He had recognized in the most prominent rider Major von Sendlingen, and in an instant he comprehended that this was a trap and that his chivalric, Christian conduct was the most base of impudent tricks.
Was Kaiserina also a betrayer? He did not believe that.
Each horseman had a pistol as well as a sword drawn, and, besides, the two inferiors were armed with carbines. This had the air of an assassination, and, infuriated by the treachery, Claudius resolved to begin the attack. It mattered little whether Fraulein von Vieradlers was in the conspiracy or not. Once she had saved his life, and he was bound not to molest her now, so long as she remained neutral. She had cowered down, from fear or because her guilt oppressed her. Perhaps his contempt would punish her sufficiently.
The old mare bore the unusual exertion bravely and charged down the incline against the odds like a war-stallion.
"Take him alive!" shouted the major, beating down the pistols with his sword flat, as a second thought changed his first intention.
He had spied the young singer in the shadow of the hood, and he had no wish to injure her.
"That's not as you decide!" retorted Claudius, and he fired both shots at the same time.
But he had not allowed for the steep descent. One bullet stung the major in the thigh, the other so cruelly lacerated the horse of the gendarme on his right that it screamed, reared and fell sidewise with a crash into the brook. The man, although encumbered by his heavy boots, contrived to disengage himself and stood up, furious at being unhorsed.
At the same moment, out of the reeds, much as though the disappeared horse had suffered a transformation, an old woman leaped up into the lane. Her grey hair was disheveled and her pelisse was shredded by the brambles. She ran to place herself before the horse in the chaise and the gendarmes, and screamed, with her eyes fastened on the girl in the vehicle:
"Hold! do not shoot! God is not willing!" But the major alone obeyed the injunction; the others, in the saddle and dismounted, were wild with rage and pain. Their two firearms rang out as one, and the old woman had only time to cover the mark by drawing herself to her full height, with an effort unknown for thirty years. Both bullets entered her chest, for she fell under the horse's feet, as it stumbled and went down beside her.
As the vehicle abruptly came to a stop, quivering in every portion, Claudius clung to the frame of the hood to save himself from being cast out. The girl was hurled against him, but she did not think of herself. She thrust into his hand a revolver and whispered rapidly:
"Quick! they are going to fire again!"
It was true; excepting, this time, the gendarmes had recourse to their carbines, the dismounted one having picked his up from the briars, and found the cap secure. At that short range, the student would be a dead man if he awaited the double discharge.
Heated with the action, inhaling the acrid smell of gunpowder, the demon possessed him which at such moments hisses: "Kill, kill, kill!" into a man's ear. The angelic demon there had supplied him with the weapon, and he fired three shots as rapidly as the mechanism would work.
The dismounted gendarme had come out on an unlucky day; a bullet in his neck laid him lifeless in the rushes beside the strangled horse; his comrade, pierced so that he bled internally, drew off to the roadside mechanically—the image of despair; nothing more heartrending than the anguish on his convulsed visage and the increasingly hopeless expression.
Here was a double tragedy, but it was the major who, under the eyes of Fraulein von Vieradlers, was to furnish the comedy of the incident. His horse took the bit in its teeth and ran away with him along the bank of the brook, threatening at any moment to lose footing and roll the two in the water.
"Victory!" said the girl, with a joy-flushed cheek, alighting and displaying no more compassion for the soldiers slain in doing their duty than for the chaise horse—or the old woman beside its heaving carcass.
"She is dead," remarked Claudius. "But what did she say? She spoke in Polish—I understand it—I caught the words, but they were not intelligible."
"Were they not?" continued the girl, not displeased.
"She said, 'my child!'"
"Very well! I am her grandchild. That was not all, though—she affectionately recommended you to me, as my cousin."
"Cousin? your cousin?" repeated Claudius, without contradicting the speaker on his impression that Baboushka's face had not worn a soft expression, in his eyes.
"It would appear that you do not know yourself as Felix Clemenceau?"
"Clemenceau?" echoed the student, remembering what he had heard in the music-hall.
"Yes; your father was the famous sculptor."
Was his predilection for art a hereditary trait? the son of a celebrity? then his essays in design were unworthy of his name. Abashed, inclined to despair, having a glimpse of a tumultuous rabble shouting: "At last he is here!" before the ruddy guillotine on a raw morning, a pale, prim man between the executioner's aids, the young Clemenceau listened to the girl, who probably resembled the Lovely Iza, but looked at the dead woman at their feet.
"Yes, we are cousins! that is why I took a fancy to you at the sight. I knew this time I loved for a good reason. The band of nature—the bond of blood—connected us! But this is not the place or time to pluck leaves, and compare them, from our genealogical tree. The major has succeeded in reining in his horse, but, who cares? the old farmhouse stood a siege in the Great Napoleon's time and could mock at him now. Leave all—all these cooling pieces of carrion, and my dear grandma!" she sneered, "and let us hasten to the house where I have friends."
Like a man in a dream, Claudius, or, better, Felix Clemenceau, since this was his true title, holding the half-emptied revolver by his side, automatically allowed the strange creature to lead him from the battlefield. He was oppressed by the magnitude of the ruin he left behind: the peaceful student to whom the pencil and the eraser were alone familiar had handled firearms like "the professor" in a shooting gallery. And then the assertion—or revelation—that he was of kin not only to the old witch, who had perished in shielding him unintentionally in saving her grandchild, but to the latter. Fair as a sylph but icy-hearted as a woman of five social seasons! But the son of the guillotined wife-murderer should not be fastidious about those relatives who deigned to recognize him.
The farmhouse was a large stone and brick structure, moss-grown but firm as a castle; at its porch, three men had tranquilly awaited the result of the conflict; most of the episodes had been observed by them. Two were comfortably clothed like farmer and overseer, and showed a respectful bearing to the third. This was a man of about thirty years, but looking younger, tall, slender, elegant and proud. Not yet calm, Clemenceau vaguely recalled the refined, winning, though dissipated visage; this was the gentleman in the Harmonista who had enlightened him unawares on the antecedents of Fraulein von Vieradlers. He did not notice her companion but his stiffness disappeared as he bowed to her. Without asking for any explanation on the affray, he said to her:
"Can he—your companion—ride? The horses are under saddle. If not—"
Clemenceau replied in the affirmative to Fraulein von Vieradlers, instead of to the gentleman. He conceived an aversion to him on the spot, although his intention to include him in the pre-arranged flight was manifest. But he was the victim of circumstances and for the present he had to yield. Besides, the prospect held out was for him to continue beside the dazzling beauty, whose influence seemed more wide than her deceased ancestress.
Like many bookworms, he had entertained a humiliating opinion of the sex that makes the world move round; he was beginning to doubt, and he would retract it before long.
Kaiserina related the events briefly, while one of the farmers brought two magnificent saddle-horses round to the long, high side of the house, facing the northwest. Clemenceau mechanically mounted the bay, and the gentleman assisted the lady upon the black. Both animals were impatient to be gone, and when given the head, started off madly. This exciting pace roused the student from his lethargy, and when the steeds had settled down to a less frenzied gait, he asked what was his guide's intention.
"It is plain. You must be put across the border into France."
"France!" it seemed to him, since the revelation of his birth in that country, that the name had a charm unknown heretofore. Yes, he ought to make a pilgrimage into that sunny land where his father had been a gem in its artistic crown.
"It is your native country and you will be safer there than in Italy or Austria. Our next stage will be the little railway station to which you may see that long double silver serpent, the metal tracks, stretching across the plain."
Fortunately for the fugitives, the poorly paid railway officials in these parts are the obsequious servants of those who liberally bribe. The station-master, though a very grand personage, indeed, in his uniform and metal-bound cap, became pliant as an East Indian waiter and accepted without question the explanation of the lady. It was she who was spokesman throughout. She said that she and her companion were play-actors and that their baggage was detained by a cruel manager of a Munich musical beer-hall; this was a wise admission as the man might have seen her at the Harmonista, or, at least, her photograph in the doorway. But they were compelled to reach Lucerne without delay or lose a profitable engagement, by the proceeds of which they could redeem their paraphernalia. While listening, the man dealt out the tickets, pocketed the gratuity which was handsomely added to a previous donation, and, without any surprise, agreed to let any one calling take away the horses; they certainly were above the means of strolling singers who had to flee from a town. Farther discussion, if he had sought it, was curtailed by the electric signal heralding the coming of a train. In eight minutes, the two were ensconced in a first-class compartment and hurried along toward the Land of Lakes.
In the sumptuous coach, the girl unburdened herself, but, with rare art or imperfect knowledge of her origin, she was more explicit on the family of her cousin than on her own. However, it was his that had made a niche in art and scandalous story.
As for Kaiserina, her mother was the eldest daughter of a Count Dobronowska, of a Polish branch of the Vieradlers, who had settled in Fuiland. The count had meddled with politics and the Czar had promptly confiscated his landed property. The loss and fear of Siberia had broken his heart. After his death, the widow passed the intervals of her grief in besieging persons of influence to obtain a restitution of the estate. Unfortunately, she had no son to fight the battle with the Czar, but two daughters were growing up with such a superabundance of charm that they promised to be no mean allies in the enterprise. But fortune did not altogether favor the widow; it is true that she interested a Russian of great wealth and political sway, but when the time came for his co-operation to be active, he played her a wicked trick. He attracted her elder daughter to him and married her. Not liking to have a mother-in-law in his mansion, he pensioned her off, with the proviso that her presence should never clash immediately with his own in any country. It is regrettable to add that Wanda, Madame Godaloff, agreed to this arrangement, and, indeed, having attained woman's goal, troubled herself not once about her parent who had schemed and plotted tirelessly for this end. The countess had brought her deer to a pretty market; but, unhappily, she gained little by the bargain compared with what she had dreamed.
She had a brother-in-law who had acted very differently from her husband. Instead of playing the patriot—and the fool—he had submitted to the tyrant and won a lucrative post at St. Petersburg. He was afraid to injure himself by giving countenance to his brother's relict, who was always seeking an audience of the Emperor. It was strongly suspected that she intended, since Wanda was out of the lists, to throw the next daughter, Iza, at the head of a Grand-duke with whom the two girls had played when all three were children at Warsaw.
The countess seemed to have educated the girl, as soon as her elder was out of the way, for a royal match. Like most Poles, Iza spoke several languages fluently, sang and played the harp and piano. She was growing lovelier than her sister because she was a purer blonde, and yet Wanda had been accounted a miracle. Remembering that, at a later period, a foreign adventuress almost inextricably ensnared one of the imperial family, the Countess Dobronowska's matrimonial project was not so insane. Some other pretender to the grand-ducal left or right hand thought it feasible, for everybody said that it was feminine jealousy that led to the countess and her "little beauty" being ordered out of the White Czar's realm. The pair, spurred on by the police of every capital, and all are in communication with St. Petersburg, at last rested in Paris. It was a favorable moment; the French government had offended the older powers by its presumption in chastising venerable Austria almost as severely as the Great Napoleon had done. The Dobronowskas were let alone in the imperial city on the Seine; but, unfortunately, the important state functionaries soon became as tired of the countess's plaints as their brothers on the Neva. Reduced to the shifts of the penniless aristocrats, the two lived like the shabby genteel. They made a desperate attempt to entrap their Grand-duke again. But the victim had warning and the pair were stopped at Warsaw. Here a beam of the sun, long withheld, glanced through the clouds and transiently warmed "the marrying mamma." A distant relative of hers, one Lergins, was an attaché of the embassy and he fell in love with his "cousin" Iza, as the mother allowed the youth to call her. As he had splendid prospects and seemed to be quite another man as regarded maternal control of Wanda's husband, mamma dismissed her brilliantignis fatuusand tried to have a clandestine marriage come off. But the young secretary of embassy was not of age and again she was forced to depart for Paris—that sink-hole for refugees of all sorts. His family put pressure on the officiale who in turn applied it to the lucklessintriguante.
Farewell, the future in which a semi-imperial coronet hand gleamed! even that where a cascade of gold coin inundated the new Danae. Wearied of this constant grasping at the unattainable Iza, who had something of a heart, chose for herself, much as her elder had done, with happiness at home as the object; one fine morning, married M. Pierre Clemenceau, a young but rising sculptor. He had on the previous visit of theirs to Paris, materially befriended them. It was only gratitude after all, although he, enamored like an artist of this unrivaled beauty, would have sacrificed fortune to possess her. Indeed, he sacrificed all—even his honor, for he suffered himself to be gulled by her wiles as profoundly as he was infatuated by her charms.
At this point, as became a young woman telling of a relative's iniquity, Kaiserina glazed the facts and gave a perversion. It was later, therefore, that Felix Clemenceau learned in detail the whole mournful tale of a beautiful wanton's ingrained perfidy and a loving husband's blind confidence. The end was inevitably tragical. Lergins was decoyed by the countess to Paris, where she languished like a shark out of water. The sculptor's income did not come up to her dreams of luxury, any more than those she inspired in her daughter. She brought about a separation of the wedded pair and rejoiced when a fresh scandal necessitated a duel between the young Russian and the Frenchman. Unhappily for her revengeful ideas, it passed over harmlessly enough.
Iza remained the talk and admiration of the gay capital, although women of superior physical attractions rendezvous there. Nothing blemished her appearance; no excesses, no indulgements, not even bearing a son had a blighting effect. Unfortunately for the dissevered artist, she had been his model for the most renowned of his works and her name was inseparably intertwined with his own.
Although "crowned" as the favorite of a king who came in transparent incognito to Paris to visit her, though occupying princely quarters, outshining the fading La Mesard and the rising Julia Barucci in diamonds, Iza was still known as "the Clemenceau Statue."
Her mother, as lost to shame, was the mistress of the wardrobe in this palace; she was spiteful as a witch, and began to resemble one in her prime, bloated, red with importance and self-indulgence, before the wrinkles came many and fast. One day, annoyed at the persistency with which a friend of Clemenceau's watched the queen of the disreputable in hopes to make her flagrancy a cause for legal annulment of the marriage, she denounced him as a traitor in an anonymous letter to the fretting husband, then in Rome. Her daughter agreed to make good the assertion that the friend had failed monstrously in his trust.
Like Othello, Clemenceau swore that this demon of lasciviousness should betray no more men. The force of depravity should no farther flow to corrupt the finest and best. He entered the boudoir of the royal favorite and stabbed her to the heart. In the morning, he gave himself up to the police.
The victim was so notorious that the Clemenceau trial was a nine days' wonder. His advocate was eloquent to a fault, but that inexplicable thing, the jury, found no extenuating circumstances in the act and brought in the verdict of murder. The good men were incapable of appreciating the right he claimed to stop the blighting career of Messalina—to divorce with steel where the state of the law, then meekly following the ecclesiastical ruling, forbade any sundering of the connubial tie except by death.
He met his doom calmly and laid his head beneath the axe with a martyr's brow. Kaiserina acknowledged this.
Felix Clemenceau understood everything now. The trustees to whom he owed his subsistence-money, M. Rollinet the imperial counsel, and M. Constantin Ritz, a famous sculptor's son, and the life-companion of Clemenceau, were characters in the momentous drama which Kaiserina recited, whom he knew by correspondence.
The finger of fate, which had urged the artist to commit a homicide for morality's sake, had pointed out to his son the way which had to be followed over corpses of the young student's slaying.
Brooding over the alteration in his future, he exchanged hardly a word with his cousin, during the prolonged journey, which they continued together, as though mutual reluctance to part bound them indissolubly. Logic said there should be a powerful repugnance between those whom the shadow of the guillotine's red arm clouded. But, spite of all, Felix felt that Kaiserina was, like himself, well within the circle of infamy. Her mother was the sister of the shameful Iza, and her husband's careful guard of her proved that he doubted her walking virtuously if her unscrupulous mother stood by her side. This old Megara—who sold her offspring to worse than death—was living—seemed eternal as evil itself. It were a pious act to save Kaiserina from her as his father had tried to do with Iza. He was pleased that she seemed inclined to cling to him as though wearied of the erratic life she seemed to have led after a flight from her mother's, and which she did not describe minutely. He was also grateful that, in her allusions to his father, she did not speak with the bitterness of a blood-avenger.
They made the journey to Paris without any stoppage. He had to visit M. Ritz, for M. Rollinet was no longer there, having accepted a judgeship in Algeria. In the vehicle, carrying to a hotel where he purposed leaving her, Felix said, feelingly:
"I think I see why we were brought together. I am not to lead the life of an artist, lounging in galleries, sketching ruins and pretty girls, but one of expiation for my poor father's crime."
"Perhaps. More surely," she replied with a smile which, on her peerless lips, seemed divine, "Ishould make the faults of the Dobronowskas be forgotten."
They had arrived at the same conclusion as the journey ended, but the means had not occurred yet to either.
"Here we are," he exclaimed, as the carriage horse came to a stop.
He alighted, entered the hotel and settled for the young lady's stay. Returning, he came to help her out.
"My door will never be closed to you," she said, remembering how, in her story, her notorious ancestors had playfully suggested in a letter announcing her renunciation of her scheming mother's toils and her return to marry Clemenceau, that he might leave his door on the jar for her at all instants. "And yet, what will be the gain in our meeting again?"
"Everything for our souls, and materially! Here in France, where La Belle Iza and the executed Clemenceau point a moral, neither of us can find a mate in marriage easily. If blood stains me, shame is reflected on you. Let us efface both blood and shame by an united effort! Let our life in common force the world to look no farther than ourselves and see nothing of the disgrace beyond."
"I do not care a fig for what people think or say," said the one-nightdiva, with a curl of the lip. "And I do not understand you fully."
"Wait till I see you again, when all shall be made clear. Meanwhile, cousin—since without you I should have lost my life, or, certainly my liberty—I am eternally bound to you. It is left to you to have the bonds solemnized in the church, here, in France—my country!"