[image]"Hurl down the Guard, and the field is ours! ... Hurl down the Guard, aha!"CHAPTER XIXTHE MELODY IN THE VIOLETS"What of the heart without her? Nay, poor heart,Of thee what word remains ere speech be still?A wayfarer by barren ways and chillSteep ways and weary, without her thou art...."ROSSETTI.Geiger-Hans laid the flowers on his knee and, still staring at them with the eyes of mingled horror and grief, gathered his instrument to his embrace and drew from it a strain the like of which Steven had never heard. Low and simple it was, with even a delicate lilt, as of the shadow-dance of bygone joys, yet so heart-rending that, after a moment or two, the listener felt tears rising to his eyes and a catch at his throat, and cried on his companion to stop.The musician laid down his fiddle and turned his drawn countenance upon his companion."That is the melody in the violets, the melody that is never silent in my soul, night or day. You cannot hear it? Why, then, you must listen to the story.—I was once as youthful as you and had also a very noble pride—I had nearly as much reason," said Geiger-Hans, his pale lips writhing in a smile of scorn; "but, as men differ, their same passions vary in motive. It was of little moment to me that I came of an ancient house. (Ah! it pleases you to know so much! You have always guessed it, else had you not frequented me. Let it pass, friend, lest I should blush for you.) No, my pride was the pride of intellect. I knew a vast amount! I learned to lisp English that I might study Bacon and Locke, and to chew German that I might wrangle over Kant. I was the friend of Helvetius and Diderot, the rival of Holbach. We worshipped Voltaire. Reason was our God! In short, I was one of those they called the Encyclopædists; we dreamed of doing away with old Abuses and replacing all established things by brand-new Perfections. 'Humanity and Freedom!' was our war-cry. With sweet-oil and rose-water our revolution was to be accomplished. You know what we did for France and the world? We set the first stone rolling, a half-century ago, and"—with a tragic gesture he pointed to the valley—"you can hear the echo of it still reverberating down yonder! Freedom we preached: and the whole world is enslaved as never it was before! Reason was our lodestar: and the State was handed over to the lowest intellects to guide it according to their brute passions! Humanity was our watchword: and France was drenched in blood from end to end, and her sons have brought blood and fire to every land in Europe! The blood of that wretched son of the steppes blackening yonder on the road, the blood shed in yonder bullet-riddled village by that very volley that shakes us as we sit, is all offered to the honour of that same trinity of our invention: Freedom, Humanity ... and Reason! Oh, glorious was the path we opened! Had we not just cause for pride?"He fell silent a second; and Steven dared not speak, so corrosive was the bitterness of his every word, so poignant the emotion written on every furrow of his countenance."Oh, it was a golden time!" he resumed. "We philosophized up to the steps of Versailles. Louis made beautiful locks; Marie Antoinette tended snowy sheep; the roses bloomed at Trianon ... and not the wisest of us ever saw the precipice yawn! As for me—even the greatest minds are subject to the everyday passions of humanity—" his lips parted upon an ironic smile—"I fell in love, neither more nor less than the most elementary youngster of the land. She——" He hesitated; then, steadying his voice, proceeded in tones which betrayed the effort of speech: "she was of an old-fashioned Breton stock, and her ideas and mine were as the poles asunder. But upon one common ground, and a fair pasture it was to me, we met and were equal: we loved."He paused, his breath came quick. "Heaven!" he said, and it seemed as if he knew not that he spoke, "how I loved her!"He picked up a violet from the heap on his knees, and passed his fingers over it caressingly; his countenance softened. When he began again, it was in gentler accents than Steven had ever heard him use:"When two people love each other, young man, and when each believes the other to be mistaken in some cardinal point of judgment, the dearest thought they cherish is to bring the Beloved to the truth. I had no doubt but that I could open her mind; she, but that she would redeem my perverted soul. I have told you what a fine pride I had. So noble it was that I was proud of my pride. And being an apostle of Liberty, the idea that a woman should resist her husband, that the weaker vessel should not give way to the stronger, never dawned on my emancipated mind! Well, well—we quarrelled! The fault was mine. Could I not have been content to worship her in her sweet faith! She had a high spirit. I wounded her in a thousand ways. Women have susceptibilities that we, thick-hided, thick-witted, dream not of. Even when we touch them to caress, we bruise. And then, when their pain is intolerable and they turn and strike at us, our wound is that of the most innocent, the most injured! Oh, when my measure was full against her, she insulted me, if you like—much as your little bride this morning insulted your Highmindedness. She said words that my exquisite pride could not endure. Of course, you will well understand (being even such a self-respecting youth as I was then) that I had no choice but to leave her. That was right, was it not?"Steven, under that terrible gaze, ironic even in its haunting agony, was at a loss how to reply. He muttered something of a woman's duty and wifely submission. The fiddler caught up the words fiercely."Ay," cried he. "A woman's duty—wifely submission. Oh, strange how men prate of chivalry, in the exercise of their bodily strength, because of a woman's weakness, and yet never see that, because also of a woman's sensitiveness of soul, a man should take shame to parade the superior strength of his will—that he should spare the delicate spirit as well as the delicate frame. Listen:—my strength of mind was such that it left me no choice but to desert the woman whom I had vowed to protect, to make parade of my manhood by leaving her to live her own life alone, to cast the frail and lovely thing I had held in my arms away from my love and guardianship. No doubt, no doubt, I made some very generous dispositions as regards my fortune—even as you now propose towards Madame Sidonia, and she had her people to go to, even as your wife has: those whom she had given up to come to me. But when the day dawned that I had to look into my heart and read the truth, what did I see? Look into your heart now, and learn the baseness of your own motives. Why do you leave your bride? Why did I leave mine? For what reason, but that she might weep and mourn for me; that she might learn how precious was the jewel she had not appreciated! ... To be revenged ... revenged on the Beloved!"He flung himself back against the bole of the fir that rose behind him and closed his eyes."I left her," he went on, "left France, left Europe. I went to America, the new home of Freedom, the only country on the face of the earth where the goddess was worshipped as she should be. I had vowed not to return till recalled: I was summoned by a voice terribly different from hers. It took three months before the noise of the storm reached me on that far-off shore, and I knew that it must take me at least a month more ere I could reach her. And she was in danger! ... I think it was then I began to go mad—for it is understood that I am mad, is it not?"He opened his bright eyes and fixed them on Steven, who became so extremely embarrassed that the fiddler broke into unmirthful laughter."Mad!" he repeated. His gaze flickered; and, if truth be told, he looked none too sane. Then he sank his head between his hands with a groan. "If only I were a little madder!" he cried. "The story is nearly finished," he went on presently, in a new, toneless voice. "When I landed in France, all the powers of the Hell my superior intellect denied were let loose in the land—Danton, Marat and Robespierre represented the trilogy of Liberty, Reason and Humanity! The prisons were full, the guillotine everywhere restless.... Our Golden Age! ... A fortnight I looked for her. Have you ever sought in vain one you had loved, even for an hour? Dante never devised a more exquisite torture for his deepest circle. My house in Paris had been confiscated for the nation's soldiers; her father's castle in Lorraine had been burnt to the ground. At my old home at Nancy at last I found a trace. She had refused, it seemed, to join in the flight of her people across the Rhine; but, when trouble became threatening, had taken up her post on my estate. That was like her. She had been arrested—so dangerous an enemy of the people! She was in the infamous prison at Nancy. She——" He flung his battered old hat from his head, dashed back his hair, loosened the wide collar at his throat. Breath seemed to fail him. A dark wave of blood rushed to his forehead. "All, all had abandoned her, save one poor girl—a peasant from our farm, whose people were of the local patriots.... This girl was allowed access to the cells. I met her at the prison gates, whither my frenzied search brought me at length. She knew me, though I was a tramp already. At sight of my face, she clapped her hands and broke into wild sobs. I was too late! That morning.... Why do you look at me like that? Do you wonder that I am still alive? That is where the God I denied has His vengeance of me, you see. I cannot die. Oh, I could kill myself, of course! But, mark how deep has the Encyclopædist fallen.... I dare not,dare not, lest I lose my chance of meeting her again!... Ah! there is great pity in your eyes.... Her little delicate head—she held it like a queen's. Under the powder, her hair was gold. (I have not even one lock of her hair.) I used to clasp her slender throat between both my hands.... The peasant girl had kept by her to the end. She had stood at the foot of the scaffold, that a last friendly glance might speed that lovely soul. 'She smiled to me,' said the poor creature, sobbing. My eyes were dry.... Then she drew from her bosom a bunch of violets, and said, 'Madame, les avail à son corsage.'..."Geiger-Hans gathered up the flowers scattered on his knees, and crushed them against his face."She always loved violets," he murmured. "These have no scent," he went on dreamily; "but hers, hers—oh, they were sweet!"[image]"She always loved violets. These have no scent, ... but hers,—oh, they were sweet!""Ah! friend!" cried Steven, and had no further word. Infinite pity indeed was in the look he turned upon the musician. It seemed as if the latter wandered as he spoke again."There was blood on the violets," said he, dropping his hands, "her blood and mine—for the man that was I died too, then, murdered in his youth, even as she." His face had grown ashen again, his eyes were restless in their orbits. "The something that lived on, the miserable carcass, the old man—call it myself, if you will—this self that is before you now—it took the violets and began to walk away.... And it has walked ever since!" He gave a laugh, and the sound of it was mad. "No place could be home to me again—no land could be country, France least of all. But the skies and the trees are kind; they understand my sorrow, they take it into themselves. And sometimes they give me back peace. And then there's the music.... I was always a musician. One, a village priest, found out by accident that the crazy tramp he had sheltered played better on his old Strad than he did himself. The fiddle was to him as his child, but he gave it to me, for he had compassion on me.... And so was born Geiger-Hans. And Fiddler Hans and his fiddle will walk until one day he can walk no more. And then he will lie down on the kind, brown earth, and turn his face to the skies ... perhaps!"He thrust the flowers into his breast. Then he leaned forward, his elbow on his knees, sheltering his eyes in his hands: and there was silence. The valley below had sunk into stillness.While Steven had listened to the story of one man's defeat in life, a combat where the fate of hundreds had been decided had been fought and won. And now they were picking up the dead yonder, in the evening calm of the plain. The wind had fallen with the fall of the day, and only the topmost branches of the pines swayed and whispered in scarcely perceptible airs. The light was growing golden mellow, the shadows were lengthening. Steven remembered his wound.The fiddler turned and spoke. It was with composure."Well," said he, "which way shall it be; back or forward?""I do not know," said Steven, in a low voice, and dropped his eyelids as if ashamed.The fiddler stretched out his hand and helped the other to rise, with a vigorous grasp. As they stood side by side, he suddenly cast his arm round the young man's shoulders."The child," said he, "Sidonia! ... Oh, I want her to be happy. The first day I ever saw her, I thought that if we had had a child, the woman I loved and I, it would have been like her. And, to my madness, she has gradually become even as my own. I have haunted her ways. However imperiously the roaming fit may come upon me, there is always something that draws me back to watch, to guard, to care. I gave her to you. Aye, Count Steven, it was I gave her to you. And if again I have failed with the happiness of what is dearest to me on earth ... then indeed it is that I am cursed!" His voice failed, broken; his eyes implored. After a while he went on: "When her soul looks out of her clear eyes, when she moves her head with its golden burden ... she has a trick of speech, a laugh ... Oh, it is like a refrain of old music to me, a sighing strain from a lost life! Her little, slender throat—I could hold it in both my hands.... Go back to her.... If I knew her happy, my restless spirit would, I believe, find some kind of peace. Ah! you think it will be hard? I tell you it will not. You do not know a woman's heart. Forget that your pride is hurt. Remember that you are young. Oh, if you but knew! Life has one unsurpassable flower for youth—take it now, lest a breath from heaven scatter its bloom. Its scent is for you! The love of your youth, go, gather it! Go back to little Sidonia!""I will go back," said Steven, and his lips trembled.Silently Geiger-Hans loosened the grey horse, helped the wounded man to mount, and led the way down the hill.CHAPTER XXTHE TRUE READING OF A LETTER"Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speakWhispers the e'er-fraught heart, and bids it break."(Macbeth).Steven, in his turn, had a tale to tell; and, as they retraced their way back towards the Burg through the gathering shadows, he narrated to the fiddler, with great simplicity, the episode with the Burgravine which had led him, first into theoubliette, and ultimately to the quarrel with Sidonia.Geiger-Hans made small comment. The facts he knew already, the motives he had shrewdly surmised. Sometimes he smiled, unseen in the thick, moist gloom; the bright day had turned to a moody night, heavy clouded. The young man's ingenuousness pleased him; also the manliness that refrained from any self-righteous assertion of innocence. But sometimes he sighed; it was a tangled story!When they reached Wellenshausen village, it was evident that there could be no question of making the ascent to the Burg till the next morning. Rain had begun to fall. Geiger-Hans might have faced the break-neck road—doubly hazardous in the wet and the dark—but he flatly refused to aid the wounded man in any such mad undertaking, and Steven's impatience had to submit to the inevitable.Steven had thought to have measured ere this all the possibilities of the Silver Stork in the matter of discomfort. But in a house now thoroughly disorganized by the incursions of a stray detachment of Jerome's cavalry, the claims, even of a fastidious traveller, not to speak of an itinerant musician, were the least of concerns to-night.In the dismal, rat-haunted attic which he shared with the bridegroom, Geiger-Hans heard his comrade groan and toss through the long hours of his wedding-night. If sleep fell upon the young man at all, it was broken by nightmare. And the fiddler, lying flat on his back with his hands under his head, resignedly facing the insomnia which his restless spirit knew but too familiarly, could foretell almost to a breath the span of troubled unconsciousness, the start, the half-groan of awakening. And he was as glad, almost, as Steven himself when the white face of dawn began stealthily to peer through the dormer window.* * * * *Geiger-Hans glanced two or three times sharply at the youth's face as once again he found himself trudging beside him. Steven had submitted almost sullenly to all the musician's arrangements; in silence had mounted the mule prepared for him; in silence had they started on their upward way. The vagrant breasted the rugged path with his usual activity; but his countenance was dark with concern. He did not like the glassy stare of Steven's eyes, the alternate pallor and flush on his cheek, the blackened, cracked look of the lips."Madame Sidonia will have some nursing to do, I think," he said once.Steven gave a wan smile, quite a long time after the words had been spoken. He was beginning to lose his original frenzy of intention in this early morning start; to think only of the rapture of lying between cool sheets in some dark place, with Sidonia's flower touch upon his throbbing temples.After the wet night had broken a gay morning—the rain-beaten earth was fragrant; fragrant every tiny sprig of herb and spicy rock-clinging bush. As they ascended, the pleasant wood-smoke from the village hearths gradually gave place to the more subtle pungencies of the heights. All this, however, was wasted upon Steven. And wasted, too, the gaunt picturesqueness of their first view of the castle, with the golden early sunshine upon the grimness of its walls, caressing the ruin, gleaming back from the defiant granite of the keep.The dogs bayed, a flock of rooks rose, beating the air at their approach; a brown donkey, heavily saddled, hitched by the bridle to a bar of the open gate, flapped his ears and turned his patient countenance, mildly surprised, upon them.The door to the hall, barred and nail-studded, so inhospitable as a rule, stood open. It was a vastly different scene from that of the evening of their first visit—when they stood, a pair of adventurers wrapped in mist, before the castle, seeking admittance to walls apparently as impenetrable as any in fairy-lore. Steven was here, now, by his right, to claim his own, and all lay in the sunshine, strangely peaceful, the open door seeming to forestall a welcome. But the fiddler was seized with boding. There are grim visages upon which the sight of a smile strikes misgivings: such was now the face of the Burg.The voice of a woman singing lustily within some distant chamber smote his ear, as he lifted a hand for the bell chain; and he shook his head. Even before Martin, the doorman, put in an appearance, shuffling out of the kind of kennel where he lurked upon that watch which had been his for thirty years, Geiger-Hans knew what had occurred. Martin, with red waistcoat unbuttoned, a china pipe hanging from his jeering lip, slippers on his feet, and the froth of bridal beer running down his chin, stared in amazement at the sight of the travellers; then welcomed them with the heartiness of the slightly elevated."The noble family have all departed," he cried quickly; and presently chuckled, leering at the bridegroom who sat stiffly on the mule, as if he neither heard nor saw.Some one came trotting into the hall, softly on list soles, in a great bustle. It was the Forest-Mother. Her pleasant face wore an unwonted air of seriousness, and her lips were pursed as upon solemn thought. But never had she been to Geiger-Hans a more comfortable spectacle.At sight of him her hands were flung up in wonder; and, at further glimpse of the rider without, they hovered in mid-air, as if paralyzed."Alas, Onkel—too late! All away, yesterday—and the child's heart bursting. Aye, it is all mighty queer and sad. I little thought I should be making for home again this morning, with everything so criss-cross and wrong and strange!"Geiger-Hans made a sudden stride out of the hall back to the side of the mule."Down with you, comrade," he said, with that note of gentleness in his voice which, so far, only Sidonia had known. Steven, after a pause for comprehension, turned towards the speaker with his feeble smile, and suddenly swayed."Nay, mother," the fiddler called out as he caught the lad in his arms, "you mistake; there will be no going home for you for some time to come."* * * * *"Ach! the poor young gentleman," sighed the Forest-Mother, when she had heard the tale. And that was not until Steven's fever-dream had been realized, and he lay between cool sheets in a dark room; though, indeed, for Sidonia's flower touch he had to put up with Mrs. Forester's large plump hand. Not that it made much difference either just then, for he was somewhat rambling in his mind. "Ach, the poor young gentleman, it is a real talent he has for coming in the way of blows!""He has a talent for mending, too, remember," said the fiddler, shortly. His dry tone concealed a real anxiety. Young things, as he knew, took blows of body and soul hard. A poisoned wound is bad enough in itself, without a sore heart and a mind ill at rest.... He could not leave the lad—that was clear. "Where have they taken the child?" he asked."Sidonia? Ach—she kept her lips close as wax and never told me a word—not even me, the old mother! But that French minx of the Lady Burgravine did nought but chatter of Cassel."The word fell like a stone on Geiger-Hans' heart. It was almost with impatience that he glanced at the long, helpless figure in the bed. The young man ought to be up and doing! ... Cassel, seething pot of intrigue and low manoeuvre, paradise of spendthrifts, adventurers, scoundrels, it was the last place on earth for the guileless fugitive bride—and Betty the born schemer. But, if life had taught this wanderer anything, it was submission to the inevitable.For the moment nothing could be done but to nurse the sick man. Some vague thought of sending a message to Sidonia, to tell her of her bridegroom's pass, flashed into his mind, only to be dismissed. The chances of any communication reaching her were remote. He could not go himself. And, could he have done so, some inner conviction told him that here he had best not interfere. Between the tree and the bark let none put his finger. The lovers must win back to each other without any further meddling. He was not certain that the separation, the very anger, misunderstanding and soreness, might not be working for the best. They all had gone too fast, they had made too sure. Steven had been an over-confident wooer: little Sidonia too ready to be won.Geiger-Hans and the Forest-Mother made a tolerable existence for themselves within those sullen walls that had certainly never before beheld such free humours as the wanderer's, such cosiness and comfort as the Frau Ober-Forsterin's. Truth to say, from the instant the sick man was put into her care, the old dame became possessed of excellent spirits. Every one has a special ideal of happiness. Nursing chanced to be hers: nursing of men, be it understood, preferably young men—no harm if they were good-looking—and wounds her speciality. She had salves that would, she was proud to say, make the bark grow on a lopped tree. As for poisoned hurts, had she not, she alone, brought her Friedel round after he had been gored and trampled upon by the stag? And as for febrifuges and herb-teas, if she had been willing to sell her secrets, she had not a doubt about it, she now might be a rich woman.On the fifth morning, a tan-faced boy, with wild eyes looking from side to side, like a bird's, came pattering up into the Burg, having defied the crags with hardened bare feet. He brought a letter which had reached the Forest-House the night before, addressed to its mistress.The Forest-Mother took it from the fiddler's hand, with many winks and pointings towards the great bed whereon her charge lay asleep. She betook herself to the window and began to peruse, with some labour, forming each word with her lips as she went on.The fiddler had recognized Sidonia's characteristic hand, upright and painstaking. Presently the good woman, shaking her head, folded the sheet and, coming over to the fiddler with her noiseless yet ponderous tread, placed the missive back into his hand.The fiddler read:"BELOVED LITTLE FOREST-MOTHER,"I promised to write. I am very well, but I wish I were back with you in the dear green forest. Greet good Friedel for me. Tell him not to forget to give the white doe a piece of rye bread from me every day. And it would be kind of him to take old Belthazar out with him now and again, if only for a short round. I know he is old and stiff; but the dear old fellow breaks his heart to be left behind when all the young dogs are taken out. And, dear Forest-Mother, when you go by the kennels, will you give him a pat for me? And you might just tell him that he is worth all the silly young things put together, and that the kennels had never such a fine dog as he. I am sure he understands, and it will hearten him up. And, when you see Geiger-Onkel, tell him I think of him, and that his airs keep playing in my head. But always the sad ones. And tell him, too, that I never was a fairy princess, but only a silly country girl. This is a place all streets and houses, and it is very noisy. Everybody seems running about, but I do not know what they do. I don't like it, but it is better for me to be here than at the Burg. Of course we are at the Palace. Aunt Betty did not like Uncle Ludo's apartment on the ground floor, so we have a great suite of rooms to ourselves in a wing. It is all gold and silk, and very grand. But, oh, I would rather have the old Forest-House kitchen, with the rafters and the little windows, and all the wood presses smelling so good of bees-wax!"Aunt Betty says it is very dull at Cassel just now, because the king is still away. Next week, she says, it will be very different when he returns. But it seems to me that she is always out at parties. I have no dresses yet. I am very glad to be left at home. So I am quiet here, but oh, it is not the quiet of the forest. Thou Forest-Mother, I wish I could kiss thee."SIDONIA."I hope the old jackdaw is well.""Na," said the old lady, who had watched him reading, her arms folded over her deep bosom, "what manner of letter is this at all for a bride who has run away from her man? That is verily but a foolish child. She was too young to be wed, eh, Geiger-Onkel?""That is the letter of a suffering woman," quoth Geiger-Hans, softly, "and the whole letter, Mother Friedel, is one cry towards him.""Jeminy, and where do you see that?" whispered the dame with a shrug for the poor loony. "Well," she added, in her cheerful undertone, "we've had a splendid night, our skin is as cool as a little frog's, and we are healing as quick as a sapling. I wouldn't say but that in another couple of weeks we might be quite able to travel."Geiger-Hans looked at the bed, at the fine sleeping face, placidly and wholesomely pale, at the charming languid hand flung in abandonment on the purple coverlet."Mother Friedel," he said, and his voice was none the less decided because so low pitched, "three days must see us on the road again."Heedless of her scandalized protest he folded the letter and, thrusting it into his breast, gave himself up to reflection. A smile, half-bitter, half-tender, hovered upon his lips. The child ... she had remembered him—after her old hound.CHAPTER XXIAT THE MOCK VERSAILLES"You are just a porcelain trifle, Belle Marquise!Just a thing of puffs and patches,Made for madrigals and catches,Not for heart-wounds, but for scratches..."AUSTIN DOBSON.Viennese Betty was in Cassel; and if ever the right person was in the right place, it was Betty in Cassel, the Frenchified Cassel at least of King Jerome. She breathed in its irresponsible, exciting, immoral atmosphere with rapture. Its tinfoil splendour was utterly satisfying to her eyes; its jests provoked her charmed laughter; its aims measured her utmost ambitions. To shine among these doubtful stars; to take the lead in frivolities, without fear of losing caste—nay, with every prospect of being lifted upon giddy triumph as the newest and most influential "pompadourette"—even in her dreams Betty had never devised for herself a more enchanting prospect! To make the thing complete, her Bluebeard was tame, absolutely at her mercy ... and held relentlessly at a distance.At the first sight of a scowl, at the first rumple of that brow that used to strike terror, at the first threat of breaking through her imposed barriers, Betty had but to prattle airily of "oubliettes" (strangely inappropriate term for dark doings that never could be forgotten), or yet to fall into alarmingpamoisons, into fits of shuddering, artistically simulated, accompanied by apparently wandering yet exceedingly suggestive speech—and the Burgrave was forthwith reduced to a jelly.The Burgrave was indeed an altered being, went moodily, found his cup bitter and his food savourless, while the Burgravine, tasting all the delights of freedom, fluttered through her first week in Cassel like a butterfly through a flower garden under full sunshine. A butterfly she was, upon one side of her nature; but, upon another, capable of determination and deep-seated resentments. True, she had other and, to her mind, better quarry to pursue now than Beau Cousin Kielmansegg—a mere rich young nobleman; yet it added not a little to the fulness of her gratification to know that she had successfully parted him from Sidonia.The evening after her visit to Napoleonshöhe found her in the most delicate of rose-powdered wrappers, seated at her writing-table in the window of her boudoir, so prodigiously content with herself and existence that little snatches of song, little trills of laughter, escaped her, as she pondered over her correspondence.It was towards the hour of seven, and the gardens beneath her windows (so satisfying to Betty's taste) with their mock Versailles elaboration, were bathed in mellow light. The statues took golden hues and flung a long fantastic shadow. The fountains flashed and tinkled. Some one was practising French airs on the clarinet in a room below. A gust of mingled flower-scents rose up to her nostrils: the pungency of clove pink, the coarser incense of white lilies, and the nearer breath of the climbing rose-tree that aspired towards her window.Betty was the last person in the world to be consciously grateful for any offering of nature; she was merely aware of a general flattering of the senses which added to her content.A few days ago, at Napoleonshöhe, she had met Jerome of Westphalia for the first time. And what a truly charming man! Not a hint of the plebeian Corsican about him. No—they maligned who said so. What manners, what courtesy and dash combined! What a delightful smile! What an eye! It was rumoured that strong men shivered under the glance of his great imperial brother. If you had asked her, Betty would have told you that, from all accounts, Napoleon seemed to her a distinctly overrated individual—a boor, who would chuck a lady under the chin or take her by the ear, as though she were a grenadier. Bah!—Nay, give her the agreeable thrill of coming beneath Jerome's meaning gaze. A delicious recurrence of the sensation crept through her frame as, with closed eyes, she recalled the moment ... Jerome's first sight of her, his start, his stare, his flickering smile.On the table lay the very rose he had presented to her with such a curve of slender olive fingers; with so happy a phrase, so graceful an inclination. Betty had handled the flower a good deal since, had sniffed and caressed it a vast number of times; the pretty leaves were blighted, but never did flower excite such admiration in the Burgravine's regard.She had met the King but a day or two ago; they had exchanged but a glance, a word, a courtesy—and behold! Betty's morning courier had brought her a letter from the monarch. A love letter, if you please, neither more nor less. A request, a demand, for a rendezvous.Peste!he lost no time, the little King! But were there not royal privileges? Had he not the same blood as the Conqueror in his veins? Moreover, was not this very haste the best compliment that could be paid a woman? Not, indeed, that Betty had any notion of allowing herself to go too cheaply. Perhaps, indeed, she had no very clear idea of letting herself go at all; but to dally with an exciting situation, to tantalize, to reign, to fire, and then dash cold water.... Stay, such coarse expressions ill applied to the Burgravine's delicate methods: to spray, very gently, with cold rose-water; not sufficiently to drown the lover's ardour, but just enough to produce a little fizz and splutter—to reign, in fact, chief of the many sultanas by reason, perhaps, of her very refusal to qualify for the post! And only to yield at last when ... But here Betty was glad to allow the prospect to be veiled in a kind of luminous mist. The immediate programme was quite sufficiently absorbing.No wonder she nibbled the feathers of her pen. Her answer to the kingly missive must be a work of art. The "rendezvous" itself must not be denied, whatever else it might deny. Betty had the instinct of her species, the born coquette. Too much virtue, at the beginning, is fatal. Many twigs are required for the lighting of a proper fire.It stood complete at last, a most dainty little note, indited on pink paper, duly folded and enclosed in a French envelope, wafered with mauve—Betty was of the last mode, these days, even to her writing paper.The congenial task concluded, she had another to perform. The courier from Heiligenstadt, whither the King had repaired on a tour of military inspection, had brought her a second letter—also a love cry, or it might better be described as a love-bellow. The Burgrave, away on duty with his sovereign, appealed from a distance to his obdurate wife.He was filled with amorous longing, jealousy, despair. How long was he to be exiled from her favour? The situation was past endurance! He implored, groaned, rebelled, threatened, and was abject again—all in a few frenzied lines. The gist of the whole was in the last phrase: "When am I to be forgiven? Am I not your husband?"The answer to this effusion required but a flourish of the pen. Yet, as the lady planted a green wafer upon the second envelope, there was a triumphant smile upon her lip, a vindictive gleam of pleasure in her eye. The despatching of her morning budget had been altogether pleasurable.* * * * *Close by, in the little chamber allotted to her, Sidonia, behind locked doors, was engaged upon a similar task; for to her the courier had also brought a letter demanding instant acknowledgment. It was a very short one, and by no means so loverlike as either of Betty's billets."I have been slightly indisposed" (wrote Steven) "and unable to travel for a few days; but I trust to be in Cassel within the week, and shall seek you in the Palace. It must be clear to you that you owe me at least an explanation. It is impossible that we can part for ever thus."STEVEN."Not a word of love! Not a hint of despair! Not even reproach! It was all cold, cruel business. As Sidonia wrote her reply, the tears dripped so quickly that she could scarce see the paper.Eliza, very brisk and tripping, who had the charge of posting the three letters, studied the superscriptions very carefully before committing them to the royal mail. Her eyes grew round at sight of the pink-wafered note.Diable!If the mistress had such correspondence, it might become a question whether Jäger Kurtz would continue to be good enough for the maid. She smiled vindictively at sight of the green wafer. If she knew her lady, the Chancellor was far from being fully paid out yet. "And serve him right," said she, who would herself be long before she forgave Burg-Wellenshausen for the horrors of its tedium.The old-fashioned sheet that bore Sidonia's childish scrawl she weighed awhile reflectively in her hand. Madame la Burgravine would doubtless give something to see the contents ofthatletter.... Then, with a shrug of her shoulders, she sent it on its voyage with the rest. The service of her lady had its advantages; and Eliza, pining in the Burg, had stuck to it with unerring prescience of better days. But it did not follow that she held no opinions of her own. And she had even a kind of good-nature that did quite as well as a conscience, as far as her neighbours were concerned, and was far more agreeable for herself."I am not hard-hearted like madame, look you," said the maid to herself. "The child is a nice child, as young ladies go, and she should have her chance."* * * * *The spirits of spring and autumn are akin, although the one journeys towards the fulness of life, and the other to the cold sleep, death. Across the dividing months they seem to meet each other, to serve you smiles and tears, skies of a tenderness unknown to summer, gales of wind, soft as milk, mighty as love. These come chanting with the voices of the ocean, the mountain and the forest, great songs of glory; seize you by the way in resistless arms, tell you wondrous things, and set your blood leaping as they pass. They set, if autumn it be, the yellow leaves awhirl in a death dance; or, if spring, every baby bud rocking on its sappy spray.The travellers, one riding, the other afoot, went side by side along the road towards Cassel. It was a south-west wind that buffeted them. Even in the heart of the inland it seemed to sing of distant seas; to bear on its pinions airs at once untamable and mild, balmy and salt. The forest trees roared under it as with the voice of waters. It gathered from them drifts of yellowing leaves, even as, leagues behind, it had churned spray from Mediterranean waves. In the young traveller's heart storm answered to storm; its breath in his nostrils maddened him, for he had fever in his veins, and he was balked in love.But to the other traveller, whose hair was grey, who tramped along with the even measure of him who has learned to ignore fatigue, the autumn lament was charged with the hopelessness of the grave. It told him how all that is born must die, and how the beautiful die first. In the choiring of the forest he heard the dirge of waning life. In each gust of pungent fragrance he could smell the bitter graves of yesteryear.The horseman was clothed in fine and fashionable garments. He who trudged was but a vagrant player, who made music for his daily bread and rarely knew in the morning where he would lay his head at night.They went in silence. Steven's heart was heavy. Robbed of his bride well-nigh on the altar-steps, he was now seeking her, in an impatience which repeated disappointment had fed to frenzy. And Geiger-Hans was his guide.At a certain spot the forest began to press closer upon the imperial road. The overarching boughs flung a swaying, premature night upon them; and, as the woodland enfolded them, it seemed to draw them into a great sanctuary. Let the gale rage without, here was protection and an inner stillness all the deeper in contrast to the outer turmoil. Instinctively the travellers drew closer to each other, and their tongues were loosened.The rider struck his saddle-bow with a passionate hand, at which the plodding grey faintly started."To think of her, at Cassel, under the devil flicker of that imperial puppet's glance! Sidonia, my wife, at the Court of Jerome!""A waterlily may defy the ooze," observed Geiger-Hans, sententiously.But the simile was hateful to the youth—a water-lily, a flower that flourishes, in atrocious beauty, upon the very slime! Then he cursed his wound for its slow healing, and his blood for its ill-timed fever, and the length of the road, and the perversity of women."And the wrong-headedness of young men!" added the musician, drily.But thereafter, in tones of consolation, for dudgeon reigned on the saddle above him, he pointed to a light far off through the dark flicker of leaf and shadowy march of trees."See, yonder shall we sup and sleep, and thence, rested, start in the brisk dawn. And to-morrow——""To-morrow!" interrupted the bridegroom, impatiently. "No; I shall be in Cassel to-night.""You forget the times we live in, comrade," came the fiddler's answer. "Why, here is my nobility afoot; and yours, all wounded, upon a sorry steed, because any less notable progression were to court suspicion, putting aside the fact that your worship's carriage and horses (Sidonia would have none of them, and if you were not otherwise matched you two would be one by pride, comrade) have been requisitioned for the use of the State. And Frantz fled with his master's dressing set, his English pistols, and his second portmanteau! Court suits I make no doubt, tut, tut. The fellow was a rogue. I saw it at half a blink. And worthy Peter, our postilion, bitten with the war fever and passed over to the Prussians! Nay, but 'tis a riddance that suits me. And here we go as I love, at our own free will, save, indeed, that we enter not Cassel to-night. Have you already forgotten that we are at war, in Westphalia? Not, I grant you, that it signifies much to our pretty monarch—so long as it does not interfere with his amusements at home. He has thought it wise, nevertheless, to make a little fortress of his capital—breastworks and glacis where lay the orchards and cottage gardens; posterns andcorps de gardeat all road entrances, and everything closed at the setting of the watch, an hour after sundown!"Steven the lover had, in his mind's eye, seen his pilgrimage ended before the fall of the day; seen himself dashed or crowned. Crowned! Upon the vision the surge rose in his heart till it overpowered him well-nigh to swooning.Geiger-Hans, with his diabolic insight, chose this moment to draw from his fiddle a sudden strain."Oh, stop!" panted the young man. "I cannot bear it."And the player fell silent, musing upon the ways of men and women and of love. Let a bride but elude her lover's embrace, what surer road shall she find to a revealing of his ardour?
[image]"Hurl down the Guard, and the field is ours! ... Hurl down the Guard, aha!"
[image]
[image]
"Hurl down the Guard, and the field is ours! ... Hurl down the Guard, aha!"
CHAPTER XIX
THE MELODY IN THE VIOLETS
"What of the heart without her? Nay, poor heart,Of thee what word remains ere speech be still?A wayfarer by barren ways and chillSteep ways and weary, without her thou art...."ROSSETTI.
"What of the heart without her? Nay, poor heart,Of thee what word remains ere speech be still?A wayfarer by barren ways and chillSteep ways and weary, without her thou art...."ROSSETTI.
"What of the heart without her? Nay, poor heart,
Of thee what word remains ere speech be still?
A wayfarer by barren ways and chill
Steep ways and weary, without her thou art...."
ROSSETTI.
ROSSETTI.
Geiger-Hans laid the flowers on his knee and, still staring at them with the eyes of mingled horror and grief, gathered his instrument to his embrace and drew from it a strain the like of which Steven had never heard. Low and simple it was, with even a delicate lilt, as of the shadow-dance of bygone joys, yet so heart-rending that, after a moment or two, the listener felt tears rising to his eyes and a catch at his throat, and cried on his companion to stop.
The musician laid down his fiddle and turned his drawn countenance upon his companion.
"That is the melody in the violets, the melody that is never silent in my soul, night or day. You cannot hear it? Why, then, you must listen to the story.—I was once as youthful as you and had also a very noble pride—I had nearly as much reason," said Geiger-Hans, his pale lips writhing in a smile of scorn; "but, as men differ, their same passions vary in motive. It was of little moment to me that I came of an ancient house. (Ah! it pleases you to know so much! You have always guessed it, else had you not frequented me. Let it pass, friend, lest I should blush for you.) No, my pride was the pride of intellect. I knew a vast amount! I learned to lisp English that I might study Bacon and Locke, and to chew German that I might wrangle over Kant. I was the friend of Helvetius and Diderot, the rival of Holbach. We worshipped Voltaire. Reason was our God! In short, I was one of those they called the Encyclopædists; we dreamed of doing away with old Abuses and replacing all established things by brand-new Perfections. 'Humanity and Freedom!' was our war-cry. With sweet-oil and rose-water our revolution was to be accomplished. You know what we did for France and the world? We set the first stone rolling, a half-century ago, and"—with a tragic gesture he pointed to the valley—"you can hear the echo of it still reverberating down yonder! Freedom we preached: and the whole world is enslaved as never it was before! Reason was our lodestar: and the State was handed over to the lowest intellects to guide it according to their brute passions! Humanity was our watchword: and France was drenched in blood from end to end, and her sons have brought blood and fire to every land in Europe! The blood of that wretched son of the steppes blackening yonder on the road, the blood shed in yonder bullet-riddled village by that very volley that shakes us as we sit, is all offered to the honour of that same trinity of our invention: Freedom, Humanity ... and Reason! Oh, glorious was the path we opened! Had we not just cause for pride?"
He fell silent a second; and Steven dared not speak, so corrosive was the bitterness of his every word, so poignant the emotion written on every furrow of his countenance.
"Oh, it was a golden time!" he resumed. "We philosophized up to the steps of Versailles. Louis made beautiful locks; Marie Antoinette tended snowy sheep; the roses bloomed at Trianon ... and not the wisest of us ever saw the precipice yawn! As for me—even the greatest minds are subject to the everyday passions of humanity—" his lips parted upon an ironic smile—"I fell in love, neither more nor less than the most elementary youngster of the land. She——" He hesitated; then, steadying his voice, proceeded in tones which betrayed the effort of speech: "she was of an old-fashioned Breton stock, and her ideas and mine were as the poles asunder. But upon one common ground, and a fair pasture it was to me, we met and were equal: we loved."
He paused, his breath came quick. "Heaven!" he said, and it seemed as if he knew not that he spoke, "how I loved her!"
He picked up a violet from the heap on his knees, and passed his fingers over it caressingly; his countenance softened. When he began again, it was in gentler accents than Steven had ever heard him use:
"When two people love each other, young man, and when each believes the other to be mistaken in some cardinal point of judgment, the dearest thought they cherish is to bring the Beloved to the truth. I had no doubt but that I could open her mind; she, but that she would redeem my perverted soul. I have told you what a fine pride I had. So noble it was that I was proud of my pride. And being an apostle of Liberty, the idea that a woman should resist her husband, that the weaker vessel should not give way to the stronger, never dawned on my emancipated mind! Well, well—we quarrelled! The fault was mine. Could I not have been content to worship her in her sweet faith! She had a high spirit. I wounded her in a thousand ways. Women have susceptibilities that we, thick-hided, thick-witted, dream not of. Even when we touch them to caress, we bruise. And then, when their pain is intolerable and they turn and strike at us, our wound is that of the most innocent, the most injured! Oh, when my measure was full against her, she insulted me, if you like—much as your little bride this morning insulted your Highmindedness. She said words that my exquisite pride could not endure. Of course, you will well understand (being even such a self-respecting youth as I was then) that I had no choice but to leave her. That was right, was it not?"
Steven, under that terrible gaze, ironic even in its haunting agony, was at a loss how to reply. He muttered something of a woman's duty and wifely submission. The fiddler caught up the words fiercely.
"Ay," cried he. "A woman's duty—wifely submission. Oh, strange how men prate of chivalry, in the exercise of their bodily strength, because of a woman's weakness, and yet never see that, because also of a woman's sensitiveness of soul, a man should take shame to parade the superior strength of his will—that he should spare the delicate spirit as well as the delicate frame. Listen:—my strength of mind was such that it left me no choice but to desert the woman whom I had vowed to protect, to make parade of my manhood by leaving her to live her own life alone, to cast the frail and lovely thing I had held in my arms away from my love and guardianship. No doubt, no doubt, I made some very generous dispositions as regards my fortune—even as you now propose towards Madame Sidonia, and she had her people to go to, even as your wife has: those whom she had given up to come to me. But when the day dawned that I had to look into my heart and read the truth, what did I see? Look into your heart now, and learn the baseness of your own motives. Why do you leave your bride? Why did I leave mine? For what reason, but that she might weep and mourn for me; that she might learn how precious was the jewel she had not appreciated! ... To be revenged ... revenged on the Beloved!"
He flung himself back against the bole of the fir that rose behind him and closed his eyes.
"I left her," he went on, "left France, left Europe. I went to America, the new home of Freedom, the only country on the face of the earth where the goddess was worshipped as she should be. I had vowed not to return till recalled: I was summoned by a voice terribly different from hers. It took three months before the noise of the storm reached me on that far-off shore, and I knew that it must take me at least a month more ere I could reach her. And she was in danger! ... I think it was then I began to go mad—for it is understood that I am mad, is it not?"
He opened his bright eyes and fixed them on Steven, who became so extremely embarrassed that the fiddler broke into unmirthful laughter.
"Mad!" he repeated. His gaze flickered; and, if truth be told, he looked none too sane. Then he sank his head between his hands with a groan. "If only I were a little madder!" he cried. "The story is nearly finished," he went on presently, in a new, toneless voice. "When I landed in France, all the powers of the Hell my superior intellect denied were let loose in the land—Danton, Marat and Robespierre represented the trilogy of Liberty, Reason and Humanity! The prisons were full, the guillotine everywhere restless.... Our Golden Age! ... A fortnight I looked for her. Have you ever sought in vain one you had loved, even for an hour? Dante never devised a more exquisite torture for his deepest circle. My house in Paris had been confiscated for the nation's soldiers; her father's castle in Lorraine had been burnt to the ground. At my old home at Nancy at last I found a trace. She had refused, it seemed, to join in the flight of her people across the Rhine; but, when trouble became threatening, had taken up her post on my estate. That was like her. She had been arrested—so dangerous an enemy of the people! She was in the infamous prison at Nancy. She——" He flung his battered old hat from his head, dashed back his hair, loosened the wide collar at his throat. Breath seemed to fail him. A dark wave of blood rushed to his forehead. "All, all had abandoned her, save one poor girl—a peasant from our farm, whose people were of the local patriots.... This girl was allowed access to the cells. I met her at the prison gates, whither my frenzied search brought me at length. She knew me, though I was a tramp already. At sight of my face, she clapped her hands and broke into wild sobs. I was too late! That morning.... Why do you look at me like that? Do you wonder that I am still alive? That is where the God I denied has His vengeance of me, you see. I cannot die. Oh, I could kill myself, of course! But, mark how deep has the Encyclopædist fallen.... I dare not,dare not, lest I lose my chance of meeting her again!... Ah! there is great pity in your eyes.... Her little delicate head—she held it like a queen's. Under the powder, her hair was gold. (I have not even one lock of her hair.) I used to clasp her slender throat between both my hands.... The peasant girl had kept by her to the end. She had stood at the foot of the scaffold, that a last friendly glance might speed that lovely soul. 'She smiled to me,' said the poor creature, sobbing. My eyes were dry.... Then she drew from her bosom a bunch of violets, and said, 'Madame, les avail à son corsage.'..."
Geiger-Hans gathered up the flowers scattered on his knees, and crushed them against his face.
"She always loved violets," he murmured. "These have no scent," he went on dreamily; "but hers, hers—oh, they were sweet!"
[image]"She always loved violets. These have no scent, ... but hers,—oh, they were sweet!"
[image]
[image]
"She always loved violets. These have no scent, ... but hers,—oh, they were sweet!"
"Ah! friend!" cried Steven, and had no further word. Infinite pity indeed was in the look he turned upon the musician. It seemed as if the latter wandered as he spoke again.
"There was blood on the violets," said he, dropping his hands, "her blood and mine—for the man that was I died too, then, murdered in his youth, even as she." His face had grown ashen again, his eyes were restless in their orbits. "The something that lived on, the miserable carcass, the old man—call it myself, if you will—this self that is before you now—it took the violets and began to walk away.... And it has walked ever since!" He gave a laugh, and the sound of it was mad. "No place could be home to me again—no land could be country, France least of all. But the skies and the trees are kind; they understand my sorrow, they take it into themselves. And sometimes they give me back peace. And then there's the music.... I was always a musician. One, a village priest, found out by accident that the crazy tramp he had sheltered played better on his old Strad than he did himself. The fiddle was to him as his child, but he gave it to me, for he had compassion on me.... And so was born Geiger-Hans. And Fiddler Hans and his fiddle will walk until one day he can walk no more. And then he will lie down on the kind, brown earth, and turn his face to the skies ... perhaps!"
He thrust the flowers into his breast. Then he leaned forward, his elbow on his knees, sheltering his eyes in his hands: and there was silence. The valley below had sunk into stillness.
While Steven had listened to the story of one man's defeat in life, a combat where the fate of hundreds had been decided had been fought and won. And now they were picking up the dead yonder, in the evening calm of the plain. The wind had fallen with the fall of the day, and only the topmost branches of the pines swayed and whispered in scarcely perceptible airs. The light was growing golden mellow, the shadows were lengthening. Steven remembered his wound.
The fiddler turned and spoke. It was with composure.
"Well," said he, "which way shall it be; back or forward?"
"I do not know," said Steven, in a low voice, and dropped his eyelids as if ashamed.
The fiddler stretched out his hand and helped the other to rise, with a vigorous grasp. As they stood side by side, he suddenly cast his arm round the young man's shoulders.
"The child," said he, "Sidonia! ... Oh, I want her to be happy. The first day I ever saw her, I thought that if we had had a child, the woman I loved and I, it would have been like her. And, to my madness, she has gradually become even as my own. I have haunted her ways. However imperiously the roaming fit may come upon me, there is always something that draws me back to watch, to guard, to care. I gave her to you. Aye, Count Steven, it was I gave her to you. And if again I have failed with the happiness of what is dearest to me on earth ... then indeed it is that I am cursed!" His voice failed, broken; his eyes implored. After a while he went on: "When her soul looks out of her clear eyes, when she moves her head with its golden burden ... she has a trick of speech, a laugh ... Oh, it is like a refrain of old music to me, a sighing strain from a lost life! Her little, slender throat—I could hold it in both my hands.... Go back to her.... If I knew her happy, my restless spirit would, I believe, find some kind of peace. Ah! you think it will be hard? I tell you it will not. You do not know a woman's heart. Forget that your pride is hurt. Remember that you are young. Oh, if you but knew! Life has one unsurpassable flower for youth—take it now, lest a breath from heaven scatter its bloom. Its scent is for you! The love of your youth, go, gather it! Go back to little Sidonia!"
"I will go back," said Steven, and his lips trembled.
Silently Geiger-Hans loosened the grey horse, helped the wounded man to mount, and led the way down the hill.
CHAPTER XX
THE TRUE READING OF A LETTER
"Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speakWhispers the e'er-fraught heart, and bids it break."(Macbeth).
"Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speakWhispers the e'er-fraught heart, and bids it break."(Macbeth).
"Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak
Whispers the e'er-fraught heart, and bids it break."
(Macbeth).
(Macbeth).
Steven, in his turn, had a tale to tell; and, as they retraced their way back towards the Burg through the gathering shadows, he narrated to the fiddler, with great simplicity, the episode with the Burgravine which had led him, first into theoubliette, and ultimately to the quarrel with Sidonia.
Geiger-Hans made small comment. The facts he knew already, the motives he had shrewdly surmised. Sometimes he smiled, unseen in the thick, moist gloom; the bright day had turned to a moody night, heavy clouded. The young man's ingenuousness pleased him; also the manliness that refrained from any self-righteous assertion of innocence. But sometimes he sighed; it was a tangled story!
When they reached Wellenshausen village, it was evident that there could be no question of making the ascent to the Burg till the next morning. Rain had begun to fall. Geiger-Hans might have faced the break-neck road—doubly hazardous in the wet and the dark—but he flatly refused to aid the wounded man in any such mad undertaking, and Steven's impatience had to submit to the inevitable.
Steven had thought to have measured ere this all the possibilities of the Silver Stork in the matter of discomfort. But in a house now thoroughly disorganized by the incursions of a stray detachment of Jerome's cavalry, the claims, even of a fastidious traveller, not to speak of an itinerant musician, were the least of concerns to-night.
In the dismal, rat-haunted attic which he shared with the bridegroom, Geiger-Hans heard his comrade groan and toss through the long hours of his wedding-night. If sleep fell upon the young man at all, it was broken by nightmare. And the fiddler, lying flat on his back with his hands under his head, resignedly facing the insomnia which his restless spirit knew but too familiarly, could foretell almost to a breath the span of troubled unconsciousness, the start, the half-groan of awakening. And he was as glad, almost, as Steven himself when the white face of dawn began stealthily to peer through the dormer window.
* * * * *
Geiger-Hans glanced two or three times sharply at the youth's face as once again he found himself trudging beside him. Steven had submitted almost sullenly to all the musician's arrangements; in silence had mounted the mule prepared for him; in silence had they started on their upward way. The vagrant breasted the rugged path with his usual activity; but his countenance was dark with concern. He did not like the glassy stare of Steven's eyes, the alternate pallor and flush on his cheek, the blackened, cracked look of the lips.
"Madame Sidonia will have some nursing to do, I think," he said once.
Steven gave a wan smile, quite a long time after the words had been spoken. He was beginning to lose his original frenzy of intention in this early morning start; to think only of the rapture of lying between cool sheets in some dark place, with Sidonia's flower touch upon his throbbing temples.
After the wet night had broken a gay morning—the rain-beaten earth was fragrant; fragrant every tiny sprig of herb and spicy rock-clinging bush. As they ascended, the pleasant wood-smoke from the village hearths gradually gave place to the more subtle pungencies of the heights. All this, however, was wasted upon Steven. And wasted, too, the gaunt picturesqueness of their first view of the castle, with the golden early sunshine upon the grimness of its walls, caressing the ruin, gleaming back from the defiant granite of the keep.
The dogs bayed, a flock of rooks rose, beating the air at their approach; a brown donkey, heavily saddled, hitched by the bridle to a bar of the open gate, flapped his ears and turned his patient countenance, mildly surprised, upon them.
The door to the hall, barred and nail-studded, so inhospitable as a rule, stood open. It was a vastly different scene from that of the evening of their first visit—when they stood, a pair of adventurers wrapped in mist, before the castle, seeking admittance to walls apparently as impenetrable as any in fairy-lore. Steven was here, now, by his right, to claim his own, and all lay in the sunshine, strangely peaceful, the open door seeming to forestall a welcome. But the fiddler was seized with boding. There are grim visages upon which the sight of a smile strikes misgivings: such was now the face of the Burg.
The voice of a woman singing lustily within some distant chamber smote his ear, as he lifted a hand for the bell chain; and he shook his head. Even before Martin, the doorman, put in an appearance, shuffling out of the kind of kennel where he lurked upon that watch which had been his for thirty years, Geiger-Hans knew what had occurred. Martin, with red waistcoat unbuttoned, a china pipe hanging from his jeering lip, slippers on his feet, and the froth of bridal beer running down his chin, stared in amazement at the sight of the travellers; then welcomed them with the heartiness of the slightly elevated.
"The noble family have all departed," he cried quickly; and presently chuckled, leering at the bridegroom who sat stiffly on the mule, as if he neither heard nor saw.
Some one came trotting into the hall, softly on list soles, in a great bustle. It was the Forest-Mother. Her pleasant face wore an unwonted air of seriousness, and her lips were pursed as upon solemn thought. But never had she been to Geiger-Hans a more comfortable spectacle.
At sight of him her hands were flung up in wonder; and, at further glimpse of the rider without, they hovered in mid-air, as if paralyzed.
"Alas, Onkel—too late! All away, yesterday—and the child's heart bursting. Aye, it is all mighty queer and sad. I little thought I should be making for home again this morning, with everything so criss-cross and wrong and strange!"
Geiger-Hans made a sudden stride out of the hall back to the side of the mule.
"Down with you, comrade," he said, with that note of gentleness in his voice which, so far, only Sidonia had known. Steven, after a pause for comprehension, turned towards the speaker with his feeble smile, and suddenly swayed.
"Nay, mother," the fiddler called out as he caught the lad in his arms, "you mistake; there will be no going home for you for some time to come."
* * * * *
"Ach! the poor young gentleman," sighed the Forest-Mother, when she had heard the tale. And that was not until Steven's fever-dream had been realized, and he lay between cool sheets in a dark room; though, indeed, for Sidonia's flower touch he had to put up with Mrs. Forester's large plump hand. Not that it made much difference either just then, for he was somewhat rambling in his mind. "Ach, the poor young gentleman, it is a real talent he has for coming in the way of blows!"
"He has a talent for mending, too, remember," said the fiddler, shortly. His dry tone concealed a real anxiety. Young things, as he knew, took blows of body and soul hard. A poisoned wound is bad enough in itself, without a sore heart and a mind ill at rest.... He could not leave the lad—that was clear. "Where have they taken the child?" he asked.
"Sidonia? Ach—she kept her lips close as wax and never told me a word—not even me, the old mother! But that French minx of the Lady Burgravine did nought but chatter of Cassel."
The word fell like a stone on Geiger-Hans' heart. It was almost with impatience that he glanced at the long, helpless figure in the bed. The young man ought to be up and doing! ... Cassel, seething pot of intrigue and low manoeuvre, paradise of spendthrifts, adventurers, scoundrels, it was the last place on earth for the guileless fugitive bride—and Betty the born schemer. But, if life had taught this wanderer anything, it was submission to the inevitable.
For the moment nothing could be done but to nurse the sick man. Some vague thought of sending a message to Sidonia, to tell her of her bridegroom's pass, flashed into his mind, only to be dismissed. The chances of any communication reaching her were remote. He could not go himself. And, could he have done so, some inner conviction told him that here he had best not interfere. Between the tree and the bark let none put his finger. The lovers must win back to each other without any further meddling. He was not certain that the separation, the very anger, misunderstanding and soreness, might not be working for the best. They all had gone too fast, they had made too sure. Steven had been an over-confident wooer: little Sidonia too ready to be won.
Geiger-Hans and the Forest-Mother made a tolerable existence for themselves within those sullen walls that had certainly never before beheld such free humours as the wanderer's, such cosiness and comfort as the Frau Ober-Forsterin's. Truth to say, from the instant the sick man was put into her care, the old dame became possessed of excellent spirits. Every one has a special ideal of happiness. Nursing chanced to be hers: nursing of men, be it understood, preferably young men—no harm if they were good-looking—and wounds her speciality. She had salves that would, she was proud to say, make the bark grow on a lopped tree. As for poisoned hurts, had she not, she alone, brought her Friedel round after he had been gored and trampled upon by the stag? And as for febrifuges and herb-teas, if she had been willing to sell her secrets, she had not a doubt about it, she now might be a rich woman.
On the fifth morning, a tan-faced boy, with wild eyes looking from side to side, like a bird's, came pattering up into the Burg, having defied the crags with hardened bare feet. He brought a letter which had reached the Forest-House the night before, addressed to its mistress.
The Forest-Mother took it from the fiddler's hand, with many winks and pointings towards the great bed whereon her charge lay asleep. She betook herself to the window and began to peruse, with some labour, forming each word with her lips as she went on.
The fiddler had recognized Sidonia's characteristic hand, upright and painstaking. Presently the good woman, shaking her head, folded the sheet and, coming over to the fiddler with her noiseless yet ponderous tread, placed the missive back into his hand.
The fiddler read:
"BELOVED LITTLE FOREST-MOTHER,
"I promised to write. I am very well, but I wish I were back with you in the dear green forest. Greet good Friedel for me. Tell him not to forget to give the white doe a piece of rye bread from me every day. And it would be kind of him to take old Belthazar out with him now and again, if only for a short round. I know he is old and stiff; but the dear old fellow breaks his heart to be left behind when all the young dogs are taken out. And, dear Forest-Mother, when you go by the kennels, will you give him a pat for me? And you might just tell him that he is worth all the silly young things put together, and that the kennels had never such a fine dog as he. I am sure he understands, and it will hearten him up. And, when you see Geiger-Onkel, tell him I think of him, and that his airs keep playing in my head. But always the sad ones. And tell him, too, that I never was a fairy princess, but only a silly country girl. This is a place all streets and houses, and it is very noisy. Everybody seems running about, but I do not know what they do. I don't like it, but it is better for me to be here than at the Burg. Of course we are at the Palace. Aunt Betty did not like Uncle Ludo's apartment on the ground floor, so we have a great suite of rooms to ourselves in a wing. It is all gold and silk, and very grand. But, oh, I would rather have the old Forest-House kitchen, with the rafters and the little windows, and all the wood presses smelling so good of bees-wax!
"Aunt Betty says it is very dull at Cassel just now, because the king is still away. Next week, she says, it will be very different when he returns. But it seems to me that she is always out at parties. I have no dresses yet. I am very glad to be left at home. So I am quiet here, but oh, it is not the quiet of the forest. Thou Forest-Mother, I wish I could kiss thee.
"SIDONIA.
"I hope the old jackdaw is well."
"Na," said the old lady, who had watched him reading, her arms folded over her deep bosom, "what manner of letter is this at all for a bride who has run away from her man? That is verily but a foolish child. She was too young to be wed, eh, Geiger-Onkel?"
"That is the letter of a suffering woman," quoth Geiger-Hans, softly, "and the whole letter, Mother Friedel, is one cry towards him."
"Jeminy, and where do you see that?" whispered the dame with a shrug for the poor loony. "Well," she added, in her cheerful undertone, "we've had a splendid night, our skin is as cool as a little frog's, and we are healing as quick as a sapling. I wouldn't say but that in another couple of weeks we might be quite able to travel."
Geiger-Hans looked at the bed, at the fine sleeping face, placidly and wholesomely pale, at the charming languid hand flung in abandonment on the purple coverlet.
"Mother Friedel," he said, and his voice was none the less decided because so low pitched, "three days must see us on the road again."
Heedless of her scandalized protest he folded the letter and, thrusting it into his breast, gave himself up to reflection. A smile, half-bitter, half-tender, hovered upon his lips. The child ... she had remembered him—after her old hound.
CHAPTER XXI
AT THE MOCK VERSAILLES
"You are just a porcelain trifle, Belle Marquise!Just a thing of puffs and patches,Made for madrigals and catches,Not for heart-wounds, but for scratches..."AUSTIN DOBSON.
"You are just a porcelain trifle, Belle Marquise!Just a thing of puffs and patches,Made for madrigals and catches,Not for heart-wounds, but for scratches..."AUSTIN DOBSON.
"You are just a porcelain trifle, Belle Marquise!
Just a thing of puffs and patches,
Made for madrigals and catches,
Not for heart-wounds, but for scratches..."
AUSTIN DOBSON.
AUSTIN DOBSON.
Viennese Betty was in Cassel; and if ever the right person was in the right place, it was Betty in Cassel, the Frenchified Cassel at least of King Jerome. She breathed in its irresponsible, exciting, immoral atmosphere with rapture. Its tinfoil splendour was utterly satisfying to her eyes; its jests provoked her charmed laughter; its aims measured her utmost ambitions. To shine among these doubtful stars; to take the lead in frivolities, without fear of losing caste—nay, with every prospect of being lifted upon giddy triumph as the newest and most influential "pompadourette"—even in her dreams Betty had never devised for herself a more enchanting prospect! To make the thing complete, her Bluebeard was tame, absolutely at her mercy ... and held relentlessly at a distance.
At the first sight of a scowl, at the first rumple of that brow that used to strike terror, at the first threat of breaking through her imposed barriers, Betty had but to prattle airily of "oubliettes" (strangely inappropriate term for dark doings that never could be forgotten), or yet to fall into alarmingpamoisons, into fits of shuddering, artistically simulated, accompanied by apparently wandering yet exceedingly suggestive speech—and the Burgrave was forthwith reduced to a jelly.
The Burgrave was indeed an altered being, went moodily, found his cup bitter and his food savourless, while the Burgravine, tasting all the delights of freedom, fluttered through her first week in Cassel like a butterfly through a flower garden under full sunshine. A butterfly she was, upon one side of her nature; but, upon another, capable of determination and deep-seated resentments. True, she had other and, to her mind, better quarry to pursue now than Beau Cousin Kielmansegg—a mere rich young nobleman; yet it added not a little to the fulness of her gratification to know that she had successfully parted him from Sidonia.
The evening after her visit to Napoleonshöhe found her in the most delicate of rose-powdered wrappers, seated at her writing-table in the window of her boudoir, so prodigiously content with herself and existence that little snatches of song, little trills of laughter, escaped her, as she pondered over her correspondence.
It was towards the hour of seven, and the gardens beneath her windows (so satisfying to Betty's taste) with their mock Versailles elaboration, were bathed in mellow light. The statues took golden hues and flung a long fantastic shadow. The fountains flashed and tinkled. Some one was practising French airs on the clarinet in a room below. A gust of mingled flower-scents rose up to her nostrils: the pungency of clove pink, the coarser incense of white lilies, and the nearer breath of the climbing rose-tree that aspired towards her window.
Betty was the last person in the world to be consciously grateful for any offering of nature; she was merely aware of a general flattering of the senses which added to her content.
A few days ago, at Napoleonshöhe, she had met Jerome of Westphalia for the first time. And what a truly charming man! Not a hint of the plebeian Corsican about him. No—they maligned who said so. What manners, what courtesy and dash combined! What a delightful smile! What an eye! It was rumoured that strong men shivered under the glance of his great imperial brother. If you had asked her, Betty would have told you that, from all accounts, Napoleon seemed to her a distinctly overrated individual—a boor, who would chuck a lady under the chin or take her by the ear, as though she were a grenadier. Bah!—Nay, give her the agreeable thrill of coming beneath Jerome's meaning gaze. A delicious recurrence of the sensation crept through her frame as, with closed eyes, she recalled the moment ... Jerome's first sight of her, his start, his stare, his flickering smile.
On the table lay the very rose he had presented to her with such a curve of slender olive fingers; with so happy a phrase, so graceful an inclination. Betty had handled the flower a good deal since, had sniffed and caressed it a vast number of times; the pretty leaves were blighted, but never did flower excite such admiration in the Burgravine's regard.
She had met the King but a day or two ago; they had exchanged but a glance, a word, a courtesy—and behold! Betty's morning courier had brought her a letter from the monarch. A love letter, if you please, neither more nor less. A request, a demand, for a rendezvous.Peste!he lost no time, the little King! But were there not royal privileges? Had he not the same blood as the Conqueror in his veins? Moreover, was not this very haste the best compliment that could be paid a woman? Not, indeed, that Betty had any notion of allowing herself to go too cheaply. Perhaps, indeed, she had no very clear idea of letting herself go at all; but to dally with an exciting situation, to tantalize, to reign, to fire, and then dash cold water.... Stay, such coarse expressions ill applied to the Burgravine's delicate methods: to spray, very gently, with cold rose-water; not sufficiently to drown the lover's ardour, but just enough to produce a little fizz and splutter—to reign, in fact, chief of the many sultanas by reason, perhaps, of her very refusal to qualify for the post! And only to yield at last when ... But here Betty was glad to allow the prospect to be veiled in a kind of luminous mist. The immediate programme was quite sufficiently absorbing.
No wonder she nibbled the feathers of her pen. Her answer to the kingly missive must be a work of art. The "rendezvous" itself must not be denied, whatever else it might deny. Betty had the instinct of her species, the born coquette. Too much virtue, at the beginning, is fatal. Many twigs are required for the lighting of a proper fire.
It stood complete at last, a most dainty little note, indited on pink paper, duly folded and enclosed in a French envelope, wafered with mauve—Betty was of the last mode, these days, even to her writing paper.
The congenial task concluded, she had another to perform. The courier from Heiligenstadt, whither the King had repaired on a tour of military inspection, had brought her a second letter—also a love cry, or it might better be described as a love-bellow. The Burgrave, away on duty with his sovereign, appealed from a distance to his obdurate wife.
He was filled with amorous longing, jealousy, despair. How long was he to be exiled from her favour? The situation was past endurance! He implored, groaned, rebelled, threatened, and was abject again—all in a few frenzied lines. The gist of the whole was in the last phrase: "When am I to be forgiven? Am I not your husband?"
The answer to this effusion required but a flourish of the pen. Yet, as the lady planted a green wafer upon the second envelope, there was a triumphant smile upon her lip, a vindictive gleam of pleasure in her eye. The despatching of her morning budget had been altogether pleasurable.
* * * * *
Close by, in the little chamber allotted to her, Sidonia, behind locked doors, was engaged upon a similar task; for to her the courier had also brought a letter demanding instant acknowledgment. It was a very short one, and by no means so loverlike as either of Betty's billets.
"I have been slightly indisposed" (wrote Steven) "and unable to travel for a few days; but I trust to be in Cassel within the week, and shall seek you in the Palace. It must be clear to you that you owe me at least an explanation. It is impossible that we can part for ever thus.
"STEVEN."
Not a word of love! Not a hint of despair! Not even reproach! It was all cold, cruel business. As Sidonia wrote her reply, the tears dripped so quickly that she could scarce see the paper.
Eliza, very brisk and tripping, who had the charge of posting the three letters, studied the superscriptions very carefully before committing them to the royal mail. Her eyes grew round at sight of the pink-wafered note.Diable!If the mistress had such correspondence, it might become a question whether Jäger Kurtz would continue to be good enough for the maid. She smiled vindictively at sight of the green wafer. If she knew her lady, the Chancellor was far from being fully paid out yet. "And serve him right," said she, who would herself be long before she forgave Burg-Wellenshausen for the horrors of its tedium.
The old-fashioned sheet that bore Sidonia's childish scrawl she weighed awhile reflectively in her hand. Madame la Burgravine would doubtless give something to see the contents ofthatletter.... Then, with a shrug of her shoulders, she sent it on its voyage with the rest. The service of her lady had its advantages; and Eliza, pining in the Burg, had stuck to it with unerring prescience of better days. But it did not follow that she held no opinions of her own. And she had even a kind of good-nature that did quite as well as a conscience, as far as her neighbours were concerned, and was far more agreeable for herself.
"I am not hard-hearted like madame, look you," said the maid to herself. "The child is a nice child, as young ladies go, and she should have her chance."
* * * * *
The spirits of spring and autumn are akin, although the one journeys towards the fulness of life, and the other to the cold sleep, death. Across the dividing months they seem to meet each other, to serve you smiles and tears, skies of a tenderness unknown to summer, gales of wind, soft as milk, mighty as love. These come chanting with the voices of the ocean, the mountain and the forest, great songs of glory; seize you by the way in resistless arms, tell you wondrous things, and set your blood leaping as they pass. They set, if autumn it be, the yellow leaves awhirl in a death dance; or, if spring, every baby bud rocking on its sappy spray.
The travellers, one riding, the other afoot, went side by side along the road towards Cassel. It was a south-west wind that buffeted them. Even in the heart of the inland it seemed to sing of distant seas; to bear on its pinions airs at once untamable and mild, balmy and salt. The forest trees roared under it as with the voice of waters. It gathered from them drifts of yellowing leaves, even as, leagues behind, it had churned spray from Mediterranean waves. In the young traveller's heart storm answered to storm; its breath in his nostrils maddened him, for he had fever in his veins, and he was balked in love.
But to the other traveller, whose hair was grey, who tramped along with the even measure of him who has learned to ignore fatigue, the autumn lament was charged with the hopelessness of the grave. It told him how all that is born must die, and how the beautiful die first. In the choiring of the forest he heard the dirge of waning life. In each gust of pungent fragrance he could smell the bitter graves of yesteryear.
The horseman was clothed in fine and fashionable garments. He who trudged was but a vagrant player, who made music for his daily bread and rarely knew in the morning where he would lay his head at night.
They went in silence. Steven's heart was heavy. Robbed of his bride well-nigh on the altar-steps, he was now seeking her, in an impatience which repeated disappointment had fed to frenzy. And Geiger-Hans was his guide.
At a certain spot the forest began to press closer upon the imperial road. The overarching boughs flung a swaying, premature night upon them; and, as the woodland enfolded them, it seemed to draw them into a great sanctuary. Let the gale rage without, here was protection and an inner stillness all the deeper in contrast to the outer turmoil. Instinctively the travellers drew closer to each other, and their tongues were loosened.
The rider struck his saddle-bow with a passionate hand, at which the plodding grey faintly started.
"To think of her, at Cassel, under the devil flicker of that imperial puppet's glance! Sidonia, my wife, at the Court of Jerome!"
"A waterlily may defy the ooze," observed Geiger-Hans, sententiously.
But the simile was hateful to the youth—a water-lily, a flower that flourishes, in atrocious beauty, upon the very slime! Then he cursed his wound for its slow healing, and his blood for its ill-timed fever, and the length of the road, and the perversity of women.
"And the wrong-headedness of young men!" added the musician, drily.
But thereafter, in tones of consolation, for dudgeon reigned on the saddle above him, he pointed to a light far off through the dark flicker of leaf and shadowy march of trees.
"See, yonder shall we sup and sleep, and thence, rested, start in the brisk dawn. And to-morrow——"
"To-morrow!" interrupted the bridegroom, impatiently. "No; I shall be in Cassel to-night."
"You forget the times we live in, comrade," came the fiddler's answer. "Why, here is my nobility afoot; and yours, all wounded, upon a sorry steed, because any less notable progression were to court suspicion, putting aside the fact that your worship's carriage and horses (Sidonia would have none of them, and if you were not otherwise matched you two would be one by pride, comrade) have been requisitioned for the use of the State. And Frantz fled with his master's dressing set, his English pistols, and his second portmanteau! Court suits I make no doubt, tut, tut. The fellow was a rogue. I saw it at half a blink. And worthy Peter, our postilion, bitten with the war fever and passed over to the Prussians! Nay, but 'tis a riddance that suits me. And here we go as I love, at our own free will, save, indeed, that we enter not Cassel to-night. Have you already forgotten that we are at war, in Westphalia? Not, I grant you, that it signifies much to our pretty monarch—so long as it does not interfere with his amusements at home. He has thought it wise, nevertheless, to make a little fortress of his capital—breastworks and glacis where lay the orchards and cottage gardens; posterns andcorps de gardeat all road entrances, and everything closed at the setting of the watch, an hour after sundown!"
Steven the lover had, in his mind's eye, seen his pilgrimage ended before the fall of the day; seen himself dashed or crowned. Crowned! Upon the vision the surge rose in his heart till it overpowered him well-nigh to swooning.
Geiger-Hans, with his diabolic insight, chose this moment to draw from his fiddle a sudden strain.
"Oh, stop!" panted the young man. "I cannot bear it."
And the player fell silent, musing upon the ways of men and women and of love. Let a bride but elude her lover's embrace, what surer road shall she find to a revealing of his ardour?