Читать книгу General Crack - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 10

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Count Michael Hensdorff rose as Leopold stood hesitant, and the confessor discreetly withdrew to the far end of the immense gallery where he occupied himself by glancing over the titles of the learned books so nicely set out on the gilt shelves.

"I did not know," said Leopold rather sullenly, "that you were aware I was here."

"You might as well have informed me yourself, Sire," replied Hensdorff, "for I only had to learn of it from one of General Crack's spies."

Leopold blushed; he had thought his journey a profound secret; he disliked Hensdorff for having discovered it; he did not, in any case, love his minister though he considerably relied on him; he began now to defend himself without having been blamed, and this in a nervous manner.

"There was nothing for me to do in Vienna," he declared. "Everywhere I turn I find chaos and contradiction. I'm plagued to pieces. I thought," he added defiantly, "that I would settle at least one thing for myself. I've some interest in my marriage, I suppose?"

"Well," admitted Hensdorff, "as it turns out, it is fortunate that you have come, Sire, though these adventures are unsuitable to the times. We do not, Sire, live in the age of chivalry."

Leopold replied bitterly that this was an unnecessary reminder; he leant against the lofty window frame and gazed moodily across the intervening river at the vast and sweeping forests that bounded the horizon; Hensdorff noted with annoyance that he was carelessly dressed, and would make, on a stranger, a poor impression; there was nothing about him of that sense of a blaze of a great presence that one felt on meeting General Crack.

Leopold was, however, quite charming, very finely bred, with a fastidious air; in his childhood he had been spoilt as the only son of the Elector of Bavaria, greatest of German princes; in his youth he had borne the empty honours of King of the Romans during the vicissitudes of a cruel war which had given his father the title of Emperor and cost him everything else; he was now twenty-four years of age and had not shown any special gifts, though he had played a difficult part with dignity; during his father's lifetime he had been overshadowed, and since his father's death he had had little chance to distinguish himself; the French, briefly dominant in Austria, had forced his election and pledged themselves to his coronation, but his fortunes were still in a dangerous state of ebb and flow—mostly, as Hensdorff reflected, ebb.

His disposition was romantic; he had not yet shown any violent emotion of any kind; he was a learned dilettante in the Arts and had acquitted himself with credit as a soldier if he had cut no great figure as a general. His mother had been a Spanish princess; twice through the female side he had inherited that Hapsburg blood which gave him his perilous claim to Imperial honours, and showed in his too full lower lip and in a melancholy strain in his character. He had no sense of the humour of life; he saw his own comedy, but was not amused by it; he was continually afraid of being ridiculous in his own estimation.

In appearance he was pleasing if not notable, elegant, light blond, with a long countenance and arched nose very suitable for medals and triumphal arches, soft blue eyes and a pure complexion; most of what he did had a touch of uncertainty, but on occasion he had displayed a manly energy.

He asked now about the success of the mission to Prince Christian, as he scrupulously called the great mercenary soldier.

For answer Hensdorff drily produced the unopened letter with the Imperial seals.

Leopold coloured fiercely (to his own intense annoyance, he blushed too easily) and tore his own missive indignantly across.

"I believe that you slighted him once," said Hensdorff. "At Belgrade—"

"Never," replied Leopold hotly. "He was always indifferent to me. Slighted? At Belgrade? You mean because I did not ask him to my table? I had forty ruling princes to entertain."

"It was the more slight to leave him out," remarked Hensdorff. "His achievements should blot out his birth."

"Insolent!" cried Leopold, tearing the letter again.

"He certainly is," agreed Hensdorff grimly. "Most men are who know they have a high value—he omits nothing to enhance his prestige. Ottenheim can rival Bosenberg."

"No doubt," said Leopold peevishly. "Both he and his father were rapacious thieves. I did not think he had refused my sister," he added bitterly.

"Nor did I," admitted Hensdorff, "but he is engaged on another affair. And through that we shall get him yet."

"Let him go," cried Leopold. "I wish to owe nothing to him—we will find another general."

Hensdorff took no heed of these brave words; he briefly outlined the Anhalt-Dessau intrigue and the necessity of relinquishing the Princess to General Crack.

"Why then," exclaimed Leopold in disgust, "I will go back to Vienna. Make your bargain, Hensdorff. I am glad to be out of a marriage with a Lutheran."

Hensdorff was irritated at this obtuseness.

"How can you sell what you haven't got?" he asked. "You must get Anhalt-Dessau to seal and sign the girl to you before you can assign her to Christian, Sire—he sees that, he's off to-day to get her for himself, and will, unless we put in with a higher price."

Leopold refused hotly to be party to any such design. "Bargaining about women with a man like that, I get lower with every day of this business—"

"If you could offer your sister," Hensdorff reminded him, "you might countenance this—"

"I was overpersuaded to it," replied Leopold with tears of humiliation in his eyes. "And where has it led me?"

"To a point where you may get what you desire," snapped Hensdorff. "If he has refused your offer, at least we know of what he won't refuse."

"I dislike the whole business," protested Leopold. "I shall certainly return to Vienna and have no hand in it."

Hensdorff knew why he was so anxious now he was vexed to return to Vienna; there was a certain Countess Carola for whom he had a sentimental and platonic affection and who contrived to combine a philosophical coquetry with Leopold and a decorous fidelity to an elderly husband; Leopold rather fancied her as his Aspasia and confided to her his worldly troubles. Hensdorff thought it a fruitless and tiresome affair, and judged the arch Countess a boring bas bleu; he had no mind that Leopold should drift back to this virtuous pedant at such a crucial moment.

"If you throw up this, Sire," he said harshly, "you might as well throw up the whole thing—"

"I have a mind to," replied Leopold peevishly. "I never wanted this place, I doubt if I am suited to it, I meet nothing but vexation and tedium."

"That is the cry of most men," interrupted Hensdorff. "Who want the places they find themselves in? Very few. To be an emperor should be as amusing as most metiers."

"But to be an emperor without an empire—that is not amusing."

"I should have thought it might have been," retorted Hensdorff drily. "But Your Imperial Majesty is rather unamusable."

"I am too often the butt of the joke at which I am asked to laugh," said Leopold. "In this business now, into which you would thrust me, I cut the figure of a fool."

"Not at all," urged Hensdorff. "You can make Christian the fool—you dislike him?"

"No," replied Leopold candidly, "I do not, I have admired him; when I have seen him after a victory I have envied him: there is something impelling and grand about the fellow—"

"Then why did you make him hate you?" demanded Hensdorff, exasperated. "All this difficulty is due to your slight of him—"

"I have explained that," put in Leopold rather haughtily. "I treated him as what he was. And really his arrogance was intolerable."

"It still is," was the dry comment, "and none the less easy to bear from his having the whip hand. But if, Sire, you will deign to use a little tact, it will be he, not you, who will look the fool."

Leopold declared that he could not see that, and added fretfully that this parcel of ill news might have been kept till after dinner.

"It cannot wait a moment," answered the inexorable Hensdorff. "Christian is already ruffling it at Schönbuchel—"

"And I," cried Leopold, "will not go there to compete with him!"

Hensdorff endeavoured to be patient.

"Why not use the fellow? Give him this little Princess for whom he has this infatuation, trust me to drive a hard bargain with him, let him give you this Empire, the lack of which you say makes you feel ridiculous, and then, when you want him no more, get rid of him—he will look foolish enough then, with nothing for his reward but a wife of whom he will probably have tired—"

"It is odd," remarked Leopold, "that he should be so set on the lady. I had not thought him romantic or easily moved by sentiment—"

"There is not, I think, either romance or sentiment about it—but we have him on this unreasonable passion as we could have him on nothing else and I pray Your Majesty to take advantage of it."

Leopold began to feel weary of the argument; he never could withstand Hensdorff for long; he was always too eager to get back to his books, or his pictures, or his music or his mere idleness; he often dreamt of some delicious existence in which he could indulge these pleasures without vexations and where people like Hensdorff could never intrude.

Annoyed by his minister's persistency he now again spoke of resigning his tiresome dignities and going into some peaceful retreat.

"A monastery?" asked Hensdorff harshly. "I do not know where else Your Majesty would find a refuge, seeing that even your own Bavaria is in the hands of the enemy."

Leopold, stung by this, blushed, and walked away down the long gallery; he felt beset and cornered. Hensdorff was like a gadfly, with his urgent schemes—and yet, as he had just so crudely pointed out, where was the alternative?

To give up his pretensions seemed to be to give up life; he had his back to the wall, and must fight or be slain.

He approached Father St. Nikola, who was diligently reading the self-confident titles of the ponderous tomes on the gilded shelves; here was enough of polemics to have founded a dozen creeds and destroyed a dozen others—or would have been enough if any one had troubled to read these laborious arguments.

The Jesuit had the greatest respect for these works for the purpose of making the brain elastic and subtle in the arguments so useful to confuse the ignorant, but he had long passed the need of them, and eyed their grandiloquent array with the reflection that any one who saw this library must know that the good Brothers had another one not so publicly displayed.

"Father St. Nikola," asked Leopold uncertainly, "do you consider it would be worth any sacrifice to secure the services of Prince Christian?"

The Jesuit had thought that question decided long since; else why the Hensdorff mission, and the offer of the Archduchess?

"I certainly do, Sire," he replied at once.

"Every one seems agreed to put a high value on this man," sighed Leopold. "Remember, Father, he is now a renegade."

"Your Majesty must use such instruments as come to your hand," said the Jesuit glibly. "I should use every effort, Sire, to gain and retain a soldier like Prince Christian."

"Then I suppose I must do as Hensdorff suggests," answered Leopold reluctantly. "It is difficult to deal with Prince Christian, Father; a very overbearing, high-handed, insolent adventurer."

"No one is so arrogant as a successful soldier," admitted the priest, "and the Prince has been glutted with fame. But disregard all that, Sire, and use him while you need him, and leave him when you do not. There are ways," added the Jesuit, thoughtfully, "of removing those who cease to be of use."

Leopold glanced at him sharply.

"But one must be powerful to employ them," he answered.

"Let Prince Christian make Your Majesty powerful, and then punish him for any presumption in which he may now indulge."

This advice ran with that of Hensdorff, though it was more courteously offered; it was still, however, far from agreeable to Leopold, who wanted to be clear of the whole intrigue and never hear again of Anhalt-Dessau, the Princess Eleanora, or General Crack.

His thoughts turned longingly to the pale boudoir of the Countess Carola, where that graceful lady so often sat at her harp and listened with such deferential sympathy to his rather mournful meditations.

Father St. Nikola saw the expression of distress and hesitation on the fair face; he did not know the details of Leopold's interview with Hensdorff, but he shrewdly guessed that the former was tempted, in a fit of disgust at some of the minister's proposals, to give over all effort on behalf of his own rather doubtful cause.

"Sire," urged the Jesuit quickly, "no man of spirit and—conscience would lightly resign—that—"

And he pointed to the beautiful country, river, wood, hill, lying, in all the pomp of summer loveliness, beyond the windows of the long gallery.

Leopold was always sensitive to such suggestions; beneath his flickering uncertainties was a constant, if baffled ambition; a lively, if fitful sense of birth and nationality.

"It is not for Your Majesty," smiled the Jesuit, quietly, "to be put out of your way by any one like Prince Christian."

The young man rallied to the pride of that; he felt that he ought, as Hensdorff had said, to use Christian for his own ends, despise him and cast him off when he had no need of him—surely the Imperial gesture.

"I suppose that I had better go to Schönbuchel," he admitted, "but it is very distasteful."

Hensdorff now strolled up, stroking his long, sour face with a wrinkled hand; Leopold felt hemmed in by these two personalities; he knew that he should do what they wished him to do, and, more, that what they wished him to do would be what he ought to do, so he mustered the best possible grace with which to submit.

They were wiser than he, he confessed, and infinitely stronger; right, of course, but if they had been wrong he could scarcely have resisted them.

So Leopold, with a gesture of resignation, permitted himself to be persuaded into the Anhalt-Dessau intrigue.

But he put off the journey till the afternoon under the excuse of the heat of the day and lounged, after dinner, in one of the alcoves of the library, exasperating Hensdorff by the delay while he strove to compose a paper of verses for the Countess Carola; but his mind had been so vexed that he got no further than:

"Like a dark rose opening to a heart of gold—

Like a deep river widening to the seas—"