Читать книгу General Crack - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 13

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Never had Hensdorff known the young man so difficult. He violently and positively refused to be party to the intrigue that his minister had mapped out for him, or to make any sacrifices to gain the services of General Crack.

"Let him go where he pleases—I care not at all. What I cannot get without him I will forgo. This will lead to nothing but disaster; I will not be so persuaded against myself."

"What is, then, your intention?" asked Hensdorff wearily. "What game, sir, do you expect me to play?"

"None at all," replied Leopold. "Let the matter be straightforward. I will keep my engagement with Anhalt-Dessau and try to carry my own fortunes to success."

Brave, flourishing words, but Hensdorff smiled.

"Does, then, Your Majesty intend to marry the Princess Eleanora?"

"Yes," replied Leopold impetuously. "It is the alliance you, sir, found for me."

"But Prince Christian is more important than the lady," explained the minister, with an air of fatigue. "When shall I be able to persuade Your Majesty that he is essential to your cause?"

"Never," replied Leopold, "for I do not believe it."

Hensdorff cast about in his mind for some means to end this tiresome argument; he had believed that he and Father St. Nikola had mastered Leopold's obstinacy, and now it had started up afresh. He looked sharply at the young man, who seemed very flushed and agitated, who walked about and sat down and rose up in restless nervousness; in the plainness of his dress and the disorder of his blond locks he did not look either distinguished or imposing, and Hensdorff, glancing him up and down, struggled with a sick desire to drop this rebellious puppet, and with him the whole disjointed show.

If only there had been something else!

But there was nothing.

Useless for one who did not believe in Heaven to renounce the World: that would be to fall into a void.

"Is Your Majesty's change of mind due to the acquaintance of the Princess?" he asked, for he had remembered Herr Lippmann's words about Prince Christian, and if one young man, why not another? She was, too, a pretty little creature.

Leopold vehemently denied this.

"I have hardly seen her, hardly spoken to her—it is manifest that she is well bred and docile, but she has nothing to do with my resolution."

"To what, then, is that due?"

"To disgust of the whole affair, to dislike of this bargaining, intriguing—"

He sat down by the lamp and put his blond head in his white hands.

"I tell you, Count, I am sick of it—"

"So am I," interrupted the minister drily. "Shall we then, Sire, give everything up and become hermits?"

Leopold blushed at his rebuke, which he saw was intended to turn him into ridicule.

"There is no other alternative," continued Hensdorff. "If you live in the world you must live on the world's terms. I myself have no illusions—often I ask myself, 'What is the use?' but I go on because I do not know how to stop, because there is nothing else to do."

"That is a dreadful doctrine," murmured Leopold. He thought of the wood, the singing girl with the basket of strawberries, the heavenly beauty of that evening hour, and he thought of this like a way of escape from the hard, cynical, hopeless existence that Hensdorff spoke of and in which he, too, seemed involved.

"You may, Sire, if you will," added Hensdorff, "consider our obligations to your family and your Allies—while you amuse yourself with fastidious scruples, these others hang with harrowing anxiety on the turn of events. Hourly I expect news that the congress has broken up and the enemy is on the move. What, in that case, do you intend to do? Fly into the marshes of Styria?"

"I shall not fly," replied Leopold hotly.

"Then perhaps you will submit to the Queen of Hungary and do homage to her husband as Emperor? Or go to Paris and join Prince Charles Edward as a pensioner of the French?"

"I do not know why you seek to inflame me!" cried Leopold bitterly.

"I do not," replied Hensdorff, dispassionately and wearily. "I merely seek to know your mind."

"I do not know it myself," admitted the baffled, distressed and baited young man, "but at least I will not give up this marriage to bribe Prince Christian—"

"And the Empire is to be sacrificed to that!" exclaimed Hensdorff scornfully. "It is as well, Sire, that your father is dead before he could see his policies and his efforts thrown to the winds."

And he thought to himself, "The romantic young fool is taken with the girl, and out of jealousy will not give her up."

Leopold read this thought in the dull, sunken eyes of Hensdorff; he saw himself summed up as a facile, irresolute, sentimental boy, and he put again his hands before his sensitive face, wincing at the truth in this judgment.

Hensdorff rose and yawned; it was useless to prolong the dispute; if Leopold was to fail like this he must set about making his pact with the Queen of Hungary and that would be difficult, for he had gone very far in services to the House of Bavaria.

"I will leave Your Majesty," he remarked, and his emphasis on the title sounded like mockery to Leopold, "to consider that by to-morrow all must be decided."

"It is decided now," replied Leopold defiantly.

Hensdorff paused by the door.

"Do you recall," he asked, "all the councils and disputes, all the advice and anxious consultations in Vienna before the resolution was come to that at all costs Prince Christian must be secured? Even at the cost of your sister, Sire?"

Leopold writhed; he did indeed remember those hideous days in Vienna, the tedium, the boredom, the confusion, the pressure brought on him on all sides to do what he loathed to do, the alarms and fears—

"And I suppose all that," added Hensdorff, "goes for nothing. The resolution so painfully taken is to be thrown over for a whim?"

Leopold had no answer, and Hensdorff, as he departed, had one last dry reproach to fling behind him:

"It is useless to dispute an empire if you are to be put out of your way by a girl."

Leopold, left alone, raged at this, but the truth of it was forced into his soul like a dart; he had been unsettled, made irresolute, wretched, by the sight of a strange girl in a romantic setting.

Until he had seen the Princess Eleanora he had been prepared to give her up; now, even though he denied to himself that she fascinated him, he had decided not to do so.

He passed a miserable night, tossing, distracted, angry with everything; he would have been yet further discomposed had he known that his host sat up almost to the dawn with Herr Lippmann, absorbed in the glasses, mirrors, charts and diagrams the astrologer expounded to him, and by that worthy's glib and flowing talk.

The Prince of Anhalt-Dessau combined a rigid Lutheranism with a vast love of the marvellous; he continually murmured, "incredible," "impossible" to the wonders that Herr Lippmann unfolded, but he was secretly impressed and delighted.

The alchemist was too acute to venture on any crude predictions in favour of Prince Christian, but he did not fail to work into his discourse some considerable eulogies of his master.

He declared that he had, from the first, foretold the extraordinary success of Christian, and now saw in the future a yet brighter destiny for this favourite of fortune.

"And what of Leopold?" asked Anhalt-Dessau. "What is there in store for him?"

Herr Lippmann snatched at this opportunity; he shrugged his shoulders and pulled down his mouth.

"Disaster," he said briefly.

Anhalt-Dessau was startled.

"Oh?" he cried, "but his prospects look fair—"

"Do they?" smiled the alchemist, who could guess by the other's consternation that he had promised his daughter to the Emperor. "And what do you think of the man himself?" he added confidentially. "I see he is here, incognito; now one of the penetration of Your Highness must have observed his weakness, his vacillation, his immaturity, his lack of all manly qualities."

"No, no," said Anhalt-Dessau, alarmed. "I saw nothing of the sort, I was favourably impressed by him—Count Hensdorff told me—"

Herr Lippmann calmly took up the word.

"Count Hensdorff is an old fox, he knows how to give a turn to things! Naturally he makes the best of Leopold. But believe me, it will be all for nothing—"

"For nothing, eh, for nothing?"

"He has not the material to deal with. Think, instead, of Christian—there's a man for you! Why, he could pitch Leopold off the throne and mount it himself if he wanted to—he might have been Czar of all the Russias if he had cared to marry Olga Petronova who was madly enamoured of him—there's nothing he can't do. And his wealth! He's more money than any one in the Empire."

Anhalt-Dessau felt uncomfortable; he mentally contrasted Leopold and Christian, not to the advantage of the former. "It is a pity his birth is base," he murmured.

"There is a doubt about that," said the alchemist boldly and darkly. "It may yet be disclosed that he is really a Ketlar and the Duke of Kurland."

"No! How is that possible?"

"I am not allowed to say," replied Herr Lippmann mysteriously. "But there was a mystery and investigations are being made."

He spoke a half truth; some years before, Christian had employed him to search into the painful story of his birth, but without any result save that of confirming the fact that he was undoubtedly the son of the Italian Columbine and possibly not the son of the Duke of Kurland; only, by chance, had he thought of this now as something with which to impress Anhalt-Dessau who was plainly discomposed and lost interest in the mirrors and telescopes, for which the alchemist was heartily thankful, as he was weary of explaining marvels to a flaccid and credulous mind.

"Of course, there is nothing in any of this," said the Prince nervously. "One must not pay any attention to this sort of thing."

"Well, Monseigneur," interrupted the astrologer, "just let me give you this advice—if you want to put faith in either of those men, put it in General Crack."

When his tedious visitor had gone, Herr Lippmann congratulated himself on having done a good stroke of work for his master, which he had achieved with the better will since he sincerely had little enough faith in Leopold and a very honest admiration for General Crack.

There were, however, more powerful aids than the predictions of an astrologer coming to the assistance of Christian, whose affairs at that moment seemed under the protection of a special Providence.

With the morning came a messenger, sent on from Mölk, who had come from Vienna almost on the heels of Leopold. He brought the worst of news; the congress at Brussels had flown asunder in bitter disagreement, and the well-prepared armies of the Allies were already in movement.

Maréchal De Lisle, Governor of Frankfurt and now at Prague, in command of the French forces in the Netherlands, had sent an urgent message for Imperial assistance, and an entreaty, which was almost a command, that Leopold would engage General Crack, to whom, for their part, the French were ready to offer considerable bribes.

With these dispatches were two feeble feminine notes for Leopold, one from Maria Luisa, his sister, and one from the Countess Carola.

Hensdorff took them all to Leopold's bedside, threw them down on the coverlet, and stood over the dismayed young man, bidding him read them.

"You see, Sire, it is exactly as I warned you."

Leopold spitefully tore up the Countess Carola's note without reading it; he thought of her with distaste, and her gushing alarms came very ill just now; irritating, too, was his sister's timid letter, talking of the panic in the capital, begging for his return, and asking if she were indeed to be betrothed to Prince Christian?

"I do not know how to move!" he exclaimed. "Is there not any one else, besides this man, to whom we can turn?"

Hensdorff had answered this protest so often that now he received it in silence. Useless to go again through the miserable list of the discredited, defeated generals, who were all who were left to lead the Imperial ranks; formal, arrogant fools like Fürth and Olivenza.

Leopold had risen out of bed and put on his chamber robe; he had scarcely slept all night and under this ill news felt giddy; he turned to the window to be rid of Hensdorff's yellow sour face, and the loveliness of the morning blooming on the river and the valley seemed like a reproach. Again he thought of the wood, and the girl beneath the beech tree; and the dispatches shook in his hand.

But the keen, inquisitive gaze of Hensdorff, his tormentor, nerved him; he made an effort to control his confusion, his fear of, and repugnance to, his task.

"I will," he declared, "see this man myself. Ask him to come here, now—I must overlook his insolence—"

"Ask whom, Sire?"

"This General Crack—ask him to come."

In half an hour Christian was there, facing Leopold in the small anteroom to the bedchamber that had been given him in the Château Schönbuchel; the windows had been set wide open on the valley, and the apartment was full of the pure thin Austrian air and the bright light of early morning.

Leopold, in his black with the silver shoulder knot—black and silver, the colours of the House of Hapsburg—leaned against the wall by the windows with the dispatches in his hand. He was, as usual, carelessly attired and his blond hair was undressed—he had brought but one body servant with him and was impatient of his administrations—but Christian was set out as if he were going on parade, with every braid, buckle and button gleaming, his clothes without a wrinkle or a speck of dust, fresh from the barber and the hairdresser, and as stiff and expressionless, Leopold thought, as a wooden soldier.

"We have come, Highness," the Bavarian said with dignity, "to a point when we do not need a go-between. What there is to settle, we can settle ourselves."

"No doubt," answered Christian. "It is, Sire, one to me who settles the matter. But it must be to-day that it is settled."

"Doubtless," replied Leopold, tolerating him with an effort, "you know how I am pressed. And my advisers think you are the man I need."

"Sire, I have heard all this from Count Hensdorff and gave him my answer."

"Not too civilly, I think," said Leopold, firing up. "By Heaven, Monseigneur, you make it difficult for me!"

"Circumstance, not I, makes the difficulty," remarked Christian unmoved. "It is not easy to beg favours of one, Sire, you dislike—"

"I have not disliked you," protested Leopold.

"You have disregarded me," replied Christian. "You do not willingly turn to me now; you may as well, Sire, have matters clear—"

"And you as well keep courteous," interrupted Leopold haughtily.

"Remembering that I speak to Caesar? But it is not my courtesy you want to buy, Sire."

"No," replied Leopold, mustering all his patience. "I bargain with you for your sword, Highness. If you will take command of all my forces—"

"I want Anhalt-Dessau's daughter," said Christian, coldly. "I go neither up nor down from that demand."

"I will not give it," replied Leopold, with a shuddering resolution.

"Then I daresay that we shall meet on the battlefield, Sire, for I go at once to join the Queen of Hungary's husband."

He turned as if to leave the room; only the sight of the fatal dispatches in his hand gave Leopold the resolution to speak any words to stay his going.

"Why are you so set on this lady?" he asked.

"Why are you so set on withholding her?" counter-demanded Christian.

"Anhalt-Dessau has already refused her to you—"

"He will withdraw that refusal if you bid him—when Caesar is out of the lists, General Crack may be good enough."

Leopold looked away, out of the window, to refresh himself by that exquisite expanse of sunny landscape, and to be rid of the sight of that cold showy face General Crack bent on him.

"I," continued the implacable soldier, "am no more eager to serve under you, Sire, than you are eager to employ me. But since I must set some man up, it may as well be you if you will pay my price."

"Any price but the price you ask—"

"You have nothing else to offer that I care about," smiled Christian. "Neither your honours, Sire, nor your sister tempt me."

This was too much for Leopold; he threw down the dispatches into the window seat.

"Then you must go," he declared hotly, "for I see we can conclude no business."

"Shall I tell Count Hensdorff so?" asked Christian mockingly. "Come, Sire, do not make all this delay and question. I do not ask what you should grudge."

The words made Leopold ashamed of the weight he had given to his own speech; he felt insignificant before the other's irony; this time yesterday he had not seen her—a girl in a wood! he might so soon forget; he felt exhausted by his own effort at strength and resolution.

Count Hensdorff and Father St. Nikola (who had accompanied the dispatch rider) entered showing grave faces; neither of them had trusted Leopold to bring this momentous interview to a satisfactory climax. At sight of them Leopold felt himself hemmed in, forced, overwhelmed as usual when they together bore down on him.

He sank in the window seat and put a trembling hand to his forehead. He thought, "She was destined for me, she was almost mine, and they will take her away."

"His Imperial Majesty," said Christian, "refuses my terms."

At that, Leopold heard the two others, minister and priest, talking together; harshly, impatiently, persuading him, reproaching him, pelting him with State arguments till his head ached and his heart sickened.

And what had he to oppose to all this wisdom? A few moments in a wood at sunset.

His two tormentors persisted, to the limit of the endurance of his nerves; they seemed to him to be bearing down on him, enclosing him with their dark figures, their old, harsh faces, their insistent voices; and, worse than them even, he was conscious of General Crack, silent, assured, waiting with the sleek patience of a beast certain of its prey.

After half an hour of this torture, Leopold gave way, with a shudder of disgust for himself, with a quiver of hatred for them.

"Settle it, then!" he cried to Hensdorff. "Only let me begone. Ay, you are all very cunning, but this may be a bad day's work for some of you—"

Christian's dark eyes, void of all expression, turned slowly on him as he gave this threat, which he himself felt to be futile. It was the last humiliation for Leopold that his rival showed no sign of triumph; now that Christian had gained his point he preserved the same icy indifference that he had shown while it was in debate; a hateful pose, this, of godlike calm!

Passionately, Leopold wished that he could emulate such serenity; as he left them he was swearing hotly to himself, "If I ever have any power I will break that man—God, how I will break him."

He wished to leave Schönbuchel without being observed, but he was not so fortunate as to achieve this. While he was hurriedly having his horse out (for he meant to ride at once and alone to Vienna) Eleanora came out on one of the little bowed balconies over the forecourt. She had been much petted that morning, for her father had told the Duchess the secret of Captain Leopold's identity and of the betrothal.

She smiled candidly at the young man, for she had been assured that he had come to be her companion and that she might walk with him in the woods and along the banks of the Danube, for they wished her to know her destined husband.

"Now, to-day, when Charlotte is ready, we can take that walk in the forest," she said, as she tied the wide ribbons of her straw hat under her chin. "It is so beautiful! And we can picnic in the woods."

These words were like a blow over the heart to Leopold. He stared at her so strangely that she thought him ill, and a tender concern clouded her gaiety.

"Something has happened?" she faltered.

"I must go back to Vienna," he answered. "I shall never be able to walk in those woods—"

"Oh, don't go!" cried Eleanora, piteously (she had dreamt of him all night). "Back to the city, when here it is so lovely?"

"It is not for me," said Leopold in bitter distress. He could not bring himself to say "good-bye" but mounted and rode away.

But he must pause again, for by the gates was the Duchess, leaning on her stick, alarmed at his departure, at his hurried looks. He saluted her mechanically and she dropped a trembling curtsy.

"Sire," she stammered, "they tell me that you are the Emperor—"

"They tell you wrong, Madam," he replied, "for I am nothing, nothing."

He rode away, alone.