Читать книгу General Crack - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 5

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Count Hensdorff, having nothing better to do, wandered over the Château, inspecting with a covert sneer the splendours of this admirable dwelling.

He thought it detestable that a man like General Crack should have been able to inherit and amass so much money, when he, after working so hard in the service of so many princes, should have accumulated nothing but debts, and he envied his host the gift he himself lacked, the gift of knowing the winning side before it won; whereas he, Hensdorff, had wasted his time in trying to bolster up failures.

He was not quite sure that even now—well, what had that hateful Pons said? "Empty pockets and a head little better." He wavered in his allegiance towards his Emperor and began to wonder if he could not strike a bargain with General Crack; but pride forbade—to any other man he might have offered his services, but not to General Crack.

Gloomily he wondered if he could bring off the bargain he had come to make; Pons had been so rudely discouraging, and that outrageous suggestion about the Princess Eleanora!

A mere feint, no doubt, but the very hint had stung because Hensdorff knew that there had been recently a hitch in the Imperial negotiations with Anhalt-Dessau. Was it possible that the shifty prince was bargaining secretly with General Crack?

Anhalt-Dessau was important, not in himself (a fussy little pedant, thought Hensdorff) but because he represented the Protestant interest in Germany, one so necessary for the Emperor, in his present precarious position, to conciliate, and he had many powerful connections and relations with whom he had contrived to keep on good terms, and his daughter was heiress to many of these childless families; a marriage with her would add many tempting appanages to the Imperial Crown.

Hensdorff cursed the Archduchess Maria Luisa for not being more beautiful; even in the miniature he had left with Pons, with all the help of roses, pearls and gauze, she made no very creditable figure.

Only two portions of the Château were disused; the chapel and the theatre; the first because General Crack, bred a Romanist, and recently under the influence of Jesuits, had now become a Lutheran (though he paid small attention to any faith and occupied the scant time he gave to spiritual affairs with astrologers) and the second because his morals had lately become austere, and the coquettish actresses and elegant dancers that had lately adorned his Château had been packed off to Paris, not without some regrets and many spoils.

Hensdorff put these two facts together; he thought they indicated a serious bid for the hand of a Protestant and modest princess.

Morosely he gazed down into the chapel; he had opened a small door in a corridor and found himself in a box handsomely furnished with red damask and mirrors, and enclosed with windows of greenish glass hung with blue silk curtains; these looked directly down onto the altar and provided a comfortable retreat against the dullest of sermons or the longest of prayers.

The chapel was empty and rather dusty; the Romish appointments had not been removed. Hensdorff peered down onto vacant tasselled chairs, black and livid pictures of martyrdoms, an altar loaded with tarnished silver, the whole lit by rather fine windows filled with pillaged glass of considerable antiquity.

A gloomy spectacle for Count Michael Hensdorff, who, if a lukewarm Romanist, loathed the Lutherans and was prepared any moment to be fiercely zealous for the Pope, if it might mean a chance of doing a mischief to the Protestants.

He was touched on the shoulder, and turned suspiciously to see a young officer in a fantastic Croatian uniform behind him; he knew this youth to be a Captain Banning high in favour with General Crack, and, despite his Eastern finery, a Swede.

Hensdorff detested foreigners and it seemed to him that he never met any one else.

"This is a very melancholy spot," remarked Captain Banning civilly. "I have been sent to find you and offer you some entertainment, my dear Count—seeing the door open I looked in—"

"Nothing entertains me," replied Hensdorff truthfully. "I'm here on business, which I daresay you know all about—"

"Colonel Pons told me," smiled the Swede. He was a heavy, plain young man, on whom the extravagant uniform sat rather ill, and so fair that his eyebrows were the same colour as his powdered hair. "Would you not care to visit the menagerie, or the fish ponds, or the stables, the music gallery, or the theatre?"

"No," refused Hensdorff bluntly. "I'm too old for toys; and never had much interest in such things."

"Well, after all, what else is there in life?" asked Captain Banning genially. "These toys, as you call them, are but evidences of power, and if you do not care for power you must he either a saint or a fool."

Hensdorff continued to peer down into the deserted chapel.

"I suppose you think General Crack a great man?" he asked.

"You also think him a great man, or you would not be here."

"Not at all," replied Hensdorff drily. "My master thinks him a successful man and therefore deigns to notice him; as for me, I am a mere messenger. I would rather," he added harshly, "be a menial in the Imperial service, than the favourite of a mercenary adventurer."

Captain Banning did not appear offended at this frankness.

"Well, take care it is the Imperial service," he said. "If your man falls, he'll be no better than an adventurer himself. Come, this is a dusty, melancholic place; we may employ the time till supper more profitably. There are eighty horses in the stables, Germans, Ukraines and English—the gardens have been designed by Bibbiena, though we have had them brought up to date—the house, like Mölk, is by Prandauer—"

Hensdorff interrupted:

"I understand that you have been sent to distract and dazzle me, Captain Banning, but pray spare your pains. I am here with an ill will and not to be coaxed into a good humour."

Captain Banning laughed.

"If you dislike my master so much, how will you tolerate him flourishing in Vienna if he becomes the Emperor's brother-in-law?"

"God knows," said Hensdorff.

The Swede regarded him keenly.

"You remember Wallenstein?" he said. "He drove a bargain with an Emperor. A hard bargain. He saved the Empire on his own terms."

"Yes, yes, what about this musty story?" asked Hensdorff, moving impatiently.

"Well," added Captain Banning, "when the Emperor had no longer need of him he had him murdered in his camp. As a revenge for that hard bargain."

Hensdorff's face was immovable; just a shade too immovable.

"Bah, those were barbarous days," he remarked.

"I've always understood," said Captain Banning, "that your master and my master hated each other—so if the Emperor, as you call him, offers his sister to General Crack, he must be in great need of his services—"

"Admitted," snarled Hensdorff.

"—and, one may well suspect, will try not to pay for them," finished the Swede. "But I can tell you this," he instantly added, "General Crack is not the man to stir without full payment in advance."

"This Château is evidence of as much," sneered Hensdorff.

They left the box in the chapel and Captain Banning took the Count to see the theatre, which was a charming little structure, wreathed round and round with gilt garlands, masks and ribbons, and looped satin curtains in glittering cascades of tinsel frivolity.

Hensdorff sank yawning into one of the stalls; he did not try to get any information out of Captain Banning, for he knew that however stupid that young man looked, he would not say a word that General Crack did not wish him to say, or do anything that he had not been instructed to do.

The reference to Wallenstein, now, he had been told to make that; it meant that General Crack suspected treachery.

Well, of course—

Hensdorff, bored, yawned in his stall while Banning fidgeted with the blue satin curtain, pulling it back from the empty stage set with a scene by Burnacini and lamenting the delicious troupe that enlivened last spring with opera bouffe and comédie Italienne—the Leilas, Silvias and Fiorinettas...

One of the dancers, he said, a Mlle. Foulché, was really entrancing—like a snowdrop, as you saw them glittering through the air at Småland, where he had lived in his youth.

"And melting as soon, no doubt," suggested Hensdorff. "You must miss these diversions, Captain Banning; it seems a very idle life here."

"Oh, we keep in good practice, and I suppose we shall be soon fighting again; if not on your side, the other," and the Swede idly caressed a tattered tinsel Pulchinello he had found tossed on the dusty stage.

"Well," said Hensdorff, "if your master is hoping to make a party for himself by joining the Lutherans and marrying the Anhalt-Dessau girl, he's deceived, for matters there are settled with the Emperor."

After having uttered this round lie, Hensdorff yawned again; he felt a sudden sense of futility amounting to mental nausea; the deserted chapel, the empty theatre, had affected him with gloom; he dwelt on all this buying and selling of tarnished commodities with disgust; every one was base and dealt in base coin, and how stupid the prizes were for which all contended!

He almost resolved to leave the stale game and retire to his estates in Moldavia, but he knew the while that he never would do so; he was caught up in the inconstant whirlpool and must go round and round till he died of weariness.

To be kicking his heels here, waiting the pleasure of General Crack, he with his hundred quarterings and his pure descent! Never had there been such a time when everything was so upside down.

He tried to fix his thoughts on something agreeable: the Emperor had promised him The Golden Fleece if he succeeded in winning over General Crack, and even, if he made a very good bargain, to create him a Count of the Holy Roman Empire.

But even these promised rewards did not afford Hensdorff much pleasure.

The empty theatre oppressed him; that barren stage, the trophies of Scaramuccia, that pale daylight which filtered through the glass cupola, the vacant chairs, and the young man in his ostentatious uniform fooling with a grinning bauble, all these things annoyed Count Hensdorff.

His heavy face, that looked sickly in the gloom, drooped into an expression of sullen mockery.

"We might go into the air," he suggested, "it's heavy here. I'm sorry to keep your master shut up, as I suppose he must be shut up for fear of meeting me—"

"No, he is in bed," replied Captain Banning, leading the way out of the theatre. "He twisted his foot getting out of his coach, and yesterday he was bled twice—on these occasions he lives on barley broth and cider and gets very low."

"I've come at an ill moment, then," sneered Hensdorff, suspecting a trick.

"To-day he is nearly recovered, and no doubt in the best of tempers—but yesterday he was very angry with Pons." Hensdorff was glad to hear that.

"And he ordered one of the Uhlans to be hanged for insubordination," added Banning. "But we waited till to-day for the execution in case he changes his mind."

Hensdorff said that he did not care if all the Uhlans were hanged and all the Croats and Heydukes, too; it would be only so many the less rogues to plague the world with. Captain Banning agreed, but reasoned that there were not so many stout fellows, well trained, that one could afford to lose even one.

They came out onto one of the terraces at the back of the Château and looked across a noble rolling champaign, watered by the Danube and bounded by low mountains, now tinged with a tender purple against a translucent sunlit sky of faint green, like sea water in a calm.

Immediately below the terraces was the shell-shaped basin of a fountain, where the water was thrown up like a tossing plume of silver feathers, and fell, in a glittering cascade, over the lip of the basin, like a silver veil.

By this fountain three Nubian pages were chattering, while they sucked sugar sticks so that their blubber lips glistened with melted sweetness; one held a stand on which was a snowy cockatoo that raised continually a sweeping crest of sulphur yellow, as the negroes annoyed it with their quick gabble.

"A lovely prospect," said Captain Banning.

But Hensdorff wanted to know why General Crack did not live in Pomerania, or Kurland, countries which were so devoted to him, and Banning pointed to one of the valleys opposite and said that the Prince of Anhalt-Dessau often stayed there with the Duchess of Schönbuchel.

"I daresay you would now relish your supper," he added, "and then you may early to bed, to shorten your period of waiting. Lieutenant Ferdinand Gabor will be of our company; he always speaks of you with kindness and is well affected to your Emperor."

Hensdorff felt more and more suspicious at all this; Gabor was a Transylvanian, a descendant on the left hand of Prince Bethlen Gabor, very much reduced in circumstances and entirely damaged in character; an able and a perilous, a cynic and a subtle man. Hensdorff had thought of buying him, but reflected that he was too untrustworthy, too fickle to be worth any money.

"I have got," he thought, "into a fine nest of scoundrels."

Colonel Pons welcomed them at the supper table, which was set in the pleasant evening light by the window where they had dined.

He was sorry that he had not yet been able to see General Crack, he declared, but promised an answer by the morning.

Ferdinand Gabor, who claimed a princely rank but who appeared to prefer the simple title of Lieutenant ("Of what army?" Hensdorff asked himself.) was seated on the left of the Imperial messenger.

He was a thin, swarthy, handsome man, faultlessly dressed, but he had a look of ruin; his eyes were, in an odd way, ashy in hue; his spirits seemed spent. He fawned on Hensdorff, but dully, as if he was too used to fawn mechanically on everybody.

Glibly he wished success to the Count's mission, and suavely he drank the health of the young Archduchess. Colonel Pons, who appeared to dislike him, rather brusquely changed the subject, speaking of a hunting party arranged for the next Tuesday which he hoped Count Hensdorff would honour with his presence.

"Nay," replied that gentleman, "I must take my answer and begone."

"With a picture of General Crack for the Archduchess," smiled Gabor slily, at which his colleagues laughed derisively, but Hensdorff kept his gloomy countenance.

"It is all very well for you to laugh," he sneered, "but things change very rapidly these times. You are all snug now, but the time may come when you will be glad of a word from me to the Emperor."

"Well, we shan't get it, I know," answered Colonel Pons. "And I, for one, shan't ask for it. I mean to die in my last battle—"

"How," asked Hensdorff, "will you know it is your last battle? In every encounter you will save yourself for the next till you are too decrepit to stir abroad."

"I hope," remarked Gabor smoothly, licking his lean lips, "that we shall be all fighting on the same side, Count Hensdorff."

The Transylvanian bowed over his wine; Hensdorff looked at him with disgust; it would be revolting if he ever had to league with such creatures. Gabor affected not to see the disdainful glance and enquired after the Emperor, as he made no ado to call him; his health, temper and activities.

"He is well enough," said Hensdorff, "but fretful at times, being so beset."

"General Crack is never fretful," remarked Captain Banning, "but always preserves his composure."

"That is no sign of greatness, as you seem to think," replied Hensdorff, "but a mere affectation intended to impress the meaner sort, 'tis a trick to keep a cold countenance, and requires no other attribute than a hard conscience. The Emperor is a man of feeling, of honour and delicacy, it is to his credit that he is often disturbed."

"Bah!" cried Pons. "It is to his credit, I suppose, that he is a ninny? Come, Count, let us talk sense the little time we are together. I took a peep at your Archduchess; the artist was skilful."

"For my part," declared Gabor, "I always thought Maria Luisa a very charming princess."

But he made the compliment in such a manner that the other two soldiers laughed grossly, and Hensdorff felt a tingle of angry blood in his cheek.

At this dangerous point in the conversation a lackey entered and respectfully told Colonel Pons that General Crack wished to see him immediately.

The Colonel hastily left his unfinished supper and hurried away without apology. Hensdorff sat sullen between Banning and Gabor and occupied himself with his food.