Читать книгу The Knot Garden: Some Old Fancies Reset - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 7

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PRINCE CHLODWIG rose phoenix-like from the ashes of his own humiliation, with a re-burnished grandeur he shone in the eyes of his admirers re-established as the preux cavalier that he had always affected to be, his pose of sensitive nobility returned, the bright glitter of his much-vaunted honour was untarnished.

He had always, from his cradle, been popular but never so popular as when his betrothal to the slighted Princess was announced. He was extolled from the farthest corners of his little kingdom. Everyone commented on his generosity, on his nobility, and the splendour of the reparation he had made for what was, after all, but a trivial and insignificant fault.

"They do not seem to think, they do not seem to consider," mused the betrothed Princess, "that by this flamboyant amend, they call attention to my humiliation. Everyone now, the whole Empire, knows that he said: 'The ugly Princess! What a disaster!' whereas if I had gone to Gandersheim and he had married Rozsika there would not have been more than perhaps a score who would have been ever aware of what happened."

Her situation was outwardly, indeed, enviable. As she had supposed her family was delighted, transported by her good news. She was popular too in the Capital of Luneburg Hohenheim; she had expensive clothes, well-tailored, and wide hats with plumes, and when she rode abroad she made, in the saddle, not such an ill figure. The people both at the Court and in the city admired her good temper, her pleasant voice, her gentle humour, and she was wise enough never to challenge her insecure happiness. She never expected much attention from him, she never asked him if, after all, he found her so abhorrent. She never demanded his time nor his attention, she never strained his courtesy.

Then he was all that a grateful, that a humble duty could inspire him to be—her most obedient cavalier, her most submissive escort.

His character seemed to have changed since the banishment of Rozsika—he had abandoned his frivolous and wanton companions, he devoted several hours a day to business, his dress became less fantastic. He dismissed his coloured pages and his Italian lute players, he did not spend so many hours at tennis and at billiards. People murmured that the gentle Princess had a good influence on her future husband...

The Princess Hedwig and Baron Hagemann, who had been for long the anxious guardians of the headstrong young man, were most joyful.

They were seldom alone together, she was careful to avoid a solitude that might have proved embarrassing to him, but he often sent her presents, an often asked her advice. Magdalena would lay awake through the most part of the brief summer night saying to herself like a prayer: "I must not come to love him! I must not come to love him!"

They were to be married in September, there was nothing to wait for, no negotiations to be put through. She had no dowry; her father's blessing was eagerly sent. It was the Princess Hedwig who bought her clothes, who lent her jewels and horses.

Gandersheim waited for an Abbess. Louisa Maria would not, after all, accept that post. She had not entirely forgotten her hopes of an earthly felicity. Sometimes the Princess Magdalena Sybilla thought with regret of that vision of white cloisters and green grass plots and ancient lime trees surrounding a long church, a pleasant dwelling in which quiet souls serene in abnegation might dwell on philosophy, on the arts, on the goodness of God.

"Perhaps I have, for all the outward show, abandoned the substance for the shadow. My position here is wholly false and hollow. I do not understand this man—who is six years younger than I am and that's a deal of difference. Can I ever make him know me? Could I ever make him love me? If we marry should we have children who would bring us together, would he come to dislike and even hate me? He has betrothed himself to me to please his pride and in one moment of self-disgust. That mood will not go on for ever, and then, even if I were his bride, Rozsika might creep back, not to the Palace this time, perhaps, but to some villa outside the city walls. While I should be lonely, waiting, day after day, night after night, pitying while I waited. If it were not Rozsika, it would be another. He is so young and what have I, who have never pleased him at all, what have I to hold him?"

She walked alone in the lofty avenues of the garden where the first leaves began to fall. It was a day when milk and pearls seemed blended in the air, veils of gold were swathed about the golden foliage of the beech trees. The Residentzschloss, white, clean, and many-turreted, rose from terrace after terrace with gilded balustrades.

It was the most beautiful place she had ever seen, or she was sure, she was ever likely to see. On a lake, flat and bright as a lady's mirror, swans floated; she saw that a man, whose ungainly figure and dark habit was in melancholy contrast with the serene gaiety of the scene, was feeding the white birds. There was something in his dejected and resigned attitude as he tossed the scraps from his basket on to the surface of the lake that moved the ready tenderness of the Princess.

She approached him along the straight gravel path; there was something about him that seemed familiar and yet she could not place where she had seen him before. As he heard her approaching step he looked round timidly, and when she saw him full in the face she recognised him—it was the violinist who had dropped his instrument on the night of the ball. She paused in her walk; she noted that he no longer wore the palace livery of white and purple, that his clothes were shabby, his hair ragged—he had the air of an under-gardener.

"But surely," she said impulsively, "it is you!"

He bowed very low, with a flush on his unhappy and embarrassed face.

"I am Johann Böhm."

"The violinist?"

"I was the violinist, madame." He added hastily: "Would Your Highness care to see the swans fed? It is really very charming to observe how they glide over the water with their wings arched up."

Magdalena Sybilla looked at the swans, but she was not thinking of them but rather thus: "He was the only one who made a diversion to save me—clumsy and stupid, no doubt, but he made it and it served its purpose. How ridiculous he looked, poor fellow, sprawling after his instrument! That made people laugh, gave them an excuse to pretend it was a jest. But I have never thought of him since. How ungrateful one is when one is self- absorbed!"

"I remember you very well," she said shyly and gravely. "You do not wear your musician's coat? Is it part of your duty to feed the swans?"

He shook his head.

"I am no longer in the orchestra, Highness."

"No? And why?"

"I was dismissed. That was quite just, you know. I was extremely clumsy and I smashed the violin—it was a very valuable Italian instrument."

Magdalena Sybilla coloured painfully and stammered in her reply:

"There has been some mistake. Oh, but this is impossible! Everyone knows, everyone understood. You were not clumsy."

"I was ridiculous, Highness."

"No, nor ridiculous, either. It is absurd! I must tell Prince Chlodwig."

He did not reply. She had expected eager thanks for her promised intervention, but the tall, clumsy fellow stood silent. His hands (and they, although his frame was gaunt and bony, were finely made—a musician's hands) were busy and trembling in the basket of scraps that he had set on the marble verge of the lake; he was on one knee beside it and threw the succulent morsels one after another on to the shining surface where, before the swans darted at them, they made ever-growing ripples.

"Is this your employment now?"

"Yes, Highness, and I am glad to have it. The gardener is fond of music—I mean the head gardener, Von Handersheim, you know." A smile quivered for a second on his coarse lips; he gave her an appealing glance. "I am not very clever at any work—I could find none, and so I was forced to come back here, though I was not very willing to return to the palace. Von Handersheim was kind—he has me on trial for a week."

This sounded incoherent to her strained attention.

"But you have been to the Prince?" she asked. "He—he would—" She could not speak the words. What she had meant, what she wished to say was: "He would reward you for helping me, for trying, however foolishly and clumsily, to cover up his disgrace."

The young musician replied reluctantly:

"It was His Highness who dismissed me."

She could hardly believe that. She stood incredulous—staring.

"Dismissed you! And when?"

"The day after the ball, Highness."

"For what reason?"

"For my great clumsiness, Highness, in breaking the violin." And he added hastily: "I make no complaint, it was quite just. I knew when I did it what would happen."

"Did you? And why?"

"I know the Prince, Highness," he replied simply.

"I see—you know the Prince!"

"Yes, Highness. I have been in the palace since we were both boys, children, indeed."

"So! you know him like that—intimately, and you expected that he would behave as in fact he has behaved? His mother, the Princess Hedwig, does she know?"

"I could not tell you, Highness. I do not think she would greatly care one way or another as long as His Highness was pleased. She would not, one understands, interfere with him or his wishes, anyway."

The sallow pinched face of the Princess was very pale.

"He uses people, Johann Böhm, is that so? He must shine in his own eyes, no one else must share in his applause?"

The musician did not reply, but continued with a mournful air to throw the morsels to the swans.

"You are fond of music?" she asked abruptly.

"Yes, Highness. I compose a little. But it is difficult—people do not pay any attention. It cannot be expected that they should."

She perceived that here was a spirit, as meek, as resigned as her own.

"Are you married?" she asked. "Have you parents, or any tie in this city?"

He replied: "None;" and he named the town a long way off from which he had wandered as an orphan child many years ago, playing on a willow whistle made of pith by the roadside, for his food. He repeated that he had always loved music however made.

"I shall soon be on my travels again," he added. "Your Highness has a very kind heart, but it must not be troubled for me. When I have saved up a few crowns to buy a little instrument I shall begin to take the road again. By playing outside the inns I can soon earn my food and, when the weather is rough, a bed. The winter is coming on and one must think of these things," he added with a smile. "Then, perhaps at some other Court, I may find my fortune again."

"Or your misfortune," she smiled. "How pure those swans keep their plumage, Herr Böhm! We are, few of us, so diligent or so lucky—only too easily we become soiled."

She returned to the Residentzschloss and she put off at once the expensive clothes for which the Princess Hedwig had so generously and so tactfully paid. She put aside the jewels and ornaments that that kind hostess had lent her and she took from her drawers and caskets all the lavish presents which had been given her by Prince Chlodwig, and she bade her ancient servant pack up the modest baggage in which she had come to Luneburg Hohenheim.

Then, when she was attired in her plain travelling dress in which a few weeks before she had arrived at the charming city, she went to the cabinet where Prince Chlodwig at this hour always worked diligently by himself.

She paused a little before she tapped on the door. She did not want to discover that he was asleep or smoking or idling over a frivolous book, for she did not want to find out that he was wholly deceitful. But she need not have alarmed herself; he answered at once to her timid tap and he was really employed at his bureau with piles of documents and maps before him.

He was startled that she should thus wait on him, and rose, embarrassed, protesting. And then when he saw her attire he exclaimed at that.

"It is what I wore when you first saw me on the balcony." She smiled and held out her hand in a friendly fashion. "Do not let us pretend any more, Chlodwig. I hope you will be very fortunate. The appointment at Gandersheim is still open; I am going there to-morrow. Wish me luck, too."

He would have protested, he would have expressed amaze, chagrin, an outraged wonderment, but her sincerity broke down his protests. He stared at her, coloured, and stammered.

"It has been," she said kindly, "a delicious make-belief. I never meant it to continue."

"I wish it could, Magdalena; it meant a great deal to me."

She smiled wistfully as she thought to herself: "He never thinks what he may have meant to me. How impossible for me to tell him I have discovered he is not the man I thought he was."

She looked at him very keenly and saw under his bewilderment a certain relief. It had been, then, a strain, this maintenance of a heroic pose. She could not avoid seeing on his desk a paper with the name "Rozsika" written across. Well, it was only natural! How could she have supposed that such as he could breathe in such an atmosphere of rarefied virtue and abnegation? He made another effort to maintain his chivalry. It was not so difficult, for he really admired her. He was used to relying on his mother and on Baron Hagemann, and lately of relying a little on her. He did not wish to lose any of this support. With some sincerity he began to plead with her determination.

"Are you not giving up something after all, Magdalena? An Abbess!—what is that? Do you dislike me?" Vanity pathetically strove for reassurances on this point, she saw an offended pride in his glance. It was, of course, incredible to him that any woman could forgo him and all he offered. She gave him all that was in her power to offer at his shrine; she could afford to do so.

"I am not good enough," she said meekly. Behind his protests she sensed the serenity of one who is appeased.