Читать книгу "If Youth but Knew!" - Castle Egerton - Страница 5

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Steven opened heavy eyes and stared vacantly at the creeping light, indigo between the wisps of yellow straw; at the large square of shimmering mists and flickering leaves where the barn door stood open to the dawn. He turned his head and found that it lay on a fragrant linen pillow, and also that it ached vaguely in spite of this luxury.

A vulgar, absurd tune was still dancing in his brain. Then he caught within his range of vision the figure of a man sitting cross-legged, putting a fresh string to a fiddle. And memory came back slowly.

"It was the fault of the music, you know," he said.

Geiger-Hans shot a look at him from under his quizzical eyebrows.

"You never got that kiss in after all."

"Ah, but I got in my slap!"

The young man sat up, quite inspirited by the recollection, and discovered that, with the exception of some dizziness and stiffness, there was nothing much amiss with him.

"But some one very nearly got his hunting-knife into you," said Geiger-Hans, dryly, "and there would have been an end of your learning to be young. Nevertheless, you have capabilities—yes, some capabilities." He wound up his string, twanged it, and nodded over it.

A cock crew in the forest farmyard. A robin was singing somewhere amid a babel of chirping birds. The breeze, balm-scented, flew straight in from the pines and fanned Stephen's head and throat. He lifted his hand to his open shirt and looked inquiringly at the musician, who nodded again.

"You were stunned by the fall," said Geiger-Hans, "with that brute on the top of you. Fortunate for you that I caught his hand at the right moment! And thereupon the little man, the Herr Inspector, you know, ran out screaming, 'No bloodshed, d'Albignac!' … It is his one good point: he is merciful of life."

"The little man? … D'Albignac?" Steven echoed the words in wonder.

"You measured his cheek charmingly—I mean d'Albignac's," said the fiddler. "We two might do great things together yet. Ay, that was the d'Albignac. I dare say you have heard the name, in Cassel. Chouan once, then renegade, now Grand-Veneur (and Great Pandar) to his Majesty of Westphalia. Such is d'Albignac."

"Majesty? … King Jerome?"

"Did you think," said Geiger-Hans, compassionately, "that Meyer and Schmidt were usual names for Frenchmen? Why, the precious incognito would not have deceived a cat."

The dawn was growing softly outside, but there was sudden vivid light in Steven's brain.

"Then—then," he stammered, struggling to his feet—"the lady——"

"The lady, my poor young friend, is naught but a dancing girl from Genoa, whom that wise and powerful man, the Emperor Napoleon, sent two emissaries to remove—it is not the first time he has had to attend to such matters—from her charming apartments in 'Napoleonshöhe,' where her presence conduced neither to the King's dignity, nor to the Queen's. The great Napoleon is mighty particular about her Westphalian Majesty's dignity. Our ardent little sovereign, however, determined to snatch a last meeting; hence the romantic attack and rescue—the casual meeting!"

"O Lord!" said Steven, and passed his hand across his mouth, as if the shadow of the yearned-for kiss polluted it.

"And so that Meyer fellow is——"

"Our brother Jerome—yes."

The fiddler lifted a sweet, worn voice, while his bow danced lightly on the strings and chanted to the absurd lilt—

"Nous allons chercher un royaume

Pour not' p'tit frère Jérome."

"'Twas the song of the soldiers before Jena," he explained. "Pardi! a taking ragamuffin tune! When our friends last night heard it, comrade, they took to their heels."

And as Steven stared with ever-increasing wonder, Geiger-Hans proceeded, in his mocking voice:

"'The wicked flee when none pursueth!' If there is one person the kinglet here is afraid of, 'tis of the great Emperor. Many a merry prank have I played on King Jerome's nerves! He holds to his high gilt throne, and knows that the mighty hand that placed him on it can pick him off it again. Big brother, on his side, knows how to punish too, when little brother passes the bounds. And the small man thinks the big man has spies on him at every corner. He has his own way of knowing things, has Cæsar … if not the ways yonder gingerbread monarch fancies."

"And he thought you were the Emperor's spy?" hazarded Steven, and looked with some doubt at his companion. A mystery the man certainly was!

"Many things have I been, comrade," said the fiddler, answering the look, "but never in any man's pay, be assured of that. Nevertheless, the Kingmaker keeps an eye on his puppets from the midst of victory—many eyes on him, indeed. And Jerome has taken into his head that your humble servant is the most cunning of Napoleon's eyes. The mistake is amusing enough, and I make it serve my own use at times. I had but to play such a simple air, you see, and his Majesty of Westphalia—his choice circle——" He made a wide gesture and a sound mimicking a flutter of wings: "Phew! Gone, scared like frightened sparrows!"

"Gone?" echoed Steven; and though she was but a dancing-girl from Genoa, and a baggage at that, his heart sank.

"Gone," said the fiddler—"gone before the dawn. So is Sidonia! Aha, Sir Count, short skirts, it seems to you, make the peasant, and fine jewels, no doubt, the great lady! Ha, ha! to see your lordship draw away from the touch of her tresses! She brought you her own pillow last night, and wept over you and thought you were dead—till I bid her put her hand over your heart and feel its solid beating. 'Tis a noble child—and a greater race you will never meet in your travels. Why, 'tis the heiress of the country. Oh, there were no lies about her! The girl visits her foster-mother for a holiday and a treat now and then. You never looked at her foot or her delicate eyebrow: she was but a peasant girl, pardi! Jerome has a keener eye——"

"Jerome!" echoed Steven, and, he knew not why, the fiercest spasm of anger he had yet felt seized him then.

"Jerome pinched her chin, as you saw," said the fiddler, "and, therefore, back we packed her, Friedel and I, to her own castle, for safety. … Meanwhile you slept. Come, come, never look so downcast," he went on with sudden change of tone. "Is it not instructive to know how the ruler of Westphalia passes his time while all the best manhood of his country is warring for the Empire—burnt in Spain, frozen in Russia? And, at any rate, have you not had a night you will remember out of all your dull, regulated youth? Come forth and I will show you something I warrant me you have never seen before—sunrise in the forest."

The yard seemed very silent and empty. They were all gone—gone like a dream!

"Come," said the musician, "look up. Have you ever seen so limpid a blue? Look at the trees enveloped in mystery; see the silver shine of the dew over every blade; hark to it as it drips from leaf to leaf. 'Tis every day a new creation! Oh, I could make you Dawn-music, if there were not such music already for you to hear! Hark to the whispering, the lisping, the murmurs! Do you mark the birds—that is your last night's robin at the top of the larch tree; he is singing under his breath now, watching the horizon; he will pipe when the sun leaps up. Do you hear the humming of the bees? There is thyme in mother Friedel's garden; and that is the sharp tinkle of the brook over the stones. Eh, my soul, what a symphony! The breath of the forest—do you feel it?—cool and living; the savour of the crushed, dew-drenched moss under your feet—do you taste it? And the smell of the beech leaves and the incense of the pines? And now watch. Behold how the forest is lit up as with some inner fire! Dark and colourless stand the trees nearest to us. Look within, how the flame grows, how it spreads—live gold, live emerald! And see there—oh, the scarlet on those fir trunks! The sun has risen! … "

The fiddler stopped speaking. Looking back upon it, Steven afterwards wondered if he had spoken at all, or had only made his thoughts felt. But here his strange companion came to a standstill in their slow wandering and took off his battered old hat and waved it.

"Farewell!" said he. "Mother Friedel will give you breakfast, and son Friedel is already on the look-out for your lost retinue. Farewell, noble Count … remember to be young!"

"Shall I never meet you again?" cried Steven, suddenly. His heart sank unaccountably, and he added with hesitation: "Comrade?"

Geiger-Hans, moving away into the forest with light, fantastic step, paused and smiled mysteriously.

"Who knows?" said he, over his shoulder. "If you know how to seek—why—who knows?"

He plunged down an opening in the trees, where the sun made a golden path before him through the yellowing oak trees; and the larches on either side were on fire with green flame.

CHAPTER V

THE INVITATION OF THE ROAD

"A vagrant's morning wide and blue,

In early fall, when the wind walks, too;

A lengthening highway, cool and brown,

Alluring up and enticing down. …"

BLISS CARMAN.

There never yet had been question of a maiden in the life of Steven Lee, up to this September day. With his Austrian tradition, Austrian pride of race and estate, he had some very clear notions of the noble blood and the territorial importance that would have to be hers who should be honoured some day as the choice of Waldorff-Kielmansegg.

Yet your young patrician, as a rule, is not chary of granting himself that interlude of amusement, dissipation—experience of life before marriage—commonly known as "sowing his wild oats." It was, perhaps, because of his English education, hearty, wholesome, sporting; by reason too, no doubt, of the English deliberation inherited from his mother, joined to his own fastidious self-sufficiency, that he had never felt the want of a woman's share in his life. The pretty chin of a peasant girl had never tempted his fingers. Little Sidonia of the forest house, had she been ten times more beautiful, had never needed to wield her plaits as flails to beat down his enterprise. Had not the fiddler's music got into his veins, that strange night; had not the insidious white wine mounted to his head, he had surely never succumbed so rapidly to the fascination of the young Italian. Yet her chief attraction, in his eyes, had been, not the parted, dewy lips, not the violet gaze of her eyes, but the false attribution to her of birth and breeding, born of his own imagination. The moonlight kiss he had suddenly yearned for was to have been snatched from a great lady—faugh! not from a ballerina! Here had, indeed, been a lesson, a humiliation—all the more deep-felt because the punishment seemed disproportionate to the single lapse. His mind went back to it sullenly, once and again. There were men, he knew, to whom the true character of the fair traveller would have been an additional allurement. He was not of them.

His fastidiousness revolted, almost as a woman's might, no less from the thought of any inferiority of status, than from the knowledge that where he condescended to favour, others had already carried their easy victories.

Yet, although the image of the dancer lingered no more pleasantly in his fancy than did that of the little patrician—disdainfully unnoticed in her peasant garb—that night of adventure in the forest had left a deep stamp upon the young man; but the chief memory for him, the one personality towards which his thoughts constantly reverted, was that of the grey-haired roadside fiddler. He had met a king yonder night, but it was the vagrant he longed to see again. He had fought for his life with one of the most notorious rufflers in Europe, but the scenes he re-lived, with the fond dalliance of a slow-thinking youth, was the meeting on the road in the rosy sunset and the parting in the green forest dawn. He was haunted by the man's smile, by his voice, by the way of his hands—above all, his music.

The taunting music, with its yearning, its suggestion, ever alluring and ever elusive, played to him by night and day. It seemed as if he should come to his old self again, could he but encounter that strange companion once more and test the emptiness of his fascination, the folly and absurdity of it! At least, this was what he told himself, to excuse his own inconceivable action. For here was he actually ranging the country, in search of what? A sort of fiddling vagabond. A fellow, moreover, who had rated his nobility at such insolent cheapness; had slighted him; had mocked, chided; had treated him as no one, since childhood, had presumed to treat the important young nobleman.

But it was an obsession: idle to try and reason it away. No, he would never rest till his desire was accomplished.

So he wandered along the Thuringian ways, making stealthy inquiries here and there; fruitlessly, but always lured on from village to village, round and about the great forest district, where, he was credibly informed, the fiddler was wont to roam about this time of year; constantly met with the tidings that, but the day before, but last night, but two hours ago, the wanderer had been seen to pass along that very road. The gracious gentleman would surely catch him on the highway to Helmstadt; at the farmhouse of Grönfeld, where he always lingered; at the fair in the next hamlet, where he was absolutely promised! Sometimes it seemed as if the very trail of his music hung in the air; there was something fantastic in the constant presence, always escaping him.

Steven, fully conscious of the absurdity of the situation, set his teeth in still more dogged determination, as the days went by. And the pursuit, started at first half idly, now became a thing of earnestness, a chase almost passionate.

"I told Geiger-Hans about the fine young nobleman that was always looking for him," called out a sunburnt girl one morning, as he passed for the second time through her green-embowered village.

Steven halted. He was on foot, after his fashion, tired with his fruitless tramp, out of temper.

"That was very kind of you," retorted he, sarcastically. "And what said the fellow?"

The girl's teeth flashed in her tanned face. She poised her bucket on the rim of the well, and shrugged her shoulder archly.

"Geiger-Hans said to me," she giggled: "'If one wants to be followed, one must first retire—remember that, Mädel,' he said. He said that to me," she went on, "because of the lad I'm after."

Steven turned away with a "pish!" of scorn for such low dallying, and an uneasy sense of doubt that the fiddler's avoidance of him was deliberate. As he swung away from her, the girl called after him good-naturedly:

"If the gracious gentleman will go to Wellenshausen, he will surely find Geiger-Hans sooner or later. He is never far from the Burg, this time of year."

"Pah!" thought Steven, "shall I waste more time in running down this beggar? The folk here-abouts must think me as crazy as himself! They are all in league to make me tramp. I vow this is some trick of the vagabond. I think I see myself squatting at a wretched village, humbly waiting Master Fiddler's pleasure."

And yet, to Wellenshausen, he next day found his way.

Thus Steven Lee, Count Waldorff-Kielmansegg, a young man of usually epicurean tastes, chose to linger in God-forsaken, out-of-the-way corners of Westphalia, this September in the year of wars, 1813.

In the eyes of his valet this was incomprehensible; seriously annoying; indeed, a matter for much head-shaking. Instead of making for the gay capital of King Jerome and enjoying himself "like a gentleman," he hung about the outskirts of the Thuringian Forest and haunted the inns of half-deserted townships, of poverty-stricken villages on the high imperial road. While the postilions and the above-mentioned valet cursed the thin wine and the gross fare, while the horses of the travelling-chaise fretted the hours away in unworthy stables, their lord and master took solitary rambles on foot, as if in search of no one knew what, only to return, haughty as usual, weary and discontented.

When a halt was ordered for the night in the hamlet of Wellenshausen, instead of pushing on to the decent town of Halberstadt, as he had expected, valet Franz felt the situation more than his lively Viennese spirit could endure and vowed he would resign. He tapped his forehead significantly as his master strolled out of the vine-grown guest-house, looking up and down the street in his singular, expectant fashion.

"There's question of a maiden," said postilion Peter, grimacing over his mug, "or else the devil's in it."

Further than this their diagnosis of the master's state of mind could not go.

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Albeit on the skirt of the low lands, the village of Wellenshausen was yet still of the mountain. It rode, so to speak, a bold buttress of the distant wooded range, and was sheltered to the north by an imposing crag, that rose, pinnacle-like, so detached and huge that it would have seemed inaccessible but for the testimony of the castle perched on its summit—the far-famed Burg of Wellenshausen. From the flank of this mount, a torrent of black waters, strangely cold at all times, born in some mysterious and dreaded cavern of the rocks, rushed, foaming brown; and, on its way to the plain, cut the village in two.

Steven Lee gazed upwards at the old Burg, frowning of aspect at most times, but just now, as it caught on its narrow windows the rays of a sinking sun, shining rosily upon the valleys. His fancy was wafted up for a moment to the height on a wing of airy romance, when a clamour of children's voices turned his attention in a new direction. A string of ragged urchins was rushing in the direction of the torrent. Over the bridge a man's figure was approaching at a swinging pace. It stopped for a moment on the summit of the rough stone arch; and the notes of a fiddle, in lively measure, rose above the children's shouts and the roar of the waters. Dancing, singing, leaping, catching at his coattails, they surrounded the musician and followed him. He advanced like the magic piper of the legend.

Steven stood still in the middle of the way; a gleam in his eye, the sunset radiance on his smiling face. The player came up to him and greeted him with a bow, his fiddle still at his chin the while he finished his stave.

"Good evening, my lord Count. We have met before," said he. His tone was placidly courteous, if his glance mocked.

"And I well-nigh despaired of our meeting again," returned the young man, with some show of emotion. "Your music has been running in my head—implacably—all these days. I think you must have bewitched me!"

There was a note almost of reproach in his voice; and yet he blushed as he spoke, ashamed of his own eagerness in such a quarter.

"Why," said the other, cruelly, "I fear you're but a dull lad. Great Apollo, could we change places, I would need no old man's company!—Nay, now, children, let a gentleman speak to a gentleman." He paused in a moment's meditation, looked through the inn gateway, then glanced up swiftly at the distant towering strong house. "Is it possible your lordship has chosen this barren village for a stage? I see your attendants supping—right sadly—in the arbour yonder. Will you bid me to supper also, comrade?"

He looped his threadbare sleeve into Steven's fine broadcloth. The urchins shouted with laughter.

The young aristocrat frowned, started; then, with sudden sweetness, submitted, and presently found himself sitting in front of his guest in the darkening bin room, to the respectful astonishment of mine host of "The Three Storks." Had the grinding struggle for existence, in such precarious war times, left a spark of imagination in the few plain wits with which Nature had gifted this honest man, he might have found something beyond mere amazement in the contrast between his two patrons—something of the old romance of which the German roads had once been full, before the cruel realities of foreign subjection, the flat prose of poverty, had driven legend and fancy from the land.

The fiddler's attire had more pretensions to neatness than on that other sunset hour when Steven had first met him, bare-breasted to the evening airs and powdered with the dust of the long way. His garments were distinctive enough, for all their poverty, and set off the fine line, the close muscle, of a figure lean to emaciation yet a model of alert strength. Breeches of home-spun clung to thigh and knee; thick knitted hose and brass-buckled shoes of country make could not conceal the elegance of leg and foot. The shirt-collar carelessly open, the abundant grey hair, quaintly tied up in the cue of twenty years bygone, emphasized a symmetry of head and throat which, in a higher walk of life, would doubtless have been termed noble. The tan of the clear-cut, ascetic face was singular against the silver of the hair. The whole personality was indeed made of anomalies:—the wild fire of the eyes under brows melancholy and philosophic; the air at once of recklessness and of self-command, of indifference and fierceness; the geniality and the illimitable scorn; the weariness of all things, the utter worn distaste which was written in every line of his countenance and might have belonged to the pitiless disillusion of old age; the swift energy of the delicate impulsive hands, the quick turn of the head and the flashing glance which made him half as young again at times than that middle-age which yet was unmistakably his. Here was a creature who seemed to know too much and to despise everything; who read the yet unspoken thought, and did not hide his scorn of it; who yet drew confidence as a woman might, and could lay his touch on the sources of tears and laughter. If angels or demons walked in human guise, this Geiger-Hans might have passed for one or the other, according to the mood of his company or according, rather, to the candour of their souls.

Against so strange a being the personality of his young entertainer stood clear as light of day. No mystery there! Four words could sum it up: pride, youth, strength, and comeliness.

The innocence of his youth looked out through his full grey eyes; the pride of his birth sat on his eyebrow, drooped in his eyelid, quivered in his nostrils; the joy of his untried strength smiled unconsciously in his red lips; there was life in the very wave of his brown hair. The healthy pallor of the cheek only emphasized how generous was the quick blood, and how ingenuous the nature that sent it rushing with every passing emotion. Scarcely conscious yet of the value of the power he wielded, the young man nevertheless gave his orders in careless tones, as one to whom wealth had always been an attribute of existence. The sober richness of his garb, the sable of the travelling cloak that hung over his chair, became his youthful nobility. And there he sat and pressed the vagrant musician to sour wine and harsh fare with the airs of a magnate at his own luxurious table.

The fiddler was unwontedly silent. He had assumed, in his sardonic way, an attitude of exceeding propriety. He addressed mine host and his unkempt daughter mincingly; so that, between laughter, wonder, and a little fear, their service became complicated. And Steven, feeling himself subtly mocked, felt the scarlet burn in his cheeks, but became only the grander and the more high-born, because of his own embarrassment.

Yet, now and again, the musician's gaze would rest upon his entertainer not unkindly. Nay, more, there was pleasure, almost caress, in the look with which the bright eyes would sweep from Count Steven's blushing face down the long limbs that still held the grace and something of the delicacy of adolescence in spite of their unmistakable vigour.

The slattern girl put a dish of hard green pears between the two, with a slam. The fiddler raised melancholy orbs upon Steven:

"Well, sir," he said, "I cannot congratulate you. The bread is sour. Sour is not the word for the wine. It is scarcely of such stuff that our Ovid sang in his 'Art of Love'—

"'Vina parant animos, faciuntque caloribus aptos.'

I have good teeth, but truly this sausage baffled them. I am unappeased." He struck his lean middle. "I shall have no spirit to play another note to-night. (Keep your curses for better uses, friend; they will not sweeten the cup.) Now," said he, luxuriously stretching out his legs and gazing at them with a musing air, "I could have done with a capon, methinks, and a beaker of ripe old Burgundy. What say you? Have you supped? Nay? Neither have I. Come, Sir Count, I invite your High Seriousness to an entertainment where nothing short of the best cellar and the fairest lady of the countryside will satisfy us." Then, regarding Steven's bewildered face for a while in silence, he went on with sudden earnestness. "The highborn English lady and the estimable Austrian nobleman, who are jointly responsible (as I understand) for your existence, have spoilt the dish for want of a little spice. Heavens, sir! have you never a smile in you, never a spark for the humorous side of things? Why, youth should itself be the laughter of life. Come with me—you have much to learn."

And leaving the pears further unheeded, he took the young man by the arm and led him to the door. The village was now steeped in grey shadow, but the strong house on the height still glowed like a ruby. Pointing to it:

"I brought you once," said the vagrant, "into somewhat low company. That was the story of our first meeting. To-night, if you will, I shall bring you into high."

"O Jemine!" exclaimed the landlord, who had been hanging open-mouthed, ready for the roar at Geiger-Hans' humour. "Yonder, where the Lord Burgrave locks up his lady?"

"Even so," said the hungry fiddler, imperturbably. "And you must lend your donkey and little Georgi, and see that this gentleman's valise is safely conveyed upwards. For yonder we spend the night."

Yonder, where the sullen lord of the district reigned in traditional terror, even in absence; where (it was whispered) he had immured a six-months' bride—jealous as any Bluebeard. Yonder in the old Burg, where ancient horrible legends of fierce dogs to devour unwelcome guests, of bottomless oubliettes, of rayless dungeons, of torture chambers (no doubt based on truth enough in bygone centuries), still lived in significance with tenants and vassals. Nay, was it not well known that none were allowed ingress or egress to the castle but the Baroness Sidonia, the Burgrave's niece, who had lived all her life with him and, being of his own blood, and little better than a child, could not be said to count? The innkeeper looked doubtfully at Geiger-Hans, compassionately at his guest. Vague memories flitted through his mind of some fantastic tale, heard to the murmurous accompaniment of his mother's spinning wheel, wherein the devil met ingenuous youths on their wanderings and tempted them to their doom.

All knew, of course, that the musician was a man of humour; still, the freak seemed beyond a joke. And yet, on an imperial gesture, the host of "The Three Storks" withdrew without further parley to carry out the crazy vagrant's order.

"Don't make a fool of me," whispered Steven, in his singular adviser's ear.

"Why, it is the wisdom of youth to be foolish and it is its privilege to be foolish with grace.—O, could you but learn that!" interrupted the other, impatiently. "No, not to-night, dear children, but to-morrow … to-morrow you shalt dance your feet off. I am a great person to-night: I am supping in the old Burg."

"Oh!" said the children, who had gathered like sparrows on their fiddler's reappearance. "Oh!" And awestruck they scattered.

"That Geiger-Hans … !" said the landlord, as by-and-by he watched his guests depart. "He bewitches all, great and small. But this is a strong one. … There they go. Maybe they'll never come back!" He had to the utmost the village terror of the menace of the Burg, inherited through centuries of high and low justice dispensed by Burgraves of Wellenshausen. "Dungeons, up there, and trapdoors, and none ever the wiser. Herr Jemine!"

Wellenshausen

CHAPTER VI

THE BURG

"I will be master of what is my own;

She is my goods, my chattels, she is my house;

And here she stands, touch her whoever dare!"

(Taming of the Shrew).

"Sidonia," said the lady up in the turret-room, "I will not endure it!"

As this remark was made at least five times a day, the hearer was less impressed than the desperate air of the speaker demanded.

"I will throw myself from the window," continued the Burgravine, carefully propping her plump elbows on the stone sill to gaze down with safety.

"If you'd only come out sometimes, and walk with me!" said little Sidonia, smiling.

"Walk, child? Your uncle knew well what he was doing when he stuck me up on this diabolic crag. I have not a pair of shoes that would last me half-way down. And merely to look at the road that leads to this place! Oh!"—she covered her eyes with her hand and shuddered—"it makes me reel with giddiness!"

"It was very lovely in the forest," said Sidonia. "The wild raspberries are nearly ripe, and——"

"Raspberries! Alas! is that what you ought to think of at your age? You, too—'tis monstrous cruelty!"

"The fawns are growing and are so sweet——"

"Fawns! Fawns? 'Tis a lover should be sweet to you. As for me—oh woe!"

Sidonia, slight, slim, and sun-kissed as a young woodland thing herself, grew crimson behind her aunt's dejected head.

"Why—why, then, does Uncle Ludovic keep us here?" she queried.

Uncle Ludovic's lady flounced round in her chair, her eyes darting flames, a flood of words rising to her cherry lips—

"Why? Because, my love, the creature is a Barbe-Bleue. And to be a Bluebeard, child, means that if a wretched woman has been fool enough to trust you, you think you have a right to chop her head off if she disobeys; and meanwhile to shut her up to prevent her having so much as a chance."

"I wonder why you married Uncle Ludo?" mused the girl. Her eyes were dreaming, across the fair plain-land, into the distance. To give your life to some one quite old and quite stout, with a grizzled double chin and veins that swell on a red forehead (ran the fleeting thought), when, about the ways of the forest, a young knight might be met wandering … a knight with hair that crisped back from forehead of ivory, with eyes that were scornful and full of fire!

"Why did I marry him?" returned the Burgravine, sharply. "Ah, he was very different then, my dear! The monster! how he deceived me! Do you think I should ever have consented if I had not known that he was King Jerome's minister; if he had not promised me that we should live at Cassel; if I had not been told that one was more gay at Cassel now than at Paris itself? And honourably I was served, was I not? Ten days at Cassel, while there was scarce a cat stirring, the King called away by the Emperor, then snatched off to this place, this bald, hateful eagle's crag, at the first hint of any gaiety. Men talk of their honour, my love—a big word behind which they can play any trick upon us poor women their humour may prompt." Her voice broke shrilly. Then she added, with sudden calmness: "And if I had had a silver groschen to my name, you may imagine 'tis not old Wellenshausen's second wife that I should be—but some fine young man's first one. Sidonia, how unfair is fate!" She looked enviously at the girl. "There are you, with all your money, who will never have a suitable notion of what to do with it, while I—I——" She snapped two taper fingers together sharply and twisted a dear little plump shoulder well-nigh free of the fashionable Viennese robe, which looked so oddly out of place in the mediæval severity of the tower room.

There was silence, while Sidonia reflected. The Burgravine had a way of opening strange perspectives before the young mind that had hitherto known but the simplest and straightest outlook on life. Wonderful customs had the new mistress brought to the old Burg—odd fads of fashion, new hours of meals, new liveries and unknown demands on the servants' attention. A prisoner, she assumed supreme authority within the limits of her prison. It sometimes seemed as if the very stones in the old wall were echoing surprise. Sidonia, who had run wild within them, near seventeen years of happy unexacting childhood, found herself frequently marvelling at a code of morality so startling in its novelty as to range beyond her judgment. She felt that she could as little fit herself to this new aunt's view of existence, as her modest country limbs to one of those outrageous garments of Viennese mode, over which the Burgravine could sigh a whole morning through in rapture and regret—lamenting, with the voluble aid of Mademoiselle Eliza, her French maid, the opportunities lost in this God-forsaken corner of the world.

"And pray," said Bluebeard's wife, after a pause (never a very long one with her, for, if Sidonia had the gift of silence which belongs to all creatures who have lived much with nature, her Aunt Betty possessed it not at all), "and pray, how many days is it since your uncle took the road for Cassel, a-bursting with hypocritical sighs of farewell?"

"I don't know," said Sidonia, starting from her dream. "Ten days?"

"Ten days!" The words were echoed in a high pitch of indignation.

"Three weeks, then," amended the girl, hastily. "I really don't know; time goes so fast."

"Time goes so fast! Oh, you—you … !" Cherry lips of scorn babbled vainly in search of fitting epithet. "You—you're his own niece!"

Yet as life would have been distinctly duller were she to quarrel outright with Sidonia, the Burgravine quickly turned the batteries of her wrath to the old direction.

"Little did I think on that day, when my father, away in our dear Austrian home, bade me hasten to the great salon and pour out coffee for the gentleman from Hanover who had come to buy our horses—little did I think what lay in store for me! 'You must smile on him, child,' said my mother; 'he is an old nobleman, very rich; and if your father sells well, it may mean a month in Vienna for you!' Ach, heavens!" said the Burgravine, "think of me, my Sidonia, smiling, in my innocence, on him—on him! And who was bought and sold? It was poor Betty!"

"I think it is very wrong of Uncle Ludo," asserted Sidonia, severely, a flush rising to her sunburnt cheek. "Why, since he has married you, will he not trust you?"

"Why? Because, having spent most of his life studying our sex, the man now flatters himself upon a wide experience of our frailties. Because, having so often proved how easy it is to break the marriage vow, he can put no confidence in another's keeping it. Because," and her bosom heaved with indignation, "Cassel is the most amusing spot at this moment in the whole of Europe—they say it is gayer than Paris itself—and no husband who respects himself can take his pleasure with any comfort, if he does not feel that his wife is correspondingly bored."

"But uncle has his Chancellor's duty," resumed Sidonia, after pondering upon these enlightening remarks.

"Chancellor's duties!" The lady drummed on the diamond panes. "Oh, yes, my love, King Jerome requires onerous duties of his ministers, and I've no doubt that Ludovic performs his con amore.—How soon will you be eighteen?" she cried suddenly.

"In four months," said Sidonia.

"Four months—an eternity! Alas, my love, long before that I shall have been laid in that hateful chapel of yours; in that very vault, no doubt, where lies my predecessor—that fool of a woman who resisted such a life as this for twenty years, and yet had the inconceivable want of tact to die at the very moment when I was ripe to fall a prey to the monster."

"Poor Aunt Hedwige!" said Sidonia, reflectively; "she was very fat and never unkind, and I don't think she was unhappy."

"Ha!" muttered the Burgravine, vindictively, "I'll warrant he might have brought her to Cassel with impunity."

"He didn't, though," said Sidonia.

"No, child," pursued the other, with much rancour, "woman's place is at home, you see, while the man is abroad—aha!" She set her teeth and growled behind them like an angry Persian kitten. Then she snapped at her niece: "And you haven't even the intelligence to be eighteen yet, and be of some use for once in your life! Yes, never look so astonished; you're not a fool, child; you know that when you are eighteen, you will be free, and the richest woman in Thuringia—owner of half the wretched little province; free, girl, free to do as you like, to live where you like, to have your own establishment, to spend your own money—and then there'd be a chance for me! Ah, but you would not give it to me. You would let dear uncle manage as he's always managed, and dole you out a thaler here and a louis there, and let him choose you a nice husband … who would not look too much into the accounts, I'll warrant."

"Aunt Betty!" panted Sidonia. The Burgravine stopped, slightly abashed by the fire that flashed in the child's glance. "If you can't forgive Uncle Ludo for being your husband, don't forget that he is a man of honour. … "

"Oh, patatata!" said the lady, with a shrug, "here's mighty fine talk! Manage your own affairs, my dear. I'll say no more."

She leaned her plump arms on the window-sill again and turned her back on her niece with an air of determined sullenness.

Sidonia was very angry. She sat down on the high-backed chair and set the ancient spinning wheel whirring with a hand that trembled.

"One thing is certain," she resumed in a choked voice, "if I ever do marry, Aunt Betty, I shall choose my own husband."

"Of course, among the crowds that besiege the gay Burg of Wellenshausen, up in the clouds, my sweet creature," said the Burgravine, without turning her head, "you will have only l'embarras du choix and then——" But here she interrupted herself with a sharp ejaculation. Her fingers ceased their angry tune. She swung back the window a trifle wider and leaned out further than she had ventured upon her threat of suicide. "Look, look!" she cried in altered tones. "Do you see? There are two men coming up the road with a pack-horse. No, 'tis a donkey!"