Part 16

A woman had been confined here for thirty-two years; her husband was a King, her son would be a King, she was by her own birth a Princess and by right Queen of England, a country she had never seen.

For thirty-two years she had seen nothing but the cold, dull rooms, the barren Hayden road, the flats, the river, the alders and the plovers.

For thirty-two years she had driven three miles forth, three miles back along that empty road, stopping always at the turnpike, setting forth and returning at the same hour.

When she had been brought to Schloss Ahlden she was gorgeous–a brilliant woman, very young, vivacious, sparkling, beautiful, full of wit and spirit, of courage and daring.

She had defied them all, defied even the perpetual imprisonment to which she was condemned. Something would happen, she said.

Nothing had happened.

She sat now, a woman older than age, a woman who had never bloomed and faded, who had been frozen in her immature loveliness, chilled by creeping monotony in face and heart, and looked out at the light fading from the road and from the river Aller. The road was dead; never had it responded to her passionate watching; no help had ever come along its dusty length; no messenger spurring to say, “Your husband repents; he bids you come back,” or “Your husband is a King now; his people insist that you share his throne,” or “Your husband is dead, and your son sets you free!”

Nothing ever happened.

With unbroken regularity her guard was changed. Such servants as could not endure the life left; others came.

These were all the sole incidents in the life at Schloss Ahlden.

There were no letters, no messages, no visitors.

Once her son, after a fierce quarrel with his father, made a desperate attempt to get to her, but she never knew of it, and soon the Prince was reconciled with the King and made no effort to come again.

It was astonishing how strong hope was, how it lived and flourished with nothing to feed on; but it died at last, as the black locks faded to gray, as the robust young body became feeble and thin, as the glowing cheek sunk and the brilliant eyes grew dim, hope sickened and died at last.

She watched the white road from habit; she ceased to think of it as a highway to deliverance. As the world had forgotten her, so she began to forget the world. Great wars tore Europe, and the man who was her husband and Elector of Hanover played a big part in them, though through the chance of birth and from no great merit; she never heard of these events.

When he became King of England she did hear of it, but it made no difference to her situation.

Her name was never spoken outside the walls of Schloss Ahlden; she was as remote from the minds of men, even from the minds of her children, as if she had been long dead.

A mere memory–Sophia Dorothea of Zell, repudiated by her husband and a prisoner at Ahlden–as one might say–Sophia Dorothea of Zell who died thirty-two years ago and is forgotten.

Her case had caused no sensation; no party espoused her cause; she had no followers, no adherents, no one planned her escape or pitied her, or prayed for her; she was merely forgotten.

Yet she was a living, breathing woman, with power to feel, to endure, to remember–worst of all, that remembering.

The dark crept closer round her as she sat looking out of the window.

The road, the river, the alders, the flats had come to be like the paintings on prison walls; they meant nothing, they did not represent the world, they circled her as surely as walls and moat, they changed as little, they were as cruel in their hard barrenness.

She had been very worldly, very gay, not in the least of a cloistered temperament, not given to caring for things spiritual; she had enjoyed life, she had had a great capacity for living fully and splendidly, a great aptitude for happiness. She remembered now how she had enjoyed life once; it made her feel very, very old.

The world had closed on her early; she was not fifteen when her vivacious, mischievous immature beauty had been wedded to her awkward, slow, selfish young cousin, Georg Ludwig, son of the Electress of Hanover, who was remotely connected with the royal Stewarts of England.

He had never loved her.

And she had laughed at him, even pitied him, not realising the power he possessed over her. Even at twenty-two he had been prosaic, sullen, ungracious, self-important, a Prince without culture, or chivalry, or sensibility, a hard, obstinate man, narrow in heart and brain.

Even her raw ignorance had seen what he lacked. His unlovely person, short and stout, his dull blonde face with the pale prominent eyes, his rude manners and gross self-indulgencies roused aversion in her; his good qualities were not those that made life any easier for her; he was brave in every way, he had much good sense, he was honourable after his fashion. Some women might have been happy with him, not the woman he had married, her bright, impetuous, fastidious nature, avid of enjoyment, was hideously ill-matched with the plodding, dull, coarse character of her husband.

Even their children did not bring them together. When she had been married six years the Revolution hurled the last Stewart from the throne of England and put a Prince of the German Empire in his place. Soon after a law was passed to secure the Protestant succession, and this made the Electress of Hanover heiress to the Throne of England.

For a while Sophia Dorothea had exulted in the prospect of one day being Queen of the second nation in the world.

She bloomed gloriously; her husband was openly unfaithful to her. The little court was coarse and sordid and scandalous, but she had the power of extracting pleasure from her life, of throwing the glamour of youth and health over everything. She was frivolous, bold–never sufficiently moved to be indiscreet, though she sailed near to danger many times.

Then, when she had been married thirteen years, she met Philip, Count von Königsmarck.

After that her life had ended as regarded all those things that made it pleasant, even endurable.

Schloss Ahlden had closed on her youth, her beauty, her high spirits, her courage. Her hot passions had flared and wasted and waned without a vent for thirty-two years, and now she was an old woman, almost passive.

Almost, not quite. At times her servants were afraid of her; at times she was like a tigress enraged.

Even after a lifetime of imprisonment, the passionate spirit at times still ranged and surged against its bonds.

Once she had had a desperate desire to pass, if only once, the turnpike on the Hayden road that marked the limit of her drive.

She would drive the cabriolet herself, drive furiously as if endeavouring to outstrip the guards who always galloped alongside. But no matter how she drove, always at the turnpike she must turn back. Of late she had not been out at all; she spent her days glooming at the window. Her women had been recently changed; only one remained, who had been with her all the time, and she was very old now and sour with long exile from her kind.

She, Madame von Arlestein, had been the confidant of the Princess in the old, old days.

The other attendants who came and went, and the changing officers of the gloomy little garrison, said that this austere, bitter old woman really knew if the Princess was innocent or guilty. Guilty the world had called her before it had forgotten her. Those few who still knew her as a living woman were not so sure.

“Innocent” or “guilty” were two arbitrary words with which to divide her conduct. She had herself always maintained her innocency of putting another man in her husband’s place, as firmly as that husband had believed in, and acted upon, the contrary.

But that she had been guilty of loving Philip von Königsmarck was beyond denial. Whether he had ever had more of her than the kiss she had given him when they were discovered together only Sophia Dorothea and the Countess von Arlestein knew. For Count Philip had died, horribly, before the dawn following that fatal night. No one cared much now, even those who waited on her, whether she had kept her marriage vows before God.

Unconsciously they thought of her as pure; they could not think one a wanton who had lived in this awful chastity and renunciation for thirty-two years.

The Captain of the Guard was a young man, born while she was in prison.

Thinking of what he had already crowded into his life, he shuddered when he saw the proud, grievous woman entering the austere little chapel on Sunday, and reflected that during his infancy, his childhood, his youth, his young manhood, she had been doing the same without rest or change, while the beauty withered on her face and hope withered in her heart.

As he rode through the courtyard to-night he looked up at her window, reluctantly but irresistibly.

There was the peaked white blur of her face, the dark, restless eyes fixed on the twilight landscape, the long white hand supporting the sharp chin.

“Herr Jesus!” he muttered. “Why does she not die?”

Sophia Dorothea was thinking the same; she wondered what had kept her alive, what had actually sustained her to grow _old_–yes, to come to that horror, to lead this existence to _old age_.

Why had she not flung away a life so miserable and died at least in the triumph of youth?

She envied Philip von Königsmarck in that he had not lived to grow old.

Hope had upheld her a certain time, but hope was dead. She could recall almost the actual moment when it had finally died, when she had stood at the window watching the road, and known at last that no help would come ever along it to her–known that her husband would not die and release her; but still she had lived and grown old.

The dark gathered, descended and settled.

She leant back in the threadbare velvet chair, and her tired eyes remained fixed on the dusk.

She thought of her husband; he was an old man now, but she pictured him as she had last seen him in the full lustiness of his youth. Her children were grown to middle life, but she saw them still in petticoats. Though both were married and had children of their own, the news had come to her through her women.

She had once had great hopes in her son; she believed that he would have some desire to see his mother.

She divined rightly. Though his attempt to swim the Aller and storm the moat had never been told her, for a long while she had clung to the hope that he had some of the chivalry his father lacked; but he was a man of forty-five now, and she was still a prisoner; that hope had died with the others. Her daughter was a Queen, and that was all Sophia Dorothea knew of her.

She soon ceased to think of them. She rose and went in to her dinner, which was served in the same room, at the same hour, always, always.

Madame von Arlestein was not there; she had the whimsies of old age; they said she was failing fast.

The other ladies were cowed and quiet; they had not been long with their mistress, and two of them had already petitioned to go home.

Sophia Dorothea (Princess of Ahlden she was called, in ghastly compromise between the titles that were hers by right and the nonentity which she really was) was an object of terror to these ladies, by reason of her history, her punishment, her usual silence and her occasional passionate lashes of speech.

Her appearance added to this horror she inspired; she still wore the fashions that were the mode when Mary Stewart set them in England and Madame de Maintenon in France, and this, added to her arrested beauty, more terrible than old age, made her like a creature resurrected from a dusty grave.

When her clothes were renewed, which was seldom, they had been cut on the same pattern, but many of the garments she now wore were those that she had brought with her when she had first come to Schloss Ahlden.

She wore now a gown of faded, crackling red silk, with a short petticoat of frilled blue sarcenet; her hair was piled up with the fan-shaped decoration of stiff lace that had been out of fashion a quarter of a century; her face had a curious bleached look: she was not wrinkled, but her fine features were as faded as her gown; she seemed bloodless, waxen, only in her eyes was that awful look of restlessness in terrible contrast with the lifelessness of her appearance.

The ladies, each with her own warm life of human interest as a background for her thoughts, pitied her and shuddered at her, and in their hearts they counted the days until they should be relieved of their posts at Schloss Ahlden.

For an hour, as always, they read and sewed after dinner, and, as always, the Princess sat rigid, looking into the fire. In summer she would look into the empty hearth in the same way; she had a great attraction for the fire or the fireplace.

She was never long in a room before she would turn to it and sit in front of it, staring into the flames or the grate ready for them.

The ladies, when alone, would sometimes dare to breathe the rumour that accounted for this; it was almost too horrid for utterance. It had to do with the manner in which Philip von Königsmarck had died.

At the usual time the chaplain came, the unalterable prayer was uttered; the ladies took up their candles, curtsied and waited for the Princess to precede them upstairs.

She, as always, went up to her cold, unadorned room, was undressed and dismissed the ladies, then stood by the great bed with the blue tapestry curtains and sent for Madame von Arlestein.

To-night she did not get into bed; she put on a blue bed-gown and went to the fire that blazed, log on log, in the open hearth, but could not do more than warm a portion of the huge draughty room.

This bedroom had been hers ever since she had been at Schloss Ahlden, and nothing in it had been altered.

The bed stood out into the room facing the fireplace, shrouded with heavy curtains and heavy draperies; either side was a sconce of silver holding five candles against the wooden walls, at the foot was a long casket for clothes and either side of that a leather chair with a fringe round the seat.

The door was to the right of the bed, the mullioned windows to the left; they were hung with dark curtains and before each of them were two more of the formal chairs.

In the corner beyond the windows was a plain dressing-table holding a few toilet articles, and behind it hung a mirror in a tortoiseshell frame.

Before the fireplace were a chair with arms in which Sophia Dorothea now sat and a stool.

Beyond the fireplace were a desk and an upright press for clothes.

On the polished floor lay a worn carpet; the ceiling hung low and dark; above the mantelshelf stood another mirror, and four candles and a clock were reflected in its murky depths.

Firelight and candlelight together caught the shadow of the woman in the chair and flung it large and leaping over wall and ceiling.

At her usual time, neither a minute early nor a minute late, Madame von Arlestein entered.

Her head was swathed in black lace and her shoulders in a black shawl; her black skirts were wide and stiff and rustling. She held a length of fine white muslin that she had been embroidering for twenty years.

As always, she seated herself on the stool, and the delicate needle, guided by her wrinkled hands, flew in and out the embroidery that was beginning to be yellow with age.

Sophia Dorothea sat erect in her chair, the black hair, streaked with white as with powder, hung, still thick in the ruins of its beauty, about her shoulders. The firelight softened and warmed the sharp lines of her face and gave a sparkle to her still glorious eyes.

“Annette,” she said, “I have been thinking of Philip von Königsmarck to-night.”

The old woman looked up from her eternal sewing.

“Oh, Madame,” she answered, “you have not spoken that name for many, many years.”

“Not for thirty-two years,” said the Princess. “I know exactly.”

“Why now?” asked Annette von Arlestein.

“Have you forgotten him?” counter-questioned Sophia Dorothea.

“No.”

“You remember it all?”

“All!”

“It seems very near to-night,” said the Princess.

“Yes, I thought so too.”

The old woman broke her invariable custom and laid her sewing down in her lap and looked at her mistress.

“Perhaps death is coming to one of us,” added Sophia Dorothea. “We are both old. My death would be a relief to a great many. Even you would not be sorry, Annette.”

She spoke knowing that Annette von Arlestein had not shared her imprisonment from any love or duty, but from necessity. She was as much a prisoner as her mistress. It had been decreed that she who had shared the shame should share the punishment.

“It is too late,” said the Countess. “Twenty years ago I might have wished you would die. Twenty years ago I might have cursed you.”

The quenchless dark eyes gleamed across at her.

“You would not have stayed if you could have gone. No one else did.”

Annette von Arlestein gave a toothless smile.

“No, I should have gone–when I was younger. Life is dull here.”

Sophia gave her a ghastly look.

“Yes, it is dull.”

A storm was blowing without. The wind cast the rain in gouts on the window; it dripped from the leads and splashed down the wide chimney in heavy drops that hissed on the logs.

“Why do you not finish your sewing?” asked the Princess. “I have never seen you sit idle before.”

“Why did you mention Count von Königsmarck?” replied Madame von Arlestein. “I have never heard you speak of him before.”

“Every night lately I have been thinking of him. You know that.”

“Yes, I know that.”

Like an angry stranger demanding admission, the rain surged at the window and the faded curtains rose and fell in the wind.

“Annette,” said Sophia Dorothea, “why have we lived, you and I? We could have died, you know. There was the moat, or a table-knife–or a bed-cord. But we lived.”

“I suppose,” answered the old woman, “we hoped.”

“_Mein Gott!_ We hoped!”

The Countess looked across at her with dim eyes that seemed to glimmer with malice. “But now–if _he_ died to-morrow, it would be too late. There is no more enjoyment for you in this world.”

“No more for me of anything,” said her mistress calmly. “Königsmarck is dead and youth is dead.”

“Why are we talking of this?” asked the old woman peevishly, “when we have been silent so long?”

“I do not know. Get on with your embroidery.”

“_Der Herr Jesus!_ Why should I finish this work? Who will wear it?”

“Talk, then, talk,” said Sophia Dorothea. “Something is different to-night.”

“It is the rain,” nodded the old woman. Her monstrous shadow wavered behind her like a giant impotently threatening.

“It is memory,” answered the Princess. She relaxed in her chair. Her arms, still lovely but colourless as the limbs of the dead, showed where the wide sleeves of dull blue fell apart, and her hands, almost inhumanly slender, clasped the polished knobs of the chair-arms. “Was I beautiful–that night?” she said. “I scarcely knew it.”

Annette von Arlestein looked at the ruined face, pale beneath the grey locks, the thin bare throat, the sunk dark eyes, the lined mouth. “I can hardly recall what you were,” she muttered; “I can hardly think you are the same.”

A veil seemed to drop over her eyes; she too was remembering.

“Annette,” said the Princess, “do you think _he_ has been just to me?”

“It is so long ago,” whispered the Countess.

“_He_ has enjoyed these thirty-two years,” replied Sophia Dorothea. “He is an old man now; he cannot be very far off answering to judgment. I wonder what God will think of what he has done to me.”

The Countess chuckled. Neither of these women had drawn nearer Heaven themselves during their captivity, no thoughts of spiritual consolations had sweetened the bitterness of their earthly punishment and no repentance had softened their hearts.

“There has always been one prick in his side,” said Annette von Arlestein. “He was never _sure_–he had no _proof_. There has been a doubt with him all his life. He will never know.”

“No one knows but you and I,” answered the Princess. She leant forward and looked into the fire. “How I hate him!” she said slowly. “What is he doing at this moment–the King of England–that cold, hideous man?”

“If curses could have blighted him,” mumbled the old Countess angrily, “mine had done it long ago. When he sent me here I still had blood in my veins; I enjoyed the world–I had my plans, and schemes, my pleasant seasons—”

The Princess rose; her figure was yet erect and graceful; the warm lights and shades touched it to youthful curves.

“Was there anything in the marriage service,” she said, “to say that he should take his pleasures and his loves where he would and that I must never look beyond my wedding ring?”

She held out her left hand and looked at the mocking symbol on her finger placed there forty-six years ago by the man who held her captive now.

“You might have had more of life,” said the Countess. “The punishment could not have been greater if you had changed your fancies as he changed his!” She laughed silently, as if it pleased her to think how her mistress had been cheated.

There was a pause of silence, broken only by the gusty descent of the rain on the window and the splashing of the drops on the glowing logs.

Sophia Dorothea closed her eyes.

“Do you remember,” she murmured, and her expression was greedy as the expression of one glimpsing the food he is famishing for, “that night–how _young_ I was?”

“Do I remember? It was the last thing that ever happened to me,” answered Annette von Arlestein.

Before the mental vision of both the tragedy that had been lying silently in their hearts so long loomed suddenly clear and distinct, as if it had happened yesterday. There was silence.

They saw the scene before them as if they had not been actors in it.

A luxurious bedroom, a white and gilt imitation of Versailles, filled with elegant furniture, fashionable toilet articles and splendid clothes, a bed of white satin and many mirrors–this was what they both saw.

All was brilliant, pretty and cheerful.

At the foot of the bed stood a beautiful woman, Sophia Dorothea, opulent in charms and happiness; her black hair rolled in curls between a braid of pearls and fell on her soft shoulders. White and crimson mingled ravishingly in her face and her dark eyes were soft, yet sparkling.

She wore a gown of white brocade, cut low on the bosom and laced across the muslin shift with a pink cord; the skirt was embroidered with little wreaths of blue roses; the petticoat glimmered with gold thread.

The candles were lit.

Near her stood a handsome creature, Annette von Arlestein, full of sparkle and daring, in a violet gown; she held a blue quilted cloak. On the peach-coloured lining the candle light flickered up and down.

They were both listening … waiting.…

“Then you put the cloak on me,” said the Princess, “and we thought we were so safe–_he_ being away–and I went downstairs.”

Madame von Arlestein saw it–the lovely figure muffled in the dark cloak, creeping down the wide, dark stairs, while she stood at the head with a candle, ready to put her hand over it at the slightest sound.

“Then you followed, Annette, to keep watch. I was a fool to go, but he had to leave soon, and I was mad to see him.”

“And the Elector was coming home the next day,” added the old woman.

Another scene rose before them: the vast dark kitchens beneath the dining-hall that opened on to the back entrance to the palace.

This room was underground, but was lit by the perpetual fire that burnt in the huge grate.