Part 15

The congenial task concluded, she had another to perform. The courier from Heiligenstadt, whither the King had repaired on a tour of military inspection, had brought her a second letter--also a love cry, or it might better be described as a love-bellow. The Burgrave, away on duty with his sovereign, appealed from a distance to his obdurate wife.

He was filled with amorous longing, jealousy, despair. How long was he to be exiled from her favour? The situation was past endurance! He implored, groaned, rebelled, threatened, and was abject again--all in a few frenzied lines. The gist of the whole was in the last phrase: "When am I to be forgiven? Am I not your husband?"

The answer to this effusion required but a flourish of the pen. Yet, as the lady planted a green wafer upon the second envelope, there was a triumphant smile upon her lip, a vindictive gleam of pleasure in her eye. The despatching of her morning budget had been altogether pleasurable.

* * * * *

Close by, in the little chamber allotted to her, Sidonia, behind locked doors, was engaged upon a similar task; for to her the courier had also brought a letter demanding instant acknowledgment. It was a very short one, and by no means so loverlike as either of Betty's billets.

"I have been slightly indisposed" (wrote Steven) "and unable to travel for a few days; but I trust to be in Cassel within the week, and shall seek you in the Palace. It must be clear to you that you owe me at least an explanation. It is impossible that we can part for ever thus.

"STEVEN."

Not a word of love! Not a hint of despair! Not even reproach! It was all cold, cruel business. As Sidonia wrote her reply, the tears dripped so quickly that she could scarce see the paper.

Eliza, very brisk and tripping, who had the charge of posting the three letters, studied the superscriptions very carefully before committing them to the royal mail. Her eyes grew round at sight of the pink-wafered note. _Diable!_ If the mistress had such correspondence, it might become a question whether Jaeger Kurtz would continue to be good enough for the maid. She smiled vindictively at sight of the green wafer. If she knew her lady, the Chancellor was far from being fully paid out yet. "And serve him right," said she, who would herself be long before she forgave Burg-Wellenshausen for the horrors of its tedium.

The old-fashioned sheet that bore Sidonia's childish scrawl she weighed awhile reflectively in her hand. Madame la Burgravine would doubtless give something to see the contents of _that_ letter.... Then, with a shrug of her shoulders, she sent it on its voyage with the rest. The service of her lady had its advantages; and Eliza, pining in the Burg, had stuck to it with unerring prescience of better days. But it did not follow that she held no opinions of her own. And she had even a kind of good-nature that did quite as well as a conscience, as far as her neighbours were concerned, and was far more agreeable for herself.

"I am not hard-hearted like madame, look you," said the maid to herself. "The child is a nice child, as young ladies go, and she should have her chance."

* * * * *

The spirits of spring and autumn are akin, although the one journeys towards the fulness of life, and the other to the cold sleep, death. Across the dividing months they seem to meet each other, to serve you smiles and tears, skies of a tenderness unknown to summer, gales of wind, soft as milk, mighty as love. These come chanting with the voices of the ocean, the mountain and the forest, great songs of glory; seize you by the way in resistless arms, tell you wondrous things, and set your blood leaping as they pass. They set, if autumn it be, the yellow leaves awhirl in a death dance; or, if spring, every baby bud rocking on its sappy spray.

The travellers, one riding, the other afoot, went side by side along the road towards Cassel. It was a south-west wind that buffeted them. Even in the heart of the inland it seemed to sing of distant seas; to bear on its pinions airs at once untamable and mild, balmy and salt. The forest trees roared under it as with the voice of waters. It gathered from them drifts of yellowing leaves, even as, leagues behind, it had churned spray from Mediterranean waves. In the young traveller's heart storm answered to storm; its breath in his nostrils maddened him, for he had fever in his veins, and he was balked in love.

But to the other traveller, whose hair was grey, who tramped along with the even measure of him who has learned to ignore fatigue, the autumn lament was charged with the hopelessness of the grave. It told him how all that is born must die, and how the beautiful die first. In the choiring of the forest he heard the dirge of waning life. In each gust of pungent fragrance he could smell the bitter graves of yesteryear.

The horseman was clothed in fine and fashionable garments. He who trudged was but a vagrant player, who made music for his daily bread and rarely knew in the morning where he would lay his head at night.

They went in silence. Steven's heart was heavy. Robbed of his bride well-nigh on the altar-steps, he was now seeking her, in an impatience which repeated disappointment had fed to frenzy. And Geiger-Hans was his guide.

At a certain spot the forest began to press closer upon the imperial road. The overarching boughs flung a swaying, premature night upon them; and, as the woodland enfolded them, it seemed to draw them into a great sanctuary. Let the gale rage without, here was protection and an inner stillness all the deeper in contrast to the outer turmoil. Instinctively the travellers drew closer to each other, and their tongues were loosened.

The rider struck his saddle-bow with a passionate hand, at which the plodding grey faintly started.

"To think of her, at Cassel, under the devil flicker of that imperial puppet's glance! Sidonia, my wife, at the Court of Jerome!"

"A waterlily may defy the ooze," observed Geiger-Hans, sententiously.

But the simile was hateful to the youth--a water-lily, a flower that flourishes, in atrocious beauty, upon the very slime! Then he cursed his wound for its slow healing, and his blood for its ill-timed fever, and the length of the road, and the perversity of women.

"And the wrong-headedness of young men!" added the musician, drily.

But thereafter, in tones of consolation, for dudgeon reigned on the saddle above him, he pointed to a light far off through the dark flicker of leaf and shadowy march of trees.

"See, yonder shall we sup and sleep, and thence, rested, start in the brisk dawn. And to-morrow----"

"To-morrow!" interrupted the bridegroom, impatiently. "No; I shall be in Cassel to-night."

"You forget the times we live in, comrade," came the fiddler's answer. "Why, here is my nobility afoot; and yours, all wounded, upon a sorry steed, because any less notable progression were to court suspicion, putting aside the fact that your worship's carriage and horses (Sidonia would have none of them, and if you were not otherwise matched you two would be one by pride, comrade) have been requisitioned for the use of the State. And Frantz fled with his master's dressing set, his English pistols, and his second portmanteau! Court suits I make no doubt, tut, tut. The fellow was a rogue. I saw it at half a blink. And worthy Peter, our postilion, bitten with the war fever and passed over to the Prussians! Nay, but 'tis a riddance that suits me. And here we go as I love, at our own free will, save, indeed, that we enter not Cassel to-night. Have you already forgotten that we are at war, in Westphalia? Not, I grant you, that it signifies much to our pretty monarch--so long as it does not interfere with his amusements at home. He has thought it wise, nevertheless, to make a little fortress of his capital--breastworks and glacis where lay the orchards and cottage gardens; posterns and _corps de garde_ at all road entrances, and everything closed at the setting of the watch, an hour after sundown!"

Steven the lover had, in his mind's eye, seen his pilgrimage ended before the fall of the day; seen himself dashed or crowned. Crowned! Upon the vision the surge rose in his heart till it overpowered him well-nigh to swooning.

Geiger-Hans, with his diabolic insight, chose this moment to draw from his fiddle a sudden strain.

"Oh, stop!" panted the young man. "I cannot bear it."

And the player fell silent, musing upon the ways of men and women and of love. Let a bride but elude her lover's embrace, what surer road shall she find to a revealing of his ardour?

*CHAPTER XXII*

*THE CABINET NOIR*

"_Good even, sir,_ _But what, in faith, make you from Wittenberg?_" (_Hamlet_).

Night had completely fallen. A full moon was forging up the sky, like some superb ship beating up the wind, all sail spread and defying the tumultuous seas of cloud, when the comrades emerged from the woodland and halted before the inn.

"The Three Ways," for a poor roadside house, held unwontedly merry company to-night, to judge by the medley of shout and song that rang out from its upper windows.

The fiddler, mounting the steps that led to the door, gave a few knocks with special emphasis. To this there was no response. Laughing silently, he waited awhile, then suddenly betook himself to his violin, at its highest pitch. Too much engrossed with their own music, unhearing, perhaps, through the rolling of the wind, the first-floor revellers paid no heed to knocks or notes; but below there was immediate stirring. The bolts screeched under a hasty hand.

"Ach! you, Geiger-Onkel!" cried the hostess, as she stood revealed on the threshold. "You will have your joke! ... We thought it was the police commissary's rap! Ah, heavens, what times these are! One's heart is in one's throat all day, all night."

She clasped her hands upon her flat bosom, but suddenly catching sight of the rider, forgot to pant that she might the better stare.

"'Tis but a new brother of mine," said the fiddler, carelessly. "Send the kerl for his horse.--So you have some of the boys here? Well, I bring news for them. Come, comrade, you must be weary."

In the kitchen, amid otherwise pleasing surroundings, their nostrils were offended by an extraordinary reek of stale wine, presently traceable, it seemed, to a postilion in dilapidated uniform, who was ensconced within the glow of the hearth.

The man's high collar and braided jacket were open for the freer intercourse of throat and can; he winked impudently at Geiger-Hans, and had a truculent roll of the eyes for Steven.

"Interception of the King's mail--_lese majeste_--crime of the first category--punishment capital," observed he, with some pride, in answer to the young man's astonished look.

"The punishment includes all accessory to the act," suggested Geiger-Hans, pleasantly.

"Not the victim of coercion," stated the postilion, with indifference.

He turned his tankard upside down as a hint to the hostess. She, poor thing, seemed to regard these doings as a hare may the trap that clutches her pad.

"The gentlemen are upstairs," she said, and wiped the dampness from her lip with the corner of her apron.

The gentlemen upstairs continued to make their presence uproariously patent.

"The Brotherhood are apparently having a little argument," quoth Geiger-Hans, with a slight smile.

"For heaven's sake, Onkel, go up and quiet them, if you can! We shall have the patrol upon us!" groaned the hostess.

"Now, comrade," said the fiddler to Steven, one foot upon the narrow stairs, "I will now introduce you into nobler company than ever! I have made you known to one of the newest kings and to one of the oldest Burgraves in the land. To-night you shall become acquainted with the offspring of a nation in chains--heroes, my little count, no less. Patriots of the first water!"

Count Kielmansegg was conscious that the corners of his highborn lips drooped. The patriotism of Westphalia--convulsions of a tin kettle on a mere corner of the vast Napoleonic fire, pot-house heroes that roared their enthusiasm into the night to the clink of the can.... Bah!

There was a twinkle in the musician's eye that mocked his words. He went nimbly up the stair, and his companion followed with the heavy foot of fatigue.

A drunken shout greeted the entrance of Geiger-Hans. Steven stood on the threshold, his lip curling into ever more open scorn at the sight which greeted them: three dishevelled youths, in different humours of intoxication, extravagantly costumed according to the taste of the militant _Studiosus_: tunics of velvet, shabby but much befrogged; jack-boots, gigantic spurs that had, doubtless, never pressed horse's sides; poetically open collars; uncut hair; tobacco-pouch and rapier on belt; china pipes in hand, six feet long, tasselled with Fatherland colours. A squat individual, exuberantly bearded, sprawled at the head of the table and was expostulating with vehemence. He had embraced the can of wine and was defending it with drawn spadroon against the other two, who--the one with uproarious laughter, the other with tipsy solemnity--were making futile attempts to wrest it from his possession. The table was strewn with letters and papers.

No sooner did this same hirsute _Bursch_ perceive Geiger-Hans than he abandoned both sword and can and, staggering to his feet, opened wide his arms.

"Welcome, brother--master--friend!" exclaimed he, dithyrambically.

"_Salve!_" then cried the laughing student, pounced upon the abandoned can and buried his impertinent sandy face in its depths. Whereupon the melancholy third, whose long black hair fell about a cadaverous countenance, sank into his chair.

"_Vilis est hominis natura_," lamented he; then suddenly broke into the vernacular and shook his fist at the drinker: "Thou rag!"

"_Salve, fratres!_" responded the fiddler, by no means surprised, it seemed, at his reception, but neatly avoiding the threatened embrace. "How beautiful it is," he went on, "thus to see the saviours of their country at work upon her interests, even when the rest of the world sleeps!" He pointed to the letters as he spoke.

An inflamed but exceedingly alert eye was here fixed upon Steven over the rim of the can.

"_Prudentia!_" cried the drinker, flung down the vessel and ran forward, "a stranger among us!"

With a bellow the bearded one lurched for his weapon.

"A stranger? ... _Pix intrantibus_!"

The weeper profited of the excitement to seize, in his turn, upon the abandoned vessel.

"Nay," said Geiger-Hans, arresting the double onslaught with outstretched arms. "_Pax intrantibus_ be it: we are friends!"

Steven stood in the doorway, sneering. He would have found a pungent satisfaction in laying flat the drunken couple--and no doubt, with the science cultivated in Jackson's London rooms, would, despite his wound, easily have put the thought into execution. He made a movement forward. But the fiddler held him at arm's length.

"Peace, brother Peter--peace, most learned doctor _in herba_. I bring a friend, I say, a new brother, my comrade, a noble Austrian who, by the way, is half an Englishman, and as bitter a foe to the tyrant as your most Germanic selves. I introduce:--Count Waldorff-Kielmansegg--Herr Paul Oster, 'Mossy-Head,' _emeritus_ swordsman, Senior of the Great Westphalic conspiracy. Behold, count, the true German garb, the type of manly beauty! Behold this Barbarossa head! Behold the sword, in short (if I may so express myself), of a great patriotic movement. And here," turning with a fresh gesture of ceremony, "we have the brain, the tongue, the acute eye: in other words, Herr Theophilus Schmeling, legal doctor, jurist, fresh from all his honours at Goettingen--and the third...?" He looked interrogation at the black-haired student.

The jurist, surprisingly alive to the situation, answered briskly for his melancholy comrade, who was still absorbed and absorbing:

"Johannis Stempel, _Sanctae Theologiae Studiosus_. An 'Ancient House,' also a faithful heart--a good labourer in the vineyard--but," he added chuckling, "apt to be _weinerisch im Wein_, whiny over the wine."

He perpetrated his atrocious quip with a wink of little red eyes.

Count Waldorff-Kielmansegg found some pleasure in bowing three times with ironical ceremony.

But Geiger-Hans took up the tale again with a dry disregard of any possibility of humour.

"Here we are, I repeat, in the heart of a great conspiracy ... and not one of us but risks his neck by so much as merely looking on! The Sword, the Law, the Church. 'Tis a conspiracy well headed!"

As he waved his hand, Steven's eyes were directed towards the table, and he suddenly realized that the papers lying in such disorder were the contents of the mail-bag that hung on the arm of the theologian's chair. His thoughts went back to the dilapidated courier downstairs: "Crime of the first category," had said that official.

"Bah!" cried the Jurist, "Jerome does not kill; he but fleeces his little flock, as all the world knows."

"Your pardon, doctor," retorted the fiddler, with a fine inciseness in his tone. "The most paternal government makes an example now and again. And the head of one Carl Schill is this moment affixed, minus its body, on the toll-gate of Helmstadt. But reassure yourselves, the odious French invention of Dr. Guillotin has not yet superseded your old Germanic square-sword; your heads would be hacked off in the true heroic style. 'Tis a consolation."

"Augh!" groaned Barbarossa, and sank into his seat at the head of the table, clasping his middle as if a sober sickness had fallen upon him. His very beard seemed to turn pale. But presently it flamed again with a revulsion of anger:

"What the hangman! How is one to manage these fools? They sit, and soak, and sop, and suck, and enough to snick twenty necks on the table before them. I told them so, just now, when I wished to put the wine away."

"The can is empty," here intoned the theologic _Studiosus_, after the manner of one giving out a psalm. "_Nunc est bibendum--Aut bibe aut abi!_"

From behind his beard the Senior growled like a dog. But the Jurist intervened.

"Content ye," he said softly. "I'll to the letters; and here's a cool head will help me. Will you not, Geiger-Hans--good Geiger-Hans? And we shall but crack a bottle between us, just to clear our brains. Shall we not, musician of my heart?"

"Yes; _aut bibe aut abi--sauf oder lauf_--drink or slink," chanted the divine, afresh.

"_Doctorlein_," said the musician, suavely, "I am with you. And the devil's own head you must have," he pursued, looking at the Jurist with a kind of admiration; "for I'll be sworn you've drunk as much as the other two put together--but I pray you, a word first: wherefore the King's mail?"

"Your question is reasonable," responded the other with renewed verbosity. "_Providus, homo sagax_.... The defendant's request is allowable, worthy Senior.... Are you defendant, by the way, or pursuer?"

"Accomplice," said the fiddler, sitting down and gathering a sheaf of letters into his hand. "To the point again, brother: why the King's mail?"

"Two warrants, we are informed, are out against the Brotherhood. And here"--the student slapped his greasy tunic--"you behold equity contravening judgments: legal sagacity tripping up edicts; the true principle--for if your lawyer is not the antidote to the law, what is he? Answer me that! Ah, here comes the wine! No more cans, but bottles! Our landlady knows how to treat gentlemen. Nay, nay, _Pastorlein_, get you to sleep again, and dream of your first sermon. There is work to be accomplished here. Mrs. Hostess, give him small-beer in the can--he will never know the difference!"

Geiger-Hans, who had rapidly sorted the letters in his hand, raised his eyes and cast a look about him. The Senior, sunk in a heap upon his chair, was staring straight before him with a glowering eye, unmistakably in the first stage of drunken stupefaction. The aspirant divine was whimpering over the strangely inferior taste of his tipple. Steven, leaning against the whitewashed walls with folded arms, stood looking upon the scene, weary, arrogant, detached.

"Hey, Sir Count," said the fiddler then to him with one of his rare sweet smiles, "what say you--a glass of wine? No? Why, then, what will your lordship do while we manipulate affairs of State ... in this _Cabinet Noir_?"

For the life of him, Steven could not display haughtiness to Geiger-Hans, however dubious might seem his proceedings. Too much he knew of him by this time, yet too little.

"Nay," said he, giving him back a faint smile. "I see a couch yonder. I will try a sleep, till the State of Westphalia is secured, or undone, for I am woefully tired."

"The couch? Right," said the fiddler, nodding. "Yes, go to sleep, comrade, and dream.--Here with that heap, brother conspirer. And now, listen: the wise commit no unnecessary crimes. We have no business with the private correspondence of the good folks of Cassel. But here is a document with an official seal, addressed to the Commissary of Police, Goettingen."

He tossed the letter across the table. There was a shout of triumph from the Jurist.

The horsehair couch was hard enough, but Steven had flung himself on it with a whole-souled desire to shut out a sordid, unsatisfactory world. Sleep, however, the jade, is not to be had for the wooing. The whines of the Theologian, the stertorous breathing of Barbarossa, the Jurist's flow of rhetoric, the crackling of the papers, the fiddler's very mutism, were all so many goads to drive him into ever more feverish wakefulness. Against the rigid bolster his heart-beats resounded in his brain. "Sidonia, Sidonia!" they said, in maddening persistence. And then, as in a sort of vision, he would see the paltry Don Juan, King Jerome, with his flickering eyes, and start, with a spasm of anger, back to a glaring consciousness of the mean room, the guttering lights, the reek of wine and smoke, the insufferable company.

"Herr Jurist, halt, halt!" came the fiddler's voice suddenly. "Leave that alone, if you please. That is, beyond any doubt, private."

"'Tis addressed to the Arch-Enemy, and no correspondence with tyrants is private," retorted the lawyer. "Besides"--with a grin--"it's one of those new-fashioned French envelopes, and everything French is damned and doomed! See, the wafer has come unsealed in my very hand. The wise man--hic--neglects no hint of Providence. _Hey da!_ what have we here? ... O thou little son of Venus, what a sweet slip of rosy paper! What a darling little claw of a hand! ... (The King has a fine taste in doves, I'll grant him that!) Bah, Sardanapalus! It is enough to turn any man republican. I am for the rights of man. Tyrants shall have no monopoly of dovecotes. Hum! neither date nor place: a cautious dove! Chirp, chirp!" The creature pressed the sheet to his tipsy lips with disgusting lushness. "Would I held the pretty flutterer here! Hark! what does she say? '_Sir_' (A cold beginning: her feathers seem ruffled), '_I ought to be very angry with you; but, alas! anger is not to be commanded any more than love. How well it would be for us women were it otherwise!_' (Pretty dear! Ambiguous as any lawyer's statement!) '_Yet I feel that you must be forgiven, if but for the sake of duty--for I should be indeed disloyal to persist in rebellion against one who is my lawful lord.--Betty! P.S._' (Aha! now we shall come to the true meaning, to the kernel, _medulla, medululla esculenta_, of the rosy note.) '_Understand: I promise nothing. But understand also: you may come and receive your pardon--if no more!_'"

The reader's mouth was opened upon fresh dithyrambics when the fiddler's voice rose peremptorily: "Pass me that letter!"