Part 4

"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 Groenfeld, 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, Maedel,' 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.

* * * * *

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_!"

*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."