Chapter 8

It was only three days later that Grover received an invitation to dine at Professor Bornholm's. He had spent the intervening period in meditation concerning Mrs. Bornholm's curious behavior. That she had something on her mind was obvious, and he had no doubt that he would to-day discover what it was. He felt confident that she had been plotting against him and had some dramatic surprise in store for him. As he rang the door-bell he had need of all his _sang froid_ to quiet his turbulent heart. He was admitted to the inner sanctuary and was greeted with studious cordiality by the three goddesses. They seemed all agitated and expectant, though they were striving to appear unconcerned. They lounged and chatted as people do in the introductory scene of a play, with hidden reference to some plot which has yet to be disclosed. To all appearances the plot had some connection with the door to the Professor's study, which, contrary to custom, was closed. Minchen repeatedly threw furtive glances at it, and Röschen made her determination not to look at it equally conspicuous; only Gretchen was frankly curious and made no effort to disguise it. A strange sense of the unreality of the whole scene, himself included, crept over the young man; he felt like a man in a play who can murder or make love with equal irresponsibility. He was about to indulge in the latter diversion, when suddenly the mysterious door opened, and the Frau Professorin entered with much dramatic _éclat_, leading a lovely dark-eyed young girl by the hand. The eyes of the three goddesses grew as big as saucers, and Röschen pressed her hand to her heart and nearly fainted from excitement.

"Mr. Grover," said the Frau Professorin, making a most elaborate bow, "allow me to present--Miss Jones."

Under ordinary circumstances the introduction to Miss Jones would have been an agreeable incident in Mr. Grover's career, and nothing further. He had met, he did not know how many hundred charming young ladies, several of whom had borne the name of Jones, and he had never been in the least disconcerted. In the present instance, however, he showed but imperfect control of his emotions. A guilty blush sprang to his cheeks, and he groped vainly in his embarrassment for the proper phrase wherewith to express his pleasure at making the lady's acquaintance. Miss Jones, too, somehow, seemed ill at ease, and gazed at him with flaming cheeks and a puzzled, half-anxious look in her eyes. The Frau Professorin, who had probably expected a different denouement, looked disappointed, and the goddesses whispered to each other and tittered.

"You will excuse me for a few moments," said the Frau Professorin; "the house needs my attention."

Having learned all that she wished to know, she could afford to be generous. It was plain that the goddesses had displaced Miss Jones in her lover's heart. Hence his annoyance and embarrassment. She could well appreciate his position and in her heart she began to relent toward him. Miss Jones had evidently, under the pretence of studying music, come to Leipsic, to look after her recreant adorer, whose silence had begun to alarm her. The goddesses, too, who had been initiated into the secret, arrived at similar conclusions, and proceeded to dislike the innocent Miss Jones with much vehemence. It was but with reluctance that they heeded their mother's significant scowl and withdrew in her wake.

"Perhaps," said Miss Jones, drawing a breath of relief as the last of the trains vanished in the doorway, "perhaps you would now have the kindness to tell me what this comedy means."

Grover lifted his eyes and gazed at her; she was surpassingly lovely. A pair of frank, dark American eyes, half humorously challenging, put at once his embarrassment to flight, and made him feel a delicious nearness and kinship to their fair possessor.

"Miss Jones," he said, answering promptly the humorous gleam in her eyes, "I shall have to make you a regular confession. I didn't have the remotest idea of your existence."

"Nor I of yours," she responded quickly; "but what has that got to do with the comedy?"

"Everything. You know, I invented you."

"_You_ invented me?"

"Yes, in my dire need, in order to escape from matrimonial persecutions, I invented a _fiancée_ in America named Miss Jones. But to be frank, I did not expect you to take me at my word, and turn up over here, in order to regulate my conduct."

"Oh, I see it all," cried Miss Jones, merrily. "You are in the position of a novelist whose heroine suddenly steps out of the book and takes him to task for his fictions."

"But I hope you won't prove a hard task-master," he retorted, gayly. "In consideration of my generosity in making you beautiful and rich, you ought not to betray me."

"Do you mean that I ought to remain your _fiancée_?" she asked, laughing. "I think that is to ask too much of my indulgence."

"You are at liberty to break with me whenever you choose; but until further notice allow the family to suppose that they are right in their conjecture. You need simply say nothing about it. You know our engagement is secret, and we are not expected to show how fond we are of each other."

"That is very fortunate. However," she continued, lightly, as if pleased with the absurdity of the thought, "my fondness for you will probably never demand any very extravagant expression."

"No, but mine may," was his daring reply; "therefore, perhaps, as a measure of self-defence, you ought to break with me at once. Make a scene of some sort, revile me; do anything you choose, only so that the eavesdroppers, who are sure to misunderstand everything except vehemence, get a notion that we have been engaged, but are so no more."

Miss Jones, who had seated herself in the sofa-corner, leaned her head in her hand and meditated.

"Do you know," she said, raising the same pretty head abruptly, "your proposition is a very original one? I wonder if a girl was ever before requested to break with a man to whom she had never been engaged. However, Mr. Grover, I am not quite as accommodating as you think. On the whole it suits my purpose very well to be engaged. I have come here for study and have no desire to be courted by students or musicians, of whom there is said to be quite a colony here."

It was now Grover's turn to be amazed. He stared at the sweetly demure and sensible little face in bewilderment.

"Then you mean to--you mean to say----" he stammered.

"Yes, I mean to say," she finished, suppressing the little mischievous gleam in her eye, "that I prefer not to break with you. We will remain engaged."

The young man's countenance fell. He began to look unhappy; perhaps Miss Jones was an unscrupulous adventuress who would turn the joke into earnest and sue him for breach of promise after they got home. To be sure, she looked as innocent as an angel, but it is a notorious fact that women are just the most dangerous in that guise. In escaping Scylla he had plunged headlong into Charybdis. He got up with a painful sense of indecision, walked toward the window, and concluded, after a moment's thought, that he could not, as a man of honor, withdraw from a bargain which he had himself proposed. It would be wiser to abide by it, and to trust to his own ingenuity to extricate him at the proper moment.

"Miss Jones," he said, rather ceremoniously, "I thank you for your kindness."

"Not at all," she retorted, carelessly; "it is an arrangement for mutual convenience. But remember," she added, lifting her index finger in playful threat, "that we are extremely well-bred and undemonstrative."

III.

The goddesses found it a harder task than they had anticipated to hate Miss Jones. Scarcely twenty-four hours had passed before Gretchen was at her feet, and vowed that she was the German equivalent for a "perfect darling." In return Miss Jones taught her how to make quince jelly, flavored with the kernels in the stones. Two days sufficed to conciliate Röschen; and when she discovered that Miss Jones did not positively and unequivocally condemn the homicidal eccentricities of Lucrezia Borgia, she declared with noble enthusiasm that Miss Jones was "a grand soul." As for Minchen, she held out heroically against Miss Jones's blandishments; but at the end of a week she too succumbed. Miss Jones had complimented her in imperfect German, but with the sweetest of accents, on her wax flowers, and had drawn new designs for her, full of animation and dash. Presently they said "thou" to each other, and Miss Jones, who had been Lulu at home, was metamorphosed into Luischen. Even the Frau Professorin, who at first had put her down as an artful little minx, began to forget her grudge against her. The Professor found it a positive hardship that he was not at liberty to kiss her. But the most amusing thing of the whole affair was that they all became her partisans against her recreant lover, Grover, who had trifled so wantonly with her feelings. They made cautious overtures to condole with her, but, in spite of the tenderest sympathy, found her singularly uncommunicative on this subject. Now the goddesses, who in external charm did not profess to compete with her, had in the first flush of their enthusiasm been quite disposed to sacrifice themselves upon the altar of their devotion; but, although they could have forgiven any other form of maltreatment, Lulu's apparent distrust of them wounded them deeply. They had looked forward to delicious nocturnal confidences, when, half disrobed, each should visit the other's boudoir and discuss the fascinating topic from all possible and impossible points of view. That Lulu had proved impervious to all hints of this nature was a slight which could not be pardoned, at least not without due penance on her part. Moreover, to add to their mortification, there seemed daily to be less occasion for sympathy. Lulu was winning Mr. Grover back to his allegiance slowly but surely. He called, now, almost every afternoon, took long walks with her through the Rosenthal, and barring a certain Anglo-Saxon reserve (which in Germany is thought perfectly incomprehensible) behaved in every way as an engaged man should. It was scarcely to be wondered at that the goddesses found such an exhibition of devotion a little bit irritating, and voted Lulu, the happy and victorious, as odious as Lulu, the abandoned, the secretly-grieving, had been lovely and interesting. It was especially Röschen, the admirer of daring unconventionally, who took it into her head that she had been wronged and deceived by the false and heartless Lulu, and she swore--that is to say, she vowed solemnly--that she should yet get even with that sly and demure little arch-fiend. The coveted opportunity did not, however, present itself as soon as her impatience demanded, and while the winter dragged along slowly, alternating delightfully between frozen mud and liquid mud, Grover's devotion went on steadily deepening, until Miss Jones even interfered with his laboratory practice, mixed herself up in his chemicals, and on one occasion precipitated an explosion which singed his whiskers and damaged his complexion for a month to come. From this experience he drew the wise deduction that love and chemistry are antagonistic forces, and therefore irreconcilable; but as he could not persuade himself to give up either, it occurred to him to effect a compromise. He would, as far as possible, devote the forenoons to chemistry and the afternoons to love--that is to say, he would devote himself to Miss Jones, and try gently to lure her on to the forbidden topic.

I believe I have said before that demonstrations of affection were strictly prohibited; but I have not remarked that in the by-laws subsequently drafted by Miss Jones for the regulation of their abnormal relation, oral references to the same interesting topic were likewise forbidden. When Miss Jones had her own way, she usually talked music, and talked intelligently and well. She seemed to find a kind of humorous satisfaction in confining her adorer strictly to practical topics and in ignoring sentimental allusions. If he rebelled against this sort of maltreatment, and became silent and moody, she aggravated the offence by not appearing to notice it. She would then find employment in separating little boys who fought in the street, or in eliciting confidences from old apple-women. There was something almost fiercely virginal about her, something bordering upon enthusiasm in the way she repelled an attempted incursion upon the forbidden ground. And withal she was so tender and sympathetic toward all mankind, that her wilful obtuseness on the subject of love bore to him the appearance of wanton cruelty. It did not occur to him that she might be acting in self-defence, fearing to give the slightest rein to a feeling which might, on very slight provocation, run away with her. She was the kind of girl which one does not readily think of in connection with the tender passion; and whose love, perhaps, for this very reason, seems so ineffably precious to him who is trying to win it.

"Did it ever occur to you," he said to her one day, as they were walking together under the leafless arches of the Rosenthal, "that when God saw all that He had made, and 'behold it was very good,' He left woman out?"

"No, I didn't know it," she said, with a gleam of amusement.

"Nevertheless, it is so," he went on. "When He said it was all very good, woman was not yet created. After she was made, God said nothing at all."

"That was because she was so nice that she needed no commendation," rejoined Miss Jones promptly.

"For all that, history shows that she has made a deal of mischief in the world," said Grover lugubriously; he was feeling piqued and abused at her want of responsiveness to his undisguised admiration.

"History was written by men," was Miss Jones's response.

"But made by women," ejaculated Grover, eager to hold his own in the tilt.

"As you like. I don't think the man was far wrong who said that there was a woman at the bottom of every important event."

"You talk like a book."

"I only wish I had the wit to make one. I would make you men stare if I published my version of the world's history."

"You can do that better without the wit," he retorted recklessly; then, seeing a little cloud, as of pained surprise, pass over her countenance, he made a motion to seize her hand, but succeeded, instead, in knocking her parasol into the middle of the road. The necessity of recovering it cooled for the moment the passion which had threatened to overmaster him.

"Pardon me," he murmured penitently, as he was again at her side. "I did not mean to hurt your feelings; but the fact is, I am on such a constant strain to keep my sentiment below the boiling point that I lose my self-control and say things the effect of which I only see after I have said them."

"Don't apologize, please," she said, hurrying on so rapidly that he could only with difficulty keep pace with her; then as a perfect godsend, there crossed her line of vision two small boys who were pulling each other's hair and pummelling each other lustily.

"You naughty boy," she ejaculated with much animation, seizing the bigger one by the arm and forcing him to face her, "why do you strike that poor little fellow?"

"He mixes himself up in my affairs," responded the culprit, defiantly; then discovering a considerable tuft of his antagonist's hair in his hand, he turned about shame-faced and tried to dispose of it, unperceived. Miss Jones, however (though she was not without sympathy for any one whose affairs were becoming mixed), dexterously caught the descending tuft on the point of her parasol and held it up as proof of his guilt. "What a dreadful little boy you are," she said, reprovingly.

"But I will pummel Anton again," retorted the dreadful little boy, "if he plays 'engaged' with Tilly Heitmann."

"Plays 'engaged!' Ah, then I beg your pardon," said Miss Jones, airily, with a sly little glance at her companion. "Little boys who play engaged deserve to be pummelled."

IV.

If Prince Bismarck or his big dog had come to town, there could not have been more excitement in the Bornholm family. The three young ladies sat upon a bed, with their hair done up in curl papers, and looked intense. They had hatched a plot of revenge which was worthy of three blonde heads done up in curl-paper. It had been ascertained that Mr. Grover had invited Miss Jones to the artists' carnival, and that Miss Jones had accepted the invitation. He had, moreover, asked the Frau Professorin to chaperone Miss Jones for the occasion, and the Frau Professorin, who was as fond of excitement as a girl, did not have the strength of mind to show him that she resented the slight he had put upon her daughters. She tried to make the daughters believe, of course, that she had; and they would undoubtedly have taken her word for it, if they hadn't been listening at the key-hole. When taken to task, the Frau Professorin was in such an indulgent mood that she would readily have consented to anything; and when Röschen proposed that she, too, should go to the masquerade and in exactly the same costume as Miss Jones, her mother only interposed a vague demurrer which was easily overridden. The interesting complications which might arise, if Grover should mistake one Daughter of the Rhine for the other, stimulated her romantic fancy and made her eager as a girl to have the plot carried into effect. What was to be accomplished by it, she did not trouble herself to define; it only gave her a kind of confused satisfaction to think that she was mystifying somebody who had for a long time been mystifying her. Röschen was exactly of Miss Jones's height and their figures closely resembled each other. So when they were masked a microscope would be required to tell them apart.

Röschen, who was full of blissful anticipations, went about during the day embracing people promiscuously from sheer excess of happiness. She could almost have embraced Grover, foe though he was, for having afforded her such a glorious opportunity for playing a trick on him. Her adventurous spirit had long yearned for some monumental enterprise, and this had somehow a mysterious atmosphere about it which made it doubly attractive to the admirer of Lucrezia Borgia. As for Miss Jones, she was unsuspicious as a new-born babe, which circumstance heightened the joy of the conspirators, thrilling them with sensations of deep and delightful villainy.

The week before Lent came at last and the reign of Prince Carnival was proclaimed through the streets by medieval heralds in gorgeous attire. The procession was watched from windows and balconies, and at last came the evening with its alluring festivities, including the _bal masque_. The Frau Professorin, as she flitted from Miss Jones's boudoir to that of her daughter, taking notes of the former's costume for the benefit of the latter, felt like an arch conspirator upon whose coolness and address the fate of empires hung. Miss Jones had had her costumes designed by an expert costumer, and the difficulty was to make Röschen's home-made finery as trim and dazzling as the products of professional skill. This feat was, however, happily accomplished, thanks to Minchen's artistic taste and Gretchen's nimble fingers. The Frau Professorin then slipped with a sigh of relief into her black domino and took her seat at Miss Jones's side in the carriage. Grover, in the guise of King Gunther in the Nibelungen Lay, sat opposite, arrayed in a splendid helmet and scarlet cloak, endeavoring to make his legs as unobtrusive as possible. The drive to the Schützenhaus was not long, and Miss Jones, muffled up to her very eyes, hopped out of the carriage as lightly as Cinderella from her metamorphosed cucumber. The Frau Professorin, likewise muffled, allowed Grover to assist her up the stairs, and was conducted by him to the door of the dressing-room, where there stood a female Cerberus whose business it was to keep away male intruders. When King Gunther, after doing sentinel duty for half an hour, again caught sight of the swan-maiden, the daughter of Father Rhine, she was so surpassingly lovely that he forgot to inquire for her chaperone. The chaperone, therefore, without difficulty, effected a clandestine retreat, found her way to a carriage and drove home as fast as the spavined droschke horse would convey her. Twenty minutes later she slipped into the dressing-room at the Schützenhaus, accompanied by a second daughter of Father Rhine, whom that worthy parent himself could scarcely have told from her lately-arrived sister.

The three floors of the enormous house represented the upper, the middle, and the lower world.

The first floor was submarine and subterranean; cool, dimly-illuminated grottoes, some in basaltic, columnar rock, some in emerald-glowing stalactite, invited all the fantastic creatures of the sea, both fabled and real, who were promenading about on the floor of the deep, to a sweet, life-long siesta in their softly-gleaming recesses. On the second floor luxuriant equatorial palm-groves grew in startling proximity to the snow-laden pines of the North, and a heterogeneous assembly of all nations and ages poured through the resplendent avenues, chatting and playing pranks on each other with Teutonic good humor.

"Let us go to Olympus," said King Gunther, who was drifting with his snow-maiden through the motley throng. "I may never have another chance of getting there," he added jocosely.

"I am afraid I should not feel at home there," answered the daughter of the Rhine; "you know I belong properly to the lower regions."

"Then let us go to the lower regions," retorted the king, gayly. "You needn't go in search of the Elysian Fields; you carry them with you wherever you go."

"Beware, your Majesty," murmured the water-nymph, threateningly. "You are defying Fate. Creatures of my kind are dangerous to trifle with."

"It is you who are trifling, not I," he burst forth; "with me the joke has long ago become serious."

He felt her arm trembling where it touched his; under the black fringe of her mask he saw her lips quiver, and her eyes shone with a strange, moist radiance. The crowd of gay maskers surged about them and the music whirled away over their heads unheeded, and broke in showers of rippling sound.

"Listen to me," he whispered boldly, stooping to her level--but in the same moment a heavy hand was laid upon his neck and a burly, gray-bearded Jupiter stood before him with a great train of Olympian attendants.

"I love the daughters of this green earth," said the king of the gods; "or I should say the green daughters of this black earth," he corrected himself, touching with a caressing hand the green sea-weeds of the swan maiden's drapery.

"Excuse me, Father Jupiter," Grover began, knowing well, in spite of his chagrin, that pranks of this kind were perfectly legitimate; "you mix up the mythologies. This is not a classic nymph, but a Northern swan-maiden."

"By my Olympian beard," cried Jupiter, "that shows your barbaric taste, if you do not pronounce her classic."

"I must insist," Grover replied, "that to your pagan majesty a creature of Northern fable has no existence."

"Then by my Ambrosian locks we will give her existence," quoth the father of gods and men. "Mercury, my son," he cried, pointing with his sceptre to a graceful youth with winged heels and cap, "change me quickly this maiden into something classic, but don't change her too much or you will spoil a divine masterpiece."

Mercury, with winged speed, came forward, waved his wand over the swan-maiden's head, when behold! she vanished.

"Why, your magic is too potent, you rascal," ejaculated Jupiter. "I didn't tell you to make her invisible."