Part 5

And suddenly the Angel of Death passed by and the brilliant season waned. In the Archduchess’ bed-chamber, watching the antics of priests and doctors, he sat there unmoved. Propped high, by many bolsters, in a vast blue canopied bed, the Archduchess lay staring laconically at a diminutive model of a flight of steps, leading to what appeared to be intended, perhaps, as a hall of Attent, off which opened quite a lot of little doors, most of which bore the word: “Engaged.” A doll, with a ruddy face, in charge, smiled indolently as she sat feigning knitting, suggesting vague “fleshly thoughts,” whenever he looked up, in the Archduchess’ spiritual adviser.

And the mind of the sinking woman, as her thoughts wandered, appeared to be tinged with “matter” too: “I recollect the first time I heard the _Blue-Danube_ played!” she broke out: “it was at Schonnbrunn--schönes Schonnbrunn--My cousin Ludwig of Bavaria came--I wore--the Emperor said----”

“If your royal highness would swallow this!” Dr Cuncliffe Babcock started forward with a glass.

“Trinquons, trinquons et vive l’amour! Schneider sang that----”

“If your royal highness----”

“Ah my dear Vienna. Where’s Teddywegs?”

At the Archduchess’ little escritoire at the foot of the bed, her Dreaminess was making ready a few private telegrams, breaking without undue harshness the melancholy news: “Poor Lizzie has ceased articulating,” she did not think she could improve on it, and indeed had written it several times in her most temperamental hand, when the Archduchess had started suddenly cackling about Vienna.

“_Ssssh_, Lizzie--I never can write when people talk!”

“I want Teddywegs.”

“The Countess Yvorra took him for a run round the courtyard.”

“I think I must undertake a convenience next for dogs.... It is disgraceful they have not got one already, poor creatures,” the Archduchess crooned accepting the proffered glass.

“Yes, yes, dear,” the Queen exclaimed rising and crossing to the window.

The bitter odour of the oleander flowers outside oppressed the breathless air and filled the room as with a faint funereal music. So still a day. Tending the drooping sun-saturated flowers, a gardener with long ivory arms alone seemed animate.

“Pull up your skirt, Marquise! Pull it up.... It’s dragging, a little, in the water.”

“_Judica me, Deus_,” in imperious tones, the priest by the bedside besought: “_et discerne causam meum de gente non sancta. Parce, Domine! Parce populo tuo--! ne in aeternum irascaris nobis_.”

“A whale! A whale!”

“_Sustinuit anima mea in verbo ejus speravit anima mea in Domino._”

“Elsie?” A look of wondrous happiness overspread the Archduchess’ face--She was wading--wading again among the irises and rushes; wading, her hand in Princess Elsie’s hand, through a glittering golden sea, towards the wide horizon.

The plangent cry of a peacock, rose disquietingly from the garden.

“I’m nothing but nerves, doctor,” her Dreaminess lamented, fidgeting with the crucifix that dangled at her neck upon a chain. _Ultra_ feminine, she disliked that another--even _in extremis_--should absorb _all_ the limelight.

“A change of scene, ma’am, would be probably beneficial,” Dr Cuncliffe Babcock replied, eyeing askance the Countess of Tolga who unobtrusively entered:

“The couturiers attend your pleasure, ma’am,” in impassive undertones she said: “to fit your mourning.”

“Oh tell them the Queen is too tired to try on now,” her Dreaminess answered repairing in agitation towards a glass.

“They would come here, ma’am,” the Countess said, pointing persuasively to the little anteroom of the Archduchess, where two nuns of the Flaming-Hood were industriously telling their beads.

“----I don’t know why, but this glass refuses to flatter me!”

“_Benedicamus Domino! Ostende nobis Domine misericordiam tuam. Et salutare tuum da nobis!_”

“Well just a toque,” the Queen sadly assented.

“_Indulgentiam absolutionem et remissionem peccatorum nostrorum tribuat nobis omnipotens et misericors Dominus._”

“Guess who is at the Ritz, ma’am, this week!” the Countess demurely murmured.

“Who is at the Ritz this week, I can’t,” the Queen replied.

“_Nobody!_”

“Why how so?”

“The Ambassadress of England, it seems has alarmed the world away. I gather they mean to prosecute!”

The Archduchess sighed.

“I want mauve sweet-peas,” she listlessly said.

“Her spirit soars; her thoughts are in the _Champs-Elysées_,” the Countess exclaimed, withdrawing noiselessly to warn the milliners.

“Or in the garden,” the Queen reflected, returning to the window. And she was standing there, her eyes fixed half wistfully upon the long ivory arms of the kneeling gardener, when the Angel of Death (who had sat unmoved throughout the day) arose.

It was decided to fix a period of mourning of fourteen days for the late Archduchess.

VII

Swans and sunlight. A little fishing boat with coral sails. A lake all grey and green. Beatitude intense. Consummate calm. It was nice to be at the Summer-Palace after all.

“The way the air will catch your cheek and make a rose of it,” the Countess of Tolga breathed. And as none of the company heeded her: “How sweetly the air takes one’s cheek,” she sighed again.

The post-prandial exercise of the members of the Court through the palace grounds was almost an institution.

The first half of the mourning prescribed, had as yet not run its course, but the tongues of the Queen’s ladies had long since made an end of it.

“I hate dancing with a fat man,” Mademoiselle de Nazianzi was saying: “for if you dance at all near him, his stomach hits you, while if you pull away, you catch either the scent of his breath or the hair of his beard.”

“But, you innocent baby, _all_ big men haven’t beards,” Countess Medusa Rappa remarked.

“Haven’t they? Never mind. Everything’s so beautiful,” the young girl inconsequently exclaimed: “Look at that Thistle! and that Bee! O, you darling!”

“Ah, how one’s face unbends in gardens!” the Countess of Tolga said, regarding the scene before her, with a faraway pensive glance.

Along the lake’s shore, sheltered from the winds by a ring of wooded hills, shewed many a proud retreat, mirroring its marble terraces to the waveless waters of the lake.

Beneath a twin-peaked crag (known locally as the White Mountain whose slopes frequently would burst forth into patches of garlic that from the valley resembled snow) nestled the Villa Clement, rented each season by the Ambassador of the Court of St James, while half-screened by conifers and rhododendrons, and in the lake itself, was St Helena--the home and place of retirement of a “fallen” minister of the Crown.

Countess Medusa Rappa cocked her sunshade; “Whose boat is that,” she asked, “with the azure oars?”

“It looks nothing but a pea-pod!” the Countess of Tolga declared.

“It belongs to a darling, with delicious lips and eyes like brown chestnuts,” Mademoiselle de Lambèse informed.

“Ah!... Ah!... Ah!... Ah!...” her colleagues crooned.

“A sailor?”

The Queen’s maid nodded: “There’s a partner, though,” she added, “A blue-eyed, gashed-cheeked angel....”

Mademoiselle de Nazianzi looked away.

“I love the lake with the white wandering ships,” she sentimentally stated, descrying in the distance the prince.

It was usually towards this time, the hour of the siesta, that the lovers would meet and taste their happiness, but, to-day, it seemed ordained otherwise.

Before the heir apparent had determined whether to advance or retreat, his father and mother were upon him, attended by two dowagers newly lunched.

“The song of the pilgrim women, how it haunts me,” one of the dowagers was holding forth: “I could never tire of that beautiful, beautiful music! Never tire of it. Ne-ver....”

“Ta, ta, ta, ta,” the Queen vociferated girlishly, slipping her arm affectionately through that of her son’s.

“How spent you look, my boy.... Those eyes....”

His Weariness grimaced.

“They’ve just been rubbing in Elsie!” he said.

“Who?”

“‘Vasleine’ and ‘Nanny-goat’!”

“Well?”

“Nothing will shake me.”

“What are your objections?”

“She’s so extraordinarily uninteresting!”

“Oh Yousef!” his mother faltered: “_Do you wish to break my heart_?”

“We had always thought you too lacking in initiative,” King William said (tucking a few long hairs back into his nose) “to marry against our wishes.”

“They say she walks too wonderfully,” the Queen courageously pursued.

“What? Well?”

“Yes.”

“Thank God for it.”

“And can handle a horse as few others can!”

Prince Yousef closed his eyes.

He had not forgotten how as an undergraduate in England he had come upon the princess once while out with the hounds. And it was only by a consummate effort that he was able to efface the sinister impression she had made--her lank hair falling beneath a man’s felt-hat, her habit skirt torn to tatters, her full cheeks smeared in blood; the blood, so it seemed, of her “first” fox.

A shudder seized him.

“No, nothing can possibly shake me,” he murmured again.

With a detached, cold face, the Queen paused to inhale a rose.

(Oh you gardens of Palaces...! How often have you witnessed agitation and disappointment? You smooth, adorned paths...! How often have you known the extremes of care ...?)

“It would be better to do away I think next year with that bed of cinerarias altogether,” the Queen of Pisuerga remarked, “since persons won’t go round it.”

Traversing the flower plat now, with the air of a black-beetle with a purpose, was the Countess Yvorra.

“We had supposed you higher-principled, Countess,” her sovereign admonished.

The Countess slightly flushed.

“I’m looking for groundsel for my birds, Sire,” she said--“for my little dickies!”

“We understand your boudoir is a sort of menagerie,” His Majesty affirmed.

The Countess tittered.

“Animals love me,” she archly professed. “Birds perch on my breast if only I wave.... The other day a sweet red robin came and stayed for hours...!”

“The Court looks to you to set a high example,” the Queen declared, focusing quizzically a marble shape of Leda green with moss, for whose time-corroded plinth the late Archduchess’ toy-terrier was just then shewing a certain contempt.

The Countess’ long, slightly pulpy fingers strayed nervously towards the rosary at her thigh.

“With your majesty’s consent,” she said, “I propose a campaign to the Island.”

“What? And beard the Count?”

“The salvation of one so fallen, in my estimation should be worth hereafter (at the present rate of exchange, but the values vary) ... a Plenary perpetual-indulgence: I therefore,” the Countess said, with an upward fleeting glance (and doubtless guileless of intention of irony), “feel it my _duty_ to do what I can.”

“I trust you will take a bodyguard when you go to St Helena?”

“And pray tell Count Cabinet from us,” the King looked implacable: “we forbid him to serenade the Court this year! or to throw himself into the Lake again or to make himself a nuisance!”

“He was over early this morning, Willie,” the Queen retailed: “I saw him from a window. Fishing, or feigning to! And with white kid gloves, and a red carnation.”

“Let us catch him stepping ashore!” the King displayed displeasure.

“And as usual the same mignon youth had the charge of the tiller.”

“I could tell a singular story of that young man,” the Countess said: “for he was once a choir-boy at the Blue Jesus. But, perhaps, I would do better to spare your ears....”

“You would do better, a good deal, to spare my cinerarias,” her Dreaminess murmured, sauntering slowly on.

Sun so bright, trees so green, it was a perfect day. Through the glittering fronds of the palms shone the lake like a floor of silver glass strewn with white sails.

“It’s odd,” the King observed, giving the dog Teddywegs a sly prod with his cane, “how he follows Yousef.”

“He seems to know!” the Queen replied.

A remark that so annoyed the Prince that he curtly left the garden.

VIII

But this melancholy period of _crêpe_, a time of idle secrets, and unbosomings, was to prove fatal to the happiness of Mademoiselle de Nazianzi. She now heard she was not the first in the Prince’s life, and that most of the Queen’s maids, indeed, had had identical experiences with her own. She furthermore learned, amid ripples of laughter, of her lover’s relations with the Marquesa Pizzi-Parma and of his light dealings with the dancer April Flowers, a negress (to what depths??) at a time when he was enjoying the waxen favours of the wife of his Magnificence, the Master of the Horse.

Chilled to the point of numbness, the mortified girl had scarcely winced, and when on repairing to her room a little later, she had found his Weariness wandering in the corridor on the chance of a surreptitious kiss, she had bolted past him without look, or word, and sharply closed her door.

The Court had returned to colours when she opened it again, and such had been the trend of her meditations, that her initial steps were directed, with deliberate austerity, towards the basilica of the Palace.

Except for the Countess Yvorra, with an _écharpe de décence_ drawn over her hair, there was no one in it.

“I thank Thee God for this _escape_,” she murmured falling to her knees before the silver branches of a cross: “It is terrible; for I did so love him ......................... ............................................... ..................................................... and oh how could he ever with _a negress_? ....................................... ...................................................... Pho ..................................... ........... I fear this complete upset has considerably aged me............................ ....... But to Thee I cling........................................ ................................................................... ................................................ Preserve me at all times from the toils of the wicked, and forgive him, as _I_ hope to forgive him soon.” Then kindling several candles with a lingering hand, she shaped her course towards the Kennels, called Teddywegs to her and started, with an aching heart, for a walk.

It was a day of heavy somnolence. Skirting the Rosery where gardeners with their slowly moving rakes were tending the sandy paths, she chose a neglected footway that descended towards the lake. Indifferent to the vivacity of Teddywegs, who would race on a little before her, then wait with leonine accouchments of head until she had almost reached him, when he would prick an ear and spring forward with a yap of exhortation, she proceeded leisurely, and with many a pause, wrapped in her own mournful thoughts.

Alack! Among the court circle there was no one to whom in her disillusion she could look for solace, and her spirit yearned for Sister Ursula, and the Convent of the Flaming-Hood.

Wending her way amid the tall trees, she felt she had never cared for Yousef as she had for Ursula ... and broodingly, in order to ease her heart, she began comparing the two together as she walked along.

After all what had he ever said that was not either commonplace or foolish? Whereas Sister Ursula’s talk was invariably pointed; and often indeed so delicately, that words seemed almost too crude a medium to convey her ethereal meanings, and she would move her evocative hands, and flash her aura, and it was no fault of hers if you hadn’t a peep of the beyond. And the infinite tenderness of her least caress. Yousef’s lips had seldom conveyed to hers the spell of Ursula’s; and once indeed lately, when he had kissed her, there had been an unsavoury aroma of tobacco and _charcuterie_, which, to deal with, had required both tact and courage.... Ah dear Hood! What harmony life had held within. Unscrupulous and deceiving men might lurk around its doors (they often did) coveting the chaste, but Old Jane, the porteress, would open to no man beyond the merest crack. And how right they were the nuns in their mistrust of man! Sister Ursula one day had declared, in uplifted mood, that “marriage was obscene.” Was it--? ...??... Perhaps it might be--! How appalling if it was!

She had reached the lake.

Beneath a sky as white as platinum it lay, pearly, dove-like, scintillating capriciously where a heat-shrouded sun kindled its torpid waters into fleeting diamonds. A convulsive breeze strayed gratefully from the opposite shore, descending from the hills that rose up all veiled, and without detail, against the brilliant whiteness of the morning.

Sinking down upon the shingle by an upturned boat, she heaved a brief sigh, and drawing from her vanity-case the last epistles of the Prince, she began methodically to arrange them in their proper sequence.

(_1_) “What is the matter with my Dearest Girl?”

(_2_) “My own tender little Lita, I do not understand--”

(_3_) “Darling, what’s this--?”

(_4_) “Beloved one, I swear--”

(_5_) “Your cruel silence--”

If published in a dainty brochure format about the time of his Coronation, they ought to realise no contemptible sum, and the proceeds might go to Charity, she reflected, thrusting them back again carefully into the bag.

Then, finding the shingle too hard through her thin gown to remain seated long, she got up, and ran a mournful race with Teddywegs along the shore.

Not far along the lake was the “village,” with the Hôtel d’Angleterre et du Lac, its stucco, belettered-walls professing: “Garages, Afternoon Tea, Modern Comfort!” Flitting by this, and the unpretentious pier (where long, blonde fishing-nets lay drying in the sun), it was a relief to reach the remoter plage beyond.

Along the banks stretched vast brown carpets of corn and rye, broken by an occasional olive-garth, beneath whose sparse shade the heavy-eyed oxen blinked and whisked their tails, under the attacks of the water-gnats that were swarming around.

Musing on Negresses--and Can-Can dancers in particular--she strolled along a strand all littered with shells and little jewel-like stones.

The sun shone down more fiercely now, and soon, for freshness sake, she was obliged to take to the fields.

Passing among the silver drooping olives, relieved here and there by a stone-pine, or slender cypress-tree eternally green, she sauntered on, often lured aside to pluck the radiant wild-flowers by the way. On the banks the pinkest cyclamens were in bloom, and cornflowers of the hue of paradise, and fine-stemmed poppies flecked with pink.

“Pho! A Negress ...” she murmured, following the flight of some waterfowl towards the opposite shore.

The mists had fallen from the hills, revealing old woods wrapped in the blue doom of Summer.

Beyond those glowing heights, towards this hour, the nuns, each in her cool, shuttered, cell, would be immersed in noontide prayer.

“Ursula--for thee!” she sighed, proffering her bouquet in the direction of the town.

A loud splash ... the sight of a pair of delicate legs (mocking the Law’s requirements under the Modesty Act as relating to bathers).... Mademoiselle de Nazianzi turned and fled. She had recognised _the Prince_.[5]

IX

And in this difficult time of spiritual distress, made more trying perhaps because of the blazing midsummer days, and long, pent feverish nights, Mademoiselle de Nazianzi turned in her tribulation towards religion.

The Ecclesiastical set at Court, composed of some six, or so, ex-Circes, under the command of the Countess Yvorra, were only too ready to welcome her, and invitations to meet Monsignor this, or “Father” that, who constantly were being _coaxed_ from their musty sacristies and wan-faced acolytes in the capital, in order that they might officiate at Masses, Confessions and Breakfast-parties _à la fourchette_, were lavished daily upon the bewildered girl.

Messages, and hasty informal lightly-pencilled notes, too, would frequently reach her; such as: “I shall be pouring out cocoa after dinner in bed. Bring your biscuits and join me!” ... or a rat-a-tat from a round-eyed page and: “The Countess’ comp’ts and she’d take it a Favour if you can make a ‘Station’ with her in chapel later on,” or: “The Marchioness will be birched to-morrow, and _not_ to-day.”

O, the charm, the flavour of the religious world! Where match it for interest or variety!

An emotion approaching sympathy had arisen, perhaps a trifle incongruously, between the injured girl and the Countess Yvorra, and before long, to the amusement of the sceptical element of the Court, the Countess and her Confessor, Father Nostradamus, might often be observed in her society.

“I need a cage-companion, Father, for my little bird,” the Countess one evening said, as they were ambling, all the three of them before Office up and down the perfectly tended paths: “ought it to be of the same species and sex, or does it matter? For as I said to myself just now (while listening to a thrush), _All_ birds are His creatures.”

The priest discreetly coughed.

“Your question requires reflection,” he said: “What is the bird?”

“A hen canary!--and with a voice, Father! Talk of soul!!”

“H--m ... a thrush and a canary, I would not myself advise.”

Mademoiselle de Nazianzi tittered.

“Why not let it go?” she asked, turning her eyes towards the window-panes of the palace, that glanced like rows of beaten-gold in the evening sun.

“A hawk might peck it!” the Countess returned, looking up as if for one, into a sky as imaginative, and as dazzling as Shelley poetry.

“Even the Court,” Father Nostradamus ejaculated wryly, “will peck at times.”

The Countess’ shoulder-blades stiffened.

“After over thirty years,” she said, “I find Court-life _pathetic_....”

“Pathetic?”

“Tragically pathetic....”

Mademoiselle de Nazianzi considered wistfully the wayward outline of the hills.

“I would like to escape from it all for a while,” she said, “and travel.”

“I must hunt you out a pamphlet, by and by, dear child, on the ‘Dangers of Wanderlust.’”

“The Great Wall of China and the Bay of Naples! It seems so frightful never to have seen them!”

“I have never seen the Great Wall, either,” the Countess said, “and I don’t suppose, my dear, I ever shall; though I once did spend a fortnight in Italy.”

“Tell me about it.”

The Countess became reminiscent.

“In Venice,” she said, “the indecent movements of the Gondolieri quite affected my health, and, in consequence, I fell a prey to a sharp nervous fever. My temperature rose and it rose, ah, yes ... until I became quite ill. At last I said to my maid (she was an English girl from _Wales_, and almost equally as sensitive as me): ‘Pack.... Away!’ And we left in haste for Florence. Ah, and Florence, too, I regret to say I found very far from what it ought to have been!!! I had a window giving on the Arno, and so I could _observe_.... I used to see some curious sights! I would not care to scathe your ears, my Innocent, by an inventory of one half of the wantonness that went on; enough to say the tone of the place forced me to fly to Rome, where beneath the shadow of dear St Peter’s I grew gradually less distressed.”

“Still, I should like, all the same, to travel!” Mademoiselle de Nazianzi exclaimed, with a sad little snatch of a smile.

“We will ask the opinion of Father Geordie Picpus, when he comes again.”

“It would be more fitting,” Father Nostradamus murmured (professional rivalry leaping to his eye), “if Father Picpus kept himself free of the limelight a trifle more!”

“Often I fear our committees would be corvés without him....”

“Tchut.”