Part 11
A sharp wind was blowing from the Alps across the high plateau. Ordham pulled up the collar of his light overcoat and walked more briskly than was his habit. Illness might be convenient as an excuse, but as a fact was little to his taste; although he realized that it was not the worst evil that could befall him at present.
For perhaps the first time in his life something deeper than his temper was agitated. He could always stamp about in a fine rage when annoyed, but he had had little occasion to rail at a perverse fate. Now he found himself face to face with a distinct crisis in his life—the probability of disaster just beyond. He had heard Frau von Wass talk wildly before, but other women talked wildly and nothing came of it. They seemed rather to enjoy their little dramas than otherwise. He regarded them all as interesting books—or plays—which he was graciously permitted to read at first hand. But his own attitude had always been nearly impersonal. When he had closed the book clept “Frau von Wass,” he had, in the insolence and inexperience of his youth, taken for granted that it would accumulate dust in limbo with all of its kind. He had been as much astonished as annoyed at the turn affairs had taken, but not apprehensive until to-day. That Hélène Wass was in desperate earnest he could no longer flatter himself by doubting. He reviewed his own share in the incident; and while he was amazed that such a price should be levied for what had been little more than politeness on his part, still was he far too intelligent not to remind himself that men had paid as high for less, and too just not to admit that it had been in his power to nip the woman’s passion in the bud.
Although he was puzzled as well as frightened at this encounter with the grim visage of life, whose gloomy unsympathetic eyes presaged defeat, he was sullenly angry with himself. If he had loved the woman or even been possessed, no matter how briefly, by one of those overwhelming passions of which he was always reading and hearing, he felt that he would have accepted the consequences without flinching. But as it was, he felt like a foolish mariner who had gone to sea without a compass and found himself justly on the rocks. Unless the unexpected happened, it looked as if he would be swept out of Munich with the rest of the Frau Geheimrath’s wreckage and landed high and dry in Italy.
Suddenly another ugly phase of this crisis in his life leapt to his mind, and he passed through the arch of the Siegesthor with such a stride that the British Minister, returning from a late card party, did not recognize him and went on without offering the hospitality of his coupé.
Normally there was a faint hope that Bridgminster would once more pay his debts, those distressing tradesmen’s bills of which he was reminded daily. His tailor’s was but one, and the aggregate must be close upon a thousand pounds. But if he openly committed the sin with which his austere brother had the least sympathy, he would be driven into the bankruptcy court. That would be a disgrace which would blast his self-respect to the roots, even did England, never lenient to this offence, forget it in time. There is a secret tendency in most human hearts to forgive a lover his worst transgressions, but no sympathy whatever for the financial muddler. And such a thing was unheard of in his family, whatever its lapses in other directions. It was bred in his very marrow to shrink with fastidious disgust from any form of monetary publicity. To owe money to tradespeople did not worry him in the least so long as they were sensible and patient, but there was ineffable disgrace in being blazoned to the world as a man hopelessly in debt.
It was at this agonizing point in his reflections that his attention was attracted by the peculiar antics of a dog emerging from the Schellingstrasse. It had dropped something and was howling, grovelling in evident appeal at the feet of a woman who soundly berated it. The woman stamped her huge foot and pointed to the object the dog had dropped. Howling and yelping an almost human protest, the dog picked up the object and ran past Ordham into the Ludwigstrasse, then discarded his burden once more, sat down on his haunches, and lifted up his voice in a series of cries that sounded like an appeal to the winking stars.
Ordham, his curiosity excited, went forward, and bending down, examined the object of the dog’s aversion. It was a block of ice. The poor beast was howling with a toothache. Ordham looked at the woman as much in amazement as in anger. She could have carried the ice in her skirt; it was inconceivable to him that any one could maltreat a dog. But as he opened his mouth to relieve his indignation, he realized that any attempt to penetrate the thick Bavarian skull with his inadequate German would be a mere waste of time. He picked up the piece of ice and dropped it into the pocket of his overcoat.
“If you will lead the way,” he said, “I will carry it for you.”
The astonished housewife stared in amazement, ejaculated “Ach Gott!” then, with a laugh of deep good-natured contempt, led off with a swing that exhibited the tops of her man’s boots, the red blanket petticoat above them, and the full flounces of her pantalets. She was almost as broad as long, her waist line being in no place distinguishable from the solid expanses above and below. Her skirts were short; she wore a shawl crossed over her upper amplitudes and pinned behind. A small Tyrolean hat sat jauntily above a walnut of plastered hair. She was a street sweeper, inured to every sort of hardship, and not likely to sympathize with a dog’s aching teeth. But no doubt she fed him as well as she could afford.
The strange procession made its way up the stately Ludwigstrasse, deserted but for the sentries before a palace. Once or twice Ordham, contemplating his guide, who swung like a vast pendulum, laughed silently. The grateful dog flew up and down, or frisked about his heels in an ecstasy of relief. At the Odeonsplatz were two belated cabs. Ordham handed into one the woman, the dog, and the ice, paid the driver, and sank into the other with a sigh of gratitude, not only for the more familiar mode of locomotion, but for the temporary diversion afforded by a dog with a toothache! For a few moments he had forgotten his bills and Frau von Wass. When he reached the Legation his throat was very sore, and fortune so far favoured him that on the following day he really was laid up with bronchitis. His servant took a verbal message to the Frau Geheimrath, which, after sharp questioning, she was forced to accept.
XV POTTERS CONFER
On this same morning there was a brief but pithy interview between Styr and Excellenz in the very centre of the Nachmeister gardens.
“So! so!” exclaimed the old woman; her grey eyes glittered like ice, the corners of her mouth were down, of her nose up. “It comes to this! Poor Fritz! We can save the young man if we are quick enough, but what of my poor old friend? . . . Ach, yes! You are not interested. He is old. You—yourself—look full of insolent youth this morning. I have never seen you in this mood. Cultivate it. You look twenty-eight. Myself, were I your age, should prefer to look more like a woman than a goddess. Also! Fritz must suffer in any case, so all we can do is to save the young man and spare the old one a lesion. Fritz is the vainest man in Germany or he would have found her out long since. He remains in Berlin ten days. You think she intends to make Mr. Ordham elope with her before his return. I wonder! Gott! I fancy it would take more than ten days to work our young friend up to that heroic pitch. More likely she has planned a coup of some sort. Otherwise—I doubt. He will politely promise to meet her at the train. At the last moment he will send a message—but in haste! ‘I am so sorry! I can’t go to-day. I have a cold.’ I know all the ingenious devices of that charming youth, and so, I doubt not, does Frau Hélène. He has not eaten of the big black cake of life yet, merely nibbled at its edges.”
“He is likely to choke on a slice unless we are quick enough.”
“True. Also! I repeat, she must know all his little ways by this time, have discovered that he is by no means as ingenuous as he looks, nor as easy to manage. She moves and lives in a network, a very maze, of intrigue. Only the devious ways appeal to her. You may be sure she has some plot on foot which the sudden departure of Fritz disarranged. That would account for her excitement that same afternoon. I have watched this little drama from the first, but she seems to have been playing a deeper game than I fancied—and different! I have watched many of her little dramas in the last twenty years. Of late it would seem that she had been lulling the suspicions of our young friend while she laid her wires. But what and where are those wires? There is only one way to find out and that is through her maid.”
“I thought of that, of course; but none of my servants know any of the Wass household.”
“Nor mine, probably. But I do my scheming through no such dangerous channels. The secret police is always at my service. By to-morrow night I shall have had an interview with the woman. If she has anything to reveal I shall extract it with the promise of a position in the Residenz; that is a bribe more potent than gold—which we will not use unless we must. As soon as I am in possession of the facts I shall act—you say he has vowed to do nothing rash for a week?”
“To be ill, if necessary. Fortunately she cannot storm the Legation.”
“Even so, we must act quickly. If the woman is really desperate, she will find some way to compromise him—and what more effective than a violent scene in the British Legation? It would be all over Munich in an hour. But, by all the saints,” Nachmeister crossed herself devoutly, “that scene she shall never make. We will baffle her before she has quite lost her patience.”
When Excellenz had bidden good-by to her guest she stood for a moment regarding the path with drawn brows. Had she engaged upon an enterprise to deliver the lamb from the panther to the tigress? In a moment she shook her head. She was a very wise old woman, and she recalled that Styr had made no apologies, no explanations. She had said nothing about disinterested friendship, taking a natural interest in a man so much younger than herself. Nachmeister had long outlived the folly of generalizing, of assuming that the same set of motives must govern the most diverse individuals. For the present, at least, Ordham was in no danger from the prima donna, who, no doubt, had lived her life, and would hardly waste her time playing upon the weakness of young men.
“But if I should be mistaken,” she thought grimly, “she too can be circumvented. Ordham must marry Mabel Cutting.”
XVI THE IVORY TOWER OF STYR
Two days later Styr stood in the tower of her living room, awaiting Excellenz, who had sent her a succession of hasty notes. As always, when the river was full, she had the sensation of floating on the current of the lovely light green waters. The birds were singing in her garden and in the deep glades of the park. The Isar itself sang of the glaciers and snow peaks that gave it birth. From the fields, beyond the heavy trees, came the dainty uplifting scent of newly mown hay. Usually this scene of sylvan isolation fed the poetry of her secret life, and in these morning hours, when the park was deserted, she might people it with satyrs and dryads, even with Valkyrs, if she wished. But to-day it seemed only the romantic annex to the exciting drama into which she had precipitated herself; and it required but a slight effort to conjure up the gorgeously dressed little butterfly with her ugly old soul in her desperate face, and the perplexed, doubtless terrified, young man, dragging his feet beside her.
Styr was by no means in a philosophic frame of mind. She fully realized that this license in which she had indulged for the first time in many years, this luxury of active interest in a human being, other than a student or a chorus girl in distress, would lead far—unless she promptly locked the gates again. Already her brain was showing a disposition to offer hospitality to more than one of the great interests with which the world palpitated. Yesterday she had been on the point of buying a newspaper. If Ordham continued to call, they would inevitably discuss all interests under the sun; books alone would never occupy them; one by one the atrophies in her uncommonly complete nature would disintegrate, disappear. And she had lived the inner life so completely, so jealously, almost as isolated in her villa by the Isar as had it been one of those schlosses on its lonely peak that decorate the German landscape! That sense of unviolated liberty! It had at times lifted her spirit to that exalted pitch to which music raises the emotional capacity of speech. There are more forms of happiness than one in this world, and Margarethe Styr had solved the greatest problem of woman’s existence: she was quite happy, and not because she had found the man of her heart, but because she had eliminated man from her existence altogether. Whether Nature, that inexorable slave-driver, would have permitted her to dwell in peace with art and her soul had not circumstances first made all men hateful to her, was beside the question. But although she had found happiness, it was at the expense of far more than the one dream to which most women cling until the last of their days. She had denied her mind much that it naturally craved, and she had suppressed those superficial frivolous instincts which have their own appetites. She often longed to dress (and show herself), in marvellous Paris frocks, and, never before having known women with whom she cared to associate (save briefly on Atlantic steamers), she would have derived much honest enjoyment from long gossips with these friendly sophisticated women of Munich; she would have liked to know and discuss all the little comedies, tragedies, diverting weaknesses, in the lives of her new compatriots. But she had not dared, and the results she had achieved by her fidelity to the life long since prescribed by her too enlightened brain, encouraged her to persist. She half resolved that, having done her obvious duty by a fellow-creature, she would withdraw from further intercourse with him at once. Better snap this link while her surfaces were merely rippled, not drift on until all that was feminine in her was caught in the net of the world again, and this ideal existence destroyed.
It was at this point in her meditations that Princess Nachmeister was shown into the gallery, and she went hastily through the arch to meet her.
“What a picture!” exclaimed Excellenz politely, although, indeed, she had long since reached the age when she could candidly enjoy feminine loveliness. “Fancy being able to wear unrelieved white in the morning! How do you like my new Paris frock? My maid says that the overskirt has too many pleats on the hips, but for my bones, I think not.”
Princess Nachmeister looked very smart in a costume of dark brown camel’s-hair and silk and a little bonnet of brown leaves, but Countess Tann gave it but a perfunctory glance, and Excellenz herself was too excited to demand more.
“Fritz arrives to-night and comes directly to me!” she announced. “I telegraphed yesterday afternoon that I must see him at once upon a business so important that he was not to waste time imagining it, but to come. He replied that he would leave Berlin this morning. Lotte made a sworn statement, and has obtained leave to visit her sick mother for two days in order to be out of the way of Hélène’s claws when the bolt falls. She is locked up in my house; but I do not wish her to see Fritz, lest his questions should lead to other revelations that would induce even him to sue for a divorce. And that would leave Hélène free to practise on the susceptibilities of our _jüngling_. No, I shall convince him—and present the subject in such a way that he may escape apoplexy. Three days hence Frau Hélène will be locked up in that castle in Hungary in good old mediæval style. I know my Fritz. His heart will never trouble him again until it develops fatty degeneration; but in his outraged vanity he will roar like a bull, he will be vicious, relentless, and in the confusion of his mind will follow blindly every suggestion I make. How he will hate her, and how he will make her pay! He will give out that he retires to Hungary for his health, taking, of course, his dutiful wife. Later, official matters recall him, but the Frau Geheimrath is afflicted with a goitre and desires to remain in seclusion. The season over, nobody thinks of her in any case. Oh, La Belle Hélène is disposed of, and our charming young friend is free to get himself into another scrape.”
“Not for some time, I fancy. He has had his lesson and is by no means a human caldron. He will not suspect that she has been shut up on his account. A young Englishman’s chivalry must be reckoned with—”
“Whatever he may suspect, he will discover nothing. Fritz will whisk her out of Munich to-night. From Hungary he will compel her to write Ordham a commonplace letter that will set him quite free.”
“Heavens, how old-fashioned and romantic you still are over here! The United States might be on another planet. But there is law for women in Europe. Will she not appeal to it? She has money of her own. Will she not escape from his castle and flee to her villa in Italy?”
“In theory, but not in fact. Fritz will not be made ridiculous in the eyes of Europe, no, not if he has to pour hot lead into her ear. But a threat of extinction and the hope of his speedy demise will keep her quiet, to say nothing of the fact that she will never escape from that castle. It is in the mountains near the Roumanian border. His servants are the wild creatures of that region, and will obey their master, not only because he is their master, but a mighty sportsman, and they revere that. I have visited there. What a romantic spot for a honeymoon! But as a prison—Ach Gott! She will never even get a letter out. When she has calmed down she will affect compliance, and take care of her complexion till Fritz dies. Then she will run to Paris, where she will be very smart and very wicked until she is fifty, when she will take to opium, religion, or roulette—all three, no doubt. But ach, dear Gräfin, what a tableau we shall miss in imagination! I could regret it, for I had every detail from Lotte. Mr. Ordham, with blank rigid face supporting the hysterical Hélène in the Pompadour boudoir, bored, vaguely apprehensive. Enter Lotte, followed by Fritz in his dressing-gown and nightcap. I am convinced he wears a mustard-yellow flannel dressing-gown like the one in which Salvini strangles Desdemona! Behind them the other servants, that the matter cannot be hushed up. It was a clever and a dramatic plot! It is almost a pity that it should not make its chapter in the unwritten history of society. And Gott! Gott! Fancy being still able to love like that! It makes one almost envious. It is the last love that makes a fool of the woman, and the first love that makes a man look as foolish as he is.”
“I suppose something interesting is happening every moment in your world?” said Styr, somewhat wistfully.
“All those little dramas are more or less alike. Only you are original, dear Gräfin, and do, for the sake of this tired old brain, remain so. If ever you succumb to your sex, I shall curse you. You are a great artist in histrionics, but I am a little artist in Life, and quite as exacting. Pay me fifty marks. I had to give that voracious Lotte a hundred, besides the promise of a position in the Residenz.”
XVII ROMANTIC MUNICH
For two days Ordham was really ill, or at least so uncomfortable that his mind was quite averted from his evil fortunes. But with the quick submission of his ailment to treatment alarm bells began to ring in his brain once more. He wasted no time, however, cursing fate and his folly, neither did he make any effort to consign their achievements to one of those water-tight compartments of which he was so proud. He set his wits to work and finally hit upon a compromise which promised to save both his honour and his credit. Immediately upon his recovery he would go to England, and by hook or crook get his debts paid. He would appeal to Bridgminster first; finding him obdurate, he would confide his predicament to his mother, and he well knew that to avert a scandal she would raise the money if she had to sell her jewels or beg of her relatives. Meanwhile he should have written to Frau von Wass, very formally,—when had he ever written to her otherwise?—assuring her that he should return to Munich within the month. If she followed him, she could be kept out of sight in London. Otherwise, he might venture to hope that before his return her common sense would have revived. If not, he supposed he should be an ass, as other men had been before him; but while his chances for the diplomatic career would be ruined, his credit would be immaculate in the eyes of his world, and that would almost console him.
As it was prudent to receive no visitors and as he was in no mood for the fiction of other minds, he arrayed one of his tables with certain books presented to him by his father long since, and whose contents he must master before presenting himself before the Civil Service Commission: histories of Europe, Asia, and America covering the period between 1789 and 1880; Blackstone’s _Commentaries_, Ker’s edition, 1862; Hallam’s _Constitutional History of England_; Mill’s _Political Economy_; Smith’s _Wealth of Nations_. Before now, when ill or annoyed, he had taken refuge in this austere masonry, and had found its fascinations quite as powerful for the time as the jewelled streets of literature where the creative minds displayed their wares. Sometimes, too, he read them when mortified with the knowledge that he had not “played up,” “risen to the occasion,” as an older man still gambling with edged tools would have done; a manifestation of the quickness and assimilative qualities of his intellect salved his wounded vanity and induced a temporary scorn of youthful follies. But, truth to tell, it is not likely that he would have opened one of these books for ten years to come could he have passed his examinations without their aid.
During the six days of his convalescence he read steadily, and if the severe diet did not elevate his spirits, it diverted his mind. From the third day of his incarceration he wrote Frau von Wass a series of pleasant little notes to keep her quiet, and, receiving no answer, inferred that she was sulking. As she crossed her letters (she never wrote him notes), he was thankful for the additional respite until the eighth day of his seclusion; then he began to feel uneasy and to wonder if she really meditated an attack on the Legation. He was on the point of cutting his convalescence short and hastening to London, when he was astounded to receive the following note from Hungary: