IN VIEW OF THE HOHENZOLLERN'S BIRTHPLACE
Our cruise came to an end in time to save the margravine from yawning.
The last day of it was windless, and we hung in sight of the colourless
low Flemish coast for hours, my father tasking his ingenuity to amuse
her. He sang with Miss Sibley, rallied Mr. Peterborough, played picquet
to lose, threw over the lead line to count the fathoms, and whistling
for the breeze, said to me, 'We shall decidedly have to offer her an
exhibition of tipsy British seamen as a final resource. The case is
grave either way; but we cannot allow the concluding impression to be a
dull one.'
It struck me with astonishment to see the vigilant watch she kept over
the princess this day, after having left her almost uninterruptedly to
my care.
'You are better?' She addressed Ottilia. 'You can sit up? You think you
can walk? Then I have acted rightly, nay, judiciously,—I have not made
a sacrifice for nothing. I took the cruise, mind you, on your account.
You would study yourself to the bone, till you looked like a canary's
quill, with that Herr Professor of yours. Now I've given you a dose of
life. Yes, you begin to look like human flesh. Something has done you
good.'
The princess flushing scarlet, the margravine cried,
'There's no occasion for you to have the whole British army in your
cheeks. Goodness me! what's the meaning of it? Why, you answer me like
flags, banners, uhlans' pennons, fullfrocked cardinals!'
My father stepped in.
'Ah, yes,' said the margravine. 'But you little know, my good Roy, the
burden of an unmarried princess; and heartily glad shall I be to hand
her over to Baroness Turckems. That's her instituted governess, duenna,
dragon, what you will. She was born for responsibility, I was not; it
makes me miserable. I have had no holiday. True, while she was like one
of their wax virgins I had a respite. Fortunately, I hear of you
English, that when you fall to sighing, you suck your thumbs and are
consoled.'
My father bowed her, and smiled her, and whirled her away from the
subject. I heard him say, under his breath, that he had half a mind to
issue orders for an allowance of grog to be served out to the sailors
on the spot. I suggested, as I conceived in a similar spirit the
forcible ducking of Mr. Peterborough. He appeared to entertain and
relish the notion in earnest.
'It might do. It would gratify her enormously,' he said, and eyed the
complacent clerical gentleman with transparent jealousy of his claims
to decent treatment. 'Otherwise, I must confess,' he added, 'I am at a
loss. My wits are in the doldrums.'
He went up to Mr. Peterborough, and, with an air of great sincerity and
courtesy, requested him in French to create a diversion for her
Highness the Margravine of Rippau during the extreme heat of the
afternoon by precipitating himself headlong into forty fathoms, either
attached or unattached. His art in baffling Mr. Peterborough's attempts
to treat the unheard-of request as a jest was extraordinary. The
ingenuity of his successive pleas for pressing such a request
pertinaciously upon Mr. Peterborough in particular, his fixed eye, yet
cordial deferential manner, and the stretch of his forefinger, and
argumentative turn of the head—indicative of an armed disputant fully
on the alert, and as if it were of profound and momentous importance
that he should thoroughly defeat and convince his man—overwhelmed us.
Mr. Peterborough, not being supple in French, fell back upon his
English with a flickering smile of protestation; but even in his native
tongue he could make no head against the tremendous volubility and
brief eager pauses besetting him.
The farce was too evanescent for me to reproduce it.
Peterborough turned and fled to his cabin. Half the crew were on the
broad grin. The margravine sprang to my father's arm, and entreated him
to be her guest in her Austrian mountain summer-seat. Ottilia was now
her darling and her comfort. Whether we English youth sucked our
thumbs, or sighed furiously, she had evidently ceased to care. Mr.
Peterborough assured me at night that he had still a difficulty in
persuading himself of my father's absolute sanity, so urgent was the
fire of his eye in seconding his preposterous proposal; and, as my
father invariably treated with the utmost reserve a farce played out,
they never arrived at an understanding about it, beyond a sententious
agreement once, in the extreme heat of an Austrian highland valley,
that the option of taking a header into sea-water would there be
divine.
Our yacht winged her way home. Prince Ernest of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld,
accompanied by Baroness Turckems, and Prince Otto, his nephew, son of
the Prince of Eisenberg, a captain of Austrian lancers, joined the
margravine in Wurtemberg, and we felt immediately that domestic affairs
were under a different management. Baroness Turckems relieved the
margravine of her guard. She took the princess into custody. Prince
Ernest greeted us with some affability; but it was communicated to my
father that he expected an apology before he could allow himself to be
as absolutely unclouded toward us as the blaze of his titles. My father
declined to submit; so the prince inquired of us what our destination
was. Down the Danube to the Black Sea and Asia Minor, Greece, Egypt,
the Nile, the Desert, India, possibly, and the Himalayas, my father
said. The prince bowed. The highest personages, if they cannot travel,
are conscious of a sort of airy majesty pertaining to one who can
command so wide and far a flight. We were supplicated by the margravine
to appease her brother's pride with half a word. My father was firm.
The margravine reached her two hands to him. He kissed over them each
in turn. They interchanged smart semi-flattering or cutting sentences.
'Good!' she concluded; 'now I sulk you for five years.'
'You would decapitate me, madam, and weep over my astonished head,
would you not?'
'Upon my honour, I would,' she shook herself to reply.
He smiled rather sadly.
'No pathos!' she implored him.
'Not while I live, madam,' said he.
At this her countenance underwent a tremour.
'And when that ends... friend! well, I shall have had my last laugh in
the world.'
Both seemed affected. My father murmured some soothing word.
'Then you do mean to stay with me?' the margravine caught him up.
'Not in livery, your Highness.'
'To the deuce with you!' would be a fair translation of the exalted
lady's reply. She railed at his insufferable pride.
'And you were wrong, wrong,' she pursued. 'You offended the prince
mightily: you travestied his most noble ancestor—'
'In your service, may it please you.'
'You offended, offended him, I say, and you haven't the courage to make
reparation. And when I tell you the prince is manageable as your ship,
if you will only take and handle the rudder. Do you perceive?'
She turned to me.
'Hither, Mr. Harry; come, persuade him. Why, you do not desire to leave
me, do you?'
Much the reverse. But I had to congratulate myself subsequently on
having been moderate in the expression of my wishes; for, as my father
explained to me, with sufficient lucidity to enlighten my dulness, the
margravine was tempting him grossly. She saw more than I did of his
plans. She could actually affect to wink at them that she might gain
her point, and have her amusement, and live for the hour, treacherously
beguiling a hoodwinked pair to suppose her partially blind or wholly
complaisant. My father knew her and fenced her.
'Had I yielded,' he said, when my heart was low after the parting, 'I
should have shown her my hand. I do not choose to manage the prince
that the margravine may manage me. I pose my pride—immolate my son to
it, Richie? I hope not. No. At Vienna we shall receive an invitation to
Sarkeld for the winter, if we hear nothing of entreaties to turn aside
to Ischl at Munich. She is sure to entreat me to accompany her on her
annual visit to her territory of Rippau, which she detests; and,
indeed, there is not a vine in the length and breadth of it. She
thought herself broad awake, and I have dosed her with an opiate.'
He squeezed my fingers tenderly. I was in want both of consolation and
very delicate handling when we drove out of the little Wurtemberg town:
I had not taken any farewell from Ottilia. Baroness Turckems was
already exercising her functions of dragon. With the terrible
forbidding word 'Repose' she had wafted the princess to her chamber in
the evening, and folded her inextricably round and round in the
morning. The margravine huffed, the prince icy, Ottilia invisible, I
found myself shooting down from the heights of a dream among shattered
fragments of my cloud-palace before I well knew that I had left off
treading common earth. All my selfish nature cried out to accuse
Ottilia. We drove along a dusty country road that lay like a glaring
shaft of the desert between vineyards and hills.
'There,' said my father, waving his hand where the hills on our left
fell to a distance and threw up a lofty head and neck cut with one
white line, 'your Hohenzollerns shot up there. Their castle looks like
a tight military stock. Upon my word, their native mountain has the air
of a drum major. Mr. Peterborough, have you a mind to climb it? We are
at your disposal.'
'Thank you, thank you, sir,' said the Rev. Ambrose, gazing
enthusiastically, but daunted by the heat: 'if it is your wish?'
'We have none that is not yours, Mr. Peterborough. You love ruins, and
we are adrift just now. I presume we can drive to the foot of the
ascent. I should wish my son perhaps to see the source of great
houses.'
Here it was that my arm was touched by old Schwartz. He saluted
stiffly, and leaning from the saddle on the trot of his horse at an
even pace with our postillion, stretched out a bouquet of roses. I
seized it palpitating, smelt the roses, and wondered. May a man write
of his foolishness?—tears rushed to my eyes. Schwartz was far behind us
when my father caught sight of the magical flowers.
'Come!' said he, glowing, 'we will toast the Hohenstaufens and the
Hohenzollerns to-night, Richie.'
Later, when I was revelling in fancies sweeter than the perfume of the
roses, he pressed their stems reflectively, unbound them, and disclosed
a slip of crested paper. On it was written:
'Violets are over.'
Plain words; but a princess had written them, and never did so golden a
halo enclose any piece of human handiwork.