AN INTERVIEW WITH PRINCE ERNEST AND A MEETING WITH PRINCE OTTO
A messenger from Prince Ernest commanding my immediate attendance at
the palace signified that the battle had begun. I could have waited for
my father, whose return from one of his expeditions in the prince's
service was expected every instant; but though I knew I should have had
a powerful coadjutor in him to assist me through such a conference, I
preferred to go down alone. Prince Otto met me in the hall. He passed
by, glancing an eye sharply, and said over his shoulder,
'We shall have a word together presently!'
The library door was flung open. Prince Ernest and the margravine were
in the room. She walked out with angry majesty. The prince held his
figure in the stiff attitude of reception. He could look imposing.
The character of the interview was perceptible at once.
'You have not, I presume, to be informed of the business in hand, Mr.
Richmond!'
'Your Highness, I believe I can guess it.'
This started him pacing the floor.
'An impossibility! a monstrous extravagance! a thing unheard of! mania!
mania!' he muttered. 'You are aware, sir, that you have been doing your
worst to destroy the settled arrangements of my family? What does it
mean? In common reason you cannot indulge any legitimate hope of
succeeding. Taking you as a foreigner, you must know that. Judge of the
case by your own reigning Families. Such events never happen amongst
them. Do you suppose that the possession of immense wealth entitles you
to the immeasurable presumption of aspiring to equality of position
with reigning Houses? Such folly is more frequently castigated than
reasoned with. Why, now—now, were it published—that I had
condescended—condescend as I am doing, I should be the laughing-stock
of every Court in Europe. You English want many lessons. You are taught
by your scribes to despise the dignity which is not supported by a
multitude of bayonets, guns, and gold. I heard of it when I travelled
incognito. You make merry over little potentates. Good. But do not
cross their paths. Their dominion may be circumscribed, but they have
it; and where we are now, my power equals that of the Kaiser and the
Czar. You will do me the favour to understand that I am not boasting,
not menacing; I attempt, since it is extraordinarily imposed on me, to
instruct you. I have cause to be offended; I waive it. I meet you on
common ground, and address myself to your good sense. Have you anything
to say?'
'Much, sir.'
'Much?' he said, with affected incredulity.
The painful hardship for me was to reply in the vague terms he had been
pleased to use.
'I have much to say, your Highness. First, to ask pardon of you,
without excusing myself.'
'A condition, apparently, that absolves the necessity for the grant.
Speak precisely.'
But I was as careful as he in abstaining from any direct indication of
his daughter's complicity, and said, 'I have offended your Highness.
You have done me the honour to suggest that it is owing to my English
training. You will credit my assurance that the offence was not
intentional, not preconceived.'
'You charge it upon your having been trained among a nation of
shopkeepers?'
'My countrymen are not illiterate or unmannerly, your Highness.'
'I have not spoken it; I may add, I do not think it.'
'I feared that your Highness entertained what I find to be a very
general, perhaps here and there wilful, error with regard to England.'
'When I was in the service I had a comrade, a gallant gentleman, deeply
beloved by me, and he was an Englishman. He died in the uniform and
under the flag I reverence.'
'I rejoice that your Highness has had this experience of us. I have to
imagine that I expressed myself badly. My English training certainly
does not preclude the respect due to exalted rank. Your Highness will,
I trust humbly, pardon my offence. I do not excuse myself because I
cannot withdraw, and I am incapable of saying that I regret it.'
'In cool blood you utter that?' exclaimed the prince.
His amazement was unfeigned.
'What are the impossible, monstrous ideas you—where—? Who leads you to
fancy there is one earthly chance for you when you say you cannot
withdraw? Cannot? Are you requested? Are you consulted? It is a
question to be decided in the imperative: you must. What wheel it is
you think you have sufficient vigour to stop, I am profoundly unaware,
but I am prepared to affirm that it is not the wheel of my household. I
would declare it, were I a plain citizen. You are a nullity in the
case, in point of your individual will—a nullity swept away with one
wave of the hand. You can do this, and nothing else: you can apologize,
recognize your station, repair a degree of mischief that I will not say
was preconceived or plotted. So for awhile pursue your studies, your
travels. In time it will give me pleasure to receive you. Mr.
Richmond,' he added, smiling and rising; 'even the head of a little
German principality has to give numberless audiences.' His features
took a more cordial smile to convince me that the dismissing sentence
was merely playful.
As for me, my mind was confused by the visible fact that the father's
features resembled the daughter's. I mention it, that my mind's
condition may be understood.
Hardly had I been bowed out of the room when my father embraced me, and
some minutes later I heard Prince Otto talking to me and demanding
answers. That he or any one else should have hostile sentiments toward
a poor devil like me seemed strange. My gift of the horse appeared to
anger him most. I reached the chateau without once looking back, a
dispirited wretch. I shut myself up; I tried to read. The singular
brevity of my interview with the prince, from which I had expected
great if not favourable issues, affected me as though I had been struck
by a cannon shot; my brains were nowhere. His perfect courtesy was
confounding. I was tormented by the delusion that I had behaved
pusillanimously.
My father rushed up to me after dark. Embracing me and holding me by
the hand, he congratulated me with his whole heart. The desire of his
life was accomplished; the thing he had plotted for ages had come to
pass. He praised me infinitely. My glorious future, he said, was to
carry a princess to England and sit among the highest there, the
husband of a lady peerless in beauty and in birth, who, in addition to
what she was able to do for me by way of elevation in my country, could
ennoble in her own territory. I had the option of being the father of
English nobles or of German princes; so forth. I did not like the
strain; yet I clung to him. I was compelled to ask whether he had news
of any sort worth hearing.
'None,' said he calmly; 'none. I have everything to hear, nothing to
relate; and, happily, I can hardly speak for joy.' He wept.
He guaranteed to have the margravine at the chateau within a week,
which seemed to me a sufficient miracle. The prince, he said, might
require three months of discretionary treatment. Three further months
to bring the family round, and the princess would be mine. 'But she is
yours! she is yours already!' he cried authoritatively. 'She is the
reigning intellect there. I dreaded her very intellect would give us
all the trouble, and behold, it is our ally! The prince lives with an
elbow out of his income. But for me it would be other parts of his
person as well, I assure you, and the world would see such a princely
tatterdemalion as would astonish it. Money to him is important. He must
carry on his mine. He can carry on nothing without my help. By the way,
we have to deal out cheques?'
I assented.
In spite of myself, I caught the contagion of his exuberant happiness
and faith in his genius. The prince had applauded his energetic
management of the affairs of the mine two or three times in my hearing.
It struck me that he had really found his vocation, and would turn the
sneer on those who had called him volatile and reckless. This led me to
a luxurious sense of dependence on him, and I was willing to live on
dreaming and amused, though all around me seemed phantoms, especially
the French troupe, the flower of the Parisian stage: Regnault, Carigny,
Desbarolles, Mesdames Blanche Bignet and Dupertuy, and Mdlle. Jenny
Chassediane, the most spirituelle of Frenchwomen. 'They are a part of
our enginery, Richie,' my father said. They proved to be an
irresistible attraction to the margravine. She sent word to my father
that she meant to come on a particular day when, as she evidently knew,
I should not be present. Two or three hours later I had Prince Otto's
cartel in my hands. Jorian DeWitt, our guest at this season, told me
subsequently, and with the utmost seriousness, that I was largely
indebted to Mdlle. Jenny for a touching French song of a beau chevalier
she sang before Ottilia in my absence. Both he and my father believed
in the efficacy of this kind of enginery, but, as the case happened,
the beau chevalier was down low enough at the moment his highborn lady
listened to the song.
It appeared that when Prince Otto met me after my interview with Prince
Ernest, he did his best to provoke a rencontre, and failing to get
anything but a nod from my stunned head, betook himself to my
University. A friendly young fellow there, Eckart vom Hof, offered to
fight him on my behalf, should I think proper to refuse. Eckart and two
or three others made a spirited stand against the aristocratic party
siding with Prince Otto, whose case was that I had played him a
dishonourable trick to laugh at him. I had, in truth, persuaded him to
relieve me at once of horse and rival at the moment when he was
suffering the tortures of a rejection, and I was rushing to take the
hand he coveted; I was so far guilty. But to how great a degree
guiltless, how could I possibly explain to the satisfaction of an angry
man? I had the vision of him leaping on the horse, while I perused his
challenge; saw him fix to the saddle and smile hard, and away to do me
of all services the last he would have performed wittingly. The
situation was exactly of a sort for one of his German phantasy-writers
to image the forest jeering at him as he flew, blind, deaf, and
unreasonable, vehement for one fierce draught of speed. We are all
dogged by the humour of following events when we start on a wind of
passion. I could almost fancy myself an accomplice. I realized the
scene with such intensity in the light running at his heels: it may be
quite true that I laughed in the hearing of his messenger as I folded
up the letter. That was the man's report. I am not commonly one to be
forgetful of due observances.
The prospect of the possible eternal separation from my beloved pricked
my mechanical wits and set them tracing the consequent line by which I
had been brought to this pass as to a natural result. Had not my father
succeeded in inspiring the idea that I was something more than
something? The tendency of young men is to conceive it for themselves
without assistance; a prolonged puff from the breath of another is
nearly sure to make them mad as kings, and not so pardonably.
I see that I might have acted wisely, and did not; but that is a
speculation taken apart from my capabilities. If a man's fate were as a
forbidden fruit, detached from him, and in front of him, he might
hesitate fortunately before plucking it; but, as most of us are aware,
the vital half of it lies in the seed-paths he has traversed. We are
sons of yesterday, not of the morning. The past is our mortal mother,
no dead thing. Our future constantly reflects her to the soul. Nor is
it ever the new man of to-day which grasps his fortune, good or ill. We
are pushed to it by the hundreds of days we have buried, eager ghosts.
And if you have not the habit of taking counsel with them, you are but
an instrument in their hands.
My English tongue admonishes me that I have fallen upon a tone
resembling one who uplifts the finger of piety in a salon of
conversation. A man's review of the course of his life grows for a
moment stringently serious when he beholds the stream first broadening
perchance under the light interpenetrating mine just now.
My seconds were young Eckart vom Hof, and the barely much older, though
already famous Gregorius Bandelmeyer, a noted mathematician, a savage
Republican, lean-faced, spectacled, and long, soft-fingered; a cat to
look at, a tiger to touch. Both of them were animated by detestation of
the Imperial uniform. They distrusted my skill in the management of the
weapon I had chosen; for reasons of their own they carried a case of
pistols to the field. Prince Otto was attended by Count Loepel and a
Major Edelsheim of his army, fresh from the garrison fortress of Mainz,
gentlemen perfectly conversant with the laws of the game, which my
worthy comrades were not. Several minutes were spent in an altercation
between Edelsheim and Bandelmeyer. The major might have had an affair
of his own had he pleased. My feelings were concentrated within the
immediate ring where I stood: I can compare them only to those of a
gambler determined to throw his largest stake and abide the issue. I
was not open to any distinct impression of the surrounding scenery; the
hills and leafage seemed to wear an iron aspect. My darling, my saint's
face was shut up in my heart, and with it a little inaudible cry of
love and pain. The prince declined to listen to apologies. 'He meant to
teach me that this was not a laughing matter.' Major Edelsheim had
misunderstood Bandelmeyer; no offer of an apology had been made. A
momentary human sensation of an unworthy sort beset me when I saw them
standing together again, and contrasted the collectedness and
good-humour of my adversary's representative with the vexatious and
unnecessary naggling of mine, the sight of whose yard-long pipe
scandalized me.
At last the practical word was given. The prince did not reply to my
salute. He was smoking, and kept his cigar in one corner of his mouth,
as if he were a master fencer bidding his pupil to come on. He assumed
that he had to do with a bourgeois Briton unused to arms, such as we
are generally held to be on the Continent. After feeling my wrist for a
while he shook the cigar out of his teeth.
The 'cliquetis' of the crossed steel must be very distant in memory,
and yourself in a most dilettante frame of mind, for you to be
accessible to the music of that thin skeleton's clank. Nevertheless, it
is better and finer even at the time of action, than the abominable
hollow ogre's eye of the pistol-muzzle. We exchanged passes, the prince
chiefly attacking. Of all the things to strike my thoughts, can you
credit me that the vividest was the picture of the old woman Temple and
I had seen in our boyhood on the night of the fire dropping askew, like
forks of brown flame, from the burning house in London city; I must
have smiled. The prince cried out in French: 'Laugh, sir; you shall
have it!' He had nothing but his impetuosity for an assurance of his
promise, and was never able to force me back beyond a foot. I touched
him on the arm and the shoulder, and finally pierced his arm above the
elbow. I could have done nearly what I liked with him; his skill was
that of a common regimental sabreur.
'Ludere qui nescit campestribus abstinet armis!' Bandelmeyer sang out.
'You observed?' said Major Edelsheim, and received another
disconcerting discharge of a Latin line. The prince frowned and made
use of some military slang. Was his honour now satisfied? Not a whit.
He certainly could not have kept his sword-point straight, and yet he
clamoured to fight on, stamped, and summoned me to assault him,
proposed to fight me with his left hand after his right had failed; in
short, he was beside himself, an example of the predicament of a man
who has given all the provocation and finds himself disabled. My
seconds could have stopped it had they been equal to their duties;
instead of which Bandelmeyer, hearing what he deemed an insult to the
order of student and scholar, retorted furiously and offensively, and
Eckart, out of good-fellowship, joined him, whereat Major Edelsheim, in
the act of bandaging the prince's arm, warned them that he could not
pass by an outrage on his uniform. Count Loepel stept politely forward,
and gave Eckart a significant bow. The latter remarked mockingly, 'With
pleasure and condescension!' At a murmur of the name of doctor from
Edelsheim, the prince damned the doctor until he or I were food for
him. Irritated by the whole scene, and his extravagant vindictiveness,
in which light I regarded the cloak of fury he had flung over the shame
of his defeat, I called to Bandelmeyer to open his case of pistols and
offer them for a settlement. As the proposal came from me, it was found
acceptable. The major remonstrated with the prince, and expressed to me
his regrets and et caeteras of well-meant civility. He had a hard task
to keep out of the hands of Bandelmeyer, who had seized my sword, and
wanted vi et armis to defend the cause of Learning and the People
against military brigands on the spot. If I had not fallen we should
have had one or two other prostrate bodies.
A silly business on all sides.