The Marshal, having plumped out with golden blood the depleted veins
of Hector’s account at Rothschild’s, exacted his pound of flesh in the
matter of the Claim of Succession. Köhler and von Steyregg, those birds
of ill omen, shortly presented themselves at the Rue du Bac, bearing
the elder Dunoisse’s letter of introduction, addressed to “His Serene
Highness the Hereditary Prince of Widinitz,” and bearing three immense
splashes of scarlet sealing-wax, impressed with the writer’s own
pretentious coat of arms....
* * * * *
Two such men, these agents, capacious vessels of clay, into which the
Marshal’s gold was continually ladled....
Köhler styled himself an Attorney and Commissioner of Oaths of Prague.
One felt sure wherever his offices were, that the business of the
money-lenders flowed across the threshold. You saw him as a small,
pale, scrupulously-attired, flaxen-haired man, with sharp, shallow
brown eyes. Three or four bristling yellow hairs at the outer angles of
the upper lip served him as a mustache--one thought of a white rat when
one looked at him. Von Steyregg was a vast, pachydermatous personality,
whose body was up-borne on short legs, shaped like balusters, and
clad in the tightest of checked pantaloons. His venerable black
frock-coat had grown green through long service--the copper of the
buttons peeped through the frayed cloth. His swag-belly rolled under
an immense nankeen waistcoat--over the voluminous folds of a soiled
muslin cravat depended his triple row of saddlebag chins, his moist,
sagging mouth betokened a love of good cheer, the hue of his nose--an
organ of the squashed-strawberry type one so seldom meets with at this
era--testified to its owner’s appreciation of potent liquors. Huge
shapeless ears, pale purple-and-brown speckled, jutted like jug-handles
from his high-peaked head, whose bald and shiny summit rose, lonely as
an Alp, from a forest of flaming red hair. His little gray eyes were
latticed with red veins. From one of them distilled a perpetual tear,
destined to become a haunting bugbear to his employer’s son.
Von Steyregg, who swore in a dozen languages with equal facility and
incorrectness, claimed to be a Magyar of noble family. His dog’s
eared visiting card dubbed him Baron. On occasions of ceremony,
an extraordinary star in tarnished metal, suspended from a soiled
watered-silk ribbon of red, green, and an indistinguishable shade,
which may once have been white, dignified his vast expanse of
snuff-stained shirt-front. Though its owner declared this ornament to
be the Order of St. Emmerich, bestowed by that saintly Prince upon a
paternal ancestor, the reader may suspect it to have been originally
a stage-property. Steyregg having failed in theatrical management
at Vienna, Pesth, and elsewhere; and being, when full of wine--and
it took an immense quantity of that liquor to fill him--prodigal of
reminiscences of the _coulisses_, pungent and racy; related with the
Rabelaisian garniture of nods, winks, leers, and oaths of the most
picturesque and highly-flavored kind.
Both men invariably addressed Dunoisse as “Highness” or “Your Serene
Highness.” They maintained a scrupulous parade of deference and respect
in their dealings with their victim--they retreated backwards from his
presence--to Madame de Roux they almost prostrated themselves--kotowing
profoundly as the Ministers of the Fifteenth Louis, before the dainty
jeweled shoe-buckles of the Pompadour....
Of the mad tarantula-dance through which this precious pair of showmen
presently jerked their puppet,--of the kennel of obloquy and shame
through which they dragged him with his companion,--the writer,
confessing to some degree of parental tenderness for the hero of the
story, designs to tell as briefly as may be.
According to Köhler and von Steyregg, the Regent Luitpold, having
obtained from the King of Bavaria permission, confirmed by the approval
of the Bund, to secularize several wealthy monasteries within the
principality of Widinitz, was in worse odor with his Catholic subjects
than ever before. Not only had several large communities of religious
been reduced to penury and rendered homeless; but certain influential
farmers, tenants of these, had been ejected from their homesteads,
and divers peasants, having espoused the cause of the monks with less
worldly wisdom than goodwill, had been turned out of their cottages,
or had them pulled down over their heads. Disaffection was spreading,
discontent prevailed. The iron was hot, said von Steyregg and Köhler,
for the striking of a blow in the interests of the son of Princess
Marie-Bathilde.
You may imagine how eloquently the Marshal’s agents dwelt upon the
enormities of Luitpold; you can conceive how they advanced their plan,
and pressed its various points upon the passive victim. Wreaths of
verbal blossoms covered up its spotted ugliness. Was it not a beautiful
and edifying notion, asked von Steyregg, that the Heir-aspirant to the
feudal throne of Widinitz should take part in the great annual festival
of mid-August, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin--at which season
the Lutheran Regent--loathing the smell of incense and the chanting of
Litanies as another personage is reputed to abominate holy water--yet
not daring to provoke his Catholic liegemen to the point of open
rebellion by prohibiting the procession--invariably absented himself
from his capital, or shut himself up in the Schloss. The suggestion of
so open a bid for popularity Dunoisse at first scouted. But the whole
plan had a spice of adventure that charmed and excited Madame....
Paris would be intolerable in August--a delicious month to travel in.
Henriette had never seen Bavaria--she longed to breathe the air of its
romantic pine-forests, and gaze upon its sunset-flushed snow-peaks. For
two pins she would make one of the expedition, she vowed.
And Dunoisse, being keenly aware that, although no suppers would be
given at the Elysée during the red-hot months of autumn, there would
be _fêtes_ at the Tuileries and at St. Cloud, and shooting parties
at Compiègne and Fontainebleau, was extremely willing to gratify the
desire of his fair friend....
Indeed, when von Steyregg and Köhler hinted that the Marshal would
not welcome the addition of a petticoat to the party, the Colonel
manifested for the first time in their experience, energy and decision.
“My father may please or not please,” he said to them. “I do not go
without Madame de Roux!”
The Marshal received the information with a fearful outburst of
profanity.
“He is not to be moved, Monseigneur!” said Köhler.
“Excellency,” put in von Steyregg, “the Prince, your son, is a chip of
the old block. Without the petticoat he will not budge, I pledge you
the word of a Magyar nobleman!” He shook his bald and flaming head,
and shook off the tear that as usual hung pendulous from the weeping
eyelid, as he added:
“And the lady is a highly attractive person!”
“We shall split on the rock of her attractive person!” said the Marshal
with a detonating oath. And so it ultimately proved.
* * * * *
Neither then, nor long afterwards, when the scar of the appalling
fiasco had partially healed, could Dunoisse rid himself of the
impression that the expedition had been of the type of adventure that
is wrought of the stuff of dreams.
In the highlands of South Bavaria, sheltered by the skirts of the
Alps, lay the Principality of Widinitz, a mountainous district cloaked
with beech-woods and pine-forests, jeweled by turquoise lakes, and
valleys like hollowed emeralds, kept green in the fiercest heats by the
mountain-torrents and glacier-rivers and streams of melted snow....
That August journey was one of unclouded pleasure. The handsome officer
and the lovely lady in the luxurious dark green traveling-chariot, that
was lined with pale green satin and drawn by three powerful grays, were
taken by the hosts and hostesses of the picturesque, vine-draped and
rose-covered posting-inns where they slept, or halted to change horses,
to be a honeymooning couple. One may imagine how the princely coronet
that gleamed above the coat-of-arms emblazoned on the door-panels of
the green chariot (a touch of von Steyregg’s) and engraved upon the
silver plating of the harness (a happy inspiration of Köhler’s) swelled
the totals of the bills. As for the Marshal’s agents, sharing with the
Colonel’s valet and Madame’s maid the big brown landau that lumbered
at the heels of four stout beasts in the wheel-tracks of the green
chariot, they were supposed to be the major-domo and the chaplain of
the distinguished pair.
Köhler traveled light in the matter of baggage. A battered hat-box and
a venerable portmanteau contained his indispensable necessaries of
the road. An old campaigner in the field of fortune, von Steyregg’s
coat-tails invariably did duty as his carpet-bags and valises.
Upturned, these well-stuffed receptacles served as cushions, upon which
the Baron lolled magnificently, patronizing the subservient valet and
the blushing maid who secretly admired large, overbearing men with
flamboyant hair. True, von Steyregg’s hyacinthine locks left off long
before they reached the summit of his cranium, but you cannot have
everything, thought the maid.
“We are not real,” Henriette would say to her lover. “We are two
sweethearts out of some fairy-tale of M. Anthony de Hamilton or Madame
d’Aulnoy.... That old woman in the red cloak is not a wood-gathering
peasant, but a witch; that black face peeping at us through the bushes
does not belong to a charcoal-burner or a lignite-miner, but to some
spiteful gnome or kobold.... You are the Prince of the Enchanted City
in the Sleeping Forest. And I am your Princess, my dear!”
Dunoisse sighed, knowing that whether he were a Prince or not would
depend upon the disposition of the liegemen of Widinitz; upon the
goodwill of His Majesty the King of Bavaria; upon the approval of the
Diet of the Germanic Confederation, and the clinching decision of the
Special Tribunal known as the Austrägal Court. And that, even if these
powers were unanimous in confirming the claim of Succession made by the
son of Marie-Bathilde, the question of Henriette’s ever becoming the
legal partner of the throne, which in that event would be his, opened
up another vista of possibilities, amongst which Divorce loomed large
... whilst Death, his black robe discreetly draped about his grisly
anatomy, hovered unobtrusively in the background.
_Nom d’un petit bonhomme!_ If de Roux should die, that regrettable loss
to the Army of France would be, it seemed to Dunoisse, the way out of
the tangled labyrinth of difficulties and anxieties.
His eyes avoided Henriette’s, lest she should read his thought in them.
But hers were raised to the rosy snow-peaks that lifted above the dark,
shaggy green of the pine-forests, her sensitive nostrils quivered, her
lips were parted as she drank the fragrant air.
How crystal-pure she seemed.... And yet it was but seeming.... A
picture, shown upon the background of a murky Paris street-corner,
by the flare of a smoky lamp, rose up in Dunoisse’s memory; and the
ugly, haunting laugh of the tall, sardonic workman who had chatted
with a comrade on that unforgettable night of the return from London,
sounded in his ears. And when Henriette asked, turning to him with the
tenderest solicitude in her lovely face:
“Why do you shiver, dearest? Are you cold?” her lover answered, with
forced gayety:
“A footstep must have passed over the place where my grave is to be
made. You know the old saying?”
“Quite well,” she told him, adding with an exquisite inflection of
tenderness. “But it would be ‘our’ grave, Hector.... For I could not
live without you, you know that very well! Dearest, why do you start?”
For the muscles of the shoulder against which she leaned, had given
a sudden jerk, and the man’s head had pivoted from her abruptly, as
though pulled by a wire.
“Did I start?” he asked, looking back at her rather vaguely. “If so,
it was because I fancied--not for the first time--that I heard someone
laugh in there!...”
He pointed to the covert of pine-scrub, larch, yellow-berried
mountain-ash, and tall brake-fern that edged the forest road, and
went climbing with them still when the slower oaks and beeches were
outstripped and left behind. It was Henriette’s turn to shiver now.
Hector was so strange--so very strange--she told herself, at times!...
Another man, much less handsome, not half so sweet-tempered, amiable,
devoted, and clever, would have made a pleasanter companion upon
these wild, rugged mountain-roads.... His blue eyes would have had a
provoking challenge always, for those of his friend.... Cynical jests,
sharp witticisms, would have alternated with daring compliments, bold
hints, and subtle allusions, upon his projecting, fleshy lips. Yet de
Moulny, a year or so back, had been a submissive, humble lover. In
those days he had yielded to and been ruled by the will of Henriette.
In these days, delicacy and shyness no longer characterized his wooing.
He demanded, exacted, extorted favors that others had obtained by
service and suit, and sighs.... She said to herself, as a mysterious
smile hovered about the exquisite lips, and the long, dark lashes swept
the cheeks that no sun, however ardent, might kiss to russet, that
Alain was no fool! He had found out that what women liked best in a man
was hardihood, and assurance touched with brutality. He had learned the
secret of success with the sex.
Now, Hector....
When a Henriette begins to compare her lover, to his disadvantage, with
other men, she has already wearied of him. His day is over and past.
Thenceafter, nearer and ever nearer, draws the fatal crisis. No fresh
turning in the beaten road they travel together, but may lead to a
definite parting of the ways.