that interlude of amusement, dissipation--experience of life before
marriage--commonly known as "sowing his wild oats." It was, perhaps,
because of his English education, hearty, wholesome, sporting; by reason
too, no doubt, of the English deliberation inherited from his mother,
joined to his own fastidious self-sufficiency, that he had never felt
the want of a woman's share in his life. The pretty chin of a peasant
girl had never tempted his fingers. Little Sidonia of the forest house,
had she been ten times more beautiful, had never needed to wield her
plaits as flails to beat down his enterprise. Had not the fiddler's
music got into his veins, that strange night; had not the insidious
white wine mounted to his head, he had surely never succumbed so rapidly
to the fascination of the young Italian. Yet her chief attraction, in
his eyes, had been, not the parted, dewy lips, not the violet gaze of
her eyes, but the false attribution to her of birth and breeding, born
of his own imagination. The moonlight kiss he had suddenly yearned for
was to have been snatched from a great lady--faugh! not from a
_ballerina_! Here had, indeed, been a lesson, a humiliation--all the
more deep-felt because the punishment seemed disproportionate to the
single lapse. His mind went back to it sullenly, once and again. There
were men, he knew, to whom the true character of the fair traveller
would have been an additional allurement. He was not of them.
His fastidiousness revolted, almost as a woman's might, no less from the
thought of any inferiority of status, than from the knowledge that where
he condescended to favour, others had already carried their easy
victories.
Yet, although the image of the dancer lingered no more pleasantly in his
fancy than did that of the little patrician--disdainfully unnoticed in
her peasant garb--that night of adventure in the forest had left a deep
stamp upon the young man; but the chief memory for him, the one
personality towards which his thoughts constantly reverted, was that of
the grey-haired roadside fiddler. He had met a king yonder night, but
it was the vagrant he longed to see again. He had fought for his life
with one of the most notorious rufflers in Europe, but the scenes he
re-lived, with the fond dalliance of a slow-thinking youth, was the
meeting on the road in the rosy sunset and the parting in the green
forest dawn. He was haunted by the man's smile, by his voice, by the
way of his hands--above all, his music.
The taunting music, with its yearning, its suggestion, ever alluring and
ever elusive, played to him by night and day. It seemed as if he should
come to his old self again, could he but encounter that strange
companion once more and test the emptiness of his fascination, the folly
and absurdity of it! At least, this was what he told himself, to excuse
his own inconceivable action. For here was he actually ranging the
country, in search of what? A sort of fiddling vagabond. A fellow,
moreover, who had rated his nobility at such insolent cheapness; had
slighted him; had mocked, chided; had treated him as no one, since
childhood, had presumed to treat the important young nobleman.
But it was an obsession: idle to try and reason it away. No, he would
never rest till his desire was accomplished.
So he wandered along the Thuringian ways, making stealthy inquiries here
and there; fruitlessly, but always lured on from village to village,
round and about the great forest district, where, he was credibly
informed, the fiddler was wont to roam about this time of year;
constantly met with the tidings that, but the day before, but last
night, but two hours ago, the wanderer had been seen to pass along that
very road. The gracious gentleman would surely catch him on the highway
to Helmstadt; at the farmhouse of Groenfeld, where he always lingered;
at the fair in the next hamlet, where he was absolutely promised!
Sometimes it seemed as if the very trail of his music hung in the air;
there was something fantastic in the constant presence, always escaping
him.
Steven, fully conscious of the absurdity of the situation, set his teeth
in still more dogged determination, as the days went by. And the
pursuit, started at first half idly, now became a thing of earnestness,
a chase almost passionate.
"I told Geiger-Hans about the fine young nobleman that was always
looking for him," called out a sunburnt girl one morning, as he passed
for the second time through her green-embowered village.
Steven halted. He was on foot, after his fashion, tired with his
fruitless tramp, out of temper.
"That was very kind of you," retorted he, sarcastically. "And what said
the fellow?"
The girl's teeth flashed in her tanned face. She poised her bucket on
the rim of the well, and shrugged her shoulder archly.
"Geiger-Hans said to me," she giggled: "'If one wants to be followed,
one must first retire--remember that, Maedel,' he said. He said that to
me," she went on, "because of the lad I'm after."
Steven turned away with a "pish!" of scorn for such low dallying, and an
uneasy sense of doubt that the fiddler's avoidance of him was
deliberate. As he swung away from her, the girl called after him
good-naturedly:
"If the gracious gentleman will go to Wellenshausen, he will surely find
Geiger-Hans sooner or later. He is never far from the Burg, this time
of year."
"Pah!" thought Steven, "shall I waste more time in running down this
beggar? The folk here-abouts must think me as crazy as himself! They
are all in league to make me tramp. I vow this is some trick of the
vagabond. I think I see myself squatting at a wretched village, humbly
waiting Master Fiddler's pleasure."
And yet, to Wellenshausen, he next day found his way.
Thus Steven Lee, Count Waldorff-Kielmansegg, a young man of usually
epicurean tastes, chose to linger in God-forsaken, out-of-the-way
corners of Westphalia, this September in the year of wars, 1813.
In the eyes of his valet this was incomprehensible; seriously annoying;
indeed, a matter for much head-shaking. Instead of making for the gay
capital of King Jerome and enjoying himself "like a gentleman," he hung
about the outskirts of the Thuringian Forest and haunted the inns of
half-deserted townships, of poverty-stricken villages on the high
imperial road. While the postilions and the above-mentioned valet
cursed the thin wine and the gross fare, while the horses of the
travelling-chaise fretted the hours away in unworthy stables, their lord
and master took solitary rambles on foot, as if in search of no one knew
what, only to return, haughty as usual, weary and discontented.
When a halt was ordered for the night in the hamlet of Wellenshausen,
instead of pushing on to the decent town of Halberstadt, as he had
expected, valet Franz felt the situation more than his lively Viennese
spirit could endure and vowed he would resign. He tapped his forehead
significantly as his master strolled out of the vine-grown guest-house,
looking up and down the street in his singular, expectant fashion.
"There's question of a maiden," said postilion Peter, grimacing over his
mug, "or else the devil's in it."
Further than this their diagnosis of the master's state of mind could
not go.
* * * * *
Albeit on the skirt of the low lands, the village of Wellenshausen was
yet still of the mountain. It rode, so to speak, a bold buttress of the
distant wooded range, and was sheltered to the north by an imposing
crag, that rose, pinnacle-like, so detached and huge that it would have
seemed inaccessible but for the testimony of the castle perched on its
summit--the far-famed Burg of Wellenshausen. From the flank of this
mount, a torrent of black waters, strangely cold at all times, born in
some mysterious and dreaded cavern of the rocks, rushed, foaming brown;
and, on its way to the plain, cut the village in two.
Steven Lee gazed upwards at the old Burg, frowning of aspect at most
times, but just now, as it caught on its narrow windows the rays of a
sinking sun, shining rosily upon the valleys. His fancy was wafted up
for a moment to the height on a wing of airy romance, when a clamour of
children's voices turned his attention in a new direction. A string of
ragged urchins was rushing in the direction of the torrent. Over the
bridge a man's figure was approaching at a swinging pace. It stopped
for a moment on the summit of the rough stone arch; and the notes of a
fiddle, in lively measure, rose above the children's shouts and the roar
of the waters. Dancing, singing, leaping, catching at his coattails,
they surrounded the musician and followed him. He advanced like the
magic piper of the legend.
Steven stood still in the middle of the way; a gleam in his eye, the
sunset radiance on his smiling face. The player came up to him and
greeted him with a bow, his fiddle still at his chin the while he
finished his stave.
"Good evening, my lord Count. We have met before," said he. His tone
was placidly courteous, if his glance mocked.
"And I well-nigh despaired of our meeting again," returned the young
man, with some show of emotion. "Your music has been running in my
head--implacably--all these days. I think you must have bewitched me!"
There was a note almost of reproach in his voice; and yet he blushed as
he spoke, ashamed of his own eagerness in such a quarter.
"Why," said the other, cruelly, "I fear you're but a dull lad. Great
Apollo, could we change places, I would need no old man's company!--Nay,
now, children, let a gentleman speak to a gentleman." He paused in a
moment's meditation, looked through the inn gateway, then glanced up
swiftly at the distant towering strong house. "Is it possible your
lordship has chosen this barren village for a stage? I see your
attendants supping--right sadly--in the arbour yonder. Will you bid me
to supper also, comrade?"
He looped his threadbare sleeve into Steven's fine broadcloth. The
urchins shouted with laughter.
The young aristocrat frowned, started; then, with sudden sweetness,
submitted, and presently found himself sitting in front of his guest in
the darkening bin room, to the respectful astonishment of mine host of
"The Three Storks." Had the grinding struggle for existence, in such
precarious war times, left a spark of imagination in the few plain wits
with which Nature had gifted this honest man, he might have found
something beyond mere amazement in the contrast between his two
patrons--something of the old romance of which the German roads had once
been full, before the cruel realities of foreign subjection, the flat
prose of poverty, had driven legend and fancy from the land.
The fiddler's attire had more pretensions to neatness than on that other
sunset hour when Steven had first met him, bare-breasted to the evening
airs and powdered with the dust of the long way. His garments were
distinctive enough, for all their poverty, and set off the fine line,
the close muscle, of a figure lean to emaciation yet a model of alert
strength. Breeches of home-spun clung to thigh and knee; thick knitted
hose and brass-buckled shoes of country make could not conceal the
elegance of leg and foot. The shirt-collar carelessly open, the
abundant grey hair, quaintly tied up in the cue of twenty years bygone,
emphasized a symmetry of head and throat which, in a higher walk of
life, would doubtless have been termed noble. The tan of the clear-cut,
ascetic face was singular against the silver of the hair. The whole
personality was indeed made of anomalies:--the wild fire of the eyes
under brows melancholy and philosophic; the air at once of recklessness
and of self-command, of indifference and fierceness; the geniality and
the illimitable scorn; the weariness of all things, the utter worn
distaste which was written in every line of his countenance and might
have belonged to the pitiless disillusion of old age; the swift energy
of the delicate impulsive hands, the quick turn of the head and the
flashing glance which made him half as young again at times than that
middle-age which yet was unmistakably his. Here was a creature who
seemed to know too much and to despise everything; who read the yet
unspoken thought, and did not hide his scorn of it; who yet drew
confidence as a woman might, and could lay his touch on the sources of
tears and laughter. If angels or demons walked in human guise, this
Geiger-Hans might have passed for one or the other, according to the
mood of his company or according, rather, to the candour of their souls.
Against so strange a being the personality of his young entertainer
stood clear as light of day. No mystery there! Four words could sum it
up: pride, youth, strength, and comeliness.
The innocence of his youth looked out through his full grey eyes; the
pride of his birth sat on his eyebrow, drooped in his eyelid, quivered
in his nostrils; the joy of his untried strength smiled unconsciously in
his red lips; there was life in the very wave of his brown hair. The
healthy pallor of the cheek only emphasized how generous was the quick
blood, and how ingenuous the nature that sent it rushing with every
passing emotion. Scarcely conscious yet of the value of the power he
wielded, the young man nevertheless gave his orders in careless tones,
as one to whom wealth had always been an attribute of existence. The
sober richness of his garb, the sable of the travelling cloak that hung
over his chair, became his youthful nobility. And there he sat and
pressed the vagrant musician to sour wine and harsh fare with the airs
of a magnate at his own luxurious table.
The fiddler was unwontedly silent. He had assumed, in his sardonic way,
an attitude of exceeding propriety. He addressed mine host and his
unkempt daughter mincingly; so that, between laughter, wonder, and a
little fear, their service became complicated. And Steven, feeling
himself subtly mocked, felt the scarlet burn in his cheeks, but became
only the grander and the more high-born, because of his own
embarrassment.
Yet, now and again, the musician's gaze would rest upon his entertainer
not unkindly. Nay, more, there was pleasure, almost caress, in the look
with which the bright eyes would sweep from Count Steven's blushing face
down the long limbs that still held the grace and something of the
delicacy of adolescence in spite of their unmistakable vigour.
The slattern girl put a dish of hard green pears between the two, with a
slam. The fiddler raised melancholy orbs upon Steven:
"Well, sir," he said, "I cannot congratulate you. The bread is sour.
Sour is not the word for the wine. It is scarcely of such stuff that
our Ovid sang in his 'Art of Love'--
"'Vina parant animos, faciuntque caloribus aptos.'
I have good teeth, but truly this sausage baffled them. I am
unappeased." He struck his lean middle. "I shall have no spirit to
play another note to-night. (Keep your curses for better uses, friend;
they will not sweeten the cup.) Now," said he, luxuriously stretching
out his legs and gazing at them with a musing air, "I could have done
with a capon, methinks, and a beaker of ripe old Burgundy. What say
you? Have _you_ supped? Nay? Neither have I. Come, Sir Count, I
invite your High Seriousness to an entertainment where nothing short of
the best cellar and the fairest lady of the countryside will satisfy
us." Then, regarding Steven's bewildered face for a while in silence,
he went on with sudden earnestness. "The highborn English lady and the
estimable Austrian nobleman, who are jointly responsible (as I
understand) for your existence, have spoilt the dish for want of a
little spice. Heavens, sir! have you never a smile in you, never a
spark for the humorous side of things? Why, youth should itself be the
laughter of life. Come with me--you have much to learn."
And leaving the pears further unheeded, he took the young man by the arm
and led him to the door. The village was now steeped in grey shadow, but
the strong house on the height still glowed like a ruby. Pointing to
it:
"I brought you once," said the vagrant, "into somewhat low company.
That was the story of our first meeting. To-night, if you will, I shall
bring you into high."
"O Jemine!" exclaimed the landlord, who had been hanging open-mouthed,
ready for the roar at Geiger-Hans' humour. "Yonder, where the Lord
Burgrave locks up his lady?"
"Even so," said the hungry fiddler, imperturbably. "And you must lend
your donkey and little Georgi, and see that this gentleman's valise is
safely conveyed upwards. For yonder we spend the night."
Yonder, where the sullen lord of the district reigned in traditional
terror, even in absence; where (it was whispered) he had immured a
six-months' bride--jealous as any Bluebeard. Yonder in the old Burg,
where ancient horrible legends of fierce dogs to devour unwelcome
guests, of bottomless oubliettes, of rayless dungeons, of torture
chambers (no doubt based on truth enough in bygone centuries), still
lived in significance with tenants and vassals. Nay, was it not well
known that none were allowed ingress or egress to the castle but the
Baroness Sidonia, the Burgrave's niece, who had lived all her life with
him and, being of his own blood, and little better than a child, could
not be said to count? The innkeeper looked doubtfully at Geiger-Hans,
compassionately at his guest. Vague memories flitted through his mind
of some fantastic tale, heard to the murmurous accompaniment of his
mother's spinning wheel, wherein the devil met ingenuous youths on their
wanderings and tempted them to their doom.
All knew, of course, that the musician was a man of humour; still, the
freak seemed beyond a joke. And yet, on an imperial gesture, the host of
"The Three Storks" withdrew without further parley to carry out the
crazy vagrant's order.
"Don't make a fool of me," whispered Steven, in his singular adviser's
ear.
"Why, it is the wisdom of youth to be foolish and it is its privilege to
be foolish with grace.--O, could you but learn that!" interrupted the
other, impatiently. "No, not to-night, dear children, but to-morrow ...
to-morrow you shalt dance your feet off. I am a great person to-night:
I am supping in the old Burg."
"Oh!" said the children, who had gathered like sparrows on their
fiddler's reappearance. "Oh!" And awestruck they scattered.
"That Geiger-Hans...!" said the landlord, as by-and-by he watched his
guests depart. "He bewitches all, great and small. But this is a
strong one.... There they go. Maybe they'll never come back!" He had
to the utmost the village terror of the menace of the Burg, inherited
through centuries of high and low justice dispensed by Burgraves of
Wellenshausen. "Dungeons, up there, and trapdoors, and none ever the
wiser. _Herr Jemine_!"
[Illustration: Wellenshausen]
*CHAPTER VI*
*THE BURG*
"_I will be master of what is my own;_
_She is my goods, my chattels, she is my house;_
_And here she stands, touch her whoever dare!_"
(_Taming of the Shrew_).
"Sidonia," said the lady up in the turret-room, "I will not endure it!"
As this remark was made at least five times a day, the hearer was less
impressed than the desperate air of the speaker demanded.
"I will throw myself from the window," continued the Burgravine,
carefully propping her plump elbows on the stone sill to gaze down with
safety.
"If you'd only come out sometimes, and walk with me!" said little
Sidonia, smiling.
"Walk, child? Your uncle knew well what he was doing when he stuck me
up on this diabolic crag. I have not a pair of shoes that would last me
half-way down. And merely to look at the road that leads to this place!
Oh!"--she covered her eyes with her hand and shuddered--"it makes me
reel with giddiness!"
"It was very lovely in the forest," said Sidonia. "The wild raspberries
are nearly ripe, and----"
"Raspberries! Alas! is that what you ought to think of at your age?
You, too--'tis monstrous cruelty!"
"The fawns are growing and are so sweet----"
"Fawns! Fawns? 'Tis a lover should be sweet to you. As for me--oh
woe!"
Sidonia, slight, slim, and sun-kissed as a young woodland thing herself,
grew crimson behind her aunt's dejected head.
"Why--why, then, does Uncle Ludovic keep us here?" she queried.
Uncle Ludovic's lady flounced round in her chair, her eyes darting
flames, a flood of words rising to her cherry lips--
"Why? Because, my love, the creature is a _Barbe-Bleue_. And to be a
Bluebeard, child, means that if a wretched woman has been fool enough to
trust you, you think you have a right to chop her head off if she
disobeys; and meanwhile to shut her up to prevent her having so much as
a chance."
"I wonder why you married Uncle Ludo?" mused the girl. Her eyes were
dreaming, across the fair plain-land, into the distance. To give your
life to some one quite old and quite stout, with a grizzled double chin
and veins that swell on a red forehead (ran the fleeting thought), when,
about the ways of the forest, a young knight might be met wandering ...
a knight with hair that crisped back from forehead of ivory, with eyes
that were scornful and full of fire!
"Why did I marry him?" returned the Burgravine, sharply. "Ah, he was
very different then, my dear! The monster! how he deceived me! Do you
think I should ever have consented if I had not known that he was King
Jerome's minister; if he had not promised me that we should live at
Cassel; if I had not been told that one was more gay at Cassel now than
at Paris itself? And honourably I was served, was I not? Ten days at
Cassel, while there was scarce a cat stirring, the King called away by
the Emperor, then snatched off to this place, this bald, hateful eagle's
crag, at the first hint of any gaiety. Men talk of their honour, my
love--a big word behind which they can play any trick upon us poor women
their humour may prompt." Her voice broke shrilly. Then she added,
with sudden calmness: "And if I had had a silver groschen to my name,
you may imagine 'tis not old Wellenshausen's second wife that I should
be--but some fine young man's first one. Sidonia, how unfair is fate!"
She looked enviously at the girl. "There are you, with all your money,
who will never have a suitable notion of what to do with it, while
I--I----" She snapped two taper fingers together sharply and twisted a
dear little plump shoulder well-nigh free of the fashionable Viennese
robe, which looked so oddly out of place in the mediaeval severity of
the tower room.
There was silence, while Sidonia reflected. The Burgravine had a way of
opening strange perspectives before the young mind that had hitherto
known but the simplest and straightest outlook on life. Wonderful
customs had the new mistress brought to the old Burg--odd fads of
fashion, new hours of meals, new liveries and unknown demands on the
servants' attention. A prisoner, she assumed supreme authority within
the limits of her prison. It sometimes seemed as if the very stones in
the old wall were echoing surprise. Sidonia, who had run wild within
them, near seventeen years of happy unexacting childhood, found herself
frequently marvelling at a code of morality so startling in its novelty
as to range beyond her judgment. She felt that she could as little fit
herself to this new aunt's view of existence, as her modest country
limbs to one of those outrageous garments of Viennese mode, over which
the Burgravine could sigh a whole morning through in rapture and
regret--lamenting, with the voluble aid of Mademoiselle Eliza, her
French maid, the opportunities lost in this God-forsaken corner of the
world.
"And pray," said Bluebeard's wife, after a pause (never a very long one
with her, for, if Sidonia had the gift of silence which belongs to all
creatures who have lived much with nature, her Aunt Betty possessed it
not at all), "and pray, how many days is it since your uncle took the
road for Cassel, a-bursting with hypocritical sighs of farewell?"
"I don't know," said Sidonia, starting from her dream. "Ten days?"
"Ten days!" The words were echoed in a high pitch of indignation.
"Three weeks, then," amended the girl, hastily. "I really don't know;
time goes so fast."
"Time goes so fast! Oh, you--you...!" Cherry lips of scorn babbled
vainly in search of fitting epithet. "You--you're his own niece!"
Yet as life would have been distinctly duller were she to quarrel
outright with Sidonia, the Burgravine quickly turned the batteries of
her wrath to the old direction.