then, as suddenly, grew grave.
"My friend," said he, "the steel has not been tempered, I fear, the lead
has not been cast, that will reach this heart.... Ah, Lord!"
It was an exclamation of uttermost weariness. He picked at his strings
and tightened them with absent fingers. Then he flashed a smile at his
companion:
"You are amazed, are you not, at my ingratitude? What! Here have I,
Count Waldorff-Kielmansegg, preserved the existence of this wretched
tramp at the risk of my noble, valuable one--here have I shed my blue
blood to save his muddy fluid, and the creature has not even a 'Thank
you'! ... Comrade," went on the musician, and his eye dilated, his
countenance assumed a lofty mien, "I would not shame myself and you by
such a word as 'Thanks'! The creature that would not give himself to
save his fellow-creature when he can is not worth the name of man."
Steven, abashed that he had indeed thought himself heroic, blushed again
and, looking down, began idly plucking with his unhurt right hand the
wood-violets that grew in patches on the bank. The fiddler followed his
movements, then his eye suddenly grew fixed, his jaw dropped. Slowly
the healthy colour ebbed from his cheek and left it ashen. Steven,
looking at him, was astonished and alarmed.
"For heaven's sake!" he cried, "are you ill?"
The fiddler stretched out his hand and culled the posy from the other's
grasp. The touch of his fingers was as cold as death.
"Violets!" said he, in a sort of whisper. "There is blood on them!" He
shuddered from head to foot.
"Perhaps all the mystery is but that he is a poor mad gentleman,"
thought Steven, It was an idea which could not fail to recur to him in
the company of this fantastic being; but never had it seemed so
justified.
[Illustration: "_Hurl down the Guard, and the field is ours! ... Hurl
down the Guard, aha!_"]
*CHAPTER XIX*
*THE MELODY IN THE VIOLETS*
"_What of the heart without her? Nay, poor heart,_
_Of thee what word remains ere speech be still?_
_A wayfarer by barren ways and chill_
_Steep ways and weary, without her thou art...._"
ROSSETTI.
Geiger-Hans laid the flowers on his knee and, still staring at them with
the eyes of mingled horror and grief, gathered his instrument to his
embrace and drew from it a strain the like of which Steven had never
heard. Low and simple it was, with even a delicate lilt, as of the
shadow-dance of bygone joys, yet so heart-rending that, after a moment
or two, the listener felt tears rising to his eyes and a catch at his
throat, and cried on his companion to stop.
The musician laid down his fiddle and turned his drawn countenance upon
his companion.
"That is the melody in the violets, the melody that is never silent in
my soul, night or day. You cannot hear it? Why, then, you must listen
to the story.--I was once as youthful as you and had also a very noble
pride--I had nearly as much reason," said Geiger-Hans, his pale lips
writhing in a smile of scorn; "but, as men differ, their same passions
vary in motive. It was of little moment to me that I came of an ancient
house. (Ah! it pleases you to know so much! You have always guessed
it, else had you not frequented me. Let it pass, friend, lest I should
blush for you.) No, my pride was the pride of intellect. I knew a vast
amount! I learned to lisp English that I might study Bacon and Locke,
and to chew German that I might wrangle over Kant. I was the friend of
Helvetius and Diderot, the rival of Holbach. We worshipped Voltaire.
Reason was our God! In short, I was one of those they called the
Encyclopaedists; we dreamed of doing away with old Abuses and replacing
all established things by brand-new Perfections. 'Humanity and
Freedom!' was our war-cry. With sweet-oil and rose-water our revolution
was to be accomplished. You know what we did for France and the world?
We set the first stone rolling, a half-century ago, and"--with a tragic
gesture he pointed to the valley--"you can hear the echo of it still
reverberating down yonder! Freedom we preached: and the whole world is
enslaved as never it was before! Reason was our lodestar: and the State
was handed over to the lowest intellects to guide it according to their
brute passions! Humanity was our watchword: and France was drenched in
blood from end to end, and her sons have brought blood and fire to every
land in Europe! The blood of that wretched son of the steppes
blackening yonder on the road, the blood shed in yonder bullet-riddled
village by that very volley that shakes us as we sit, is all offered to
the honour of that same trinity of our invention: Freedom, Humanity ...
and Reason! Oh, glorious was the path we opened! Had we not just cause
for pride?"
He fell silent a second; and Steven dared not speak, so corrosive was
the bitterness of his every word, so poignant the emotion written on
every furrow of his countenance.
"Oh, it was a golden time!" he resumed. "We philosophized up to the
steps of Versailles. Louis made beautiful locks; Marie Antoinette
tended snowy sheep; the roses bloomed at Trianon ... and not the wisest
of us ever saw the precipice yawn! As for me--even the greatest minds
are subject to the everyday passions of humanity--" his lips parted upon
an ironic smile--"I fell in love, neither more nor less than the most
elementary youngster of the land. She----" He hesitated; then,
steadying his voice, proceeded in tones which betrayed the effort of
speech: "she was of an old-fashioned Breton stock, and her ideas and
mine were as the poles asunder. But upon one common ground, and a fair
pasture it was to me, we met and were equal: we loved."
He paused, his breath came quick. "Heaven!" he said, and it seemed as
if he knew not that he spoke, "how I loved her!"
He picked up a violet from the heap on his knees, and passed his fingers
over it caressingly; his countenance softened. When he began again, it
was in gentler accents than Steven had ever heard him use:
"When two people love each other, young man, and when each believes the
other to be mistaken in some cardinal point of judgment, the dearest
thought they cherish is to bring the Beloved to the truth. I had no
doubt but that I could open her mind; she, but that she would redeem my
perverted soul. I have told you what a fine pride I had. So noble it
was that I was proud of my pride. And being an apostle of Liberty, the
idea that a woman should resist her husband, that the weaker vessel
should not give way to the stronger, never dawned on my emancipated
mind! Well, well--we quarrelled! The fault was mine. Could I not have
been content to worship her in her sweet faith! She had a high spirit.
I wounded her in a thousand ways. Women have susceptibilities that we,
thick-hided, thick-witted, dream not of. Even when we touch them to
caress, we bruise. And then, when their pain is intolerable and they
turn and strike at us, our wound is that of the most innocent, the most
injured! Oh, when my measure was full against her, she insulted me, if
you like--much as your little bride this morning insulted your
Highmindedness. She said words that my exquisite pride could not
endure. Of course, you will well understand (being even such a
self-respecting youth as I was then) that I had no choice but to leave
her. That was right, was it not?"
Steven, under that terrible gaze, ironic even in its haunting agony, was
at a loss how to reply. He muttered something of a woman's duty and
wifely submission. The fiddler caught up the words fiercely.
"Ay," cried he. "A woman's duty--wifely submission. Oh, strange how
men prate of chivalry, in the exercise of their bodily strength, because
of a woman's weakness, and yet never see that, because also of a woman's
sensitiveness of soul, a man should take shame to parade the superior
strength of his will--that he should spare the delicate spirit as well
as the delicate frame. Listen:--my strength of mind was such that it
left me no choice but to desert the woman whom I had vowed to protect,
to make parade of my manhood by leaving her to live her own life alone,
to cast the frail and lovely thing I had held in my arms away from my
love and guardianship. No doubt, no doubt, I made some very generous
dispositions as regards my fortune--even as you now propose towards
Madame Sidonia, and she had her people to go to, even as your wife has:
those whom she had given up to come to me. But when the day dawned that
I had to look into my heart and read the truth, what did I see? Look
into your heart now, and learn the baseness of your own motives. Why do
you leave your bride? Why did I leave mine? For what reason, but that
she might weep and mourn for me; that she might learn how precious was
the jewel she had not appreciated! ... To be revenged ... revenged on
the Beloved!"
He flung himself back against the bole of the fir that rose behind him
and closed his eyes.
"I left her," he went on, "left France, left Europe. I went to America,
the new home of Freedom, the only country on the face of the earth where
the goddess was worshipped as she should be. I had vowed not to return
till recalled: I was summoned by a voice terribly different from hers.
It took three months before the noise of the storm reached me on that
far-off shore, and I knew that it must take me at least a month more ere
I could reach her. And she was in danger! ... I think it was then I
began to go mad--for it is understood that I am mad, is it not?"
He opened his bright eyes and fixed them on Steven, who became so
extremely embarrassed that the fiddler broke into unmirthful laughter.
"Mad!" he repeated. His gaze flickered; and, if truth be told, he
looked none too sane. Then he sank his head between his hands with a
groan. "If only I were a little madder!" he cried. "The story is nearly
finished," he went on presently, in a new, toneless voice. "When I
landed in France, all the powers of the Hell my superior intellect
denied were let loose in the land--Danton, Marat and Robespierre
represented the trilogy of Liberty, Reason and Humanity! The prisons
were full, the guillotine everywhere restless.... Our Golden Age! ... A
fortnight I looked for her. Have you ever sought in vain one you had
loved, even for an hour? Dante never devised a more exquisite torture
for his deepest circle. My house in Paris had been confiscated for the
nation's soldiers; her father's castle in Lorraine had been burnt to the
ground. At my old home at Nancy at last I found a trace. She had
refused, it seemed, to join in the flight of her people across the
Rhine; but, when trouble became threatening, had taken up her post on my
estate. That was like her. She had been arrested--so dangerous an
enemy of the people! She was in the infamous prison at Nancy. She----"
He flung his battered old hat from his head, dashed back his hair,
loosened the wide collar at his throat. Breath seemed to fail him. A
dark wave of blood rushed to his forehead. "All, all had abandoned her,
save one poor girl--a peasant from our farm, whose people were of the
local patriots.... This girl was allowed access to the cells. I met
her at the prison gates, whither my frenzied search brought me at
length. She knew me, though I was a tramp already. At sight of my
face, she clapped her hands and broke into wild sobs. I was too late!
That morning.... Why do you look at me like that? Do you wonder that I
am still alive? That is where the God I denied has His vengeance of me,
you see. I cannot die. Oh, I could kill myself, of course! But, mark
how deep has the Encyclopaedist fallen.... I dare not, _dare not, lest
I lose my chance of meeting her again!_ ... Ah! there is great pity in
your eyes.... Her little delicate head--she held it like a queen's.
Under the powder, her hair was gold. (I have not even one lock of her
hair.) I used to clasp her slender throat between both my hands....
The peasant girl had kept by her to the end. She had stood at the foot
of the scaffold, that a last friendly glance might speed that lovely
soul. 'She smiled to me,' said the poor creature, sobbing. My eyes
were dry.... Then she drew from her bosom a bunch of violets, and said,
'_Madame, les avail a son corsage._'..."
Geiger-Hans gathered up the flowers scattered on his knees, and crushed
them against his face.
"She always loved violets," he murmured. "These have no scent," he went
on dreamily; "but hers, hers--oh, they were sweet!"
[Illustration: "_She always loved violets. These have no scent, ... but
hers,--oh, they were sweet!_"]
"Ah! friend!" cried Steven, and had no further word. Infinite pity
indeed was in the look he turned upon the musician. It seemed as if the
latter wandered as he spoke again.
"There was blood on the violets," said he, dropping his hands, "her
blood and mine--for the man that was I died too, then, murdered in his
youth, even as she." His face had grown ashen again, his eyes were
restless in their orbits. "The something that lived on, the miserable
carcass, the old man--call it myself, if you will--this self that is
before you now--it took the violets and began to walk away.... And it
has walked ever since!" He gave a laugh, and the sound of it was mad.
"No place could be home to me again--no land could be country, France
least of all. But the skies and the trees are kind; they understand my
sorrow, they take it into themselves. And sometimes they give me back
peace. And then there's the music.... I was always a musician. One, a
village priest, found out by accident that the crazy tramp he had
sheltered played better on his old Strad than he did himself. The
fiddle was to him as his child, but he gave it to me, for he had
compassion on me.... And so was born Geiger-Hans. And Fiddler Hans and
his fiddle will walk until one day he can walk no more. And then he
will lie down on the kind, brown earth, and turn his face to the skies
... perhaps!"
He thrust the flowers into his breast. Then he leaned forward, his
elbow on his knees, sheltering his eyes in his hands: and there was
silence. The valley below had sunk into stillness.
While Steven had listened to the story of one man's defeat in life, a
combat where the fate of hundreds had been decided had been fought and
won. And now they were picking up the dead yonder, in the evening calm
of the plain. The wind had fallen with the fall of the day, and only
the topmost branches of the pines swayed and whispered in scarcely
perceptible airs. The light was growing golden mellow, the shadows were
lengthening. Steven remembered his wound.
The fiddler turned and spoke. It was with composure.
"Well," said he, "which way shall it be; back or forward?"
"I do not know," said Steven, in a low voice, and dropped his eyelids as
if ashamed.
The fiddler stretched out his hand and helped the other to rise, with a
vigorous grasp. As they stood side by side, he suddenly cast his arm
round the young man's shoulders.
"The child," said he, "Sidonia! ... Oh, I want her to be happy. The
first day I ever saw her, I thought that if we had had a child, the
woman I loved and I, it would have been like her. And, to my madness,
she has gradually become even as my own. I have haunted her ways.
However imperiously the roaming fit may come upon me, there is always
something that draws me back to watch, to guard, to care. I gave her to
you. Aye, Count Steven, it was I gave her to you. And if again I have
failed with the happiness of what is dearest to me on earth ... then
indeed it is that I am cursed!" His voice failed, broken; his eyes
implored. After a while he went on: "When her soul looks out of her
clear eyes, when she moves her head with its golden burden ... she has a
trick of speech, a laugh ... Oh, it is like a refrain of old music to
me, a sighing strain from a lost life! Her little, slender throat--I
could hold it in both my hands.... Go back to her.... If I knew her
happy, my restless spirit would, I believe, find some kind of peace.
Ah! you think it will be hard? I tell you it will not. You do not know
a woman's heart. Forget that your pride is hurt. Remember that you are
young. Oh, if you but knew! Life has one unsurpassable flower for
youth--take it now, lest a breath from heaven scatter its bloom. Its
scent is for you! The love of your youth, go, gather it! Go back to
little Sidonia!"
"I will go back," said Steven, and his lips trembled.
Silently Geiger-Hans loosened the grey horse, helped the wounded man to
mount, and led the way down the hill.
*CHAPTER XX*
*THE TRUE READING OF A LETTER*
"Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak
Whispers the e'er-fraught heart, and bids it break."
(_Macbeth_).
Steven, in his turn, had a tale to tell; and, as they retraced their way
back towards the Burg through the gathering shadows, he narrated to the
fiddler, with great simplicity, the episode with the Burgravine which
had led him, first into the _oubliette_, and ultimately to the quarrel
with Sidonia.
Geiger-Hans made small comment. The facts he knew already, the motives
he had shrewdly surmised. Sometimes he smiled, unseen in the thick,
moist gloom; the bright day had turned to a moody night, heavy clouded.
The young man's ingenuousness pleased him; also the manliness that
refrained from any self-righteous assertion of innocence. But sometimes
he sighed; it was a tangled story!
When they reached Wellenshausen village, it was evident that there could
be no question of making the ascent to the Burg till the next morning.
Rain had begun to fall. Geiger-Hans might have faced the break-neck
road--doubly hazardous in the wet and the dark--but he flatly refused to
aid the wounded man in any such mad undertaking, and Steven's impatience
had to submit to the inevitable.
Steven had thought to have measured ere this all the possibilities of
the Silver Stork in the matter of discomfort. But in a house now
thoroughly disorganized by the incursions of a stray detachment of
Jerome's cavalry, the claims, even of a fastidious traveller, not to
speak of an itinerant musician, were the least of concerns to-night.
In the dismal, rat-haunted attic which he shared with the bridegroom,
Geiger-Hans heard his comrade groan and toss through the long hours of
his wedding-night. If sleep fell upon the young man at all, it was
broken by nightmare. And the fiddler, lying flat on his back with his
hands under his head, resignedly facing the insomnia which his restless
spirit knew but too familiarly, could foretell almost to a breath the
span of troubled unconsciousness, the start, the half-groan of
awakening. And he was as glad, almost, as Steven himself when the white
face of dawn began stealthily to peer through the dormer window.
* * * * *
Geiger-Hans glanced two or three times sharply at the youth's face as
once again he found himself trudging beside him. Steven had submitted
almost sullenly to all the musician's arrangements; in silence had
mounted the mule prepared for him; in silence had they started on their
upward way. The vagrant breasted the rugged path with his usual
activity; but his countenance was dark with concern. He did not like
the glassy stare of Steven's eyes, the alternate pallor and flush on his
cheek, the blackened, cracked look of the lips.
"Madame Sidonia will have some nursing to do, I think," he said once.
Steven gave a wan smile, quite a long time after the words had been
spoken. He was beginning to lose his original frenzy of intention in
this early morning start; to think only of the rapture of lying between
cool sheets in some dark place, with Sidonia's flower touch upon his
throbbing temples.
After the wet night had broken a gay morning--the rain-beaten earth was
fragrant; fragrant every tiny sprig of herb and spicy rock-clinging
bush. As they ascended, the pleasant wood-smoke from the village
hearths gradually gave place to the more subtle pungencies of the
heights. All this, however, was wasted upon Steven. And wasted, too,
the gaunt picturesqueness of their first view of the castle, with the
golden early sunshine upon the grimness of its walls, caressing the
ruin, gleaming back from the defiant granite of the keep.
The dogs bayed, a flock of rooks rose, beating the air at their
approach; a brown donkey, heavily saddled, hitched by the bridle to a
bar of the open gate, flapped his ears and turned his patient
countenance, mildly surprised, upon them.
The door to the hall, barred and nail-studded, so inhospitable as a
rule, stood open. It was a vastly different scene from that of the
evening of their first visit--when they stood, a pair of adventurers
wrapped in mist, before the castle, seeking admittance to walls
apparently as impenetrable as any in fairy-lore. Steven was here, now,
by his right, to claim his own, and all lay in the sunshine, strangely
peaceful, the open door seeming to forestall a welcome. But the fiddler
was seized with boding. There are grim visages upon which the sight of
a smile strikes misgivings: such was now the face of the Burg.
The voice of a woman singing lustily within some distant chamber smote
his ear, as he lifted a hand for the bell chain; and he shook his head.
Even before Martin, the doorman, put in an appearance, shuffling out of
the kind of kennel where he lurked upon that watch which had been his
for thirty years, Geiger-Hans knew what had occurred. Martin, with red
waistcoat unbuttoned, a china pipe hanging from his jeering lip,
slippers on his feet, and the froth of bridal beer running down his
chin, stared in amazement at the sight of the travellers; then welcomed
them with the heartiness of the slightly elevated.
"The noble family have all departed," he cried quickly; and presently
chuckled, leering at the bridegroom who sat stiffly on the mule, as if
he neither heard nor saw.
Some one came trotting into the hall, softly on list soles, in a great
bustle. It was the Forest-Mother. Her pleasant face wore an unwonted
air of seriousness, and her lips were pursed as upon solemn thought.
But never had she been to Geiger-Hans a more comfortable spectacle.
At sight of him her hands were flung up in wonder; and, at further
glimpse of the rider without, they hovered in mid-air, as if paralyzed.
"Alas, Onkel--too late! All away, yesterday--and the child's heart
bursting. Aye, it is all mighty queer and sad. I little thought I
should be making for home again this morning, with everything so
criss-cross and wrong and strange!"
Geiger-Hans made a sudden stride out of the hall back to the side of the
mule.
"Down with you, comrade," he said, with that note of gentleness in his
voice which, so far, only Sidonia had known. Steven, after a pause for
comprehension, turned towards the speaker with his feeble smile, and
suddenly swayed.
"Nay, mother," the fiddler called out as he caught the lad in his arms,
"you mistake; there will be no going home for you for some time to
come."
* * * * *
"Ach! the poor young gentleman," sighed the Forest-Mother, when she had
heard the tale. And that was not until Steven's fever-dream had been
realized, and he lay between cool sheets in a dark room; though, indeed,
for Sidonia's flower touch he had to put up with Mrs. Forester's large
plump hand. Not that it made much difference either just then, for he
was somewhat rambling in his mind. "Ach, the poor young gentleman, it
is a real talent he has for coming in the way of blows!"
"He has a talent for mending, too, remember," said the fiddler, shortly.
His dry tone concealed a real anxiety. Young things, as he knew, took
blows of body and soul hard. A poisoned wound is bad enough in itself,
without a sore heart and a mind ill at rest.... He could not leave the
lad--that was clear. "Where have they taken the child?" he asked.
"Sidonia? Ach--she kept her lips close as wax and never told me a
word--not even me, the old mother! But that French minx of the Lady
Burgravine did nought but chatter of Cassel."
The word fell like a stone on Geiger-Hans' heart. It was almost with
impatience that he glanced at the long, helpless figure in the bed. The
young man ought to be up and doing! ... Cassel, seething pot of intrigue
and low manoeuvre, paradise of spendthrifts, adventurers, scoundrels, it
was the last place on earth for the guileless fugitive bride--and Betty
the born schemer. But, if life had taught this wanderer anything, it
was submission to the inevitable.