threshold, his lip curling into ever more open scorn at the sight which
greeted them: three dishevelled youths, in different humours of
intoxication, extravagantly costumed according to the taste of the
militant _Studiosus_: tunics of velvet, shabby but much befrogged;
jack-boots, gigantic spurs that had, doubtless, never pressed horse's
sides; poetically open collars; uncut hair; tobacco-pouch and rapier on
belt; china pipes in hand, six feet long, tasselled with Fatherland
colours. A squat individual, exuberantly bearded, sprawled at the head
of the table and was expostulating with vehemence. He had embraced the
can of wine and was defending it with drawn spadroon against the other
two, who--the one with uproarious laughter, the other with tipsy
solemnity--were making futile attempts to wrest it from his possession.
The table was strewn with letters and papers.
No sooner did this same hirsute _Bursch_ perceive Geiger-Hans than he
abandoned both sword and can and, staggering to his feet, opened wide
his arms.
"Welcome, brother--master--friend!" exclaimed he, dithyrambically.
"_Salve!_" then cried the laughing student, pounced upon the abandoned
can and buried his impertinent sandy face in its depths. Whereupon the
melancholy third, whose long black hair fell about a cadaverous
countenance, sank into his chair.
"_Vilis est hominis natura_," lamented he; then suddenly broke into the
vernacular and shook his fist at the drinker: "Thou rag!"
"_Salve, fratres!_" responded the fiddler, by no means surprised, it
seemed, at his reception, but neatly avoiding the threatened embrace.
"How beautiful it is," he went on, "thus to see the saviours of their
country at work upon her interests, even when the rest of the world
sleeps!" He pointed to the letters as he spoke.
An inflamed but exceedingly alert eye was here fixed upon Steven over
the rim of the can.
"_Prudentia!_" cried the drinker, flung down the vessel and ran forward,
"a stranger among us!"
With a bellow the bearded one lurched for his weapon.
"A stranger? ... _Pix intrantibus_!"
The weeper profited of the excitement to seize, in his turn, upon the
abandoned vessel.
"Nay," said Geiger-Hans, arresting the double onslaught with
outstretched arms. "_Pax intrantibus_ be it: we are friends!"
Steven stood in the doorway, sneering. He would have found a pungent
satisfaction in laying flat the drunken couple--and no doubt, with the
science cultivated in Jackson's London rooms, would, despite his wound,
easily have put the thought into execution. He made a movement forward.
But the fiddler held him at arm's length.
"Peace, brother Peter--peace, most learned doctor _in herba_. I bring a
friend, I say, a new brother, my comrade, a noble Austrian who, by the
way, is half an Englishman, and as bitter a foe to the tyrant as your
most Germanic selves. I introduce:--Count Waldorff-Kielmansegg--Herr
Paul Oster, 'Mossy-Head,' _emeritus_ swordsman, Senior of the Great
Westphalic conspiracy. Behold, count, the true German garb, the type of
manly beauty! Behold this Barbarossa head! Behold the sword, in short
(if I may so express myself), of a great patriotic movement. And here,"
turning with a fresh gesture of ceremony, "we have the brain, the
tongue, the acute eye: in other words, Herr Theophilus Schmeling, legal
doctor, jurist, fresh from all his honours at Goettingen--and the
third...?" He looked interrogation at the black-haired student.
The jurist, surprisingly alive to the situation, answered briskly for
his melancholy comrade, who was still absorbed and absorbing:
"Johannis Stempel, _Sanctae Theologiae Studiosus_. An 'Ancient House,'
also a faithful heart--a good labourer in the vineyard--but," he added
chuckling, "apt to be _weinerisch im Wein_, whiny over the wine."
He perpetrated his atrocious quip with a wink of little red eyes.
Count Waldorff-Kielmansegg found some pleasure in bowing three times
with ironical ceremony.
But Geiger-Hans took up the tale again with a dry disregard of any
possibility of humour.
"Here we are, I repeat, in the heart of a great conspiracy ... and not
one of us but risks his neck by so much as merely looking on! The
Sword, the Law, the Church. 'Tis a conspiracy well headed!"
As he waved his hand, Steven's eyes were directed towards the table, and
he suddenly realized that the papers lying in such disorder were the
contents of the mail-bag that hung on the arm of the theologian's chair.
His thoughts went back to the dilapidated courier downstairs: "Crime of
the first category," had said that official.
"Bah!" cried the Jurist, "Jerome does not kill; he but fleeces his
little flock, as all the world knows."
"Your pardon, doctor," retorted the fiddler, with a fine inciseness in
his tone. "The most paternal government makes an example now and again.
And the head of one Carl Schill is this moment affixed, minus its body,
on the toll-gate of Helmstadt. But reassure yourselves, the odious
French invention of Dr. Guillotin has not yet superseded your old
Germanic square-sword; your heads would be hacked off in the true heroic
style. 'Tis a consolation."
"Augh!" groaned Barbarossa, and sank into his seat at the head of the
table, clasping his middle as if a sober sickness had fallen upon him.
His very beard seemed to turn pale. But presently it flamed again with
a revulsion of anger:
"What the hangman! How is one to manage these fools? They sit, and
soak, and sop, and suck, and enough to snick twenty necks on the table
before them. I told them so, just now, when I wished to put the wine
away."
"The can is empty," here intoned the theologic _Studiosus_, after the
manner of one giving out a psalm. "_Nunc est bibendum--Aut bibe aut
abi!_"
From behind his beard the Senior growled like a dog. But the Jurist
intervened.
"Content ye," he said softly. "I'll to the letters; and here's a cool
head will help me. Will you not, Geiger-Hans--good Geiger-Hans? And we
shall but crack a bottle between us, just to clear our brains. Shall we
not, musician of my heart?"
"Yes; _aut bibe aut abi--sauf oder lauf_--drink or slink," chanted the
divine, afresh.
"_Doctorlein_," said the musician, suavely, "I am with you. And the
devil's own head you must have," he pursued, looking at the Jurist with
a kind of admiration; "for I'll be sworn you've drunk as much as the
other two put together--but I pray you, a word first: wherefore the
King's mail?"
"Your question is reasonable," responded the other with renewed
verbosity. "_Providus, homo sagax_.... The defendant's request is
allowable, worthy Senior.... Are you defendant, by the way, or
pursuer?"
"Accomplice," said the fiddler, sitting down and gathering a sheaf of
letters into his hand. "To the point again, brother: why the King's
mail?"
"Two warrants, we are informed, are out against the Brotherhood. And
here"--the student slapped his greasy tunic--"you behold equity
contravening judgments: legal sagacity tripping up edicts; the true
principle--for if your lawyer is not the antidote to the law, what is
he? Answer me that! Ah, here comes the wine! No more cans, but
bottles! Our landlady knows how to treat gentlemen. Nay, nay,
_Pastorlein_, get you to sleep again, and dream of your first sermon.
There is work to be accomplished here. Mrs. Hostess, give him
small-beer in the can--he will never know the difference!"
Geiger-Hans, who had rapidly sorted the letters in his hand, raised his
eyes and cast a look about him. The Senior, sunk in a heap upon his
chair, was staring straight before him with a glowering eye,
unmistakably in the first stage of drunken stupefaction. The aspirant
divine was whimpering over the strangely inferior taste of his tipple.
Steven, leaning against the whitewashed walls with folded arms, stood
looking upon the scene, weary, arrogant, detached.
"Hey, Sir Count," said the fiddler then to him with one of his rare
sweet smiles, "what say you--a glass of wine? No? Why, then, what will
your lordship do while we manipulate affairs of State ... in this
_Cabinet Noir_?"
For the life of him, Steven could not display haughtiness to
Geiger-Hans, however dubious might seem his proceedings. Too much he
knew of him by this time, yet too little.
"Nay," said he, giving him back a faint smile. "I see a couch yonder. I
will try a sleep, till the State of Westphalia is secured, or undone,
for I am woefully tired."
"The couch? Right," said the fiddler, nodding. "Yes, go to sleep,
comrade, and dream.--Here with that heap, brother conspirer. And now,
listen: the wise commit no unnecessary crimes. We have no business with
the private correspondence of the good folks of Cassel. But here is a
document with an official seal, addressed to the Commissary of Police,
Goettingen."
He tossed the letter across the table. There was a shout of triumph
from the Jurist.
The horsehair couch was hard enough, but Steven had flung himself on it
with a whole-souled desire to shut out a sordid, unsatisfactory world.
Sleep, however, the jade, is not to be had for the wooing. The whines of
the Theologian, the stertorous breathing of Barbarossa, the Jurist's
flow of rhetoric, the crackling of the papers, the fiddler's very
mutism, were all so many goads to drive him into ever more feverish
wakefulness. Against the rigid bolster his heart-beats resounded in his
brain. "Sidonia, Sidonia!" they said, in maddening persistence. And
then, as in a sort of vision, he would see the paltry Don Juan, King
Jerome, with his flickering eyes, and start, with a spasm of anger, back
to a glaring consciousness of the mean room, the guttering lights, the
reek of wine and smoke, the insufferable company.
"Herr Jurist, halt, halt!" came the fiddler's voice suddenly. "Leave
that alone, if you please. That is, beyond any doubt, private."
"'Tis addressed to the Arch-Enemy, and no correspondence with tyrants is
private," retorted the lawyer. "Besides"--with a grin--"it's one of
those new-fashioned French envelopes, and everything French is damned
and doomed! See, the wafer has come unsealed in my very hand. The wise
man--hic--neglects no hint of Providence. _Hey da!_ what have we here?
... O thou little son of Venus, what a sweet slip of rosy paper! What a
darling little claw of a hand! ... (The King has a fine taste in doves,
I'll grant him that!) Bah, Sardanapalus! It is enough to turn any man
republican. I am for the rights of man. Tyrants shall have no monopoly
of dovecotes. Hum! neither date nor place: a cautious dove! Chirp,
chirp!" The creature pressed the sheet to his tipsy lips with
disgusting lushness. "Would I held the pretty flutterer here! Hark!
what does she say? '_Sir_' (A cold beginning: her feathers seem
ruffled), '_I ought to be very angry with you; but, alas! anger is not
to be commanded any more than love. How well it would be for us women
were it otherwise!_' (Pretty dear! Ambiguous as any lawyer's
statement!) '_Yet I feel that you must be forgiven, if but for the sake
of duty--for I should be indeed disloyal to persist in rebellion against
one who is my lawful lord.--Betty! P.S._' (Aha! now we shall come to
the true meaning, to the kernel, _medulla, medululla esculenta_, of the
rosy note.) '_Understand: I promise nothing. But understand also: you
may come and receive your pardon--if no more!_'"
The reader's mouth was opened upon fresh dithyrambics when the fiddler's
voice rose peremptorily: "Pass me that letter!"
There fell a silence between the two. Geiger-Hans, his lean jaws
propped upon his hands, sat staring at the pink sheet. The lawyer fell
upon a new pile of letters with monkey-like mischief and activity. The
supposed director of the _Cabinet Noir_ was now snoring lustily. Its
religious guide and philosopher was still pondering over the perversity
of his liquor.
"Ha!" cried the Jurist, with a sudden shout, "another missive from the
pink dove--same hand, same paper and cover, and addressed to no less a
person than the great Chancellor Wellenshausen! Also at Heiligenstadt.
Never draw such angry brows upon me, _Minnesinger_ mine. I tell you,
this woman positively cannot seal a letter!"
Steven lifted his head from the pillow. He heard the rustle of the
opening sheet in the student's hands; then came another crow:
"Excellent, upon my _cerevies_, excellent! Listen, man. Whatever your
faults are, you can laugh:
"'_Palais de Bellevue_,
'"Cassel.
"'NEVER!
"'Betty, Burgravine of Wellenshausen.'
"Thunder! 'Tis his wife! It is a whole story _a la Kotzebue_. Do you
hear, Geiger-Hans? 'Tis his wife. 'Never!' she writes to him. Oh, the
dove has claws and beak, and she can peck!"
Without betraying any of the exuberant mirth expected of him,
Geiger-Hans leaned over and, with neat decision, plucked the letter from
the other's hands. And as the Jurist stared, wavering confusedly upon
offence: "Go on with your work, friend," said the musician, smiling.
"That second warrant has not yet been discovered. The night is waning.
It may be well to be fairly on your road to Goettingen before the hue
and cry."
*CHAPTER XXIII*
*THE KING'S MAIL*
"_Ei! Kennt ihr noch das alte Lieb_
_Das einst so wild die Brust burchglueht,_
_Ihr Saiten, dumpf und truebe?_
_Die Engel, die nennen es Himmelsfreud;_
_Die Teufel, die nennen es Hoellenleid;_
_Die Menschen, die nennen es--Liebe!_"
HEINE.
Steven, whose mind had become keenly on the alert at the first mention
of Betty's name, turned on his hard couch with a general relaxation of
mind and body. The consoling news that it was Betty who occupied
Jerome's attention fell on his jealous anguish like balm. His thoughts
began to wander, rocked on the tide of the ebbing tempest. He must then
have fallen into slumber, for he was suddenly back in the old Burg of
Wellenshausen, with Sidonia, his little bride. She was sitting in the
high-backed chair, in all her wedding finery, even as he had last seen
her. But she was smiling upon him.... "_I have your letter. It was
all a mistake, a great mistake_," she was saying to him. Then, as he
sprang forward to take her in his arms, suddenly, with the fantastic
horror of dreams, her face changed, became red, distorted, even as the
face of the student. Her voice changed, too; grew raucous, broken with
insupportable laughter. "_You never loved me_," it said; "_that is now
clear to me. You meant well with me, I know; but it is not right--such a
union as ours cannot be right, either before God or man. Had I
understood before, I should have died rather than consent. But it is
not yet too late. Aunt Betty says our marriage is no marriage, and she
knows all about your Austrian law. Uncle Ludo has taken advice of
lawyers for me; and very soon we may both be free. No--I will not see
you. I will never see you again._"
Steven sat up straight, and even at that moment there was an uproar.
Geiger-Hans, creeping round the table like a cat, had fallen silently
upon the student and was paralyzing, with a grasp of steel, the hand
that held the letter.
The Jurist bellowed as if the executioner were already upon him, and
Mossy-Head, waking up, shouted: "Treachery!" while, as if the clamour
had given the finishing touch to his instability, the Theologian and the
once more empty can fell in a heap on the floor. The Senior flung his
drunken bulk blindly against the fiddler. Steven leaped from the couch.
Even with one hand (his left arm was still weak), anything so
intoxicated was easily disposed of. He picked the "Sword of the
conspiracy" off Geiger-Hans, who thereupon, finding himself free to deal
with "the Brain," possessed himself at once of the letter. The
musician's thin cheeks were faintly touched with scarlet, and his
nostrils worked with quick breathing; otherwise he seemed unmoved.
Steven, therefore, was all the more astonished to hear him exclaim with
utmost disgust, utmost scorn and anger:
"_Palsambleu!_ but I am weary of this! Drunken swine! Out with them to
some sty! Roll your fellow forth, count, and down the stairs. If your
shoulder smarts, you have sound legs at least ... and riding-boots!"
The wine, which had seemed so long merely to stimulate him, here
suddenly took melting effect upon the student of law. He twisted in the
fiddler's grasp, flung both his arms round his neck, and, embracing him
with the ejaculation: "O thou dear, ancient one!" showed an instant
inclination to slumber on his shoulder.
"Pah!" exclaimed Geiger-Hans, and disengaged himself with what seemed to
Steven surprising vindictiveness. He then trundled his man into the
passage. The door of an empty bedroom, flooded with moonlight, stood
suggestively open; here he cast the creature from him; threw sword,
scabbard and pipe on top of the grunting body.
Steven, in perfect gravity, followed his friend's example; but, with
more mercy, deposited his burden on the billows of the feather bed.
"There is yet another," quoth the fiddler, dusting his hands. Disgust
was upon him. He was Geiger-Hans no longer, but a _grand seigneur_ with
a vengeance, offended in all his Versailles refinement. He led Steven
back into the room. "We shall have to carry the hog. Take you his
feet, while I his greasy poll."
The Theologian had not even a grunt. They spread him beside the Jurist
in the moonlight--with a certain effect of symmetry, like fish on a
slab.
[Illustration: _They spread him beside the Jurist in the moonlight--with
a certain effect of symmetry._]
Geiger-Hans locked the door on the outside and pocketed the key. A
second, then he and Steven stood together in the darkness of the
landing. Except for the snores from within the room and for similar
sounds rising from the kitchen below, the inn of The Three Ways was
wrapped in stillness.
Outside, the gale, which had long been waning, had now fallen.
"That is the courier, I take it," said the wanderer. "Did I not say, my
noble friend, that I would bring you into the company of heroes? Listen
to them! Thus do we conspire in Westphalia!"
When they re-entered the room, the musician went instantly to the window
and, opening it wide, stood inhaling in deep draughts the clean airs of
the woods. It was that most silent, most mysterious hour of the whole
circle--the hour before dawn. More silent and more mysterious, this
night, it seemed because of the storm that had passed. Nature was
exhausted after her passion, merely shaken by a faint reminiscent sigh
that came stealing with scarce the quiver of a leaf, as from a tired
heart.
The night sky held a strange depth of blue against the garish yellow
lamplight within; the stars were paling. With head, thrown back, the
wanderer stood gazing upwards. There were moods of his strange comrade
that Steven had learned to respect. He therefore neither spoke nor
approached; but, after completing the purification of the room by the
simple process of turning out all the cans and bottles, he sat down and
waited, absorbed in his own painful reflections. At last Geiger-Hans
drew a deep breath, and, leaving the window open, sat down facing his
companion. The contents of the rifled mail-bag lay between them.
The musician's face looked pale and severe. Still in silence, he began
to toss such packets as had escaped violation back into the bag.
"Will you give me my letter, please?" said Steven, dully. Then his
youth and hot blood betrayed him into a cry: "Oh, I am miserable!"
The older man glanced at him from under his eyebrows. It was an odd
thing--for what was he, after all, but a poor, half-crazed, broken
gentleman? yet there was a certain smile of this Geiger-Hans which made
the world seem warm to the rich and highborn Steven.
"O blessed unhappiness of youth!" cried the musician in his old manner,
mocking yet passionate. "Did you but know it, these pangs, these sighs,
will be sweeter to the memory of your old age than your youth's most
satisfied ecstasies! Here is your letter, boy. Go, weep and rage upon
it, if you will, with all the fury of your checked aspiration.... What,
you open your arms, and she is not ready forthwith to fall into them?
You condescend to run after her, and she does not instantly stand still
to be caught! You thought that to-morrow's sun would see you with your
bride in your embrace, and behold! you have yet to woo her? Bewail your
hard fate, you are indeed to be pitied!"
"Would you not like your fiddle?" cried Steven, as he caught the
half-folded sheet that the musician tossed towards him, "that you may
set my folly to a tune? When you want to sermonize, I had rather you
did it on the strings, if you don't mind."
For a second Geiger Hans seemed about to resent the pettish speech as an
impertinence. A frown gathered; but, with a short laugh, broken by a
deep sigh, he resumed his air of sad serenity.
"Nay," said he, stroking the strings of the instrument that Steven
pushed towards him, and then laying his hand flat upon them to still
their wailing, "did I make music to-night, it would not be music for
your youth. Fool!" said Geiger-Hans, fixing his mad, brilliant eyes
upon Steven, "is she not living, she whom you love? and you prate to
me--to me, of unhappiness!"
Though the words were harsh, his tone was strangely gentle. Had Steven
dared, he would have put out his hand to touch the speaker.
The wind was rustling through the trees; there came a stir and a murmur
from the woods; the purple-blue depth of the sky seemed to quiver with
pallid changes.
"It is the dawn," said the fiddler, in a worn voice. "Get you to that
couch again, for you must sleep, and we have a day of action before us.
Aye, take that letter with you and lay it under your cheek. If it seem
cruel, have not her fingers touched it? Ah, if you but knew from what a
wounded heart, perhaps, sprang those reproachful words! Why, if she has
pride, man, will she not be the fitter mate for you? And if she will
have naught of a loveless marriage, is it not because she would have
love? Poor little Sidonia ... who only yesterday was a child! You have
awakened a woman's heart in her; see that you know how to meet that
heart's measure."
Steven stood by the couch, palpitating to the words, to the golden
visions they opened before his fevered eyes.... Sidonia, the child,
with her yellow plaits of hair, with her eyes brown and green, clear yet
deep, like the brook under the trees.... Sidonia, whose lips he had
kissed; who had smiled at him under her bridal veil!
Geiger-Hans had said he would make no music; but it was the music of the
gods his words had evoked in the dawn. Presently the older man looked
up from his dreary abstraction: Steven, stretched on the sofa in all the
abandonment of young fatigue, was sleeping like a child. The watcher's
features relaxed.
"_O bella Gioventu_...!" he murmured. Then he looked down at the
scattered sheets before him, and his lips twisted in bitter mockery.
Here had been a night's work of petty crime under the fine-sounding
title of patriotism and national conspiracy. But might not now some good
be brought out of it after all? How sound the fellow slept! Not that
he, the wanderer, envied any sleeper but him that would never
wake.--Well, to work!
He took up, with contemptuous fingers, Burgravine Betty's easy lines of
surrender to the royal Don Juan. It was clear that she was vastly
flattered at the thought of becoming one of the _mil e tre_. But Betty
had a husband...! Yes, the butterfly should be saved, if it were only
for the sake of the pure child who had, as yet, no better shelter than
those fragile gaudy wings.
He re-read the lines destined to the King, and smiled. Then he turned
over the other sheet with his forefinger. The pregnant "Never!" sprang
again at him out of the page, in Betty's flourish.
The fiddler smiled again.
* * * * *
Through the open window a shaft of sunlight struck the sleeper's
forehead. Geiger-Hans rose to draw the wooden shutter. But Steven
frowned and awoke.
Without, the forest was one golden lyric. It was an autumn day of
sparkle and scurry. A flock of migrating birds were calling to each
other over the yellowing tree-tops. Against the pale, exquisite blue of
a sky such as September alone seems to give, the rooks were circling in
fantastic squadrons.