should cease. Because you are my wife. Because you bear my name.
Because your honour is mine, and I will not have you running about the
world--under no better guard than that of Burgravine Betty."
The contempt of his accents, the doubt, stung her beyond bearing.
"By all accounts," she cried--and there was almost a sneer upon her
sweet lips--"you had been willing enough, not so long ago, to trust her
with your own honour."
So the fiddler had been right. Betty had made mischief! The thought
danced a moment through Steven's brain; but in the confusion of anger he
failed to seize its real import.
Sidonia went on, vainly endeavouring to steady her voice as it throbbed
to the beating of her heart:
"You talk of honour! Is it honourable to speak of her like this--is it
generous?"
"Generous?" he echoed. "Will you teach me generosity, you who drove me
away, without explanation--without giving me a chance to explain? You,
the bride of an hour!"
"Come, then, I am listening now. Explain." Her accent, her air, were
passionately peremptory. Her fingers sought hastily in the reticule at
her side--the tangible evidence of her misfortune was hidden there. She
laid the note before him on the table, spreading it and smoothing it out
for him, even as Betty had done for her on the wedding day, in the
turret at Wellenshausen. "Explain this," she said.
Steven cast a quick glance at the incriminating document, opened his
mouth upon scorn and denial, then checked himself with a bitter laugh
and a shrug of the shoulders.
"Tell her the naked truth!" It was the fiddler's advice. To tell her
upon what a petty rock their barque was foundering ... it ought to have
been an easy thing! Yet the man stood, contemptuous, smiling, silent.
Every instinct of his being revolted against the girl's haughty command.
His pride alone would have kept him mute, but there was something yet
stronger, more intimate, to restrain him. "Tell her the naked truth!"
Naked enough was the truth, ugly enough, sordid enough, to be convincing
if he could have brought himself to speak it! The truth? Why, here it
would have been: "Your Aunt Betty offered herself to me, threw herself
upon my protection. I did not love her, I did not want her. She gave
me no choice; and this is her woman's revenge!"
Aye, it is all very well to say: "You are an honest lad." But if a
gentleman has behind him long generations of gentlemen, each of whom has
planned his life upon the conventional code of honour among gentlemen,
he cannot easily bring his lips to form the words that will betray a
woman in relation to himself--least of all, perhaps, where he has been
loved and has not loved in return.
So his lips were silent upon that smile of scorn. And Sidonia's last
hope--how strong it had been, how dear, she never knew till this
moment--agonized within her. That he should mock her for jealousy: that
was the supreme insult.
As in a flash of unbearable illumination she saw herself in his eyes,
heavy-lidded, unkempt; saw the figure that had provoked just now even
Betty's pity; saw beside her, Betty, rich in loveliness, velvet clad ...
it was no wonder that Beau Cousin Kielmansegg should fix her with this
smile, this contempt.
And Steven, in his _morgue_, who would have perished rather than
condescend to explain--could he but have known (Ah, if youth but knew!)
that no explanation was really needed of him, that no words are ever
needed in the great crises of life! Words are our enemies. The
inability to express the subtleties of wounded feeling, the false
witness that our tongues bear against us, have divided more lovers
secretly yearning for each other than ever did most adverse
circumstances. One touch of his hand on hers, one kiss upon her lips,
and Sidonia would have felt the truth, would have understood that he
loved her, and that, to him who loves, the beloved is queen. Angry
Steven, Steven the lover, had never even noticed the dishevelment of her
bright hair. Her face was pale?--it was a pearl in his eyes. Her
attire was shabby?--it might have been a garment of state. Had Betty
broken in on them then, in all her glory, he would have drawn no
comparison, save to the superlative advantage of the woman who was his
choice.
Alas! if youth but knew!
From the bowling green without came a gust of laughter; then a light
voice broke into a stave of popular song. They had, in happier moments,
heard that lilt upon the fiddle of wandering Hans; it struck them
poignantly. Wounded love flamed into intemperate resentment.
"After all, Aunt Betty but told me the truth, if a little late--you have
nothing to say," said Sidonia, between teeth clenched upon a sob.
"Only this," replied Steven, arrogantly, from the height of his disdain,
"that I command you, as your husband, to come with me now."
Sidonia pointed to the door.
"_Herr Graf von Kielmansegg_, my uncle expects to hear from the judges
to-day anent the annulment of that ill-considered ceremony which made me
nominally your wife. His lawyers will call upon you in due course."
"Madam," answered the count, bowing, "I intend to take up my abode in
Cassel--at the _Aigle Imperial_. Therefore there will be no difficulty
about my address. But let me remark that annulments are not easily
concluded without the consent of both parties."
He closed the door between them upon these words.
"He does not love me--he never loved me!" said Sidonia to her bursting
heart. "It was all pride!"
The other unworthy suspicions, which Betty had so subtly instilled,
could not live in her soul after having come again under the glance of
Steven's eye. But she had pride too, her woman's pride, and it showed
her what she had to do, even though it killed her.
"O Geiger-Onkel," cried the poor child, "what have you brought me to!
Even you have abandoned me!"
Betty's arrows, shot at spiteful random, occasionally hit a truer mark
than she herself suspected. When, in her tower prison, she had
petulantly averred that the Burgrave would certainly keep in his own
hands the choosing of Sidonia's husband (and for very good reasons!) she
had unconsciously struck the gold. The heiress's guardian did not
intend, if it could be helped, to have his accounts examined. Hence,
apart from the humiliating pressure put upon him, against which his
elementary violence rebelled, the young Austrian was the last person the
Burgrave would have desired as nephew-in-law. There was a
relentlessness in the young man's eye and a clear penetration, which,
whenever the Burgrave remembered them, sent uncomfortable chills through
his frame. True, Count Kielmansegg had never breathed one syllable on
the subject of his bride's fortune; but this very silence struck the
Chancellor as the more ominous.
"I shall have his lawyers on top of me before I know where I am," he had
many a time growled in those sullen days that followed Sidonia's
betrothal, chiefly at those hours of conscience's activity, the dull
hours before the dawn, when the night's potations had ceased to
stimulate.
It was not that Wellenshausen had ever been consciously dishonest. In
his fine masculine, Germanic way, when he had put large sums of his
ward's money to his own uses, he had felt himself almost in the right.
Was it not against nature that mere females should have advantages over
the male? Indeed, he had scarcely taken the trouble to make memoranda
of the expenditure: in Jerome's kingdom, especially in financial
matters, it was never customary to waste time upon details, and the
sense of impending catastrophe, more particularly of late, had increased
the sense of the value of the fleeting moment.
Since his second marriage the Burgrave had certainly taken both hands to
Sidonia's treasure. There was the loan to his Royal Master; a matter of
high diplomacy! It was well to have a lien over so slippery a patron.
And, besides, it would be all to the child's advantage, no doubt, later
on. Practically an investment! There were Betty's pearls.... Well, in
these uncertain times, might not jewels also be looked upon as an
investment? none the worse for having gleamed so charmingly on Betty's
shoulders!
And there was this, and there was that.... In the small hours above
mentioned, memory became inconveniently active. Once or twice the
Burgrave had sat up in his feather-bed to wipe a clammy forehead; in
truth, he did not know how much the heiress of Wellenshausen, apart from
the lands, was heiress to. But there was a certain document of his late
brother's, referring, in very precise terms, to the _Fideicommission_,
to the trust.
It was no wonder, then, that when Sidonia had come to him, on the day of
the wedding, where he sat glowering over his wine-cup and the remains of
the feast, and had told him how she and her new husband had parted for
ever, the relief should have been so unexpected and so great as
completely to sober him.
In a spasm of paternal affection he had assured her that such a ceremony
could not count, and that it would be the easiest thing in the world to
release her, since she wished it.
She had looked at him stonily over her bridal white. Was that indeed
the case? she had asked. She had thought marriages were for ever.
And he had laughed at her joyously. "Na, na, little dove--a marriage of
this kind, if one wishes it, was as good as no marriage at all!"
"Then see to it, please," she had said steadily, avoiding his embrace.
There was horror in the look she cast upon him as she turned to leave
the room; but he was too completely absorbed in his joy to see anything
but the deliverance before him. He never even paused to wonder, to
inquire the reason of the breach--and this, doubtless, had been well for
Betty.
The connubial migration to Cassel, consent to which had been wrung from
him at the expense of so much mental agony, now became a project which
could not be soon enough, to please him, put into execution. For would
it not mean the prompt legal annulment of Sidonia's most inopportune
alliance? His original jealousy of Beau Cousin would seem to have been
the one thing really murdered in the _oubliette_; yet, perhaps,
somewhere deep down in his consciousness, there faintly stirred, beneath
all the other reasons for relief, a satisfaction at the thought that
Cousin Kielmansegg could never again be made welcome to the house that
had sheltered his divorced wife.
*CHAPTER XXVI*
*THE WAYS OF LITTLE COURTS*
"_Thinkest thou there is no tyranny but that_
_Of blood and chains? The despotism of vice--_
_The weakness and the wickedness of luxury--_
_Of sensual sloth--produce ten thousand tyrants._"
BYRON.
Betty came thoughtfully into her husband's presence. The review had not
been a success. In spite of velvet _redingote_ and yellow plumes, she
could not flatter herself that Jerome had singled her out. She began to
have qualms as to the results of that unexplained and inexplicable
mistake in her correspondence. She had fully promised herself that the
first glance between her and the King would delicately give him to
understand that her rigour was not as eternal as the uncompromising
"_Never_" might have led him to believe.
Indeed, with natural optimism, under the rosy atmosphere evolved between
her mirror and the _shako a la Saxonne_, she had come to tell herself
that the unintended rebuff was, perhaps, not a thing to be regretted
after all. Kings or chancellors, or simple Viennese lieutenants, men
were much the same, she took it. And, as the experienced French have
it, _tenir la dragee haute_, was none too bad a way to make the
creatures yearn for it. Was not her own Burgrave a telling proof?
But the fact remained that Jerome had not even seemed aware of her
existence that afternoon. Something had gone wrong about the review. At
the last moment it had been found wiser to leave a certain regiment in
barracks, information having transpired about a leaven of disloyalty.
Jerome's brow had been thunder black. There had been a vast amount of
discussion between him and five or six generals. And finally the King
had left the field in high displeasure, before the programme of
evolutions had been half concluded. And it was a painful fact that none
of the populace cheered him as he went.
Certainly, if he had not looked at her, he had, at least, looked at no
other fair one. Still, the day had been a failure for the Burgravine;
and, as she drove back to the Palace, she had actually some doubts as to
the shako. In her own apartment a new trouble confronted her. Sidonia,
who had locked herself up alone after that momentous interview, now came
very calmly to greet her. She had a smile on her lips, and--thus do we
cherish vipers in our bosom!--Eliza's fingers had obviously been busy on
the yellow head. The child was positively _coiffee_! Yes, and she was
dressed, too: a fashionable creature. And pretty--undeniably pretty, in
a singular, girlish way of her own. And not a word could the most
insidious question draw from her lips. Betty was forced, in the end, to
apply to Eliza. The tirewoman shrugged her shoulders. She knew well
enough what had passed, but it was too much to expect her to gratify her
mistress.
"Cannot _madame_ see? Ah, it will not be long before those two are
together again! If she coquets a little, _certes_, it will not be
_madame_ who will blame her! Oh, it is not for nothing that
_mademoiselle_ is making herself beautiful! Who knows if she will not
meet him to-morrow night!"
"Heavens!" exclaimed the Burgravine, disagreeably struck, "you do not
mean that she intends to go to the fete!"
"But, yes, madame; she has been choosing her dress. And oh, I know some
one who will look pretty."
"But the deeds are actually drawn up. The marriage is as good as
annulled already," cried Betty.
Eliza clacked her tongue contemptuously. "Until people are divorced,
they are still married," she remarked sagely. "And it is not the young
gentleman who wants a divorce, I can tell madame. 'Oh, how he is
enamoured!' says Kurtz to me. 'He came in like a lion roaring,' says
Kurtz. 'That is love,' he says to me. 'Beautiful!' he says."
Betty snapped herself out of her maid's hands, flung herself into a
wrapper and went to seek the Burgrave.
As matters stood, the storm-wind of injured vanity and jealousy blowing
very strong, she actually would rather give up her conquest of Jerome
than, she thought, the sweets of revenge. In the Burgrave she had an
ally--she never paused to wonder why, so little did she heed the flight
of her arrows.
Before they parted, the sagacious couple, for once warmly united, were
agreed that until Sidonia were provided with another husband, they could
scarcely feel themselves safe from Kielmansegg's persecution. Now, in
the court of Jerome, husbands had been known to be provided for people
at the shortest notice ... things had generally to be done at short
notice at the court of Jerome.
Sidonia was still quite sufficiently an heiress for the Chancellor (he
knew his court) to be quite sure of being able to find some excellent
person who would take her thankfully from his hands without daring to
request, much less to stipulate, for an exhibition of figures.
* * * * *
There was a Court-concert the next night at the Royal Palace, and it was
in the music-room that Sidonia was, by command, presented to Jerome.
She dropped her curtsey. Here was a King for whose royalty, in her
sturdy patriotism and her inherited race tradition, she felt neither
allegiance nor respect. As she drew herself up from the perfunctory
obeisance, she looked him in the face and met the well-remembered
glance, with its hateful gleam and flicker. Turning aside she became
conscious of the gaze of the King's Master of the Horse, General
d'Albignac, as he towered over his dapper little sovereign. Steady
enough this, something like the glare with which the beast of prey
regards his quarry. The girl's heart sank with a double terror.
"I am charmed," said the King, "to behold at last with my own eyes the
young heiress of Wellenshausen, in whose lovely person, I am told, is
vested so much of my territory."
This was spoken in German, with a pronounced Italian accent. Then
Jerome slid into French to say caressingly:
"_Mademoiselle de Wellenshausen_ is welcome at my Court."
Betty von Wellenshausen, at Sidonia's side, stood twittering, awaiting
her moment. Jerome was once more in high good humour; all trace of the
gloom that had weighted his brow through yesterday's afternoon was gone.
Betty felt sure of triumph. Her entrance had created quite a flutter in
the assembly. Women had whispered together behind their fans. Men's
eyes had followed her with bold, curious looks. Her Bluebeard shadowed
her with a fierce anxiety which to-night Betty accepted cheerfully as a
further tribute, confident that she and his sovereign could elude it
when the critical time came.
What, therefore, were her feelings when she found Jerome's eyes glinting
past her--ay, past Betty von Wellenshausen at her fairest--to rest with
marked interest (if ever the word "rest" could be applied to Jerome's
eyes) upon Sidonia, the gawky child. There could be no mistake about
it, she could not soothe herself with the thought that pique was the
cause of his neglect. His attention swept by her with no deliberate
indifference; she simply did not exist for him, his interest was vividly
enkindled elsewhere. In the blasting disillusion of the experience, the
Burgravine turned livid. Through the buzzing in her ears she could
scarce catch Sidonia's reply to the King's gracious words.
The child, however, was speaking in clear, deliberate tones, and what
she was saying was sufficiently remarkable:
"Your Majesty mistakes. I am the Countess Waldorff-Kielmansegg."
[Illustration: _What she was saying was sufficiently remarkable:_ "_Your
Majesty mistakes. I am the Countess Waldorff-Kielmansegg._"]
Outward decorum is the rule even at the most amateur court, yet the
sensation created by the announcement Sidonia could feel to her
innermost nerve. The countenance of Jerome became as suddenly and
threateningly overcast as that of a spoilt urchin thwarted. He flung a
look of anger at his Chancellor. The veins swelled on the crimsoning
forehead of General d'Albignac.
* * * * *
The rumour that old Wellenshausen had a rich _niece a marier_ had spread
very quickly through the Palace. D'Albignac remembered her quite well;
it was she who had struck him over the eyes with her plaits--that added
something to the zest with which the King's Master of the Horse had
sought an interview that morning with the young lady's guardian. It was
not unsatisfactory in its results. Ere they parted, indeed, the two
thoroughly understood each other. The _ex-chouan_ was hardly a match,
perhaps, for a Wellenshausen; but then there was the coming scandal of
the annulment! Her fortune, on the other hand, might not be now what it
had been on her father's death, but it was considerable. And, again,
times were bad. The Burgrave could guarantee, at any rate, that the
broad lands were intact. One must make up one's mind to give and take
in this world; and every one, from King downwards, was more or less in
debt at the Court of Jerome--d'Albignac distinctly more than less.
Besides, a pretty wife was always a good speculation at Cassel. And
when d'Albignac saw Jerome fix his future bride with a well-known look,
he knew that she might prove a very profitable speculation indeed. A
prolonged course of "_Pompadourettes_" had begun to satiate the royal
palate; here was a wild, high-born thing that carried her head like a
stag, and looked out upon them all with fire in her eyes. By the side of
the ogling, mincing bit of plumpness that the Burgrave had provided
himself with, with all her stage tricks and fireworks, even to the
chouan renegade (who was no eclectic) the contrast was grateful. And
now there was this nonsense about a previous marriage to spoil all!
What a pity he had not been allowed quietly to finish off the
impertinent interloper that night in the forest!
* * * * *
Betty's voice broke shrilly upon the brooding pause:
"Your Majesty," she cried, "has, I believe, already received information
of the true position of affairs. The marriage was no marriage. A
quixotic piece of nonsense, half-hearted, soon repented, at least on one
side. The deeds of annulment are actually drawn up. Count
Kielmansegg's signature--or I am very much mistaken--will be promptly
affixed now, and it is not to be imagined, as your Majesty will well
believe, that my husband's niece will then withhold hers. It would be
against all feminine delicacy, all proper pride."
She shot a look of fury at her niece; then she nudged the Burgrave, who
instantly reasseverated in his deep bass:
"The deed of annulment is drawn up, sire."
Jerome's good humour returned. He rubbed his hands. In spite of all
his royal assumption, much of the exuberant gesture of the Corsican had
stuck to him, to the distaste of his stolid subjects.
"_Il faut aller vite, vite, alors_. We must make haste," he averred.
To make haste and enjoy was, indeed, the rule of his existence. Now, a
Lent of unexampled rigour seemed inevitably drawing near him, and all
the more vertiginous was his carnival. So vertiginous indeed, that,
willingly blind though she was, the Queen, true German daughter of
Wuertemberg, had withdrawn from the whirl, giddy and panting, to take
refuge at Napoleonshoehe till such time as her spouse would come to
sober sense again.
Jerome considered the girl a moment longer in silence. That she should
flush and pale beneath his glance, look anger at him from her deep eyes
and then avert her head with an insulted turn of the neck, all added so
much fuel to his easily kindled flame. He wished to go quick, quick;
but if she gave him a bit of a chase, so much the better. And now he
found a smile for Betty, and a gracious word, ere he passed on, taking
the Burgrave by the arm. Betty might do very well for an idle hour,
by-and-by, perhaps; but, heavens, how many Betties had he not known!
The Burgravine's self-esteem was at once too profound and too sensitive
not to realize the completeness of her failure. But vanity has its
heroines. None could have guessed, as she paired off merrily with
d'Albignac, the extent of her mortification. Yet it was something very
little short of torture that she was enduring as she smiled and
coquetted and fanned herself, and babbled her pretty babble.
*CHAPTER XXVII*
*THE SONG OF THE WOODS*
"Das ist ein Klingen und Droehnen
Bon Pauken und Schalmei'n
Dazwischen schluchzen und stoehnen
Die guten Engelein."
HEINE.
Sidonia slipped away alone to a shadowed window-recess. Under the
insult of her aunt's words, the insult of Jerome's gaze, pain and anger
had so burned within her as to exclude all other feelings. But in the
"solitude of the crowd," her brain gradually cleared; and, as she
reviewed the situation, a new feeling, a dread unnamed but overwhelming,
began to take possession of her. With wits naturally alert, and to-night
abnormally stimulated, she began to notice strange things about her.
She was in danger--in danger of what, she knew not, but something
horrible, unspeakable. The looks the King and d'Albignac had cast upon
her, the glance of intelligence they had then exchanged, her uncle's
obsequious haste to disclaim her marriage, and her aunt's public affront
to her, were as many lightning flashes that showed the precipice yawning
at her feet. Not a friend had she in the world to whom she could turn,
save the man who did not love her, and a poor, wandering musician, now
probably far away on some Thuringian road, playing gay tunes to the
rhythm of his own incurable melancholy.
Unavowed, even to her own heart, these two days the thought had haunted
her that perhaps--nay, doubtless--Steven would take the opportunity of
meeting her, which the royal function afforded him this night. She knew
enough of the ways of Jerome's court already to be aware that there
would be no difficulty in his being present at the palace concert should
he wish it. The Upstart loved to parade his magnificence before
strangers; and to a Waldorff-Kielmansegg the palace doors would be open
_a double battants_.