They satisfied the passion for the little obsolete capital which had

been growing upon them by strolling past the old Resident at an hour so

favorable for a first impression. It loomed in the gathering dusk even

vaster than it was, and it was really vast enough for the pride of a

King of France, much more a Margrave of Ansbach. Time had blackened and

blotched its coarse limestone walls to one complexion with the statues

swelling and strutting in the figure of Roman legionaries before it, and

standing out against the evening sky along its balustraded roof, and

had softened to the right tint the stretch of half a dozen houses with

mansard roofs and renaissance facades obsequiously in keeping with

the Versailles ideal of a Resident. In the rear, and elsewhere at fit

distance from its courts, a native architecture prevailed; and at no

great remove the Marches found themselves in a simple German town again.

There they stumbled upon a little bookseller's shop blinking in a quiet

corner, and bought three or four guides and small histories of Ansbach,

which they carried home, and studied between drowsing and waking. The

wonderful German syntax seems at its most enigmatical in this sort

of literature, and sometimes they lost themselves in its labyrinths

completely, and only made their way perilously out with the help of

cumulative declensions, past articles and adjectives blindly seeking

their nouns, to long-procrastinated verbs dancing like swamp-fires in

the distance. They emerged a little less ignorant than they went in, and

better qualified than they would otherwise have been for their second

visit to the Schloss, which they paid early the next morning.

They were so early, indeed, that when they mounted from the great inner

court, much too big for Ansbach, if not for the building, and rung the

custodian's bell, a smiling maid who let them into an ante-room, where

she kept on picking over vegetables for her dinner, said the custodian

was busy, and could not be seen till ten o'clock. She seemed, in her

nook of the pretentious pile, as innocently unconscious of its

history as any hen-sparrow who had built her nest in some coign of

its architecture; and her friendly, peaceful domesticity remained a

wholesome human background to the tragedies and comedies of the past,

and held them in a picturesque relief in which they were alike tolerable

and even charming.

The history of Ansbach strikes its roots in the soil of fable, and above

ground is a gnarled and twisted growth of good and bad from the time

of the Great Charles to the time of the Great Frederick. Between these

times she had her various rulers, ecclesiastical and secular, in various

forms of vassalage to the empire; but for nearly four centuries

her sovereignty was in the hands of the margraves, who reigned in a

constantly increasing splendor till the last sold her outright to the

King of Prussia in 1791, and went to live in England on the proceeds.

She had taken her part in the miseries and glories of the wars that

desolated Germany, but after the Reformation, when she turned from

the ancient faith to which she owed her cloistered origin under St.

Gumpertus, her people had peace except when their last prince sold them

to fight the battles of others. It is in this last transaction that her

history, almost in the moment when she ceased to have a history of her

own, links to that of the modern world, and that it came home to the

Marches in their national character; for two thousand of those poor

Ansbach mercenaries were bought up by England and sent to put down a

rebellion in her American colonies.

Humanly, they were more concerned for the Last Margrave, because of

certain qualities which made him the Best Margrave, in spite of the

defects of his qualities. He was the son of the Wild Margrave, equally

known in the Ansbach annals, who may not have been the Worst Margrave,

but who had certainly a bad trick of putting his subjects to death

without trial, and in cases where there was special haste, with his own

hand. He sent his son to the university at Utrecht because he believed

that the republican influences in Holland would be wholesome for him,

and then he sent him to travel in Italy; but when the boy came

home looking frail and sick, the Wild Margrave charged his official

travelling companion with neglect, and had the unhappy Hofrath Meyer

hanged without process for this crime. One of the gentlemen of his

realm, for a pasquinade on the Margrave, was brought to the scaffold; he

had, at various times, twenty-two of his soldiers shot with arrows

and bullets or hanged for desertion, besides many whose penalties his

clemency commuted to the loss of an ear or a nose; a Hungarian who

killed his hunting-dog, he had broken alive on the wheel. A soldier's

wife was hanged for complicity in a case of desertion; a young soldier

who eloped with the girl he loved was brought to Ansbach from a

neighboring town, and hanged with her on the same gallows. A sentry

at the door of one of the Margrave's castles amiably complied with the

Margrave's request to let him take his gun for a moment, on the pretence

of wishing to look at it. For this breach of discipline the prince

covered him with abuse and gave him over to his hussars, who bound him

to a horse's tail and dragged him through the streets; he died of his

injuries. The kennel-master who had charge of the Margrave's dogs was

accused of neglecting them: without further inquiry the Margrave rode to

the man's house and shot him down on his own threshold. A shepherd who

met the Margrave on a shying horse did not get his flock out of the way

quickly enough; the Margrave demanded the pistols of a gentleman in his

company, but he answered that they were not loaded, and the shepherd's

life was saved. As they returned home the gentleman fired them off.

“What does that mean?” cried the Margrave, furiously. “It means,

gracious lord, that you will sleep sweeter tonight, for not having heard

my pistols an hour sooner.”

From this it appears that the gracious lord had his moments of regret;

but perhaps it is not altogether strange that when he died, the whole

population “stormed through the streets to meet his funeral train, not

in awe-stricken silence to meditate on the fall of human grandeur, but

to unite in an eager tumult of rejoicing, as if some cruel brigand who

had long held the city in terror were delivered over to them bound and

in chains.” For nearly thirty years this blood-stained miscreant had

reigned over his hapless people in a sovereign plenitude of power, which

by the theory of German imperialism in our day is still a divine right.

They called him the Wild Margrave, in their instinctive revolt from

the belief that any man not untamably savage could be guilty of his

atrocities; and they called his son the Last Margrave, with a touch

of the poetry which perhaps records a regret for their extinction as a

state. He did not harry them as his father had done; his mild rule was

the effect partly of the indifference and distaste for his country bred,

by his long sojourns abroad; but doubtless also it was the effect of a

kindly nature. Even in the matter of selling a few thousands of them to

fight the battles of a bad cause on the other side of the world, he had

the best of motives, and faithfully applied the proceeds to the payment

of the state debt and the embellishment of the capital.

His mother was a younger sister of Frederick the Great, and was so

constantly at war with her husband that probably she had nothing to do

with the marriage which the Wild Margrave forced upon their son. Love

certainly had nothing to do with it, and the Last Margrave early escaped

from it to the society of Mlle. Clairon, the great French tragedienne,

whom he met in Paris, and whom he persuaded to come and make her home

with him in Ansbach. She lived there seventeen years, and though always

an alien, she bore herself with kindness to all classes, and is

still remembered there by the roll of butter which calls itself a

Klarungswecke in its imperfect French.

No roll of butter records in faltering accents the name of the brilliant

and disdainful English lady who replaced this poor tragic muse in

the Margrave's heart, though the lady herself lived to be the last

Margravine of Ansbach, where everybody seems to have hated her with a

passion which she doubtless knew how to return. She was the daughter

of the Earl of Berkeley, and the wife of Lord Craven, a sufficiently

unfaithful and unworthy nobleman by her account, from whom she was

living apart when the Margrave asked her to his capital. There she set

herself to oust Mlle. Clairon with sneers and jests for the theatrical

style which the actress could not outlive. Lady Craven said she was

sure Clairon's nightcap must be a crown of gilt paper; and when Clairon

threatened to kill herself, and the Margrave was alarmed, “You forget,”

said Lady Craven, “that actresses only stab themselves under their

sleeves.”

She drove Clairon from Ansbach, and the great tragedienne returned to

Paris, where she remained true to her false friend, and from time

to time wrote him letters full of magnanimous counsel and generous

tenderness. But she could not have been so good company as Lady Craven,

who was a very gifted person, and knew how to compose songs and sing

them, and write comedies and play them, and who could keep the Margrave

amused in many ways. When his loveless and childless wife died he

married the English woman, but he grew more and more weary of his dull

little court and his dull little country, and after a while, considering

the uncertain tenure sovereigns had of their heads since the French King

had lost his, and the fact that he had no heirs to follow him in his

principality, he resolved to cede it for a certain sum to Prussia. To

this end his new wife's urgence was perhaps not wanting. They went to

England, where she outlived him ten years, and wrote her memoirs.

The custodian of the Schloss came at last, and the Marches saw instantly

that he was worth waiting for. He was as vainglorious of the palace as

any grand-monarching margrave of them all. He could not have been more

personally superb in showing their different effigies if they had been

his own family portraits, and he would not spare the strangers a single

splendor of the twenty vast, handsome, tiresome, Versailles-like

rooms he led them through. The rooms were fatiguing physically, but so

poignantly interesting that Mrs. March would not have missed, though she

perished of her pleasure, one of the things she saw. She had for once a

surfeit of highhoting in the pictures, the porcelains, the thrones and

canopies, the tapestries, the historical associations with the margraves

and their marriages, with the Great Frederick and the Great Napoleon.

The Great Napoleon's man Bernadotte made the Schloss his headquarters

when he occupied Ansbach after Austerlitz, and here he completed his

arrangements for taking her bargain from Prussia and handing it over

to Bavaria, with whom it still remains. Twice the Great Frederick had

sojourned in the palace; visiting his sister Louise, the wife of the

Wild Margrave, and more than once it had welcomed her next neighbor

and sister Wilhelmina, the Margravine of Baireuth, whose autobiographic

voice, piercingly plaintive and reproachful, seemed to quiver in the

air. Here, oddly enough, the spell of the Wild Margrave weakened in the

presence of his portrait, which signally failed to justify his fame of

furious tyrant. That seems, indeed, to have been rather the popular

and historical conception of him than the impression he made upon his

exalted contemporaries. The Margravine of Baireuth at any rate could

so far excuse her poor blood-stained brother-in-law as to say: “The

Margrave of Ansbach... was a young prince who had been very badly

educated. He continually ill-treated my sister; they led the life of cat

and dog. My sister, it is true, was sometimes in fault.... Her education

had been very bad... She was married at fourteen.”

At parting, the custodian told the Marches that he would easily have

known them for Americans by the handsome fee they gave him; they

came away flown with his praise; and their national vanity was again

flattered when they got out into the principal square of Ansbach.

There, in a bookseller's window, they found among the pamphlets teaching

different languages without a master, one devoted to the Amerikanische

Sprache as distinguished from the Englische Sprache. That there could be

no mistake, the cover was printed with colors in a German ideal of

the star-spangled banner; and March said he always knew that we had a

language of our own, and that now he was going in to buy that pamphlet

and find out what it was like. He asked the young shop-woman how it

differed from English, which she spoke fairly well from having lived

eight years in Chicago. She said that it differed from the English

mainly in emphasis and pronunciation. “For instance, the English say

'HALF past', and the Americans 'Half PAST'; the English say 'laht' and

the Americans say 'late'.”

The weather had now been clear quite long enough, and it was raining

again, a fine, bitter, piercing drizzle. They asked the girl if it

always rained in Ansbach; and she owned that it nearly always did. She

said that sometimes she longed for a little American summer; that it was

never quite warm in Ansbach; and when they had got out into the rain,

March said: “It was very nice to stumble on Chicago in an Ansbach

book-store. You ought to have told her you had a married daughter in

Chicago. Don't miss another such chance.”

“We shall need another bag if we keep on buying books at this rate,”

said his wife with tranquil irrelevance; and not to give him time for

protest; she pushed him into a shop where the valises in the window

perhaps suggested her thought. March made haste to forestall her there

by saying they were Americans, but the mistress of the shop seemed to

have her misgivings, and “Born Americans, perhaps?” she ventured. She

had probably never met any but the naturalized sort, and supposed these

were the only sort. March re-assured her, and then she said she had a

son living in Jersey City, and she made March take his address that he

might tell him he had seen his mother; she had apparently no conception

what a great way Jersey City is from New York.

Mrs. March would not take his arm when they came out. “Now, that is what

I never can get used to in you, Basil, and I've tried to palliate it for

twenty-seven years. You know you won't look up that poor woman's son!

Why did you let her think you would?”

“How could I tell her I wouldn't? Perhaps I shall.”

“No, no! You never will. I know you're good and kind, and that's why

I can't understand your being so cruel. When we get back, how will you

ever find time to go over to Jersey City?”

He could not tell, but at last he said: “I'll tell you what! You must

keep me up to it. You know how much you enjoy making me do my duty, and

this will be such a pleasure!”

She laughed forlornly, but after a moment she took his arm; and he

began, from the example of this good mother, to philosophize the

continuous simplicity and sanity of the people of Ansbach under all

their civic changes. Saints and soldiers, knights and barons,

margraves, princes, kings, emperors, had come and gone, and left their

single-hearted, friendly subjectfolk pretty much what they found them.

The people had suffered and survived through a thousand wars, and

apparently prospered on under all governments and misgovernments. When

the court was most French, most artificial, most vicious, the citizen

life must have remained immutably German, dull, and kind. After all, he

said, humanity seemed everywhere to be pretty safe, and pretty much the

same.

“Yes, that is all very well,” she returned, “and you can theorize

interestingly enough; but I'm afraid that poor mother, there, had no

more reality for you than those people in the past. You appreciate her

as a type, and you don't care for her as a human being. You're nothing

but a dreamer, after all. I don't blame you,” she went on. “It's your

temperament, and you can't change, now.”

“I may change for the worse,” he threatened. “I think I have, already.

I don't believe I could stand up to Dryfoos, now, as I did for poor

old Lindau, when I risked your bread and butter for his. I look back

in wonder and admiration at myself. I've steadily lost touch with life

since then. I'm a trifler, a dilettante, and an amateur of the right and

the good as I used to be when I was young. Oh, I have the grace to be

troubled at times, now, and once I never was. It never occurred to

me then that the world wasn't made to interest me, or at the best to

instruct me, but it does, now, at times.”

She always came to his defence when he accused himself; it was the

best ground he could take with her. “I think you behaved very well with

Burnamy. You did your duty then.”

“Did I? I'm not so sure. At any rate, it's the last time I shall do it.

I've served my term. I think I should tell him that he was all right in

that business with Stoller, if I were to meet him, now.”

“Isn't it strange,” she said, provisionally, “that we don't come upon a

trace of him anywhere in Ansbach?”

“Ah, you've been hoping he would turn up!”

“Yes. I don't deny it. I feel very unhappy about him.”

“I don't. He's too much like me. He would have been quite capable of

promising that poor woman to look up her son in Jersey City. When I

think of that, I have no patience with Burnamy.”

“I am going to ask the landlord about him, now he's got rid of his

highhotes,” said Mrs. March.

XLIX.

They went home to their hotel for their midday dinner, and to the

comfort of having it nearly all to themselves. Prince Leopold had risen

early, like all the hard-working potentates of the continent, and got

away to the manoeuvres somewhere at six o'clock; the decorations had

been removed, and the court-yard where the hired coach and pair of the

prince had rolled in the evening before had only a few majestic ducks

waddling about in it and quacking together, indifferent to the presence

of a yellow mail-wagon, on which the driver had been apparently dozing

till the hour of noon should sound. He sat there immovable, but at the

last stroke of the clock he woke up and drove vigorously away to the

station.

The dining-room which they had been kept out of by the prince the night

before was not such as to embitter the sense of their wrong by its

splendor. After all, the tastes of royalty must be simple, if the prince

might have gone to the Schloss and had chosen rather to stay at this

modest hotel; but perhaps the Schloss was reserved for more immediate

royalty than the brothers of prince-regents; and in that case he could

not have done better than dine at the Golden Star. If he paid no more

than two marks, he dined as cheaply as a prince could wish, and as

abundantly. The wine at Ansbach was rather thin and sour, but the bread,

March declared, was the best bread in the whole world, not excepting the

bread of Carlsbad.

After dinner the Marches had some of the local pastry, not so

incomparable as the bread, with their coffee, which they had served them

in a pavilion of the beautiful garden remaining to the hotel from the

time when it was a patrician mansion. The garden had roses in it

and several sorts of late summer flowers, as well as ripe cherries,

currants, grapes, and a Virginia-creeper red with autumn, all

harmoniously contemporaneous, as they might easily be in a climate where

no one of the seasons can very well know itself from the others. It had

not been raining for half an hour, and the sun was scalding hot, so

that the shelter of their roof was very grateful, and the puddles of

the paths were drying up with the haste which puddles have to make in

Germany, between rains, if they are ever going to dry up at all.

The landlord came out to see if they were well served, and he was

sincerely obliging in the English he had learned as a waiter in London.

Mrs. March made haste to ask him if a young American of the name of

Burnamy had been staying with him a few weeks before; and she described

Burnamy's beauty and amiability so vividly that the landlord, if he had

been a woman, could not have failed to remember him. But he failed, with

a real grief, apparently, and certainly a real politeness, to recall

either his name or his person. The landlord was an intelligent,

good-looking young fellow; he told them that he was lately married,

and they liked him so much that they were sorry to see him afterwards

privately boxing the ears of the piccolo, the waiter's little

understudy. Perhaps the piccolo deserved it, but they would rather not

have witnessed his punishment; his being in a dress-coat seemed to make

it also an indignity.

In the late afternoon they went to the cafe in the old Orangery of the

Schloss for a cup of tea, and found themselves in the company of several

Ansbach ladies who had brought their work, in the evident habit of

coming there every afternoon for their coffee and for a dish of gossip.

They were kind, uncomely, motherly-looking bodies; one of them combed

her hair at the table; and they all sat outside of the cafe with their

feet on the borders of the puddles which had not dried up there in the

shade of the building.

A deep lawn, darkened at its farther edge by the long shadows of trees,

stretched before them with the sunset light on it, and it was all very

quiet and friendly. The tea brought to the Marches was brewed from some

herb apparently of native growth, with bits of what looked like willow

leaves in it, but it was flavored with a clove in each cup, and they sat

contentedly over it and tried to make out what the Ansbach ladies were,

talking about. These had recognized the strangers for Americans, and one

of them explained that Americans spoke the same language as the English

and yet were not quite the same people.

“She differs from the girl in the book-store,” said March, translating

to his wife. “Let us get away before she says that we are not so nice

as the English,” and they made off toward the avenue of trees beyond the

lawn.

There were a few people walking up and down in the alley, making

the most of the moment of dry weather. They saluted one another like

acquaintances, and three clean-shaven, walnut-faced old peasants bowed

in response to March's stare, with a self-respectful civility. They were

yeomen of the region of Ansbach, where the country round about is dotted

with their cottages, and not held in vast homeless tracts by the nobles

as in North Germany.

The Bavarian who had imparted this fact to March at breakfast,

not without a certain tacit pride in it to the disadvantage of the

Prussians, was at the supper table, and was disposed to more talk, which

he managed in a stout, slow English of his own. He said he had never

really spoken English with an English-speaking person before, or at all

since he studied it in school at Munich.

“I should be afraid to put my school-boy German against your English,”

March said, and, when he had understood, the other laughed for pleasure,

and reported the compliment to his wife in their own parlance. “You

Germans certainly beat us in languages.”

“Oh, well,” he retaliated, “the Americans beat us in some other things,”

and Mrs. March felt that this was but just; she would have liked to

mention a few, but not ungraciously; she and the German lady kept

smiling across the table, and trying detached vocables of their

respective tongues upon each other.

The Bavarian said he lived in Munich still, but was in Ansbach on an

affair of business; he asked March if he were not going to see the

manoeuvres somewhere. Till now the manoeuvres had merely been the

interesting background of their travel; but now, hearing that the

Emperor of Germany, the King of Saxony, the Regent of Bavaria, and the

King of Wurtemberg, the Grand-Dukes of Weimar and Baden, with visiting

potentates of all sorts, and innumerable lesser highhotes, foreign and

domestic, were to be present, Mrs. March resolved that they must go to

at least one of the reviews.

“If you go to Frankfort, you can see the King of Italy too,” said the

Bavarian, but he owned that they probably could not get into a hotel

there, and he asked why they should not go to Wurzburg, where they could

see all the sovereigns except the King of Italy.

“Wurzburg? Wurzburg?” March queried of his wife. “Where did we hear of

that place?”

“Isn't it where Burnamy said Mr. Stoller had left his daughters at

school?”

“So it is! And is that on the way to the Rhine?” he asked the Bavarian.

“No, no! Wurzburg is on the Main, about five hours from Ansbach. And it

is a very interesting place. It is where the good wine comes from.”

“Oh, yes,” said March, and in their rooms his wife got out all their

guides and maps and began to inform herself and to inform him about

Wurzburg. But first she said it was very cold and he must order some

fire made in the tall German stove in their parlor. The maid who came

said “Gleich,” but she did not come back, and about the time they were

getting furious at her neglect, they began getting warm. He put his hand

on the stove and found it hot; then he looked down for a door in the

stove where he might shut a damper; there was no door.

“Good heavens!” he shouted. “It's like something in a dream,” and he ran

to pull the bell for help.

“No, no! Don't ring! It will make us ridiculous. They'll think Americans

don't know anything. There must be some way of dampening the stove; and

if there isn't, I'd rather suffocate than give myself away.” Mrs. March

ran and opened the window, while her husband carefully examined the

stove at every point, and explored the pipe for the damper in vain.

“Can't you find it?” The night wind came in raw and damp, and threatened

to blow their lamp out, and she was obliged to shut the window.

“Not a sign of it. I will go down and ask the landlord in strict

confidence how they dampen their stoves in Ansbach.”

“Well, if you must. It's getting hotter every moment.” She followed him

timorously into the corridor, lit by a hanging lamp, turned low for the

night.

He looked at his watch; it was eleven o'clock. “I'm afraid they're all

in bed.”

“Yes; you mustn't go! We must try to find out for ourselves. What can

that door be for?”

It was a low iron door, half the height of a man, in the wall near their

room, and it yielded to his pull. “Get a candle,” he whispered, and when

she brought it, he stooped to enter the doorway.

“Oh, do you think you'd better?” she hesitated.

“You can come, too, if you're afraid. You've always said you wanted to

die with me.”

“Well. But you go first.”

He disappeared within, and then came back to the doorway. “Just come in

here, a moment.” She found herself in a sort of antechamber, half the

height of her own room, and following his gesture she looked down where

in one corner some crouching monster seemed showing its fiery teeth in a

grin of derision. This grin was the damper of their stove, and this was

where the maid had kindled the fire which had been roasting them alive,

and was still joyously chuckling to itself. “I think that Munich man was

wrong. I don't believe we beat the Germans in anything. There isn't a

hotel in the United States where the stoves have no front doors, and

every one of them has the space of a good-sized flat given up to the

convenience of kindling a fire in it.”

L.

After a red sunset of shameless duplicity March was awakened to a

rainy morning by the clinking of cavalry hoofs on the pavement of the

long-irregular square before the hotel, and he hurried out to see the

passing of the soldiers on their way to the manoeuvres. They were troops

of all arms, but mainly infantry, and as they stumped heavily through

the groups of apathetic citizens in their mud-splashed boots, they

took the steady downpour on their dripping helmets. Some of them were

smoking, but none smiling, except one gay fellow who made a joke to a

serving-maid on the sidewalk. An old officer halted his staff to scold a

citizen who had given him a mistaken direction. The shame of the erring

man was great, and the pride of a fellow-citizen who corrected him was

not less, though the arrogant brute before whom they both cringed used

them with equal scorn; the younger officers listened indifferently round

on horseback behind the glitter of their eyeglasses, and one of them

amused himself by turning the silver bangles on his wrist.

Then the files of soldier slaves passed on, and March crossed the bridge

spanning the gardens in what had been the city moat, and found his way

to the market-place, under the walls of the old Gothic church of St.

Gumpertus. The market, which spread pretty well over the square, seemed

to be also a fair, with peasants' clothes and local pottery for sale,

as well as fruits and vegetables, and large baskets of flowers, with old

women squatting before them. It was all as picturesque as the markets

used to be in Montreal and Quebec, and in a cloudy memory of his wedding

journey long before, he bought so lavishly of the flowers to carry back

to his wife that a little girl, who saw his arm-load from her window

as he returned, laughed at him, and then drew shyly back. Her laugh

reminded him how many happy children he had seen in Germany, and how

freely they seemed to play everywhere, with no one to make them afraid.

When they grow up the women laugh as little as the men, whose rude toil

the soldiering leaves them to.

He got home with his flowers, and his wife took them absently, and

made him join her in watching the sight which had fascinated her in the

street under their windows. A slender girl, with a waist as slim as a

corseted officer's, from time to time came out of the house across the

way to the firewood which had been thrown from a wagon upon the sidewalk

there. Each time she embraced several of the heavy four-foot logs and

disappeared with them in-doors. Once she paused from her work to joke

with a well-dressed man who came by; and seemed to find nothing odd in

her work; some gentlemen lounging at the window over head watched her

with no apparent sense of anomaly.

“What do you think of that?” asked Mrs. March. “I think it's good

exercise for the girl, and I should like to recommend it to those fat

fellows at the window. I suppose she'll saw the wood in the cellar, and

then lug it up stairs, and pile it up in the stoves' dressing-rooms.”

“Don't laugh! It's too disgraceful.”

“Well, I don't know! If you like, I'll offer these gentlemen across the

way your opinion of it in the language of Goethe and Schiller.”

“I wish you'd offer my opinion of them. They've been staring in here

with an opera-glass.”

“Ah, that's a different affair. There isn't much going on in Ansbach,

and they have to make the most of it.”

The lower casements of the houses were furnished with mirrors set at

right angles with them, and nothing which went on in the streets was

lost. Some of the streets were long and straight, and at rare moments

they lay full of sun. At such times the Marches were puzzled by the

sight of citizens carrying open umbrellas, and they wondered if they had

forgotten to put them down, or thought it not worth while in the brief

respites from the rain, or were profiting by such rare occasions to dry

them; and some other sights remained baffling to the last. Once a man

with his hands pinioned before him, and a gendarme marching stolidly

after him with his musket on his shoulder, passed under their windows;

but who he was, or what he, had done, or was to suffer, they never knew.

Another time a pair went by on the way to the railway station: a young

man carrying an umbrella under his arm, and a very decent-looking old

woman lugging a heavy carpet bag, who left them to the lasting question

whether she was the young man's servant in her best clothes, or merely

his mother.

Women do not do everything in Ansbach, however, the sacristans being

men, as the Marches found when they went to complete their impression

of the courtly past of the city by visiting the funeral chapel of

the margraves in the crypt of St. Johannis Church. In the little

ex-margravely capital there was something of the neighborly interest

in the curiosity of strangers which endears Italian witness. The

white-haired street-sweeper of Ansbach, who willingly left his broom

to guide them to the house of the sacristan, might have been a

street-sweeper in Vicenza; and the old sacristan, when he put his velvet

skull-cap out of an upper window and professed his willingness to

show them the chapel, disappointed them by saying “Gleich!” instead of

“Subito!” The architecture of the houses was a party to the illusion.

St. Johannis, like the older church of St. Gumpertus, is Gothic, with

the two unequal towers which seem distinctive of Ansbach; at the St.

Gumpertus end of the place where they both stand the dwellings are

Gothic too, and might be in Hamburg; but at the St. Johannis end they

seem to have felt the exotic spirit of the court, and are of a sort of

Teutonized renaissance.

The rococo margraves and margravines used of course to worship in St.

Johannis Church. Now they all, such as did not marry abroad, lie in the

crypt of the church, in caskets of bronze and copper and marble, with

draperies of black samite, more and more funereally vainglorious to the

last. Their courtly coffins are ranged in a kind of hemicycle, with

the little coffins of the children that died before they came to the

knowledge of their greatness. On one of these a kneeling figurine in

bronze holds up the effigy of the child within; on another the epitaph

plays tenderly with the fate of a little princess, who died in her first

year.

In the Rose-month was this sweet Rose taken.

For the Rose-kind hath she earth forsaken.

The Princess is the Rose, that here no longer blows.

From the stem by death's hand rudely shaken.

Then rest in the Rose-house.

Little Princess-Rosebud dear!

There life's Rose shall bloom again

In Heaven's sunshine clear.

While March struggled to get this into English words, two German ladies,

who had made themselves of his party, passed reverently away and left

him to pay the sacristan alone.

“That is all right,” he said, when he came out. “I think we got the most

value; and they didn't look as if they could afford it so well; though

you never can tell, here. These ladies may be the highest kind of

highhotes practising a praiseworthy economy. I hope the lesson won't

be lost on us. They have saved enough by us for their coffee at the

Orangery. Let us go and have a little willow-leaf tea!”

The Orangery perpetually lured them by what it had kept of the days when

an Orangery was essential to the self-respect of every sovereign prince,

and of so many private gentlemen. On their way they always passed the

statue of Count Platen, the dull poet whom Heine's hate would have

delivered so cruelly over to an immortality of contempt, but who stands

there near the Schloss in a grass-plot prettily planted with flowers,

and ignores his brilliant enemy in the comfortable durability of bronze;

and there always awaited them in the old pleasaunce the pathos of Kaspar

Hauser's fate; which his murder affixes to it with a red stain.

After their cups of willow leaves at the cafe they went up into that

nook of the plantation where the simple shaft of church-warden's Gothic

commemorates the assassination on the spot where it befell. Here the

hapless youth, whose mystery will never be fathomed on earth, used to

come for a little respite from his harsh guardian in Ansbach, homesick

for the kindness of his Nuremberg friends; and here his murderer found

him and dealt him the mortal blow.

March lingered upon the last sad circumstance of the tragedy in which

the wounded boy dragged himself home, to suffer the suspicion and

neglect of his guardian till death attested his good faith beyond cavil.

He said this was the hardest thing to bear in all his story, and that he

would like to have a look into the soul of the dull, unkind wretch who

had so misread his charge. He was going on with an inquiry that pleased

him much, when his wife pulled him abruptly away.

“Now, I see, you are yielding to the fascination of it, and you are

wanting to take the material from Burnamy!”

“Oh, well, let him have the material; he will spoil it. And I can always

reject it, if he offers it to 'Every Other Week'.”

“I could believe, after your behavior to that poor woman about her son

in Jersey City, you're really capable of it.”

“What comprehensive inculpation! I had forgotten about that poor woman.”

LI.

The letters which March had asked his Nuremberg banker to send them came

just as they were leaving Ansbach. The landlord sent them down to the

station, and Mrs. March opened them in the train, and read them first so

that she could prepare him if there were anything annoying in them, as

well as indulge her livelier curiosity.

“They're from both the children,” she said, without waiting for him to

ask. “You can look at them later. There's a very nice letter from

Mrs. Adding to me, and one from dear little Rose for you.” Then she

hesitated, with her hand on a letter faced down in her lap. “And there's

one from Agatha Triscoe, which I wonder what you'll think of.” She

delayed again, and then flashed it open before him, and waited with a

sort of impassioned patience while he read it.

He read it, and gave it back to her. “There doesn't seem to be very much

in it.”

“That's it! Don't you think I had a right to there being something in

it, after all I did for her?”

“I always hoped you hadn't done anything for her, but if you have, why

should she give herself away on paper? It's a very proper letter.”

“It's a little too proper, and it's the last I shall have to do with

her. She knew that I should be on pins and needles till I heard how her

father had taken Burnamy's being there, that night, and she doesn't say

a word about it.”

“The general may have had a tantrum that she couldn't describe. Perhaps

she hasn't told him, yet.”

“She would tell him instantly!” cried Mrs. March who began to find

reason in the supposition, as well as comfort for the hurt which the

girl's reticence had given her. “Or if she wouldn't, it would be because

she was waiting for the best chance.”

“That would be like the wise daughter of a difficult father. She may be

waiting for the best chance to say how he took it. No, I'm all for Miss

Triscoe, and I hope that now, if she's taken herself off our hands,

she'll keep off.”

“It's altogether likely that he's made her promise not to tell me

anything about it,” Mrs. March mused aloud.

“That would be unjust to a person who had behaved so discreetly as you

have,” said her husband.

They were on their way to Wurzburg, and at the first station, which was

a junction, a lady mounted to their compartment just before the train

began to move. She was stout and middle-aged, and had never been pretty,

but she bore herself with a kind of authority in spite of her thread

gloves, her dowdy gray travelling-dress, and a hat of lower middle-class

English tastelessness. She took the only seat vacant, a backward-riding

place beside a sleeping passenger who looked like a commercial

traveller, but she seemed ill at ease in it, and March offered her

his seat. She accepted it very promptly, and thanked him for it in the

English of a German, and Mrs. March now classed her as a governess who

had been teaching in England and had acquired the national feeling

for dress. But in this character she found her interesting, and even a

little pathetic, and she made her some overtures of talk which the

other met eagerly enough. They were now running among low hills, not so

picturesque as those between Eger and Nuremberg, but of much the same

toylike quaintness in the villages dropped here and there in their

valleys. One small town, completely walled, with its gray houses and

red roofs, showed through the green of its trees and gardens so like a

colored print in a child's story-book that Mrs. March cried out for joy

in it, and then accounted for her rapture by explaining to the stranger

that they were Americans and had never been in Germany before. The lady

was not visibly affected by the fact, she said casually that she had

often been in that little town, which she named; her uncle had a

castle in the country back of it, and she came with her husband for

the shooting in the autumn. By a natural transition she spoke of her

children, for whom she had an English governess; she said she had never

been in England, but had learnt the language from a governess in her own

childhood; and through it all Mrs. March perceived that she was trying

to impress them with her consequence. To humor her pose, she said they

had been looking up the scene of Kaspar Hauser's death at Ansbach; and

at this the stranger launched into such intimate particulars concerning

him, and was so familiar at first hands with the facts of his life,

that Mrs. March let her run on, too much amused with her pretensions to

betray any doubt of her. She wondered if March were enjoying it all as

much, and from time to time she tried to catch his eye, while the lady

talked constantly and rather loudly, helping herself out with words

from them both when her English failed her. In the safety of her perfect

understanding of the case, Mrs. March now submitted farther, and even

suffered some patronage from her, which in another mood she would have

met with a decided snub.

As they drew in among the broad vine-webbed slopes of the Wurzburg,

hills, the stranger said she was going to change there, and take a train

on to Berlin. Mrs. March wondered whether she would be able to keep up

the comedy to the last; and she had to own that she carried it off very

easily when the friends whom she was expecting did not meet her on the

arrival of their train. She refused March's offers of help, and remained

quietly seated while he got out their wraps and bags. She returned with

a hardy smile the cold leave Mrs. March took of her; and when a porter

came to the door, and forced his way by the Marches, to ask with anxious

servility if she, were the Baroness von-----, she bade the man get them.

a 'traeger', and then come back for her. She waved them a complacent

adieu before they mixed with the crowd and lost sight of her.

“Well, my dear,” said March, addressing the snobbishness in his wife

which he knew to be so wholly impersonal, “you've mingled with one

highhote, anyway. I must say she didn't look it, any more than the Duke

and Duchess of Orleans, and yet she's only a baroness. Think of our

being three hours in the same compartment, and she doing all she could

to impress us and our getting no good of it! I hoped you were feeling

her quality, so that we should have it in the family, anyway, and always

know what it was like. But so far, the highhotes have all been terribly

disappointing.”

He teased on as they followed the traeger with their baggage out of the

station; and in the omnibus on the way to their hotel, he recurred to

the loss they had suffered in the baroness's failure to dramatize her

nobility effectually. “After all, perhaps she was as much disappointed

in us. I don't suppose we looked any more like democrats than she looked

like an aristocrat.”

“But there's a great difference,” Mrs. March returned at last. “It isn't

at all a parallel case. We were not real democrats, and she was a real

aristocrat.”

“To be sure. There is that way of looking at it. That's rather novel; I

wish I had thought of that myself. She was certainly more to blame than

we were.”

LII.

The square in front of the station was planted with flag-poles wreathed

in evergreens; a triumphal arch was nearly finished, and a colossal

allegory in imitation bronze was well on the way to completion, in honor

of the majesties who were coming for the manoeuvres. The streets which

the omnibus passed through to the Swan Inn were draped with the imperial

German and the royal Bavarian colors; and the standards of the visiting

nationalities decked the fronts of the houses where their military

attaches were lodged; but the Marches failed to see our own banner, and

were spared for the moment the ignominy of finding it over an apothecary

shop in a retired avenue. The sun had come out, the sky overhead was of

a smiling blue; and they felt the gala-day glow and thrill in the depths

of their inextinguishable youth.

The Swan Inn sits on one of the long quays bordering the Main, and its

windows look down upon the bridges and shipping of the river; but the

traveller reaches it by a door in the rear, through an archway into a

back street, where an odor dating back to the foundation of the city is

waiting to welcome him.

The landlord was there, too, and he greeted the Marches so cordially

that they fully partook his grief in being able to offer them rooms on

the front of the house for two nights only. They reconciled themselves

to the necessity of then turning out for the staff of the King of

Saxony, the more readily because they knew that there was no hope of

better things at any other hotel.

The rooms which they could have for the time were charming, and they

came down to supper in a glazed gallery looking out on the river

picturesque with craft of all fashions: with row-boats, sail-boats, and

little steamers, but mainly with long black barges built up into houses

in the middle, and defended each by a little nervous German dog.

Long rafts of logs weltered in the sunset red which painted the swift

current, and mantled the immeasurable vineyards of the hills around

like the color of their ripening grapes. Directly in face rose a castled

steep, which kept the ranging walls and the bastions and battlements of

the time when such a stronghold could have defended the city from foes

without or from tumult within. The arches of a stately bridge spanned

the river sunsetward, and lifted a succession of colossal figures

against the crimson sky.

“I guess we have been wasting our time, my dear,” said March, as they,

turned from this beauty to the question of supper. “I wish we had always

been here!”

Their waiter had put them at a table in a division of the gallery beyond

that which they entered, where some groups of officers were noisily

supping. There was no one in their room but a man whose face was

indistinguishable against the light, and two young girls who glanced at

them with looks at once quelled and defiant, and then after a stare at

the officers in the gallery beyond, whispered together with suppressed

giggling. The man fed on without noticing them, except now and then to

utter a growl that silenced the whispering and giggling for a moment.

The Marches, from no positive evidence of any sense, decided that they

were Americans.

“I don't know that I feel responsible for them as their

fellow-countryman; I should, once,” he said.

“It isn't that. It's the worry of trying to make out why they are just

what they are,” his wife returned.

The girls drew the man's attention to them and he looked at them for the

first time; then after a sort of hesitation he went on with his supper.

They had only begun theirs when he rose with the two girls, whom Mrs.

March now saw to be of the same size and dressed alike, and came heavily

toward them.

“I thought you was in Carlsbad,” he said bluntly to March, with a nod at

Mrs. March. He added, with a twist of his head toward the two girls,

“My daughters,” and then left them to her, while he talked on with her

husband. “Come to see this foolery, I suppose. I'm on my way to the

woods for my after-cure; but I thought I might as well stop and give the

girls a chance; they got a week's vacation, anyway.” Stoller glanced at

them with a sort of troubled tenderness in his strong dull face.

“Oh, yes. I understood they were at school here,” said March, and he

heard one of them saying, in a sweet, high pipe to his wife:

“Ain't it just splendid? I ha'n't seen anything equal to it since the

Worrld's Fairr.” She spoke with a strong contortion of the Western r,

and her sister hastened to put in:

“I don't think it's to be compared with the Worrld's Fairr. But these

German girls, here, just think it's great. It just does me good to laff

at 'em, about it. I like to tell 'em about the electric fountain and

the Courrt of Lionorr when they get to talkin' about the illuminations

they're goun' to have. You goun' out to the parade? You better engage

your carriage right away if you arre. The carrs'll be a perfect jam.

Father's engaged ourrs; he had to pay sixty marrks forr it.”

They chattered on without shyness and on as easy terms with a woman of

three times their years as if she had been a girl of their own age;

they willingly took the whole talk to themselves, and had left her quite

outside of it before Stoller turned to her.

“I been telling Mr. March here that you better both come to the parade

with us. I guess my twospanner will hold five; or if it won't, we'll

make it. I don't believe there's a carriage left in Wurzburg; and if you

go in the cars, you'll have to walk three or four miles before you get

to the parade-ground. You think it over,” he said to March. “Nobody else

is going to have the places, anyway, and you can say yes at the last

minute just as well as now.”

He moved off with his girls, who looked over their shoulders at the

officers as they passed on through the adjoining room.

“My dear!” cried Mrs. March. “Didn't you suppose he classed us with

Burnamy in that business? Why should he be polite to us?”

“Perhaps he wants you to chaperon his daughters. He's probably heard

of your performance at the Kurhaus ball. But he knows that I thought

Burnamy in the wrong. This may be Stoller's way of wiping out an

obligation. Wouldn't you like to go with him?”

“The mere thought of his being in the same town is prostrating. I'd far

rather he hated us; then he would avoid us.”

“Well, he doesn't own the town, and if it comes to the worst, perhaps we

can avoid him. Let us go out, anyway, and see if we can't.”

“No, no; I'm too tired; but you go. And get all the maps and guides

you can; there's so very little in Baedeker, and almost nothing in that

great hulking Bradshaw of yours; and I'm sure there must be the most

interesting history of Wurzburg. Isn't it strange that we haven't the

slightest association with the name?”

“I've been rummaging in my mind, and I've got hold of an association at

last,” said March. “It's beer; a sign in a Sixth Avenue saloon window

Wurzburger Hof-Brau.”

“No matter if it is beer. Find some sketch of the history, and we'll

try to get away from the Stollers in it. I pitied those wild girls, too.

What crazy images of the world must fill their empty minds! How their

ignorant thoughts must go whirling out into the unknown! I don't envy

their father. Do hurry back! I shall be thinking about them every

instant till you come.”

She said this, but in their own rooms it was so soothing to sit looking

through the long twilight at the lovely landscape that the sort

of bruise given by their encounter with the Stollers had left her

consciousness before March returned. She made him admire first the

convent church on a hill further up the river which exactly balanced the

fortress in front of them, and then she seized upon the little books he

had brought, and set him to exploring the labyrinths of their German,

with a mounting exultation in his discoveries. There was a general guide

to the city, and a special guide, with plans and personal details of the

approaching manoeuvres and the princes who were to figure in them;

and there was a sketch of the local history: a kind of thing that the

Germans know how to write particularly, well, with little gleams of

pleasant humor blinking through it. For the study of this, Mrs. March

realized, more and more passionately, that they were in the very most

central and convenient point, for the history of Wurzburg might be

said to have begun with her prince-bishops, whose rule had begun in

the twelfth century, and who had built, on a forgotten Roman work, the

fortress of the Marienburg on that vineyarded hill over against the

Swan Inn. There had of course been history before that, but 'nothing so

clear, nothing so peculiarly swell, nothing that so united the glory of

this world and the next as that of the prince-bishops. They had made the

Marienburg their home, and kept it against foreign and domestic foes for

five hundred years. Shut within its well-armed walls they had awed

the often-turbulent city across the Main; they had held it against the

embattled farmers in the Peasants' War, and had splendidly lost it to

Gustavus Adolphus, and then got it back again and held it till Napoleon

took it from them. He gave it with their flock to the Bavarians, who

in turn briefly yielded it to the Prussians in 1866, and were now in

apparently final possession of it.

Before the prince-bishops, Charlemagne and Barbarossa had come and

gone, and since the prince-bishops there had been visiting thrones and

kingdoms enough in the ancient city, which was soon to be illustrated

by the presence of imperial Germany, royal, Wirtemberg and Saxony,

grand-ducal Baden and Weimar, and a surfeit of all the minor potentates

among those who speak the beautiful language of the Ja.

But none of these could dislodge the prince-bishops from that supreme

place which they had at once taken in Mrs. March's fancy. The potentates

were all going to be housed in the vast palace which the prince-bishops

had built themselves in Wurzburg as soon as they found it safe to come

down from their stronghold of Marienburg, and begin to adorn their city,

and to confirm it in its intense fidelity to the Church. Tiepolo had

come up out of Italy to fresco their palace, where he wrought year after

year, in that worldly taste which has somehow come to express the most

sovereign moment of ecclesiasticism. It prevailed so universally in

Wurzburg that it left her with the name of the Rococo City, intrenched

in a period of time equally remote from early Christianity and modern

Protestantism. Out of her sixty thousand souls, only ten thousand are

now of the reformed religion, and these bear about the same relation to

the Catholic spirit of the place that the Gothic architecture bears to

the baroque.

As long as the prince-bishops lasted the Wurzburgers got on very well

with but one newspaper, and perhaps the smallest amount of merrymaking

known outside of the colony of Massachusetts Bay at the same epoch. The

prince-bishops had their finger in everybody's pie, and they portioned

out the cakes and ale, which were made according to formulas of their

own. The distractions were all of a religious character; churches,

convents, monasteries, abounded; ecclesiastical processions and

solemnities were the spectacles that edified if they did not amuse the

devout population.

It seemed to March an ironical outcome of all this spiritual severity

that one of the greatest modern scientific discoveries should have been

made in Wurzburg, and that the Roentgen rays should now be giving her

name a splendor destined to eclipse the glories of her past.

Mrs. March could not allow that they would do so; or at least that the

name of Roentgen would ever lend more lustre to his city than that of

Longfellow's Walther von der Vogelweide. She was no less surprised than

pleased to realize that this friend of the birds was a Wurzburger, and

she said that their first pilgrimage in the morning should be to the

church where he lies buried.

LIII.

March went down to breakfast not quite so early as his wife had planned,

and left her to have her coffee in her room. He got a pleasant table in

the gallery overlooking the river, and he decided that the landscape,

though it now seemed to be rather too much studied from a drop-certain,

had certainly lost nothing of its charm in the clear morning light. The

waiter brought his breakfast, and after a little delay came back with

a card which he insisted was for March. It was not till he put on his

glasses and read the name of Mr. R. M. Kenby that he was able at all to

agree with the waiter, who stood passive at his elbow.

“Well,” he said, “why wasn't this card sent up last night?”

The waiter explained that the gentleman had just, given him his card,

after asking March's nationality, and was then breakfasting in the next

room. March caught up his napkin and ran round the partition wall, and

Kenby rose with his napkin and hurried to meet him.

“I thought it must be you,” he called out, joyfully, as they struck

their extended hands together, “but so many people look alike, nowadays,

that I don't trust my eyes any more.”

Kenby said he had spent the time since they last met partly in Leipsic

and partly in Gotha, where he had amused himself in rubbing up his rusty

German. As soon as he realized that Wurzburg was so near he had slipped

down from Gotha for a glimpse of the manoeuvres. He added that he

supposed March was there to see them, and he asked with a quite

unembarrassed smile if they had met Mr. Adding in Carlsbad, and without

heeding March's answer, he laughed and added: “Of course, I know she

must have told Mrs. March all about it.”

March could not deny this; he laughed, too; though in his wife's absence

he felt bound to forbid himself anything more explicit.

“I don't give it up, you know,” Kenby went on, with perfect ease. “I'm

not a young fellow, if you call thirty-nine old.”

“At my age I don't,” March put in, and they roared together, in men's

security from the encroachments of time.

“But she happens to be the only woman I've ever really wanted to marry,

for more than a few days at a stretch. You know how it is with us.”

“Oh, yes, I know,” said March, and they shouted again.

“We're in love, and we're out of love, twenty times. But this isn't a

mere fancy; it's a conviction. And there's no reason why she shouldn't

marry me.”

March smiled gravely, and his smile was not lost upon Kenby. “You mean

the boy,” he said. “Well, I like Rose,” and now March really felt swept

from his feet. “She doesn't deny that she likes me, but she seems to

think that her marrying again will take her from him; the fact is, it

will only give me to him. As for devoting her whole life to him, she

couldn't do a worse thing for him. What the boy needs is a man's care,

and a man's will--Good heavens! You don't think I could ever be unkind

to the little soul?” Kenby threw himself forward over the table.

“My dear fellow!” March protested.

“I'd rather cut off my right hand!” Kenby pursued, excitedly, and then

he said, with a humorous drop: “The fact is, I don't believe I should

want her so much if I couldn't have Rose too. I want to have them both.

So far, I've only got no for an answer; but I'm not going to keep it. I

had a letter from Rose at Carlsbad, the other day; and--”

The waiter came forward with a folded scrap of paper on his salver,

which March knew must be from his wife. “What is keeping you so?” she

wrote. “I am all ready.” “It's from Mrs. March,” he explained to Kenby.

“I am going out with her on some errands. I'm awfully glad to see you

again. We must talk it all over, and you must--you mustn't--Mrs. March

will want to see you later--I--Are you in the hotel?”

“Oh yes. I'll see you at the one-o'clock table d'hote, I suppose.”

March went away with his head whirling in the question whether he should

tell his wife at once of Kenby's presence, or leave her free for the

pleasures of Wurzburg, till he could shape the fact into some safe and

acceptable form. She met him at the door with her guide-books, wraps and

umbrellas, and would hardly give him time to get on his hat and coat.

“Now, I want you to avoid the Stollers as far as you can see them. This

is to be a real wedding-journey day, with no extraneous acquaintance to

bother; the more strangers the better. Wurzburg is richer than anything

I imagined. I've looked it all up; I've got the plan of the city, so

that we can easily find the way. We'll walk first, and take carriages

whenever we get tired. We'll go to the cathedral at once; I want a good

gulp of rococo to begin with; there wasn't half enough of it at Ansbach.

Isn't it strange how we've come round to it?”

She referred to that passion for the Gothic which they had obediently

imbibed from Ruskin in the days of their early Italian travel and

courtship, when all the English-speaking world bowed down to him in

devout aversion from the renaissance, and pious abhorrence of the

rococo.

“What biddable little things we were!” she went on, while March was

struggling to keep Kenby in the background of his consciousness. “The

rococo must have always had a sneaking charm for us, when we were

pinning our faith to pointed arches; and yet I suppose we were perfectly

sincere. Oh, look at that divinely ridiculous Madonna!” They were now

making their way out of the crooked footway behind their hotel toward

the street leading to the cathedral, and she pointed to the Blessed

Virgin over the door of some religious house, her drapery billowing

about her feet; her body twisting to show the sculptor's mastery of

anatomy, and the halo held on her tossing head with the help of stout

gilt rays. In fact, the Virgin's whole figure was gilded, and so was

that of the child in her arms. “Isn't she delightful?”

“I see what you mean,” said March, with a dubious glance at the statue,

“but I'm not sure, now, that I wouldn't like something quieter in my

Madonnas.”

The thoroughfare which they emerged upon, with the cathedral ending

the prospective, was full of the holiday so near at hand. The narrow

sidewalks were thronged with people, both soldiers and civilians, and up

the middle of the street detachments of military came and went, halting

the little horse-cars and the huge beer-wagons which otherwise seemed

to have the sole right to the streets of Wurzburg; they came jingling

or thundering out of the aide streets and hurled themselves round

the corners reckless of the passers, who escaped alive by flattening

themselves like posters against the house walls. There were peasants,

men and women, in the costume which the unbroken course of their country

life had kept as quaint as it was a hundred years before; there were

citizens in the misfits of the latest German fashions; there were

soldiers of all arms in their vivid uniforms, and from time to time

there were pretty young girls in white dresses with low necks, and bare

arms gloved to the elbows, who were following a holiday custom of the

place in going about the streets in ball costume. The shop windows

were filled with portraits of the Emperor and the Empress, and the

Prince-Regent and the ladies of his family; the German and Bavarian

colors draped the facades of the houses and festooned the fantastic

Madonnas posing above so many portals. The modern patriotism included

the ancient piety without disturbing it; the rococo city remained

ecclesiastical through its new imperialism, and kept the stamp given it

by the long rule of the prince-bishops under the sovereignty of its King

and the suzerainty of its Kaiser.

The Marches escaped from the present, when they entered the cathedral,

as wholly as if they had taken hold of the horns of the altar, though

they were far from literally doing this in an interior so grandiose.

There area few rococo churches in Italy, and perhaps more in Spain,

which approach the perfection achieved by the Wurzburg cathedral in the

baroque style. For once one sees what that style can do in architecture

and sculpture, and whatever one may say of the details, one cannot deny

that there is a prodigiously effective keeping in it all. This interior

came together, as the decorators say, with a harmony that the travellers

had felt nowhere in their earlier experience of the rococo. It was,

unimpeachably perfect in its way, “Just,” March murmured to his wife,

“as the social and political and scientific scheme of the eighteenth

century was perfected in certain times and places. But the odd thing is

to find the apotheosis of the rococo away up here in Germany. I wonder

how much the prince-bishops really liked it. But they had become rococo,

too! Look at that row of their statues on both sides of the nave! What

magnificent swell! How they abash this poor plain Christ, here; he would

like to get behind the pillar; he knows that he could never lend himself

to the baroque style. It expresses the eighteenth century, though.

But how you long for some little hint of the thirteenth, or even the

nineteenth.”

“I don't,” she whispered back. “I'm perfectly wild with Wurzburg. I

like to have a thing go as far as it can. At Nuremberg I wanted all the

Gothic I could get, and in Wurzburg I want all the baroque I can get. I

am consistent.”

She kept on praising herself to his disadvantage, as women do, all the

way to the Neumunster Church, where they were going to revere the tomb

of Walther von der Vogelweide, not so much for his own sake as for

Longfellow's. The older poet lies buried within, but his monument is

outside the church, perhaps for the greater convenience of the sparrows,

which now represent the birds he loved. The cenotaph is surmounted by

a broad vase, and around this are thickly perched the effigies of the

Meistersinger's feathered friends, from whom the canons of the church,

as Mrs. March read aloud from her Baedeker, long ago directed his

bequest to themselves. In revenge for their lawless greed the defrauded

beneficiaries choose to burlesque the affair by looking like the

four-and-twenty blackbirds when the pie was opened.

She consented to go for a moment to the Gothic Marienkapelle with her

husband in the revival of his mediaeval taste, and she was rewarded

amidst its thirteenth-century sincerity by his recantation. “You are

right! Baroque is the thing for Wurzburg; one can't enjoy Gothic here

any more than one could enjoy baroque in Nuremberg.”

Reconciled in the rococo, they now called a carriage, and went to visit

the palace of the prince-bishops who had so well known how to make the

heavenly take the image and superscription of the worldly; and they were

jointly indignant to find it shut against the public in preparation for

the imperialities and royalties coming to occupy it. They were in time

for the noon guard-mounting, however, and Mrs. March said that the way

the retiring squad kicked their legs out in the high martial step of the

German soldiers was a perfect expression of the insolent militarism of

their empire, and was of itself enough to make one thank Heaven that

one was an American and a republican. She softened a little toward their

system when it proved that the garden of the palace was still open,

and yet more when she sank down upon a bench between two marble groups

representing the Rape of Proserpine and the Rape of Europa. They stood

each in a gravelled plot, thickly overrun by a growth of ivy, and the

vine climbed the white naked limbs of the nymphs, who were present on a

pretence of gathering flowers, but really to pose at the spectators,

and clad them to the waist and shoulders with an effect of modesty never

meant by the sculptor, but not displeasing. There was an old fountain

near, its stone rim and centre of rock-work green with immemorial mould,

and its basin quivering between its water-plants under the soft fall of

spray. At a waft of fitful breeze some leaves of early autumn fell from

the trees overhead upon the elderly pair where they sat, and a little

company of sparrows came and hopped about their feet. Though the square

without was so all astir with festive expectation, there were few people

in the garden; three or four peasant women in densely fluted white

skirts and red aprons and shawls wandered by and stared at the Europa

and at the Proserpine.

It was a precious moment in which the charm of the city's past seemed to

culminate, and they were loath to break it by speech.

“Why didn't we have something like all this on our first wedding

journey?” she sighed at last. “To think of our battening from Boston to

Niagara and back! And how hard we tried to make something of Rochester

and Buffalo, of Montreal and Quebec!”

“Niagara wasn't so bad,” he said, “and I will never go back on Quebec.”

“Ah, but if we could have had Hamburg and Leipsic, and Carlsbad

and Nuremberg, and Ansbach and Wurzburg! Perhaps this is meant as a

compensation for our lost youth. But I can't enjoy it as I could when

I was young. It's wasted on my sere and yellow leaf. I wish Burnamy and

Miss Triscoe were here; I should like to try this garden on them.”

“They wouldn't care for it,” he replied, and upon a daring impulse he

added, “Kenby and Mrs. Adding might.” If she took this suggestion in

good part, he could tell her that Kenby was in Wurzburg.

“Don't speak of them! They're in just that besotted early middle-age

when life has settled into a self-satisfied present, with no past and

no future; the most philistine, the most bourgeois, moment of existence.

Better be elderly at once, as far as appreciation of all this goes.” She

rose and put her hand on his arm, and pushed him away in the impulsive

fashion of her youth, across alleys of old trees toward a balustraded

terrace in the background which had tempted her.

“It isn't so bad, being elderly,” he said. “By that time we have

accumulated enough past to sit down and really enjoy its associations.

We have got all sorts of perspectives and points of view. We know where

we are at.”

“I don't mind being elderly. The world's just as amusing as ever, and

lots of disagreeable things have dropped out. It's the getting more than

elderly; it's the getting old; and then--”

They shrank a little closer together, and walked on in silence till he

said, “Perhaps there's something else, something better--somewhere.”

They had reached the balustraded terrace, and were pausing for pleasure

in the garden tops below, with the flowery spaces, and the statued

fountains all coming together. She put her hand on one of the fat little

urchin-groups on the stone coping. “I don't want cherubs, when I can

have these putti. And those old prince-bishops didn't, either!”

“I don't suppose they kept a New England conscience,” he said, with a

vague smile. “It would be difficult in the presence of the rococo.”

They left the garden through the beautiful gate which the old court

ironsmith Oegg hammered out in lovely forms of leaves and flowers, and

shaped laterally upward, as lightly as if with a waft of his hand, in

gracious Louis Quinze curves; and they looked back at it in the kind of

despair which any perfection inspires. They said how feminine it was,

how exotic, how expressive of a luxurious ideal of life which art had

purified and left eternally charming. They remembered their Ruskinian

youth, and the confidence with which they would once have condemned it;

and they had a sense of recreance in now admiring it; but they certainly

admired it, and it remained for them the supreme expression of that

time-soul, mundane, courtly, aristocratic, flattering, which once

influenced the art of the whole world, and which had here so curiously

found its apotheosis in a city remote from its native place and under

a rule sacerdotally vowed to austerity. The vast superb palace of the

prince bishops, which was now to house a whole troop of sovereigns,

imperial, royal, grand ducal and ducal, swelled aloft in superb

amplitude; but it did not realize their historic pride so effectively

as this exquisite work of the court ironsmith. It related itself in its

aerial beauty to that of the Tiepolo frescoes which the travellers knew

were swimming and soaring on the ceilings within, and from which it

seemed to accent their exclusion with a delicate irony, March said. “Or

iron-mongery,” he corrected himself upon reflection.

LIV.

He had forgotten Kenby in these aesthetic interests, but he remembered

him again when he called a carriage, and ordered it driven to their

hotel. It was the hour of the German mid-day table d'hote, and they

would be sure to meet him there. The question now was how March should

own his presence in time to prevent his wife from showing her ignorance

of it to Kenby himself, and he was still turning the question hopelessly

over in his mind when the sight of the hotel seemed to remind her of a

fact which she announced.

“Now, my dear, I am tired to death, and I am not going to sit through a

long table d'hote. I want you to send me up a simple beefsteak and a

cup of tea to our rooms; and I don't want you to come near for hours;

because I intend to take a whole afternoon nap. You can keep all the

maps and plans, and guides, and you had better go and see what the

Volksfest is like; it will give you some notion of the part the people

are really taking in all this official celebration, and you know I don't

care. Don't come up after dinner to see how I am getting along; I shall

get along; and if you should happen to wake me after I had dropped

off--”

Kenby had seen them arrive from where he sat at the reading-room window,

waiting for the dinner hour, and had meant to rush out and greet Mrs.

March as they passed up the corridor. But she looked so tired that he

had decided to spare her till she came down to dinner; and as he sat

with March at their soup, he asked if she were not well.

March explained, and he provisionally invented some regrets from her

that she should not see Kenby till supper.

Kenby ordered a bottle of one of the famous Wurzburg wines for their

mutual consolation in her absence, and in the friendliness which its

promoted they agreed to spend the afternoon together. No man is so

inveterate a husband as not to take kindly an occasional release to

bachelor companionship, and before the dinner was over they agreed that

they would go to the Volksfest, and get some notion of the popular life

and amusements of Wurzburg, which was one of the few places where Kenby

had never been before; and they agreed that they would walk.

Their way was partly up the quay of the Main, past a barrack full

of soldiers. They met detachments of soldiers everywhere, infantry,

artillery, cavalry.

“This is going to be a great show,” Kenby said, meaning the manoeuvres,

and he added, as if now he had kept away from the subject long enough

and had a right to recur to it, at least indirectly, “I should like to

have Rose see it, and get his impressions.”

“I've an idea he wouldn't approve of it. His mother says his mind is

turning more and more to philanthropy.”

Kenby could not forego such a chance to speak of Mrs. Adding. “It's one

of the prettiest things to see how she understands Rose. It's charming

to see them together. She wouldn't have half the attraction without

him.”

“Oh, yes,” March assented. He had often wondered how a man wishing to

marry a widow managed with the idea of her children by another marriage;

but if Kenby was honest; it was much simpler than he had supposed. He

could not say this to him, however, and in a certain embarrassment he

had with the conjecture in his presence he attempted a diversion. “We're

promised something at the Volksfest which will be a great novelty to

us as Americans. Our driver told us this morning that one of the houses

there was built entirely of wood.”

When they reached the grounds of the Volksfest, this civil feature of

the great military event at hand, which the Marches had found largely

set forth in the programme of the parade, did not fully keep the glowing

promises made for it; in fact it could not easily have done so. It was

in a pleasant neighborhood of new villas such as form the modern quarter

of every German city, and the Volksfest was even more unfinished than

its environment. It was not yet enclosed by the fence which was to hide

its wonders from the non-paying public, but March and Kenby went in

through an archway where the gate-money was as effectually collected

from them as if they were barred every other entrance.

The wooden building was easily distinguishable from the other edifices

because these were tents and booths still less substantial. They did not

make out its function, but of the others four sheltered merry-go-rounds,

four were beer-gardens, four were restaurants, and the rest were devoted

to amusements of the usual country-fair type. Apparently they had little

attraction for country people. The Americans met few peasants in the

grounds, and neither at the Edison kinematograph, where they refreshed

their patriotism with some scenes of their native life, nor at the

little theatre where they saw the sports of the arena revived, in the

wrestle of a woman with a bear, did any of the people except tradesmen

and artisans seem to be taking part in the festival expression of the

popular pleasure.

The woman, who finally threw the bear, whether by slight, or by main

strength, or by a previous understanding with him, was a slender

creature, pathetically small and not altogether plain; and March as

they walked away lapsed into a pensive muse upon her strange employ. He

wondered how she came to take it up, and whether she began with the bear

when they were both very young, and she could easily throw him.

“Well, women have a great deal more strength than we suppose,” Kenby

began with a philosophical air that gave March the hope of some rational

conversation. Then his eye glazed with a far-off look, and a doting

smile came into his face. “When we went through the Dresden gallery

together, Rose and I were perfectly used up at the end of an hour, but

his mother kept on as long as there was anything to see, and came away

as fresh as a peach.”

Then March saw that it was useless to expect anything different from

him, and he let him talk on about Mrs. Adding all the rest of the way

back to the hotel. Kenby seemed only to have begun when they reached the

door, and wanted to continue the subject in the reading-room.

March pleaded his wish to find how his wife had got through the

afternoon, and he escaped to her. He would have told her now that Kenby

was in the house, but he was really so sick of the fact himself that he

could not speak of it at once, and he let her go on celebrating all she

had seen from the window since she had waked from her long nap. She said

she could never be glad enough that they had come just at that time.

Soldiers had been going by the whole afternoon, and that made it so

feudal.

“Yes,” he assented. “But aren't you coming up to the station with me to

see the Prince-Regent arrive? He's due at seven, you know.”

“I declare I had forgotten all about it. No, I'm not equal to it. You

must go; you can tell me everything; be sure to notice how the Princess

Maria looks; the last of the Stuarts, you know; and some people consider

her the rightful Queen of England; and I'll have the supper ordered, and

we can go down as soon as you've got back.”

LV.

March felt rather shabby stealing away without Kenby; but he had really

had as much of Mrs. Adding as he could stand, for one day, and he was

even beginning to get sick of Rose. Besides, he had not sent back a

line for 'Every Other Week' yet, and he had made up his mind to write a

sketch of the manoeuvres. To this end he wished to receive an impression

of the Prince-Regent's arrival which should not be blurred or clouded

by other interests. His wife knew the kind of thing he liked to see, and

would have helped him out with his observations, but Kenby would have

got in the way, and would have clogged the movement of his fancy in

assigning the facts to the parts he would like them to play in the

sketch.

At least he made some such excuses to himself as he hurried along toward

the Kaiserstrasse. The draught of universal interest in that direction

had left the other streets almost deserted, but as he approached

the thoroughfare he found all the ways blocked, and the horse-cars,

ordinarily so furiously headlong, arrested by the multiple ranks of

spectators on the sidewalks. The avenue leading from the railway station

to the palace was decorated with flags and garlands, and planted with

the stems of young firs and birches. The doorways were crowded, and the

windows dense with eager faces peering out of the draped bunting. The

carriageway was kept clear by mild policemen who now and then allowed

one of the crowd to cross it.

The crowd was made up mostly of women and boys, and when March joined

them, they had already been waiting an hour for the sight of the princes

who were to bless them with a vision of the faery race which kings

always are to common men. He thought the people looked dull, and

therefore able to bear the strain of expectation with patience better

than a livelier race. They relieved it by no attempt at joking; here

and there a dim smile dawned on a weary face, but it seemed an effect

of amiability rather than humor. There was so little of this, or else

it was so well bridled by the solemnity of the occasion, that not a man,

woman, or child laughed when a bareheaded maid-servant broke through

the lines and ran down between them with a life-size plaster bust of the

Emperor William in her arms: she carried it like an overgrown infant,

and in alarm at her conspicuous part she cast frightened looks from side

to side without arousing any sort of notice. Undeterred by her failure,

a young dog, parted from his owner, and seeking him in the crowd,

pursued his search in a wild flight down the guarded roadway with an air

of anxiety that in America would have won him thunders of applause, and

all sorts of kindly encouragements to greater speed. But this German

crowd witnessed his progress apparently without interest, and without a

sign of pleasure. They were there to see the Prince-Regent arrive,

and they did not suffer themselves to be distracted by any preliminary

excitement. Suddenly the indefinable emotion which expresses the

fulfilment of expectation in a waiting crowd passed through the

multitude, and before he realized it March was looking into the friendly

gray-bearded face of the Prince-Regent, for the moment that his carriage

allowed in passing. This came first preceded by four outriders, and

followed by other simple equipages of Bavarian blue, full of highnesses

of all grades. Beside the Regent sat his daughter-in-law, the Princess

Maria, her silvered hair framing a face as plain and good as the

Regent's, if not so intelligent.

He, in virtue of having been born in Wurzburg, is officially supposed

to be specially beloved by his fellow townsmen; and they now testified

their affection as he whirled through their ranks, bowing right and

left, by what passes in Germany for a cheer. It is the word Hoch,

groaned forth from abdominal depths, and dismally prolonged in a hollow

roar like that which the mob makes behind the scenes at the theatre

before bursting in visible tumult on the stage. Then the crowd

dispersed, and March came away wondering why such a kindly-looking

Prince-Regent should not have given them a little longer sight of

himself; after they had waited so patiently for hours to see him. But

doubtless in those countries, he concluded, the art of keeping the

sovereign precious by suffering him to be rarely and briefly seen is

wisely studied.

On his way home he resolved to confess Kenby's presence; and he did so

as soon as he sat down to supper with his wife. “I ought to have told

you the first thing after breakfast. But when I found you in that mood

of having the place all to ourselves, I put it off.”

“You took terrible chances, my dear,” she said, gravely.

“And I have been terribly punished. You've no idea how much Kenby has

talked to me about Mrs. Adding!”

She broke out laughing. “Well, perhaps you've suffered enough. But you

can see now, can't you, that it would have been awful if I had met him,

and let out that I didn't know he was here?”

“Terrible. But if I had told, it would have spoiled the whole morning

for you; you couldn't have thought of anything else.”

“Oh, I don't know,” she said, airily. “What should you think if I told

you I had known he was here ever since last night?” She went on in

delight at the start he gave. “I saw him come into the hotel while you

were gone for the guide-books, and I determined to keep it from you as

long as I could; I knew it would worry you. We've both been very nice;

and I forgive you,” she hurried on, “because I've really got something

to tell you.”

“Don't tell me that Burnamy is here!”

“Don't jump to conclusions! No, Burnamy isn't here, poor fellow! And

don't suppose that I'm guilty of concealment because I haven't told you

before. I was just thinking whether I wouldn't spare you till morning,

but now I shall let you take the brunt of it. Mrs. Adding and Rose are

here.” She gave the fact time to sink in, and then she added, “And Miss

Triscoe and her father are here.”

“What is the matter with Major Eltwin and his wife being here, too? Are

they in our hotel?”

“No, they are not. They came to look for rooms while you were off

waiting for the Prince-Regent, and I saw them. They intended to go to

Frankfort for the manoeuvres, but they heard that there was not even

standing-room there, and so the general telegraphed to the Spanischer

Hof, and they all came here. As it is, he will have to room with Rose,

and Agatha and Mrs. Adding will room together. I didn't think Agatha was

looking very well; she looked unhappy; I don't believe she's heard, from

Burnamy yet; I hadn't a chance to ask her. And there's something else

that I'm afraid will fairly make you sick.”

“Oh, no; go on. I don't think anything can do that, after an afternoon

of Kenby's confidences.”

“It's worse than Kenby,” she said with a sigh. “You know I told you

at Carlsbad I thought that ridiculous old thing was making up to Mrs.

Adding.”

“Kenby? Why of co--”

“Don't be stupid, my dear! No, not Kenby: General Triscoe. I wish

you could have been here to see him paying her all sort; of silly

attentions, and hear him making her compliments.”

“Thank you. I think I'm just as well without it. Did she pay him silly

attentions and compliments, too?”

“That's the only thing that can make me forgive her for his wanting her.

She was keeping him at arm's-length the whole time, and she was doing it

so as not to make him contemptible before his daughter.”

“It must have been hard. And Rose?”

“Rose didn't seem very well. He looks thin and pale; but he's sweeter

than ever. She's certainly commoner clay than Rose. No, I won't say

that! It's really nothing but General Triscoe's being an old goose about

her that makes her seem so, and it isn't fair.”

March went down to his coffee in the morning with the delicate duty of

telling Kenby that Mrs. Adding was in town. Kenby seemed to think it

quite natural she should wish to see the manoeuvres, and not at all

strange that she should come to them with General Triscoe and his

daughter. He asked if March would not go with him to call upon her after

breakfast, and as this was in the line of his own instructions from Mrs.

March, he went.

They found Mrs. Adding with the Triscoes, and March saw nothing that was

not merely friendly, or at the most fatherly, in the general's behavior

toward her. If Mrs. Adding or Miss Triscoe saw more, they hid it in

a guise of sisterly affection for each other. At the most the general

showed a gayety which one would not have expected of him under any

conditions, and which the fact that he and Rose had kept each other

awake a good deal the night before seemed so little adapted to call

out. He joked with Rose about their room and their beds, and put on

a comradery with him that was not a perfect fit, and that suffered by

contrast with the pleasure of the boy and Kenby in meeting. There was a

certain question in the attitude of Mrs. Adding till March helped Kenby

to account for his presence; then she relaxed in an effect of security

so tacit that words overstate it, and began to make fun of Rose.

March could not find that Miss Triscoe looked unhappy, as his wife had

said; he thought simply that she had grown plainer; but when he reported

this, she lost her patience with him. In a girl, she said, plainness was

unhappiness; and she wished to know when he would ever learn to look an

inch below the surface: She was sure that Agatha Triscoe had not

heard from Burnamy since the Emperor's birthday; that she was at

swords'-points with her father, and so desperate that she did not care

what became of her.

He had left Kenby with the others, and now, after his wife had talked

herself tired of them all, he proposed going out again to look about

the city, where there was nothing for the moment to remind them of the

presence of their friends or even of their existence. She answered that

she was worrying about all those people, and trying to work out

their problem for them. He asked why she did not let them work it out

themselves as they would have to do, after all her worry, and she said

that where her sympathy had been excited she could not stop worrying,

whether it did any good or not, and she could not respect any one who

could drop things so completely out of his mind as he could; she had

never been able to respect that in him.

“I know, my dear,” he assented. “But I don't think it's a question of

moral responsibility; it's a question of mental structure, isn't it?

Your consciousness isn't built in thought-tight compartments, and one

emotion goes all through it, and sinks you; but I simply close the doors

and shut the emotion in, and keep on.”

The fancy pleased him so much that he worked it out in all its

implications, and could not, after their long experience of each other,

realize that she was not enjoying the joke too, till she said she saw

that he merely wished to tease. Then, too late, he tried to share her

worry; but she protested that she was not worrying at all; that she

cared nothing about those people: that she was nervous, she was tired;

and she wished he would leave her, and go out alone.

He found himself in the street again, and he perceived that he must be

walking fast when a voice called him by name, and asked him what his

hurry was. The voice was Stoller's, who got into step with him and

followed the first with a second question.

“Made up your mind to go to the manoeuvres with me?”

His bluntness made it easy for March to answer: “I'm afraid my wife

couldn't stand the drive back and forth.”

“Come without her.”

“Thank you. It's very kind of you. I'm not certain that I shall go at

all. If I do, I shall run out by train, and take my chances with the

crowd.”

Stoller insisted no further. He felt no offence at the refusal of his

offer, or chose to show none. He said, with the same uncouth abruptness

as before: “Heard anything of that fellow since he left Carlsbad?”

“Burnamy?”

“Mm.”

“No.”

“Know where he is?”

“I don't in the least.”

Stoller let another silence elapse while they hurried on, before he

said, “I got to thinking what he done afterwards. He wasn't bound to

look out for me; he might suppose I knew what I was about.”

March turned his face and stared in Stoller's, which he was letting hang

forward as he stamped heavily on. Had the disaster proved less than

he had feared, and did he still want Burnamy's help in patching up

the broken pieces; or did he really wish to do Burnamy justice to his

friend?

In any case March's duty was clear. “I think Burnamy was bound to look

out for you; Mr. Stoller, and I am glad to know that he saw it in the

same light.”

“I know he did,” said Stoker with a blaze as from a long-smouldering

fury, “and damn him, I'm not going to have it. I'm not going to, plead

the baby act with him, or with any man. You tell him so, when you get

the chance. You tell him I don't hold him accountable for anything I

made him do. That ain't business; I don't want him around me, any more;

but if he wants to go back to the paper he can have his place. You tell

him I stand by what I done; and it's all right between him and me. I

hain't done anything about it, the way I wanted him to help me to; I've

let it lay, and I'm a-going to. I guess it ain't going to do me any

harm, after all; our people hain't got very long memories; but if it is,

let it. You tell him it's all right.”

“I don't know where he is, Mr. Stoller, and I don't know that I care to

be the bearer of your message,” said March.

“Why not?”

“Why, for one thing, I don't agree with you that it's all right. Your

choosing to stand by the consequences of Burnamy's wrong doesn't undo

it. As I understand, you don't pardon it--”

Stoller gulped and did not answer at once. Then he said, “I stand by

what I done. I'm not going to let him say I turned him down for doing

what I told him to, because I hadn't the sense to know what I was

about.”

“Ah, I don't think it's a thing he'll like to speak of in any case,”

said March.

Stoller left him, at the corner they had reached, as abruptly as he had

joined him, and March hurried back to his wife, and told her what had

just passed between him and Stoller.

She broke out, “Well, I am surprised at you, my dear! You have always

accused me of suspecting people, and attributing bad motives; and here

you've refused even to give the poor man the benefit of the doubt. He

merely wanted to save his savage pride with you, and that's all he wants

to do with Burnamy. How could it hurt the poor boy to know that Stoller

doesn't blame him? Why should you refuse to give his message to Burnamy?

I don't want you to ridicule me for my conscience any more, Basil;

you're twice as bad as I ever was. Don't you think that a person can

ever expiate an offence? I've often heard you say that if any one owned

his fault, he put it from him, and it was the same as if it hadn't been;

and hasn't Burnamy owned up over and over again? I'm astonished at you,

dearest.”

March was in fact somewhat astonished at himself in the light of her

reasoning; but she went on with some sophistries that restored him to

his self-righteousness.

“I suppose you think he has interfered with Stoller's political

ambition, and injured him in that way. Well, what if he has? Would it be

a good thing to have a man like that succeed in politics? You're always

saying that the low character of our politicians is the ruin of the

country; and I'm sure,” she added, with a prodigious leap over all the

sequences, “that Mr. Stoller is acting nobly; and it's your duty to help

him relieve Burnamy's mind.” At the laugh he broke into she hastened to

say, “Or if you won't, I hope you'll not object to my doing so, for I

shall, anyway!”

She rose as if she were going to begin at once, in spite of his

laughing; and in fact she had already a plan for coming to Stoller's

assistance by getting at Burnamy through Miss Triscoe, whom she

suspected of knowing where he was. There had been no chance for them

to speak of him either that morning or the evening before, and after

a great deal of controversy with herself in her husband's presence she

decided to wait till they came naturally together the next morning for

the walk to the Capuchin Church on the hill beyond the river, which

they had agreed to take. She could not keep from writing a note to

Miss Triscoe begging her to be sure to come, and hinting that she had

something very important to speak of.

She was not sure but she had been rather silly to do this, but when they

met the girl confessed that she had thought of giving up the walk, and

might not have come except for Mrs. March's note. She had come with

Rose, and had left him below with March; Mrs. Adding was coming later

with Kenby and General Triscoe.

Mrs. March lost no time in telling her the great news; and if she had

been in doubt before of the girl's feeling for Burnamy she was now in

none. She had the pleasure of seeing her flush with hope, and then the

pain which was also a pleasure, of seeing her blanch with dismay.

“I don't know where he is, Mrs. March. I haven't heard a word from him

since that night in Carlsbad. I expected--I didn't know but you--”

Mrs. March shook her head. She treated the fact skillfully as something

to be regretted simply because it would be such a relief to Burnamy to

know how Mr. Stoller now felt. Of course they could reach him somehow;

you could always get letters to people in Europe, in the end; and,

in fact, it was altogether probable that he was that very instant in

Wurzburg; for if the New York-Paris Chronicle had wanted him to write

up the Wagner operas, it would certainly want him to write up the

manoeuvres. She established his presence in Wurzburg by such an

irrefragable chain of reasoning that, at a knock outside, she was just

able to kelp back a scream, while she ran to open the door. It was not

Burnamy, as in compliance with every nerve it ought to have been, but

her husband, who tried to justify his presence by saying that they were

all waiting for her and Miss Triscoe, and asked when they were coming.

She frowned him silent, and then shut herself outside with him long

enough to whisper, “Say she's got a headache, or anything you please;

but don't stop talking here with me, or I shall go wild.” She then shut

herself in again, with the effect of holding him accountable for the

whole affair.

LVI.

General Triscoe could not keep his irritation, at hearing that his

daughter was not coming, out of the excuses he made to Mrs. Adding; he

said again and again that it must seem like a discourtesy to her. She

gayly disclaimed any such notion; she would not hear of putting off

their excursion to another day; it had been raining just long enough to

give them a reasonable hope of a few hours' drought, and they might not

have another dry spell for weeks. She slipped off her jacket after they

started, and gave it to Kenby, but she let General Triscoe hold her

umbrella over her, while he limped beside her. She seemed to March, as

he followed with Rose, to be playing the two men off against each other,

with an ease which he wished his wife could be there to see, and to

judge aright.

They crossed by the Old Bridge, which is of the earliest years of the

seventh century, between rows of saints whose statues surmount the

piers. Some are bishops as well as saints; one must have been at Rome

in his day, for he wore his long thick beard in the fashion of

Michelangelo's Moses. He stretched out toward the passers two fingers

of blessing and was unaware of the sparrow which had lighted on them

and was giving him the effect of offering it to the public admiration.

Squads of soldiers tramping by turned to look and smile, and the dull

faces of citizens lighted up at the quaint sight. Some children stopped

and remained very quiet, not to scare away the bird; and a cold-faced,

spiritual-looking priest paused among them as if doubting whether to

rescue the absent-minded bishop from a situation derogatory to his

dignity; but he passed on, and then the sparrow suddenly flew off.

Rose Adding had lingered for the incident with March, but they now

pushed on, and came up with the others at the end of the bridge, where

they found them in question whether they had not better take a carriage

and drive to the foot of the hill before they began their climb. March

thanked them, but said he was keeping up the terms of his cure, and

was getting in all the walking he could. Rose begged his mother not to

include him in the driving party; he protested that he was feeling so

well, and the walk was doing him good. His mother consented, if he would

promise not to get tired, and then she mounted into the two-spanner

which had driven instinctively up to their party when their parley

began, and General Triscoe took the place beside her, while Kenby, with

smiling patience, seated himself in front.

Rose kept on talking with March about Wurzburg and its history, which it

seemed he had been reading the night before when he could not sleep. He

explained, “We get little histories of the places wherever we go. That's

what Mr. Kenby does, you know.”

“Oh, yes,” said March.

“I don't suppose I shall get a chance to read much here,” Rose

continued, “with General Triscoe in the room. He doesn't like the

light.”

“Well, well. He's rather old, you know. And you musn't read too much,

Rose. It isn't good for you.”

“I know, but if I don't read, I think, and that keeps me awake worse.

Of course, I respect General Triscoe for being in the war, and getting

wounded,” the boy suggested.

“A good many did it,” March was tempted to say.

The boy did not notice his insinuation. “I suppose there were some

things they did in the army, and then they couldn't get over the habit.

But General Grant says in his 'Life' that he never used a profane

expletive.”

“Does General Triscoe?”

Rose answered reluctantly, “If anything wakes him in the night, or if he

can't make these German beds over to suit him--”

“I see.” March turned his face to hide the smile which he would not

have let the boy detect. He thought best not to let Rose resume his

impressions of the general; and in talk of weightier matters they found

themselves at that point of the climb where the carriage was waiting

for them. From this point they followed an alley through ivied, garden

walls, till they reached the first of the balustraded terraces which

ascend to the crest of the hill where the church stands. Each terrace

is planted with sycamores, and the face of the terrace wall supports

a bass-relief commemorating with the drama of its lifesize figures the

stations of the cross.

Monks and priests were coming and going, and dropped on the steps

leading from terrace to terrace were women and children on their knees

in prayer. It was all richly reminiscent of pilgrim scenes in other

Catholic lands; but here there was a touch of earnest in the Northern

face of the worshipers which the South had never imparted. Even in the

beautiful rococo interior of the church at the top of the hill there

was a sense of something deeper and truer than mere ecclesiasticism;

and March came out of it in a serious muse while the boy at his side

did nothing to interrupt. A vague regret filled his heart as he gazed

silently out over the prospect of river and city and vineyard, purpling

together below the top where he stood, and mixed with this regret was a

vague resentment of his wife's absence. She ought to have been there

to share his pang and his pleasure; they had so long enjoyed everything

together that without her he felt unable to get out of either emotion

all there was in it.

The forgotten boy stole silently down the terraces after the rest of

the party who had left him behind with March. At the last terrace they

stopped and waited; and after a delay that began to be long to Mrs.

Adding, she wondered aloud what could have become of them.

Kenby promptly offered to go back and see, and she consented in seeming

to refuse: “It isn't worth while. Rose has probably got Mr. March into

some deep discussion, and they've forgotten all about us. But if you

will go, Mr. Kenby, you might just remind Rose of my existence.” She let

him lay her jacket on her shoulders before he left her, and then she sat

down on one of the steps, which General Triscoe kept striking with the

point of her umbrella as he stood before her.

“I really shall have to take it from you if you do that any more,” she

said, laughing up in his face. “I'm serious.”

He stopped. “I wish I could believe you were serious, for a moment.”

“You may, if you think it will do you any good. But I don't see why.”

The general smiled, but with a kind of tremulous eagerness which might

have been pathetic to any one who liked him. “Do you know this is almost

the first time I have spoken alone with you?”

“Really, I hadn't noticed,” said Mrs. Adding.

General Triscoe laughed in rather a ghastly way. “Well, that's

encouraging, at least, to a man who's had his doubts whether it wasn't

intended.”

“Intended? By whom? What do you mean, General Triscoe? Why in the world

shouldn't you have spoken alone with me before?”

He was not, with all his eagerness, ready to say, and while she smiled

pleasantly she had the look in her eyes of being brought to bay and

being prepared, if it must come to that, to have the worst over, then

and there. She was not half his age, but he was aware of her having no

respect for his years; compared with her average American past as he

understood it, his social place was much higher, but, she was not in the

least awed by it; in spite of his war record she was making him behave

like a coward. He was in a false position, and if he had any one but

himself to blame he had not her. He read her equal knowledge of these

facts in the clear eyes that made him flush and turn his own away.

Then he started with a quick “Hello!” and stood staring up at the steps

from the terrace above, where Rose Adding was staying himself weakly by

a clutch of Kenby on one side and March on the other.

His mother looked round and caught herself up from where she sat and ran

toward him. “Oh, Rose!”

“It's nothing, mother,” he called to her, and as she dropped on her

knees before him he sank limply against her. “It was like what I had in

Carlsbad; that's all. Don't worry about me, please!”

“I'm not worrying, Rose,” she said with courage of the same texture as

his own. “You've been walking too much. You must go back in the carriage

with us. Can't you have it come here?” she asked Kenby.

“There's no road, Mrs. Adding. But if Rose would let me carry him--”

“I can walk,” the boy protested, trying to lift himself from her neck.

“No, no! you mustn't.” She drew away and let him fall into the arms that

Kenby put round him. He raised the frail burden lightly to his shoulder,

and moved strongly away, followed by the eyes of the spectators who had

gathered about the little group, but who dispersed now, and went back to

their devotions.

March hurried after Kenby with Mrs. Adding, whom he told he had just

missed Rose and was looking about for him, when Kenby came with her

message for them. They made sure that he was nowhere about the church,

and then started together down the terraces. At the second or third

station below they found the boy clinging to the barrier that protected

the bass-relief from the zeal of the devotees. He looked white and sick,

though he insisted that he was well, and when he turned to come away

with them he reeled and would have fallen if Kenby had not caught him.

Kenby wanted to carry him, but Rose would not let him, and had made his

way down between them.

“Yea, he has such a spirit,” she said, “and I've no doubt he's suffering

now more from Mr. Kenby's kindness than from his own sickness he had one

of these giddy turns in Carlsbad, though, and I shall certainly have a

doctor to see him.”

“I think I should, Mrs. Adding,” said March, not too gravely, for it

seemed to him that it was not quite his business to alarm her further,

if she was herself taking the affair with that seriousness. He

questioned whether she was taking it quite seriously enough, when she

turned with a laugh, and called to General Triscoe, who was limping down

the steps of the last terrace behind them:

“Oh, poor General Triscoe! I thought you had gone on ahead.”

General Triscoe could not enter into the joke of being forgotten,

apparently. He assisted with gravity at the disposition of the party

for the return, when they all reached the carriage. Rose had the place

beside his mother, and Kenby wished March to take his with the general

and let him sit with the driver; but he insisted that he would rather

walk home, and he did walk till they had driven out of eight. Then he

called a passing one-spanner, and drove to his hotel in comfort and

silence.

LVII.

Kenby did not come to the Swan before supper; then he reported that

the doctor had said Rose was on the verge of a nervous collapse. He had

overworked at school, but the immediate trouble was the high, thin air,

which the doctor said he must be got out of at once, into a quiet place

at the sea-shore somewhere. He had suggested Ostend; or some point on

the French coast; Kenby had thought of Schevleningen, and the doctor had

said that would do admirably.

“I understood from Mrs. Adding,” he concluded, “that you were going.

there for your after-cure, Mr. March, and I didn't know but you might be

going soon.”

At the mention of Schevleningen the Marches had looked at each

other with a guilty alarm, which they both tried to give the cast of

affectionate sympathy but she dismissed her fear that he might be going

to let his compassion prevail with him to his hurt when he said: “Why,

we ought to have been there before this, but I've been taking my life in

my hands in trying to see a little of Germany, and I'm afraid now that

Mrs. March has her mind too firmly fixed on Berlin to let me think of

going to Schevleningen till we've been there.”

“It's too bad!” said Mrs. March, with real regret. “I wish we were

going.” But she had not the least notion of gratifying her wish; and

they were all silent till Kenby broke out:

“Look here! You know how I feel about Mrs Adding! I've been pretty frank

with Mr. March myself, and I've had my suspicions that she's been frank

with you, Mrs. March. There isn't any doubt about my wanting to marry

her, and up to this time there hasn't been any doubt about her not

wanting to marry me. But it isn't a question of her or of me, now. It's

a question of Rose. I love the boy,” and Kenby's voice shook, and he

faltered a moment. “Pshaw! You understand.”

“Indeed I do, Mr. Kenby,” said Mrs. March. “I perfectly understand you.”

“Well, I don't think Mrs. Adding is fit to make the journey with

him alone, or to place herself in the best way after she gets to

Schevleningen. She's been badly shaken up; she broke down before

the doctor; she said she didn't know what to do; I suppose she's

frightened--”

Kenby stopped again, and March asked, “When is she going?”

“To-morrow,” said Kenby, and he added, “And now the question is, why

shouldn't I go with her?”

Mrs. March gave a little start, and looked at her husband, but he

said nothing, and Kenby seemed not to have supposed that he would say

anything.

“I know it would be very American, and all that, but I happen to be an

American, and it wouldn't be out of character for me. I suppose,” he

appealed to Mrs. March, “that it's something I might offer to do if it

were from New York to Florida--and I happened to be going there? And I

did happen to be going to Holland.”

“Why, of course, Mr. Kenby,” she responded, with such solemnity that

March gave way in an outrageous laugh.

Kenby laughed, and Mrs. March laughed too, but with an inner note of

protest.

“Well,” Kenby continued, still addressing her, “what I want you to do is

to stand by me when I propose it.”

Mrs. March gathered strength to say, “No, Mr. Kenby, it's your own

affair, and you must take the responsibility.”

“Do you disapprove?”

“It isn't the same as it would be at home. You see that yourself.”

“Well,” said Kenby, rising, “I have to arrange about their getting away

to-morrow. It won't be easy in this hurly-burly that's coming off.”

“Give Rose our love; and tell Mrs. Adding that I'll come round and see

her to-morrow before she starts.”

“Oh! I'm afraid you can't, Mrs. March. They're to start at six in the

morning.”

“They are! Then we must go and see them tonight. We'll be there almost

as soon as you are.”

March went up to their rooms with, his wife, and she began on the

stairs:

“Well, my dear, I hope you realize that your laughing so gave us

completely away. And what was there to keep grinning about, all

through?”

“Nothing but the disingenuous, hypocritical passion of love. It's always

the most amusing thing in the world; but to see it trying to pass itself

off in poor old Kenby as duty and humanity, and disinterested affection

for Rose, was more than I could stand. I don't apologize for laughing; I

wanted to yell.”

His effrontery and his philosophy both helped to save him; and she said

from the point where he had side-tracked her mind: “I don't call it

disingenuous. He was brutally frank. He's made it impossible to treat

the affair with dignity. I want you to leave the whole thing to me, from

this out. Now, will you?”

On their way to the Spanischer Hof she arranged in her own mind for Mrs.

Adding to get a maid, and for the doctor to send an assistant with her

on the journey, but she was in such despair with her scheme that she

had not the courage to right herself when Mrs. Adding met her with the

appeal:

“Oh, Mrs. March, I'm so glad you approve of Mr. Kenby's plan. It does

seem the only thing to do. I can't trust myself alone with Rose, and Mr.

Kenby's intending to go to Schevleningen a few days later anyway. Though

it's too bad to let him give up the manoeuvres.”

“I'm sure he won't mind that,” Mrs. March's voice said mechanically,

while her thought was busy with the question whether this scandalous

duplicity was altogether Kenby's, and whether Mrs. Adding was as

guiltless of any share in it as she looked. She looked pitifully

distracted; she might not have understood his report; or Kenby might

really have mistaken Mrs. March's sympathy for favor.

“No, he only lives to do good,” Mrs. Adding returned. “He's with Rose;

won't you come in and see them?”

Rose was lying back on the pillows of a sofa, from which they would

not let him get up. He was full of the trip to Holland, and had already

pushed Kenby, as Kenby owned, beyond the bounds of his very general

knowledge of the Dutch language, which Rose had plans for taking up

after they were settled in Schevleningen. The boy scoffed at the notion

that he was not perfectly well, and he wished to talk with March on the

points where he had found Kenby wanting.

“Kenby is an encyclopaedia compared with me, Rose,” the editor

protested, and he amplified his ignorance for the boy's good to an

extent which Rose saw was a joke. He left Holland to talk about other

things which his mother thought quite as bad for him. He wished to know

if March did not think that the statue of the bishop with the sparrow on

its finger was a subject for a poem; and March said gayly that if Rose

would write it he would print it in 'Every Other Week'.

The boy flushed with pleasure at his banter. “No, I couldn't do it. But

I wish Mr. Burnamy had seen it. He could. Will you tell him about it?”

He wanted to know if March had heard from Burnamy lately, and in the

midst of his vivid interest he gave a weary sigh.

His mother said that now he had talked enough, and bade him say good-by

to the Marches, who were coming so soon to Holland, anyway. Mrs. March

put her arms round him to kiss him, and when she let him sink back her

eyes were dim.

“You see how frail he is?” said Mrs. Adding. “I shall not let him out of

my sight, after this, till he's well again.”

She had a kind of authority in sending Kenby away with them which was

not lost upon the witnesses. He asked them to come into the reading-room

a moment with him, and Mrs. March wondered if he were going to make

some excuse to her for himself; but he said: “I don't know how we're to

manage about the Triscoes. The general will have a room to himself, but

if Mrs. Adding takes Rose in with her, it leaves Miss Triscoe out, and

there isn't a room to be had in this house for love or money. Do you

think,” he appealed directly to Mrs. March, “that it would do to offer

her my room at the Swan?”

“Why, yes,” she assented, with a reluctance rather for the complicity

in which he had already involved her, and for which he was still

unpunished, than for what he was now proposing. “Or she could come in

with me, and Mr. March could take it.”

“Whichever you think,” said Kenby so submissively that she relented, to

ask:

“And what will you do?”

He laughed. “Well, people have been known to sleep in a chair. I shall

manage somehow.”

“You might offer to go in with the general,” March suggested, and the

men apparently thought this was a joke. Mrs. March did not laugh in her

feminine worry about ways and means.

“Where is Miss Triscoe?” she asked. “We haven't seen them.”

“Didn't Mrs. Adding tell you? They went to supper at a restaurant; the

general doesn't like the cooking here. They ought to have been back

before this.”

He looked up at the clock on the wall, and she said, “I suppose you

would like us to wait.”

“It would be very kind of you.”

“Oh, it's quite essential,” she returned with an airy freshness which

Kenby did not seem to feel as painfully as he ought.

They all sat down, and the Triscoes came in after a few minutes, and a

cloud on the general's face lifted at the proposition Kenby left Mrs.

March to make.

“I thought that child ought to be in his mother's charge,” he said.

With his own comfort provided for, he made no objections to Mrs.

March's plan; and Agatha went to take leave of Rose and his mother.

“By-the-way,” the general turned to March, “I found Stoller at the

restaurant where we supped. He offered me a place in his carriage for

the manoeuvres. How are you going?”

“I think I shall go by train. I don't fancy the long drive.”

“Well, I don't know that it's worse than the long walk after you leave

the train,” said the general from the offence which any difference of

taste was apt to give him. “Are you going by train, too?” he asked Kenby

with indifference.

“I'm not going at all,” said Kenby. “I'm leaving Wurzburg in the

morning.”

“Oh, indeed,” said the general.

Mrs. March could not make out whether he knew that Kenby was going with

Rose and Mrs. Adding, but she felt that there must be a full and open

recognition of the fact among them. “Yes,” she said, “isn't it fortunate

that Mr. Kenby should be going to Holland, too! I should have been so

unhappy about them if Mrs. Adding had been obliged to make that long

journey with poor little Rose alone.”

“Yes, yes; very fortunate, certainly,” said the general colorlessly.

Her husband gave her a glance of intelligent appreciation; but Kenby was

too simply, too densely content with the situation to know the value of

what she had done. She thought he must certainly explain, as he walked

back with her to the Swan, whether he had misrepresented her to Mrs.

Adding, or Mrs. Adding had misunderstood him. Somewhere there had been

an error, or a duplicity which it was now useless to punish; and Kenby

was so apparently unconscious of it that she had not the heart to be

cross with him. She heard Miss Triscoe behind her with March laughing

in the gayety which the escape from her father seemed to inspire in her.

She was promising March to go with him in the morning to see the Emperor

and Empress of Germany arrive at the station, and he was warning her

that if she laughed there, like that, she would subject him to fine

and imprisonment. She pretended that she would like to see him led off

between two gendarmes, but consented to be a little careful when he

asked her how she expected to get back to her hotel without him, if such

a thing happened.

LVIII.

After all, Miss Triscoe did not go with March; she preferred to sleep.

The imperial party was to arrive at half past seven, but at six the

crowd was already dense before the station, and all along the street

leading to the Residenz. It was a brilliant day, with the promise of

sunshine, through which a chilly wind blew, for the manoeuvres. The

colors of all the German states flapped in this breeze from the poles

wreathed with evergreen which encircled the square; the workmen putting

the last touches on the bronzed allegory hurried madly to be done, and

they had, scarcely finished their labors when two troops of dragoons

rode into the place and formed before the station, and waited as

motionlessly as their horses would allow.