LOVE'S SPRINGTIDE
'A queenly rose of sound, with tune for scent;
A pause of shadow in a day of heat;
A voice to make God weak as man,
And at its pleadings take away the ban
'Neath which so long our spirits have been bent--
A voice to make death tender and life sweet!'
PHILIP BOURKE MARSTON.
THE Hofmarshall's house stood in the 'Graben,' a broad road which ran
proudly past the old town ending at the ducal gardens on the west, while
to the east began the fields and vineyards leading up to the royal
hunting forest, the Rothwald. Stafforth's house was a fine stone building
decorated with rococo masks. To the back lay a beautiful garden laid out
on a plan of M. Lenôtre's, from whose book of _Jardins Mignons_ Stafforth
had selected it. On the morning after the theatricals Wilhelmine was
seated on one of the garden benches, and though her eyes were fixed on
the pages of a French translation of Barclay's satirical novel _Argenis_,
her thoughts were busy with the events of the previous evening. Her
reverie was interrupted by Madame de Ruth who arrived, as usual, in a
cloud of her own words. She embraced Wilhelmine affectionately,
exclaiming: 'Never was there so great a victory! One battle and the
country is ours! The hero at your feet, my dear! Did I not say that you
had a great future before you? Ah! the Geyling! Ha! ha! ha! what a face
she made when his Highness led you out on to the balcony, and I asked her
if she thought it convenable for you! Ha! ha! ha! she looked sour indeed,
and she screeched at me in her peahen voice: "Mademoiselle de Grävenitz
seems to be a lady of experience; she can guard her own young virtue, I
suppose!" "'Tis not her virtue, Madame," I said, with a surprised look
and the prim manner of a Pietist, "I know _that_ is safe with so devoted
a husband as Serenissimus, but I fear for her reputation! Ah! Madame, the
evil tongues of older women! and already no one here to-night can speak
of ought save Mademoiselle. But I assure you the theatricals are not even
mentioned, Madame! They can remember nothing save the Envoi and its
singer." O Wilhelmine! if you could have seen her face! I suffer, I
expire with laughter, when I think of it.' And Madame de Ruth laughed
till she really was almost suffocated, and was obliged to hold her hands
over her heaving sides.
Wilhelmine leaned her head on her hands. 'Poor Madame de Geyling!' she
said in a musing tone.
Madame de Ruth ceased laughing and looked at her piercingly. 'Poor Madame
de Geyling?' she exclaimed. 'But, my child! Ah!' and she caught
Wilhelmine by the wrist; 'you pity her? because she has lost the Duke's
affection? Why?' She paused a moment--reflected. 'Girl! you have fallen
in love with Serenissimus,' she whispered.
Wilhelmine sprang up--her cheeks aflame. It was true, and she knew it
herself then for the first time. She was angry, and yet there was an
immense gladness in her heart. Her eyes were wet, and she felt the pulses
throbbing in her temples. She was ashamed and yet gloriously proud.
Madame de Ruth watched her; at first, with smiling curiosity, then the
old woman's face softened, she took Wilhelmine's hand and said gently:
'God give you joy, my child. There, there--I am a foolish old woman--you
make me weep.--Lord God! but hearts are the great intriguers, not
brains!'
Wilhelmine turned to her and, bending, kissed the old courtesan on the
brow.
'Madame,' she said, 'Madame, be my friend; I shall need one in the days
to come.'
Madame de Ruth drew the girl down beside her on the bench, her face had
grown suddenly old and infinitely sad. 'Yes,' she answered, 'I will be
your friend. Do you know that I had a little girl twenty years ago? She
would have been just your age now, had she lived, and perhaps I should
have been a different woman. Well, well--no sentiment, my dear; it is so
unsuitable, isn't it? but I will be your friend.'
She kissed the young woman, and, rising hastily, took her way towards the
house.
* * * * *
The days dragged slowly on in Stuttgart for Wilhelmine, and there came no
message from his Highness, who had gone to Urach, they told her, to hunt.
Though the court remained nominally in Stuttgart while her Highness
Johanna Elizabetha resided at the castle, most of the courtiers had
retired to the country and Stuttgart was more than usually dull.
Stafforth had accompanied the Duke to Urach, so Wilhelmine remained alone
with Madame de Stafforth. The heat was terrible in the town, which lay
encircled by the vine-clad hills, as in a great caldron. The Stuttgarters
told her that such heat was unusual at that time of year, but there was
little consolation for her in that.
To some natures dullness becomes an insupportable suffering. Loneliness,
all you will, they can bear, for they draw occupation and joy from the
depth of their own souls; but that dreariness, which has been called
dullness, is an almost tangible presence at moments, and seems to blight
the beauty of all things. This Wilhelmine felt in those stifling days at
Stuttgart. Madame de Stafforth's moth-like personality wearied her.
Madame de Ruth, who had returned to Rottenburg, wrote constantly
imploring her friend to visit her; yet something seemed to hold the girl,
some mysterious sentiment, that if she left Stuttgart she would turn her
back on her life.
Once or twice Wilhelmine accompanied Madame de Stafforth to the castle.
The Duchess received her with amiable indifference, and the young woman
stood silently by while the two dull women discussed their habitual
uninteresting topics.
It was perfectly unreasonable, but she felt a hatred growing in her heart
for the wife of Eberhard Ludwig.
One morning towards the end of June, Wilhelmine awoke to find the grey
dawn creeping in at her window; she rose and opened the casement and
leaned out. Her room looked on the formal garden. There was a solemn hush
in the air, and she realised that even the birds were asleep. Far in the
east, over the top of the one beech-tree which still stood in the garden
in spite of M. Lenôtre, the rising sun was tingeing the horizon with a
delicate rosy glow. A bird stirred--twittered--finally a clear note of
welcome to the day rang out, and the world was awake. The radiance in the
east grew brighter, long streaks of glorious colour invaded the soft grey
of dawn. From the distant field roads came the rumble of a peasant's
cart. Wilhelmine dressed herself hurriedly and tiptoed down the dark
stair to the house door. The broad street, the Graben, was deserted and
silent, save for an occasional rattle in the direction of the
market-place, where the peasants were arriving from the country with
their carts heaped up with fresh fruit and vegetables. She walked up the
street, delighting in the coolness and the scent of the morning air after
the long days of oppressive heat which she had endured. A fancy took her
to wander in the Rothwald, and she walked briskly along, up the dusty
country path which led to the wood on the hill. The sun had risen, and
even at that early hour the heat was so great that once or twice
Wilhelmine almost turned homewards; however, the thought of the cool
shade of the beech-trees in the forest drew her, and she pressed onward.
At length she reached the edge of the wood, and, turning, she
contemplated the steep hill which she had climbed from the town. The
rough country road wound like some white riband through the green
vineyards which lay between Stuttgart and the Rothwald. A light breeze
sprang up and stirred the long, lush grass of the field which bordered
the shadow of the trees. There is no part of a forest more beautiful than
the line where wood begins and meadow ends; it is as the lip of the
forest breathing forth in a fragrant kiss of poesy some mystery of silent
dells and fairy's haunts, which it hints of but does not quite betray.
Wilhelmine mused on this; she was gifted with a delicate appreciation of
each beauty-forming detail, and the accurate observation without which
the enjoyment of beauty is a mere sensuous mood. She paused a while,
drinking in the freshness and revelling in the solitude; then she
entered the wood and walked onward, her feet sinking deep into the rich
moss. She inhaled the delicious smell of the beech-trees, that light
odour of the northern forest which is almost imperceptible, and yet so
fresh, so pungent. It is made up of the smell of earth, of moss, of fern,
of grass and leaves, and the resinous health of young pine. As Wilhelmine
walked, she whispered a melody half in greeting to the trees, half
mechanically. She found a shallow bank, and, seating herself on the
ground, she supported her shoulders against the slope. She leaned her
head back and gazed up into Spring's wonderful tracery in the myriad
beech-leaves, and the cool green fell like balsam on her eyes. A breeze
stirred the tree-tops, and for a moment they swayed and leaned together
whisperingly, then, like little children playing at some gentle teasing
game, they drew back as the breeze passed.
Wilhelmine's thoughts wandered to Eberhard Ludwig; of a truth they knew
the way, for how often had they sought his memory since that night in the
castle garden? She pondered how she had been told his Highness loved to
sleep in the forest. 'Ridiculous poet-fellow' he had called himself. She
drew a deep breath. 'Au revoir, Philomèle,' he had said. Ah! but he had
forgotten her! Madame de Ruth had been mistaken! The campaign was not
won. Wilhelmine's cheeks glowed suddenly, she crushed a leaf of an
overhanging beech-branch; it was intolerable. All those people would
ridicule her! Leaning her head in her hand, she pressed her fingers
against her eyes to shut out the sunlight, but it lingered in her
eyeballs, and against the blackness she saw dancing rays of blinding
light. A feeling of delightful drowsiness was coming over her--a far-away
feeling. Presently she raised her head from her hands, and once more
contemplated the peaceful wood. What did she care for those people who
would mock her? She would return their malevolent stares with her evil
look, which she knew would be eminently disagreeable to them. Her
thoughts turned back to Güstrow now--Güstrow and Monsieur Gabriel. Almost
unconsciously, as she thought of her old friend, she found herself
humming an air. At first she but whispered it under her breath, then she
was gradually carried away by the physical enjoyment of letting forth her
powerful voice, and she burst into full song:
'Bois épais redouble ton ombre,
Tu ne saurais être assez sombre.
Tu ne peux trop cacher
Mon malheureux amour!
Je sens un désespoir,
Dont l'horreur est extrême.
Je ne dois plus voir
Ce que j'aime--
Je ne veux plus souffrir le jour!'
She sang the old French melody out into the trees, and the great notes
thrilled and echoed through the wood till it was as though they had
become an integrant part of the forest. Her voice was truly a woman's
voice in the ineffable tenderness and the grand passion of it, but there
lay in its tones a depth of strong uncompromising nobility which lives in
an organ's notes or in the rich low chords of a violoncello. Truly, as
Monsieur Gabriel had said, her voice belonged by right to the shadowy
cathedrals, for each note seemed a sacred thing, a homage to God, and
itself deserving to be worshipped in reverent devotion. During the song
Wilhelmine had not heard the sound of approaching footsteps, nor did she
observe how a hand pushed aside some branches not far from where she sat,
and a man's head and shoulders appeared. She leaned back on the moss for
a moment's rest, and then springing up recommenced to sing. She stood
very straight and tall, her hands locked together behind her, like a
schoolgirl reciting a lesson; somehow this childlike attitude added by
its simplicity to the woman's dignity. Her head was held a little back,
chin tilted upwards, and the eyes looked far away as though they beheld a
whole world of dreams and lovely melody beyond all save the singer's ken.
As she sang the colour mounted slowly to her cheeks, flooding her face
with a divine flush; perhaps her very heart's blood rushed to adore the
tones which fell from her lips. The man watching held his breath. She
finished her song on a clear high note, and as she gave it forth, she
flung back her head in an impulsive gesture, glorying in an ecstasy of
sound, a magnificence of accomplishment.
When the echo of the last ringing note faded, the man sprang forward,
and, throwing himself impetuously on his knees before Wilhelmine, he
raised the hem of her gown to his lips in a passionate gesture, though
with the adoring reverence that all poets give to great singers.
'Philomèle!' he murmured. 'Ah! Philomèle! Beloved!'
She looked down at him. How strangely natural, necessary, unsurprising it
seemed to her that he should be kneeling there, and yet she thought
herself in some oft-remembered dream.
'Gentil poète,' she whispered back, and her hand fell on his shoulder.
His hand sought hers, he caught it and kissed it with a sort of piety.
'I love you.' He spoke the words like a prayer. She drew away from him.
'Monseigneur,' she said, 'I thought you had forgotten me!' He started at
her gesture of repulsion and at the formal word.
'You are a woman no man can forget,' he answered. Then he told her how
that evening in the castle garden he had known he loved her; how he had
dreaded giving himself up to a passion which he divined would prove so
absorbing as to turn him from his cherished military ambition. He poured
out to her his life's history, all his dreams of brilliant feats of arms,
the raising of his duchy to a kingdom; he told her of his bitter
disappointment when he found these ambitions were incomprehensible to the
Duchess Johanna Elizabetha; of how, gradually, he had awakened to the
fact that he was tied to a woman who utterly lacked in sympathy, and thus
wearied him and drove him to seek consolation and amusement in the light
loves and fancies of court gallantry, and then how each lady's charms had
palled inevitably.
'And now,' he paused, 'now I feel that all my life began when first I
heard your voice! I have been fighting with my thoughts ever since.
Beloved! I have nothing to offer you--you are too pure to take the only
position I could give you--and I love you too well to ask you.'
She looked at him, and a smile touched her lips and vanished almost
before it was born.
'Mon poète,' she whispered, and stretched out both hands to him; he took
them in his, and drew her towards him. One thick curl of hair had fallen
forward on her neck, he lifted it and buried his face in it, kissing it
wildly, breathing in its fragrance.
'I love you,' he said again, and drew her, unresisting, into his arms.
'Philomèle! Ah!' and his lips met hers.
Overhead a bird burst forth into a rhapsody of song.