IN VIEW OF THE HOHENZOLLERN'S BIRTHPLACE
Our cruise came to an end in time to save the margravine from yawning.
The last day of it was windless, and we hung in sight of the colourless
low Flemish coast for hours, my father tasking his ingenuity to amuse
her. He sang with Miss Sibley, rallied Mr. Peterborough, played picquet
to lose, threw over the lead line to count the fathoms, and whistling for
the breeze, said to me, 'We shall decidedly have to offer her an
exhibition of tipsy British seamen as a final resource. The case is
grave either way; but we cannot allow the concluding impression to be a
dull one.'
It struck me with astonishment to see the vigilant watch she kept over
the princess this day, after having left her almost uninterruptedly to my
care.
'You are better?' She addressed Ottilia. 'You can sit up? You think you
can walk? Then I have acted rightly, nay, judiciously,--I have not made
a sacrifice for nothing. I took the cruise, mind you, on your account.
You would study yourself to the bone, till you looked like a canary's
quill, with that Herr Professor of yours. Now I 've given you a dose of
life. Yes, you begin to look like human flesh. Something has done you
good.'
The princess flushing scarlet, the margravine cried,
'There's no occasion for you to have the whole British army in your
cheeks. Goodness me! what's the meaning of it? Why, you answer me like
flags, banners, uhlans' pennons, fullfrocked cardinals !'
My father stepped in.
'Ah, yes,' said the margravine. 'But you little know, my good Roy, the
burden of an unmarried princess; and heartily glad shall I be to hand her
over to Baroness Turckems. That's her instituted governess, duenna,
dragon, what you will. She was born for responsibility, I was not; it
makes me miserable. I have had no holiday. True, while she was like one
of their wax virgins I had a respite. Fortunately, I hear of you
English, that when you fall to sighing, you suck your thumbs and are
consoled.'
My father bowed her, and smiled her, and whirled her away from the
subject. I heard him say, under his breath, that he had half a mind to
issue orders for an allowance of grog to be served out to the sailors on
the spot. I suggested, as I conceived in a similar spirit the forcible
ducking of Mr. Peterborough. He appeared to entertain and relish the
notion in earnest.
'It might do. It would gratify her enormously,' he said, and eyed the
complacent clerical gentleman with transparent jealousy of his claims to
decent treatment. 'Otherwise, I must confess,' he added, 'I am at a
loss. My wits are in the doldrums.'
He went up to Mr. Peterborough, and, with an air of great sincerity and
courtesy, requested him in French to create a diversion for her Highness
the Margravine of Rippau during the extreme heat of the afternoon by
precipitating himself headlong into forty fathoms, either attached or
unattached. His art in baffling Mr. Peterborough's attempts to treat the
unheard-of request as a jest was extraordinary. The ingenuity of his
successive pleas for pressing such a request pertinaciously upon Mr.
Peterborough in particular, his fixed eye, yet cordial deferential
manner, and the stretch of his forefinger, and argumentative turn of the
head--indicative of an armed disputant fully on the alert, and as if it
were of profound and momentous importance that he should thoroughly
defeat and convince his man--overwhelmed us. Mr. Peterborough, not being
supple in French, fell back upon his English with a flickering smile of
protestation; but even in his native tongue he could make no head against
the tremendous volubility and brief eager pauses besetting him.
The farce was too evanescent for me to reproduce it.
Peterborough turned and fled to his cabin. Half the crew were on the
broad grin. The margravine sprang to my father's arm, and entreated him
to be her guest in her Austrian mountain summer-seat. Ottilia was now
her darling and her comfort. Whether we English youth sucked our thumbs,
or sighed furiously, she had evidently ceased to care. Mr. Peterborough
assured me at night that he had still a difficulty in persuading himself
of my father's absolute sanity, so urgent was the fire of his eye in
seconding his preposterous proposal; and, as my father invariably treated
with the utmost reserve a farce played out, they never arrived at an
understanding about it, beyond a sententious agreement once, in the
extreme heat of an Austrian highland valley, that the option of taking a
header into sea-water would there be divine.
Our yacht winged her way home. Prince Ernest of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld,
accompanied by Baroness Turckems, and Prince Otto, his nephew, son of the
Prince of Eisenberg, a captain of Austrian lancers, joined the margravine
in Wurtemberg, and we felt immediately that domestic affairs were under a
different management. Baroness Turckems relieved the margravine of her
guard. She took the princess into custody. Prince Ernest greeted us
with some affability; but it was communicated to my father that he
expected an apology before he could allow himself to be as absolutely
unclouded toward us as the blaze of his titles. My father declined to
submit; so the prince inquired of us what our destination was. Down the
Danube to the Black Sea and Asia Minor, Greece, Egypt, the Nile, the
Desert, India, possibly, and the Himalayas, my father said. The prince
bowed. The highest personages, if they cannot travel, are conscious of a
sort of airy majesty pertaining to one who can command so wide and far a
flight. We were supplicated by the margravine to appease her brother's
pride with half a word. My father was firm. The margravine reached her
two hands to him. He kissed over them each in turn. They interchanged
smart semi-flattering or cutting sentences.
'Good!' she concluded; 'now I sulk you for five years.'
'You would decapitate me, madam, and weep over my astonished head, would
you not?'
'Upon my honour, I would,' she shook herself to reply.
He smiled rather sadly.
'No pathos!' she implored him.
'Not while I live, madam,' said he.
At this her countenance underwent a tremour.
'And when that ends . . . friend! well, I shall have had my last
laugh in the world.'
Both seemed affected. My father murmured some soothing word.
'Then you do mean to stay with me?' the margravine caught him up.
'Not in livery, your Highness.'
'To the deuce with you!' would be a fair translation of the exalted
lady's reply. She railed at his insufferable pride.
'And you were wrong, wrong,' she pursued. 'You offended the prince
mightily: you travestied his most noble ancestor--'
'In your service, may it please you.'
'You offended, offended him, I say, and you haven't the courage to make
reparation. And when I tell you the prince is manageable as your ship,
if you will only take and handle the rudder. Do you perceive?'
She turned to me.
'Hither, Mr. Harry; come, persuade him. Why, you do not desire to leave
me, do you?'
Much the reverse. But I had to congratulate myself subsequently on
having been moderate in the expression of my wishes; for, as my father
explained to me, with sufficient lucidity to enlighten my dulness, the
margravine was tempting him grossly. She saw more than I did of his
plans. She could actually affect to wink at them that she might gain her
point, and have her amusement, and live for the hour, treacherously
beguiling a hoodwinked pair to suppose her partially blind or wholly
complaisant. My father knew her and fenced her.
'Had I yielded,' he said, when my heart was low after the parting,
'I should have shown her my hand. I do not choose to manage the prince
that the margravine may manage me. I pose my pride--immolate my son to
it, Richie? I hope not. No. At Vienna we shall receive an invitation
to Sarkeld for the winter, if we hear nothing of entreaties to turn aside
to Ischl at Munich. She is sure to entreat me to accompany her on her
annual visit to her territory of Rippau, which she detests; and, indeed,
there is not a vine in the length and breadth of it. She thought herself
broad awake, and I have dosed her with an opiate.'
He squeezed my fingers tenderly. I was in want both of consolation and
very delicate handling when we drove out of the little Wurtemberg town:
I had not taken any farewell from Ottilia. Baroness Turckems was already
exercising her functions of dragon. With the terrible forbidding word
'Repose' she had wafted the princess to her chamber in the evening, and
folded her inextricably round and round in the morning. The margravine
huffed, the prince icy, Ottilia invisible, I found myself shooting down
from the heights of a dream among shattered fragments of my cloud-palace
before I well knew that I had left off treading common earth. All my
selfish nature cried out to accuse Ottilia. We drove along a dusty
country road that lay like a glaring shaft of the desert between
vineyards and hills.
'There,' said my father, waving his hand where the hills on our left fell
to a distance and threw up a lofty head and neck cut with one white line,
'your Hohenzollerns shot up there. Their castle looks like a tight
military stock. Upon my word, their native mountain has the air of a
drum major. Mr. Peterborough, have you a mind to climb it? We are at
your disposal.'
'Thank you, thank you, sir,' said the Rev. Ambrose, gazing
enthusiastically, but daunted by the heat: 'if it is your wish?'
'We have none that is not yours, Mr. Peterborough. You love ruins, and
we are adrift just now. I presume we can drive to the foot of the
ascent. I should wish my son perhaps to see the source of great houses.'
Here it was that my arm was touched by old Schwartz. He saluted stiffly,
and leaning from the saddle on the trot of his horse at an even pace with
our postillion, stretched out a bouquet of roses. I seized it
palpitating, smelt the roses, and wondered. May a man write of his
foolishness?--tears rushed to my eyes. Schwartz was far behind us when
my father caught sight of the magical flowers.
'Come!' said he, glowing, 'we will toast the Hohenstaufens and the
Hohenzollerns to-night, Richie.'
Later, when I was revelling in fancies sweeter than the perfume of the
roses, he pressed their stems reflectively, unbound them, and disclosed a
slip of crested paper. On it was written:
'Violets are over.'
Plain words; but a princess had written them, and never did so golden a
halo enclose any piece of human handiwork.