AN INTERVIEW WITH PRINCE ERNEST AND A MEETING WITH PRINCE OTTO
A messenger from Prince Ernest commanding my immediate attendance at the
palace signified that the battle had begun. I could have waited for my
father, whose return from one of his expeditions in the prince's service
was expected every instant; but though I knew I should have, had a
powerful coadjutor in him to assist me through such a conference, I
preferred to go down alone. Prince Otto met me in the hall. He passed
by, glancing an eye sharply, and said over his shoulder,
'We shall have a word together presently!'
The library door was flung open. Prince Ernest and the margravine were
in the room. She walked out with angry majesty. The prince held his
figure in the stiff attitude of reception. He could look imposing.
The character of the interview was perceptible at once.
'You have not, I presume, to be informed of the business in hand, Mr.
Richmond!'
'Your Highness, I believe I can guess it.'
This started him pacing the floor.
'An impossibility! a monstrous extravagance! a thing unheard of!
mania! mania!' he muttered. 'You are aware, sir, that you have been
doing your worst to destroy the settled arrangements of my family? What
does it mean? In common reason you cannot indulge any legitimate hope of
succeeding. Taking you as a foreigner, you must know that. Judge of the
case by your own reigning Families. Such events never happen amongst
them. Do you suppose that the possession of immense wealth entitles you
to the immeasurable presumption of aspiring to equality of position with
reigning Houses? Such folly is more frequently castigated than reasoned
with. Why, now--now, were it published--that I had condescended--
condescend as I am doing, I should be the laughing-stock of every Court
in Europe. You English want many lessons. You are taught by your
scribes to despise the dignity which is not supported by a multitude of
bayonets, guns, and gold. I heard of it when I travelled incognito. You
make merry over little potentates. Good. But do not cross their paths.
Their dominion may be circumscribed, but they have it; and where we are
now, my power equals that of the Kaiser and the Czar. You will do me the
favour to understand that I am not boasting, not menacing; I attempt,
since it is extraordinarily imposed on me, to instruct you. I have cause
to be offended; I waive it. I meet you on common ground, and address
myself to your good sense. Have you anything to say?'
'Much, sir.'
'Much?' he said, with affected incredulity.
The painful hardship for me was to reply in the vague terms he had been
pleased to use.
'I have much to say, your Highness. First, to ask pardon of you, without
excusing myself.'
'A condition, apparently, that absolves the necessity for the grant.
Speak precisely.'
But I was as careful as he in abstaining from any direct indication of
his daughter's complicity, and said, 'I have offended your Highness.
You have done me the honour to suggest that it is owing to my English
training. You will credit my assurance that the offence was not
intentional, not preconceived.'
'You charge it upon your having been trained among a nation of
shopkeepers?'
'My countrymen are not illiterate or unmannerly, your Highness.'
'I have not spoken it; I may add, I do not think it.'
'I feared that your Highness entertained what I find to be a very
general, perhaps here and there wilful, error with regard to England.'
'When I was in the service I had a comrade, a gallant gentleman, deeply
beloved by me, and he was an Englishman. He died in the uniform and
under the flag I reverence.'
'I rejoice that your Highness has had this experience of us. I have to
imagine that I expressed myself badly. My English training certainly
does not preclude the respect due to exalted rank. Your Highness will,
I trust humbly, pardon my offence. I do not excuse myself because I
cannot withdraw, and I am incapable of saying that I regret it.'
'In cool blood you utter that?' exclaimed the prince.
His amazement was unfeigned.
'What are the impossible, monstrous ideas you--where--? Who leads you
to fancy there is one earthly chance for you when you say you cannot
withdraw? Cannot? Are you requested? Are you consulted? It is a
question to be decided in the imperative: you must. What wheel it is you
think you have sufficient vigour to stop, I am profoundly unaware, but I
am prepared to affirm that it is not the wheel of my household. I would
declare it, were I a plain citizen. You are a nullity in the case, in
point of your individual will--a nullity swept away with one wave of the
hand. You can do this, and nothing else: you can apologize, recognize
your station, repair a degree of mischief that I will not say was
preconceived or plotted. So for awhile pursue your studies, your
travels. In time it will give me pleasure to receive you. Mr.
Richmond,' he added, smiling and rising; 'even the head of a little
German principality has to give numberless audiences.' His features
took a more cordial smile to convince me that the dismissing sentence
was merely playful.
As for me, my mind was confused by the visible fact that the father's
features resembled the daughter's. I mention it, that my mind's
condition may be understood.
Hardly had I been bowed out of the room when my father embraced me,
and some minutes later I heard Prince Otto talking to me and demanding
answers. That he or any one else should have hostile sentiments toward
a poor devil like me seemed strange. My gift of the horse appeared to
anger him most. I reached the chateau without once looking back, a
dispirited wretch. I shut myself up; I tried to read. The singular
brevity of my interview with the prince, from which I had expected great
if not favourable issues, affected me as though I had been struck by a
cannon shot; my brains were nowhere. His perfect courtesy was
confounding. I was tormented by the delusion that I had behaved
pusillanimously.
My father rushed up to me after dark. Embracing me and holding me by the
hand, he congratulated me with his whole heart. The desire of his life
was accomplished; the thing he had plotted for ages had come to pass.
He praised me infinitely. My glorious future, he said, was to carry a
princess to England and sit among the, highest there, the husband of a
lady peerless in beauty and in birth, who, in addition to what she was
able to do for me by way of elevation in my country, could ennoble in her
own territory. I had the option of being the father of English nobles or
of German princes; so forth. I did not like the strain; yet I clung to
him. I was compelled to ask whether he had news of any sort worth
hearing.
'None,' said he calmly; 'none. I have everything to hear, nothing to
relate; and, happily, I can hardly speak for joy.' He wept.
He guaranteed to have the margravine at the chateau within a week, which
seemed to me a sufficient miracle. The prince, he said, might require
three months of discretionary treatment. Three further months to bring
the family round, and the princess would be mine. 'But she is yours!
she is yours already!' he cried authoritatively. 'She is the reigning
intellect there. I dreaded her very intellect would give us all the
trouble, and behold, it is our ally! The prince lives with an elbow out
of his income. But for me it would be other parts of his person as well,
I assure you, and the world would see such a princely tatterdemalion as
would astonish it. Money to him is important. He must carry on his
mine. He can carry on nothing without my help. By the way, we have to
deal out cheques?'
I assented.
In spite of myself, I caught the contagion of his exuberant happiness and
faith in his genius. The prince had applauded his energetic management
of the affairs of the mine two or three times in my hearing. It struck
me that he had really found his vocation, and would turn the sneer on
those who had called him volatile and reckless. This led me to a
luxurious sense of dependence on him, and I was willing to live on
dreaming and amused, though all around me seemed phantoms, especially the
French troupe, the flower of the Parisian stage: Regnault, Carigny,
Desbarolles, Mesdames Blanche Bignet and Dupertuy, and Mdlle. Jenny
Chassediane, the most spirituelle of Frenchwomen. 'They are a part of
our enginery, Richie,' my father said. They proved to be an irresistible
attraction to the margravine. She sent word to my father that she meant
to come on a particular day when, as she evidently knew, I should not be
present. Two or three hours later I had Prince Otto's cartel in my
hands. Jorian DeWitt, our guest at this season, told me subsequently,
and with the utmost seriousness, that I was largely indebted to Mdlle.
Jenny for a touching French song of a beau chevalier she sang before
Ottilia in my absence. Both he and my father believed in the efficacy of
this kind of enginery, but, as the case happened, the beau chevalier was
down low enough at the moment his highborn lady listened to the song.
It appeared that when Prince Otto met me after my interview with Prince
Ernest, he did his best to provoke a rencontre, and failing to get
anything but a nod from my stunned head, betook himself to my University.
A friendly young fellow there, Eckart vom Hof, offered to fight him on my
behalf, should I think proper to refuse. Eckart and two or three others
made a spirited stand against the aristocratic party siding with Prince
Otto, whose case was that I had played him a dishonourable trick to laugh
at him. I had, in truth, persuaded him to relieve me at once of horse
and rival at the moment when he was suffering the tortures of a
rejection, and I was rushing to take the hand he coveted; I was so far
guilty. But to how great a degree guiltless, how could I possibly
explain to the satisfaction of an angry man? I had the vision of him
leaping on the horse, while I perused his challenge; saw him fix to the
saddle and smile hard, and away to do me of all services the last he
would have performed wittingly. The situation was exactly of a sort for
one of his German phantasy-writers to image the forest jeering at him as
he flew, blind, deaf, and unreasonable, vehement for one fierce draught
of speed. We are all dogged by the humour of following events when we
start on a wind of passion. I could almost fancy myself an accomplice.
I realized the scene with such intensity in the light running at his
heels: it may be quite true that I laughed in the hearing of his
messenger as I folded up the letter. That was the man's report. I am
not commonly one to be forgetful of due observances.
The prospect of the possible eternal separation from my beloved pricked
my mechanical wits and set them tracing the consequent line by which I
had been brought to this pass as to a natural result. Had not my father
succeeded in inspiring the idea that I was something more than something?
The tendency of young men is to conceive it for themselves without
assistance; a prolonged puff from the breath of another is nearly sure to
make them mad as kings, and not so pardonably.
I see that I might have acted wisely, and did not; but that is a
speculation taken apart from my capabilities. If a man's fate were as a
forbidden fruit, detached from him, and in front of him, he might
hesitate fortunately before plucking it; but, as most of us are aware,
the vital half of it lies in the seed-paths he has traversed. We are
sons of yesterday, not of the morning. The past is our mortal mother,
no dead thing. Our future constantly reflects her to the soul. Nor is
it ever the new man of to-day which grasps his fortune, good or ill. We
are pushed to it by the hundreds of days we have buried, eager ghosts.
And if you have not the habit of taking counsel with them, you are but an
instrument in their hands.
My English tongue admonishes me that I have fallen upon a tone resembling
one who uplifts the finger of piety in a salon of conversation. A man's
review of the course of his life grows for a moment stringently serious
when he beholds the stream first broadening perchance under the light
interpenetrating mine just now.
My seconds were young Eckart vom Hof, and the barely much older, though
already famous Gregorius Bandelmeyer, a noted mathematician, a savage
Republican, lean-faced, spectacled, and long, soft-fingered; a cat to
look at, a tiger to touch. Both of them were animated by detestation of
the Imperial uniform. They distrusted my skill in the management of the
weapon I had chosen; for reasons of their own they carried a case of
pistols to the field. Prince Otto was attended by Count Loepel and a
Major Edelsheim of his army, fresh from the garrison fortress of Mainz,
gentlemen perfectly conversant with the laws of the game, which my worthy
comrades were not. Several minutes were spent in an altercation between
Edelsheim and Bandelmeyer. The major might have had an affair of his own
had he pleased. My feelings were concentrated within the immediate ring
where I stood: I can compare them only to those of a gambler determined
to throw his largest stake and abide the issue. I was not open to any
distinct impression of the surrounding scenery; the hills and leafage
seemed to wear an iron aspect. My darling, my saint's face was shut up
in my heart, and with it a little inaudible cry of love and pain. The
prince declined to listen to apologies. 'He meant to teach me that this
was not a laughing matter.' Major Edelsheim had misunderstood
Bandelmeyer; no offer of an apology had been made. A momentary human
sensation of an unworthy sort beset me when I saw them standing together
again, and contrasted the collectedness and good-humour of my adversary's
representative with the vexatious and unnecessary naggling of mine, the
sight of whose yard-long pipe scandalized me.
At last the practical word was given. The prince did not reply to my
salute. He was smoking, and kept his cigar in one corner of his mouth,
as if he were a master fencer bidding his pupil to come on. He assumed
that he had to do with a bourgeois Briton unused to arms, such as we are
generally held to be on the Continent. After feeling my wrist for a
while he shook the cigar out of his teeth.
The 'cliquetis' of the crossed steel must be very distant in memory, and
yourself in a most dilettante frame of mind, for you to be accessible to
the music of that thin skeleton's clank. Nevertheless, it is better and
finer even at the time of action, than the abominable hollow ogre's eye
of the pistol-muzzle. We exchanged passes, the prince chiefly attacking.
Of all the things to strike my thoughts, can you credit me that the
vividest was the picture of the old woman Temple and I had seen in our
boyhood on the night of the fire dropping askew, like forks of brown
flame, from the burning house in London city; I must have smiled. The
prince cried out in French: 'Laugh, sir; you shall have it!' He had
nothing but his impetuosity for an assurance of his promise, and was
never able to force me back beyond a foot. I touched him on the arm and
the shoulder, and finally pierced his arm above the elbow. I could have
done nearly what I liked with him; his skill was that of a common
regimental sabreur.
'Ludere qui nescit campestribus abstinet armis!' Bandelmeyer sang out.
'You observed?' said Major Edelsheim, and received another disconcerting
discharge of a Latin line. The prince frowned and made use of some
military slang. Was his honour now satisfied? Not a whit. He certainly
could not have kept his sword-point straight, and yet he clamoured to
fight on, stamped, and summoned me to assault him, proposed to fight me
with his left hand after his right had failed; in short, he was beside
himself, an example of the predicament of a man who has given all the
provocation and finds himself disabled. My seconds could have stopped it
had they been equal to their duties; instead of which Bandelmeyer,
hearing what he deemed an insult to the order of student and scholar,
retorted furiously and offensively, and Eckart, out of good-fellowship,
joined him, whereat Major Edelsheim, in the act of bandaging the prince's
arm, warned them that he could not pass by an outrage on his uniform.
Count Loepel stept politely forward, and gave Eckart a significant bow.
The latter remarked mockingly, 'With pleasure and condescension!' At a
murmur of the name of doctor from Edelsheim, the prince damned the doctor
until he or I were food for him. Irritated by the whole scene, and his
extravagant vindictiveness, in which light I regarded the cloak of fury
he had flung over the shame of his defeat, I called to Bandelmeyer to
open his case of pistols and offer them for a settlement. As the
proposal came from me, it was found acceptable. The major remonstrated
with the prince, and expressed to me his regrets and et caeteras of well-
meant civility. He had a hard task to keep out of the hands of
Bandelmeyer, who had seized my sword, and wanted vi et armis to defend
the cause of Learning and the People against military brigands on the
spot. If I had not fallen we should have had one or two other prostrate
bodies.
A silly business on all sides.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Ask pardon of you, without excusing myself
Habit of antedating his sagacity
He thinks or he chews
If you kneel down, who will decline to put a foot on you?
It goes at the lifting of the bridegroom's little finger
Look within, and avoid lying
Mindless, he says, and arrogant
One who studies is not being a fool
The past is our mortal mother, no dead thing
The proper defence for a nation is its history
Then for us the struggle, for him the grief
They seem to me to be educated to conceal their education
We has long overshadowed "I"
Who beguiles so much as Self?