MAX VERSUS MAXIMILIAN
"ACH Himmel!" exclaimed Frau Johann. And "Ach Himmel!" she exclaimed
again, with frantic uplifting of the hands.
The Grand Duchess turned pale, for the landlady had suddenly
exhibited these signs of emotion while passing a window of the private
sitting-room. It was the hour for afternoon tea in England, for
afternoon coffee in Rhaetia, and already the Princess's mother had
begun to look nervously for the climbers return. Naturally, at Frau
Johann's outburst of excitement, her imagination pictured disaster.
"What--oh, what can you see?" she implored in piercing accents; but
for once the courtesy due to a guest was forgotten, and Frau Johann
fled without giving an answer.
Half paralyzed with apprehension, her mind conjuring some sight of
terror, the Grand Duchess tottered to the window. Was there--yes,
there was a procession. Oh, horror! They were perhaps bringing Sylvia
down from the mountain, dead, her beautiful face crushed out of
recognition. Yet, no--there was Sylvia herself, the central figure in
that procession. A peasant, loaded with cloaks and rücksacks, headed
the band, while Sylvia and Miss M'Pherson followed after.
The anxious mother had thrown wide the window, but as she was about to
attract the truants attention with an impromptu speech of welcome, the
words were arrested on her lips. What was the matter with Frau Johann?
The old woman had popped out of the door like a Jack out of his box,
sprung to the much-loaded peasant, and, almost rudely elbowing Miss
M'Pherson aside, was distractedly tearing at the bundle of cloaks and
rücksacks. Her inarticulate groans ascended to the Grand Duchess at
the window, adding to the lady's increased bewilderment.
"What has the man been doing?" the Grand Duchess demanded. But nobody
answered, because nobody heard.
"Pray let him carry our thing indoors," Sylvia was insisting, while
the peasant stood among the three women, apparently a prey to
conflicting emotions. To the Grand Duchess, as she regarded the
strange scene through her lorgnette, it seemed that his dark face
expressed a mingling amusement, annoyance, and embarrassment. He
looked like a man who had somehow placed himself in a false position,
and was torn betwixt a desire to laugh and to fly into a rage. He
frowned haughtily at Frau Johann, smiled at the two ladies, dividing
his energies between secret gestures (which he evidently intended for
the eye of the landlady alone) and endeavours to unburden himself, in
his own time and way, of the load he carried.
More and more did the Grand Duchess wonder what was going on. Why did
this man not speak out what he had to say? Why did Frau Johann at
first seek to seize the things which he had on his back, then suddenly
shrink away as if in fear, leaving the brown-faced peasant to his own
devices? How had he contrived, with a look, to intimidate that brave
honest woman?
There was mystery here, thought the Grand Duchess; and she remembered
dark tales of brigands, dreaded by all the country-folk, yet protected
for very fear. She was painfully near-sighted, but by constant
application of the lorgnette she arrived at a logical conclusion.
Frau Johann had doubtless been frightened at seeing her guests coming
down the mountain in such evil company. She had rushed to their
succour, trying to make sure that their belongings had not been
tampered with. But those great brown eyes under the rakish hat had
glared a secret warning, and Frau Johann had despairingly abandoned
her championship of the ladies.
In the adjoining sitting-room, the Grand Duchess had reason to know,
were at that moment assembled some or all of the mysterious gentlemen
stopping at the inn. They had probably been attracted to their window
by the voices below; and the Grand Duchess courageously resolved that,
at the slightest sign of impudence on the part of the luggage-carrier,
these noblemen should be promptly summoned by her to the rescue.
Her anxiety was even slightly allayed at this point in her reflections
by the thought (she had not quite outgrown an inmate love of romance)
that the Emperor himself might rush to the succour of beauty in
distress. His friends were in the next room, having come down from the
mountains at noon, and there seemed little doubt that he was among
them. If he had not already looked out from the window, and been
astonished at sight of so much loveliness, the Grand Duchess decided,
upon an inspiration, that he must be induced to do so. She would help
on Sylvia's cause and win her gratitude when the true story of this
day should be told.
In a penetrating voice, which could not fail to reach the ears of
those in the room adjoining hers, or the ears of the actors in the
scene below, she adjured her daughter in English. This language was
safest, she considered, as the desperado with the rücksacks could not
understand and resent her criticism, while the flower of Rhaetian
chivalry next door would comprehend both the words and the necessity
for action.
"Mary!" she shrieked, loyally remembering in her excitement the part
she was playing. "Mary, where did you pick up that alarming-looking
ruffian? I believe he intends to keep your rücksacks. Is there no
man-servant about the place whom Frau Johann can call to her
assistance?"
All four of the actors glanced up, aware for the first time of an
audience. Had the Grand Duchess been less near-sighted, less agitated,
she might have been surprised at the varying yet vivid expressions of
the faces. But she saw only that the tall, dark-faced peasant, who had
so glared at poor Frau Johann, was throwing off his burdens with
sudden haste and roughness.
"I do hope he hasn't stolen anything," said the Grand Duchess. "Better
not let him go until you have looked into your rücksacks. That silver
drinking-cup you _would_ take up----"
She paused, not so much in obedience to Sylvia's quick reply, as in
amazement at Frau Johann's renewed antics. Was it possible that the
landlady understood more English than her guests supposed, and feared
lest the man with the bare knees--perhaps equally well-informed--might
seek immediate revenge? Those bare knees alone were evidence against
his character in the eyes of the Grand Duchess. They imparted a
brazen, desperate air; and a man who cultivated so long a space
between stockings and trousers might easily be capable of any crime.
"Oh, mother, you are very much mistaken. This excellent young man is a
great friend of mine, and has saved my life," Sylvia was protesting;
and her words began at length to penetrate the ears of the Grand
Duchess. Overwhelmed by their full import, she suffered a sudden
revulsion of feeling, which caused her to catch at the window-curtains
for support.
"Saved your life!" she echoed. "Then you have been in danger. Thank
heaven, the young man is not likely to know English, or I should not
soon forgive myself. Here is my purse. Give it to him, and come
indoors at once. You really look ready to faint."
So speaking, she snatched from a table close by her purse, containing
ten or twelve pounds in Rhaetian money; but before she could
accomplish her dramatic purpose, flinging the guerdon literally at the
misjudged hero's feet, Sylvia prevented her with an imploring gesture.
"He will take no reward for what he has done save our thanks, and
those I give him now, for the second time," cried the girl. She then
turned to the man, and made him a present of her hand, over which he
bowed with the air of a courtier rather than the rough manner of a
peasant. The Grand Duchess still hoped that the Emperor might be at
the window, as really it was a pretty sight, and presented a pleasing
phase of Sylvia's character.
She eagerly awaited her daughter's approach, and having lingered to
watch with impatience the rather ceremonious parting, she hastened to
the door of the sitting-room to welcome the travellers as they came
upstairs.
"My darling, who do you think was listening and looking from the
window next ours?" she breathlessly inquired, when she had embraced
her recovered treasure for the secret of the adjoining room was too
great to keep. "You can't guess? I'm surprised at that, since you are
not ignorant of a certain person's nearness. Why, who but the Emperor
himself?"
"Then he must have an astral body--a _Doppelgänger_," said Sylvia,
"since he has been with me all day, and that was he to whom you
offered your purse."
The Grand Duchess sat down; not so much because she desired to assume
the sitting position as because she experienced a sudden weakening of
the knees. For a moment she was unable to speculate: but a poignant
thought passed through her brain. "Heavens! what have I done? And it
may be that one day he will become my son-in-law."
Meanwhile, Frau Johann--a strangely subdued Frau Johann--had
droopingly followed the chamois-hunter into the house.
"My friend, you must learn not to lose your head," said he, when she
had timidly joined him in the otherwise deserted hall.
"Oh, but Your Majesty--"
"How many times must I remind you that His Majesty remains in
Salzbrück or some other of his residences when I am at Heiligengelt?
If you cannot remember, I must look for chamois elsewhere than on the
Weisshorn."
"I will not forget again, Your--I mean, I will do my best. Yet never
before have I been so tried. To see your noble and high-born shoulders
loaded down as if--as if you had been but a common _Gepäckträger_
instead of----"
"A chamois-hunter? Don't distress yourself my friend. I have had a
very good day's sport."
"It has given me a weakness of the heart, Your--sir. How can I again
order myself civilly to those ladies, who----"
"Who have afforded peasant Max a few amusing hours. Be more civil than
ever, for my sake, friend. And, by the way, do you happen to know the
names of the ladies? That one of them is Miss Collison, I have heard;
but the others----"
"They are mother and daughter, sir. The elder, who spoke, in her
ignorance, such treasonable things from the window, is called by the
Miss Collinson 'Lady de Courcy'. The younger--the beautiful one--is
also a miss; and I think her name is Mary. They talk together in
English, and though I know few words of that language, I have heard
'London' mentioned not once, but many times between them. Besides, it
is painted in big black letters on their boxes."
"You did not expect them here?"
"Oh, no, sir. Had any one written at this season, when I am honoured
by your presence, I should have answered that we were full, or the
house closed--or any excuse which occurred to me. But no strangers
have ever remained in Heiligengelt, or arrived, so late; and I was
taken unawares when my son Alois drove them up last night. They are
here but for a few days, on their way to Salzbrück, and so home, the
pretty Miss de Courcy said; and I thought----"
"You did quite right, Frau Johann. Has my messenger come with
letters?"
"Yes, Your--yes, sir; just now also a telegram was brought up by
another messenger, who came in a great hurry, and has but lately
gone." The chamois-hunter shrugged his shoulders and gave vent to
an impatient sigh. "It is too much to expect that I should be left in
peace for a single day, even here," he muttered as he moved toward the
stairs.
To reach Frau Johann's best sitting-room (selfishly occupied,
according to one opinion, by the gentlemen absent all day upon the
mountains) he was obliged to pass a door through which issued unusual
sounds. Involuntary he paused. Some one was striking the preliminary
chords of a _volkslied_ on his favourite instrument, a Rhaetian
improvement upon the zither. As he lingered, listening, a voice began
to sing--such a voice! Softly seductive as the purling of a brook
through a meadow; rich as the deepest notes of a nightingale in its
first passion for the moon.
The song was the heartbroken cry of an old Rhaetian peasant, who,
lying near death in a strange land, longs for the sunrise light on the
mountain-tops at home, more earnestly than for heaven.
The listener did not move until the voice had died into silence. He
knew, though he could not see, who the singer had been. It was
impossible for the fat lady at the window, or the thin lady with the
Baedeker, to own a voice like that. Only one there was who could so
exhale her soul in the perfume of sound. To his fancy, it was like
hearing the fragrance of a lily breathed aloud. In reality, it was
Sylvia, with childish vanity, showing off her prettiest
accomplishment, in order that the impression she had made might be
deepened.
The man outside the door had heard many golden voices--golden in all
senses of the word--but never before one which so strangely stirred
his spirit, stirred it with a pain that was bitter sweet and a vague
yearning for something he had never known. If he had been asked what
was the thing for which he sighed, he could not, if he would, have
told; for a man cannot explain that inner part of himself which he has
never even tried to understand.
Before he had thought of moving, the beautiful voice, no longer
plaintive, but swelling to triumphant brilliancy, broke into the
national anthem of Rhaetia warlike, calling her sons to face death
singing, in her defense. It was as if a rainbow shower of diamonds had
been flung into the sunshine, and the heart of the man who stood at
the head of his nation thrilled with the response that never failed.
"She is an Englishwoman, yet she sings the Rhaetian music as I have
never known a Rhaetian girl sing it," he told himself, slowly passing
on to his own door. "She is a new type of woman to me. A pity that she
is not a Princess, or else--that Maximilian and Max the chamois-hunter
are not two. Still, in such a case, the chamois-hunter would be no
match for Miss de Courcy of London, so the weights would balance in
the scales as unevenly as now."
He smiled, and sighed, and shrugged his shoulders once again. Then he
opened the door of his sitting-room, to forget, among certain
documents which urged the importance of immediate return to duty, the
difference between Max and Maximilian, the difference between women
and women.
"Good-bye to the mountains, to-morrow morning," he said to his chosen
comrades. "Hey for work and Salzbrück again!"
_She_ was going to Salzbrück in a few days, according to Frau Johann.
But Salzbrück was not Heiligengelt, and Maximilian the Emperor was
not, at his palace, in the way of meeting tourists. It was good-bye to
Miss de Courcy as well as to the mountains.
"She'll never know to whom she gave her ring," he thought, with the
dense innocence of a man who has studied all books save woman's looks.
"And I'll never know who gives her a plain gold one for the finger on
which she once wore this."
But in the next room, divided from him by a single wall, sat Princess
Sylvia of Eltzburg-Neuwald.
"When we meet again at Salzbrück, he must never dream that I _knew_
all the time," she was saying to herself. "Some day I shall long to
confess. But I could only confess to a man who excused, because he
loved me. And suppose that day should never come?"