The village of Elsenau, which has hardly yet risen to the dignity of a
town, lies somewhere midway between the Hartz Mountains and the
Thuringia Wald, which, as everyone knows, stretches away in
undulations of wooded uplands and valleys southward to the Black
Forest. Its most recent possession is the fine Hotel Wilhelmshof--an
entirely admirable creation of the German instinct for catering,
facing south-west, and sheltered north and east by uplands crowned
with stately pines. Southward it has smooth, new-made lawns, dotted
with clumps of firs and parterres of flowers, shielded by curves of
flowering bushes. The lawns slope down to the edge of a long narrow
lake, which, on the evening of the day after the prince and the
marquise left Petersburg, lay smooth and blue-black beneath the
cloudless azure of the summer heaven.
But the principal attraction of Elsenau, which, indeed, had given the
luxurious hotel its reason for existence, and which had raised the
little village of charcoal-burners and woodcutters to the dignity of a
Kur-anstalt, was a spring, accidentally discovered by an enterprising
engineer who was looking among the mountains for a water-supply for
the city of Ilmosheim, some three miles away to the south. The waters
had a curious taste and a most unpleasant smell. Learned chemists and
doctors analysed them, and reported that they contained ingredients
which formed a sovereign remedy for gout and rheumatism--especially
the hereditary form of the first. They were bottled and sent far and
wide, and soon after their qualities had been duly appreciated and
commented on by the medical press of Europe and America, the Hotel
Wilhelmshof rose, as it were, with the wave of the contractor's magic
wand, hard by the little limestone grotto in which the spring had been
discovered.
About eight o'clock on a lovely evening in July, Lord Orrel and Lady
Olive, under the broad verandah of the Wilhelmshof, sat drinking their
after-dinner coffee and watching the full moon sailing slowly up over
the black ridges of the pine-crowned hills which stretched away to the
southward.
"I suppose the prince must have missed his train, or else the train
was behind time and missed the coach," said Lord Orrel, taking out his
watch. "It is rather curious that I should have met him regularly
every year at Homburg or Spa or Aix, and that somehow you have never
met him; and now it seems from his letter that we have both discovered
this new little place of evil-smelling waters together. I am glad that
he is bringing his daughter with him."
"Ah, yes; his daughter--she is the second Marie Antoinette, isn't
she?" said Lady Olive, putting her cup down and taking up her
cigarette. "The most beautiful woman in Europe, the last daughter of
the old House of Bourbon--I mean the elder branch, of course. And the
prince?"
"The first gentleman in Europe, in my opinion," replied the earl,
flicking the ash off his cigar. "A man who, granted the possibility of
circumstances which, of course, are not now possible, might mount the
throne of Louis XIV., and receive the homage of all his courtiers
without their knowing the difference. A great man, my dear Olive, born
four generations out of his time. If he had succeeded the Grand
Monarque--there would have been no French Revolution, no Napoleon----"
"And therefore, my dear papa," laughed Lady Olive, "no Peninsular War,
no Wellington, no Waterloo, no Nelson, no Nile and Trafalgar, and so
none of that expiring British supremacy which you were arguing about
so eloquently the other day in the House of Lords."
While she was speaking, the double doors giving on to the verandah
were thrown open, a lacquey, gorgeously uniformed in blue and silver,
came out, with his body inclined at an angle of thirty degrees, and
his arms hanging straight down, and said, in thick Swiss French:
"Your Excellency and Madame la Marquise will find Milord and Miladi on
the verandah here."
As Lady Olive looked round she heard a rustle of frilled skirts on the
planks of the verandah, and saw a tall, stately gentleman and the most
beautiful woman she had ever seen coming towards her.
The gentleman's eyes brightened and his brows lifted as he raised his
hat. The woman's face might have been a mask, and her eyes looked out
upon nothingness.
"Ah, my dear prince," said the earl, rising and going towards him with
outstretched hands. "Delighted to renew our acquaintance in a new and
yet a very charming place. I was hoping that you would get here for
dinner; but, of course, once off the main line, you can never trust a
German train to get anywhere in time. And this is Mam'selle la
Marquise, I presume. This is fortunate. You see I have my daughter
Olive taking care of me, so perhaps they may help to entertain each
other in this out-of-the-way place."
"Yes," replied the prince, as they shook hands, "this is my daughter
of whom I have spoken to you so often; and this is yours, the Lady
Olive. Mam'selle, I have the honour to salute you. Adelaide, this is
the daughter of Lord Orrel--an old friend, and one of the ancienne
noblesse."
Olive had risen while he was speaking; the mask melted away from the
marquise's lovely face, her lips softened into a smile, and a swift
gleam of scrutiny took the place of vacancy in her eyes. Lady Olive's
met hers with a frank though involuntary look of challenge. She
certainly was what the gossip of half-a-dozen countries called
her--the most beautiful woman in Europe. She possessed an exquisite
grace of form and face and manner which made her indescribable. When
one woman honestly admires another it is always with a half-conceived
sense either of envy or hostility. Lady Olive was herself one of the
best types of an English patrician, and the blood in her veins had
flowed through ten generations of the proudest lineage in Britain; but
in Adelaide de Conde, the daughter of the most ancient aristocracies
of France and Austria, she instinctively recognised her equal, perhaps
her superior.
She put out her hand in a frank, English way, and said, in the most
perfectly accented French:
"My father has told me so much about yours, and they are such good
friends, that I hope it isn't possible that we can be anything else."
"Quite impossible!" smiled the marquise, taking the hand of the
new-made friend who in days to come was to be an enemy. "Since our
fathers are such old and good friends, why should we not be new
friends and good ones too?" And then, turning round to her father, she
said: "Voila, papa, since we find ourselves in such good company, and
we have missed the dinner, and cannot eat till they get something
ready, why do you not have your vermouth and a cigarette? In fact, as
we are so entirely 'chez nous' here in this delightful retreat, you
may order one for me too, I think."
The prince lifted his eyelids, and the lacquey approached and took his
order, and then the party proceeded to make friends.
A little after tea the same evening, when Lady Olive and the marquise
had retired to Lady Olive's sitting-room for a chat on things feminine
and European, Lord Orrel and the prince were strolling up and down the
moonlit lawn, smoking their cigars and exchanging the experiences that
they had had since their last meeting at Homburg the year before.
Their friendship had begun by a chance acquaintance some six years
before at Aix-les-Bains. Both of them aristocrats to their
finger-tips, it was not long before they struck a note of common
sympathy. The once splendid name which the prince bore appealed
instantly to the Englishman, who could trace his descent back to the
days of the first Plantagenet, and it was not long before they found a
closer bond than that of ancient ancestry.
One night, when the beach at Trouville was lit up by just such a moon
as was now floating high over the pines on the hills round Elsenau, he
had told the prince the story of his life--the story of an elder scion
of an ancient line devoted rather to literature and the byways of
science than to the political and social duties of his position, and,
moreover, a man who had never found a woman whom his heart could call
to his side to share it with him. He had devoted his after-college
days to study and travel. His younger brother, a splendid specimen of
English chivalry, had found his mate in the daughter of his father's
oldest friend. He was a soldier, and when the Franco-German war broke
out, nothing, not even the longing, half-reproachful looks of his
betrothed, could keep him from volunteering in the French service. He
had fought through the war with brilliant distinction, a private at
Saarbruck and a captain during the Siege of Paris. Then, captured,
badly wounded, by the Germans after a brilliant sortie, he was cured
and released, only to be murdered by the communards on the eve of his
return to England. A year or two after, the Earl abjured his vows of
celibacy under the fascinations of a brilliant American beauty, and so
had accepted the responsibility of perpetuating his race.
So these two men had met on common ground, and nothing was more
natural than that they should have become such friends as they were.
To a very great extent they stood apart from the traditions of their
times. They were aristocrats in an age of almost universal democracy.
Both of them firmly believed that democracy spelt degeneration,
national and individual. Both of them were, in fact, incarnations of
an age that was past, and which might or might not be renewed.
This was, indeed, the subject of their conversation as they strolled
up and down the smoothly-shaven lawn under the sheltering pines,
chatting easily and comparing in well-selected phrases the things of
their own youth with those of the present swiftly moving and even a
trifle blatant generations of to-day.
"I quite agree with you, my dear Lord Orrel," said the prince, as they
turned at the end of their walk. "Democracy is tending now, just as it
did in the days of Greece and Carthage and Rome, and to-day in my own
unhappy France, to degeneration, and the worst of it is that there is
no visible possibility of salvation. Our rulers have armed the mob
with a weapon more potent than the thunders of Jove. The loafer of the
cafe and the pot-house has a vote, and, therefore, the same voice in
choosing the rulers of nations as the student and the man of science,
or the traveller who is familiar with many lands and many races. I
often think that it is a pity that some means cannot be found for
placing--well, I will call it a despotic power--in the hands of a few
men--men, for instance, if I may say so without flattery or vanity,
like ourselves--men of wide experience and broad sympathies, and yet
possessing what you and I know to be the essentials of despotism--that
something that can only be inherited, not acquired."
"My dear prince, I agree with you entirely," replied Lord Orrel. "Our
present civilisation is suffering from a sort of dry-rot. Sentiment
has degenerated into sentimentalism, courage into a reckless gambling
for honours, statesmanship into politics, oratory into verbosity. In
short, the nineteenth century has degenerated into the twentieth.
Everything seems going wrong. The world is ruled by the big man who
shots his quotations on the Stock Exchange and the little one who
serves behind his counter. It is all buying and selling. Honour and
faith, and the old social creed which we used to call noblesse oblige,
are getting quite out of date."
"Not that yet, my friend, surely," the prince interrupted, quickly
gripping his companion's arm; "not that, at least, for us. I confess
that we and those like us are, as one might say, derelicts on the
ocean of society--we, who one day were stately admirals, to use the
old phrase. And yet, as you said just now, if only some power could be
placed in the hands of a few like ourselves, a power which would
over-ride the blind, irresponsible, shifting will of the mutable mob
which changes its vote and its opinions with the seasons, the world
might be brought again into order, and the proletariat might be saved
from its own suicide.
"And," he went on, turning at the other end of their promenade,
"perhaps you will not believe me, but only a few weeks ago there was
such a power in the hands of a Frenchman--of an Alsatian, perhaps I
should say, but a man who had preserved his loyalty to France--a
scientist of European reputation--a man who had discovered that this
earth had a spirit, a living soul, and who could gain control of
it--so complete a control, that he could draw it out and leave the
earth dead--a man who--But there, I am wearying you; I am sure you
must think that I am telling you some fairy tale."
"By no means, my dear prince," said Lord Orrel, doing his best to keep
his voice steady, and not quite succeeding. "In the first place, I am
quite sure that you would not speak so seriously on a subject that was
not serious; and, in the second place, I can assure you that I am most
deeply interested."
"A thousand pardons, my lord," said the prince. "Of course you would
not think that of me. We have both of us lived too long to indulge in
romance, and yet, if I could tell you the whole story, you would say
that you have never heard such a romance as this."
"And, if it is not trespassing too far upon your confidence, my dear
prince, I should be only too happy to hear you tell the whole story,"
said his lordship, with an unmistakable note of curiosity in his tone.
"I can tell you part of the story," replied the prince; "but not here.
It is so strange, and it might have meant so much, not only to France,
but to the world, that I can only tell it to you where no other ears
than ours can hear it, and even then only under your solemn pledge of
secrecy."
"As for the first condition, my dear prince," replied Lord Orrel, "I
will ask you to take a glass of wine with me in my sitting-room. As
for the second, you have my word."
"And, therefore, both conditions are amply satisfied. Let us go, and I
will tell you the strangest story you have ever heard."