LITTLE CARL
I was awakened by the note of a horn blown by some ranger in the forest.
The sun was shining in through the window, night had vanished with all
its dreams and fears, and Joubert was at the door.
Joubert, unsuccessful, perhaps, in one of his multifarious love-affairs,
was grumpy; and when I tried to explain about the nocturnal visitors he
wouldn't listen. He knew my imaginative powers, and put my story down to
them; and, as for me, attracted by the events of the moment as all
children are, I had nearly forgotten the whole matter by breakfast-time.
I was led down by Joubert and given into the charge of Gretel. Breakfast
was laid for Eloise and me in the same boudoir where we had supped the
night before, but lo, and behold! when we reached the room another child
was there as well as Eloise.
A boy of my own age. A charming little figure dressed in the uniform of
a Pomeranian grenadier.
"This is Carl!" cried Eloise, pulling the little grenadier forward by
the hand. "This is Toto, Carl. I forgot his other name. No matter. I am
hungry. Gretel, I pray you let us have breakfast."
Carl was dark; and he met me without smiling, and took my hand without
grasping it properly, and looked at me, not directly, but in a veiled
manner curious in a child so young.
Carl repelled me, and yet attracted me. When I contrast his face with
the portrait in the picture-gallery of the schloss, I can see now, with
the eye of memory, the awful likeness between him and the dead and gone
Margaret von Lichtenberg, just as I can see the likeness between myself
and Philippe de Saluce.
The "family likeness"--that mysterious fact in life before which science
is dumb--never was more manifest; but what made the thing more curious,
more deeply involved in mystery, was the fact that under the same roof,
hundreds of years after the old tragedy of long ago, the facsimiles of
the two actors should meet as children fresh to the world.
As for me this morning, I saw nothing in Carl von Lichtenberg but a
little boy of my own age, somewhat fantastically dressed. The
half-terror, the extraordinary sensation that the picture of Margaret
von Lichtenberg had called up in my mind the night before, had expended
itself and vanished, leaving me incapable of further psychic perception.
Everything was commonplace again as the bread-and-butter that Gretel was
cutting for us at the side-table.
The schloss was so vast, so solidly constructed, that no sound came to
us from the other guests.
After breakfast, when we were running down a corridor making for the
garden, and led by Eloise, a gentleman stopped us, and spoke a few words
of greeting, and passed on.
"That was the King," said Eloise. "He is leaving to-morrow--he and Graf
von Bismarck. We, too, are leaving the day after."
"You, too?" I cried, my childish heart recalling the lovely Countess
Feliciani, who had been clean forgotten for twelve hours or more.
"Yes," said Eloise. "And there's mamma. Come along. See, she is with
those ladies by the fountain."
We had broken into the garden, a wonderful and beautiful garden, with
shaven lawns and clipped yew-trees, terraces, dim vistas cypress-roofed,
and, far away down one of these alleys a sight to fascinate the heart of
any child, the figure of a great stone man running. He was dressed in
green lichen, lent him by the years; he held a spear in his hand, and he
seemed in the act of hurling it at the game he was pursuing there beyond
the cypress-trees at the edge of the singing pines.
For the garden became the forest without wall or barrier, except the
shadow cast by the trees; and you could walk from the sunlight and the
sound of the fountains into the dryad-haunted twilight and the old
quaint world of the woods.
The Countess kissed Eloise; then she bent to kiss me, and I--I turned my
face away--a crimson face--and felt like a fool.
Someone laughed--a gentleman who was standing by. The Countess laughed;
and then, to my extreme relief, someone came to my rescue.
It was little Carl. He had run into the house for his drum, and now he
was coming along the path solemnly beating it, with Eloise for a
faithful camp follower. I joined her; and away down the garden we went,
hand in hand, marching in time to the rattle of the little drum.
Eloise snatched flowers from the flower-beds as we passed them, and
pelted the drummer with them as he marched before us; and so we went, a
gallant company, through the garden, past the running man, and under the
forest trees, the echoes and the bluejays answering to the drum.
My father, the Countess Feliciani, our host, and a number of ladies and
gentlemen were in the garden. They laughed as we marched away; and when
the shadow of the trees took us they forgot us, I suppose, and the
pretty picture we must have made.
* * * * *
Scarcely twenty minutes could have elapsed when screams from the wood
drew their startled attention, and out from the trees came Carl,
dripping with water, without his drum, running, and screaming as he ran.
After him ran Eloise and I.
"He tried to drown me in the lake in the wood!" screamed Carl, clasping
the knees of his father, who had run to meet him, and looking back at
me. "He tried to drown me; he did it before--he did it before! Save me
from him, father, father! Father! Father!"
Baron Lichtenberg's face, as he clasped the child, was turned on me. He
was white as little Carl, and I shall never forget his expression.
"Did you try to drown my child?" he said. And he spoke as though he were
speaking to a man.
Before I could reply Eloise struck in:
"Oh, Carl, how can you say such things? I saw it all. No, monsieur.
They had a little quarrel as to who should play with the drum, and Toto
pushed him, and he fell into the water. Was it not so, Carl?"
But Carl was incapable of answering. Screaming like a girl in hysterics
he clung to the Baron, who had taken him in his arms.
"Now, then," said my father, who had come up. "What is this? What is the
meaning of this, sir? Come, speak! Did you dare to----"
"Father," I said, "I pushed him, but I did not mean to hurt him--truly I
did not."
"Do not blame him," said Von Lichtenberg, turning to the house with Carl
in his arms. "It is Fate. Children do these things without knowing it.
Do not punish him."
The hypocrisy of those last four words! Lost to my father, whose simple
mind could not read the tones of a man's voice or guess what hatred can
be hidden in honey.
"All the same," said my father, as the Baron departed, "the child is
half drowned. You have disgraced yourself. Off with you to Joubert, and
place yourself under arrest."
I saluted.
"Bread and water," said my father; "and for three days."
I saluted again, and marched off to the house dejectedly enough.
As I went, little footsteps sounded behind me, and Eloise ran up. "You
must not mind Carl, Toto," said she. "He cannot help crying. Listen,
and I will tell you a secret. I heard mamma telling it to father; they
thought I was asleep. Little Carl is a girl! Monsieur le Baron has
brought her up as a boy to avoid something evil that has been
prophesied--so mother said. What is 'prophesied,' Toto?"
"I don't know," I replied, my head too full of the dismal prospect of
arrest and bread and water to trouble much about anything else. Then
religiously I went to Joubert who formally placed me under arrest.