I HAD questioned János on our homeward way concerning my new
acquaintances; but the fellow was so ill-disposed by nature to external
gossip, so wholly occupied with the minute fulfilment of his daily
task, which was to watch over the well-being and safety of his master,
that he had gathered no acquaintance with affairs outside his province.
With the head factor, however, whom I sent for immediately after
supper, I was more fortunate. This man, Karl Schultz, is Saxon-born,
and consequently one of the few of my numerous dependants with whom I
can hold converse here. It was but natural that among the peasantry
the advent of strangers, evidently of wealth and distinction, should
have created some stir, and it is Schultz’s business, among many other
things, to know what the peasantry talk about; although in this more
contented part of the world this sort of knowledge is not of such
importance as among our neighbours the Poles. Schultz, therefore, was
aware of the arrival of the ladies, likewise of the rumour of smallpox,
which had, so he informed me, not only driven all the servants out of
the Castle of Schreckendorf, but spread something like a panic over the
country-side. Tidings had also come to his ears that two gentlemen—one
of them suffering from the dreadful malady (doubtless the poor
Chamberlain)—had been abandoned in their carriage by their postillions
and servants at the small village of Kittlitz, some forty miles from
here, just over the Lusatian border. He corroborated, in fact, greatly
to my joy, all that I had been told; for I had had an uneasy fear
upon me, now and again, as I marched home in the evening chill, that
I had been too ready to lend credence to a romantic and improbable
story. But, better than all, Schultz, having felt a special curiosity
concerning visitors from his own country, had, despite the attempt to
keep the matter secret, contrived to satisfy himself to the full as to
their identity. And thus did I, to my no small triumph, from the first
day easily penetrate the ill-guarded incognita.
The beautiful wandering Princess was the only daughter of the old
reigning house of Lausitz-Rothenburg; and it was from Georgenbrunn,
where she had been on a visit to her aunt the Dowager Duchess of
Saxony, that the second outbreak of the epidemic had driven her to
take refuge with the Countess Schreckendorf in our neighbourhood.
Vastly satisfied with my discovery, and not a little fluttered by the
impending honour, I made elaborate preparations the next day against
the coming of such guests. We rifled the gardens, the greenhouses, and
the storerooms, and contrived a collation the elegance of which taxed
our resources to the uttermost.
Not in peasant garb did I start at noon upon my romantic quest, but
in my finest riding suit of mulberry cloth embroidered with green and
silver, (of what good auguries did I not think when I remembered that
green and white were actually the colours of the Maison de Lusace, and
that in this discreet manner I could wear on my sleeve the mark of a
delicate homage?), ruffles of finest Mechlin fluttered on my throat and
wrists, and a hat of the very latest cock was disposed jauntily at the
exact angle prescribed by the Vienna mode.
With my trim fellows behind me, and with as perfect a piece of
horseflesh between my knees as the Emperor himself could ever hope to
bestride, I set out in high delight and anticipation.
Now, on this freezing winter’s night, when I look back upon those
days and the days that followed, it seems to me as though it were all
a dream. The past events are wrapped to memory in a kind of haze,
out of which certain hours marked above the rest stand out alone in
clearness.—That particular day stands forth perhaps the clearest of
all.
I remember that the Princess Ottilie looked even more queenly to my
mind than at first, with her fair hair powdered and a patch upon the
satin whiteness of her chin. In the complacency of my young man’s
vanity, I was exceedingly elated that she should have considered
it worth while to adorn herself for me. I remember, too, that the
lady-in-waiting examined me critically, and cast a look of approval
upon my altered appearance; that she spoke less and that her mistress
spoke more than upon our first meeting; that even the presence, mute,
dark, and scowling, of their female attendant could not spoil the
pleasure of our intercourse.
In the vineyards, it is true, an incident occurred which for a moment
threatened to mar my perfect satisfaction. The peasant girls—it is the
custom of the country on the appearance of strangers in the midst of
their work—gathered round each lady, surrounding her in wild dancing
bands, threatening in song to load her shoulders with a heavy hodful
of grapes unless she paid a ransom. It was of course most unseemly,
considering the quality of the company I was entertaining, and I had
not foreseen the possibility of such a breach of respect. Never before,
it was evident, in the delicately nurtured life of the Princess, had
such rough amusement been allowed to approach her. This being the
case, it was not astonishing that the admirable composure of her usual
attitude should break down—her dignity give way to the emotion of
fear. She called—nay, she screamed—to me for help. The while her
pert lady-in-waiting, no whit abashed, laughed back at her circle of
grinning sunburnt prancers, threw mocking good-humoured gibes at them
in German, and finally was sharp enough to draw her purse and pay
for her footing, crying out to her mistress to do the same. But the
latter was in no state to listen to advice, and, alas! I found myself
powerless to deliver the distressed lady. In my ignorance of their
language I could do nothing short of use brute force to control my
savages, who were after all (it seems) but acting in good faith upon an
old-established privilege. So I was fain, in my turn, to summon Schultz
to the rescue from a distant part of the ground. He, practical fellow,
made no bones about the matter; with a bellow and a knowing whirl of
his cane every stroke of which told with a dull thwack, he promptly
dispersed the indiscreet merrymakers.
I suppose it is my English blood that rises within me at the sight of
a woman struck. Upon the impulse of the first moment I had well-nigh
wrenched the staff from his hands and laid it about his shoulders;
but fortunately, on second thought, I had wisdom enough to refrain
from an act which would have been so fatal to all future discipline.
Nevertheless, as I stood by, a passive spectator of it, the blood
mounted, for very shame, to my cheek, and I felt myself degraded to the
level of my administrator’s brutality.
The poor fools fell apart, screaming between laughter and pain.
One handsome wench I marked, indeed, who withdrew to the side of a
sullen gipsy-looking fellow, her husband or lover apparently; and as
she muttered low in his ear they both cast looks charged with such
murderous import, not only at the uncompromising justiciary, but also
at me, and the man’s hand stole instinctively to his back with so
significant a gesture, that I realised for the first time quite fully
that there might be good reasons for János’s precautions anent the
lord’s precious person when the lord took his walks abroad.
Another girl passed me close by, sobbing aloud, as she returned to her
labour. She rubbed her shoulder sorely, and the tears hopped off the
rim of her fat cheeks, contorted like those of a blubbering child. In
half-ashamed and sneaking fashion, yet unable to resist the urging of
my heart, I followed her behind the next row of vines and touched her
on the arm.
She recognised me with a start, and I, all fearful of being noticed by
the others, in haste and without a word—as what word could I find in
which to communicate with a Slovack?—hastily dropped a consolatory
coin, the first that met my touch, into her palm.
It was a poor plain creature with dull eyes, coarse lips, and matted
hair, and she gazed at me a moment stupidly bewildered. But the next
instant, reading I know not what of sympathy and benevolence in my
face, as a dog may read in his master’s eyes, she fell at my feet,
letting the gold slip out of her grasp that she might the better seize
my hand in hers and cover it with kisses, pouring forth the while a
litany of gratitude, as unintelligible to me as if she had been indeed
a dog whining at my feet.
To put an end to the absurd situation, distasteful to my British
free-born pride for all my foreign training, I pushed her from me and
turned away, to find the lady-in-waiting at my elbow.
Instead, however, of making my weakness a mark for her wit, this
latter, to my great relief, and likewise to my astonishment, looked
wistfully from the ugly besmeared face to the coin lying on the black
soil, then at my countenance, which at that moment was, I felt, that of
a detected schoolboy. And then, without a word, she followed me back to
her mistress’s side.
My august visitor had not yet regained her wonted serenity. Still
fluttered, she showed me something of a pouting visage. I thought to
discern in her not only satisfaction at the punishment she had seen
administered, but some resentment at my passive attitude. And this, I
confess, surprised me in her, who seemed so gentle and womanly. But I
told myself then that it was but natural in one born as she was to a
throne.
On the other hand, while I confounded myself in excuses and
explanations, blaming myself for having (through my inexperience of
this country) neglected to prevent the possibility of so untoward an
incident, I heard behind me the voice of the young Court lady, rating
Schultz in most explicit German for the heaviness of his hand upon my
folk. And, as the Princess gradually became mollified towards me and
showed me once again her own smiling graciousness, I contrasted her
little show of haughtiness with the unreserve of her companion, and
convinced myself that it did but become her (being what she was). The
while I watched Mademoiselle Ottilie, mingling with peasants as if she
had been born among them, with an ever renewed wonder that she should
have been chosen for the high position she occupied.
Later on my guest, according to her promise, condescended to rest and
refresh herself in the castle. This was the culminating moment of a
golden afternoon. I felt the full pride of possession when I led her
in through the old halls that bore the mark of so many centuries of
noble masters; although indeed, as a Jennico, I had no inherited right
to peacock in the glories of the House of Tollendhal. But, at each
portrait before which she was gracious enough to halt, I took care to
speak of some notable contemporary among the men and women of my own
old line, in that distant enchanted island of the North, where the men
are so brave and strong and the women so fair. And, without stretching
any point, I am sure the line of Jennico lost nothing in the comparison.
She was, I saw, beyond mistake impressed. I rejoiced to note that I
was rapidly becoming a person of importance in her eyes. Even the
lady-in-waiting continued to measure me with an altered and thoughtful
look.
Between the eating of our meal together—which, as I said, was quite
a delicate little feast, and did honour to my barefooted kitchen
retinue—and the departure of my visitors, I took them through many
of the chambers, and showed them some of the treasures, quaint
antiquities, and relics that my great-uncle had inherited or himself
collected. On a little table under his picture—yonder on that wall
it hangs before me—I had spread forth in a glass case, with a sort
of tender and pious memory of the rigid old hero, his own personal
decorations and honours, from the first cross he had won in comparative
youth to the last blazing order that a royal hand had pinned over the
shrunken chest of the field-marshal. In this portrait, painted some
five years before his death, my uncle had insisted on appearing full
face, with a fine scorn of any palliation of the black patch or the
broken jaw. It is a grim enough presentment in consequence,—the artist
having evidently rather relished his task,—and sometimes, indeed, when
I am alone here in this great room at night, and it seems as if the
candle-light does but serve to heighten the gloom of the shadows, I
find my uncle’s one eye following me with so living a sternness that I
can scarce endure it.
But that day of which I am writing, I thought there was benignity in
the fierce orb as it surveyed such honourable company, and even an
actual touch of geniality in the set of the black patch.
As I opened the case, both the ladies fell, women-like, to fingering
the rich jewels. There was a snuff-box set around with diamonds, upon
the lid of which was painted a portrait of the Dauphine. This, Maria
Theresa had herself given to my uncle on the occasion of her daughter’s
marriage, to which it was deemed my uncle’s firm attitude in council
over the Franco-Austrian difficulty had not a little contributed.
With a cry of admiration, the Princess took it up. “Ach, what
diamonds!” she said. I looked from the exquisite face on the ivory to
the no less exquisite countenance bending above it, and I was struck by
the resemblance which had no doubt unconsciously been haunting me ever
since I first met her. The arch of the dark eyebrow, the supercilious
droop of the eyelid, the curve of the short upper lip, and the pout of
the full under one, even the high poise of the head on the long throat,
were curiously similar. I exclaimed upon the coincidence, while the
Princess flushed with a sort of mingled pleasure and bashfulness.
Mademoiselle Ottilie took up the miniature in her turn, and, after
gravely comparing it with her own elfish, sunburnt visage in the glass,
gazed at her mistress; then, heaving a lugubrious sigh, she assented
to my remarks, adding, however, that there was no ground for surprise,
as the Princess Marie Ottilie was actually cousin to her Royal Highness
the Dauphine.
The Princess blushed again, and lifted up her hand as if to warn her
companion. But the latter, with her almost uncanny perspicacity,
continued, turning to me:
“Of course, M. de Jennico” (she had at last mastered my name)—“of
course, M. de Jennico has found out all about us by this time, and is
perfectly aware of her Highness’s identity.”
Then she added, and her eyes danced:
“Since M. de Jennico is so fond of genealogy” (among the curiosities of
the place I had naturally shown them my uncle’s monumental pedigree),
“he can amuse himself in tracing the connection and relationships—no
doubt he has the ’Almanach de Gotha’—between the houses of Hapsburg
and the Catholic house of Lausitz-Rothenburg.”
And indeed, although she meant this in sarcasm, when, after I had
escorted them home, I returned, through the mists and shades of
twilight, to my solitude (now peopled for me with delightful present,
and God knows what fantastic future, visions), I did produce that
excellent new book, the “Almanach de Gotha,” and found great interest
in tracing the blood-relation between the Dauphine and the fairest of
princesses. And afterwards, moved by some spirit of vainglory, I amused
myself by comparing on the map the relative sizes of the Duchy of
Lausitz and the lands of Tollendhal.
And next I was moved to unroll once again my uncle’s pedigree, and to
study the fine chain of noble links of which I stand the last worthy
Jennico, when something that had been lying unformed in my mind during
these last hours of strange excitement suddenly took audacious and
definite shape.