FALL
The pistol had been practically fired. Under ordinary circumstances the
scene at the council table would have entirely exhausted Otto’s store
both of energy and anger; he would have begun to examine and condemn his
conduct, have remembered all that was true, forgotten all that was unjust
in Seraphina’s onslaught; and by half an hour after would have fallen
into that state of mind in which a Catholic flees to the confessional and
a sot takes refuge with the bottle. Two matters of detail preserved his
spirits. For, first, he had still an infinity of business to transact;
and to transact business, for a man of Otto’s neglectful and
procrastinating habits, is the best anodyne for conscience. All
afternoon he was hard at it with the Chancellor, reading, dictating,
signing, and despatching papers; and this kept him in a glow of
self-approval. But, secondly, his vanity was still alarmed; he had
failed to get the money; to-morrow before noon he would have to
disappoint old Killian; and in the eyes of that family which counted him
so little, and to which he had sought to play the part of the heroic
comforter, he must sink lower than at first. To a man of Otto’s temper,
this was death. He could not accept the situation. And even as he
worked, and worked wisely and well, over the hated details of his
principality, he was secretly maturing a plan by which to turn the
situation. It was a scheme as pleasing to the man as it was
dishonourable in the prince; in which his frivolous nature found and took
vengeance for the gravity and burthen of the afternoon. He chuckled as
he thought of it: and Greisengesang heard him with wonder, and attributed
his lively spirits to the skirmish of the morning.
Led by this idea, the antique courtier ventured to compliment his
sovereign on his bearing. It reminded him, he said, of Otto’s father.
‘What?’ asked the Prince, whose thoughts were miles away.
‘Your Highness’s authority at the board,’ explained the flatterer.
‘O, that! O yes,’ returned Otto; but for all his carelessness, his
vanity was delicately tickled, and his mind returned and dwelt
approvingly over the details of his victory. ‘I quelled them all,’ he
thought.
When the more pressing matters had been dismissed, it was already late,
and Otto kept the Chancellor to dinner, and was entertained with a leash
of ancient histories and modern compliments. The Chancellor’s career had
been based, from the first off-put, on entire subserviency; he had
crawled into honours and employments; and his mind was prostitute. The
instinct of the creature served him well with Otto. First, he let fall a
sneering word or two upon the female intellect; thence he proceeded to a
closer engagement; and before the third course he was artfully dissecting
Seraphina’s character to her approving husband. Of course no names were
used; and of course the identity of that abstract or ideal man, with whom
she was currently contrasted, remained an open secret. But this stiff
old gentleman had a wonderful instinct for evil, thus to wind his way
into man’s citadel; thus to harp by the hour on the virtues of his hearer
and not once alarm his self-respect. Otto was all roseate, in and out,
with flattery and Tokay and an approving conscience. He saw himself in
the most attractive colours. If even Greisengesang, he thought, could
thus espy the loose stitches in Seraphina’s character, and thus
disloyally impart them to the opposite camp, he, the discarded
husband—the dispossessed Prince—could scarce have erred on the side of
severity.
In this excellent frame he bade adieu to the old gentleman, whose voice
had proved so musical, and set forth for the drawing-room. Already on
the stair, he was seized with some compunction; but when he entered the
great gallery and beheld his wife, the Chancellor’s abstract flatteries
fell from him like rain, and he re-awoke to the poetic facts of life.
She stood a good way off below a shining lustre, her back turned. The
bend of her waist overcame him with physical weakness. This was the
girl-wife who had lain in his arms and whom he had sworn to cherish;
there was she, who was better than success.
It was Seraphina who restored him from the blow. She swam forward and
smiled upon her husband with a sweetness that was insultingly artificial.
‘Frédéric,’ she lisped, ‘you are late.’ It was a scene of high comedy,
such as is proper to unhappy marriages; and her _aplomb_ disgusted him.
There was no etiquette at these small drawing-rooms. People came and
went at pleasure. The window embrasures became the roost of happy
couples; at the great chimney the talkers mostly congregated, each
full-charged with scandal; and down at the farther end the gamblers
gambled. It was towards this point that Otto moved, not ostentatiously,
but with a gentle insistence, and scattering attentions as he went. Once
abreast of the card-table, he placed himself opposite to Madame von
Rosen, and, as soon as he had caught her eye, withdrew to the embrasure
of a window. There she had speedily joined him.
‘You did well to call me,’ she said, a little wildly. ‘These cards will
be my ruin.’
‘Leave them,’ said Otto.
‘I!’ she cried, and laughed; ‘they are my destiny. My only chance was to
die of a consumption; now I must die in a garret.’
‘You are bitter to-night,’ said Otto.
‘I have been losing,’ she replied. ‘You do not know what greed is.’
‘I have come, then, in an evil hour,’ said he.
‘Ah, you wish a favour!’ she cried, brightening beautifully.
‘Madam,’ said he, ‘I am about to found my party, and I come to you for a
recruit.’
‘Done,’ said the Countess. ‘I am a man again.’
‘I may be wrong,’ continued Otto, ‘but I believe upon my heart you wish
me no ill.’
‘I wish you so well,’ she said, ‘that I dare not tell it you.’
‘Then if I ask my favour?’ quoth the Prince.
‘Ask it, _mon Prince_,’ she answered. ‘Whatever it is, it is granted.’
‘I wish you,’ he returned, ‘this very night to make the farmer of our
talk.’
‘Heaven knows your meaning!’ she exclaimed. ‘I know not, neither care;
there are no bounds to my desire to please you. Call him made.’
‘I will put it in another way,’ returned Otto. ‘Did you ever steal?’
‘Often!’ cried the Countess. ‘I have broken all the ten commandments;
and if there were more to-morrow, I should not sleep till I had broken
these.’
‘This is a case of burglary: to say the truth, I thought it would amuse
you,’ said the Prince.
‘I have no practical experience,’ she replied, ‘but O! the good-will! I
have broken a work-box in my time, and several hearts, my own included.
Never a house! But it cannot be difficult; sins are so unromantically
easy! What are we to break?’
‘Madam, we are to break the treasury,’ said Otto and he sketched to her
briefly, wittily, with here and there a touch of pathos, the story of his
visit to the farm, of his promise to buy it, and of the refusal with
which his demand for money had been met that morning at the council;
concluding with a few practical words as to the treasury windows, and the
helps and hindrances of the proposed exploit.
‘They refused you the money,’ she said when he had done. ‘And you
accepted the refusal? Well!’
‘They gave their reasons,’ replied Otto, colouring. ‘They were not such
as I could combat; and I am driven to dilapidate the funds of my own
country by a theft. It is not dignified; but it is fun.’
‘Fun,’ she said; ‘yes.’ And then she remained silently plunged in
thought for an appreciable time. ‘How much do you require?’ she asked at
length.
‘Three thousand crowns will do,’ he answered, ‘for I have still some
money of my own.’
‘Excellent,’ she said, regaining her levity. ‘I am your true accomplice.
And where are we to meet?’
‘You know the Flying Mercury,’ he answered, ‘in the Park? Three pathways
intersect; there they have made a seat and raised the statue. The spot
is handy and the deity congenial.’
‘Child,’ she said, and tapped him with her fan. ‘But do you know, my
Prince, you are an egoist—your handy trysting-place is miles from me.
You must give me ample time; I cannot, I think, possibly be there before
two. But as the bell beats two, your helper shall arrive: welcome, I
trust. Stay—do you bring any one?’ she added. ‘O, it is not for a
chaperon—I am not a prude!’
‘I shall bring a groom of mine,’ said Otto. ‘I caught him stealing
corn.’
‘His name?’ she asked.
‘I profess I know not. I am not yet intimate with my corn-stealer,’
returned the Prince. ‘It was in a professional capacity—’
‘Like me! Flatterer!’ she cried. ‘But oblige me in one thing. Let me
find you waiting at the seat—yes, you shall await me; for on this
expedition it shall be no longer Prince and Countess, it shall be the
lady and the squire—and your friend the thief shall be no nearer than the
fountain. Do you promise?’
‘Madam, in everything you are to command; you shall be captain, I am but
supercargo,’ answered Otto.
‘Well, Heaven bring all safe to port!’ she said. ‘It is not Friday!’
Something in her manner had puzzled Otto, had possibly touched him with
suspicion.
‘Is it not strange,’ he remarked, ‘that I should choose my accomplice
from the other camp?’
‘Fool!’ she said. ‘But it is your only wisdom that you know your
friends.’ And suddenly, in the vantage of the deep window, she caught up
his hand and kissed it with a sort of passion. ‘Now go,’ she added, ‘go
at once.’
He went, somewhat staggered, doubting in his heart that he was over-bold.
For in that moment she had flashed upon him like a jewel; and even
through the strong panoply of a previous love he had been conscious of a
shock. Next moment he had dismissed the fear.
Both Otto and the Countess retired early from the drawing-room; and the
Prince, after an elaborate feint, dismissed his valet, and went forth by
the private passage and the back postern in quest of the groom.
Once more the stable was in darkness, once more Otto employed the
talismanic knock, and once more the groom appeared and sickened with
terror.
‘Good-evening, friend,’ said Otto pleasantly. ‘I want you to bring a
corn sack—empty this time—and to accompany me. We shall be gone all
night.’
‘Your Highness,’ groaned the man, ‘I have the charge of the small
stables. I am here alone.’
‘Come,’ said the Prince, ‘you are no such martinet in duty.’ And then
seeing that the man was shaking from head to foot, Otto laid a hand upon
his shoulder. ‘If I meant you harm,’ he said, ‘should I be here?’
The fellow became instantly reassured. He got the sack; and Otto led him
round by several paths and avenues, conversing pleasantly by the way, and
left him at last planted by a certain fountain where a goggle-eyed Triton
spouted intermittently into a rippling laver. Thence he proceeded alone
to where, in a round clearing, a copy of Gian Bologna’s Mercury stood
tiptoe in the twilight of the stars. The night was warm and windless. A
shaving of new moon had lately arisen; but it was still too small and too
low down in heaven to contend with the immense host of lesser luminaries;
and the rough face of the earth was drenched with starlight. Down one of
the alleys, which widened as it receded, he could see a part of the
lamplit terrace where a sentry silently paced, and beyond that a corner
of the town with interlacing street-lights. But all around him the young
trees stood mystically blurred in the dim shine; and in the stock-still
quietness the upleaping god appeared alive.
In this dimness and silence of the night, Otto’s conscience became
suddenly and staringly luminous, like the dial of a city clock. He
averted the eyes of his mind, but the finger rapidly travelling, pointed
to a series of misdeeds that took his breath away. What was he doing in
that place? The money had been wrongly squandered, but that was largely
by his own neglect. And he now proposed to embarrass the finances of
this country which he had been too idle to govern. And he now proposed
to squander the money once again, and this time for a private, if a
generous end. And the man whom he had reproved for stealing corn he was
now to set stealing treasure. And then there was Madame von Rosen, upon
whom he looked down with some of that ill-favoured contempt of the chaste
male for the imperfect woman. Because he thought of her as one degraded
below scruples, he had picked her out to be still more degraded, and to
risk her whole irregular establishment in life by complicity in this
dishonourable act. It was uglier than a seduction.
Otto had to walk very briskly and whistle very busily; and when at last
he heard steps in the narrowest and darkest of the alleys, it was with a
gush of relief that he sprang to meet the Countess. To wrestle alone
with one’s good angel is so hard! and so precious, at the proper time, is
a companion certain to be less virtuous than oneself!
It was a young man who came towards him—a young man of small stature and
a peculiar gait, wearing a wide flapping hat, and carrying, with great
weariness, a heavy bag. Otto recoiled; but the young man held up his
hand by way of signal, and coming up with a panting run, as if with the
last of his endurance, laid the bag upon the ground, threw himself upon
the bench, and disclosed the features of Madame von Rosen.
‘You, Countess!’ cried the Prince.
‘No, no,’ she panted, ‘the Count von Rosen—my young brother. A capital
fellow. Let him get his breath.’
‘Ah, madam . . . ’ said he.
‘Call me Count,’ she returned, ‘respect my incognito.’
‘Count be it, then,’ he replied. ‘And let me implore that gallant
gentleman to set forth at once on our enterprise.’
‘Sit down beside me here,’ she returned, patting the further corner of
the bench. ‘I will follow you in a moment. O, I am so tired—feel how my
heart leaps! Where is your thief?’
‘At his post,’ replied Otto. ‘Shall I introduce him? He seems an
excellent companion.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘do not hurry me yet. I must speak to you. Not but I
adore your thief; I adore any one who has the spirit to do wrong. I
never cared for virtue till I fell in love with my Prince.’ She laughed
musically. ‘And even so, it is not for your virtues,’ she added.
Otto was embarrassed. ‘And now,’ he asked, ‘if you are anyway rested?’
‘Presently, presently. Let me breathe,’ she said, panting a little
harder than before.
‘And what has so wearied you?’ he asked. ‘This bag? And why, in the
name of eccentricity, a bag? For an empty one, you might have relied on
my own foresight; and this one is very far from being empty. My dear
Count, with what trash have you come laden? But the shortest method is
to see for myself.’ And he put down his hand.
She stopped him at once. ‘Otto,’ she said, ‘no—not that way. I will
tell, I will make a clean breast. It is done already. I have robbed the
treasury single-handed. There are three thousand two hundred crowns. O,
I trust it is enough!’
Her embarrassment was so obvious that the Prince was struck into a muse,
gazing in her face, with his hand still outstretched, and she still
holding him by the wrist. ‘You!’ he said at last. ‘How?’ And then
drawing himself up, ‘O madam,’ he cried, ‘I understand. You must indeed
think meanly of the Prince.’
‘Well, then, it was a lie!’ she cried. ‘The money is mine, honestly my
own—now yours. This was an unworthy act that you proposed. But I love
your honour, and I swore to myself that I should save it in your teeth.
I beg of you to let me save it’—with a sudden lovely change of tone.
‘Otto, I beseech you let me save it. Take this dross from your poor
friend who loves you!’
‘Madam, madam,’ babbled Otto, in the extreme of misery, ‘I cannot—I must
go.’
And he half rose; but she was on the ground before him in an instant,
clasping his knees. ‘No,’ she gasped, ‘you shall not go. Do you despise
me so entirely? It is dross; I hate it; I should squander it at play and
be no richer; it is an investment, it is to save me from ruin. Otto,’
she cried, as he again feebly tried to put her from him, ‘if you leave me
alone in this disgrace, I will die here!’ He groaned aloud. ‘O,’ she
said, ‘think what I suffer! If you suffer from a piece of delicacy,
think what I suffer in my shame! To have my trash refused! You would
rather steal, you think of me so basely! You would rather tread my heart
in pieces! O, unkind! O my Prince! O Otto! O pity me!’ She was still
clasping him; then she found his hand and covered it with kisses, and at
this his head began to turn. ‘O,’ she cried again, ‘I see it! O what a
horror! It is because I am old, because I am no longer beautiful.’ And
she burst into a storm of sobs.
This was the _coup de grâce_. Otto had now to comfort and compose her as
he could, and before many words, the money was accepted. Between the
woman and the weak man such was the inevitable end. Madame von Rosen
instantly composed her sobs. She thanked him with a fluttering voice,
and resumed her place upon the bench, at the far end from Otto. ‘Now you
see,’ she said, ‘why I bade you keep the thief at distance, and why I
came alone. How I trembled for my treasure!’
‘Madam,’ said Otto, with a tearful whimper in his voice, ‘spare me! You
are too good, too noble!’
‘I wonder to hear you,’ she returned. ‘You have avoided a great folly.
You will be able to meet your good old peasant. You have found an
excellent investment for a friend’s money. You have preferred essential
kindness to an empty scruple; and now you are ashamed of it! You have
made your friend happy; and now you mourn as the dove! Come, cheer up.
I know it is depressing to have done exactly right; but you need not make
a practice of it. Forgive yourself this virtue; come now, look me in the
face and smile!’
He did look at her. When a man has been embraced by a woman, he sees her
in a glamour; and at such a time, in the baffling glimmer of the stars,
she will look wildly well. The hair is touched with light; the eyes are
constellations; the face sketched in shadows—a sketch, you might say, by
passion. Otto became consoled for his defeat; he began to take an
interest. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I am no ingrate.’
‘You promised me fun,’ she returned, with a laugh. ‘I have given you as
good. We have had a stormy _scena_.’
He laughed in his turn, and the sound of the laughter, in either case,
was hardly reassuring.
‘Come, what are you going to give me in exchange,’ she continued, ‘for my
excellent declamation?’
‘What you will,’ he said.
‘Whatever I will? Upon your honour? Suppose I asked the crown?’ She
was flashing upon him, beautiful in triumph.
‘Upon my honour,’ he replied.
‘Shall I ask the crown?’ she continued. ‘Nay; what should I do with it?
Grünewald is but a petty state; my ambition swells above it. I shall
ask—I find I want nothing,’ she concluded. ‘I will give you something
instead. I will give you leave to kiss me—once.’
Otto drew near, and she put up her face; they were both smiling, both on
the brink of laughter, all was so innocent and playful; and the Prince,
when their lips encountered, was dumbfoundered by the sudden convulsion
of his being. Both drew instantly apart, and for an appreciable time sat
tongue-tied. Otto was indistinctly conscious of a peril in the silence,
but could find no words to utter. Suddenly the Countess seemed to awake.
‘As for your wife—’ she began in a clear and steady voice.
The word recalled Otto, with a shudder, from his trance. ‘I will hear
nothing against my wife,’ he cried wildly; and then, recovering himself
and in a kindlier tone, ‘I will tell you my one secret,’ he added. ‘I
love my wife.’
‘You should have let me finish,’ she returned, smiling. ‘Do you suppose
I did not mention her on purpose? You know you had lost your head.
Well, so had I. Come now, do not be abashed by words,’ she added
somewhat sharply. ‘It is the one thing I despise. If you are not a
fool, you will see that I am building fortresses about your virtue. And
at any rate, I choose that you shall understand that I am not dying of
love for you. It is a very smiling business; no tragedy for me! And now
here is what I have to say about your wife; she is not and she never has
been Gondremark’s mistress. Be sure he would have boasted if she had.
Good-night!’
And in a moment she was gone down the alley, and Otto was alone with the
bag of money and the flying god.