# If Youth But Knew/The King's Mail

pp. 595–607.

### V.—THE KING'S MAIL.

BETTY, the little Austrian wife of the Burgrave of Wellenshausen—Chancellor to His Majesty King Jerome I. of Westphalia—had charming capacities for mischief; but they were sadly undeveloped. Shut up for the three years of her married life by her grossly jealous husband in an inaccessible Burg, amid the hills of Thuringia, small chance had she had indeed. The single opportunity which had presented itself—that of separating her husband's niece, Sidonia, from her hour-old bridegroom—she had conscientiously availed herself of. The young man had had the audacity to admire Betty herself first, or so Betty had chosen to think; he was, therefore, distinctly not to be trusted, and must, moreover, be punished. Morals demanded it. But the business had been a mere trifle, accomplished with disappointing ease. Betty, in her consciousness of power, yearned for wider scope; and now, at last, she had attained it.
The Burgrave's very jealousy had delivered him into his wife's hands. From tyrant he was become slave. Betty was mistress, not only of herself, but of the situation.
And therefore it was that she was actually in Cassel—Cassel, the gay, irresponsible capital of the gay, irresponsible Jerome—Cassel, the Mecca of her dreams! And not only was she in Cassel, but she had got rid of her Bluebeard. For what pleasure could a poor little woman expect, I ask you, with the shadow of a huge, jealous husband perpetually between her and the sunshine of the most innocent flirtation? Away with Bluebeard to his Chancellor apartments at the Palace! Lady Bluebeard preferred the hotel, if you please, and her liberty.
How the monster roared! Yet she had him at her mercy, and for fear of greater scandal he was fain to submit. As for Sidonia, the new Countess Waldorf-Kilmansegg (who should not long bear that title if the Burgravine could help it), Betty consented to keep her by her side. The girl made an excellent chaperon; and the sight of the minx's proud, silent sorrow was not altogether disagreeable to her aunt by marriage.
So Betty was in Cassel and Betty was free: a butterfly in a garden, the long summer's day before her, and all the flowers of spring to choose from! And what a charming man was King Jerome! Not a hint of the sort of savage they said those Corsicans all were, much less of the plebeian, about him. A real little king, after Betty's own heart. She had always had a conviction that they would understand each other. Burgravine Betty had occasion, very soon, to write to this affable sovereign a most delicate little note on pink paper.
It was posted by Mademoiselle Elisa, who might well stare at the superscription, and promise herself that if her lady had such correspondence, the Burgrave's Jaeger would certainly no longer suffice the maid.
There was also, be it said, a trifle of a note to the Burgrave posted at the same occasion. It had cost Countess Betty but a single dash of her pen.
The spirits of spring and autumn are akin, although the one wanders to the fulness of life, and the other to the cold sleep, death. Across the dividing months they seem to meet each other, in grace and pathos, in caprice and gentleness. They serve you smiles and tears, skies of a tenderness unknown to summer, huge gales of wind, soft as milk, mighty as love—winds that come chanting with the voices of the ocean, the mountain, and the forest; great songs of glory, that seize you by the way, in resistless arms, and tell you wondrous things, and set your blood leaping as they pass: set, if autumn it be, the yellow leaves awhirl in a death dance; or, if spring, every baby bud rocking on its sappy spray.
Two travellers, one riding, the other afoot, went side by side along the high imperial road from Goettingen towards Cassel. There was a mighty spring wind which blew into their faces. To the rider, who was young, it spoke mightily of the spring in his blood—spoke spring things of love and budding secrets. The breath of it in his nostrils was full of a scent of growth and yearning that maddened him: for he had fever in his veins and he was baulked in love.
But to the other traveller, whose hair was already grey, who tramped along at the swing of him who had learned to ignore fatigue, an autumn lament was hidden in the April joy. It told him how all that is born must die, and how the beautiful die first. In the whisper of each infant leaf he heard the coming sigh of inevitable fall; in the fragrance of the striving earth he could smell the bitter graves of yester-year.
"Two travellers, one riding, the other afoot, went side by side along the high imperial road."
The horseman was clothed in fine and fashionable garments, as became a high-born traveller; he who trudged was but a vagrant player, who made music for his daily bread, and rarely knew in the morning where he would lay his head at night. The hazard of the road had thrown these two strangely together; and Hans, the vagrant, had fiddled joy and sorrow, love and hate into the life of Steven Lee, Count Waldorf-Kilmansegg, almost, it seemed, at his fantastic pleasure. But Steven loved his mad companion. Though peaceful travellers both, they had recently been caught in the whirl of a Cossack raid—for in the death-throes of Napoleon's empire, even Westphalia was shaken—and at the risk of his own life, the Austrian patrician had saved the vagabond from a wanton spear; and, with all the reasonless generosity of youth, he loved him now all the more for the burning of his own wound.
They went in silence. Steven's heart was heavy: he had been robbed of his bride well-nigh on the altar-steps, and was now seeking her, in an impatience which repeated disappointment had fed to frenzy. And Fiddle-Hans was his guide: he had long ceased even to wonder at his own blind confidence in this being of mysterious influence.
"'Take it now, lest a breath from Heaven scatter its bloom.'"
At a certain spot the forest began to press upon the imperial road. The overarching boughs flung premature night upon them; and, as the whispered protection of the woodland enfolded them, they drew closer together and their tongues were loosened. It seemed as if Nature had drawn them into a green chamber of confidence which made for speech, even as the desert plain for silence. The rider struck his saddle-bow with a passionate hand, at which the plodding grey faintly started.
"To think of her, at Cassel, under the devil flicker of that imperial puppet's glance! Sidonia, my wife, at the Court of Jerome——!"
The countenance of Fiddle-Hans, safely shadowed, was wrinkled by a grin of satisfaction.
"A waterlily may defy the ooze," he observed sententiously.
But the simile was hateful to the youth—a waterlily, a flower that flourishes, in atrocious beauty, upon the very slime! Then he cursed his wound for its slow healing and his blood for its ill-timed fever, and the length of the road, and the perversity of women.
"And the wrong-headedness of young men!" added the musician drily. But thereafter, in tones of consolation, for dudgeon still reigned on the saddle above him, he pointed to a light far off through the dark flicker of leaf and shadowy march of trees:
"See, yonder shall we sup and sleep; and thence, rested, start in the brisk dawn. And to-morrow——"
"To-morrow!" interrupted the bridegroom impatiently. "No, I shall be in Cassel to-night."
"You forget the times we live in, comrade," came the fiddler's answer. "Our beloved monarch has made a fortress of his capital—breastworks and glacis where of old the orchards and cottage gardens; posterns and corps de garde at all road entrances. And everything closed at the setting of the watch, an hour after sundown! No, friend, we enter Cassel to-morrow."
With the ardour that brooks no delay, Steven the lover had, in his mind's eye, seen his pilgrimage ended before the fall of the day, seen himself dashed or crowned. Crowned! Upon the latter vision, how the surge would rise in his heart, till he well-nigh swooned from it!
Fiddle-Hans, with his diabolic insight, chose this moment to draw from his fiddle sudden strains of melting sweetness.
"Have done!" panted the bridegroom. "I cannot bear it." And the player fell silent, musing upon the ways of men and women and of love. Let a bride but elude her lover's embrace, what surer road shall she find to his ardour?
Night had fallen, and a full moon was floating up the sky, when the comrades emerged from the woodland and halted before the doorstep of the inn.
"The Three Ways" held, it seemed, merry company on that April night, judging by the medley of shout and song that rang out from its upper windows.
The fiddler, mounting up the steps that led to the door, gave a few knocks with special emphasis. To this there was no response. Laughing silently, he waited awhile, hearkening; then suddenly betook himself to his violin, at its hight pitch. Too much engrossed with their own music, the first-floor revellers paid no heed to knocks or notes; but below there were immediate stirrings; the bolts screeched under a hasty hand.
"Ach! you, Geigel-Onkel!" cried the hostess, as she stood revealed on the threshold. "You will have your joke! We thought it was the police commissary's rap! Ah, Heavens! what times these are! One's heart is in one's throat all day, all night."
She clasped her hands upon her bosom, but suddenly catching sight of the rider, forgot to pant that she might the better stare.
"'Tis but a new brother of mine," said the fiddler carelessly. "Send the Kerl for his horse. So you have some of the boys here? Well, I bring news for them! Come, comrade, you must be weary."
In the kitchen, amid otherwise pleasing surroundings, their sense of smell was offended by an extraordinary reek of stale wine, presently traceable, it seemed, to a postilion in dilapidated uniform, who was ensconced within the glow of the hearth.
The man's high collar and braided jacket were open for the freer intercourse of throat and can; he winked impudently at Fiddle-Hans, and had a truculent roll of the eyes for Steven.
"Interception of the King's mail—lése majesté—crime of the first category—punishment capital," observed he, with some pride, in answer to the young man's astonished look.
"The punishment includes all accessory to the act," suggested Fiddle-Hans pleasantly.
"Not the victim of coercion," stated the postilion with serene indifference.
He turned his tankard upside down as a hint to the hostess. She, poor thing, seemed to regard these doings as a hare may the trap that clutches her pad.
"The gentlemen are upstairs," she said, and wiped the dampness from her lip with the comer of her apron.
The gentlemen upstairs now began again to make their presence uproariously patent.
"The Brotherhood are apparently having a little argument," quoth Fiddle-Hans, with a slight smile.
"For Heaven's sake go up and quiet them, if you can! We shall have the gendarmes!" groaned the hostess.
"Now, comrade," said the fiddler to Steven, one foot upon the narrow stairs, "I will now introduce you into nobler company than ever. I have made you known to the newest King and the oldest Burgrave in the world. To-night you shall become acquaint with the offspring of a nation in chains—heroes, my little Count, no less. Patriots of the first water!"
Count Kilmansegg was conscious that the corners of his high-born lips drooped. The patriotism of this Westphalia, the convulsions of this tin kettle on a mere corner of the vast Napoleonic fire—the pot-house heroes that roared their enthusiasm into the night to the clink of the can——!
There was a twinkle in the musician's eye that seemed to mock his words. He went nimbly up the stair, and his companion followed with the heavy foot of indifference.
A drunken shout greeted the entrance of Fiddle-Hans. Steven stood on the threshold, his disdainful lip curling into ever more open scorn at the sight with greeted them:—three dishevelled youths, in different humours of intoxication, extravagantly costumed according to the taste of the militant Studiosus: tunics of velvet, shabby but much-befrogged; jack-boots; gigantic spurs that had, probably, never pressed horse's sides; poetically open collars; uncut hair; tobacco-pouch and rapier on belt; china pipes, six feet long, tasselled with Fatherland colours. A squat individual, exuberantly bearded, sprawled at the head of the table, expostulating with vehemence; he was embracing a can of wine, and defending it with drawn spadroon against the other two, who—the one with uproarious laughter, the other with tipsy solemnity—were making futile attempts to wrest it from his possession. The table was strewn with letter? and papers.
No sooner did the hirsute Bursch perceive Fiddle-Hans that he abandoned both sword and can, and staggering to his feet, opened wide his arms.
"Welcome, brother—master—friend!" exclaimed he dithyrambically.
"Salve!" then cried the laughing student, pounced upon the abandoned can and, neglecting the glass at his elbow, buried his impertinent, sandy face in its depths. Whereupon the melancholy third, whose long, black hair fell about a cadaverous countenance, sank into his chair.
"Vilis est hominis natura——" lamented he; then suddenly broke into the vernacular and shook his fist at the drinker: "Thou rag!"
"Salve, fratres!" said the fiddler, by no means surprised, it seemed, at his reception, but neatly avoiding the threatened embrace. "How beautiful it is," he went on, "to see the saviours of their country at work upon her interests, even when the rest of the world sleeps!" and he pointed to the letters as he spoke.
An inflamed but exceedingly alert eye was here fixed upon Steven over the rim of the can.
"Prudentia!" cried the drinker, flung down the vessel and ran forward—"A stranger among us!"
With a bellow the bearded one lurched for his weapon:
"A stranger? … Pix intrantibus!"
The weeper profited of the excitement to seize, in his turn, upon the abandoned vessel.
"Nay," said Fiddle-Hans, arresting the double onslaught with outstretched arms. "Pax intrantibus be it—we are friends!"
Steven stood in the doorway, sneering. In his ill temper he would have found a pungent satisfaction in laying flat the drunken couple—and no doubt, with the science cultivated in Jackson's London rooms, would, despite his wound, easily have accomplished the thought. He made a movement forward. But the fiddler held him at arm's length; held him still more, it seemed, by that strange authority he exercised no lees over King Jerome's rebels than over King Jerome himself.
"Peace, brother Peter—peace, most learned doctor in herhâ, I bring a friend, I say, a new brother, my comrade, a noble Austrian who, by the way, is half an Englishman, and thus as bitter a foe to the tyrant as your most Germanic selves. I introduce:—Count Waldorf-Kilmansegg—Herr Paul Oster, 'Mossy-head,' emeritus swordsman, Senior of the Great Westphalic conspiracy. Behold, Count, the true German garb, the type of manly beauty! Behold this Barbarossa head! Behold the sword, in short (if I may so express myself), of a great patriotic movement. And here," turning, with a fresh gesture of ceremony, "we have the brain, the tongue, the acute eye: in other words, Herr Theophilus Schmeeling, legal doctor, a jurist fresh from all his honours at Goettingen—and the third …?" He looked interrogation at the black-haired student, who was slowly discussing the remains of the wine. The jurist, surprisingly alive to the situation, here answered briskly for his melancholy comrade, who was still absorbed and absorbing:
"Johannis Stempel, Sanctæ Theologiæ Studiosus. The moral guide, we may say, of our movement. An 'Ancient House,' also a faithful heart—a good labourer in the vineyard—but," he added, chuckling, "apt to be weinerisch im Wein, whiny over the wine."
He perpetrated his atrocious quip with a wink of little red eyes.
Count Waldorf-Kilmansegg found some pleasure in bowing three times with ironical ceremony. But Fiddle-Hans took up the tale again with a dry disregard of any possibility of humour.
"Here we are, in the heart of a great conspiracy, and not one of us but risks his head by so much as merely looking on! The Sword, the Law, the Church. 'Tis a conspiracy well headed!"
As he waved his hand, Steven's eyes were directed towards the table, and he realised that the papers lying in such disorder were the contents of the mail-bag that hung on the theologian's chair. His thoughts went back to the dilapidated courier downstairs: "Crime of the first category," had said that official.
"Bah!" cried the Jurist, "Jerome does not kill; he but fleeces his little flock, as all the world knows."
"Your pardon, doctor," retorted the fiddler, with a fine incisiveness in his tone. "The most paternal government makes an example now and again. And the head of one Carl Schill is now affixed, minus its body, on the toll-gate of Helmstadt. But reassure yourselves, the odious French invention of Dr. Guillotin has not yet superseded your old Germanic square-sword; your heads would be hacked off in the heroic style. Immense consolation!" "Your pardon, doctor," retorted the fiddler, with a fine incisiveness in his tone. "The most paternal government makes an example now and again. And the head of one Carl Schill is now affixed, minus its body, on the toll-gate of Helmstadt. But reassure yourselves, the odious French invention of Dr. Guillotin has not yet superseded your old Germanic square-sword; your heads would be hacked off in the heroic style. Immense consolation!"
"Augh!" cried Barbarossa, and sank into his seat at the head of the table, clasping his middle, as if a sober sickness had fallen upon him with these tidings. His very beard seemed to turn pale. But presently it flamed again with a revulsion of anger:
"What the hangman! How is one to manage these fools? They sit and soak and sop and suck, and enough to twist twenty necks on the table before them. I told them so, just now, when I wished to put the wine away."
"The can is empty," here intoned the theologic Studiosus, after the manner of one giving out a psalm. Nunc est bibendum—Aut bibe aut abi!"
The Senior growled like a dog in his beard, but the Jurist intervened. "Content ye," he said softly. "I'll to the letters, and here's a cool head will help me. Will you not, Geigel-Hans—good Geigel-Hans? And we shall but crack a bottle between us, just to clear our brains. Shall we not, musician of my heart?"
"Yes; aut bibe aut abi—sauf oder lauf—drink or slink," asserted the Divine afresh.
"Doctorlein," said the musician suavely, "I am with you. And the devil's own head you must have," he pursued, looking at the Jurist with a kind of admiration; "for I'll be sworn you've drunk as much as the other two put together—but I pray you, a word first. Wherefore the King's mail?"
"Your request is reasonable," responded the other in fuddled verbosity. "Providus, homo sagaz … The defendant's request is allowable, worthy Senior.—Are you defendant, by the way, or pursuer?"
"Accomplice," said the fiddler quietly, sitting down and gathering a sheaf of letters into his hand. "To the point again, brother: why the King's mail?"
"A batch of warrants out against the Brotherhood. And here," the student slapped his greasy tunic, "you behold equity contravening judgments: legal sagacity tripping up edicts; the true principle—for if your lawyer is not the antidote to the law, what is he? Answer me that! Ah, here comes the wine! No more cans, but bottles. Our landlady knows how to treat gentlemen. Nay, nay, Pastorlein, get you to sleep again and dream of your first sermon. There is work to be accomplished here. Mrs. Hostess, give him small-beer in the can—he will never know the difference!"
Fiddle-Hans, who had rapidly sorted the letters in his hand, raised his eyes and cast a look about him. The Senior, sunk in a heap upon his chair, was staring straight before him with a glowering eye, and evidently in the first stage of drunken stupefaction. The aspirant Divine was whimpering over the strangely inferior taste of his tipple. Steven, leaning against the whitewashed walls with folded arms, stood looking upon the scene, weary, arrogant, detached.
"Hey, Sir Count," said the fiddler then, with one of his rare sweet smiles, "what say you—a glass of wine? No? Why, then, what will your lordship do while we manipulate affairs of State … in this Cabinet Noir?"
For the life of him Steven could never display haughtiness to his strange companion, however dubious might seem his proceedings. Too much he knew of him by this time, yet too little.
"Nay," said he, giving him back a faint smile. "I see a couch yonder. I will try a sleep, till the State of Westphalia is secured—or undone—for I am woefully tired."
"The couch? Right," said the fiddler, nodding. "Yes, go to sleep, comrade, and dream. Here with that heap, brother conspirer. And now, listen: the wise commit no unnecessary crimes. We have no business with the private correspondence of the good folks of Cassel. But here is a document with an official seal, and addressed to the Commissary of Police, Goettingen."
He tossed the letter across the table. There was a shout of triumph from the Jurist.
The couch was clean enough, and Steven had flung himself on it with a whole-souled desire to shut out a sordid, unsatisfactory world. But sleep, the jade, is not to be had for the asking. The maudlin whines of the Theologian, the stertorous breathing of Barbarossa, the Jurist's ceaseless flow of language, the crackling of the papers, the fiddler's very mutism, were all so many goads to drive him into ever more feverish wakefulness. Against the hard hair bolster his heart-beats resounded ever stronger in his ear. "Sidonia, Sidonia!" they said, in maddening persistence. And then, as in a sort of vision, he would see the Don Juan, King Jerome, with his flickering eyes, and start with a spasm of anger to a glaring consciousness of the mean room, the guttering lights, the sickening reek of wine and smoke, the insufferable company.
"Hey—Herr Jurist, halt, halt!" came the fiddler's voice suddenly. "Leave that letter alone. That is, beyond any doubt, a private letter."
"Nay, 'tis addressed to the Arch-Enemy, and no correspondence with tyrants is private. Besides," with a grin, "it's one of those new-fashioned French envelopes, and the wafer has come unsealed in my very hand The wise man—hic—neglects no hint of Providence. Hey da! what have we here? O thou little son of Venus, what a sweet slip of rosy paper! what a darling little claw of a hand! (The King has a fine taste in doves. … I'll grant him that!) Bah, Sardanapalus! It is enough to turn any man republican. I am for the rights of man. Tyrants shall have no monopoly of dovecotes. Hum! neither date nor place: a cautious dove! Chirp, chirp!" The creature pressed the sheet to his tipsy lips with disgusting lushness. "Would I held the darling here! Hark! what does she say?—'Sir' (A cold beginning: her feathers seem ruffled!),—'I ought to be very angry with you; but, alas! anger is not to be commanded any more than love. How well it would be for us women were it otherwise!' (Pretty dear! Ambiguous as a lawyer's statement!) 'Yet I feel that you must be forgiven, if but for the sake of duty—for I should be indeed disloyal to persist in rebellion against my lawful lord.—Betty!' (O Betty, I thought better of you! Tamed so suddenly?) 'P.S.' (Aha! now we shall come to the true meaning, to the kernel, medulla, medudulla esculenta, of the rosy note.)—'Understand: I promise nothing. But understand also you are forgiven. You may come and receive your pardon—if no more!'"
The reader's mouth was opened upon a fresh flood of dithyrambics, when the fiddler's voice rose with sudden peremptoriness: "Pass me that letter!"
There fell a silence between the two. Fiddle-Hans, his lean jaws propped upon his hands, sat staring at the pink sheet. The lawyer fell upon a fresh pile of letters with monkeylike mischief and activity. The Senior, supposed director of this Cabinet Noir, snored lustily. Its religious guide and philosopher was still pondering over the perversity of his liquor.
"'How beautiful it is to see the saviours of their country at work upon her interests!'"
"Ha!" cried the Jurist, with a sudden shout, "another missive from the pink dove—same hand, same paper and cover, and addressed to no less a person than the great Chancellor Wellenshausen! Never draw such angry brows upon me, Minnesinger mine. I tell you, this woman positively cannot seal a letter!"
Steven lifted his head from the pillow. He heard the rustle of the opening sheet in the student's hands; then came another crow:
"Excellent, upon my cerevies, excellent! Listen, man. Whatever your faults are, you can laugh.
"'Hôtel de l'Aigle Impérial.
          NEVER!
Betty, Burgravine of Wellenshausen.'
"Thunder! 'tis his wife! It is a whole story a la Kotzebus. Do you hear, Fiddler-Hans? 'Tis his wife. 'Never!' she writes to him. Oh, the dove has claws and beak, and she can peck!"
Fiddle-Hans, without betraying any of the exuberant mirth expected from him, leaned over and, with neat decision, plucked the letter from the other's hands. And as the Jurist stared, wavering confusedly upon offence: "Go on with your work, friend," said the musician, smiling. "That second warrant has not yet been discovered. The night is waning. It may be well to be fairly on your road to Goettingen before the hue and cry——"
Steven, whose mind had become keenly on the alert at the first mention of Betty's name, had turned again on his hard couch with a general relaxation of mind and body. As soon as the student's indiscretion had made him master of the Burgravine's address, and of the consoling fact that she and Sidonia—for where the Burgravine was, surely also was Sidonia—were not at the Palace, and that it was Betty—frivolous, pretty Betty—who was the prey marked down by the wanton eye of Jerome—there had come a kind of relief. He must have fallen into slumber, for he was suddenly back in the old Burg of Wellenshausen, with Sidonia, his little bride. She wag sitting in the high-backed chair, in all her wedding finery, even as he had last seen her. But she was smiling upon him. … "Uncle has given me your letter. It was all a mistake, a great mistake," she was saying to him. Then, as he sprang forward to take her in his arms, suddenly, with the fantastic horror of dreams, her face changed, became red, distorted, even as the face of the vinous student who was violating the secrecy of private letters. Her voice changed, too; grew raucous, broken with insupportable laughter. "You never loved me," it said; "that is now clear to me. You meant well with me, I know; but it is not right—such a marriage as ours cannot be right, either before God or man. Had I understood before, I should have died rather than consent. But it is not yet too late. Our marriage is no marriage. I have taken advice, and very soon we may both be free. No—I will not see you. I will never see you again."
Steven sat up straight, and even at that moment there was an uproar. Fiddle-Hans, creeping round the table like a cat, had fallen silently upon the student, and was paralysing, with a grasp of steel, the hand that held the letter.
The Jurist bellowed as if the executioner were already upon him, and "Mossy-Head," waking up, shouted "Treachery!" while, as the clamour had given the finishing touch to his unstability, the Theologian, clutching the once more empty can, fell, a sodden heap on the floor. The Senior flung his drunken bulk blindly against the fiddler; Steven, in his turn, leaped from the couch.
Even with one hand (his left arm was still in a sling) anything so intoxicated was easily disposed of. He picked the Sword of the conspiracy off Fiddle-Hans, who thereupon, finding himself free to deal with the Jurist, possessed himself at once of the letter. His thin checks were faintly touched with scarlet, and his fine nostrils worked with quick breathing; otherwise he seemed unmoved. Steven, therefore, was all the more astonished to hear him exclaim with utmost disgust—utmost scorn and anger:
"Palsambleu! but I am weary of this! Drunken, sottish swine! Out with them to some sty! Roll your fellow out, Count, and down the stairs. If your shoulder smarts, you have sound legs at least … and riding-boots!"
The wine, which had seemed so long merely to stimulate him, here suddenly took melting effect upon the student of law. He twisted in the fiddler's grasp, flung both his arms round his neck, and embracing him with the ejaculation: "thou dear, ancient one!" showed an instant inclination to slumber on his shoulder.
"Pah!" cried Fiddle-Hans, and disengaged himself with what seemed to Steven surprising vindictiveness. He then trundled his man into the passive. The door of an empty bedroom, flooded with moonlight, stood suggestively open; here he cast the creature from him, and threw sword and scabbard and pipe on top of the grunting body.
Steven, in perfect gravity, followed his friend's example; but, with more mercy, he cast his burden on the billows of the feather bed.
"There is yet another," quoth the fiddler, dusting his hands. He also, it seemed, failed to see humour in the situation. Disgust was upon him. He was Fiddle-Hans no longer, but a grand seigneur with a vengeance, offended in all his Versailles refinement. He led Steven back into the room. "We shall have to carry the him. Take you his feet, while I his greasy poll."
The Theologian had not even a grunt. They laid him beside the Jurist in the moonlight—with a certain effect of symmetry, like fish on a slab.
Fiddle-Hans locked the door on the outside and pocketed the key. A second, then he and Steven stood together in the darkness of the landing. Except for the snores from within the room, and similar sounds rising from below, the inn of "The Three Ways" was wrapped in stillness.
"That is the courier, I take it," said the wanderer. "Did I not say, my noble friend, that I would bring you into the company of heroes? Listen to it. Thus do we conspire in Westphalia!"
When they re-entered the room, the musician went instantly to the window, and, opening it wide, stood inhaling in deep draughts the clean breath of the woods. It was then that stillest, most mysterious hour of the whole circle—the hour before dawn. The night sky held a strange depth of blue against the garish yellow lamplight within; the stars were paling. With head thrown back, the vagabond stood gazing upwards. There were moods of his strange comrade that Steven had learned to respect. He therefore neither spoke nor approached; but, after completing the purification of the room by the simple process of turning out all the cans and bottles, he sat down and waited, absorbed in his own painful reflections. At last Fiddle-Hans gave a heavy sigh and, leaving the window open, sat down facing his companion. The contents of the rifled mail-bag lay between them.
The musician's face looked pale and weary and severe. Still in silence he began to toss such packets as had escaped violation back into the bag.
"Will you give me my letter, please?" said Steven dully. Then his youth and hot blood betrayed him into a bitter cry: "O, I am miserable!"
The older man glanced at him from under his eyebrows. It was an odd thing—for what has he, after all, but a poor, half-crazed, broken gentleman?—yet there was a certain smile of this Fiddle-Hans which made the world seem warm to the rich and high-born Steven Lee, Count Waldorf-Kilmansegg.
"He had the great big bag upon his back."
"O blessed unhappiness of youth!" cried the musician in his old manner, half mocking, half passionate. "Did you but know it, these pangs, these sighs will be sweeter to the memory of our old age than your youth's most satisfied ecstasies! Here is your letter boy. Go, weep and rage upon it, if you will, with all the fury of your checked aspiration. … What! you open your arms, and she is not ready forthwith to fall into them! You condescend to run after her, and she does not instantly stand still to be caught! You thought that to-morrow's sun would see you with your bride in your embrace, and behold! you have still to woo her! Bewail your hard fate, you are indeed to be pitied!"
"Would you not like your fiddle?" cried Steven, as he caught the half-folded sheet that the musician tossed towards him, "that you may set my folly to a tune? When you want to sermonise, I had rather you did it on the strings, if you don't mind."
For a second. Fiddle-Hans seemed about to resent the pettish speech as an impertinence. A frown gathered; but, with a short laugh, broken by another deep sigh, he resumed his air of sad serenity:
"Nay," said he, stroking the strings of the instrument that Steven was pushing towards him, and then laying his hand flat upon them to still the wailing sound, "did I make music to-night, it would not be music for your youth, but that of hopeless sorrow. Fool!" said Fiddle-Hans, fixing his mad, brilliant eyes upon Steven, "is she not alive, she whom yon love? and you prate to me—to me, of unhappiness!"
Though the words were harsh, his tone was strangely gentle. Had Steven dared, he would have put out his hand to touch the speaker. But he did not dare, and it was well. The wind rustled through the trees; there came a stir and a murmur from the woods; the purple, blue depth of the sky quivered with pallid changes.
"It is the dawn," said the fiddler in a worn voice. "Get you to that couch again, for you must sleep, and we have a day of action before us. Aye, take that letter with you and lay it under your cheek. If it seems cruel, have not her fingers touched it? Ah! if you but knew from what a wounded heart, perhaps, sprang those reproachful words! Why, if she has pride, man, will she not be the fitter mate for you? And if she will have naught of a loveless marriage, is it not because she would have love? Poor little Sidonia … who only yesterday was a child! You have made a woman of her; see that you know how to meet her woman's measure."
Steven stood by the couch, palpitating to the words, to the golden visions they opened before his fevered eyes. … Sidonia, the child, with her yellow plaits of hair, and her eyes brown and green, clear, yet deep, like the brook under the trees. … Sidonia, whose lips he had once, only once, kissed; who had smiled at him under her bridal veil. …
Fiddle-Hans had said he would make no music; but it was the music of the gods his words had evoked for Steven in the dawn. Presently the older man looked up from his dreary abstraction. Steven, stretched on the sofa in all the abandonment of young fatigue, was sleeping like a child; his beautiful young face, upturned towards the dawn, was smiling. The watcher's set features relaxed into tenderness.
"O bella Gioventú. …!" he murmured. Then he looked down at the scattered sheets before him, and his lips twisted in bitter mockery. Here had been a night's work of petty crime under the fine-sounding title of patriotism and national conspiracy. But, now, might not some good be brought out of it, after all? How sound the fellow slept! Not that he, the wanderer, envied any sleeper but him that would never wake. Well, to work!
He took up, with contemptuous fingers, Burgravine Betty's easy lines of surrender to the royal Don Juan. It was clear that she was vastly flattered at the thought of becoming one of the mil e tre. But Butterfly Betty had a husband. …! Yes, the butterfly should be saved, if it were only for the sake of the pure child who had, as yet, no better shelter than those fluttering, gaudy wings.
He re-read the letter destined to Jerome, and smiled. Then he turned over the other sheet with his forefinger. The pregnant "Never!" sprang again at him out of the page, in Betty's delicate flourish.
The fiddler smiled again.
Through the open window a level shaft of light struck the sleeper's forehead. Fiddle-Hans rose to draw the wooden shutter. but Steven frowned and awoke.
Without, the forest was one green song. It was spring's busiest day: such chirping and fluttering and matings, such pushing of blades and buds, such strivings of sappy shoots, such buzzings of new-winged flights, such flurry and scurry of soft-furred things were going on in those dappled glades!
It seemed shame to be sullenly sleepy on such a morning. Steven breathed the bright air sharply, and his ill-humour vanished
"That is well," said Fiddle-Hans, as if the young man had spoken. "Nature sets us the example; what work she has to do, she does happily. Be brisk, comrade; we have also a task before us, and an immediate. The mail-bag is ready. We must now start the courier again on his interrupted duty. Heaven knows in what state we shall find the clown! We shall probably have to pump on him! … Then, to Cassel."
Melodious snores were yet intercrossing each other, in finer rhythm than ever, in the locked bedroom as they passed down the stairs. But the postilion was awake, although he still lay full length on the bench, with face upturned to the rafters, staring stupidly at a bunch of herbs immediately above him, with an eye totally devoid of speculation.
Early as it was, the thrifty household was already astir. A fire was crackling pleasantly in the huge hearth, and a fresh sound of water running came from an inner room. The host of "The Three Ways" stood in the wide-open house-door looking into the empty road. He turned quickly at the sound of their steps and grinned in jovial greeting as he saw Fiddle-Hans.
"Good morning, Mr. Host," said the musician. "Fine doings have you had here the night!"
"He held the letter at arm's length."
"Students' tricks, students' tricks," said the host, suddenly uncomfortable, and slouching back into the kitchen as he spoke. His small eyes blinked furtively away from the sight of the mail-bag, which Fiddle-Hans now heaved on the table. "Bah!" pursued he, "I knew nothing! I busy not my head over gentry's doings or students' pranks. I go to sleep. They concern me not." Then he burst into a forced chuckle. "Popped him into a wine-cask, they did, in the back yard of the 'Bunch of Grapes,' up in Cassel, where the fellow takes his nip before going his round. And they sat on the cask, the three of them, singing and smoking their pipes, as they drove past, with the French soldiers who looked on and laughed, out of the town gates, with not a finger lifted to stop them. 'Pon my soul, it was a fine joke! The cart's out yonder, and the cask, too!" he added, and chucked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the sunlit yard, shaking the while with a laugh that might have struck the observer as a trifle forced.
"Your jokers are still enjoying the sleep of a blameless conscience," said Fiddle-Hans. "They lie in your best bedroom, Mr. Landlord. I locked them in, lest your good wine should lead their innocence and light-heartedness into new jokes. … that might be less excellent." He took the key from his pocket and tossed it on the table. "Release the birds when you think fit," he added.
The landlord took up the key with some alacrity. Fiddle-Hans remained a while musingly fixing the outstretched form of the postilion; then a faint laugh shook him.
"In a wine cask," commented he. "A right old German jest, not without its gross humour. …! He did suggest they had kidnapped him: the creature actually spoke truth!"
Mine host almost perpetrated a wink, but checked himself and merely coughed. "O, these students!" he reiterated vaguely.
"No wonder the beast smells like a bottle-brush," cried Steven suddenly, curling his fine nose. Here, then, was the explanation of that stench of stale wine which had sickened him in the close room the night before, and which, even now, the sweeping fresh breeze could scarcely conquer.
"The High-Born has perfect reason," cried the innkeeper; "for the rascal is sopped, within and without. If you squeezed him, he would run vinegar. Well, so long as I am paid—" was the philosophic parenthesis. "But the wife has shaken him in vain. There he lies, and it were perhaps as wholesome he should jog." His eye moved uneasily towards the mail-bag. "And what is to be done with that?" it seemed to ask.
"Quite so," said Fiddle-Hans gravely. "Has he not his letters to deliver? They will be one post late; but in Cassel, nowadays, no one is so mighty particular. He must be freshened up, I think. Here, Mr. Landlord, I and my comrade will bring him to the trough, and you shall do the pumping. We'd better off with his jacket first, comrade. Never look so doubtful, Mr. Landlord. If His Majesty hears of it, you may be decorated. Think of that!"
"Saints forbid!" said the host, turning pale, and sketching a cross on his vast apron-bib. "If Jerome heard of it, I might be shot."
"Nay," said Fiddle-Hans cheerfully, "you may take my word for it: the hours are counted within which there will be either decorations or executions in the name of Jerome. But, meanwhile, to our duty! Never look so disgusted, little comrade. This is a vile beast, as you said; but in a minute we shall have him purified."
It was, indeed, a purified courier, a chastened and subdued mail-bearer, who trotted his way back to Cassel, astride that self-same horse that had dragged him forth in his reeking prison the night before. He had the great bag on his back (undiminished save for two warrants and one private missive—one, indeed, that had already reached its proper destination), a gold piece in his pocket, and a plausible tale of violence and rescue to tell, should it be required of him.
In the best bedchamber of the Aigle Impérial at Cassel, the Burgravine Betty von Wellenshausen awoke, and looked out upon her surroundings with a sleepy smile of complacency.
She yawned and stretched herself deliciously. It was good to wake in Cassel and hear the bustle of life about her, the ceaseless movement of the inn courtyard, the horn of postilions, the clattering chariots, the gay French voices of the guardsmen calling for their morning coffee, the distant joyousness of military music on the breeze, instead of the rarefied loneliness of her Wellenshausen dungeon up on the crags, where the morning might find her higher than the clouds themselves, and with perhaps scarce the beat of a bird's wing about the awful stillness of her mist-enveloped turret.
Yes, it was du dernier agréable in this gay Cassel—Betty's thoughts ran naturally to French—to wake up to the prospect of a day that was likely to hold the most new and diverting experience. … Positively Jerome was a charming fellow.
It was perhaps a trifle strong to ask for a secret rendezvous on the strength of one meeting; but Betty did not regret her answer. Without being at all prepared to yield—gracious powers, was one not to enjoy oneself a little?. … after three years of Wellenshausen!
In the midst of these gossamer resolves, the door creaked apart.
The Burgravine rubbed her eyes and thought she must be still dreaming, for in the aperture peered the heavy countenance, the bald head of her husband—yes, actually the Burgrave of Wellenshausen himself!
She sat up, her lace cap awry upon the starting dark curls, her cherry mouth open, her eyes round and staring, the very image of astonished indignation. With ponderous tip-toe tread, not unlike that of a wild boar stepping out of covert, the husband entered the room. He closed the door behind him and stood smiling, half timidly, half fatuously. Betty's clenched hands flew up in the air and down again on the sheets.
"How dare you!" she gasped. "Did I not forbid you——?"
"Oh, come now, Betty, my little wife, my little dove, I've startled you. You were asleep, angel? But when I got your dear little letter——"
"My … my dear little letter?" Betty shrieked, eyes rounder, curls more startled than ever. She sat rigid. He had bombarded her with abject appeals, positive bellows on paper; but Betty's reply had been firm—very firm.
"My dear little letter?" she repeated under her breath once more. Then, as she recalled the missive in question, she was shaken with an irresistible giggle. Her face dimpled all over. The Burgrave, gazing on her amorously, thought her the most ravishing, the most maddening of beings ever created for the delight or torment of man.
"Your letter, my Betty, of this morning," he murmured, drew a pink sheet scored with delicate writing, from his breast pocket, and carried it to his lips. "What wonder that, upon receipt of this, I could not delay coming to my sweet Betty a minute longer!" He held the letter at arm's length. "Your wifely, your dutiful words: 'I should indeed be disloyal to persist in rebellion against my lawful lord.'"
Now, at a flash, the situation was laid clear before her:—by some inconceivable carelessness she had put her correspondence of two nights ago in the wrong covers. … A plague on this new-fangled French invention of envelopes!
She shut her gaping lips with a snap, and swallowed down the cry that rose to them. Rapidly she tried to recall that elegant little epistle which had given her so much satisfaction; and then all other feelings were lost in a gush of gratitude to the Providence that had suggested those delicately ambiguous terms which saved the situation—saved Betty, Burgravine of Wellenshausen, from irreparable disgrace.
She turned and smiled adorably on the Burgrave.
"Monster!" she cooed, "do you deserve forgiveness?"
There was brilliant sunshine as Steven rode in at the gates of Cassel. The fiddler tramped beside him. But once within the town, he halted, waved his hand, and called out:
"Good-bye."
"How?" cried Steven, drawing rein, his heart suddenly sinking at this unexpected parting.
"Ah, little bridegroom!" said Fiddle-Hans, "it is even so. And a pretty figure," he said, "should I be, to shadow your lordship's magnificence in this gay Cassel!"
Nevertheless, he stepped across the cobbles, laid his hand on the horse's neck, and looked up at the young man; all mockery was fled out of his tired, kind eyes.
"You are an honest lad," he whispered, "and you love her—go, tell her the naked truth."
At the Imperial Eagle, Sidonia, in her little gable-room, sat alone according to her wont. She had told her false bridegroom (for had not Aunt Betty irrefutably demonstrated that he had dared to marry her without love, out of pity?) that she would never see him again, that her marriage was no marriage.
And yet, as she sat, she held her wedding-ring close to her finger, as though she loved it. And ever she watched the street, almost as if she expected to see some dear one coming.