# Ainslee's Magazine/A Prince of Marionettes

“IN this number you have read three short novelettes, each remarkable of its kind. ... “A Prince of Marionettes,” a charming romance in which I. A. R. Wylie proves to our satisfaction that “Zenda” stories still strongly appeal if only they are good “Zenda” stories.” —From "Talks with Ainslee's Readers" in the issue.
A PRINCE OF MARIONETTES
By I. A. R. Wylie
HIS excellency sat upright in his corner of the box, one hand clenched lightly on the plush-upholstered vamp, the other resting on his knee. Beyond bending his head to catch the remarks of his neighbor, the wife of a Balkan prime minister, very décollettée and heavily incrusted with diamonds, he scarcely once changed his pose, and the most careful scrutiny of his rather waxen countenance would not have revealed either amusement or boredom—or, indeed, any recognizable human emotion. In the intervals when the court orchestra, half hidden behind a bank of flowers, made its solemn bow in the direction of the grand-ducal box and took its departure, his excellency's eyes swept the theater, from the gallery, with its congested pack of gaping plebeians, to the sparkling, bowing, rustling grand circle, and thence to the grand-ducal box itself. There his glance lingered, and the prolongation of his unostentatious gaze might have been taken as significant of satisfaction.
The young Grand Duchess Louise and her newly found prince consort sat in their corners of their box, and maintained the unmoved bearing that is the one talent required of modern royalty. Possibly they were sustained by the knowledge that the real pivot of the situation was formed by his excellency rather than by themselves. The beautiful grand duchess, with her golden hair and her transparent skin and her blue dreamer's eyes, and her big, stocky, wooden-looking English husband, were just amusing puppets dancing at the end of his excellency's string. For his excellency ruled in the Grand Duchy of Lunéville—a little patch of the world that really exists, though necessarily under a nom de plume so far as this narrative is concerned, and is so tenderly coveted by its neighbors that its position resembles that of a much courted beauty amid a crowd of suitors.
His excellency, by dint of keeping one hand on his knee and the other on the plush vamp at all public functions for twenty years, and never losing his impassivity even before his valet, had won a reputation which wavered between that of Machiavelli and that of Bismarck. Even the bigwigs from the courts of the great suitors were rather afraid of him, not knowing quite what his unalterable moral and physical pose concealed; and the Lunévillians themselves, quiet, self-satisfied folk, would have gone down fighting to the last man rather than lose their diplomatic jewel.
In a word, his excellency was a little great man in a little great principality.
And now he stood at the zenith of his career. He had solved the problem that had secretly worried the good Lunévillians ever since, eighteen years ago, the toy cannons on the castle mound had announced the fact that the grand duchess had given birth to a daughter, and consequently—since Lunéville cared nothing for the Salic law—to a future ruler. The problem had been made no easier by the fact that it had fair hair, blue eyes, a transparent skin, and a romantic temperament—characteristics almost unique in the royal catalogues of the period.
The solution had been abnormally difficult to find. It had to be young, Protestant, tolerable, morally and physically. It had to be somebody and nobody in a breath—that is to say, of high birth and no importance. It could not belong to a reigning house, because other reigning houses would have shown temper; it could not be too inferior, because that would have insulted the quality of the problem; and it could not be too superior, because it would have been highly undesirable if it had entered Lunéville with any other feelings than those of humility and appreciation.
The search had been long and arduous, but there at last the result sat—the younger son of an impoverished English duke adorned with a new title, tightly bound in the pale-blue uniform of the Lunéville chevau-légers, rather red in the face, and inexpressibly wooden.
The Balkan lady touched his excellency on the arm with her fan.
“My best felicitations, cher comte. Quite a beautiful young man, considering. Perhaps a little—how shall I say?—truculent—a little sullen. But that will pass, no doubt, under her royal highness' softening influence——”
“He will be managed,” his excellency returned, with his perfect, rather mysterious conviction.
Then, in answer to a summons brought by a blue-coated gentleman of the suite, he made his way through the labyrinth of passages to the grand-ducal box and kissed the small, white hand of the grand duchess and bowed to her consort with just the amount of deference and disregard to emphasize delicately their respective positions.
The Grand Duchess Louise looked very radiant. Though his excellency never expressed emotion, he was not incapable of experiencing it, and he was touched by the warmth of the blue eyes and the eager color in the usually pale cheeks.
“Oh, Paul,” she said, in a swift undertone, “this is the night of all my life! How shall I ever thank you?”
“Your royal highness is too good.”
Rather stiffly he rejected the old-time and childish intimacy, but he continued to feel touched. After all, she was amazingly young. Thanks for the acquisition sitting silent and glum on his right seemed to him a little exaggerated, and also a little surprising. There had been considerable difficulty on both sides before the problem and its solution had been brought to terms, and now this sudden burst of warmth on the part of the former was a trifle disconcerting.
“But your royal highness' happiness is mine,” he added gravely. “I need no other thanks.”
She nodded, not so much in response to him as in confirmation of her own thoughts. She looked, at that moment, ethereally lovely, ethereally happy.
“I have always dreamed of this night,” she said. “I have dreamed of flowers and music, but never of such music and flowers as you have given me. It is all color and light and life; and the people seem glad. They look at me—or do I imagine it?—as if they really cared for me. Do they?”
“They do,” he answered. “Who could help it?” He glanced out of the corner of his eye at her consort, who sat staring unconcernedly down at the fauteuils with their lines of many-colored uniforms. “And the people feel themselves at one with your royal highness, in happiness and in sorrow. No ruler has a greater reward than that.”
She was silent for a moment. Her blue eyes—intensely blue even in the artificial light—passed over the house and came to rest, as his excellency's had done, on the man beside her, and there they lost color and grew cold and expressionless, as if they were looking at a total stranger.
“I have tried to do my duty—I have tried to win their love,” she said; and then, with a sudden, joyous change of tone, as if she were turning from an unpleasant subject: “Tell me, your excellency, who was it conducted the overture? I have never heard anything so superb—except in my dreams—but the conductor was unknown to me. I could only see his head, but I felt a new life in the music—a new fire. What is his name?”
His excellency smiled his pleasant, unmeaning smile.
“Maubert, from the Russian Opera House, madame. He has come here to present his new opera. A great musician, I am told, though I myself am no judge. To-night he conducts here for the first time.”
“Ah!” She leaned her wonderfully molded chin in the palm of her hand and gazed down dreamily into the empty orchestra. “Yes, I think he must be a very good musician. He has a wonderful head. There is an old Roman statue in my gallery with just such a profile. Ah, you are smiling at me, your excellency! You are thinking that I am not much older than the child who swore to you that she saw fairies hiding under the oak trees in the park. But to-night I must be humored. I have done so much that is practical and political and statesmanlike.” She laughed a little, and though her words had been almost childishly natural and gay, her laughter sounded constrained. “I wish to speak to this Monsieur Maubert,” she added quietly.
His excellency hesitated.
“The second act is about to begin, madame.”
“I shall not keep him long. Won't they be a little patient for me? I must have so much patience!”
His excellency, happening to glance in the direction of the prince consort, thought he perceived a change in the set, blunt-featured face, and the change, by some inexplicable process, hastened his courtly assent.
“As your royal highness wishes.”
He whispered to the prince's attaché, Count Epernay, who whispered to a flunky; and five minutes later Ivan Maubert stood in the shadowy box, his head bent over the grand duchess' white, extended hand. Then he stood upright and bowed to the prince, who nodded at him.
“I have been done too much honor,” he said; but there was neither gratitude nor real humility in his tone—rather, to a finely attuned ear, a note of sarcasm. He stood there and waited, tall, slender, but powerfully knit, the graceful head set finely on the broad shoulders, the dark-featured face composed and watchful. The grand duchess looked up at him, perforce, and his large, intensely living eyes met hers without flinching.
“I have to thank you, monsieur,” she said gravely, and her girlish enthusiasm, mingled with an inherent dignity, had become a sweet, impersonal graciousness. “I have rarely heard such music as I have heard to-night, and music is everything to me—the only thing I love.” She paused a little, and grew more grave, as if holding his steady gaze away from her. “His excellency tells me you are here to produce your new opera, monsieur.”
“That is so, madame. But I dare not hope for much success. It is a long and difficult work.”
His tone implied a frank contempt for the abilities of his hearers. She smiled faintly, without annoyance.
“You must not think too hardly of us, monsieur. Even if we do not understand, we can recognize what is good and beautiful. As for me, I should be glad to hear something of this new work before it is produced. Will you not play me extracts from it—and perhaps explain a little?”
He caught the gentle mockery in her words, and flushed hotly.
“It is as your royal highness commands.”
“One cannot command an artist, monsieur. It is a wish.”
“That is the same thing, madame.”
He frowned at her with his fierce eyes, almost as if in defiance of the courtly phrase, and she held out her hand, still rather grave, even a little troubled.
“It is well, monsieur. His excellency will arrange the time and place. Until then—au revoir.”
He took her hand and kissed it boldly, bowed perfunctorily to the prince consort, and drew back into the shadow. His excellency went with him to the door, murmuring commonplaces; and when he returned to his place, the lights had gone down and the house was hushing itself to silence. His excellency sat well in the background, watchful and invisible. Against the dim glow from the orchestra lights, the grand duchess' profile stood out with exquisite delicacy. She was leaning a little forward, and her eyes rested thoughtfully on the man standing, baton in hand, at the conductor's desk, waiting, with a haughty patience, for the last sound, the last movement, in the hushed audience. She was smiling to herself as a child smiles in anticipation of some great happiness.
At the last moment, just as Maubert held his baton poised, the prince consort shifted his position, and there was a sharp, jarring jangle of sword and spurs. His excellency saw the little grand duchess shrink together, and the man make a heavy, sullen gesture of apology.
And suddenly his excellency found himself intensely sorry for the problem he had so cleverly solved. He detested the solution. He detested the necessity for a solution. He detested this boorish block, so obviously ill at ease in the fanciful uniform, so obviously aloof, so obviously contemptuous of his surroundings, so sullenly indifferent to the fragile, beautiful girl who had become his wife. His excellency detested him very cordially, and on account of this violent emotion, he grew more rigid, more expressionless, and it was only some time later that his passionate eyes moved in the direction of his new-born dislike.
He perceived then that the prince consort was sound asleep. Whereat his excellency, mercifully protected by the darkness, gave vent to his feelings and shrugged his shoulders.
II.
His excellency looked up from the long table on which he had been methodically arranging his state papers, and, true to himself, showed no surprise, merely noting the phenomenon before him as he would have noted a change in the weather. The prince consort stood in front of the long Venetian glass and admired himself. He wore the undress uniform of his regiment—a sky-blue, gold-laced tunic, red riding breeches, and Hessian boots; and in the big, solemn room, with its multitudinous collection of solemn relics from a solemn, comfort-despising period, he stood out in rather pleasing contrast. At any rate, there he was—one hand planted on his hip, the other stroking his close-cropped mustache, a smile of fatuous, exaggerated self-complacency relieving the otherwise immense solemnity of his bearing. He appeared to feel his excellency's scrutiny, for he swung around on his heels with a musical jangle of spurs.
“Well, how do I look?” he asked, in his perfect French, with its English accent.
His excellency bowed.
“Excellently well, sir. The uniform is most becoming to your highness.”
“That's what I thought. Carry it off well, don't I? Altogether, my dear count, I hope you feel I do you credit.”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“Oh, I only meant—I hope you're satisfied. It must have been nervous work choosing me. After all, suppose pale blue hadn't suited my complexion, or suppose I hadn't grasped the full importance of my position here, or suppose I hadn't responded nicely to the receptions I get from my dear subjects—I beg your pardon—my wife's subjects? It might have been awkward for you. You might have lost your world-wide reputation for infallibility.”
His excellency considered for a moment. He was quite able to recognize sarcasm when it was intended, but it was difficult to connect so much mental adroitness with this big, blunt-featured, stolid-looking young man. Moreover, as far as his excellency could see, there was nothing to be sarcastic about. He made a deprecatory gesture.
“Your highness' position is indeed a serious and delicate one,” he admitted gravely. “Hitherto, if 1 may presume to say, your highness has fulfilled the highest hopes of the country.”
“In other words, I have given satisfaction—satisfaction all around.” He came jangling up to the table, and began to disarrange his excellency's papers with a careless, unconscious hand. “And every one owes everything to your excellency! Think alone what my creditors owe you!”
“Oh!” interrupted his excellency.
He gave no indication of being either shocked or annoyed. He merely cut his highness' considerations neatly in half. At the same time, he unostentatiously rescued his papers.
“Surely, sir, these are matters better forgotten.”
The prince consort shook his head with great earnestness.
“Indeed no. I beg your pardon—the papers await my wife's signature, no doubt? As I was about to say, I like to remember—I like to think of my tailor and candlestick maker and all the rest of them going about with a quiet mind on my account. I like to think of my thankful parents and all the relief caused by my departure. In fact, I like to remember, so that I may be properly grateful——”
He broke off, arrested by a sudden stiffening in his excellency's bearing. The double doors behind him had been flung open by two liveried flunkies, and the grand duchess was entering. She was dressed very simply in a black dress of the softest crêpe de Chine, which embraced her slight figure with a delicate gravity and made a counterfoil to the glory of her fair head and pure skin and her shadowy blue eyes. She gave her hand to the two men in turn, and the prince consort bowed over it stiffly, so as to suggest that he had narrowly escaped shaking it.
“Am I very late, count?”
“Indeed no, madame. I was before my time. His highness graciously bore me company.”
“Ah!”
She glanced up from the papers lying under her hand. The prince consort had gone over to the window, but her eyes scarcely considered him. They passed on, and rested dreamily, half wistfully, on the avenue of trees without, on the sunshine that lay like golden water amid their shadows.
“How beautiful it is!” she said, and sighed a little. “Surely there can be no solemn affairs of state on such a day, count?”
“Not many, madame.”
“And none in which I am concerned,” the prince consort suggested. “Have I the permission to withdraw.?”
He looked from one to the other. The grand duchess had taken her seat at the head of the table, her white hands clasped loosely on the carved arms of her chair, her fair head resting against the high back. His excellency stood at her elbow.
“If I might humbly suggest,” he began suavely, “it would be advisable for his highness to remain. After all, it is only right that his highness should familiarize himself with the affairs of the country which is now his own.”
“Oh, by all means,” the prince consort agreed. He came back to the table and sat down at the far end. “I should like to do what is right,” he added.
He folded his hands in front of him and leaned forward a little, as if in close attention, and his excellency bowed his acknowledgment. The grand duchess, after one swift glance at the stolid face across the table, bent her head over the first document before her.
“A pardon, Paul?”
“Yes, madame; a poor woman who stole for her starving family.”
“I should like to sign, Paul.”
“Your royal highness may well do so. At such an auspicious time, it would be taken as a gracious act on the part of your royal highness to distribute happiness among others.”
“To celebrate my own happiness?” she interposed lightly, and scrawled her signature across the parchment. “There—now some one is really happy,” she added, sighing.
His excellency interposed a second document.
“Your royal highness' convocation of parliament.”
At that she smiled with a whimsical despair.
“How terribly serious! And shall I have to read another of your speeches, Paul?”
“I hope your royal highness has never been compelled to utter distasteful sentiments.”
“Never, Paul. I should never feel compelled to do that. No, it's been so pleasant to have all my thoughts put tidy and set forth in such neat order. I tremble to think what would happen if I had to face all those solemn folk without you behind me. There!”
She signed, and his excellency insinuated a third document with much the same cheerful adroitness practiced by physicians in the administration of ill-tasting medicines.
“The new finance budget, madame.”
“Won't you explain a little?”
“It's very dull, madame.”
“Never mind. I'd like to know how much my poor people have to pay, and why. Please!”
His excellency sat down beside her, his bald head close to her fair one, and she listened gravely, her brows faintly puckered, her chin resting on her hand, her eyes lowered to the close-written sheets of the new bill. At the other end of the table the prince consort sat and waited. He had not moved by so much as an inch from his pose of intense interest, and its exaggeration, allied to his fanciful uniform and his stony features, gave him the look of a life-sized marionette which had been forgotten. When at length his excellency rose, and gathered up his papers, the prince consort jerked himself to his feet.
“And now that I have done everything I can to be of assistance,” he said, “perhaps I may be permitted to withdraw.”
For the first time, the grand duchess looked up at him as if she saw him; but her eyes were overshadowed with a vague trouble.
“You are going out, Richard?”
“I propose, unless my services are required, to ride in the forest with Count Epernay,” he answered.
His excellency put his head thoughtfully to one side.
“A delightful idea. At the same time—if an old man may venture to express an opinion——”
“Your excellency knows that we are always glad of your opinion,” the young duchess interposed, with a girlish dignity.
“I thank your royal highness. I was about to remark that his highness is a remarkable horseman—whose prowess in the saddle has already been much commented on. At the same time, it might be perhaps advisable if the lonely rides were partly exchanged for drives in company with her royal highness. The people take a natural pleasure in the life of their ruler, and there might be some disappointment, and among the less ruly a certain amount of criticism——”
“I am, as you know, anxious to do everything desirable,” the prince consort interrupted placidly.
He made as if to resume his seat, but the grand duchess lifted her right hand quickly, peremptorily, and there was a delicate flush in her cheeks that was almost of anger.
“Please—that is not in the least necessary. I am not driving out to-day. Monsieur Maubert is coming to play his opera to me; and you don't care for music, I understand.”
“No,” he said. “I don't care for music—or for musicians.”
He paused, as if on the point of some further comment, clapped his spurs together, and was gone.
The grand duchess rose. She appeared to have forgotten his excellency's presence, for she went over to the window and stood looking into the park beneath, and did not speak until his excellency himself, on the strength of a lifelong service, coughed delicately. Then she turned to him, smiling.
“Forgive me, Paul. I'm a little tired. Figures always tire me. I suppose I'm very childish and foolish. Please, when you go, will you ask the Countess Epernay to receive Monsieur Maubert and to attend me during his recital?”
“Very well, madame.”
He kissed her outstretched hand.
“I trust your royal highness is nothing more than tired.”
“Nothing more.”
She drew a stiff-backed, gold-brocaded chair to the window, and sat down where she could see the tops of the great oaks glittering in the red of the fading sunlight, their outlines sharpening as the sky deepened from turquoise to the amber and gold of evening. Somewhere in the park the sharp, rhythmic beat of galloping hoofs echoed through the stillness, seeming to hold her attention to the exclusion of all other sounds, for the doors were flung open and she did not move.
“Monsieur Maubert awaits your royal highness' pleasure.”
The Countess Epernay, gray-haired, mob-capped, rustling in the regulation black silk, curtsied almost at her elbow, and behind her loomed the tall shadow of a man. The grand duchess controlled a start, and stretched out her hand in gracious, girlish welcome.
“You have come at a good hour, monsieur. You can give a voice to all this color, for, to me, color and sound are only different expressions of each other—or different expressions of all beauty, seeking its way by different paths into men's hearts. Is that not so?”
“Your royal highness is an artist,” he returned, his gray eyes fixed with a fearless directness on her face.
“I love what is beautiful,” she answered. “I hunger after what is beautiful. Is that to be an artist?”
“There is no other definition, madame.” He paused, and then went on deliberately: “I had not expected to play this evening. I meant to offer my apologies—some excuse—and to escape. I had expected lighted chandeliers, and flunkies to turn my music, and a court circle yawning itself to death. That would have stifled me—I could not have played. As it is—I can play to you.”
She stared at him, large-eyed, with a half-haughty, half-childish wonderment. It seemed incredible that any man should speak to her as he did—so incredible that she scarcely trusted her senses. He had discarded all the formulas, all the courtly phrases to which her ears were attuned, and his scornful directness was like a new harmony that jarred and yet stung her nerves to strong vibrations. And before she could speak, could think with what terms to throw back his audacity, he had turned from her and opened the piano.
“Now I will play the overture,” he said. “I will not try to explain. Either you will understand of yourself, or you will never understand. Please leave the lights alone, countess. This twilight is perfect.”
The Countess Epernay seated herself near the fire, bolt upright, her wizened, aristocratic hands clasped in her lap, her pale face set in grim lines of disapproval, and Ivan Maubert began to play. At first, his music was very quiet, very subdued. It seemed to draw its life from the fading colors of the sunset and to weave itself with the shadows and mists rising from the long, silent avenues of trees. But little by little it grew more stately, more sonorous, taking to itself the grandeur and solemnity of the coming night.
The Grand Duchess Louise sat by the window and dreamed, her young profile, with its romantic purity, sharply cut against the light, her head thrown back as if her very soul were listening, breathless in some mystic suspense. And as the night came on, the black lines of her dress mingled with the darkness, so that her fair face seemed to float like a lotus flower on the bosom of a shadowy pool.
For one hour the Russian played, without speaking, without interruption; and when he stopped, it was not abruptly, but rather as he had begun, passing imperceptibly, through strangely beautiful minor chords, into silence. The grand duchess turned her head, and for an instant her eyes met the man's inspired glance unseeingly. Then, as if suddenly awakened, she turned toward her lady in waiting. The Countess Epernay still sat bolt upright, her hands clasped in front of her, the firelight playing on her grimly disapproving features; but for all her uprightness and disapproval, the countess slept the sleep of the just and bored.
Ivan Maubert laughed softly.
“That is how it will be,” he said. “That is all the understanding I may hope for.”
“I have understood,” the grand duchess answered.
She no longer weighed her words or his. She was no longer herself, and the great room was full of enchantment.
“You!” he exclaimed, in the same hushed tones. “Yes, I knew you would understand. You are the artist, the dreamer, the creator. You could not have sat there, so still, so conscious, if you had not in your turn created—I do not know what—a poem, a painting, perhaps only a perfect dream.”
She smiled wistfully to herself. Her rank, her pride of race, and all the binding laws of royalty slept in the firelight, and the man's voice came to her from the shadows like the voice of her own thoughts.
“So little,” she said; “just verses—so childish and foolish that I have always kept them hidden. It is strange that you guessed.”
“It was no guess—a certainty;” he answered. “There is a Masonic brotherhood among those who live in beauty, and, where it is not, build it for themselves; and you must have the greatest artist's soul of us all—to create here!”
Into the last word he compressed an arrogance that passed her by, it was so assured, so justified. He went on gently, as if not to startle her from her trance:
“Poems! Love poems—oh, I can guess at them, princess! In this dry, soulless world of arid minds and petrified hearts, you have created your own world—you have made yourself an image of love as it must be to all those who truly live. And I know that your image must be as beautiful as the sunrise. Give them to me—your poems, princess, and I will set them to my music.”
She stirred, awake for an instant to the passion beneath the low, suppressed tones. Then the quiet and the magic of the half light closed in again over her.
“It could never be,” she said. “If we dare to dream, it must be for ourselves alone.”
“No one need ever know, princess. They shall go out unnamed into the world—as songs of prisoners and captives—of those who may not sing aloud. But the greatest tenors in the world shall give them back to you as if you were at last alive—a human woman, loving and beloved. Princess——”
She started. Through the silence there broke again the thud of hoofs on the soft turf. The sound drew nearer, like the rumble of distant thunder. She was fully awake now. The trance was broken. The shadows that had walled her in recoiled, leaving her face to face with a man who looked at her as no man had ever dared or cared to look—with an unveiled feeling, with a proud denial of every barrier that divided them. She shivered.
“You call me princess. That is not my title.”
“What are you? A grand duchess? What is that to me? A name—a foolish nothing that makes you no different from the poorest vagrant on the street. But I make you princess—princess of dreams—of a kingdom of poets and musicians——”
She rose swiftly to her feet.
“Monsieur, you forget yourself!”
The hoofbeats sounded on the long avenue. They had dropped to the methodical rhythm of a slow canter. Ivan Maubert met her eyes steadily.
“I am not a courtier,” he said. “The distinctions with which you shield yourself from the world are nothing to me. Man to man, I am worth ten of that stiff puppet whom a petty title has made your equal. Any lackey could replace him. But I am a musician, and you are a poetess, and I choose to claim you as my equal.”
A burning log clattered into the grate, and the Countess Epernay awoke, with so little appearance of doing so that it was difficult to believe she had ever slept. She held herself a trifle more stiffly, and her expression was a trifle more disapproving. It jarred on her principles of etiquette that a grand duchess should sit in the twilight.
“If your royal highness permits——”
“Please, countess.”
A touch of the wizened aristocrat's hand, and the gorgeously painted twilight had vanished. In a blatant, shadowless world of gilt chairs and marble-topped tables, which seemed to have held their post unchanging for generations, the man and woman faced each other. The grand duchess' breath came quickly, but she gave no other sign. Ivan Maubert took her limp hand and kissed it deliberately.
“This hour has been one of the happiest in my life, madame. Your royal highness has shown more understanding than I dared hope from any mortal, and if, as a last act of graciousness, my humble request were granted——” He looked at her. Almost imperceptibly her lips moved. “I thank your royal highness.”
The two flunkies held the folding doors open for him. He bowed himself out, and the grand duchess stood upright and motionless, listening to the merry jangle of the invisible horseman as he rode in through the palace gates.
III.
The tenor bowed deeply in the direction of the royal pair, while Maubert, true to his principle of indifference, sat unheeding at the piano, his powerful hands still lingering on the keyboard. The court circle, stiff in their best clothes and their ugliest heirlooms, followed the princely example and applauded decorously, but not altogether at their ease. The well-clothed, well-padded automatons which they called their souls were, indeed, rather too badly shaken for ease.
The Countess Epernay whispered to his excellency. She could do so unobserved, long practice enabling her to whisper without moving her lips.
“My dear count, that intolerable fellow ought to be spoken to! He ought not to be allowed—— Those songs—they might pass in—in a public concert—but here in the court—— I have never heard anything like it! Positively I blushed!”
His excellency did not look to see whether such a phenomenon had really taken place. He stood with one hand resting on the back of a gilt chair, and looked at the grand duchess with the expressionless persistency for which he was famous.
“Of course, I am no judge,” he admitted, “but I thought the songs rather beautiful. As you are an old friend, countess, I will even confess to you that I distinctly felt my old, very unimpressionable, heart beat quicker.”
“Your excellency could not have uttered a more annihilating criticism. This is no place for plebeian passions. My dear count, if we are going to have that kind of thing in our midst—love, kisses, longings, and heartaches—there will be nothing left to separate us from the working classes.”
His excellency nearly smiled.
“Monsieur Maubert is not likely to bring about such a catastrophe,” he reassured her.
“Not that catastrophe, perhaps, but another. Count, that man is too much here. People are beginning to talk. The grand duchess is young—she should be warned.”
“My dear countess, the grand duchess is a great music lover. Nothing is more natural——”
“We are not here to be natural,” the countess interposed sharply. “Supposing every one in the court did what they wanted?”
His excellency sighed.
“He is going to sing again,” he said.
The tenor sang a couplet—it was no more than that—just the irrepressible exclamation of some profoundly troubled heart; and the sweet quality of his voice veiled the incongruity of the fact that the song was a woman's. The accompaniment led up to it in a crescendo of accumulated passion, and died away into the peace that follows the heart's unburdening of itself.
Maubert played the accompaniment, and he, too, looked at the grand duchess.
The court sat rigid and tense, grown painfully self-conscious, as if the song had somehow bereft their souls of their padded dress clothes and left them naked. But the grand duchess applauded, and automatically they applauded after her. They saw the prince consort bend toward her and exchange smiles and remarks, which, to all appearances, were so utterly polite that the court almost recovered. The prince consort wore the full-dress uniform of his regiment. The gold-braided collar seemed to hold him in a grip of iron, and its prettiness accentuated the plain strength of his features.
“I didn't know you could listen to such songs,” he said, as he bent toward her.
“I don't know whether they are beautiful or not,” she answered; “but I love them. They are human.”
“Yes; they are the love songs of a human woman,” he said. “That is why I did not think you would like them.”
They were still smiling, faintly, restrainedly, as they had been taught to smile, but a new metal had crept into their subdued voices. The color ebbed and flowed in the grand duchess' pale cheeks.
“You do not think I am human?” she asked.
“I think you are a grand duchess.”
The tenor was turning over the leaves of another song. Seeing that the royal couple were exchanging comments, the court rustled and whispered. The grand duchess looked at the man beside her. Her eyes were very bright, very straight in their full, swift measuring.
“And are you not the prince?” she asked ironically.
“I have been made one.”
“Against your will?”
“No. I asked a price—I had debts, you know—and it was paid, cash down. It appeared I was rather an acquisition—the only fool bloodless and brainless enough to sell himself.”
“Ah!” she breathed.
“But it appeared that I was good enough,” he went on. “It appeared that grand duchesses have no need for anything but puppets—and that even though my class produces nothing else, I was a peculiarly desirable specimen. That is why I am surprised that you appear to like this unknown poet's songs. You cannot really understand them.”
“I wrote them,” she said simply.
His excellency saw the prince consort lean forward with a courteous movement of interrogation. It was as if he were venturing to ask her for a repetition of her last sentence. And the grand duchess looked up at him with a fire glowing at the back of her shadowed eyes that his excellency did not see.
“Yes, I wrote them,” she said again.
“You—but not to me,” he flung back. “They are love songs!”
“Yes—and I wrote them. I am quite human enough to love.”
“But not me,” he reiterated.
“One does not love puppets who sell themselves,” she said.
All that passed between them passed almost in a breath. It was as if a dam had suddenly given way, flinging two quiet rivers into a seething whirlpool of contending passions. And yet outwardly they made no sign. They still sat there, with their faces set in an inexorable placidity, and as Maubert touched an impatient chord of reminder, the prince consort smiled a vague apology, and sat back stiffly in his gilt chair.
It was the last song on the program—a hymn of such joyous vigor and fiery purity that the court, to whom vigor and fire were all necessarily gross, sat rigid with horror. And Maubert looked at the grand duchess as he played, and the prince looked at Maubert; and once their glances clashed, and, though no muscle of the musician's face moved, he seemed to smile.
Then it was over. The court rustled to its feet. The tenor bowed over the grand duchess' hand, while Maubert held himself insolently apart. The great audience chamber hummed with platitudes and empty phrases as the grand duchess moved from one guest to another toward the wide folding doors. She paid for every step toward freedom with some automatic graciousness, but at last it was done, and she stood in her own room, alone save for her two waiting women.
“You can leave me,” she said gently. “I shall not need you. Good night.”
“Good night, madame.”
They curtsied themselves out of her presence.
She turned out the overbrilliant lights and threw open the windows that led onto the balcony. It was very dark and still. In the distance the crunch and rumble of the departing carriages and the clash of arms as the sentries sprang to the salute sounded faintly. Before her lay the great park, its black density making the unlit sky seem pale and luminous by contrast. A few feet beneath her lay the garden, with its borders of sober autumn flowers. Their faint fragrance mingled with the more pungent odor of decaying leaves, and rose up to her on the keen, intoxicating air in tragic reminder of past sunshine and drear days to come.
And suddenly the surrounding stillness was gone. There were footfalls quite near to her—soft, cautious as an animal's. A man's hand fell like a white stain on the balustrade. The grand duchess did not move. She stood there, with parted, breathless lips and tense eyes—waiting. The next instant Maubert was at her side. She knew him even though there was nothing visible but the black outline of his head and shoulders, and before she could move or speak his hand fell, silencing, on her arm.
“Hush! I had to come. I've waited long enough. I hung about under the trees. No one noticed me. I knew you would come out. After those songs, you could not have endured that room—it would have stifled you.”
“You must be mad!” she interrupted, in a still, dead voice. “The sentries will shoot you!”
“They won't do that. You'll be with me—we shall shield each other. Don't ask how I dare. You know I dare everything. There's no man or devil whom I fear.”
“I know,” she said. “I know you would dare anything for what you want. What do you want with me?”
“You!” he answered.
The darkness between them seemed to thin, and they could see each other's faces. Both were white—his with the heat of headlong passion, hers with cold. Their eyes were black and lightless hollows.
“And what I want—is that nothing to you?” she asked.
“Everything! But I know all you need. I know you better than you know yourself—for I made you. Yes, I made you. I gave you life. Until I came, you were a dead thing, asleep, with only your dreams and your songs. But I have awakened you. I am the reality.”
“You?” she echoed under her breath.
“Yes—I! I saw your face when I played, and I knew. That dull, heavy-blooded fool—was it to him you sang?”
“It was not to you,” she said.
“You say that because you must—because to the last you must play your part—you, the grand duchess, and I the commoner, the man from the street. But I know none of these distinctions. I have told you that I am your equal.”
“I accept you as my equal,” she returned, with sudden sternness. “If I had played my part, as you call it, I would have called on the sentries to shoot you!”
“Then I claim you——”
“You cannot! You put your music to my songs, you helped me to voice myself, but there was nothing in that self of you—nothing! You are my equal—you are more, for you are a great artist, and I am only a grand duchess—but you are nothing to me. And I claim the freedom of the lowest human being—to choose——”
“You mean that—you dare say that? You mean you have played a royal game with me? I have been a mere plaything, to be lured on——”
The hand that held hers trembled. She shook herself free with a movement of horror.
“You were my friend,” she said. “You are not that now! Now go!”
He stared down at her.
“My God, you have courage! It would ruin you—I could ruin you! Maybe I shall!”
“Neither am I afraid,” she interrupted proudly.
Silence rose up between them. She might have fled then, and saved herself; but she stood and looked at him. And suddenly he turned, and was gone as swiftly as he had come. She heard his hushed footsteps on the gravel pathway, and listened, all the horror and fear of the last minutes released from her iron control. But there must have been something in his bearing, in his face, that overawed the sentries, for they let him pass unchallenged, and presently all was still again.
And the grand duchess went back into the dark room and knelt down by the wonderfully painted bed, and lay there in all her splendor, with her face buried in her arms.
IV.
His excellency sat at a little, round table under the flaring gas jets of the Café de Lunéville and sipped distastefully at his bock. He was disguised—that is to say, he wore old, shabby clothes, and a slouch hat drawn deep over his brows—but most of the people in the café had already recognized him. It was one of his carefully cultivated eccentricities to play the part of the adventure-seeking caliph, and the admiring Lunévillians were tactful enough not so much as to glance in his direction.
But to-night he was not happy in his part. The evening at the court concert had played havoc with his nerves. Alternately his thoughts flashed from the prince consort to the grand duchess, from her to Ivan Maubert. He did not know what connected them, or what was troubling him, but he did know that there had been something wrong. There had been storm in the heavy, listless court air. He, who had never conceived such a thing possible, had suffered from the horrible conviction that at any moment the nice solemnity of the proceedings might be smashed to nothing by some outrageous outbreak of human passion.
A few tables away from him, the tenor had gathered around him the musicians of the capital, and was expatiating on the qualities of his own voice as compared to Caruso's—somewhat to the latter's detriment—and on his success of that particular evening. His excellency listened attentively.
“Yes, of course, the singer makes the songs. I tell you, I made them to-night. I believe I stirred up even his high and mightiness——”
At this juncture some one must have kicked him warningly, for he broke off and looked nervously in the direction of the shabby old man in the corner.
“Yes—I was saying—remarkable songs—as near to genius as anything since Schumann—and genuine, too! Must have been written by some one who meant what she said. I wonder who the deuce wrote them, and to whom—— Hello! Here's some one who can tell us. Maubert, come here, there's a good fellow! What the devil's the matter with you?”
His excellency looked up. He scarcely knew what had startled him, but as he saw the man who had entered, he felt a distinct confirmation of the dread that had flashed through his steeled nerves. Maubert stood by the long table. The haze of tobacco smoke that rose up about him added something fantastic and unreal to his appearance. The night was calm, and yet he had the look of a man who had fought his way through a storm. His black hair was disheveled, and his eyes, which fixed themselves directly on his excellency, had a look of somber, dangerous purpose in their lightless depths. But he spoke quietly, with a lazy intonation, and a voice thickened either by drink or by passion.
“What were you talking about, eh? The songs at the court concert? Fine, weren't they, my would-be Caruso? Even you couldn't help putting some fire into them. Passion, eh? The outpourings of a loving woman's heart, eh? Ah, I thought you'd like them!”
And all the time he stared at his excellency, an ugly little smile at the corners of his lips. An uncomfortable silence hung over the table. The tenor fidgeted.
“Yes, even I couldn't spoil them,” he said, with the sarcasm of wounded vanity. “We were just wondering who composed them.”
“I wrote the music,” said Maubert.
“Good man! And the words—eh?”
Maubert took the wineglass out of the tenor's hand and held the sparkling yellow liquid to the light.
“I drink to her,” he said. “For they were written to me!”
“Lucky dog! And who is she? Who has fallen such a victim to thy fine eyes, Ivan the Terrible?”
Maubert drank the wine to the dregs and put down the glass. He looked at his excellency.
“That would be telling,” he said. “But she lives in this glorious city of yours, and, if you met her, you'd get off the pavement and take off your hat. She has fair hair and blue eyes and a white skin and a sweet smile——”
His excellency rose up, and sat down again, mastering himself in time. A young violinist from the court orchestra had sprung to his feet.
“You'd better be careful what you say, Maubert!” he said violently. “We've no such thing as lese majesty here, but we've other things.”
“Well?” Maubert laughed in his face. “You asked me a question, Hotspur. I've given you an answer. Now you quarrel with it.”
“Because it's a lie! You must be mad, or drunk, to dare——”
“I am neither, good young man; and I would shoot you like the puppy you are if it would not amuse me more to hear you apologize.”
“You'll have to prove what you say.”
“Since you are so ungallant as to demand proof, I am ready to produce it. The lady's handwriting may be known to one or two of you.” He waved his hand with an exaggerated courtesy. “Gentlemen, I invite you all here to-morrow night, and then you will see whether I lied or not. The poems themselves are charming, and there is a fragrance about the originals that I would not have you miss. Even this excited gentleman here will be convinced, and then”—he bowed deeply to all the table, and lastly to his excellency—“the matter will be closed so far as I am concerned.”
He refilled his glass and drank, and refilled, and they stared at him in sullen, angry consternation. Then, one by one, they got up and left him, not once glancing at the old man in the corner, Finally, he, too, got up, paid his reckoning, and passed out into the bustling streets.
Ten minutes later an ordinary taxi-cab swung through the palace gates, the sentries presenting arms as they recognized the white-faced man in the corner, and pulled up sharply at the private entrance. The shabby old man encountered no difficulty. The drowsy lackeys bowed before him like corn before a relentless storm, and led him instantly along the dreary passages to the royal apartments.
It was still early, and the prince consort sat at his writing table. He looked up as his excellency entered, the pen slipping from his fingers, and even at that moment of genuine anguish the old man was struck by something written on the usually stolid face—a look of exhaustion and stress, almost of suffering. It passed instantly, and the prince consort rose, smiling, to his feet.
“Why, my dear count, what brings you here? A message from my wife, perhaps?”
His excellency stared blankly. In all his little big career no crisis had presented itself like this, and he could no longer sustain his attitude of sphinxlike ambiguity.
“Why should your highness think of that?” he asked.
“Oh, I don't know. It just occurred to me. Sometimes an unsatisfactory choice gets sent back to the place it was bought from——”
His excellency stalked up to the table and laid his hand upon it by sheer force of habit. But his face was like a wax mask grown cracked and yellow with age.
“Sir—I beg your highness not to jest. I beg of you to listen to me. I have come straight from the Café de Lunéville. It is a hobby of mine to visit these places incognito—to feel the pulse of the people. That fellow Maubert was there, with a crowd of his friends. I don't know whether he was mad, or drunk, or both, but he boasted——”
“What did he boast?”
“Sir—I dare hardly remember——”
“Out with it, count!”
His excellency lifted his haggard eyes and smothered an exclamation. He did not know this young man towering at his side. He did not know the blunt features, made mobile by a released force. He did not know the grip that fastened on his padded shoulder, nor the metal in the quiet voice. He had the odd feeling that he had called something to life—some power that he could not control.
“Come, count! What is it you are afraid of?”
“Sir—I am an old man—I have served Lunéville many years—watched over her honor—her welfare—and now that this has come, I am shaken—broken. One can control armies, statesmen, nations, but not a woman.”
“You are speaking of—of my wife?”
“Your highness—I am afraid: The grand duchess is so young, so romantic, so ignorant of life. Her life hitherto has been full of dreams——”
“And stupid, dull realities.” The prince consort held out the hand that wore the wedding ring, and considered it somberly. “What did this man boast, count?”
“That the songs were written to him—that they were written by the grand duchess!”
His excellency, forgetting the laws that governed his life, sank down in a chair by the table and covered his face with his hands. He did not trust himself to look at the man opposite him. The quiet voice went on unmovedly:
“And what proof did he offer?”
“None at present. To-morrow night—the poems, in her royal highness' handwriting.”
“Where does this man live?”
“No. 35, Rue de Cambert.”
The prince nodded to himself.
“You ought to go home and rest, count,” he said gently. “You are upset. It would never do for you to show that face to the world.”
“Sir!”
“People might almost believe that you were capable of emotion—pain, love—Heaven knows what! They might even begin to doubt the value of all masks and puppets, and to believe that most of us are human.”
His excellency leaned forward, searching every line of the composed, resolute face, fastening at last on the eyes, as if striving to read their full message.
“Sir—do I understand—that you have full confidence——”
“I have full confidence that those poems will never be produced, your excellency.”
“You——”
The prince lifted his hand.
“Let us leave it at that, your excellency.”
“Your highness will be careful? You will be gentle in your—your thought of her?”
“No one can think of her as I do,” was the answer.
The old man rose, leaning on the table as if his age had suddenly overtaken him. His lips twitched uncertainly.
“It is in your highness' hands. I have grown feeble and tired. As you say—we are all human. Good night, your highness.”
“Won't you shake hands with your unlucky choice, count?”
His excellency looked up, a glint of humor in his faded eyes. Then he laid his hand in the outstretched one, and let it rest there for a moment.
“We statesmen are sometimes less foolish than we know,” he said.
The prince consort followed him to the door. They stood together as if struck simultaneously by a sound—the creak of a second door farther down the passage. The prince consort shook his head.
“It was nothing,” he said. “Sleep well, count.”
Then he went back to his table. He glanced swiftly around him, searching the shadows, flung open a drawer, and drew out an oblong wooden case. His movements were now swift and decided, as if a course of action had become clear to him.
V.
Ivan Maubert had been turning over some loose sheets of paper, muttering broken quotations, humming snatches of melody in the thick voice of intoxication. He had drunk heavily, but it was not the wine that had intoxicated him. His passion, flung back from its self-appointed course, had recoiled on him in a torrent that swept him into a vortex of ungovernable impulses. A satanic enjoyment and a satanic suffering were scrawled across his disfigured features as he sat stretched back in his chair, his hand raised as if appealing to an invisible audience.
“Listen to this, my friends. How does this strike you? Now recognize the purely master touch—the royal note of passion——”
    “O my beloved, since all my hours and dreams——”
He broke off, throwing back his head to challenge the intruder. Then he sat upright, the uneven flush receding from his face and leaving it pale and evil looking.
“Oh, princess,” he said, scarcely above a whisper, “I asked much of you—but not so much as this! How greatly daring of you!”
She closed the door and pushed the thick, disguising veil from her face. She was very pale, very quiet. She came forward and laid something that glittered on the table. She kept her hand close to it, watching him.
“Yes, I have dared a great deal to come,” she said, “but not so much as you think.”
“Ah!” He smiled up into her face from where he lounged. “A dramatist as well as a poetess! An action like that would earn a storm of applause from the gallery. So the villain of the piece is to be assassinated?”
“It is melodramatic to talk like that,” she interrupted quietly. “Whatever it cost, I had to come—but not to kill you—you know that well enough. I am making a bid to save myself—my name, my country—last of all my happiness, which I have jeopardized by my trust in you. But I have no more trust. That is why I brought—that with me.”
“Why have you come at all?”
“I heard what you did to-night,” she answered, and now a controlled excitement vibrated in her voice. “It went down to my husband's apartments, and Count Paul was talking to him. I listened a moment—I heard what you did——”
“Well? And your husband?”
“He didn't believe. He had confidence—that it was not true.”
Maubert tapped the little bundle of manuscript with his fingers and smiled at the pain that dragged at the muscles of her ashy face.
“It is true!”
“You know that it is not!”
“But to-morrow night he will have less confidence, I think.”
She nodded. Her breath was coming quickly now, but she was still quiet, still desperately intent on her self-control.
“That is why I have come. You must have been mad to-night—frenzied. I can believe it possible. But I can't believe it possible that you should go on. I have come for what belongs to—me—to save——”
“Your happiness!” He sprang to his feet with the violence and swiftness of a tiger freeing itself from a long and patient restraint, his face so black and convulsed that it was scarcely recognizable. “Your happiness—his confidence—these two are synonyms, I gather. You think I was mad. Well, you are mad, your royal highness—mad to come here. You child! You think you can twist us around your white fingers and play havoc with our lives and whistle us to heel! You've been brought up in a bad school for dealing with living men. Pull the strings of your marionettes, but don't play with flesh and blood!” He flung the table between them aside. “Shoot, then, princess, if you dare!”
He stood an instant, his arms wide apart, as if to receive the bullet, challenging her with a wild laugh, and as the point of her revolver wavered and sank, he sprang at her. But almost in the same instant he faltered, listening; and, as he listened, his eyes fixed on her face, he seemed to see her for the first time—to pierce the red mist of passion and reach some dim understanding of her agony.
“There's some one coming!” he whispered hoarsely. “Quick! Into the room there! No one shall see you—I swear it!” He pushed her from him, sprang across the intervening space, and smashed the electric lamp to the ground with his bare fist, plunging the room into complete darkness. “Who's there?”
The door was thrown open. Against the pale yellow of the gas jet burning on the staircase a man's figure was shadowed. Maubert felt his way back to the table and sat down. His hand, groping instinctively among the papers, touched something hard and cold, and he gripped it with a savage recognition.
“Who's there?” he repeated.
“You will see when you turn on the light.”
“I regret—the light is broken.”
“That is unfortunate. We shall have to transact our business in the dark.”
The door was closed again, and the man's figure lost itself in the darkness. Maubert, with every faculty alert, bent forward.
“You are pretty cool, whoever you are. Who let you in?”
“Your manservant. He made no difficulty.”
“Then he deserves dismissal. I must request you to withdraw.”
“When I have finished with you, monsieur.”
Ivan Maubert was still an instant, listening, weighing the voice, the tone. Then suddenly he burst out laughing.
“Your highness does me too much honor.”
“I am glad you recognize me.”
“The accent—the arrogance—both so unmistakably Anglo-Saxon! I only regret that my welcome must be necessarily so somber.”
There was a movement—the jangle of spurs. Maubert judged that his visitor had come a step nearer.
“There is light in the next room. Open the door.”
“I refuse!”
“Very well, then. You compel me——”
“I am armed, your highness. I can judge your whereabouts. If you move toward the door, I shall take my chance of hitting you.”
“I also am armed.”
“Good, then! Let us stay where we are. What do you want with me?”
“I have come here to preserve my wife's honor.”
“A fine phrase, your highness! There is more dramatic talent in royal circles than I should have judged possible. Even the puppet in chief can assume a heroic pose.” He waited an instant, then added, with sudden violence: “What do you want?”
“My wife's poems—the manuscripts that you boasted about, you unspeakable cur!”
“Ah, the Anglo-Saxon phlegm is disturbed! The poems? They do not belong to you. They are mine—given me—dedicated to me——”
“I shall not leave here without them.”
“You!” His voice shook now with an overpowering passion. “And who are you? A figurehead—a salable commodity! The heroic pose doesn't become you, my Prince of Marionettes! What is she to you, or you to her, that you should take it upon yourself to interfere?”
“You may judge for yourself on the last point. What my wife is to me is my own affair. I am speaking to you as man to man, and I am in earnest. You had better give me those papers.”
Again the jangle of spurs. Maubert lifted the toy revolver.
“Stay where you are! I also am in earnest! I am a man who has always gratified his passions at all costs, and I hate you at this moment to a degree that makes any cost insignificant. I warn you!” Still he could hear his opponent fumbling his way toward the door under which the light gleamed, and he rose stealthily. “Your royal highness, I have no desire to shoot you down like that; I am not a coward. I am what you Englishmen would call a sportsman. You say you are armed. Very well. The love poems of her royal highness are on the table. Fight me for them!”
“In the dark?”
“A duel à la Russe!”
Their voices had dropped. With the rising of a primitive, reckless enmity, they had grown quieter, more restrained, on the surface almost apathetic. They no longer spoke to each other, and a deadly hush seemed to add a leaden weight to the pall-like darkness. Maubert shifted his position with the noiseless swiftness of a panther, avoiding the crease of light near the floor, and then stood still to listen.
There was a jangle of spurs, but so soft and momentary that he could not measure its significance. By his own movement he had lost something of his first advantage—he could no longer guess at his opponent's whereabouts; but the chances were still on his side. He was lighter, unencumbered by military accouterments, and he knew the geography of their narrow battlefield. Therefore, he waited. But his enemy gave no sign. He, too, avoided the light. Neither did he respond to Maubert's challenging overturning of a chair. He held his fire.
Thus for many minutes they confronted the darkness,until the suspense became intolerable. Then Maubert moved, and in answer he could hear soft footsteps that not all the straining of his senses could locate. The sweat began to break out on his forehead. He was not afraid, but the unreality and uncertainty were like the working of a surgical device that tightened every nerve to snapping point. His stealth increased with the horrible temptation to scream aloud. He no longer thought of the woman cowering behind the light line, nor of his own peril, nor of his insensate passions—only of the temptation to break the silence. Thus they hunted each other backward and forward, their left hands groping amid the tables and chairs, their right hands half raised in tense preparedness—no sound save that of their suppressed breathing—of the maddening spurs and the occasional tap of a hand fumbling against an invisible obstacle.
Then Maubert stumbled; he scarcely knew whether it was accidental or willful, but he knew that the challenge could no longer be resisted. He crouched—there was a flash—a rip of canvas close above his head. He sprang upright. Swift as he had been, he knew that his opponent had already changed his ground, and the knowledge of his narrow escape and of his failure was like a knife on an exposed nerve. He felt a scream rise to his lips, but as it reached his throat, the crease of light spread upward like a broad burst of fire. The door had been torn open, and immediately opposite him he saw the prince consort, dazed, blinded, his face turned with an expression of incredulous pain toward the light.
Then Maubert fired. He thought that he had missed. The tall, upright figure had not moved. He saw the grand duchess run forward. He heard her voice, almost unrecognizable with terror:
“Richard—for pity's sake—what have you done? You're hurt—-and it was my fault! Oh, Richard!”
The prince consort held her away from him with his left hand. The other hung limp and useless at his side. He stared down at her.
“Then it's true——”
She tried to speak, her lips moving inaudibly, and an intense pity softened his set features.
“Poor child!” He broke off, and looked across at Maubert, and his voice steadied, grew sharp and hard with authority. “There's one thing we've overlooked—you and I,” he said. “We were a trifle primitive in our arrangements. We should have chosen a desert island.”
Maubert turned his head, listening.
“What is it?”
“Some one coming—the police, probably. Quick—put the lamp on the table! Set up that chair there! For Heaven's sake, don't look like that, man! We're not fighting now. We've got to pull together for her sake. Sit down at the piano—play something—and we'll sit here—so we——”
Some one rapped sharply at the door. He forced the grand duchess into the armchair by the table and took his place opposite her. A disordered heap of manuscript lay between them. His hand rested on it. Involuntarily the prince consort glanced down, and then at the white, drawn face across the table. She did not look at him. Her eyes were fixed piteously on his hand, and he drew it hastily away. But there was blood on the white paper.
“Play, man, can't you?” he whispered.
Maubert struck a chord as the door flew open. A gendarme stood on the threshold. Maubert played on unheedingly. The prince consort was smiling with the fatuous amiability of princes, and the grand duchess sat and listened, intent, calm, white to the lips.
“Sir—your highness—your royal highness——”
The man stood there with his hand to his helmet, baffled, frightened, and incapable of speech, and the prince consort looked up at him with the fatuous amiability changed to an equally fatuous hauteur.
“What is the meaning of this intrusion?” he asked.
“Sir—I beg your royal highness' pardon—pistol shots were heard down-stairs. The neighbors were frightened There is a crowd——”
The prince consort rose stiffly and offered the grand duchess his left arm. His right arm he kept hidden.
“What an absurdity! I should have thought Lunéville knew the difference between Monsieur Maubert's music and pistol shots. This is most trying. Her royal highness and I paid monsieur a private and informal visit, in order to make ourselves more familiar with his new opera, and now we shall be subject to a tiresome publicity. And at this hour of night, too! Would it be possible to clear the crowd away and get us a carriage—sergeant?”
The man's eyes opened wider.
“Your highness is mistaken—not sergeant—only gendarme.”
“Surely not,” the prince consort returned suavely, and smiled down at the grand duchess. “Surely, sergeant,” he repeated, and she nodded silently, her white lips forced into a trembling smile.
The man drew himself up to an even greater rigidity. A kind of dull understanding had dawned in his stolid face.
“I thank your royal highness. In five minutes there will be no one left in the street. I will fetch your royal highness a carriage and a reliable driver——”
“Thank you, sergeant.”
They listened to his retreating footsteps. The prince consort bent down and gathered up the loose sheets of manuscript and gave them to the grand duchess, with a little military bow.
“They are safer in your keeping,” he said gently. “I am sorry that I have stained them. They are very beautiful.” He offered her his arm, and she accepted it blindly, clinging to him. “Good night, and good-by, Monsieur Maubert. Your music was a fitting accompaniment. But it is the tragedy of life that some harmonies are forbidden us. I wish you a good voyage.”
Maubert stood quietly at the piano. He looked at the grand duchess, and then at the man beside her.
“Believe me—I am sorry,” he said gravely, and with dignity. “I wish you both much happiness.”
The prince consort led the grand duchess down the stairs. He sat beside her in the stuffy, antiquated fiacre, and at the end of the silent drive gave her his arm again to her private apartments. A stolid-faced lackey held open the door of her boudoir, and they entered together. The prince consort gently released her hand.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I had to do what I could. I understood so well—even that man's madness—but I wanted to save you.”
She made no answer for a moment. She went over to her writing table and stood there, supporting herself with her hand, her back half turned to him.
“You say you understand—but I cared nothing for that man—nothing! My songs were never written to him. He was nothing more to me than the musician who gave a new, more perfect voice to my thoughts—and dreams. And he understood, too; he treated me as a human being. No one had ever done that before.” She paused, and then went on steadily: “But I did not love him. I went to him to-night because I knew what he had done, and what he had threatened. I, too, had to act—to try to save my honor, my——”
She broke off.
The prince consort came, a step nearer. His voice sounded hurried, shaken, but still controlled.
“I am glad of that. I shall take that faith and comfort with me.”
“You are going away?”
“I am going back. Not to my own country—I have no country now—but at least I shall set you free. For they will set you free—some time; and then perhaps happiness—all the romance and poetry—will become real to you. That is why I am going.”
“It is not true!” She turned to him, her fair head erect, her wet eyes and cheeks bright with passion. “It is not true. You are going because you have reached the limit of your endurance. You are as human as I am. They try to turn us into little wooden dolls, to strut and bow at their will—but we're not dolls—we're flesh and blood—all of us alike. You, too! They made you sell yourself—and you played your part. But now you've done with it. You hate your bargain. You are a man, It galls your pride that you should be less than I—your wife—a woman no more to you than——”
He strode up to her, laying his roughly bandaged hand on hers.
“Do you think me so petty—so poor in spirit?” he asked unevenly. “The pride you talk of is the poor treasure of the puppets who have tried to twist us to their own likeness. But I am a man. Do you think that if you loved me, I should care if you were ten times more the grand duchess, and I ten times more your subject? And if I hated you—or if you were indeed nothing to me—why, then, I'd take what I could get and play my part—as it was given me. But I love you—have loved you—and I'm human, and I have the pride of all human beings who love. That is why I am going.”
He was silent. They gazed at each other with a steadfast intensity, as if they had come face to face for the first time. The grand duchess gathered up the bloodstained manuscript and held it out to him.
“Those are the songs of my dreams,” she said softly. “This evening, when I was bitter and angry, I told you that they were written to the man I love. I didn't lie to you. Will you—take them?”
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1959, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 65 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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