Miss Portman – a devout Royalist, and firm believer in the right of kings – grew crimson, her nose especially, as it invariably did at moments of strong emotion.
The Emperor of Rhaetia, here, caught and trapped, like Pegasus bound to the plow, and forced to carry luggage as if he were a common porter – worst of all, her insignificant, twice wretched luggage!
She would have protested if she had dared; but she did not dare, and was obliged to see that imperial form – unmistakably imperial, it seemed to her, though masquerading in humble guise – loaded down with her rücksack and her large golf cape, with goloshes in the pocket.
Crushed under the magnitude of her discovery, dazzled by the surprising brilliance of the Princess’s capture, stupefied by the fear of saying or doing the wrong thing and ruining her idol’s bizarre triumph, poor Miss Portman staggered as Virginia helped her to her feet.
“Why, you’re cramped with sitting so long!” cried the Princess. “Be careful! But Leopold will give you his arm. Leopold will take you down, won’t you, Leopold?”
And the Imperial Eagle, who had hoped for better things, meekly allowed another link to be added to his chain.
CHAPTER V
LEO VERSUS LEOPOLD
“Ach, Himmel!” exclaimed Frau Yorvan; and “Ach Himmel!” she exclaimed again, her voice rising to a wail, with a frantic uplifting of the hands.
The Grand Duchess grew pale, for the apple-cheeked lady suddenly exhibited these alarming signs of emotion while passing a window of the private dining-room. Evidently some scene of horror was being enacted outside; and – Virginia and Miss Portman had been away for many hours.
It was the time for tea in England, for coffee in Rhaetia; Frau Yorvan had just brought in coffee for one, with heart-shaped, sugared cakes, which would have appealed more poignantly to the Grand Duchess’s appetite, if the absent ones had been with her to share them. Naturally, at the good woman’s outburst, her imagination instantly pictured disaster to the one she loved.
“What – oh, what is it you see?” she implored, her heart leaping, then falling. But for once, the courtesy due to an honored guest was forgotten, and the distracted Frau Yorvan fled from the room without giving an answer.
Half paralyzed with dread of what she might have to see, the Grand Duchess tottered to the window. Was there – yes, there was a procession, coming down the hilly street that led to town from the mountain. Oh, horror upon horror! They were perhaps bringing Virginia down, injured or dead, her beautiful face crushed out of recognition. Yet no – there was Virginia herself, the central figure in the procession. Thank Heaven, it could be nothing worse than an accident to poor, dear Miss Portman – But there was Miss Portman too; and a very tall, bronzed peasant man, loaded with cloaks and rücksacks, headed the band, while the girl and her ex-governess followed after.
Unspeakably relieved, yet still puzzled and vaguely alarmed, the Grand Duchess threw up the window overlooking the little village square. But as she strove to attract the truants’ attention by waving her hand and crying out a welcome or a question, whichever should come first, the words were arrested on her lips. What could be the matter with Frau Yorvan?
The stout old landlady popped out through the door like a Jack out of his box, on a very stiff spring, flew to the overloaded peasant, and almost rudely elbowing Miss Portman aside, began distractedly bobbing up and down, tearing at the bundle of rücksacks and cloaks. Her inarticulate cries ascended like incense to the Grand Duchess at the open window, adding much to the lady’s intense bewilderment.
“What has that man been doing?” demanded the Grand Duchess in a loud, firm voice; but nobody answered, for the very good reason that nobody heard. The attention of all those below was entirely taken up with their own concerns.
“Pray, mein frau, let him carry our things indoors,” Virginia was insisting, while the tall man stood among the three women, motionless, but apparently a prey to conflicting emotions. If the Grand Duchess had not been obsessed with a certain idea, which was growing in her mind, she must have seen that his dark face betrayed a mingling of amusement, impatience, annoyance, and boyish mischief. He looked like a man who had somehow stumbled into a false position from which it would be difficult to escape with dignity, yet which he half enjoyed. Torn between a desire to laugh, and fly into a rage with the officious landlady, he frowned warningly at Frau Yorvan, smiled at the Princess, and divided his energies between quick, secret gestures intended for the eyes of the Rhaetian woman, and endeavors to unburden himself in his own time and way, of the load he carried.
With each instant the perturbation of the Grand Duchess grew. Why did the man not speak out what he had to say? Why did the landlady first strive to seize the things from his back, then suddenly shrink as if in fear, leaving the tall fellow to his own devices? Ah, but that was a terrible look he gave her at last – the poor, good woman! Perhaps he was a brigand! And the Grand Duchess remembered tales she had read – tales of fearful deeds, even in these modern days, done in wild, mountain fastnesses, and remote villages such as Alleheiligen. Not in Rhaetia, perhaps; but then, there was no reason why they should not happen in Rhaetia, at a place like this. And if there were not something evil, something to be dreaded about this big, dark-browed fellow, why had Frau Yorvan uttered that exclamation of frantic dismay at sight of him, and rushed like a madwoman out of the house?
It occurred to the Grand Duchess that the man must be some notorious desperado of the mountains, who had obtained her daughter’s confidence, or got her and Miss Portman into his power. But, she remembered, fortunately some or all of the mysterious gentlemen stopping at the inn, had returned and were at this moment assembled in the room adjoining hers. The Grand Duchess resolved that, at the first sign of insolent behavior or threatening on the part of the luggage carrier, these noblemen should be promptly summoned by her to the rescue of her daughter.
Her anxiety was even slightly allayed at this point in her reflections, by the thought (for she had not quite outgrown an innate love of romance) that the Emperor himself might go to Virginia’s assistance. His friends were in the next room, having come down from the mountain about noon, and there seemed little doubt that he was among them. If he had not already looked out of his window, drawn by the landlady’s excited voice, the Grand Duchess resolved that, in the circumstances, it was her part as a mother to make him look out. She had promised to help Virginia, and she would help her by promoting a romantic first encounter.
In a penetrating voice, which could not fail to reach the ears of the men next door, or the actors in the scene below, she adjured her daughter in English.
This language was the safest to employ, she decided hastily, because the brigand with the rücksacks would not understand, while the flower of Rhaetian chivalry in the adjoining room were doubtless acquainted with all modern languages.
“Helen!” she screamed, loyally remembering in her excitement, the part she was playing, “Helen, where did you come across that ferocious-looking ruffian? Can’t you see he intends to steal your rücksacks, or – or blackmail you, or something? Is there no man-servant about the place whom the landlady can call to help her?”
All four of the actors on the little stage glanced up, aware for the first time of an audience; and had the Grand Duchess’s eyes been younger, she might have been still further puzzled by the varying and vivid expressions of their faces. But she saw only that the dark-browed peasant man, who had glared so haughtily at poor Frau Yorvan, was throwing off his burden with haste and roughness.
“I do hope he hasn’t already stolen anything of value,” cried the Grand Duchess. “Better not let him go until you’ve looked into your rücksacks. Remember that silver drinking cup you would take with you – ”
She paused, not so much in deference to Virginia’s quick reply, as in amazement at Frau Yorvan’s renewed gesticulations. Was it possible that the woman understood more English than her guests supposed, and feared lest the brigand – perhaps equally well instructed – might seek immediate revenge? His bare knees alone were evidence against his character in the eyes of the Grand Duchess. They gave him a brazen, abandoned air; and a young man who cultivated so long a space between stockings and trousers might be capable of any crime.
“Oh, Mother, you’re very much mistaken,” Virginia was protesting. “This man is a great friend of mine, and has saved my life. You must thank him. If it were not for him, I might never have come back to you.”
At last the meaning of her words penetrated to the intelligence of the Grand Duchess, through an armor of misapprehension.
“He saved your life?” she echoed. “Oh, then you have been in danger! Heaven be thanked for your safety – and also that the man’s not likely to know English, or I should never forgive myself for what I’ve said. Here is my purse, dearest. Catch it as I throw, and give it to him just as it is. There are at least twenty pounds in it, and I only wish I could afford more. But what is the matter, my child? You look ready to faint.”
As she began to speak, she snatched from a desk at which she had been writing, a netted silver purse. But while she paused, waiting for Virginia to hold out her hands, the girl forbade the contemplated act of generosity with an imploring gesture.
“He will accept no reward for what he has done, except our thanks; and those I give him once again,” the girl answered. She then turned to the chamois hunter, and made him a present of her hand, over which he bowed with the air of a courtier rather than the rough manner of a peasant. And the Grand Duchess still hoped that the Emperor might be at the window, as really it was a pretty picture, and, it seemed to her, presented a pleasing phase of Virginia’s character.
She eagerly awaited her daughter’s coming, and having lingered at the window to watch with impatience the rather ceremonious leave-taking, she hastened to the door of the improvised sitting-room to welcome the mountaineers, as they returned to tell their adventures.
“My darling, who do you think was listening and looking from the window next ours?” she breathlessly inquired, when she had embraced her newly-restored treasure – for the secret of the adjoining room was too good to keep until questions had been put. “Can’t you guess? I’m surprised at that, since you were so sure last night of a certain person’s presence not far away. Why, who but your Emperor himself!”
The Princess laughed happily, and kissed her mother’s pink cheek. “Then he must have an astral body,” said she, “since one or the other has been with me all day; and it was to him – or his Doppelgänger – that you offered your purse to make up for accusing him of stealing!”
The Grand Duchess sat down; not so much because she wished to assume a sitting position, as because she experienced a sudden, uncontrollable weakness of the knees. For a moment she was unable to speak, or even to speculate; but one vague thought did trail dimly across her brain. “Heavens! what have I done to him? And maybe some day he will be my son-in-law.”
Meanwhile, Frau Yorvan – a strangely subdued Frau Yorvan – had droopingly followed the chamois hunter into the inn.
“My dear old friend, you must learn not to lose that well-meaning head of yours,” said he in the hall.
“Oh, but, your Majesty – ”
“Now, now, must I remind you again that his Majesty is at Kronburg, or Petersbrück, or some other of his residences, when I am at Alleheiligen? This time I believe he’s at the Baths of Melina. If you can’t remember these things, I fear I shall be driven away from here, to look for chamois elsewhere than on the Schneehorn.”
“Indeed, I will not be so stupid again, your – I mean, I will do my very best not to forget. But never before have I been so tried. To see your high-born, imperial shoulders loaded down as if – as if you had been a common Gepäckträger for tourists, instead of – ”
“A chamois hunter. Don’t distress yourself, good friend. I’ve had a day of excellent sport.”
“For that I am thankful. But to see your – to see you coming back in such an unsuitable way, has given me a weakness of the heart. How can I order myself civilly to those ladies, who have – ”
“Who have given peasant Leopold some hours of amusement. Be more civil than ever, for my sake. And by the way, can you tell me the names of the ladies? That one of them – a companion, I judge – is a Miss Manchester, I have heard in conversation; but the others – ”
“They are mother and daughter – sir. The elder, who in her ignorance, cried out such treasonable abominations from the window (as I could tell even with the little English I have picked up) is Lady Mowbray. I have seen the name written down; and I know how to speak it because I have heard it pronounced by the companion, the Mees Manchester. The younger – the beautiful one – is also a Mees – and the mother calls her Hélène. They talk together in English, also in French, and though I have so few words of either language, I could tell that London was mentioned between them more than once, while I waited on the table. Besides, it is painted in black letters on their traveling boxes.”
“You did not expect their arrival?”
“Oh, no, sir. Had they written beforehand, at this season, when I generally expect to be honored by your presence, I should have answered that the house was full – or closed – or any excuse which occurred to me, to keep strangers away. But none have ever before arrived so late in the year, and I was taken all unawares when my son Alois drove them up last night. He did not know you had arrived, as the papers spoke so positively of your visit to the Baths; and I could not send travelers away; you have bidden me not to do so, once they are in the house. But these ladies are here but for a day or two more, on their way to Kronburg for a visit; and I thought – ”
“You did quite right, Frau Yorvan. Has my messenger come up with letters?”
“Yes, your – yes, sir. Just now also a telegram was brought by another messenger, who came and left in a great hurry.”
The chamois hunter shrugged his shoulders, and sighed an impatient sigh. “It’s too much to expect that I should be left in peace for a single day, even here,” he muttered, as he went toward the stairs.
To reach Frau Yorvan’s best sitting-room (selfishly occupied, according to one opinion, by four men absent all day on a mountain), he was obliged to pass by a door through which issued unusual sounds. So unusual were they, that the Emperor paused.
Some one was striking the preliminary chords of a volkslied on his favorite instrument, a Rhaetian variation of the zither. As he lingered, listening, a voice began to sing – ah, but a voice!
Softly seductive it was as the cooing of a dove in the spring, to its mate; pure as the purling of a brook among meadow flowers; rich as the deep notes of a nightingale in his passion for the moon. And for the song, it was the heart-breaking cry of a young Rhaetian peasant who, lying near death in a strange land, longs for one ray of sunrise light on the bare mountain tops of the homeland, more earnestly than for his first sight of an unknown Heaven.
The man outside the door did not move until the voice was still. He knew well, though he could not see, who the singer had been. It was impossible for the plump lady at the window, or the thin lady with the glasses, to own a voice like that. It was the girl’s. She only, of the trio, could so exhale her soul in the very perfume of sound. For to his fancy, it was like hearing the fragrance of a rose breathed aloud. “I have heard an angel,” he said to himself. But in reality he had heard Princess Virginia of Baumenburg-Drippe, showing off her very prettiest accomplishment, in the childish hope that the man she loved might hear.
Leopold of Rhaetia had heard many golden voices – golden in more senses of the word than one – but never before, it seemed to him, a voice which so stirred his spirit with pain that was bitter-sweet, pleasure as blinding as pain, and a vague yearning for something beautiful which he had never known.
If he had been asked what that something was, he could not, if he would, have told; for a man cannot explain that part of himself which he has never even tried to understand.
Before he had moved many paces from the door, the lovely voice, no longer plaintive, but swelling to brilliant triumph, broke into the national anthem of Rhaetia – warlike, inspiring as the Marseillaise, but wilder, calling her sons to face death singing, in the defense.
“She’s an English girl, yet she sings our Rhaetian music as no Rhaetian woman I have ever heard, can sing it,” he told himself, slowly passing on to his own door. “She is a new type to me. I don’t think there can be many like her. A pity that she is not a Princess, or else – that Leopold the Emperor and Leo the chamois hunter are not two men. Still, the chamois hunter of Rhaetia would be no match for Miss Mowbray of London, so the weights would balance in the scales as unevenly as now.”
He gave a sigh, and a smile that lifted his eyebrows. Then he opened the door of his sitting-room, to forget among certain documents which urged the importance of an immediate return to duty, the difference between Leopold and Leo, the difference between women and a Woman.
“Good-by to our mountains, to-morrow morning,” he said to his three chosen companions. “Hey for work and Kronburg.”
She was going to Kronburg in a few days, according to Frau Yorvan. But Kronburg was not Alleheiligen; and Leopold, the Emperor, was not, at his palace, in the way of meeting tourists – or even “explorers.”
“She’ll never know to whom she gave her ring,” he thought with the dense innocence of a man who has studied all books save women’s looks. “And I’ll never know who gives her a plain gold one for the finger on which she once wore this.”
But in the next room, divided from him by a single wall, sat Princess Virginia of Baumenburg-Drippe.
“When we meet again at Kronburg, he mustn’t dream that I knew all the time,” she was saying to herself. “That would spoil everything – just at first. Yet oh, some day how I should love to confess all – all! Only I couldn’t possibly confess except to a man who would excuse, or perhaps even approve, because he had learned to love me – well. And what shall I do, how shall I bear my life now I’ve seen him, if that day should never come?”
CHAPTER VI
NOT IN THE PROGRAM
Letters of introduction for Lady Mowbray and her daughter to influential and interesting persons attached to the Rhaetian Court, were necessarily a part of the wonderful plan connected in the English garden, though they were among the details thought out afterwards.
The widow of the Hereditary Grand Duke of Baumenburg-Drippe was reported in the journals of various countries, to be traveling with the Princess Virginia and a small suite, through Canada and the United States; and fortunately for the success of the innocent plot, the Grand Duchess had spent so many years of seclusion in England, and had, even in her youth, met so few Rhaetians, that there was little fear of detection. Her objections to Virginia’s scheme for winning a lover instead of thanking Heaven quietly for a mere husband, were based on other grounds, but Virginia had overcome them, and eventually the Grand Duchess had proved not only docile, but positively fertile in expedient.
The choosing of the borrowed flag under which to sail had at first been a difficulty. It was pointed out by a friend taken into their confidence (a lady whose husband had been ambassador to Rhaetia), that a real name, and a name of some dignity, must be adopted, if proper introductions were to be given. And it was the Grand Duchess who suggested the name of Mowbray, on the plea that she had, in a way, the right to annex it.
The mother of the late Duke of Northmoreland had been a Miss Mowbray, and there were still several eminently respectable, inconspicuous Mowbray cousins. Among these cousins was a certain Lady Mowbray, widow of a baron of that ilk, and possessing a daughter some years older and innumerable degrees plainer than the Princess Virginia.
To this Lady Mowbray the Grand Duchess had gone out of her way to be kind in Germany, long years ago, when she was a very grand personage indeed, and Lady Mowbray comparatively a nobody. The humble connection had expressed herself as unspeakably grateful, and the two had kept up a friendship ever since. Therefore, when the difficulty of realism in a name presented itself, the Grand Duchess thought of Lady Mowbray and Miss Helen Mowbray. They were about to leave England for India, but had not yet left; and the widow of the Baron was flattered as well as amused by the romantic confidence reposed in her by the widow of the Grand Duke. She was delighted to lend her name, and her daughter’s name; and who could blame the lady if her mind rushed forward to the time when she should have earned gratitude from the young Empress of Rhaetia? for of course she had no doubt of the way in which the adventure would end.
As for the wife of the late British Ambassador to the Rhaetian Court, she was not sentimental and therefore was not quite as comfortably sure of the sequel. As far as concerned her own part in the plot, however, she felt safe enough; for though she was, after a fashion, deceiving her old acquaintances at Kronburg, she was not foisting adventuresses upon them; on the contrary, she was giving them a chance of entertaining angels unawares, by sending them letters to ladies who were in reality the Grand Duchess of Baumenburg-Drippe and the Princess Virginia.
The four mysterious gentlemen left Alleheiligen the day after Virginia’s encounter with the chamois hunter; but the Mowbrays lingered on. The adventure had begun so gloriously that the girl feared an anti-climax for the next step. Though she longed for the second meeting, she dreaded it as well, and put off the chance of it from day to day. The stay of the Mowbrays at Alleheiligen lengthened into a week, and when they left at last, it was only just in time for the great festivities at Kronburg, which were to celebrate the Emperor’s thirty-first birthday, an event enhanced in national importance by the fact that the eighth anniversary of his coronation would fall on the same date.
On the morning of the journey, the Grand Duchess had neuralgia and was frankly cross.
“I don’t see after all, what you’ve accomplished so far by this mad freak which has dragged us across Europe,” she said, fretfully, in the train which they had taken at a town twenty miles from Alleheiligen. “We’ve perched on a mountain top, like the Ark on Ararat, for a week, freezing; the adventure you had there is only a complication. What have we to show for our trouble – unless incipient rheumatism?”
Virginia had nothing to show for it; at least, nothing that she meant to show, even to her mother; but in a little scented bag of silk which lay next her heart, was folded a bit of blotting-paper. If you looked at its reflection in a mirror, you saw, written twice over in a firm, individual hand, the name “Helen Mowbray.”
The Princess had found it on a table in the best sitting-room, after Frau Yorvan had made that room ready for its new occupants. Therefore she loved Alleheiligen: therefore she thought with redoubled satisfaction of her visit there.
To learn her full name, he must have thought it worth while to make inquiries. It had lingered in his thoughts, or he would not have scrawled it twice on some bit of paper – since destroyed no doubt – in a moment of idle dreaming.
Through most of her life, Virginia had known the lack of money; but she would not have exchanged a thousand pounds for the contents of that little bag.
Hohenlangenwald is the name of the House from which the rulers of Rhaetia sprang; therefore everything in the beautiful city of Kronburg which can take the name of Hohenlangenwald, has taken it; and it was at the Hohenlangenwald Hotel that a suite of rooms had been engaged for Lady Mowbray.
The travelers broke the long journey at Melinabad; and Virginia’s study of trains had timed their arrival in Kronburg for the morning of the birthday eve, early enough for the first ceremony of the festivities; the unveiling by the Emperor of a statue of Rhaetia in the Leopoldplatz, directly in front of the Hohenlangenwald Hotel.
Virginia looked forward to seeing the Emperor from her own windows; as according to her calculation, there was an hour to spare; but at the station they were told by the driver of the carriage sent to meet them, that the crowd in the streets being already very great, he feared it would be a tedious undertaking to get through. Some of the thoroughfares were closed for traffic; he would have to go by a roundabout way; and in any case could not reach the main entrance of the hotel. At best, he would have to deposit his passengers and their luggage at a side entrance, in a narrow street.
As the carriage started, from far away came a burst of martial music; a military band playing the national air which the chamois hunter had heard a girl sing, behind a closed door at Alleheiligen.
The shops were all shut – would be shut until the day after to-morrow, but their windows were unshuttered and gaily decorated, to add to the brightness of the scene. Strange old shops displayed the marvelous, chased silver, the jeweled weapons and gorgeous embroideries from the far eastern provinces of Rhaetia; splendid new shops rivaled the best of the Rue de la Paix in Paris. Gray medieval buildings made wonderful backgrounds for drapery of crimson and blue, and garlands of blazing flowers. Modern buildings of purple-red porphyry and the famous honey-yellow marble of Rhaetia, fluttered with flags; and above all, in the heart of the town, between old and new, rose the Castle Rock. Virginia’s pulses beat, as she saw the home of Leopold for the first time, and she was proud of its picturesqueness, its riches and grandeur, as if she had some right in it, too.
Ancient, narrow streets, and wide new streets, were alike arbors of evergreen and brilliant blossoms. Prosperous citizens in their best, inhabitants of the poorer quarters, and stalwart peasants from the country, elbowed and pushed each other good-naturedly, as they streamed toward the Leopoldplatz. Handsome people they were, the girl thought, her heart warming to them; and to her it seemed that the very air tingled with expectation. She believed that she could feel the magnetic thrill in it, even if she were blind and deaf, and could hear or see nothing of the excitement.
“We must be in time – we shall be in time!” she said to herself. “I shall lean out from my window and see him.”
But at the hotel, which they did finally reach, the girl had to bear a keen disappointment. With many apologies the landlord explained that he had done his very best for Lady Mowbray’s party when he received their letter a fortnight before, and that he had allotted them a good suite, with balconies overlooking the river at the back of the house – quite a venetian effect, as her ladyship would find. But, as to rooms at the front, impossible! All had been engaged fully six weeks in advance. One American millionaire was paying a thousand gulden solely for an hour’s use of a small balcony, to-day for the unveiling and again to-morrow for the street procession. Virginia was pale with disappointment. “Then I’ll go down into the crowd and take my chance of seeing something,” she said to her mother, when they had been shown into handsome rooms, satisfactory in everything but situation. “I must hurry, or there’ll be no hope.”
“My dear child, impossible for you to do such a thing!” exclaimed the Grand Duchess. “I can’t think of allowing it. Fancy what a crush there will be. All sorts of creatures trampling on each other for places. Besides, you could see nothing.”
“Oh, Mother,” pleaded the Princess, in her softest, sweetest voice – the voice she kept for extreme emergencies of cajoling. “I couldn’t bear to stay shut up here while that music plays and the crowds shout themselves hoarse for my Emperor. Besides, it’s the most curious thing – I feel as if a voice kept calling to me that I must be there. Miss Portman and I’ll take care of each other. You will let me go, won’t you?”
Of course the Grand Duchess yielded, her one stipulation being that the two should keep close to the hotel; and the Princess urged her reluctant companion away without waiting to hear her mother’s last counsels.
Their rooms were on the first floor, and the girl hurried eagerly down the broad flight of marble stairs, Miss Portman following dutifully upon her heels.
They could not get out by way of the front door, for people had paid for standing room there, and would not yield an inch, even for an instant; while the two or three steps below, and the broad pavement in front were as closely blocked.
Matters began to look hopeless, but Virginia would not be daunted. They tried the side entrance and found it free, the street into which it led being comparatively empty; but just beyond, where it ran into the great open square of the Leopoldplatz, there was a solid wall of sight-seers.
“We might as well go back,” said Miss Portman, who had none of the Princess’s keenness for the undertaking. She was tired after the journey, and for herself, would rather have had a cup of tea than see fifty emperors unveil as many statues by celebrated sculptors.
“Oh no!” cried Virginia. “We’ll get to the front, somehow, sooner or later, even if we’re taken off our feet. Look at that man just ahead of us. He doesn’t mean to turn back. He’s not a nice man, but he’s terribly determined. Let’s keep close to him, and see what he means to do; then, maybe, we shall be able to do it as well.”