TOWER OF IVORY

BY MRS. ATHERTON

THE CONQUEROR

A FEW OF HAMILTON’S LETTERS

ANCESTORS

THE GORGEOUS ISLE

RULERS OF KINGS

THE ARISTOCRATS

THE TRAVELLING THIRDS

THE BELL IN THE FOG

PATIENCE SPARHAWK AND HER TIMES

SENATOR NORTH

HIS FORTUNATE GRACE

CALIFORNIA SERIES

REZÁNOV

THE DOOMSWOMAN

THE SPLENDID IDLE FORTIES

A DAUGHTER OF THE VINE

THE CALIFORNIANS

AMERICAN WIVES AND ENGLISH HUSBANDS

A WHIRL ASUNDER

THE VALIANT RUNAWAYS (A BOOK FOR BOYS)

TOWER OF IVORY

A NOVEL

BY

GERTRUDE ATHERTON

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1910

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1910,

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1910. Reprinted

March, twice, July, 1910.

Norwood Press

J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

CONTENTS

I
WHEN BRIDGMINSTER WAS TWENTY-FOUR

John Ordham had been in Munich several months before he met Margarethe Styr. Like all the young men, native and foreign, he chose to fancy himself in love with her, and although both too dignified and too shy to applaud with the vehemence of the Germans, he never failed to attend a performance at the “Hof” when the greatest hochdramatische the new music had developed sang Iseult or Brynhildr. He was not sure that he wanted to meet her, for in a languid and somewhat affected manner he persuaded himself that she existed on the stage alone, and that did he even permit his imagination to picture her in private life it must be as a commonplace American woman of German extraction who drank enormously of beer and ate grossly, like the people in the restaurants. And as at that time he cultivated the sensuous rather than the stronger elements of his nature, he avoided what might have attenuated one of the most exquisite of his pleasures. It was true that in the second and last acts of Götterdämmerung her tragedy was so stupendous, her grief so poignant, her despair so fathomless, that he turned cold to his marrow, and felt as if the sufferings of all humanity were drowning him. But vicarious woe has all the voluptuousness and none of the hell of Life’s cruelties at first hand.

Styr’s methods were as likely to inthral the fastidious Englishman as the more artistic German. In a day when Sarah Bernhardt was the fashion in tragediennes, she had a still method all her own, a manner of appearing quietly on the stage, seemingly as impersonal as a part of its setting; then gradually dominating it, not only by the magic of her great golden voice and imposing height and presence, but by a force, which the critics, after long and acrimonious controversy, agreed to be an emanation from the brain. Whether she possessed also that physical magnetism, commonly indispensable to stage people, was a question still agitated when Ordham arrived in Munich, although she had then been “Royal Bavarian Court Singer” for six years; but that she had cultivated a mental power which above all else made her the great artist she was, the most violent partisans of other prime donne, lyric and dramatic, frankly conceded. Her associates at the Hof told that at rehearsals she merely walked through her part; and Princess Nachmeister, boasting private acquaintance with her since her elevation to the Bavarian aristocracy as Countess Tann, confided to the world that she never practised even those slow, grand, graceful, and infinitely varied gestures of hands and arms which were as expressive as her voice, but directed them from her brain as she did her acting; that she sat for hours thinking out the minutest details, but without moving a muscle until the night of public performance. All facial expression was concentrated in her eyes. She could express more with those features for which Nature had failed to invoke her conventions, than any living actress with physical writhings and distorted visage. Therefore, when she gave way to momentary violence, as, when at Siegfried’s repudiation she looked to be tearing her heart out, she created so profound an impression that more than Ordham rose breathless from their seats. Her desolation, her incredulous horror, the alternate pride of the goddess and agony of the woman, the dark and remorseless vengeance of the daughter of Wotan, not only induced a nervous shudder in Ordham but plunged his imagination down the past of this great but forbidding creature, who seemed to unlock her own heart for the moment with the reckless indifference of the supreme artist. He was but twenty-four at this time, but he had seen a good deal of the world, and its inheritances had composed many of his brain cells; he was, moreover, a very clever young man, as all admitted. Nevertheless, when he stared at Brynhildr in her agony and wrath, or dreamed through the second act of Tristan und Isolde, he had vague prickings in the depths of his soul that tragedy was not confined to the gods, and uneasy forebodings that life even for such as he was not all roses and cream.

But at this time, although had Styr ever been photographed, he would have framed and enthroned her, he rarely thought of her when not in his seat in the Hof, or listening to the comments of his friends. He was fluttering from flower to flower with the impatience and curiosity of his years, fearful of missing the least the gods provided for fortunate youth; drawn intensely for a day or a week by a beautiful face or an odd personality, but not daring to dally too long lest something more charming escape him. He had passing episodes of a semi-serious nature in that gay scampish underworld of Munich (that world of soubrettes, waitresses, young officers, students of both sexes), as well as in the sphere that revolved about the Queen-mother, but they were by no means ardent or sustained. He had not yet begun to cultivate that outdoor life which makes Englishmen so virile, and in extenuation of his fickleness he reminded himself of the penetrating observation of Marguerite de Valois, that the passions of young men are apt to be wavering and cold. The truth was that he was influenced by what appealed to his mind and taste rather than to his passions, although being sensitive and eager, these could momentarily be aroused by a charming woman who chose to take the initiative. The serious side of his nature had hardly begun its development; youth, bubbling youth, was uppermost; unconsciously (sometimes!) he smiled into any pair of pretty eyes that met and held his rather absent gaze, flirted desperately for an evening with a delightful creature whom he quite forgot to call upon next day. He found life very satisfactory and his studies not too arduous: persuaded by his family to enter diplomacy, and taking to it as naturally as he turned from the more dubious work of politics, he had spent a year in Paris unofficially attached to the British Embassy; then, a relative being appointed Minister Resident to the Court of Bavaria, he had come to him for another year in order to perfect himself in the German language before attempting his examinations.

It was some time before Munich found him out. For a while he was too much interested in the cafés, the ale-halls, the student life, the opera and theatre, to go about in society, even had it not been away. But soon after the return of the fashionable world to the capital, it became known that visiting at the British Legation was a young Englishman of fine appearance, distinguished family, and excellent prospects: his half-brother, Lord Bridgminster, although still a young man and quite healthy, was, owing to an early disappointment and an accident which marred his features, a misanthropist and misogynist. Almost simultaneously Ordham began to go about with Mr. Trowbridge, the minister; and, to do himself as well as society justice, he was immediately and enthusiastically liked for himself. The glamour of long descent and a possible coronet can never wholly be forgotten, but they carry a man so far and no farther. John Ordham’s worldly advantages no doubt were among the earliest of the factors that made him the fashion in Munich, so slow to accept strangers; but, later they were but the final excuse to shower attentions upon a young man who, under a shy and languid exterior, possessed an independent and audacious mind, who breathed refinement, and whose gentle and courteous manner charmed even the morose Ludwig to invite him to a private concert at Neuschwanstein, where he and Princess Nachmeister were the only guests. It was there that he met Margarethe Styr.

II
FLYING ARROWS

Princess Nachmeister was the most disagreeable old woman in Munich and quite the most powerful. Herself a Prussian, she was a lifelong friend of the Queen-mother, and one of the few women ever admitted to the presence of the King; her genius for social leadership had been cultivated for forty years, and she had a “palace” in the Königenstrasse, whose high-walled garden extended through to the Kaulbachstrasse. Ordham, in his rather listless walks, had often glanced longingly over the flat coping at the grounds, half formal, half wild, crowded with trees and set with Italian seats and fountains, noseless satyrs and empty urns. The princess boasted that she was the first to “discover” him, and after the season opened he found himself dining or attending parties at her house several times a week. At the moment, so great was the depression, owing to the persistent seclusion of the King, that few besides Excellenz Nachmeister had the spirit to entertain on the grand scale. Luncheons, kettle-drums, diplomatic dinners, were not infrequent, and occasionally one of the minor royal palaces opened its doors for a rout; but had it not been for the old lady whom all vilified and courted, society would have been moribund. No one was more aware of this than Excellenz herself, for one secret of her uninterrupted success in a city that still hated Prussia was her genius for seizing and holding the strategic position.

She took Ordham to the routs that were given, to private tea-parties at the Residenz, where frequently the only other guests of the Queen-mother were her ancient ladies-in-waiting, and, in time, invited him alone of all the unofficial young men to her dinners given in honour of the diplomatic corps. She knew that he barely tolerated her, that he came to her house so often, not only because he found much to amuse him there, but because he was far too good-natured to refuse any one that pressed hospitality upon him; but she would have forgiven more to his manners, which she pronounced the finest in the world; and the old court intriguer honestly admired the diplomatic talents which inspired him to express the proper amount of deference and polite gratitude without sacrificing his dignity in the fashion of many that craved something more than a mere entrée to the Palast Nachmeister; then, later, when to be the enfant gâté and the formal man-of-the-world.

Ordham, indeed, began by disliking her intensely. Her thin dispraising nose, which, he reflected, looked as if it had a pin in it; her narrow mouth, whose corners seemed to drip poison; her hard, round, brilliant eyes; her red wig and emaciated figure,—all offended him; but her manifest and disinterested friendship (she had not a young relative in the world), her many favours, and the more subtle influence of Time, to say nothing of her discretion in not inviting him to make love to her, inclined him to indulgence, and he even began to find good points in her,—after his habit with people whom he tolerated at all.

And he was never bored in her house, for he met in it a far more cosmopolitan society than he had been accustomed to in England or even in Paris. The United States had not yet discovered Munich, but it was always refreshed, this beautiful art city of mid-Europe, by Russians, Hungarians, Austrians, Italians, and odd and interesting people from the Balkans and the Porte. Moreover, he loved beautiful things, and the Nachmeister’s house was an essential reincarnation of the rococo, even to the dinginess of the gilt, so fatally neglected by Ludwig in his brand-new palaces, Linderhof and Herrenchimsee. Her rooms and her grounds satisfied him so completely that he could not go to them often enough, and he was able to exclude their owner from his memory unless she stood in front of him.

Nor did she deny him anything he craved. When the rather nervous young man, who blushed so often, and yet was as automatically sure of himself as only an Englishman of his class can be, told her flatly that he wanted to meet the King, whom no stranger met, the audacity of the request took her breath away, but she managed the interview through the Queen-mother; and Ludwig, who happened to be in one of those intensely lucid tempers when he was sick unto death of shams and hypocrisies, and the vileness he found in the men that cringed at his wavering feet, fancied that he saw in the clean high-bred young Englishman something of the nobility and beauty of his own untainted youth, and impulsively invited him to Neuschwanstein for the following evening.

It was quite in keeping with the curious complications which at this period began to deflect John Ordham’s feet from the sunny highway into dim by-paths ending in the mazes of life, that he should have met Mabel Cutting before he made even the bare acquaintance of Margarethe Styr. She was just eighteen, and her mother had brought her to Munich for a few weeks of German and music before launching her into London society. Princess Nachmeister, giving a garden party soon after the squares and gardens of Munich had burst into the vivid young greens of spring, begged Mrs. Cutting, whom she had known for many years, to bring the new American beauty to decorate her “gloomy old park.” This with her romantic loveliness—she was tall and slim, her hair was golden, her big eyes were brown, sad, remote, her little nose and mouth cut with the sharpest and most rapid of chisels—Mabel accomplished with much complacency; she was not only quite aware of her charms, but that her smart Parisian gown made the greater number of the Bavarian aristocracy look like housemaids. But she was bored by the strange babel of tongues about her, and, unable to interest herself in the stiff young officers that clicked their heels together in front of her, permitted them to be captured by ladies with whose methods they were more familiar. She was sitting alone,—save for her pug-dog, LaLa,—on one of the curved marble seats under a large tree, flanked by a pink hawthorn on one side and a white lilac bush on the other, when Ordham, who had arrived late, as usual, caught sight of her. A few moments later, his hostess, congratulating herself upon her subtlety, had steered him to the maiden’s side and casually presented him.

Mabel enlivened immediately when the tall “boy,” as she defined him, very dignified and very diffident, stood blushing before her, and talked so fast that Ordham subsided into a chair with the welcome sensation of being spared all trouble. He was fascinated not more by the sparkling flow of empty words than by the play of dimples in the pink and white cheeks, and the flecks of golden light which the large pathetic brown eyes seemed to intercept from the aureole of her hair. She talked of England and Paris, which she knew far better than New York, “adoring” both, delivered her soul of her hatred of all things German, from the music to the shops, spoke with admiration of his mother who was a great friend of “Momma’s,” and admitted that she was simply dying to see the inside of Ordham Castle and its romantic recluse, Lord Bridgminster. Occasionally she dammed the stream of her eloquence with a question, answered by a glance from Ordham’s smiling eyes. Then Mrs. Cutting, who had been detained within, bore down upon them, and Mabel rose to her feet like a willow branch slowly released from the water.

“Momma!” she cried, “this is Mr. Ordham, Lady Bridgminster’s son. I have asked him to call. Do invite him for dinner to-night. He is the very nicest boy I ever met. You are sure to like him, for he talks so splendidly, and says such amusing things.”

Ordham had much ado to refrain from laughing outright, and Mrs. Cutting caught the flash in his eyes which made him suddenly look older. He cultivated—or perhaps, in his conventional hours, it was quite natural to him—a somewhat infantile expression, and Mrs. Cutting, observing him from the window, had concluded that he was a mere boy, and quite safe to sit alone with her little daughter at a formal German party. But as she stood talking to him,—he was now quite at his ease,—this woman whose keen American brain had never for a moment been clouded by passion, whose nerves were mere magnetic needles for the thousand complexities of the world she lived in, experienced a subtle response to something hard under the plastic surface of this charming young man. It was remote, a whisper from the unknown, as evanescent as a quiver along the branches of the tree that cast its shadow on the young pink of the hawthorn; and in a moment she forgot the impression in her general approval. But she recalled it long after, that fleeting response in herself to the germ of ruthlessness under that sincere and boyish desire to please her.

Then and there she made up her mind that he should marry Mabel. The serious quest of her life was the son-in-law who should make her one with the aristocracy she had selected as the best this world had precipitated. She was a woman as fastidious as she was ambitious, for she belonged to the aristocracy of her own country, and there was still much of the Puritan in her, albeit none of the provincial. She would give her immaculate daughter to no man whom she knew to be unworthy, no matter what his rank; and, unsuspected, she had examined and rejected all the young unmarried noblemen she had met during her last two seasons in England. As it happened, she had never met Ordham, although she enjoyed something more than a passing acquaintance with Lady Bridgminster. Always a favourite of fortune, she realized at once that this garden party had been arranged by the august recipient of the prayers she never omitted to offer up when the exigencies of fashion took her to church.

“Certainly you must dine with us to-night, if you are not ‘invited,’ as they say over here,” she exclaimed in her bright cordial voice which retained not a taint of the national crudity. “Mabel is a chatterbox and I shall send her to bed; but you and I will have a delightful gossip about London, from which I have been banished so often these last three years—since my husband’s death there has been so much tiresome litigation in New York. It is a delight even to look at an Englishman once more, especially here in Germany, which—let me whisper it—I hate as much as I love Paris. I am still a good American, you see, even if I did migrate long since to England. And you will come at eight?”

Ordham murmured his thanks, almost as much fascinated by the mother as by the daughter. Mrs. Cutting was not yet forty, very slim, Parisian, high-bred, not in the least faded, and her grey eyes, if cold, were very bright; her small mouth could accomplish smiles dazzling, arch, sympathetic, merely sweet, and she held her head higher than any lady of the court of Queen Marie. Ordham had met Americans of all sorts, but never any that attracted him as strongly as this distinguished couple that said nothing so charmingly and liked him so spontaneously. He felt the utter passionlessness of the older woman’s nature, but after the tempestuousness of certain of his foreign acquaintance this but added to her charm. As for the exquisite Mabel, she suggested all enchanting possibilities, although perhaps more than aught else the divine white flame of Wagner’s Elizabeth; that is to say (he was dreaming over a midnight cigarette at his window in the Legation when these reflections took shape), she would resemble that exalted ideal when she passed the chatterbox stage, that inevitable phase of the young American female. But, barring the fact that she talked too much and really knew nothing at all, she was quite flawless.

He dined, lunched, drove constantly with the Cuttings during the ensuing fortnight, writing pathetic notes of apology to those that had booked him long since; and as Mrs. Cutting dined in her private suite, his many good friends almost wept as they thought on his sufferings. He answered their notes of sympathy in terms of passionate gratitude and regret (which made him more popular than ever) and gave not a second thought to the writers save when endeavouring to fix each particular excuse in his memory. He was enchanted with his new friends. Mrs. Cutting talked smartly, and on all subjects which she discovered appealed to him. Mabel was not sent to bed, and a great deal of quiet flirting went on under Momma’s discreetly averted eye. Frequently Mrs. Cutting was summoned into an adjoining room by her “dressmaker” (she would not have worn a German gown into her coffin), but certainly Ordham never felt so much as a passing suspicion that the girl was being thrown at his head, nor that his ideals, peculiarities, vague desires, were being carefully sounded and analyzed. When they departed he missed them so acutely for a few days that he was almost melancholy; then, by rapid gradations, forgot them. Mabel bedewed her pillow for many nights, and Mrs. Cutting, as soon as she had opened her house in London, and presented Mabel at Buckingham Palace, devoted herself to ripening her pleasant acquaintance with Lady Bridgminster into friendship. It was not long before those two astute dames understood one another, and the pliant Mabel, by no means without the craft of her sex, was put into training.

III
NEUSCHWANSTEIN

Ordham journeyed down to Neuschwanstein full of pleasant anticipations, which for several hours after his arrival seemed unlikely to be fulfilled. Although he and Princess Nachmeister, with whom he travelled, were received at Füssen by a royal coach, which bounded at the heels of four galloping steeds through the grey mediæval town crowded on the banks of the river, then up through the woods to the white castle on its lofty rock, in a fashion that exhilarated his blood, and although they were received at Neuschwanstein with vast ceremony, he learned immediately that the King found himself too unwell to see his guests, and that the Gräfin von Tann would dine in her own apartments over in the Kemenate, where rooms had been put in order for herself and the Princess Nachmeister. In the main body of the castle no woman had ever slept, and few men. Ordham, after ascending to the third story, was conducted through endless suites of rooms, very new, very gaudy, painted with the legends of the sagas and furnished with blue, purple, red, or green satin heavily incrusted with gold. In his own imposing chamber, finding nothing comfortable but the bed—after turning up a corner of the quilt—to sit on (the gold embroideries of the chairs being at least four inches thick), he made his way out of the castle and determined to explore while it was still daylight, half hoping to meet the King or the Styr.

He forgot both for a time while he roamed about what is probably the most beautiful spot on earth. In an undulating valley surrounded by an irregular chain of Alps, the two castles were set on their heights about a mile apart: Hohenschwangau, feudal in appearance if not in fact, old and brown, with citadel, wall, and bastions; Neuschwanstein, a white mass of towers on a mighty rock springing abruptly from the deep gorge of the river Pöllat. Between the castles and on all sides was the dark green forest, separating only for those two jewels of the Bavarian Highlands, the lakes, Alp and Schwan. Down in the lower valley were the old grey towers of Füssen; beyond Hohenschwangau and facing Neuschwanstein, three sharp peaks of the higher Alps glittered with snow. Behind the newer castle a green mountain rose almost as straight as a rampart, throwing the romantic white pile into such bold relief that it attracted the eye from every point of the valleys.

As Ordham wandered about, staring at the castles from all sides, or lying on the turf under the trees of the forest, his solitude broken only by a passing peasant in the picturesque grey and green costume of the Highlands, or the sudden appearance of a chamois at the end of a vista, he understood something of Ludwig’s contempt for mere mortals. He loitered on in the groves sacred to the unhappiest man the modern world has seen, many moods sweeping over him, but finally he lay dreaming idly; and, feeling that such romantic solitudes demanded a mate in fancy, since fate was obdurate, he evoked the image of the prettiest girl he knew, Mabel Cutting, and persuaded himself for a few moments that his happiness depended upon seeing her again and at once. He had just resolved to overcome his hatred for letter writing and indite her an epistle on the morrow, when a footman came to remind him that dinner was at seven. Mabel vanished with the chamois, although he made a wry face as he reflected that he was to dine alone in this enchanted vale with Princess Nachmeister.

The same lackey stood outside his door while he dressed, evidently under the impression that he must not be lost sight of again, and this time conducted him to the story above. He had expected as a matter of course that the dinner would be served in one of the smaller rooms, perhaps over in the Kemenate, where Excellenz might have inveigled the Styr to join their little party. But he was shown into a vast room, which was in such a glitter of light that for a moment he was half blinded. Few surprises ruffled his imperturbability, however; and although he appeared barely to glance about him, he observed with much pleasure the immense vaulted room, which was nearly a hundred feet long and almost half as wide, supported on carved columns and decorated with the legend of Parsifal. The ten chandeliers were blazing suns.

At the upper end of the hall a small square table looked like an oasis in a painted desert, with its service of crystal and gold, its candles shaded with pink—no doubt a satiric attention on the part of the King. Princess Nachmeister, very magnificent in pale blue brocade embroidered with silver (which, Ordham reflected, became her hideously), stood by the window and watched the young man with sharp interest as he advanced down the long apartment between the rows of gorgeous lackeys that seemed to await a concourse of kings. She despised the Anglo-Saxon race with all her German soul, believing them to be moderns without subtlety, and never forgetting that they were savages when the Italy of her ancestors was the crown of civilization; but if she had a soft spot in her fibrous old heart, it was for this protégé of hers, and it delighted her to observe that, far from being disconcerted, he had never looked more at his ease. Always, even in his boyish moments, he had the quiet aloofness of those born to the unpurchasable prizes and responsibilities of life, and although he was often nervous and shy in petty ordeals, the centuries that had made him invariably came to his rescue when suddenly placed in positions that shift the ballast of older men of less persistent breeding. Moreover, it is doubtful if the English aristocrat has deference in him for even the royal families of the minor states. He is democratic in manner, partly because it has become the fashion, partly through discretion, partly from sheer careless sense of superiority; but let no one mistake that attitude for humility of spirit or a sense of the universal brotherhood of man.

Ordham was not a little assisted in his present ordeal by his slight erect graceful figure, and he always carried his arms better than any man Excellenz had ever seen. She almost blushed with pleasure (poor lady, she could no longer blush) as she noted the respectful wonder on the faces of the lackeys. No doubt they had hoped to enjoy the embarrassment of so young a guest; and a rare entertainment it would have been to them, for the greatest nobles in Germany seldom found access to a castle where the solitary King forgot the world when he could.

Ordham seated himself with a grumble at the short time he had been given to dress. “And my servant is lost somewhere in this barrack,” he added (and this was a genuine grievance). “I could not find anything!”

“Tiens! Tiens!” (Excellenz relieved her English with French or German according to the specific gravity of her mood.) “You would have been late if I had sent for you an hour earlier. You were roaming all over the place hoping to meet Die Styr—don’t deny it!”

“Why couldn’t she dine with us? She is not going to sing an opera.”

“But she is going to sing out of doors, and her temper is worse than your own. I had a few words with her, and I never saw even a prima donna in such a state of suppressed fury. Of course she expected to sing in this room, but it seems the King has taken a vow that he will honour the memory of The Master by permitting no more music inside his castles, so—enfin!—he gets round his vow by commanding the great Styr to sing in the open—which, of course, is bad for the voice.”

“Why doesn’t she refuse—fall ill? I thought that prime donne were never without corns on their vocal chords when determined to have their own way, and that even a King must be prepared for caprice.”

“Not this King. Styr did not bring her doctor with her, and she loves but two things on earth, her art and Munich. When his Majesty commands, no excuse will serve. He alone in this realm is permitted to indulge caprice.”

“The Styr looks much too imperious to submit to such slavery—disgusting! She could sing anywhere.”

“Could she? Richard Wagner has no foothold as yet in either England or America—hardly outside of Germany. Styr’s voice would tear the old lyric rôles to tatters—divinely lyric as she makes her Isolde. It is Germany or nothing. And in Germany it is Munich or nothing—for she goes no more to Bayreuth.”

“Yes, Munich!—I too love Munich—Bavaria,” Ordham said softly, his eyes straying to the mountains beyond the narrow gorge. The windows were open and he could hear the low roar of the Pöllat waterfall.

“Now don’t fall into a dream,” said Excellenz, tartly. “It isn’t often that I have you alone. What a situation—what surroundings! It makes me feel almost young again.”

“Then tell me something about the Styr.” Ordham sometimes amused himself playing on the strings of the old coquette’s remnant of sex. But he always smiled so charmingly that she really did feel younger for the moment. The Nachmeister was never able to decide whether it was his manners or his smile that enabled her to understand the relations between Elizabeth and Essex.

Her fine little nose seemed to rise and point further downward as her round brilliant eyes, whose expression never changed, returned his steady ingenuous gaze. In a moment the corners of her protesting mouth moved upward and she shrugged her shoulders.

“Enfin, mon enfant gâté! What do you want to know? Surely you hear the gossip of the town.”

“All gossip is more or less alike. Is she the King’s mistress?”

“That I am sure you have never heard. His worst enemy would not raise the point. I do not know but that I had better carry you over into the Kemenate to-night.”

“Great heaven!” Ordham upset his champagne. “Why then does he show her more favour than the other singers—why has he given her a title and a house?”

“Her voice. Her art. Are not those enough—for this King? He is quite mad over both. One might have hoped for the supreme Isolde, Kundry, Brünhilde, in the course of another ten or twenty years—for has not Wagner revolutionized voices as well as music?—but she burst upon the world full blown. One day she appeared in Bayreuth and demanded audience of The Master. He taught her the great rôles himself; her voice was ready for them—perfectly placed and trained, flexible, sweet, resonant, noble, enormous, three perfect octaves. Wonderful! No doubt he and the King put their heads together and determined that she should leave Bavaria for short gastspiels only. But where did she come from? Who is she? Why has she no credentials? Even if lowly born, which would seem incredible did not the most queenly creatures appear now and again among the peasantry,—while as for queens—do not they often look as if Nature, worn out, had peevishly sent her highest back to the soil to begin over again?—Tiens! Genius is no respecter of quarterings—but, even so, why such reticence? Beyond the bare assertion that she is an American she has barely alluded to her impossible country. Why doesn’t she invent a plausible story that would put people’s imaginations to sleep? Has it occurred to you as odd that she never will be photographed?” she concluded abruptly.

“How fatiguing to think about anything that matters so little!” He had fumed more than once because he could not obtain even a magazine sketch of her. “The ordinary prima donna caprice, no doubt. Or réclame. Such self-abnegation is enough to make any ‘artist’ notorious.”

Excellenz shook her befeathered head. Ordham, fascinated, as he often was by the intensifying of her wicked old face, wondered if visible poison were about to drop from her lips.

“She dare not. Photographs travel. Did hers reach America—and those vaudeville newspapers—cannot you fancy whole pages devoted to her past? They would rake it up in a week. Fortunate for her that America comes not to Munich and she goes no more to Bayreuth.”

“If she is too haughty to silence slander by an ingenious lie, why should she not be too haughty—too much the artist—to care? She must know that Munich has settled down into the belief that her past will not bear inspection. I have heard that much.”

“Ah, but it is all vague rumour now. Never was the woman, not publicly in the half-world, who did not congratulate herself that many people gave her the benefit of the doubt. And whatever Styr was in America, here in Germany she is a goddess walking on clouds. Her voice, her method, her acting, her superb appearance, which yet is not commonplace beauty, above all, her divine artist soul, have made her the idol of the public. In the Hof there are the usual jealousies and intrigues that have driven so many fine artists from Munich never to return, but the influence of the King, to say nothing of her own wit, tact, and will of cast iron, blunt every shaft. She is cleverer than all the good people in the world put together, and I, Olivia Nachmeister, who have seen so many great gifts disintegrate for want of that virile brain-mortar of many ingredients that compels success, greatly respect her.”

“And in private life?”

“An ivory statue waiting for the night of a public performance to come to life at the bidding of The Master. When she first appeared in Munich our men shook out all their battered flags of a thousand sieges. They bombarded that ivory fortress with notes, flowers, jewels, even with proposals of marriage after she had demonstrated her imperviousness to the more regular sort. The jewels she sent publicly to charities; of the other attentions she made no acknowledgment whatever. Not a man, barring the officials of the Hof, or perhaps a new composer, can boast that he has been received by her alone. She opens her doors once a month, she goes to routs, sometimes to dinners—at first she went a good deal into society, and, I fancy, was fascinated by it; but no man got a word alone with her. I believe she hates men—but mortally! If this be true, it is significant enough. It may be, however, that the monotonies of society merely bore her. She is the most intellectual woman I know.”

“Intellectual?” She had succeeded in surprising his interest to the surface.

“She has a fine library of her own, and her footman may be seen any day striding between her villa and the royal library—looking very cross. She often attends lectures at the University, and when at home always is either reading or buried in her rôles—when she does not walk. Gott! what a life for a woman under forty! And no one would care if she had a lover. She is a great artist. Does not that give her the liberty of a goddess? What futile regrets when she is my age—sixty!” (Ordham amused himself on rainy days looking up the ages of his friends in the Graf Buch, and knew that Princess Nachmeister was seventy; but she was not too old to retain delusions, and fancied that young men were above such curiosities, or that their memories at least were unfeminine.)

“Where does she walk?”

“That no one discovers. I have an idea that she rises at four in the morning, when, of a certainty, she will not meet the gallants of Munich. She is always in fine physical condition, and one would know that she took much exercise—and baths—not too favourite a pastime in Germany!—even did she not allude once in a while to her ‘tramps.’ But don’t lie in wait for her. You would only get a snub for your pains.”

Ordham coloured haughtily. He did not like the word. “I never lie in wait for any one,” he replied coldly. “Besides, no doubt, she is stalked by a footman.”

“None of her servants speak English.”

“How is it that her German is so faultless? I am told that before any stories got about she was taken for a German as a matter of course.”

“Her parents were Hungarian. Her singing teacher in America was a Hanoverian.”

“Has she told you that much?”

“Now and again I get something out of her—but nothing that really counts. To judge from her manner, her carriage, her breeding, she might be a Karoly or a Festetics, but one day when I told her bluntly there was a rumour to the effect that her parents were emigrants,—steerage emigrants,—she replied coolly that she should be delighted if the story put an end to romantic nonsense.”

“I should like to believe that she was a runaway—or an abducted—princess.”

“So would all the other romantic babies. Unfortunately, we have her word for it that she is an American born—and reared. Of course her policy in admitting that much is to stifle curiosity in her origin—origin in America not counting with Europeans in the least—as well as to discourage curiosity. The place is so vast—ten thousand miles across, I am told—or is it in diameter?—that one might as well look for a lost soul in Hades. She has even admitted that she was on the stage in America. But under what name? That I cannot surprise out of her, and the few Americans I know never saw nor heard of her. They all live in Europe. Of course she never sang over there. She need not tell us that, for if they were still red and wore feathers, they would have made that voice famous in a day.”

“What makes you so sure that Margarethe Styr is not her name?”

“Am I a Frau Professor or an old woman of the world? When the King decided that bracelets, rings, even necklaces were inadequate acknowledgment from the first living royal patron of art to the greatest interpreter of the new music, and that she must be raised to the Bavarian aristocracy—Gott!—I was commanded to be her social sponsor. Naturally, with the utmost delicacy, I endeavoured to extract such information as would satisfy the curiosity of her future compatriots. I distilled a little and inferred more. Enfin! I am convinced that the story, whatever it may be, is hideous—but hideous! Who minds a lover or two?—and an artist, as I have said. I know women—ach Gott, ja! and I have studied the Styr far more deeply than she knows. There are certain signs—”

Excellenz lifted her shoulders and curved the corners of her mouth almost to her chin.

“I wonder!” Again Ordham’s glance strayed into the dusk beyond the glare. He recalled the curses and the ecstasies of Isolde. A footman changed his plate, and he asked, “How is it that I have never met her, even at a rout?”

“She has gone into society very little this year. I fancy she is now quite tired of it, and that only a royal command could draw her forth. And”—with a sigh—“there is no court, as you know.”

“Do the men still pursue her?”

“Not the older men; there are always recruits among the fledglings, but men soon learn the difference between ice and ivory, and life is short.”

“I should like to meet her.”

“No doubt. But she is more difficult to meet than the King.”

“You seem to know her very well.”

“Comparatively. But she happens to be the only genius of my acquaintance—of my own sex—and I am never quite at ease with her. I should far more aptly take a liberty with the Queen, to whom, indeed, I am privileged to say du; but I have never ventured into that zone of liberty with Die Styr. She is the most majestic, or shall I say, the most frozen, creature I have ever met. Where did she get it? Her origin! Her past! She upsets every theory.”

“There are no theories where genius is concerned. And if, in addition, she has an intellect—naturally she dominates. There are so few intellects. D’you see?”

“I do, you impertinent boy! And I shall not even try to present you to her.”

“According to all accounts, dear Princess, you should be the last to fear her, for in your society alone does she appear to find any pleasure. Who else can claim to know her? I have heard of no one.”

“Again I am assured of your fitness for the diplomatic career! As I told you, she was placed in my hands. I found her little in need of instruction. She seems to have been born with a sort of royal tact—this makes me believe that her parents were political refugees, at least. Perhaps they had disgraced themselves in other ways. Or it is possible that she is the illegitimate offspring of a prince and some pretty little actress who was bundled out of the country. Austrian archdukes have a mania for romantic marriages. N’importe! We have always remained friends of a sort. I rarely let a week pass without going to see her, and once in a while she comes to me alone and sits in my garden—and expresses her scorn of Sardou and her admiration of Ibsen! When I would give two or three of my best memories to hear how many lovers she has had, and what they were like. A woman can always be read through her lovers. Whatever Styr’s may have been, her one desire now is to be impersonal. I might as well invoke Brynhildr or Iseult. Perhaps nothing personal remains in that charming casket. Off the stage ivory, on the stage fire. It is all very odd. I have never been so intriguée in my life. Don’t try to know her. She might find you worth talking to—and then—who knows?”

Ordham flushed at the bare suggestion. “I am quite determined to know her.”

Excellenz noted that his eyes were less infantile than usual. “Well, later—I will take you to one of her routs,” she remarked indifferently, determined to do nothing of the sort. “I wonder where this remarkable concert is to take place.” She beckoned to the master of ceremonies, and was informed that the prima donna would stand on the Marienbrücke, the narrow bridge that spans the Pöllat at a dizzy height, and that the guests would listen from the windows of the Festsaal, or from the balcony of the throne room below, as suited their pleasure. His Majesty would occupy the balcony before his bedroom windows.

Ordham’s eyes flashed. “When?” he demanded.

“When the moon rises, sir. In less than an hour.”

IV
THE STYR

John Ordham stood alone on the balcony before the throne room. Princess Nachmeister, shivering and twinging, had gone over to her own comfortable apartment, where, wrapped in a wadded dressing-gown, she could sit at her window and lose nothing of the concert. Ordham, for some time, was sensitively conscious of an unquiet spirit just round the corner of the castle. He could not hear a footfall, a sigh, but he knew that the lonely King was trying to surrender his tormented soul to the golden flood pouring upward from the white figure on the Marienbrücke, perhaps to the unearthly beauty of the night.

The full moon mounted slowly above the three snow peaks of the distant Alps. It turned even the lakes to sheets of silver, threw forest and unpowdered mountain tops into hard black outline against the deep blue of a sky that seemed to throb with a thousand responsive notes: the golden notes of every human song-bird that Earth had lost. The wind was still. Save for the roar of the waterfall, there was not a sound in the world but that great voice that seemed to fill it.

Ordham had waited breathlessly during the few moments that preceded her appearance, the intense stillness pounding in his ears. Then, by what sleight of body he could not guess, she seemed to dart suddenly up from the gorge below the bridge as she uttered the terrible shriek of Kundry when summoned by Klingsor from her enchanted sleep.

“Ach! Ach! Tiefe Nacht—Wahnsinn!—Oh!—Wuth!—”

Ordham fancied he recognized a note of genuine anger in her wild remonstrance, a bitter personal reproach. But she was artist before all, and when she passed on to her scene with Parsifal, her dulcet reminiscences of his infancy when she herself seemed to brood above him, the helpless anguish of the desolate wife and adoring mother, the maternal agony when the boy ran from her out into the world, the waiting, the savage cries of despair, the “dulling of the smart,” the ebbing of life—the strain of exquisite pity in which she told the youth that he was alone on Earth—Ordham shivered more than once, staring back into a brief past where he could recall little of maternal love, wondering how much he would care if he never saw his mother nor any member of his distinguished selfish family again.

The echoes gave back Parsifal’s brief lament; then the tall white figure on the bridge, although she did not move, seemed to bend her voice above the kneeling boy, summoning him to consolation. As it rose in seduction, in the insolent triumph of the passionate woman who knows that not for her is the balking of desire, it was so warm, so rich, so vast in its compass, that Ordham felt as if the golden waters were rising to suffocate him. When she paused so lingeringly on the final note of seduction, “Ersten kuss,” that the words seemed to live on and gather volume in the thrilling rebellious ear, and an angry cry burst from the balcony of the King:—

“Amfortas!—

Die wunde! Die wunde!—

Sie brent in meinen Herzen—

Oh, Klage! Klage!

Furchtbare, Klage!—”

he came as angrily to himself. It was the spell whose meshes he cared least to encounter, and he wondered how he could be sensible to it, even under the influence of music, so soon after breaking from an entanglement which the lady had taken with a seriousness incomprehensible to himself. He was in a mood which impelled him to close the eyes of the lover in him forever, and his real interest in Margarethe Styr began when the Princess Nachmeister told him that she was a woman of intellect and hated his sex. He by no means hated hers, but his mind was lonely, and his ego sought blindly for that companionship which all souls claim as their right, and generally go forth to other worlds still seeking.

The voice of the King ceased. Kundry burst forth again. The wild grief, the remorse of her awakened soul at her abandonment of Christ, then her passionate supplication for the joys and compensations of mortal love, hardly removed the impression, nor her promise to make the obstinate youth a god in her embrace. But when she hurled forth her curses, Ordham breathed more freely, although the furies of hell seemed to echo among the hills.

There was a brief pause. Then with a wild and startling transition:—

“Ho-yo-to-ho! Ho-yo-to-ho!

Hi-ya-ha! Hi-ya-ha!

Ho-yo-to-ho! Ho-yo-to-ho!”

Brünhilde’s jubilant cry sprang from peak to peak; then this strange woman’s vocal interpretation of the gulf that separated Wotan’s daughter from her sisters even before the War-father bereft her of her godhead; the gathering clouds of her approaching humanity; the eternal tragedy of woman’s sacrifice to man.

Styr passed from opera to songs, all, no doubt, selected by the King. Some were sonorous with deep religious feeling, others a long-sustained chaunt of sadness and despair; one alone was insolent with triumph and power. It seemed to Ordham that he was swept upward to the stars, those golden voices of dead singers once as great as this virile creature below him. His body was cold, his pulses were still, his brain was on fire. He had a vision of himself and this woman swirling together on a tide of song through the infinite paths of the Milky Way—invisible to-night under the violent light of the moon—then—up—up—through the gates of heaven—

But he was by character and training too cool and self-controlled to remain in a condition of mental intoxication for any length of time. He had glanced at the programme handed to him at the conclusion of dinner and knew that the songs were to end the night’s performance.

Ordham, constitutionally shy, albeit with the audacity which so often accompanies that weakness, possessed also what Napoleon called two o’clock in the morning courage. He had felt sure that were he suddenly to be introduced to the mysterious Styr he should turn cold to his marrow and long to bolt. But to meet her formally might prove impossible. To-night was his opportunity. He made up his mind that he would talk to her did she invoke the vengeance of the gods.

He hastily made his way out of the castle by the main entrance, ran down the slope of the great rock, skirted its base, and ascended through the forest to the bridge. He believed that the King would retire as soon as the concert was over, and that the singer would remain for a few moments to enjoy the extraordinary beauty of the night.

And so it happened. Styr, her engagement finished, but still exalted with the intoxication of song, after one long look about her, leaned both hands on the railing of the bridge and stared down into the wild depths below. The grip of the bridge on the rocks was none too secure; a landslip, such as occurred daily in the Alps, and she would lie shattered below. But she enjoyed the hint of danger and might have stood motionless for an hour, warm as she was in her white woollen draperies, had not a footstep made her move her shoulders impatiently. She supposed it to be a lackey with a superfluous wrap, and did not move again until aware that some one stood beside her on the bridge. Then she turned with a start and faced Ordham. She knew at once who he must be; Princess Nachmeister often talked of her favourite, and had told her that he was a guest at the castle to-night. His audacity in approaching her and in such circumstances took away her breath. But only for an instant. She drew herself up with a majesty few queens have had sufficient practice to attain. Her height nearly matched his—not quite; he thanked his stars that she was compelled to look up at him; and she did look the cold astonishment her lips would not frame.

“I could not think of letting you return to the castle alone, Countess Tann,” said Ordham, gently, “even if those lackeys were not too stupid to think of coming for you. I am sure this forest is full of peasants; they must have known of the concert. They may be harmless, but as the King’s only guest of his own sex, and as he is unable to look after you himself—I am sure you will forgive me. How could I remain quiet in the castle while you found your way back alone? I should be a barbarian.”

There was no trace of emotion or even of admiration in his face, merely the natural courtesy of a gentleman, perhaps a touch of boyish knightliness. And certainly he was a mere boy, Margarethe Styr reflected. In that white downpour, that has rejuvenated many a battered visage, he looked—she groped for the word—virginal. And his steady gaze had never wavered before the haughty inquiry of hers. This young man might or might not be as innocent as he looked, but his perfect breeding, which she instantly divined to be an integral part of him, appealed to the woman who had so often found polished manners a brittle veneer. Moreover, she was as amused at his ruse, which had not deceived her for a moment, as she felt herself compelled to admire his strategic cleverness. Then she abruptly asked herself the question that perhaps the immortal goddesses asked in their day, “Why not?” and bent her head pleasantly.

“Thank you,” she said. “Of course you are Mr. Ordham. Thank you many times for thinking of me. Shall we walk a little? I should not stand too long after singing.”

He was so taken aback by the swiftness of his triumph that diffidence overwhelmed him, and he stammered: “You are sure you would not like another wrap? I can fetch one in a moment.”

“I am very warmly clad. Do not bother.” She did not notice his relapse and asked him idly if he had enjoyed her singing.

“Oh—enjoy! Please do not tempt me into banalities. It was much too wonderful to talk about. I should like to talk to you—about a hundred other things. I know your voice—I have never missed one of your nights since I came to Munich. But I do not know you at all. This is the blessed opportunity.”

He had had time to recover himself, and he watched her intently. Her eyes, which had hung before his mental vision like two tragic suns, flashed with amusement.

“Do you know that I have lived in Munich for six years and not had five minutes’ conversation with any man alone, except on business relating to the Hof? Much less have I ‘known’ any one.”

“But you can’t go on forever like that. If you weren’t fundamentally human, you could not be a great artist; and if you are human, you must crave some sort of companionship. Are you never quite horribly lonely?”

“There is so much in life that is worse than loneliness.” Her voice sounded as dry as dust. “Moreover, it is an excellent rampart. But I am not lonely. I work constantly. Why do you set such a high value on human companionship?”

“I don’t think I do. I am often glad enough to get away from people. And I fancy I read a good deal more than I talk—and I am not sure that I don’t like the theatre quite as well as society. But, after all—there are certain wants—”

“We outlive so many of them!”

“Do we—permanently, I mean? I feel that sooner or later you would have flung down your barriers. It is mere chance that makes me the blessed first.”

“I wonder?”

“Whether it is chance or destiny?” He smiled as if at the audacity of his own words.

“Not at all. There is no such thing as chance, or any destiny but that which you make for yourself—that is, after you are old enough to know what you are about. I wondered if the human needs were stronger than the brain.”

“I was thinking of mental needs when I spoke. Nothing is more human than the brain. One can get on without love, after one has had a dose or two of it, but not without striking fire from another brain now and again. From one brain in particular, I should say.”

“That is a curious speech for so young a man to make.”

“Perhaps I should not make it if I were ten years older. For the matter of that, do years count? We come into the world encased in traditions and are only happy when we have shed the last of them.”

She liked the way he walked beside her, seeming to protect her down the steep path without touching her. He carried himself with a quiet unconscious dignity, refreshing after the military strut of which she was artistically weary; and as he looked down at her with his kind smile and calm almost studious gaze, he attracted her more than any man had done for half his years. She also felt a curious mental excitement, a desire to talk very fast, which she attributed to the uncommon circumstances, but which she realized before long was the stimulating influence of that rarest of mortal contacts, a sympathetic brain. In days gone by she had found it easy to love, but she remembered few men she had cared to talk to. At the moment she shot up an inquisitive glance. Might he not be older than she had fancied? Nineteen he had looked on the bridge. Possibly he was nearer thirty. But she recalled that Princess Nachmeister had mentioned his age. Young men—with one tragic exception—had never interested her. But she was quick to read the human countenance; and she observed that if his eyes recorded nothing beyond the mood of the moment, the line from ear to chin, under the fine smooth English skin, was uncommonly long. It might indicate future character and present obstinacy; although there were no strong lines yet in the boyish sensuous mouth, soft and pouting in spite of its fine modelling. And although he had demonstrated that he could seize and hold a fort, there was no hint of obstinacy in his manner, which was very gentle and diffident. For the first time in her life she experienced a sensation of gratitude toward a member of the man sex, a sensation made up of many parts, and rising from dark corners of memory. It impelled her to say:

“Let us sit down. It is quite warm here in the forest.”

“You are sure you will not take a cold? I will give you my coat to sit on.”

“You will do nothing of the sort. Fortunately, these classic costumes commanded by the King are made of wool. Besides, I always dress warmly to sing in that Festsaal. It is colder there than out of doors.”

“Nevertheless, you were very angry when you began to sing.”

“Did you detect that? I hope the King did.”

Ordham, who had stretched himself at her feet—she had seated herself on a bench—looked steadily at her while they talked, wondering if she were beautiful or not, or if it mattered. Her head in poise and form was classic, her face oval, and her rather long nose thin and sensitive. But her eyes—those eyes that looked immense on the stage—were small, deeply set, dark, impenetrable, sullen, like the lower part of her face. Occasionally they lit up with amusement, and hinted of temper and other uncomfortable attributes; nor was there any suggestion of tenderness in the close mouth and strong jaw. In the second act of Tristan und Isolde she expressed every soft enchantment of womanhood, and Ordham for the first time fully realized what a great artist she was, for he could see no indication that any traces remained of those impulses that drive the race blindfolded, in this sullen almost angry shell. She looked like a fallen goddess, whom mortal passions had consumed, leaving but a vast regret for her lost godhead. No wonder she could play Brynhildr! There was nothing else in that imposing casket but brain, and although he could imagine the tigerish beauty of her youth, she fascinated him far more as she was. The world was full of soft passionate women—he hated the thought of them—and his mind, almost full-blown, imperiously demanded this particular brain as its mate. But he made no effort to lead the conversation into unusual channels. In conversation, for that matter, he was not skilful, and depended upon the inspiration of the moment.

Princess Nachmeister had said that a woman might be known by her lovers, but he judged people largely by what they read, and he asked Margarethe Styr if she took in all the reviews.

“Not one. To me this high plateau is the world. I do not know who is the President of the United States, or the Prime Minister of England.”

“Does your art really fill your life?”

“Almost. And I read a great deal, although no reviews, newspapers, and few novels.”

“And is this to go on forever? How do you define the word ‘life’?”

“All that I most wish to forget.”

“Then if you had not this wonderful voice, you would not live at all,” he adventured.

Her eyes gleamed, and for the moment she seemed about to turn the remark aside. But she looked at him unflinchingly, and finally answered, “No.”

“Then art does suffice. It is very interesting to learn that.”

“It once saved me from death—when I was almost dead. Every one else had succumbed. It was the knowledge of that golden wonder in my throat and the memory of the ecstasy in pouring it forth that kept the breath in my body.”

“Tell me about it!” He sat up eagerly.

She shook her head. “I never think of it. I cannot imagine what has brought it to my mind to-night.” She bent her head and looked at him keenly. “Yes, there is a slight resemblance,” she added thoughtfully.

“You are unfair. I am mad with curiosity. Tell me. Tell me.”

She asked him abruptly: “Do you find that I have a German accent? It is seven years and more since I have spoken with any one of my own tongue, and I am curious to know.”

“It is a colour rather than an accent—that is to say—I always express myself very badly—as if you had dyed your native American with brown and crimson, and at the same time rounded off the thin edges. But I should not take you for a German. Is that what you wish?”

“Not in the least.”

“But Princess Nachmeister intimated that Munich was the passion of your life, or something of that sort.”

“Well, it is one of them, certainly; and for a while I was so grateful to Germany, so enchanted with my new life, that I deliberately tried to make myself over into a German, put myself into the rôle, as one does on the stage. I succeeded for a time, but all that is past. Once an American always an American, I fancy. And the longer I live in Europe the more American I become. Don’t ask me to define this. It is merely an instinct—perhaps a jealousy of birthright. I may never return to the United States. I know nothing of her affairs. But—well, my essence was compounded in that great country. She could put Germany into her pocket and not hear it rattle. It may be that—the physical vastness of the country—that holds me. I am only thinking out loud—I have never attempted to analyze why I finally admitted that Europe could inspire me with everything but a new patriotism, but I have a fancy that it is only snobs that become thoroughly Europeanized. Titles are a form of intoxication to republicans as well as to the bourgeoisie of monarchical countries. But after all, they work less harm than absinthe and cognac, so why be too severe? If one must have human weaknesses, let us be content merely with making fools of ourselves and save our livers and our nerves.”

Ordham laughed. “I was sure you were a monster of charity! But I hardly understand your loyalty to the United States. If your blood is Hungarian, what matters your birthplace? No Englishman feels a sentiment for the American flag because he happens to have been born under it.”

“Who told you I was of Hungarian parentage?”

“Everybody.”

“My mother was a Hungarian—emigrant. I have caused that story to be circulated about Munich, for I was tired of their nonsense. If you have any curiosity on the subject—I have not the vaguest idea who my father was. My mother, I have reason to believe, was of aristocratic blood on her father’s side, but she was a natural child, of course, and a vagrant.”

“Are you trying to disenchant me?” Ordham felt a little angry; he was, in truth, too much of a Briton and a born diplomatist to relish such plain speech.

“Perhaps. But, to be quite honest, not entirely that. It is rather a relief to fling the bare facts into somebody’s teeth. When you have been shut up within yourself for many years, it suddenly becomes necessary to lift the lid and let the steam escape. Of course I cannot give all the facts to the public. It would not be fair to the King, in the first place. Moreover, when I set foot on German soil and assumed the name of Margarethe Styr, it was with the firm intention of beginning life over again. I had no scruple about holding my tongue on many subjects. I brought to the Germans the equivalent of all they could give to me. We are quits. I experience a kind of defiance now and again, a desire to assert my complete liberty and independence by proclaiming the truth from the housetops. But of course I do nothing of the sort.”

She did not ask him to keep her counsel, and he volunteered no promise, two facts that must have struck them as significant had either been in the analytical temper. But Ordham was wondering if she would ever tell him the whole story; and she, if the excited stir of her mind were due to the unwonted occurrence of talking to a young man alone in a forest at night, after eight years of almost complete disassociation from his sex; or if it were merely the usual nervous aftermath of song. But she had no time to define her sensations at the moment. There was a rapid step in the forest. Out of the shadows emerged the King’s personal footman, Meyr, who announced that his Majesty’s coach was in the courtyard, ready for the customary midnight drive, and that his Majesty requested the pleasure of the company of the Gräfin Tann and Herr Ordham.

“I won’t go,” said Ordham, in English. “I wish to stay here and talk to you. Please don’t get up.”

“Not even for the pleasure of talking to you would I risk being dismissed out of Bavaria to-morrow. This is the sovereign that takes no excuse. And why should I deny him? Has he not made me what I am? And do you realize that a great honour is being conferred upon you?—upon us both? So far as I know, he has never invited any one to drive with him at night before.”

“I will go for the sake of remaining with you, and only hope it may prove half as interesting as our talk would have been.”

He walked beside her down the hill, grumbling all the way. In the upper courtyard was a large open coach, bountifully gilded, to which six white horses were harnessed. On two were postilions; an outrider carried an unlighted torch. A footman was on the box beside the coachman, but there was none behind. Ordham’s eyes sparkled as he put on without further protest the overcoat and hat with which his apologetic servant awaited him; and had they been less under control, would have danced a moment later when the King’s valet came hastily from the castle with the announcement, which surprised no one but the English stranger, that his Majesty found himself too indisposed to go out that night, and begged that his guests would use the carriage at their pleasure. Countess Tann, whose maid had muffled her in a white hood and cloak, half turned from the coach, but she suddenly found herself handed in and Ordham seated beside her.

“This is quite wonderful!” he cried, as the horses seemed to make a flying leap over the drawbridge. “And I thought this visit was to be a failure. Blessed be the fates!”

And in spite of all that followed he never recalled that pæan.

V
ORDHAM AND THE STYR

The six horses seemed to take another leap through the air as they left the lower courtyard, and Ordham expected to land on the tree-tops below. But those horses, that had the motion of winged things, flew unerringly along the lower road, through the dark forest, down the mountain side to Füssen. In this loyal village every window, suddenly lighted, was flung open, heads of old and young appeared, and delighted cries of “Heil unserem König, Heil!” rang after the undetected occupants of the coach when they were once more in the forest. Up hill and down hill flew the horses, out of the forest again, toward snow peaks that seemed to be flying about in distraction, sometimes rushing to meet these mad riders of the night. The coachman and footman kept their seats as if a part of the bounding vehicle. But Ordham and his companion were so tossed about that he soon gathered up the cushions and packed them round her, then leaning his weight on those between them, braced his feet on the opposite seat. He made no attempt to hold her in place as another man might have done, he did not even touch her; and Margarethe Styr, who had been accustomed to men that took every possible advantage of a woman’s helplessness, gave him a place in her regard that she never permanently revoked.

But nothing was farther from his mind than the wish to touch her. She was a woman alone with him under somewhat hazardous circumstances, and he protected her instinctively and made her as comfortable as possible. Although he would have risen to the occasion as a matter of course, he was grateful that he was not with a woman who would expect to be made love to, but with this strange and delightful creature, who, exhilarated by the terrific speed and the danger, could enjoy herself in precisely his own fashion. He did not even ask her if she were frightened, although once, as they tore through a narrow gorge with the roar of waters far below, he leaned over the side of the carriage, holding the cushions firmly against her with his left hand, then, as he resumed his former position, remarked:

“Three hundred feet, I should think, and perhaps three inches between the wheels and the edge.”

She laughed, and he turned his eyes quickly to her white face, in which the dark eyes were more widely opened and eager than usual.

“You enjoy the idea of possibly being dashed to pieces on those rocks—getting out of it all.”

Her eyes met his in a cold flash. “Do you realize what you have said?”

“That you are the bravest woman I ever saw, but with no love of life. Could you be the greatest actress in the world otherwise?”

“I wonder if you really know what you are saying? But you are young—so very young.”

“What has that to do with it?”

“Well—perhaps—what?”

“Nothing, really. I have seen you look very old and very young, and every shade between. When you get that helmet on your head in Die Walküre, you look sixteen, much too young for the part. Just now you look like a fate. A woman who calls out of their graves other women that have been dead for centuries and gives them life again for four or five hours,—Wagner’s operas are much too long,—who makes them live so intensely that their very dust must feel the current,—why, of course, you have no age. Margarethe Styr disappears, ceases to exist. When she returns to her tenement, it must be with the sensation of being born again. For myself—well, perhaps I am forty masquerading as a boy.”

“I know exactly how old you are,” she said maliciously. “And you could not grow a mustache to save your life.”

“Nothing would induce me to!” And then they both laughed, although he blushed very red, for he was sensitive on the subject of his age and wished that Peerages had never been invented.

Styr put her hands to her face and gave a faint scream. A column of fire had shot up in the path just ahead of the horses.

“The moon has gone under a cloud and the outrider has lit the torch,” Ordham reassured her.

She dropped her hands and leaned forward eagerly. The moon had made the wild mountain scenery, the forests and snow peaks, the upper reaches, so beautiful that more than once she had held her breath, felt as if her soul were full of crystal flowers. The flaming torch, high in the right hand of the outrider, lit the vast scene in a fashion that suggested the approach to Hell arranged in honour of distinguished visitors. The waterfalls leaping down the opposite cliffs, the glittering peaks, the gloomy roaring depths of the gorges, started out red and black, disappeared, flashed in the distance, rushed forward to hurl themselves at the flying carriage. Ordham wondered how many horses the King killed in a year. But he was too much interested in the scene, the adventure, to care. It was more wonderful, more satisfying, than anything he had ever dreamed of. For a moment he had an ecstatic desire for death, if only to avoid the anticlimax of life.

The moon came out again. The torch was extinguished. All the Alpine world was white and silver. It seemed like a sudden ascent into the vast quiet regions of space from the chaos of the Inferno. Both Ordham and his companion, who had been sitting tensely, leaned back with a sensation of contentment and peace.

In a moment she turned to him with softly shining eyes and said, “Cannot you understand the King a little better?”

“I think so.”

“Not yet! Be thankful for that.”

“When you began to sing to-night, I was frightfully oppressed by the thought of that tormented soul only a few feet from me. Then I forgot him.”

“Is it possible?” She stared at him with a puzzled interest. She knew nothing of the worldly and mental precocity of young Englishmen of Ordham’s class, and Ordham was himself in more ways than one.

“ ‘Tormented soul.’ Nothing could express it more perfectly.” She continued in a moment: “It was developed for some other planet where all conditions are higher and more satisfying than on this, then strayed here through some mismanagement of the Unknown Forces—and into the dark passages of a Wittelsbach brain, of all places! If he only had been in a position to work out his one hope of mortal salvation—to become a great artist. Genius inflamed and smothered by the megalomania of a king—and of a king with no part to play on the stage of Europe! No wonder there are abysses in his brain for which this life will build no bridges.”

“Do you know him well?”

“I have never exchanged a word with him, never met him face to face.”

“No?” Ordham turned to her with a quickened interest. He had attributed the Nachmeister’s defence to the amiable mood of the moment, but it did not occur to him to doubt the word of Margarethe Styr. “He has shown you so much favour—”

“He is grateful for my voice, poor soul, for it gives him a few moments’ happiness. But I shall never know him. I wish I might. I understand him so well.”

“Then you too do not belong to this planet?”

“I wonder you did not add that I too have a tormented soul.”

“That is what I meant.”

“But I have not.” She looked at him steadily. “Perhaps—once—yes. But that is long past. You, being a man, with a more sensitive fibre in you than most men possess,—you may catch just a glimmer of the depths of Ludwig, in spite of your tender years. But there is one thing of which you know absolutely nothing, and that is the intense and absorbing joy that an artist finds in his art.”

“ ‘His.’ Can a woman?”

“Oh, you are clever! But, yes—in certain conditions. There are moments when I am happier than any one not an artist can ever dream of being. And betweenwhiles—with my studies, my long meditations upon the characters I portray—for I find always something new in those strange women, that not even The Master apprehended when he resurrected them—in my unruffled life, in my certainty of repeated triumphs—well, it is close enough to happiness; although I am willing to confess that it might not have been at your age. Have we really pulled up a bit?”

The horses were trotting quietly across a valley, where, unable to find excitement, the King, no doubt, was in the habit of sparing his unhappy beasts. But a few moments later the speed was increased again, apparently that they might enter a village on the other side of the valley like a hurricane. Here, as in all the other villages through which they had flashed, was the same rattling of windows flung up, the same flaring of lights, the same passionate cry:—

“Heil unserem König, Heil!”

But in this case the cheers stopped abruptly, for the faithful peasants had time to discover their mistake; the foaming horses came to a sudden halt before the gasthaus trembling and panting. As Ordham and Countess Tann descended into the narrow street which flamed like a comet, there were loud astonished cries. The outrider made a brief explanation, and the lights were extinguished, the windows slammed. In the beloved romantic figure of their King these humble folk took a deathless interest, but not the least in any guest he might invite to his castles; although for a week from this night they discussed the strange fact that he condescended to have guests at all, much less relinquish in their favour his midnight drive.

But the landlord of the inn had expected the King’s visitors, and kept his counsel: a groom on horseback had galloped in with orders half an hour before. Ordham and Styr were conducted into a long dark raftered room which had been hastily aired of its evening fumes of beer and tobacco, and illuminated with lamps and candles. There was a fire in the big tiled stove, and Ordham quickly threw off his overcoat and removed the long Arabian-looking wrap in which the singer was muffled. The supper was not ready, and he looked her over as she stood by the fire with her back to him, a tall figure draped in severe white folds, a finely poised head with loosened coils of heavy but rippling brown hair that shone as if polished daily with a silk handkerchief. But although she was engaged in the prosaic occupation of warming her hands, he received the impression that he always did in the first act of Tristan and the second of Götterdämmerung, of a ruthless mental force, barely held in leash, of sullen deadly fires.

It was like a sudden vision of Aspasia in the dark tobacco-scented room of the little Alpine gasthaus, but in a moment he forgot his fancies; she turned to him with bright eyes and flushed cheeks that made her look human and young.

“How odd! How odd!” she cried. “And the oddest part of it is that I like it—talking to a human being once more. It might even seem natural to feel young and gay again. And in spite of your preternatural insight—or whatever it is—you are deliciously young, and, I think, stimulated all that was still youthful in my brain the moment we made friends.”

“Are we to remain friends?”

“I do not know. I must think it over.”

“I shall call.”

“Of course. That would be mere civility. But I am not sure that you will get in.”

He was never demonstrative in manner, although he often indulged in certain exaggerations of speech. But he could direct a quiet smiling appeal from his juvenile orbs which he had discovered was seldom resisted. He was far too clever to flirt with Margarethe Styr, so upon this occasion he merely looked like a very young man begging indulgence of a goddess. She smiled and shook her head.

“I am not sure. It is the first step that counts, and first steps are too often fatal. I might find myself enjoying the society of my kind again. I want nothing less—the even tenor of my life destroyed. When one has attained a form of happiness it is the quintessence of folly to risk it.”

“But the first step—you have taken it. We have had an adventurous night together and I shall refuse to be ignored.”

“To-morrow it will seem like a dream.”

“To-morrow, but not a week hence,” he retorted with his uncommon sagacity, which fascinated her more than any trait he had yet displayed to her. “And nothing can alter the fact that it is no dream, and that neither of us can forget it. I shall call to-morrow.”

She laughed and they sat down to the omelette that preceded the chickens. Like all singers she had a healthy appetite, and wondered that she had not missed her usual replenishment even after but an hour and a half of work.

“How do you manage it—concentrating all that tragedy in your eyes?” asked Ordham, abruptly. “Is it that you draw your brows together in some peculiar way—I fancy that is it; they are so low and straight. Will you show me?”

“Do you think I am a machine?” The artist arose in her wrath. “Do you fancy that when I am suffering the anguish of Iseult or Brynhildr I put eyebrows on my soul?”

“But you don’t really feel it? I thought artists dared not feel too much. I have seen would-be emotional actresses carried away to such an extent that they were quite ridiculous.”

“You give no stage artist the credit of a brain, I suppose? Can you imagine a born actress—born, mind you—living her part, yet never quite shaking loose from that strong grip above? That is what is meant by ‘living a part.’ You abandon yourself deliberately—with the whole day’s preparation—into that other personality, almost to a soul in possession, and are not your own self for one instant; although the purely mental part of that self never relaxes its vigilance over the usurper. It is a curious dual experience that none but an artist can understand. Of course that perfect duality is only possible after years of study, work, practical experience, mastery of technique. No beginner, no matter what her genius, should dare to abandon herself to her rôles.”

“You must have had great masters. You have harrowed me horribly.”

“I have had none, except Wagner. Five years of stage experience in the United States were of a certain value, for although I never had an important part—I was too tall, I was not interested, my talent barely stirred—still I observed, I studied in an abstract mental fashion, I gained poise. It is an achievement alone to feel at home on the stage.”

He was burning with impatience. “How in heaven’s name could they have failed over there to discover that you were a great actress, whether or not you chose to cultivate your genius—and why not? why not? I hope you do not think me merely curious. I am trying to speak as one of the public that adores you—quite impersonally. There are so few great actresses. I feel that you had no right, for any private reasons whatever, to build a bushel over your talent. No genius belongs to himself alone.”

The colour left her face, but she replied composedly: “Perhaps not, but that is not the way that women, at least, reason when they are young. I went on the stage, not because I was stage-struck, nor in poverty, but for a reason that I cannot give you. When I found that the big heavy voice that even singing teachers had laughed at could be minted into pure gold for the new music,—which only one of the many instructors I sought knew anything about, or at least believed in,—then I felt resigned even to the causes which had driven me to the stage. I have become inordinately ambitious; I often wonder what life can mean to those that have no excuse for ambition—it is one of the reasons which enabled me to begin life all over again. I was indeed another being after my first triumph at Bayreuth, and not only because half the crowned heads in Europe rushed to hear me the second time I sang; when I stood on the greatest stage in the world with all my being set to the music soaring from my throat, not a nerve out of tune, I knew that I no longer was of common clay, that nothing that had ever happened to me before mattered in the least. Ah, what matter the charnel rooms in the soul when such memories blaze forever above? Poor women! Poor women!—that have no such blinding moments—that must sit and think—and think—”

Her eyes, dilated, horror-struck, gazed beyond Ordham, who felt intolerably excited. He drew a short breath of relief when she recovered herself abruptly, and said with a laugh: “But the world is very ungrateful to its stage artists. Think of Mallinger, Josephine Schefzky, Malwina Schnoor von Caroldsfeld. Less than twenty years ago all Germany rang with their fame. Have you ever heard their names?”

“I have heard of Schefzky! It was she that overturned the swan boat in the winter garden of the Residenz when sailing with the King—dressed up as Lohengrin!—and he ran off, dripping, and calling to a lackey to pull her out. I love that story.”

“It is all that keeps poor Josephine’s name alive. However—what matter so long as we have our little day? Only the chosen few have that. What have you made up your mind to do with your own life?”

She put the question so abruptly that he almost dropped his fork. “If I have interested you sufficiently to inspire that question, then the last six or eight years have not atrophied everything but the artist. Unless you asked it for the sake of saying something,” he added anxiously.

“Not altogether. I suddenly wondered. Excellenz Nachmeister and the few people I meet often mention you. I have had the impression that you were badly spoilt, but your head does not seem to be turned.”

“Why should it be? No one has ever spoilt me—thought of such a thing” (and he really meant it). “I am going into the diplomatic service, if you care to know. I am here to get my German—not that I get much, between rushing about and four teachers that practise their English on me.”

“Why four teachers?”

“I take every new one that is recommended, and am too weak-minded to dismiss the others. They all seem to be so horribly poor.”

“I must find you a good teacher.” She spoke impulsively, feeling an uncommon interest in a promising young creature, quite thirteen years her junior. She had never had a child, but as she regarded Ordham, who in the mellow light looked his youngest, and was eating his abundant supper as daintily as a girl, she moved toward him with an instinct of protection. He still had the soft bloom of lip and cheek and eye that the most innocent of women lose so early, and she knew the world he lived in. What a pity it must go, that he too must change! Between his inherited impressions and exceeding opportunities, he might know his world, and his brain might be all that admiring Munich acclaimed, but he was young, divinely young. No girl had ever given her such an impression of youth—fleeting youth! His contacts with the emotional side of life had made no impression on him beyond satisfying his curiosity and saving his mind from morbidity. She divined, indeed, that, his heart still being untouched, his nature was practically unawakened, that his casual experiences, when they had not disgusted him, had affected him no more than some story he had read and forgotten. Other phases of life meant so much more.

She reached these conclusions by aid of her deep instincts rather than through any conscious mental process, for her own contacts had been almost entirely with American men who were either ingenuously fast or uncompromisingly puritanical, generally the former, circumstances having limited her experience. She had met, as all handsome actresses must, young Americans of Ordham’s age; and when they had not been precocious and impertinent, they had belonged to that gallant, clean-minded, well-bred type the universities turn out in such abundance—the type that has every attribute to win the girl and not one to interest the woman. Ordham’s inherited complexities, intensified by growing up among men of affairs in a country always consciously making history, added to his own uncommon individuality, fascinated her. She would have liked to cultivate him, but she relinquished that idea, and said practically:

“These are precious years if you really mean to make a career. I know an excellent teacher, and will send her to you to-morrow. But you must not waste her time. Will you promise me to study?”

“Of course.” Ordham was always willing to promise anything. “I’ll dismiss all four and take her for as many hours as she will give me. You inspire me with a desire to work. Did you begin to study German when you were very young that your accent is so perfect?”

“I did not study anything when I was very young.” She hesitated, reflected that in all probability she would never see this young man again, and might as well drop a good seed when the opportunity was given her; it did not occur often. “I did not know even the English alphabet until I was fifteen. Nor did any other child in the wretched coal-mining district where I first saw light. It was peopled wholly by the poorest class of immigrants from eastern Europe—brought over wholesale by enterprising and not too honest mine owners. My clothes were made of hop-sacking. I had not the faintest idea that I was good-looking, for the simple reason that I was never clean or half fed. My mind was as tightly closed as an oyster. I recall no desires beyond want of more food and the night that brought rest. My mother died at my birth, and I was taken in by a family of fellow-immigrants to whom one more child meant one more future bread-winner.

“Suddenly, I went to New York. Almost immediately I began to attend a public school—a free school, not a public school in your sense. Later I had tutors, masters. I learned well from the first. My intellect, that is to say my interest in books, awakened early—novels, at first, of course; gradually heavier works. In them I soon learned to forget; that is to say, I found in them a separate and particular happiness. I made a special study of the language and the literature of Germany. Whence I inherit my tendencies and talents I have no idea. From nowhere, most likely. Some mysterious disarrangement of particles, of which science, so far, knows nothing. You are an exotic yourself, or I am much mistaken. To return—that rushing of the awakened mind over dam after dam, barrier after barrier,—there is nothing under heaven like it, except the discovery that one was born to be a great artist, which, of course, is the supreme happiness. There were times, even then, when I was as happy as I ever shall be; that is to say, my mental exaltation was as great, for I suppose that is what mortal happiness really means, what gives us our most precise distinction from the lower order of animals, and makes us feel our relationship to that omnipotent force which we personify as God. At all events it was a life apart, a secret life, a life in which no one—no one—” her voice rose on an accent almost furious—“could enter. And of course those years of study played their part in making me what I am to-day. Most singers have no brain, no mental life; they must be taught their rôles like parrots, they put on a simulation of art with their costumes which deceives the great stupid public and touches no one. Mere emotionalism, animal robustness, they call temperament. I strengthened and developed my brain during those terrible years to such an extent that I now act out of it, think myself into every part, relying not at all upon the instructions of the uninspired, nor upon chance.”

Ordham had forgotten his dessert and was staring at her, fascinated, almost bewildered. Again she had lifted a corner of the veil. If she would but fling it aside! And pity overwhelmed him, for he saw far behind her words. But his face betrayed little of his emotions, and when she paused abruptly, he said: “You have an object in telling me this. What is it?”

“To show what obstacles can be overcome by the power of the will and by ceaseless mental activity rightly directed. You have no obstacle to overcome but your indolence, which may, nevertheless, balk your languid desire for a career. Therefore, if you fail; if ten years hence you are a mere society butterfly, a drone, which, I infer, Munich is doing its best to make of you; if twenty years hence you are an old beau, with no object but to be invited out every night that you may escape death by ennui,—you need curse no one but yourself. Had I failed, I should have been justified in throwing myself into the river, cursing life, fate, your entire sex. I have conquered in spite of every millstone that could be hung about a woman’s neck. But you!”

He had flushed, and looked frightened. The vision she had evoked was not pleasant. He answered steadily, however: “Thank you for telling me all this. I know that no one, not even Princess Nachmeister, has ever heard one-tenth as much from you. What shall I do to show my gratitude?”

“Make a great man of yourself and study with Fräulein Lutz,” she said gayly, as they rose from the table. “I think they are bringing those poor horses round.”

They started by the light of the torch, but on the return journey the horses were spared, save on the more dangerous parts of the road. Then they galloped as if bent on destruction. While the carriage rocked and bounded through a gorge with the thunder of waters below and the narrow pass reeling in the red flame, Ordham regaled his companion with the story of the wild black night when the outrider, overcome by panic, had flung the torch into the depths, and fled shrieking, leaving the King to his fate. But she only laughed and shrugged her shoulders, and would not talk until they entered the valley of the Pöllat. The moon had sailed high above the thick Bavarian clouds, and the great white pile of Neuschwanstein seemed to be poised in the black void. Margarethe pointed to a solitary figure standing on the balcony before the throne room.

“The King,” she said softly. “He has his consolations. Who can say he is not happier in his mystic communion with nature, in his freedom to dwell amidst such scenes as this, than the mere mortals that pity him and think him mad? He is looking out now on the three snow peaks. Who knows? He may be their offspring. Mountains are no mere masses of rock, and he is no mere mortal. When his adumbrated spirit sheds that gross mass of flesh, who can say what glorious destiny awaits it? I should like to meet him out there in space. I feel sure he will reign over a noble kingdom, where he will no longer be alone, but where only the rarest spirits may enter.”

“Are you in love with Ludwig—with his soul?”

“Not even that. But I should be glad to know that he, above all men,—for he has suffered most,—had found what we all seek and never find—I mean all of us who are worthy of loneliness.”

“You do not believe in mortal companionship, then?”

“No.”

“I wonder.”

As he handed her out of the carriage in the courtyard they were surrounded by lackeys, and her anxious maid awaited her. But he said, as they shook hands:

“Thank you so much—again and again. And I shall call to-morrow.”

VI
CERTAIN INEVITABLE PHASES

Somewhat to his surprise, but vastly to his gratification, Ordham, on the following afternoon, was handed a card inscribed “Hiobe Lutz,” accompanied by a line of introduction on one of Gräfin von Tann’s. He had just risen from luncheon in the Legation, and received the rather formidable looking female in the anteroom. She addressed him in such German as he had seldom heard in Bavaria, announced that she should never utter a word of English during his lessons, that he must dismiss his other teachers and study with her every morning, Sundays excepted, from ten until twelve. The last was a harrowing prospect, for he hated early rising; but he had the wit to perceive that here was the force to control his indolence and furnish his brain, that he would never fascinate this grenadier with his wiles and be permitted to entertain her in English. Moreover, he realized that she had received instructions from Margarethe Styr, and this flattered him deeply. The arrangement was quickly made and Fräulein Lutz departed, announcing that upon his second failure to appear promptly at ten o’clock she should consider herself dismissed. She would not waste her time,—she was assisting a historian upon a great work,—no, not for anybody.

Several hours later Ordham left a card on Countess Tann, and with it a note of thanks. But he did not ask for admittance. It cost him an unaccustomed effort of self-denial to turn from her door when there was a bare possibility of crossing its threshold, but he had reflected that he had no right to take advantage of his chance intimacy with a recluse, nor even of her very marked kindness; moreover, that, having done his duty, it was her privilege to ask him to come another day and drink a cup of tea.

But the days passed and it waxed evident that she had no intention of embracing her opportunity. In ordinary conditions he might have been piqued, for he was more spoilt than he knew; certainly disappointed. But even he had his worries, and two descended upon him the day after his return from Neuschwanstein.

One arrived in the morning mail. It was a request from his tailor to pay a bill of four years’ standing, a letter whose inexorable business flavour—which seemed to him sheer insolence—left him aghast. It is true that he had received several reminders from this necessary but ignominious person during the past six months, and tossed them, half read, into his waste-basket. It annoyed him to receive a bill at all, but that the demands of a mere machine might increase in firmness, much less hint of “summons,” had never crossed his mind. Until his father’s death four years since, he had rarely read a bill, or even, extravagant as he was, suffered remonstrance from a parent, who, regretting that his favourite son should not have been his first, made a point of ignoring the fact when he could. Every acre of the large estate was entailed, Lord Bridgminster’s personal property was small, and there were five sons more to educate and provide for. The oldest son and his father had not met for years, but while there was antipathy, there was no rancour; and Lord Bridgminster, never being called upon to meet debts for a man who lived the year round in his hunting box, contrived to forget him. Disappointed in his second wife, after the glamour of her peculiar personality had vanished, he devoted himself to politics and the son whom he fain would believe must inherit the solid honours as well as the brains of his house. Whenever the boy came home from Eton, and later, from Oxford,—where it rarely occurred to him to open a book,—he was received at Ordham Castle with all the honours and attentions due to the heir, and, had his father lived a year longer, the celebration of his twenty-first birthday would have dimmed the memory of the perfunctory festivities with which the majority of Lord Ordham had been announced to the county. And as it grew to be an accepted fact that the Timon would never marry, the oldest of the second family was so generally recognized as the heir, that, from the servants up, he was visited with no reminders of the long interval which might elapse before he could spend the income that went with the titles. Even after his father’s death it was some time before he began to appreciate the difference in his fortunes, for he spent the following summer yachting with a friend, and, a few months later, left Christ Church abruptly and went for a tour round the world. He finished in Paris, where, through the influence of his mother, a place had been found for him, unofficially, in the British Embassy. Moreover, Lord Bridgminster had managed to leave him two thousand pounds, and, although this ran away quickly, it served to postpone the day when he must reckon with a younger son’s portion.

And he had been brought up in that criminal ignorance of the value of money which has compassed the ruin of so many of the younger members of the British aristocracy. American fathers may live up to the last dollar of the large income they make by the constant turning over of their discrepant capital, die bankrupt, or leave nothing but a life insurance to their women; but the sons, no matter how indulged, grow up in the electric atmosphere of a business country; the subject of money and its infinite meanings is never long absent from the conversation about them nor from their minds; they witness the rise and fall of fortunes, the fluctuation of incomes, the accidents to which the most cautious are liable; and they live through those periodical rabies of the money market known as panics, which focus the attention of the most careless. Leisure they know to be merely an incident; they realize that, however wise it may be to enjoy life while conditions are favourable, it is equally wise to keep one’s energies polished and alert. And these energies are born in the blood, which perhaps is the whole point.

There is, save for war and sport, little latent energy in the blood of the young British aristocrat whose ancestors have too long been men of leisure. He has no acquaintance with business, and as little premonition of the serious responsibilities of life as of its ugly contacts. Surrounded, sheltered, reared in an atmosphere of plenty, with expensive habits, and self-denial no part of his creed (and the sons of peers comparatively poor are no exceptions), he has during his father’s lifetime all the advantages and refinements of the concentrated income of the estates that go to the head of the house. Then comes the inevitable moment when he is turned adrift, and confronted with the problem of maintaining his legitimate position in the world upon a younger son’s pittance. Readjustment taking place in few characters except at the conclusion of a series of shocks, and as often not then, he goes on spending mechanically, expecting that a new deus ex machinâ will as inevitably appear as the regular if sometimes invisible stars.