The King's Mirror Part 34

"I suppose," said I, "that I frighten her rather."

William Adolphus took a long pull at his cigar, looked at the ash carefully, and then gazed for some moments across the river toward Waldenweiter. It was a beautiful evening, and my eyes followed in the same direction. Thus we sat for quite a long time. Then William Adolphus gave a laugh.

"She's got to get used to you," he said.

"Precisely," said I.

For that was pretty Elsa's task in life.

CHAPTER XIX.

GREAT PROMOTION.

I should be doing injustice to my manners and (a more serious offence) distorting truth, if I represented myself as a shy gaby, afraid or ashamed to make love because people knew the business on which I was engaged. Holding a position like mine has at least the virtue of curing a man of such folly; I had been accustomed to be looked at from the day I put on breeches, and, thanks to unfamiliarity with privacy, had come not to expect and hardly to miss it. The trouble was unhappily of a deeper and more obstinate sort, rooted in my own mind and not due to the covert stares or open good-natured interest of those who surrounded me.

There is a quality which is the sign and soul of high and genuine pleasure, whether of mind or body, of sight, feeling, or imagination; I mean spontaneity. This characteristic, with its included incidents of unexpectedness, of suddenness, often of unwisdom and too entire absorption in the moment, comes, I take it, from a natural agreement of what you are with what you do, not planned or made, but revealed all at once and full-grown; when the heart finds it, it knows that it is satisfied. The action fits the agent--the exercise matches the faculty.

Thenceforward what you are about does itself without your aid, but pours into your hand the treasure that rewards success, the very blossom of life. There may be bitterness, reproaches, stings of conscience, or remorse. These things are due to other claims and obligations, artificial, perhaps, in origin, although now of binding force. Beneath and beyond them is the self-inspired harmony of your nature with your act, sometimes proud enough to claim for itself a justification from the mere fact of existence, oftener content to give that question the go-by, whispering softly, "What matters that? I am."

By some such explanation as this, possibly not altogether wide of the mark, I sought to account for my disposition in the days that followed Elsa's arrival. I was conscious of an extreme reluctance to set about my task. I have used the right word there; a task it seemed to me. The trail of business and arrangement was over it; it was defaced by an intolerable propriety, ungraced by a sc.r.a.p of uncertainty; its stages had been marked, numbered, and catalogued beforehand. Bederhof knew the wedding-day to within a fortnight, the settlement to within a shilling, the addresses of congratulation to a syllable. To this knowledge we were all privy. G.o.d save us, how we played the hypocrite!

I am fully aware that there are men to whom these feelings would not have occurred. There are probably women in regard to whom n.o.body would have experienced them in a very keen form. Insensibility is infectious.

We have few scruples in regard to the unscrupulous. We feel that the exact shade of colour is immaterial when we present a new coat to a blind man. Had Hammerfeldt left as his legacy the union with some rude healthy creature, to follow his desire might have been an easy thing--one which, on a broad view of my life, would have been relatively insignificant. I should have disliked my duty and done it, as I did a thousand things I disliked. But I should not have been afflicted with the sense that where I endured ten lashes another endured a thousand; that, being a fellow-sufferer, I seemed the executioner; that, myself yearning to be free, I was busied in forging chains. It was in this light that Elsa made me regard myself, so that every word to her from my lips seemed a threat, every approach an impertinence, every hour of company I asked a forecast of the lifelong bondage that I prepared for her. This was my unhappy mood, while Victoria laughed, jested, and spurred me on; while William Adolphus opined that Elsa must get used to me; while Cousin Elizabeth smiled open motherly encouragement; while Princess Heinrich moved through the appropriate figures as though she graced a stately minuet. I had come to look for little love in the world; I was afflicted with the new terror that I must be hated.

Yet she did not hate me; or, at least, our natures were not such as to hate one another or to be repugnant naturally. Nay, I believe that we were born to be good and appreciative friends. Sometimes in those early days we found a sympathy of thought that made us for the moment intimate and easy, forgetful of our obligation, and frankly pleased with the society which we afforded one another. Soon I came to enjoy these intervals, to look and to plan for them. In them I seemed to get glimpses of what my young cousin ought to be always; but they were brief and fleeting. An intrusion ended them; or, more often, they were doomed to perish at my hands or at hers. A troubled shyness would suddenly eclipse her mirth; or I would be seized with a sense that my cheating of fate was useless, and served only to make the fate more bitter. She seemed to dread any growth of friendship, and to pull herself up abruptly when she felt in danger of being carried away into a genuine comradeship. I was swiftly responsive to such an att.i.tude; again we drew apart. Here is an extract from a letter which I wrote to Varvilliers:

"MY DEAR VARVILLIERS: The state of things here is absurd enough.

My cousin and I can't like, because we are ordered to love; can't be friends, because we must be mates; can't talk, because we must flirt; can't be comfortable alone together, because everybody prepares our _tete-a-tete_ for us. She is in apprehension of an amourousness which I despair of displaying; I am ashamed of a backwardness which is her only comfort. And the audience grows impatient; had the G.o.ds given them humour they would laugh consumedly. Surely even they must smile soon, and so soon as they smile I must take the leap; for, my dear friend, we may be privately unhappy, but we must not be publicly ludicrous. To-day, as we walked a yard apart along the terrace, I seemed to see a smile on a gardener's face. If it were of benevolence, matters may not advance just yet; if I conclude that amus.e.m.e.nt inspired it, even before you receive this I may have performed my duty and she her sacrifice. Pray laugh at and for me from your safe distance; in that there can be no harm. I laugh myself sometimes, but dare not risk sharing my laugh with Elsa. She has humour, but to ask her to turn its rays on this situation would be too venturous a stroke. An absolute absorption in the tragic aspect is probably the only specific which will enable her to endure.

Unhappily the support of pure tragedy, with its dignity of unbroken gloom, is not mine. I forget sometimes to be unhappy in reflecting that I am d.a.m.nably ridiculous. What, I wonder, were the feelings of Coralie at the first attentions of her big-bellied impresario? Did stern devotion nerve her? Was her face pale and her lips set in tragic mode? Or did she smile and yawn and drawl and shrug in her old delightful fashion? I would give much to be furnished with details of this parallel.

Meanwhile Bederhof tears his hair, for I threaten to be behind time, and the good d.u.c.h.ess tells me thrice daily that Elsa is timid. Princess Heinrich has made no sign yet; when she frowns I must kiss. So stands the matter. I must go hence to pray her to walk in the woods with me. She will flush and flutter, but, poor child, she will come. What I ask she will not and must not refuse. But, deuce take it, I ask so little! There's the rub! I hear your upbraiding voice, 'Pooh, man, catch her up and kiss her!' Ah, my dear Varvilliers, you suffer under a confusion. She is a duty; and who is impelled by duty to these sudden cuttings of a knot? And she does a duty, and would therefore not kiss me in return. And I also, doing duty, am duty. Thus we are both of us strangled in the black coils of that belauded serpent."

I did not tell Varvilliers everything. Had I allowed myself complete unreserve I must have added that she charmed me, and that the very charm I found in her made my work harder. There was a dainty delicacy about her, the freshness of a flower whose velvet bloom no finger-touch has rubbed. This I was to destroy.

But at last from fear, not of the gardener's smiles, but of my own ridicule, I made my start, and, as I foreshadowed to Varvilliers, it was as we walked in the woods that I began.

"What of that grenadier?" I asked her--she was sitting on a seat, while I leaned against a tree-trunk--"the grenadier you were in love with when I was at Bartenstein. You remember? You described him to me."

She blushed and laughed a little.

"He married a maid of my mother's, and became one of the hall-porters.

He's grown so fat."

"The dream is ended then?"

"Yes, if it ever began," she answered. "How amused at me you must have been!"

Suddenly she perceived my gaze on her, and her eyes fell.

"He was Romance, Elsa," said I. "He has married and grown fat. His business now is to shut doors; he has shut the door on himself."

"Yes," she answered, half-puzzled, half-embarra.s.sed.

"He had an unsuccessful rival," said I. "Do you recollect him? A lanky boy whom n.o.body cared much about. Elsa, the grenadier is out of the question."

Now she was agitated; but she sat still and silent. I moved and stood before her. My whole desire was to mitigate her fear and shrinking. She looked up at me gravely and steadily. It went to my heart that the grenadier was out of the question. Her lips quivered, but she maintained a tolerable composure.

"You should not say that about--about the lanky boy, Augustin," said she. "We all liked him, I liked him."

"Well, he deserved it a little better then than now. Yet perhaps, since the grenadier----"

"I don't understand what you mean about the grenadier."

"Yes, don't you?" I asked with a smile. "No dreams, Elsa, that you told to n.o.body?"

She flushed for a moment, then she smiled. Her smiling heartened me, and I went on in lighter vein.

"One can never be sure of being miserable," I said.

"No," she murmured softly, raising her eyes a moment to mine. The glance was brief, but hinted a coquetry whose natural play would have delighted--well, the grenadier.

She seemed very pretty, sitting there in the half-shade, with the sun catching her fair hair. I stood looking down on her; presently her eyes rose to mine.

"Not of being absolutely miserable," said I.

"You wouldn't make anybody miserable. You're kind. Aren't you kind?"

She grew grave as she put her question. I made her no answer in words; I bent down, took her hand, and kissed it. I held it, and she did not draw it away. I looked in her eyes; there I saw the alarm and the shrinking that I had expected. But to my wonder I seemed to see something else.

There was excitement, a sparkle witnessed to it; I should scarcely be wrong if I called it triumph. I was suddenly struck with the idea that I had read my feelings into her too completely. It might be an exaggeration to say that she wished to marry me, but was there not something in her that found satisfaction in the thought of marrying me?

I remembered with a new clearness how the little girl who rolled down the hill had thought that she would like to be a queen. At that moment this new idea of her brought me pure relief. I suppose there were obvious moralizings to be done; it was also possible to take the matter to heart, as a tribute to my position at the cost of myself. I felt no soreness, and I did no moralizing. I was honestly and fully glad that for any reason under heaven she wished to marry me.

Moreover this touch of a not repulsive worldliness in her sapped some of my scruples. What I was doing no longer seemed sacrilege. She had one foot on earth already then, this pretty Elsa, lightly poised perhaps, and quite ethereal, yet in the end resting on this common earth of ours.

She would get used to me, as William Adolphus put it, all the sooner. I took courage. The spirit of the scene gained some hold on me. I grew less repressed in manner, more ardent in looks. I lost my old desire not to magnify what I felt. The coquetry in her waged now an equal battle with her timidity.

"You're sure you like me?" she asked.

"Is it incredible? Have they never told you how pretty you are?"

She laughed nervously, but with evident pleasure. Her eyes were bright with excitement. I held out my hands, and she put hers into them. I drew her to me and kissed her lightly on the cheek. She shrank suddenly away from me.

"Don't be frightened," I said, smiling.

"I am frightened," she answered, with a look that seemed almost like defiance.

"Shall we say nothing about it for a little while?"

This proposal did not seem to attract her, or to touch the root of the trouble, if trouble there were.