The King's Mirror Part 48

"Never," said I.

"Be careful, sire. The revolver I bought for Struboff is in my pocket."

"Make me a present of it," I suggested.

He looked hard in my eyes, laughed a little, drew out a small revolver, and handed it to me.

"Struboff was never in great danger," he said.

"I was never much afraid for Struboff," said I. "Thanks for the revolver. You're not quibbling with me?"

"I don't understand."

"There's no river in this town; no inst.i.tution called the Morgue?"

"Not a trace of such things. Do you know why not?"

"Because it's the king's pleasure," said I, smiling and holding out my hand to him.

"Because I'm a friend to a friend," he said, as he took my hand. Then without another word he turned and walked out quickly. I heard him speak to Vohrenlorf in the outer room, and laugh loudly as he ran down the stairs.

He had reminded me that I was a pupil of Hammerfeldt's. The reminder came home to me as a reproach. I had been forgetful of the Prince's lessons; I had allowed myself to fall into a habit of thought which led me to a.s.sume that my happiness or unhappiness was a relevant consideration in judging of the merits of the universe. The a.s.sumption is so common as to make us forget that so far from being proved it is not even plausible. I saw the absurdity of it at once, in the light of my recent discoveries. Was G.o.d shamed because Struboff was miserable, because Coralie was serenely selfish, because Wetter was tempestuous beyond rescue? I smiled at all these questions, and proceeded to the inference that the exquisite satisfaction of my own cravings was probably not an inherent part of the divine purpose. That is, if there were such a thing; and if there were not, the whole matter was so purely accidental as not to admit of any one consideration being in the least degree more or less relevant than another. "Willingly give thyself up to Clotho, allowing her to spin thy thread into whatever things she pleases." That was an extremely good maxim; but it would have been of no service to cast the pearl before Coralie's impresario. I would use it myself, though. I summoned Vohrenlorf.

"We have stayed here too long, Vohrenlorf," said I. "My presence is necessary in Forstadt. I must not appear wanting in interest in these preparations."

"Undoubtedly," said he, "they are very anxious for your Majesty's return."

"And I am very anxious to return. We'll go by the evening train to-morrow. Send word to Bederhof."

He seemed rather surprised and not very pleased, but promised to see that my orders were executed. I sat down in the chair in which Wetter had sat, and began again to console myself with my Stoic maxim. But there was a point at which I stuck. I recalled Coralie and her bread, and regarded Struboff not in the aspect of his own misery (which I had decided to be irrelevant), but in the light of Coralie's feelings. It seemed to me that the philosopher should have spared more consideration to this side of the matter. Had he reached such heights as to be indifferent not only to his own sufferings, but to being a cause of suffering to others? Perhaps Marcus Aurelius had attained to this; Coralie Mansoni, by the way, seemed most blessedly to have been born into it. To me it was a stone of stumbling. Pride came to me with insidious aid and admired while I talked of Clotho; but where was my ally when I pictured Elsa also making her surrender to the Fates? My ally then became my enemy. With a violent wrench I brought myself to the thought that neither was Elsa's happiness a relevant consideration. It would not do, I could not maintain the position. For Elsa was young, fresh, aspiring to happiness as a plant rears its head to the air. And our wedding was but a fortnight off.

"Am I repulsive, am I loathsome?"

"What a question, my dear M. Struboff!"

I had that s.n.a.t.c.h of talk in my head when I fell asleep.

The next day but one found me back at Forstadt. They had begun to decorate the streets.

CHAPTER XXV.

A SMACK OF REPEt.i.tION.

The contrast of outer and inner, of the world's myself and my own myself, of others as they seem to me and to themselves (of the reality they may be, through inattention or dulness, as ignorant as I), which is the most permanent and the dominant impression that life has stamped on my mind, was never more powerfully brought home to me than in the days which preceded my marriage to my cousin Elsa. As I have said, they had begun to decorate the streets; let me summarize all the rest by repeating that they decorated the streets, and went on decorating them.

The decorative atmosphere enveloped all external objects, and wrapped even the members of my own family in its spangled cloud. Victoria blossomed in diamonds, William Adolphus sprouted in plumes; my mother embodied the stately, Cousin Elizabeth a gorgeous heartiness; the Duke's eyes wore a bored look, but the remainder of his person was fittingly resplendent. Bederhof was b.u.mble in Olympus; beyond these came a sea of smiles, bows, silks, and uniforms. Really I believe that the whole thing was done as handsomely as possible, and the proceedings are duly recorded in a book of red leather, clasped in gold and embellished with many pictures, which the Munic.i.p.ality of Forstadt presented to Elsa in remembrance of the auspicious event. It lies now under a gla.s.s case, and, I understand, excites much interest among ladies who come to see my house.

Elsa was a puzzle no longer; I should have welcomed more complexity of feeling. The month which had pa.s.sed since we parted had brought to her many reflections, no doubt, and as a presumable result of them a fixed att.i.tude of mind. William Adolphus would have said (and very likely did say to Victoria) that she had got used to me; but this mode of putting the matter suffers from my brother-in-law's bluntness. She had not defied Clotho, but neither had she altogether given herself up to Clotho. She had compromised with the Formidable Lady, and, although by no means enraptured, seemed to be conscious that she might have come off worse. What was distasteful in Clotho's terms Elsa attempted to reduce to insignificance by a disciplined arrangement of her thoughts and emotions. Much can be done if one will be firm with would-be vagrants of the mind. The pleasant may be given prominence; the disagreeable relegated to obscurity; the attractive installed in the living apartments; the repellant locked in a distant cellar, whence their ill-conditioned cries are audible occasionally only and in the distance.

What might have been is sternly transformed from a beautiful vision into a revolting peril, and in this new shape is invoked to applaud the actual and vilify what is impossible. This att.i.tude of mind is thought so commendable as to have won for itself in popular speech the name of philosophy--so even with words Clotho works her will. Elsa, then, in this peculiar sense of the term was philosophical about the business.

She was balanced in her att.i.tude, and, left to herself, would maintain equilibrium.

"She's growing fonder and fonder of you every day," Cousin Elizabeth whispered in my ear.

"I hope," said I, with a reminiscence, "that I am not absolutely repulsive to her." And in order not to puzzle Cousin Elizabeth with any glimmer of truth I smiled.

"My dearest Augustin" (that she seemed to say "Struboff" was a childish trick of my imagination), "what an idea!" ("What a question, my dear M.

Struboff!")

I played too much, perhaps, with my parallel, but I was not its slave. I knew myself to be unlike Struboff (in my case Coralie scouted the idea of a fresh slice of bread). I knew Elsa to be of very different temperament from Coralie's. These variances did not invalidate the family likeness; a son may be very like his father, though the nose of one turns up and the other's nose turns down. We were, after making all allowances for superficial differences--we were both careers, Struboff and I. I need none to point out to me my blunder; none to say that I was really fortunate and cried for the moon. It is admitted. I was offered a charming friendship; it was not enough. I could give a tender friendship; I knew that it was not enough.

And there was that other thing which went to my heart, that possibility which must ever be denied realization, that beginning doomed to be thwarted. As we were talking once of all who were to come on the great day, I saw suddenly a little flush on Elsa's cheek. She did not look away or stammer, or make any other obvious concession to her embarra.s.sment, but the blush could not be denied access to her face and came eloquent with its hint.

"And M. de Varvilliers--he will be there, I suppose?" she asked.

"I hope so; I have given directions that he shall be invited. You like him, Elsa?"

"Yes," she said, not looking at me now, but straight in front of her, as though he stood there in his easy heart-stealing grace. And for an instant longer the flush flew his flag on her cheek.

But Struboff had been so mad as to fall in love with Coralie, and to desire her love out of no compa.s.sion for her but sheerly for itself. Was I not spared this pang? I do not know whether my state were worse or better. For with him, even in direst misery, there would be love's own mad hope, that denial of impossibility, that dream of marvellous change which shoots across the darkest gloom of pa.s.sion. Or at least he could imagine her loving as he loved, and thereby cheat the wretched thing that was. I could not. In dreary truth, I was toward her as she toward me, and before us both there stretched a lifetime. If an added sting were needed, I found it in a perfectly clear consciousness that a great many people would have been absolutely content, and, as onlookers of our case, would have wondered what all the trouble was about. There are those who from a fortunate want of perception are called sensible; just as Elsa by her resolute evasion of truth would be accorded the t.i.tle of philosophical.

Victoria was the prophet of the actual, picking out with optimistic eye its singular abundance of blessedness. I do not think that she reminded me that Elsa might have had but one eye, one leg, or a crooked back, but her felicitations ran on this strain. Their obvious artificiality gave them the effect of sympathy, and Victoria would always sanction this interpretation by a kiss on departure. But she had her theory; it was that Elsa only needed to be wooed. The "only" amused me, but even with that point waived I questioned her position. It left out imagination, and it left out Varvilliers, who had become imagination's pet. Nevertheless, Victoria spoke out of experience; she did not blush at declaring herself "after all very comfortable" with William Adolphus.

Granted the argument's sincerity, its force could not be denied with honesty.

"We're not romantic, and never have been, of course," she conceded.

"My dear Victoria, of course not," said I, laughing openly.

"We have had our quarrels."

"The quarrels wouldn't trouble me in the least."

"We don't expect too much of one another."

"I seem to be listening to the address on the wedding day."

"You're an exasperating creature!" and with that came the kiss.

Victoria's affection was always grateful to me, but in the absence of Wetter and Varvilliers, neither of whom had made any sign as yet, I was bereft of all intellectual sympathy. I had looked to find some in the Duke, and some, as I believe, there was; but its flow was checked and turned by what I must call a repressed resentment. His wife's blind heartiness was impossible to him, and he read with a clear eye the mind of a loved daughter. With him also I ranked as a necessity; so far as the necessity was distasteful to Elsa, it was unpalatable to him.

Beneath his friendliness, and side by side with an unhesitating acceptance of the position, there lay this grudge, not acknowledged, bound to incur instant absurdity as the price of any open a.s.sertion of itself, but set in his mind and affecting his disposition toward me. He was not so foolish as to blame me; but I was to him the occasion of certain fears and shrinkings, possibly of some qualms as to his own part in the matter, and thus I became a less desired companion. There was something between us, a subject always present, never to be mentioned.

As a result, there came constraint. My pride took alarm, and my polite distance answered in suitable terms to his reticent courtesy. I believe, however, that we found one common point in a ludicrous horror of Cousin Elizabeth's behaviour. Had she a.s.sumed the air she wore, she must have ranked as a diplomatist; having succeeded in the great task of convincing herself, she stands above those who can boast only of deceiving others. To Cousin Elizabeth the alliance was a love match; had she possessed the other qualities, her self-persuasion would have been enough to enable her to found a religious sect and believe that she was sent from heaven for its prophet.

Amid this group of faces, all turned toward the same object but with expressions subtly various, I spent my days, studying them all, and finding (here has been nature's consolation to me) relief from my own thoughts in an investigation of the mind of others. The portentous pretence on which we were engaged needed perhaps a G.o.d to laugh at it, but the smaller points were within the sphere of human ridicule; with them there was no danger of amus.e.m.e.nt suffering a sudden death, and a swift resurrection in the changed shape of indignation.

There was already much to laugh at, but now a new occasion came, taking its rise in a thing which seemed very distinct, and appertaining to moods and feelings long gone by, a plaything of memory destined (as it had appeared) to play no more part in actual life. The matter was simply this: Count Max von Sempach was on leave, and proposed with my permission to be in Forstadt for the wedding festivities.

Bederhof had heard legendary tales; his manner was dubious and solemn as he submitted the Count's proposal to me; Princess Heinrich's carelessness of reference would have stirred suspicion in the most guileless heart; William Adolphus broke into winks and threatened nudges; I invoked my dignity just in time. Victoria was rather excited, rather pleased, looking forward to an amusing spectacle. Evidently something had reached Cousin Elizabeth's ears, for she overflowed with unspoken a.s.surances that the news was of absolutely no importance, that she took no notice of boyish follies, and did not for a moment doubt my whole-hearted devotion to Elsa. Elsa herself betrayed consciousness only by not catching my eye when the Sempachs' coming cropped up in conversation. For my own part I said that I should be very glad to see the Count and the Countess, and that they had a clear claim to their invitation. My mother's manner had shown that she felt herself in no position to raise objections; Bederhof took my commands with resigned deference. I was aware that his wife had ceased to call on the Countess some time before Count Max went Amba.s.sador to Paris.