Chapter XXVI The Ways of Little Courts
“Thinkest thou there is no tyranny but that
Of blood and chains? The despotism of vice—
The weakness and the wickedness of luxury—
Of sensual sloth—produce ten thousand tyrants.”
BYRON.
Betty came thoughtfully into her husband’s presence. The review had not been a success. In spite of velvet redingote and yellow plumes, she could not flatter herself that Jerome had singled her out. She began to have qualms as to the results of that unexplained and inexplicable mistake in her correspondence. She had fully promised herself that the first glance between her and the King would delicately give him to understand that her rigour was not as eternal as the uncompromising “Never” might have led him to believe.
Indeed, with natural optimism, under the rosy atmosphere evolved between her mirror and the shako à la Saxonne, she had come to tell herself that the unintended rebuff was, perhaps, not a thing to be regretted after all. Kings or chancellors, or simple Viennese lieutenants, men were much the same, she took it. And, as the experienced French have it, tenir la dragée haute, was none too bad a way to make the creatures yearn for it. Was not her own Burgrave a telling proof?
But the fact remained that Jerome had not even seemed aware of her existence that afternoon. Something had gone wrong about the review. At the last moment it had been found wiser to leave a certain regiment in barracks, information having transpired about a leaven of disloyalty. Jerome’s brow had been thunder black. There had been a vast amount of discussion between him and five or six generals. And finally the King had left the field in high displeasure, before the programme of evolutions had been half concluded. And it was a painful fact that none of the populace cheered him as he went.
Certainly, if he had not looked at her, he had, at least, looked at no other fair one. Still, the day had been a failure for the Burgravine; and, as she drove back to the Palace, she had actually some doubts as to the shako. In her own apartment a new trouble confronted her. Sidonia, who had locked herself up alone after that momentous interview, now came very calmly to greet her. She had a smile on her lips, and—thus do we cherish vipers in our bosom!—Eliza’s fingers had obviously been busy on the yellow head. The child was positively coiffée! Yes, and she was dressed, too: a fashionable creature. And pretty—undeniably pretty, in a singular, girlish way of her own. And not a word could the most insidious question draw from her lips. Betty was forced, in the end, to apply to Eliza. The tirewoman shrugged her shoulders. She knew well enough what had passed, but it was too much to expect her to gratify her mistress.
“Cannot madame see? Ah, it will not be long before those two are together again! If she coquets a little, certes, it will not be madame who will blame her! Oh, it is not for nothing that mademoiselle is making herself beautiful! Who knows if she will not meet him to-morrow night!”
“Heavens!” exclaimed the Burgravine, disagreeably struck, “you do not mean that she intends to go to the fête!”
“But, yes, madame; she has been choosing her dress. And oh, I know some one who will look pretty.”
“But the deeds are actually drawn up. The marriage is as good as annulled already,” cried Betty.
Eliza clacked her tongue contemptuously. “Until people are divorced, they are still married,” she remarked sagely. “And it is not the young gentleman who wants a divorce, I can tell madame. ‘Oh, how he is enamoured!’ says Kurtz to me. ‘He came in like a lion roaring,’ says Kurtz. ‘That is love,’ he says to me. ‘Beautiful!’ he says.”
Betty snapped herself out of her maid’s hands, flung herself into a wrapper and went to seek the Burgrave.
As matters stood, the storm-wind of injured vanity and jealousy blowing very strong, she actually would rather give up her conquest of Jerome than, she thought, the sweets of revenge. In the Burgrave she had an ally—she never paused to wonder why, so little did she heed the flight of her arrows.
Before they parted, the sagacious couple, for once warmly united, were agreed that until Sidonia were provided with another husband, they could scarcely feel themselves safe from Kielmansegg’s persecution. Now, in the court of Jerome, husbands had been known to be provided for people at the shortest notice... things had generally to be done at short notice at the court of Jerome.
Sidonia was still quite sufficiently an heiress for the Chancellor (he knew his court) to be quite sure of being able to find some excellent person who would take her thankfully from his hands without daring to request, much less to stipulate, for an exhibition of figures.
There was a Court-concert the next night at the Royal Palace, and it was in the music-room that Sidonia was, by command, presented to Jerome.
She dropped her curtsey. Here was a King for whose royalty, in her sturdy patriotism and her inherited race tradition, she felt neither allegiance nor respect. As she drew herself up from the perfunctory obeisance, she looked him in the face and met the well-remembered glance, with its hateful gleam and flicker. Turning aside she became conscious of the gaze of the King’s Master of the Horse, General d’Albignac, as he towered over his dapper little sovereign. Steady enough this, something like the glare with which the beast of prey regards his quarry. The girl’s heart sank with a double terror.
“I am charmed,” said the King, “to behold at last with my own eyes the young heiress of Wellenshausen, in whose lovely person, I am told, is vested so much of my territory.”
This was spoken in German, with a pronounced Italian accent. Then Jerome slid into French to say caressingly:
“Mademoiselle de Wellenshausen is welcome at my Court.”
Betty von Wellenshausen, at Sidonia’s side, stood twittering, awaiting her moment. Jerome was once more in high good humour; all trace of the gloom that had weighted his brow through yesterday’s afternoon was gone. Betty felt sure of triumph. Her entrance had created quite a flutter in the assembly. Women had whispered together behind their fans. Men’s eyes had followed her with bold, curious looks. Her Bluebeard shadowed her with a fierce anxiety which to-night Betty accepted cheerfully as a further tribute, confident that she and his sovereign could elude it when the critical time came.
What, therefore, were her feelings when she found Jerome’s eyes glinting past her—ay, past Betty von Wellenshausen at her fairest—to rest with marked interest (if ever the word “rest” could be applied to Jerome’s eyes) upon Sidonia, the gawky child. There could be no mistake about it, she could not soothe herself with the thought that pique was the cause of his neglect. His attention swept by her with no deliberate indifference; she simply did not exist for him, his interest was vividly enkindled elsewhere. In the blasting disillusion of the experience, the Burgravine turned livid. Through the buzzing in her ears she could scarce catch Sidonia’s reply to the King’s gracious words.
The child, however, was speaking in clear, deliberate tones, and what she was saying was sufficiently remarkable:
“Your Majesty mistakes. I am the Countess Waldorff-Kielmansegg.”
Outward decorum is the rule even at the most amateur court, yet the sensation created by the announcement Sidonia could feel to her innermost nerve. The countenance of Jerome became as suddenly and threateningly overcast as that of a spoilt urchin thwarted. He flung a look of anger at his Chancellor. The veins swelled on the crimsoning forehead of General d’Albignac.
The rumour that old Wellenshausen had a rich nièce à marier had spread very quickly through the Palace. D’Albignac remembered her quite well; it was she who had struck him over the eyes with her plaits—that added something to the zest with which the King’s Master of the Horse had sought an interview that morning with the young lady’s guardian. It was not unsatisfactory in its results. Ere they parted, indeed, the two thoroughly understood each other. The ex-chouan was hardly a match, perhaps, for a Wellenshausen; but then there was the coming scandal of the annulment! Her fortune, on the other hand, might not be now what it had been on her father’s death, but it was considerable. And, again, times were bad. The Burgrave could guarantee, at any rate, that the broad lands were intact. One must make up one’s mind to give and take in this world; and every one, from King downwards, was more or less in debt at the Court of Jerome—d’Albignac distinctly more than less. Besides, a pretty wife was always a good speculation at Cassel. And when d’Albignac saw Jerome fix his future bride with a well-known look, he knew that she might prove a very profitable speculation indeed. A prolonged course of “Pompadourettes” had begun to satiate the royal palate; here was a wild, high-born thing that carried her head like a stag, and looked out upon them all with fire in her eyes. By the side of the ogling, mincing bit of plumpness that the Burgrave had provided himself with, with all her stage tricks and fireworks, even to the chouan renegade (who was no eclectic) the contrast was grateful. And now there was this nonsense about a previous marriage to spoil all! What a pity he had not been allowed quietly to finish off the impertinent interloper that night in the forest!
Betty’s voice broke shrilly upon the brooding pause:
“Your Majesty,” she cried, “has, I believe, already received information of the true position of affairs. The marriage was no marriage. A quixotic piece of nonsense, half-hearted, soon repented, at least on one side. The deeds of annulment are actually drawn up. Count Kielmansegg’s signature—or I am very much mistaken—will be promptly affixed now, and it is not to be imagined, as your Majesty will well believe, that my husband’s niece will then withhold hers. It would be against all feminine delicacy, all proper pride.”
She shot a look of fury at her niece; then she nudged the Burgrave, who instantly reasseverated in his deep bass:
“The deed of annulment is drawn up, sire.”
Jerome’s good humour returned. He rubbed his hands. In spite of all his royal assumption, much of the exuberant gesture of the Corsican had stuck to him, to the distaste of his stolid subjects.
“Il faut aller vite, vite, alors. We must make haste,” he averred.
To make haste and enjoy was, indeed, the rule of his existence. Now, a Lent of unexampled rigour seemed inevitably drawing near him, and all the more vertiginous was his carnival. So vertiginous indeed, that, willingly blind though she was, the Queen, true German daughter of Würtemberg, had withdrawn from the whirl, giddy and panting, to take refuge at Napoleonshöhe till such time as her spouse would come to sober sense again.
Jerome considered the girl a moment longer in silence. That she should flush and pale beneath his glance, look anger at him from her deep eyes and then avert her head with an insulted turn of the neck, all added so much fuel to his easily kindled flame. He wished to go quick, quick; but if she gave him a bit of a chase, so much the better. And now he found a smile for Betty, and a gracious word, ere he passed on, taking the Burgrave by the arm. Betty might do very well for an idle hour, by-and-by, perhaps; but, heavens, how many Betties had he not known!
The Burgravine’s self-esteem was at once too profound and too sensitive not to realize the completeness of her failure. But vanity has its heroines. None could have guessed, as she paired off merrily with d’Albignac, the extent of her mortification. Yet it was something very little short of torture that she was enduring as she smiled and coquetted and fanned herself, and babbled her pretty babble.