Chapter VI The Burg
“I will be master of what is my own;
She is my goods, my chattels, she is my house;
And here she stands, touch her whoever dare!”
(Taming of the Shrew).
“Sidonia,” said the lady up in the turret-room, “I will not endure it!”
As this remark was made at least five times a day, the hearer was less impressed than the desperate air of the speaker demanded.
“I will throw myself from the window,” continued the Burgravine, carefully propping her plump elbows on the stone sill to gaze down with safety.
“If you’d only come out sometimes, and walk with me!” said little Sidonia, smiling.
“Walk, child? Your uncle knew well what he was doing when he stuck me up on this diabolic crag. I have not a pair of shoes that would last me half-way down. And merely to look at the road that leads to this place! Oh!”—she covered her eyes with her hand and shuddered—“it makes me reel with giddiness!”
“It was very lovely in the forest,” said Sidonia. “The wild raspberries are nearly ripe, and——”
“Raspberries! Alas! is that what you ought to think of at your age? You, too—’tis monstrous cruelty!”
“The fawns are growing and are so sweet——”
“Fawns! Fawns? ’Tis a lover should be sweet to you. As for me—oh woe!”
Sidonia, slight, slim, and sun-kissed as a young woodland thing herself, grew crimson behind her aunt’s dejected head.
“Why—why, then, does Uncle Ludovic keep us here?” she queried.
Uncle Ludovic’s lady flounced round in her chair, her eyes darting flames, a flood of words rising to her cherry lips—
“Why? Because, my love, the creature is a Barbe-Bleue. And to be a Bluebeard, child, means that if a wretched woman has been fool enough to trust you, you think you have a right to chop her head off if she disobeys; and meanwhile to shut her up to prevent her having so much as a chance.”
“I wonder why you married Uncle Ludo?” mused the girl. Her eyes were dreaming, across the fair plain-land, into the distance. To give your life to some one quite old and quite stout, with a grizzled double chin and veins that swell on a red forehead (ran the fleeting thought), when, about the ways of the forest, a young knight might be met wandering... a knight with hair that crisped back from forehead of ivory, with eyes that were scornful and full of fire!
“Why did I marry him?” returned the Burgravine, sharply. “Ah, he was very different then, my dear! The monster! how he deceived me! Do you think I should ever have consented if I had not known that he was King Jerome’s minister; if he had not promised me that we should live at Cassel; if I had not been told that one was more gay at Cassel now than at Paris itself? And honourably I was served, was I not? Ten days at Cassel, while there was scarce a cat stirring, the King called away by the Emperor, then snatched off to this place, this bald, hateful eagle’s crag, at the first hint of any gaiety. Men talk of their honour, my love—a big word behind which they can play any trick upon us poor women their humour may prompt.” Her voice broke shrilly. Then she added, with sudden calmness: “And if I had had a silver groschen to my name, you may imagine ’tis not old Wellenshausen’s second wife that I should be—but some fine young man’s first one. Sidonia, how unfair is fate!” She looked enviously at the girl. “There are you, with all your money, who will never have a suitable notion of what to do with it, while I—I——” She snapped two taper fingers together sharply and twisted a dear little plump shoulder well-nigh free of the fashionable Viennese robe, which looked so oddly out of place in the mediæval severity of the tower room.
There was silence, while Sidonia reflected. The Burgravine had a way of opening strange perspectives before the young mind that had hitherto known but the simplest and straightest outlook on life. Wonderful customs had the new mistress brought to the old Burg—odd fads of fashion, new hours of meals, new liveries and unknown demands on the servants’ attention. A prisoner, she assumed supreme authority within the limits of her prison. It sometimes seemed as if the very stones in the old wall were echoing surprise. Sidonia, who had run wild within them, near seventeen years of happy unexacting childhood, found herself frequently marvelling at a code of morality so startling in its novelty as to range beyond her judgment. She felt that she could as little fit herself to this new aunt’s view of existence, as her modest country limbs to one of those outrageous garments of Viennese mode, over which the Burgravine could sigh a whole morning through in rapture and regret—lamenting, with the voluble aid of Mademoiselle Eliza, her French maid, the opportunities lost in this God-forsaken corner of the world.
“And pray,” said Bluebeard’s wife, after a pause (never a very long one with her, for, if Sidonia had the gift of silence which belongs to all creatures who have lived much with nature, her Aunt Betty possessed it not at all), “and pray, how many days is it since your uncle took the road for Cassel, a-bursting with hypocritical sighs of farewell?”
“I don’t know,” said Sidonia, starting from her dream. “Ten days?”
“Ten days!” The words were echoed in a high pitch of indignation.
“Three weeks, then,” amended the girl, hastily. “I really don’t know; time goes so fast.”
“Time goes so fast! Oh, you—you...!” Cherry lips of scorn babbled vainly in search of fitting epithet. “You—you’re his own niece!”
Yet as life would have been distinctly duller were she to quarrel outright with Sidonia, the Burgravine quickly turned the batteries of her wrath to the old direction.
“Little did I think on that day, when my father, away in our dear Austrian home, bade me hasten to the great salon and pour out coffee for the gentleman from Hanover who had come to buy our horses—little did I think what lay in store for me! ‘You must smile on him, child,’ said my mother; ‘he is an old nobleman, very rich; and if your father sells well, it may mean a month in Vienna for you!’ Ach, heavens!” said the Burgravine, “think of me, my Sidonia, smiling, in my innocence, on him—on him! And who was bought and sold? It was poor Betty!”
“I think it is very wrong of Uncle Ludo,” asserted Sidonia, severely, a flush rising to her sunburnt cheek. “Why, since he has married you, will he not trust you?”
“Why? Because, having spent most of his life studying our sex, the man now flatters himself upon a wide experience of our frailties. Because, having so often proved how easy it is to break the marriage vow, he can put no confidence in another’s keeping it. Because,” and her bosom heaved with indignation, “Cassel is the most amusing spot at this moment in the whole of Europe—they say it is gayer than Paris itself—and no husband who respects himself can take his pleasure with any comfort, if he does not feel that his wife is correspondingly bored.”
“But uncle has his Chancellor’s duty,” resumed Sidonia, after pondering upon these enlightening remarks.
“Chancellor’s duties!” The lady drummed on the diamond panes. “Oh, yes, my love, King Jerome requires onerous duties of his ministers, and I’ve no doubt that Ludovic performs his con amore.—How soon will you be eighteen?” she cried suddenly.
“In four months,” said Sidonia.
“Four months—an eternity! Alas, my love, long before that I shall have been laid in that hateful chapel of yours; in that very vault, no doubt, where lies my predecessor—that fool of a woman who resisted such a life as this for twenty years, and yet had the inconceivable want of tact to die at the very moment when I was ripe to fall a prey to the monster.”
“Poor Aunt Hedwige!” said Sidonia, reflectively; “she was very fat and never unkind, and I don’t think she was unhappy.”
“Ha!” muttered the Burgravine, vindictively, “I’ll warrant he might have brought her to Cassel with impunity.”
“He didn’t, though,” said Sidonia.
“No, child,” pursued the other, with much rancour, “woman’s place is at home, you see, while the man is abroad—aha!” She set her teeth and growled behind them like an angry Persian kitten. Then she snapped at her niece: “And you haven’t even the intelligence to be eighteen yet, and be of some use for once in your life! Yes, never look so astonished; you’re not a fool, child; you know that when you are eighteen, you will be free, and the richest woman in Thuringia—owner of half the wretched little province; free, girl, free to do as you like, to live where you like, to have your own establishment, to spend your own money—and then there’d be a chance for me! Ah, but you would not give it to me. You would let dear uncle manage as he’s always managed, and dole you out a thaler here and a louis there, and let him choose you a nice husband... who would not look too much into the accounts, I’ll warrant.”
“Aunt Betty!” panted Sidonia. The Burgravine stopped, slightly abashed by the fire that flashed in the child’s glance. “If you can’t forgive Uncle Ludo for being your husband, don’t forget that he is a man of honour....”
“Oh, patatata!” said the lady, with a shrug, “here’s mighty fine talk! Manage your own affairs, my dear. I’ll say no more.”
She leaned her plump arms on the window-sill again and turned her back on her niece with an air of determined sullenness.
Sidonia was very angry. She sat down on the high-backed chair and set the ancient spinning wheel whirring with a hand that trembled.
“One thing is certain,” she resumed in a choked voice, “if I ever do marry, Aunt Betty, I shall choose my own husband.”
“Of course, among the crowds that besiege the gay Burg of Wellenshausen, up in the clouds, my sweet creature,” said the Burgravine, without turning her head, “you will have only l’embarras du choix and then——” But here she interrupted herself with a sharp ejaculation. Her fingers ceased their angry tune. She swung back the window a trifle wider and leaned out further than she had ventured upon her threat of suicide. “Look, look!” she cried in altered tones. “Do you see? There are two men coming up the road with a pack-horse. No, ’tis a donkey!”
Sidonia sprang up and leaned out eagerly across her aunt’s shoulder. They were but a pair of children of different ages, when all was said and done.
“It can only be the miller’s boy and the gardener... or the shepherd,” opined she.
“Oh, yes, the very outline of humpback John and the swing of bandy Peperl!” (This was sarcastic.) “To the hangman with these evening mists! Now, now, see! a gentleman, or I’m a goose-girl... a young man, or I’m a grandmother! Poor things, how they toil!”
“Why, ’tis Geiger-Hans!” exclaimed the lady’s niece, in amazement. But it was not, surely, the sight of Geiger-Hans which brought such crimson to her cheek.
“And who may Geiger-Hans be?” cried the Burgravine.
“My dear friend, everybody’s friend, Geiger-Hans the roadside player,” said the girl. “Why, you have heard me speak of him many a time. If he were young and wore a plume and a dagger, people would call him a minnesinger. And his music—ah! it moves the heart like——”
“Why, the creature’s a beggar, child!” interrupted the lady, peering down. “But the other——”
She drew back from the window in great fluster. “It’s quite clear that you and I have company at last. Oh, for once I will be mistress here! They shall be admitted, maugré my ogre! Call Eliza! Get you into a decent gown, for Heaven’s sake! My rose taffeta—it shall be my rose taffeta. And you?—Wear anything but white at your peril!”