Fickle Fortune Part 24

'How could you cause us so much anxiety?' said Heideck reproachfully.

'Three times to-day have I knocked at your door in vain, and I have been compelled almost to force an entrance here.'

Again there was no reply. Edmund remained quite motionless. His uncle went nearer, and bent over him.

'Give me a word of answer, Edmund. You rushed away like a madman yesterday. There was no holding you back. I trust that you have grown calmer by now, and that you can at least listen to what I have to say.

I have just come from your mother----'

The mention of this name seemed at length to produce some effect.

Edmund s.h.i.+vered slightly, and sat up.

At sight of his countenance the Baron started back, scared and shocked.

'For G.o.d's sake, what ails you? How can you allow yourself to be so utterly overcome?'

The young man's features were indeed so changed as to be hardly recognisable. The misfortune which had befallen him seemed at one dire stroke to have taken from him all strength and courage. The dimmed look of his eyes and the complete prostration evident in voice and bearing told this plainly, as he replied:

'What is there for me yet to hear?'

'You know no details. Have you really no questions to put to me?'

'None.'

Heideck glanced uneasily at his nephew. A pa.s.sionate outburst of feeling would have pleased him better than this numb listlessness. He sat down by Edmund and took his hand.

The young man offered no resistance; he seemed hardly to know what was going on about him.

'Yesterday I did all in my power to conceal the truth from you,'

pursued the Baron; 'for I myself am perhaps not blameless in this unhappy business. I interfered in a somewhat arbitrary manner with the lives of two human beings, and the fault, if fault it were, has been cruelly avenged. My intentions were indeed of the best. I knew that the young officer to whom my sister was attached, and even secretly engaged, was as poor as herself. He had no fortune to offer her, he could not have married for years, and I had too sincere an affection for Constance to allow her to lose the bloom of her youth, to pine away in anxiety and sadness. When I separated her from her first love, and persuaded her to accept the hand of Count Ettersberg, I did so in the firm persuasion that her attachment had been a mere transient romance, a pa.s.sing fancy, which marriage would cure at once and effectually. Could I have guessed what deep root the feeling had taken, I would not have interfered. It was only about a year later, when I heard that the regiment had been moved and quartered in the garrison-town nearest to Ettersberg, that I began to divine a danger, and my next visit here transformed the suspicion into a certainty.

When the two met, their old love sprang up with fresh intensity, and developed into a pa.s.sion which bore down all barriers before it. When I discovered this, when I stepped between them and forcibly recalled them to a sense of their duty, it ... it was, I grieve to say, too late!'

He paused, and seemed to expect an answer. Edmund withdrew his hand from his uncle's grasp, and stood up.

'Go on,' he said, in a half-stifled voice.

'I have nothing more to add. With this separation all was over. I told you yesterday that the portrait was the portrait of a dead man. He fell the very next year, being one of the first victims of the war which then broke out. My sister never saw him again. Now you know the chain of events, and how it all happened; now try to regain composure.

I can understand that it has been a terrible blow to you. You must accept it as a hard decree of Fate.'

'Yes, a hard decree,' repeated Edmund. 'You see that I succ.u.mb to it.'

'A man must not so easily succ.u.mb to life's first trouble,' said Heideck earnestly. 'You will learn to bear that which must be borne.

But now exert yourself, and put from you this useless brooding over the unalterable, the irreparable. Will you not come with me to your mother?'

The young Count negatived the proposal with a hasty gesture.

'No, uncle. Do not ask that of me, not that!'

'Edmund, be reasonable. You cannot remain shut up in your rooms for ever.'

'I shall leave them to-day. In a couple of hours I shall start on a journey.'

'On a journey? Where do you mean to go?'

'To town, to Oswald.'

'To Oswald!' cried Heideck, bounding from his seat, and staring at his nephew as though he had not heard aright. 'Are you out of your senses?'

'Did you imagine that I should be the accomplice of this fraud?' burst forth Edmund, his unnatural calm suddenly merging into a fierce blaze of anger. 'Did you really think it possible that I should be silent and continue to play the master here, when the rightful heir is driven out, leading a life of privation and almost of poverty? If you two can do it, I cannot. How I am to bear the terrible existence before me, whether I shall be able to bear it at all, I know not. But this I do know. I must go to Oswald, must tell him that he has been cheated, defrauded, that Ettersberg is his of right. He shall hear it all; then ... then it will matter little what becomes of me.'

Heideck had listened in mortal alarm. Whatever he may have feared, for this turn of affairs he certainly was not prepared. Were Edmund to learn that his cousin knew, or at least divined, the secret, an explanation between the two could no longer be prevented, and so the whole edifice would crash to pieces.

The uncle understood all the incalculable consequences of such a catastrophe better than his impetuous nephew, and he was resolved to prevent it at any price.

'You forget that you are not the only person concerned in this,' he said emphatically. 'Have you not thought whom the confession you propose making would disgrace and dishonour?'

Edmund recoiled, and the feverish glow which had overspread his features gave way to a livid pallor.

'Oswald has always been your mother's enemy,' continued Heideck. 'He has always hated her, and she has never deceived herself as to his sentiments. Will you really go to him--to him of all people, with a tale which will ruin her? What a triumph for him to see at length the woman he hates in the dust before him, to hear her own son----'

'Uncle, no more,' broke in Edmund, with a wild cry. 'I cannot bear it.'

'I should not have supposed you could hesitate a moment between your mother and Oswald,' said the Baron, frowning. 'But here there is really no alternative. You must yield to necessity.'

Edmund had thrown himself on to a chair, and hidden his face in his hands. A low groan escaped his overcharged breast.

'Do you think it has been a light thing for me to keep silence, and to aid and abet that which you call fraud?' asked his uncle, after a short pause. 'But I repeat, you have here no choice. The entailed estates are not transferable; they cannot be alienated from you. You must either remain Master of Ettersberg, or proclaim your secret to the world--in which case the honour of two houses, of Heideck as of Ettersberg, will be irretrievably lost. There is no other issue. I set this distinctly before my sister in years gone by, when she was on the point of owning all to her husband; now again I must call upon you to recognise it. You must be silent. If Oswald's future is sacrificed through our silence, we cannot help that. The family honour stands higher than his right.'

He spoke with iron firmness and composure, but this only lent more power to his words, and Edmund felt the truth that was in them. A desperate struggle was going on in the young man's breast, a struggle between his sense of justice and the stern necessity which was so forcibly demonstrated to him.

Oswald's query recurred to his mind. 'Suppose silence was imposed on you for the sake of the family honour?'

He was, indeed, far from attributing to his cousin's words any deeper significance, or from divining his knowledge of the truth. That conversation had come about most naturally. The young Count remembered in this hour how he had been fired with indignation at the bare notion that anyone could impute to his mother interested motives. How proudly and disdainfully had he declared that no shadow, no slur should attach itself to his life, that he must ever bear himself before the world with a clear conscience and unsullied brow! Two days ago he had held that language, and now....

Baron Heideck lost not a moment in pursuing his advantage. He had recourse to the last and most effectual weapon in his armoury.

'Now come with me to your mother,' he said, in a milder tone. 'You do not know how cruelly she has suffered since yesterday evening. She is waiting in terrible suspense for news of you, for a word from your lips. Come.'

Edmund pa.s.sively allowed himself to be raised from his seat and led a few steps towards the door. There he halted suddenly.

'I cannot,' he said.

Heideck, who had thrown open the door, which had been locked on the inside, paid no attention to this protest, but endeavoured to draw his nephew from the room. The latter now resisted energetically.

'I cannot see my mother. Do not press me, uncle; do not try compulsion, or there will be a repet.i.tion of last night's scene.'

He freed himself from Heideck's grasp, and pulled the bell. Everard came in at once.

'My horse,' commanded his master. 'Have him saddled immediately.'

'Is this your reply to all that I have been saying to you? Has it all been in vain?' cried Heideck, in despair, when the man had withdrawn.