My Lady Rotha Part 55

The Waldgrave shrugged his shoulders. 'Well, go to her now, and tell her,' he said. 'I want to see her; I want to thank her. I have a hundred things to say to her. Quick, Martin, for I am laden with debts, and I choke to pay some of them.'

I ran upstairs, marvelling. On the lobby I met Fraulein Max coming down. 'What is it?' she asked impatiently.

'The Waldgrave! He has been released! He is here!' I cried in a breath.

She stared at me while a man might count ten. Then to my astonishment she laughed aloud. 'Who released him?' she asked.

'The magistrates,' I said. 'I suppose so. I don't know.' I had not given the matter a thought.

'Not Count Leuchtenstein?'

I started. 'So!' I muttered, staring at her in my turn. 'It must have been he. The Waldgrave said something about him. And he must have come here to tell us.'

'And you gave him my lady's message?'

'Alas! yes.'

Fraulein Max laughed again, and kept on laughing, until I grew hot all over, and could have struck her for her malice. She saw at last that I was angry, and she stopped. 'Tut! tut!' she said, 'it is nothing. But that disposes of the old man. Now for the young one. He is here?'

'Yes.'

'Then why do you not show him up?'

'She must be prepared,' I muttered.

She laughed again; this time after a different fas.h.i.+on. 'Oh you fools of men!' she said. 'She must be prepared? Do you think that women are made of gla.s.s and that a shock breaks them? That she will die of joy?

Or would have died of grief? Send him up, gaby, and I will prepare her! Send him up.'

I supposed that she knew women's ways, and I gave in to her, and sent him up; and I do not know that any harm was done. But, as a result of this, I was not present when my lady and the Waldgrave met, and I only learned by hearsay what happened.

An hour or two later, when the bustle of shrieks and questions had subsided, and the excitement caused by his return had somewhat worn itself out, Marie slipped out to me on the stairs, and sat with me in the darkness, talking. The gate of curious ironwork which guarded the house entrance was closed for the night; but the moon was up, and its light, falling through the scrollwork, lay like a pale, reedy pool at our feet. The men were at supper, the house was quiet, the city was for a little while still. Not a foot sounded on the roadway; only sometimes a skulking dog came ghost-like to the bars and sniffed, and sneaked noiselessly away.

I have said that we talked, but in truth we sat long silent, as lovers have sat these thousand years, I suppose, in such intervals of calm.

The peace of the night lapped us round; after the perils and hurry, the storm and stress of many days, we were together and at rest, and content to be silent. All round us, under the covert of darkness, under the moonlight, the city lay quaking; dreading the future, torn by pangs in the present; sleepless, or dreaming of death and outrage, ridden by the nightmare of Wallenstein. But for the moment we recked nothing of this, nothing of the great camp round us, nothing of the crash of nations. We were of none of these. We had one another, and it was enough; loved one another, and the rest went by. For the moment we tasted perfect peace; and in the midst of the besieged city, were as much alone, as if the moonlight at our feet had been, indeed, a forest pool high in the hills over Heritzburg.

Does some old man smile? Do I smile myself now, though sadly? A brief madness, was it? Nay; but what if then only we were sane, and for a moment saw things as they are--lost sight of the unreal and awoke to the real? I once heard a wise man from Basle say something like that at my lady's table. The men, I remember, stared; the women looked thoughtful.

For all that, it was Marie who on this occasion broke the trance. The town clock struck ten, and at the sound hundreds, I dare swear, turned on their pillows, thinking of the husbands and sons and lovers whom the next light must imperil. My girl stirred.

'Ah!' she murmured, 'the poor Countess! Can we do nothing?'

'Do?' I said. 'What should, we do? The Waldgrave is back, and in his right mind; which of all the things I have ever known, is the oddest.

That a man should lose his senses under one blow, and recover them under another, and remember nothing that has happened in the interval--it almost pa.s.ses belief.'

'Yet it is true.'

'I suppose so,' I answered. 'The Waldgrave was mad--I can bear witness to it--and now he is sane. There is no more to be said.'

'But the Countess, Martin?'

'Well, I do not know that she is the worse,' I answered stupidly. 'She sent off the Count with a flea in his ear, and a poor return it was.

But she can explain it to him, and after all, she has got the Waldgrave back, safe and sound. That is the main thing.'

Marie sighed, and moved restlessly. 'Is it?' she said. 'I wish I knew.'

'What?' I asked, drawing her little head on to my shoulder.

'What my lady wishes?'

'Eh?'

'Which?'

My jaw fell. I stared into the darkness open-mouthed. 'Why,' I exclaimed at last, 'he is sixty--or fifty-five at least, girl!'

Marie laughed softly, with her face on my breast. 'If she loves him,'

she murmured. 'If she loves him.' And she hung on me.

I sat amazed, confounded, thinking no more of Marie, though my arm was round her, than of a doll. 'But he is fifty five,' I said.

'And if you were fifty-five, do you think that I should not love you?'

she whispered. 'When you are fifty-five, do you think that I shall not love you? Besides, he is strong, brave, famous--a man; and she is not a girl, but a woman. If the Count be too old, is not the Waldgrave too young?'

'Yes,' I said cunningly. 'But why either?'

'Because love is in the air,' Marie answered; and I knew that she smiled, though the gloom hid her face. 'Because there is a change in her. Because she knows things and sees things and feels things of which she was ignorant before. And because--because it is so, my lord.'

I whistled. This was beyond me. 'And yet you don't know which?' I said.

'No; I suspect.'

'Well--but the Waldgrave?' I exclaimed. 'Why, madchen, he is one of the handsomest men I have ever seen. An Apollo! A Fairy Prince! It is not possible that she should prefer the other.'

Marie laughed. 'Ah!' she said, 'if men chose all the husbands, there would be few wives.'

CHAPTER x.x.xIII.

TWO MEN.