The World Masters Read online

  CHAPTER VII

  The village of Elsenau, which has hardly yet risen to the dignity of atown, lies somewhere midway between the Hartz Mountains and theThuringia Wald, which, as everyone knows, stretches away inundulations of wooded uplands and valleys southward to the BlackForest. Its most recent possession is the fine Hotel Wilhelmshof--anentirely admirable creation of the German instinct for catering,facing south-west, and sheltered north and east by uplands crownedwith stately pines. Southward it has smooth, new-made lawns, dottedwith clumps of firs and parterres of flowers, shielded by curves offlowering bushes. The lawns slope down to the edge of a long narrowlake, which, on the evening of the day after the prince and themarquise left Petersburg, lay smooth and blue-black beneath thecloudless azure of the summer heaven.

  But the principal attraction of Elsenau, which, indeed, had given theluxurious hotel its reason for existence, and which had raised thelittle village of charcoal-burners and woodcutters to the dignity of aKur-anstalt, was a spring, accidentally discovered by an enterprisingengineer who was looking among the mountains for a water-supply forthe city of Ilmosheim, some three miles away to the south. The watershad a curious taste and a most unpleasant smell. Learned chemists anddoctors analysed them, and reported that they contained ingredientswhich formed a sovereign remedy for gout and rheumatism--especiallythe hereditary form of the first. They were bottled and sent far andwide, and soon after their qualities had been duly appreciated andcommented on by the medical press of Europe and America, the HotelWilhelmshof rose, as it were, with the wave of the contractor's magicwand, hard by the little limestone grotto in which the spring had beendiscovered.

  About eight o'clock on a lovely evening in July, Lord Orrel and LadyOlive, under the broad verandah of the Wilhelmshof, sat drinking theirafter-dinner coffee and watching the full moon sailing slowly up overthe black ridges of the pine-crowned hills which stretched away to thesouthward.

  "I suppose the prince must have missed his train, or else the trainwas behind time and missed the coach," said Lord Orrel, taking out hiswatch. "It is rather curious that I should have met him regularlyevery year at Homburg or Spa or Aix, and that somehow you have nevermet him; and now it seems from his letter that we have both discoveredthis new little place of evil-smelling waters together. I am glad thathe is bringing his daughter with him."

  "Ah, yes; his daughter--she is the second Marie Antoinette, isn'tshe?" said Lady Olive, putting her cup down and taking up hercigarette. "The most beautiful woman in Europe, the last daughter ofthe old House of Bourbon--I mean the elder branch, of course. And theprince?"

  "The first gentleman in Europe, in my opinion," replied the earl,flicking the ash off his cigar. "A man who, granted the possibility ofcircumstances which, of course, are not now possible, might mount thethrone of Louis XIV., and receive the homage of all his courtierswithout their knowing the difference. A great man, my dear Olive, bornfour generations out of his time. If he had succeeded the GrandMonarque--there would have been no French Revolution, no Napoleon----"

  "And therefore, my dear papa," laughed Lady Olive, "no Peninsular War,no Wellington, no Waterloo, no Nelson, no Nile and Trafalgar, and sonone of that expiring British supremacy which you were arguing aboutso eloquently the other day in the House of Lords."

  While she was speaking, the double doors giving on to the verandahwere thrown open, a lacquey, gorgeously uniformed in blue and silver,came out, with his body inclined at an angle of thirty degrees, andhis arms hanging straight down, and said, in thick Swiss French:

  "Your Excellency and Madame la Marquise will find Milord and Miladi onthe verandah here."

  As Lady Olive looked round she heard a rustle of frilled skirts on theplanks of the verandah, and saw a tall, stately gentleman and the mostbeautiful woman she had ever seen coming towards her.

  The gentleman's eyes brightened and his brows lifted as he raised hishat. The woman's face might have been a mask, and her eyes looked outupon nothingness.

  "Ah, my dear prince," said the earl, rising and going towards him withoutstretched hands. "Delighted to renew our acquaintance in a new andyet a very charming place. I was hoping that you would get here fordinner; but, of course, once off the main line, you can never trust aGerman train to get anywhere in time. And this is Mam'selle laMarquise, I presume. This is fortunate. You see I have my daughterOlive taking care of me, so perhaps they may help to entertain eachother in this out-of-the-way place."

  "Yes," replied the prince, as they shook hands, "this is my daughterof whom I have spoken to you so often; and this is yours, the LadyOlive. Mam'selle, I have the honour to salute you. Adelaide, this isthe daughter of Lord Orrel--an old friend, and one of the anciennenoblesse."

  Olive had risen while he was speaking; the mask melted away from themarquise's lovely face, her lips softened into a smile, and a swiftgleam of scrutiny took the place of vacancy in her eyes. Lady Olive'smet hers with a frank though involuntary look of challenge. Shecertainly was what the gossip of half-a-dozen countries calledher--the most beautiful woman in Europe. She possessed an exquisitegrace of form and face and manner which made her indescribable. Whenone woman honestly admires another it is always with a half-conceivedsense either of envy or hostility. Lady Olive was herself one of thebest types of an English patrician, and the blood in her veins hadflowed through ten generations of the proudest lineage in Britain; butin Adelaide de Conde, the daughter of the most ancient aristocraciesof France and Austria, she instinctively recognised her equal, perhapsher superior.

  She put out her hand in a frank, English way, and said, in the mostperfectly accented French:

  "My father has told me so much about yours, and they are such goodfriends, that I hope it isn't possible that we can be anything else."

  "Quite impossible!" smiled the marquise, taking the hand of thenew-made friend who in days to come was to be an enemy. "Since ourfathers are such old and good friends, why should we not be newfriends and good ones too?" And then, turning round to her father, shesaid: "Voila, papa, since we find ourselves in such good company, andwe have missed the dinner, and cannot eat till they get somethingready, why do you not have your vermouth and a cigarette? In fact, aswe are so entirely 'chez nous' here in this delightful retreat, youmay order one for me too, I think."

  The prince lifted his eyelids, and the lacquey approached and took hisorder, and then the party proceeded to make friends.

  A little after tea the same evening, when Lady Olive and the marquisehad retired to Lady Olive's sitting-room for a chat on things feminineand European, Lord Orrel and the prince were strolling up and down themoonlit lawn, smoking their cigars and exchanging the experiences thatthey had had since their last meeting at Homburg the year before.

  Their friendship had begun by a chance acquaintance some six yearsbefore at Aix-les-Bains. Both of them aristocrats to theirfinger-tips, it was not long before they struck a note of commonsympathy. The once splendid name which the prince bore appealedinstantly to the Englishman, who could trace his descent back to thedays of the first Plantagenet, and it was not long before they found acloser bond than that of ancient ancestry.

  One night, when the beach at Trouville was lit up by just such a moonas was now floating high over the pines on the hills round Elsenau, hehad told the prince the story of his life--the story of an elder scionof an ancient line devoted rather to literature and the byways ofscience than to the political and social duties of his position, and,moreover, a man who had never found a woman whom his heart could callto his side to share it with him. He had devoted his after-collegedays to study and travel. His younger brother, a splendid specimen ofEnglish chivalry, had found his mate in the daughter of his father'soldest friend. He was a soldier, and when the Franco-German war brokeout, nothing, not even the longing, half-reproachful looks of hisbetrothed, could keep him from volunteering in the French service. Hehad fought through the war with brilliant distinction, a private atSaarbruck and a captain during the Siege of Paris. Then, captured,badly wounded,
by the Germans after a brilliant sortie, he was curedand released, only to be murdered by the communards on the eve of hisreturn to England. A year or two after, the Earl abjured his vows ofcelibacy under the fascinations of a brilliant American beauty, and sohad accepted the responsibility of perpetuating his race.

  So these two men had met on common ground, and nothing was morenatural than that they should have become such friends as they were.To a very great extent they stood apart from the traditions of theirtimes. They were aristocrats in an age of almost universal democracy.Both of them firmly believed that democracy spelt degeneration,national and individual. Both of them were, in fact, incarnations ofan age that was past, and which might or might not be renewed.

  This was, indeed, the subject of their conversation as they strolledup and down the smoothly-shaven lawn under the sheltering pines,chatting easily and comparing in well-selected phrases the things oftheir own youth with those of the present swiftly moving and even atrifle blatant generations of to-day.

  "I quite agree with you, my dear Lord Orrel," said the prince, as theyturned at the end of their walk. "Democracy is tending now, just as itdid in the days of Greece and Carthage and Rome, and to-day in my ownunhappy France, to degeneration, and the worst of it is that there isno visible possibility of salvation. Our rulers have armed the mobwith a weapon more potent than the thunders of Jove. The loafer of thecafe and the pot-house has a vote, and, therefore, the same voice inchoosing the rulers of nations as the student and the man of science,or the traveller who is familiar with many lands and many races. Ioften think that it is a pity that some means cannot be found forplacing--well, I will call it a despotic power--in the hands of a fewmen--men, for instance, if I may say so without flattery or vanity,like ourselves--men of wide experience and broad sympathies, and yetpossessing what you and I know to be the essentials of despotism--thatsomething that can only be inherited, not acquired."

  "My dear prince, I agree with you entirely," replied Lord Orrel. "Ourpresent civilisation is suffering from a sort of dry-rot. Sentimenthas degenerated into sentimentalism, courage into a reckless gamblingfor honours, statesmanship into politics, oratory into verbosity. Inshort, the nineteenth century has degenerated into the twentieth.Everything seems going wrong. The world is ruled by the big man whoshots his quotations on the Stock Exchange and the little one whoserves behind his counter. It is all buying and selling. Honour andfaith, and the old social creed which we used to call noblesse oblige,are getting quite out of date."

  "Not that yet, my friend, surely," the prince interrupted, quicklygripping his companion's arm; "not that, at least, for us. I confessthat we and those like us are, as one might say, derelicts on theocean of society--we, who one day were stately admirals, to use theold phrase. And yet, as you said just now, if only some power could beplaced in the hands of a few like ourselves, a power which wouldover-ride the blind, irresponsible, shifting will of the mutable mobwhich changes its vote and its opinions with the seasons, the worldmight be brought again into order, and the proletariat might be savedfrom its own suicide.

  "And," he went on, turning at the other end of their promenade,"perhaps you will not believe me, but only a few weeks ago there wassuch a power in the hands of a Frenchman--of an Alsatian, perhaps Ishould say, but a man who had preserved his loyalty to France--ascientist of European reputation--a man who had discovered that thisearth had a spirit, a living soul, and who could gain control ofit--so complete a control, that he could draw it out and leave theearth dead--a man who--But there, I am wearying you; I am sure youmust think that I am telling you some fairy tale."

  "By no means, my dear prince," said Lord Orrel, doing his best to keephis voice steady, and not quite succeeding. "In the first place, I amquite sure that you would not speak so seriously on a subject that wasnot serious; and, in the second place, I can assure you that I am mostdeeply interested."

  "A thousand pardons, my lord," said the prince. "Of course you wouldnot think that of me. We have both of us lived too long to indulge inromance, and yet, if I could tell you the whole story, you would saythat you have never heard such a romance as this."

  "And, if it is not trespassing too far upon your confidence, my dearprince, I should be only too happy to hear you tell the whole story,"said his lordship, with an unmistakable note of curiosity in his tone.

  "I can tell you part of the story," replied the prince; "but not here.It is so strange, and it might have meant so much, not only to France,but to the world, that I can only tell it to you where no other earsthan ours can hear it, and even then only under your solemn pledge ofsecrecy."

  "As for the first condition, my dear prince," replied Lord Orrel, "Iwill ask you to take a glass of wine with me in my sitting-room. Asfor the second, you have my word."

  "And, therefore, both conditions are amply satisfied. Let us go, and Iwill tell you the strangest story you have ever heard."