^^^^^^^^^^^1^ ^ THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN « JUSTIN HUNTLY WcCARTHY ^ 1 i,xj;;j/^^-<^;^<^u;^ j JjL^nXOTZIN 11 » ^ '^^ aIaamaou^^ ^ ^ ^ w ^ %> NEW YORK AND LONDON » ^x- HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS MCMVI ^3 .w i^[:^c^t:^o^c^c>^t>^t^i>^^ D^ Copyright, 1906, by Harper & Ail rights resf-rved. Brothers. Published November, go6. TO MY DEAR FATHER CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I. The Twin Brethren i II. A Girl in a Garden S III. "If Only John Were Here" lo IV. The Gentleman with the Rose 20 V. The Banbury Manner 27 VI. The Sweetest Young Prince 43 VII. Always in the Dream 54 VIII. The Minuet 65 IX. Passions in the Park 78 X. CoMus and His Crew 86 XI. The Man at the Balcony 91 XII. The "Three Kings" 105 XIII. One in a Wardrobe 115 XIV. "The Knight of the Flowers" .... 128 XV. Mr. Banbury Intervenes 139 XVI. A Ghost from Greece 145 XVII. Graf von Lutten 155 XVIII. A Palace of Perturbation 166 XIX. Petticoat Influence 182 XX. Tit for Tat 189 XXI. Riding for Rescue 201 XXII. In the Way-side Wood 210 XXIII. Rising at Court 223 XXIV. Sonnenburg's Duke 235 V CONTENTS CHAP. XXV. In a Library 241 XXVI. Count Wolfram 248 XXVII. Lady Bodmor 263 XXVIII. The Summer-House by the River . . . 274 XXIX. An Unexpected Message 285 XXX. The Watchers in the Dark 295 XXXI. The Fury at the Feast 302 XXXII. At the Pavilion 310 Epilogue 328 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN I THE TWIN BRETHREN IT is written in the history of the O'Hagans of Killacurry, in the county of Cork, in the province of Munster, in the island of Ireland, that family resemblance was characteristic of the race. Son was ever like sire and daughter like dame when the sire or the dame was a slip from the standard of the O'Hagans of Killacurry. The particular O'Hagan who founded the Killacurry dynasty is lost in the mists of tradition; an Irish king, indeed, but moving dimly through a fine confusion of Firbolgs and Tuatha de Danaan. Whoever he was, he must have been a goodly man, and a stalwart and a dominant, so to persist, through the generations, in setting the seal of his lineaments upon the children of his line. His black hair and his blue eyes, his height of forehead and his pride of chin, appeared again and again through the centuries. At first the evidence for this is no THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN more than the faithful tradition of unpictorial ages, but later the thing is testified to, for the confounding of the incredulous, by the portraits of the O'Hagans, male and female, that adorned the walls of Killa- curry, or that shone here and there, where the ad- venture of the blood had borne their originals, in palaces or castles of Flanders, France, and Spain. But the greatest marvel in this matter of family likeness had its dawn in the dusk of the seventeenth century, when Madame Joan O'Hagan (nee O'Rourke) , the much-beloved spouse of the reigning O'Hagan of the day, Domenick the Dare-Devil, was brought to bed with twins. Fine babies both, they were bap- tized John and Philip, and when they emerged from that age in which all babies may be said to resemble one another, at least to alien spectators, it was found that each of the pair had inherited the O'Hagan face to an amazing and precisely similar degree. Never did twins resemble each other more closely than did the twin O'Hagan babies, the twin O'Hagan boys, the twin O'Hagan youths, the twin O'Hagan men. Let it be believed that the fabled pair of Ephesus and Syracuse were not more faithful copies. Madame O'Hagan pretended occasionally, a gentle impostor, that she could not tell the brethren apart ; but this was not true, and no more than delicate deceit aired to heighten the general effect of the marvel. But The O'Hagan, jolly Domenick, was often as much puzzled by the resemblances between son John and son Philip as any outsider could be, and as every outsider was. THE TWIN BRETHREN But the business of this history is not with Dome- nick O'Hagan, nor with Madam Joan his wife, gallant Irish gentleman and gracious Irish gentlewoman, nor with the childhood of their duplicated heirs. Take for granted the patent fact, not at all uncommon in the history of twins, male or female, but instanced for the first time in the annals of the O'Hagans of Killa- curry, that two brothers existed so amazingly alike in every outward form and feature, that no study of such form and feature was of much service in enabling stranger or familiar to tell John from Philip or Philip from John. There was little more than outward resemblance between the twins. Both proved to be brave in an age of brave men. Both were strong, dexterous, and ambidexterous, as became sons of Domenick the Dare- Devil, and both were healthy as became sons of Joan his wife. But the natures of the pair were as dif- ferent as the natures of father and mother. John took after Domenick, Philip after Joan. John was of a rollicking, riotous disposition, jovial, mettlesome, amorous, sanguine, a general lover, a general fighter, his own most inveterate enemy. Rabelais would have rejoiced in John as John would have rejoiced in Rabelais, if he ever read a book. This, indeed, he never did, for while the family fortunes still flared, he was too hot a hunter of all things huntable, too florid a lover when the quarry was cornered, too jolly a pot-companion, too rabid a gambler, to have heed of, or need of, other books than those men call 3 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN the devil's. It was all kissing-time, drinking-time, singing - time, tripping - time with him. He could never squeeze a moment from his ease for poring over the infrequent tomes in his father's lean library. Now in much of this Philip was as difEerent as you please. Philip was the mother's child. He had a love for sport ; that was in the blood ; he was an Irish gentleman and could not help it. So he drank and danced and gambled cheerfully at each deed's season, and lost, no doubt, what he could not lose again, as soon as ever his brother did. But in his soul he was something of a solitary, and the dying century found him something of a solitary still, a man well over thirty who had never really loved. Unless that were indeed love, that idyl of his youth which had hap- pened so long ago, but which now lived so vividly in his memory, thanks to the open letter in his hand. II A GIRL IN A GARDEN THE letter came from a woman he did not know, from a woman he had never heard of. It found him in his lodgings in Paris, and it carried him far away from Paris to w little German town and a little German palace. The little German palace was very like a palace in a fairy tale. It had a moat, and there were lily-cups on the water, with swans swim- ming among them, and it had a park. In the park were stately avenues of trees and great gardens formally French, but very pleasant for children to play in, with their boscages and fountains, their statues and bustos. It was very romantic, too, when one of the children was an Irish lad of nineteen, with a humming head, a thumping heart, and his sword for his fortune, and the other was a yellow-haired lass of twelve, with blue eyes of ineffable candor, who was also the high and well-born lady, the only daughter of the petty sovereign of the petty principality. An abyss of dignity lay between the playmates. Though the O'Hagans had been kings once upon a time, royal crowns had fallen from their foreheads, and royal mantles had dropped from their shoulders 5 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN long before the days of Domenick the Dare-Devil, while the little princess's amiable parent was ruler in his own right of his nursery garden of a duchy, and carried quarterings on his shield that would have turned the wits of an Enghsh herald. Still, there was one thing in common about the fortunes of the two children, and that was their plentiful lack of fortune. If Philip had not a penny beyond his at- tenuated pay and his rare gains at the gaming-table, the jolly duke was no more than a golden, or silver- gilt, pauper, who found it hard enough to rub along from day to day and keep up some show of dignity, and keep up some show of cheer. A common poverty could not, however, span the chasm of dignity. Madam Joan O'Hagan would, no doubt, have thought that any son of hers, rich in the blood of the O'Hagans and O'Rourkes, was a right proper match for the daughter of any High Dutch duke in all Germany. It is possible that in his heart Philip might have agreed with her, but in his brain he was well aware that no such opinion would receive the indorsement of the easy-going lord of the easy-going state who had such a slim, sweet slip of a girl for his daughter. But, indeed, such questions did not vex that childish idyl. The jolly duke and the honest duchess saw no harm in the friendship between the slender strip- ling who made such a comely page and their dainty, capricious daughter. Golden - haired Dorothea was often hard to please, but she took a fancy to the 6 A GIRL IN A GARDEN youth from over -seas who spoke French so well, though with such a soft, warm accent; and the affable parents were content enough in the pleasure of their petulant, imperious daughter, so the fantastic friend- ship throve. It was a garden friendship, lived in the open through a splendid spring, a splendid summer, and the best of a splendid autumn. At first they played games together, the simple games that have delighted childhood from the dawn, and Philip, the brisk page, condescended to play hide-and-seek, touch, and bat- tledore and shuttlecock with his lissome, impertinent princess and mistress, as Mars might have condescend- ed to wind silks for Venus. In a palace where a young page had no serious duties such sportings might well fall within the scope of his ofl&ce, if a Bacchic duke and a tranquil duchess were willing to have an impish piece of girl-mischief taken somewhat off their hands. But as the lad that was nigh to manhood fell under the spell of the lass with her quaint precocity of womanhood the games changed their nature. They became romances, dramas, epics, evolved from Philip's hot head that had the Gaelic, and brimmed with mem- ories of Celtic tales. And these romances, dramas, epics, were interpreted by the boy and the girl, in the joy of their hearts, in the sunlight and the shadow of those happy gardens, through all those happy months, while the plump duchess dozed over her knitting, and the plump duke drank Rhenish deeply, aped the 7 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN scholar in his library, played the virtuoso in his ridiculous museum, and paid visits, none too furtive, to the lady-in-waiting he was, for the time, pleased to favor. What a queer httle world it was, as PhiHp looked back upon it now, over the highway of the years! It did not seem queer to him then, for the world to him was the company of that raw, green girl for whom he held a love as green and raw, for whom he taxed his store of peasant tales to please her whimsies. All the old Irish legends, heard by him at many firesides, took new life in that trim German garden for the sport of boy and girl. Grania put her love -law upon Diarmid, and then Philip and Dorothea would fly for their lives and their loves through the alleys of the little sham Versailles, and hear Finn winding his horn behind them, and the baying of his mighty hounds. Or CuhuUn would woo his lady and do terrible deeds for her sake, the white-and-gold child standing upon a marble seat and clapping her hands as the armies of Queen Maeve faded before the fall of Cuhulin's unconquerable sword. - Something of the spirit of the age came over the great tales as Philip and Dorothea acted them out together. The heroes of the Red Branch fought with small swords, and shook magnificent periwigs when they nodded their august heads. The won- derful women of the West, Children of the Mist, and kindred of mysterious gods, fluttered, in the fancy of the players, the suave air with fans, and fled 8 A GIRL IN A GARDEN through haunted forests on high heels and in brocaded gowns. But the heart of the romance was there for the boy and for the girl, and Philip, masquerading as some hero that was himself translated to a figure in a masquerade, was only Philip squeezing from an unripe heart the wine of his worship for a golden, precocious, exquisite girl. By-and-by the sport changed to an earnest scarcely less unreal than the play, and unconsciously in their pastime they rehearsed their parts in the mystery- piece of love. It was all very sweet, and all very pure, and all very long ago. He saw dimly as in a faded picture the form of that buoyant youth whom the sad destiny of his land had driven into exile, and whom chance and the patronage of foreign friends had set for a season in the service of that little sleepy, slipshod, out-at-elbows duchy. He saw the girl far more distinctly, yellow-haired and blue-eyed, white- robed, high-spirited, possibilities of fierce passions masked by the mould of her youth. When they kissed in all innocence he remembered now with a thrill how she sheltered in his arms, and how he, at her touch, felt his house of flesh tremble, vexed with unappreciable flames. Boy and girl they loved each other, boyishly, girlishly, but behind the very simplicity of their immature and unrealized passion there lurked the dim images of imperious desires, of unacknowledged longings. Dear Heaven, how the world had changed since then! Ill "IF ONLY JOHN WERE HERE" AS Philip sat now with the letter in his hand his L eyes through the open window looked upon the Seine and beheld in hard fact the crawling boats and the crowds upon the banks. But he was un- conscious of these things; his liberated spirit strayed in that fair garden, so very green in its grass, so very golden in its sunlight, so very black in its shadows. She held him by the hand, commanding, and they babbled as they went, babble half-childish, half-wise, for the truth of the world was with them in their play and his heart ached and glowed with the sweet, fierce purity of a boy's love for a child. He lifted the letter to look at it again. It had been left at his lodgings that afternoon by a man, a stranger to Philip's servant Teague, who simply said that he had been intrusted to deliver it by the writer, and having said so much went away with no more words. The letter was in a woman's hand, fine, delicate, and firm. It was addressed to Captain Philip O'Hagan, of the Irish Brigade in Paris, and it was sealed with a heart in a border bearing the legend, "Tout pour amiti^." It was dated a fortnight earlier "IF ONLY JOHN WERE HERE" from the Electoral Palace of Schlafingen. It ran thus: " If Philip O'Hagan cherishes any tenderness for the time when he played as a child with a child in the gar- dens of Sonnenburg, and if that tenderness has the strength to serve a woman who needs loyal service, there is work for a brave man in Schlafingen." The letter was signed Swanhild von Eltze, a name that he had never heard before, a name that carried with it no association of any kind to his mind. But the writer was a magician who had brought back to him his youth, and his young love, and his idol Dorothea. What had happened to her in all those years? He had never seen her since the afternoon, fifteen years before, when he rode from Sonnenburg to take the promotion, long promised, which had come at last. He had heard of her time and again, in this court and that camp, and the worst news to him was the news of her marriage to Max, son of the Electoral Prince of Schlafingen. After that he heard little, for he had no wish to hear anything, and the years drove on and made him a better soldier, a more experienced gallant, a shrewder man of the world, a colder student of life and the conduct of the great and of the fair. In peace, as in war, he won for himself, from men and from women, the pleasing title of the illustrious O'Hagan, a name well deserved by his splendid carriage in action, by his sweet dignity in success. All this time he had lived unconscious that he was loveless; that was not the reputation of the illustrious 3 zi THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN O'Hagan in Paris or Vienna, in Venice or Madrid. But now with the face of Dorothea shining upon him in all the sweetness of her thirteenth year, all the gallantries and amours of the dead years showed themselves for what they were, the trivial felicities, the pitiful intrigues incidental to, perhaps essential to, the glittering career of a soldier of fortune, but seeming mean, ignoble, even shabby, when thus suddenly flamed on by the radiance of the love-Ught of his youth. He had judged his life to be bustling and full of purpose; now it seemed to want meaning and true motion. He had been but a drudge-horse trudging a millround, when he believed that he was galloping to the glory of the world. Memory mettled resolution. At least he would blunder no longer; a voice had called to him, the voice of his beautiful youth, when his lips were clean and his heart was pure and his spirit moved freely in the kingdom of dreams. That he had served his country and served his King did not cheer his retrospect. Any Irish gentleman would do as much nor consider himself to be praised for duty, and the cause of the one showed sadly whenever he had news from Ireland, and the cause of the other showed sadly when he waited upon King James at St. -Germain. But now the clarions of the past rang out a command that the prisoned, stifled Galahad in him leaped to answer. He had work to do and it must needs be great work, for it was in the service of the child, the fairy, the angel of his spring. 12 "IF ONLY JOHN WERE HERE" It was growing dusk. Philip lit a candle, and after reading the letter once again extended it to the flame and held it till he let it drop, a charred scroll with a little point of flame, upon the hearth. Whatever happened, it would be better for that unknown woman that such a paper should cease to exist. Then he set himself to think of what he had to do. Never for one moment since he read that appeal, and had felt his youth rekindle under the spell of memory, had it occurred to him to hesitate as to his obedience to the call. The only question was how best and swiftest to obey. The first step was to obtain liberty of action. The next was to get together as much money as he could command. The third was to start as soon as possible for the frontier. He had no need to feel uneasy about money, yet had no need to encroach upon that reserve fund which he, with a caution unusual in a soldier of fort- une, had always managed to maintain in sure hands since he first took the field in war and love. In his desk lay a large handful of gold pieces which he' had won the night before from the Count de Guiche, and besides that the purse in his pocket was plump enough to justify high spirits. As for the liberty of action, he would set about obtaining that at once. His heart was beating joyously at the prospect of this adventure into the unknown, this summons from he knew not whom, to do he knew not what, a summons not to be denied when it conjured with the memory of a divine child. Then, sharply, in the thick of his 13 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN delight, he sighed. "If only John were here," he said to himself, sadly. "If only John were here." John the beloved brother, as like himself as his mirror's image; John the joyous comrade, so unlike himself, who took the world so readily as it was and made the most of it; John the splendid reveller, loving all pleasures largely, never denying a desire, never questioning a delight, so long as the one did not prompt or the other offer to reward any action that was not according to the code of honor of the illustrious O'Hagan. For John, too, was the illustrious O'Hagan in the eyes of his admirers, male and female, as Philip was on the lips and in the hearts of others with whom John had little to do. Indeed, the brothers were very content to divide the flattering epithet as they were already agreed in Irish manner to divide their right to the title of The O'Hagan. For it passed the wit of man to say to which of the twins the distinction of precedence belonged. On the child which came first into a brawling world the nurse in a hurry wound a thread of colored silk, but the nurse in a hurry blund- ered in her work, and when the pair of babes were wailing in company, the thread of colored silk lay on the floor too loosely twined, and it remained forever beyond the power of ntirse or doctor, mother or sire, to say which of the two babies should in the days to come have the right to style himself The O'Hagan. When the boys came in later years to realize the dilemma, they made light of it, indorsing Domenick's 14 "IF ONLY JOHN WERE HERE" earlier judgment: "There can never be too much of a good thing in this hungry world, so let there be two The O'Hagans." Well, John was gone, with all his mirth, his wanton- ness, his jollity; his last lip kissed, his last cup crushed, his last card hazarded. Had not a Turkish bullet done his business for him yonder in the Morea a year ago, leaving British justice screaming unsatisfied for a bloody murder to his account in London. Well, it was better to die by the hand of a janissary than by the hand of a hangman; to rot on the desolate plain of Argos than to swing from an English gibbet. But jolly John would have been good company now; would have forgotten his cards and his minxes in a twink to serve Philip ; would have ridden with Philip if Philip had a mind to his society ; would have placed his ever-full purse and his ever-ready sword at Philip's disposal. The brothers had only met at long in- tervals since they left Ireland; for some years they had not met; but at every meeting they were the best of friends, the closest of companions, the kindliest of allies. Illustrious O'Hagan facing illustrious O'Hagan always realized that The O'Hagan could keep no finer company than The O'Hagan, and acted passion- ately upon the knowledge. You could never coax John from Philip or Philip from John, whenever the twin brethren were in the same city together. And now all was in the dust. Philip's thoughts were interrupted by a tap at the door, by the entrance of Teague looking very mys- THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN terious, by the announcement that a gentleman desired speech with him, the same gentleman that had left the letter in the morning. Eagerly PhiUp bade Teague admit the stranger, and, rising to his feet, advanced to welcome a man of middle-age, of middle height, seemingly of middle class, though Philip was not able to place his exact state. If he were certainly not soldier, he seemed no less certainly not wholly plain workaday citizen. His face was expressionless, his eyes were expressionless, his mouth expressionless. He came to a halt as soon as he had crossed the threshold, and said, speaking in French, but with a strong German accent, that he had come for an answer to the letter he had the honor to leave for Monsieur le Chevalier O'Hagan in the morning. Philip, seeking some key to the enigma, was for ply- ing him with questions, but the stranger stonily assured him that he had no knowledge whatever of the matter or of the contents of the letter that he had carried and with regard to which he now awaited a monosyllabic answer. "Yes," said Philip, instantly, whereupon the man, with the same imperturbable air of lack of interest in his commission, produced from an inner pocket an- other letter which he offered to Philip with a formal bow, and as soon as the packet had changed owners he made as if to retire. Philip delayed him, would have stayed him to drink wine, but the stranger de- clined, and with the splendid brevity that charac- terized him he took his leave and disappeared. i6 "IP ONLY JOHN WERE HERE" Philip hurried to the window, opened the letter, and read: "Gallant gentleman, on your arrival in Schlafingen, make your way to the inn of the 'Three Kings.' There you will find rooms and further instructions. Heaven keep you in health, for on earth there is much need of you." This time the letter was signed simply with the writer's initials, "S. v. E." She evidently felt that in the event of this letter coming by Philip's choice into Phihp's possession she considered him her friend. And her friend Phihp considered himself with all his heart. Though he did not know whether she was young or old, fair or foul, he felt sure that she was youthful and pretty. But that did not matter; she enchanted him with the magic of the past. Phihp O'Hagan drew on his gloves, threw his cloak about him, and, after telling his servant that he would not be long abroad, descended the stairs and stepped into the street. The evening was gentle; Paris swam in a luminous haze. It was that season of the year when to a genial observer young women seem younger, pretty women seem prettier, green leaves and blue sky of a livelier hue than ordinary. It was that season when old hopes renew their youth; when the tags of old ballads seem to whisper in the ears and to linger on the lips; when a man that has ever known ambition knows it again, at least as a bright and beautiful phantom; when a man that has ever trem- bled with tender sentiments feels again for an instant 17 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN those infantile fingers playing on the strings of his cynic heart and awakening some echoes of the rare and ancient music. Philip was still young enough to yield to the incantations of the spring, but this even- ing he seemed to be recreated, to tread etherealized on field of air, to hear the harps of fairy-land, to walk in the companionship of gods. Yet all the while he was but treading the narrow streets of Paris on his way to the hotel where dwelt the Colonel of the Irish Brigade, to whom he proposed to tender his resigna- tion. He could not tell where his new enterprise might lead. France was at peace. He wished to be free to follow his great adventure. Philip found no difficulty in obtaining his wish. His Colonel's gray eyes smiled over his gray mus- taches on his favorite soldier as he told him that France and Ireland required his services if war should again break out. Then he wrote a letter of intro- duction to Schlafingen. "A love-affair, lad," he laughed, half question, half affirmation, while he wrote. "My first love, my Colonel," Philip answered, gravely. Then saluting, he, with his letter of in- troduction, departed, leaving the Colonel to wonder what had come to the illustrious O'Hagan of the many love-affairs to make him talk such nonsense. The next morning, soon after dawn, Philip rode out of Paris on the road to the frontier that divided the kingdom of France from the kingdom and principal- ities of Germany. Philip was mounted on his blaclc i8 "IF ONLY JOHN WERE HERE" horse Sarsfield, and was followed at a little distance by the faithful Teague, on a gray nag. The morning was fine, the road stretched white into the shining distance, and Philip rode forward briskly on to ad- venture-land with the burden of a love-song on his lips. IV THE GENTLEMAN WITH THE ROSE A FEW hours after Philip had ridden from Paris any friend of his who had happened to be in the neighborhood of another gate of the city would have sworn that he had seen Philip riding into Paris travel- stained and impatient. The traveller made his way at as rapid a rate as the state of the streets permitted, till he came to an inn on the fringe of the fashionable quarter of the town. Here he alighted, stabled his animal, and after removing the dust from his out- wards with the aid of a large brush, and the dust from his inwards with the aid of a large bottle, he proceeded to make his way on foot towards the centre of the city. He hummed a jolly song as he went; he twirled be- tween his finger and thumb a flower that he had nipped, while kiss was given and taken, from the breast-knot of the merry maid at the inn, and he seemed to inhale and to exhale satisfaction at the sunny, noisy world about him. Women looked at him admiringly as he passed, for his jaunty carriage invited attention; men surveyed him enviously, jealous of his height, his breadth, his nonchalance, his grand air. A keen observer would have detected 20 THE GENTLEMAN WITH THE ROSE traces of suffering in the comely face, a pallor as from loss of blood beneath the sunburn, a hint of recent convalescence in the gait, for all its springiness. The traveller took all attentions with the cool in- difference of one accustomed to be looked at, pointed out, admired, and envied. But while the attention he now commanded in his passage through the streets of Paris was for the most part fugitive, one individual whom he countered seemed to take a deeper interest in his person than the rest. This was a middle-sized, middle-aged man, plainly habited, a man with a smooth face and lustreless eyes, who nearly ran against him at the corner of a street. The florid traveller waved an apology, went his way, and thought no more about the encounter, but the sober-coated man instantly turned round and looked after the departing figure, and then quickly crossing the road, hastened at a pace that was Uttle less than a run to get ahead of the joyous gentleman who twirled the red flower in his fingers. As soon as he had accomplished so much — and the feat was not so easy, for the quarry he stalked went at a brisk rate — ^the pursuer crossed the road, and, facing back, again met and again stared at the genial gentleman with the rose. When this manoeuvre, repeated for the second time, brought for the third time the two very different individuals into proximity, the genial gentleman realized that these encounters were not accidental. His counte- nance grew less genial, and he came to an abrupt halt. The other instantly took the opportunity to speak. 21 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN "You will pardon me,"hesaid, in his even, ordinary voice, "if I venture to observe that it surprises me not a little to find you in Paris." The gentleman with the rose began to laugh, a jovial, melodious laugh that defied care. "Faith," he retorted, "it surprises me a great deal to find myself in Paris, and it delights me a great deal I promise you, but I fail to see what concern it is of yours, anyway." The man in gray renewed his plaint. "I had allowed myself to hope that by this time you would be otherwhere." "You have the advantage of me," the gentleman with the rose commented, cheerfully; "but I am sorry if I cause you any disappointment, none the less. Personally, I am mighty glad to be here." The stolid man nodded his head with the expres- sionless activity of a toy. "I am pleased to find you so discreet," he mur- mured. "Yet methinks even discretion may be over- drawn." "may the devil fly away with me!" the rose-bearer began impatiently, but the other raised a hand in grave protestation, and went on heavily: "If I may presume to suggest, there is very good wine to be had hard by, and quiet, very pleasant for gentlemen who do not care for conversation on the street. Will you do me the favor to drink a glass with me?" The first impulse of the invited was to decline, the 22 THE GENTLEMAN WITH THE ROSE second was to accept. True, he had already allayed his thirst on his arrival at the inn, but a good glass of wine was never to be despised, and he began now to have his own private reasons for desiring to know what the devil his would-be host was after. He acted upon the second thought and accepted the offer. Immediately the stolid personage conducted him in silence down a by-street to a decent-looking tavern. The pair entered and seated themselves by a table in the far corner of a deserted room and the guide called for wine. Silence was preserved until the bottle and glasses were brought and the room again empty. Then the gray man, after very deliberately filling his companion's glass and his own, leaned across the table and spoke slowly, picking his words, as it seemed, with care and precision. "You may think it a liberty on my part to meddle in this matter further than the exact limit of my com- mission, but surely you will admit that I had every reason to believe that you were willing to assist us ?" "I admit that cheerfully," the gentleman with the rose replied, and he nodded sagaciously. He had not the slightest idea of his associate's meaning, but he desired to learn it, and acquiescence seemed the readiest way to that end. "Then," continued the other, with a show of ani- mation unusual to his phlegmatic countenance, "you may readily understand that when one so humble as myself ventures to have certain exalted interests" — ^here he lowered his voice solemnly — "so much at 23 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN heart, it was natural to expect alacrity in so gallant a man as the Chevalier O'Hagan." The lids of the bright eyes across the table lowered a little, the firm Ups tightened a little; the gentleman with the rose accepted the identity with the best grace in the world. "Frankly," he said, "and speaking as man to man, what did you expect me to do?" His opposite sniffed a little, apologetically. "I told you the truth," he said, "when I told you I did not know what the letters contained. Their carriage was an addition to the business which brought me to Paris — ^business in high service, business of importance. But when the writer commanded me to leave one letter in the morning, to call for an answer in the afternoon, and if that answer were in the affirmative to deliver the second letter, why, naturally I began to put two and two together." "A dangerous practice," murmured the gentleman with the rose philosophically. "Pray, what was the result of your computations?" "Why, that the first letter felt the way, tested your readiness to do something that would be explained in number two. So when you said yes, and accepted the second letter, I somehow took it for granted — " He paused, eagerness and apology contending, to his visible embarrassment. His companion spurred him. "Yes, yes, speak freely. What was it you took for granted?" 24 THE GENTLEMAN WITH THE ROSE "I took it for granted," said the other, positively, "that you would at once take the road to Schlafin- gen." The gentleman with the rose began to understand the matter now. "You took it for granted," he repeated, "that I should take the road for Schlafingen ?" "Sir," said the man in gray, with some show of heat, "I can only say that that is what I should have done if I were in your place and had it in my power to be of use to an unhappy lady." jThe gentleman with the rose knew all that he wanted to know. He was sufficiently familiar with the scandals of the Schlafingen court, with the tales of the brutalities of the Electoral Prince and the tragedy of the marriage of Dorothea of Sonnenburg. He knew, also, the story of a girl and a boy in a gar- den, and he found himself putting two and two to- gether as pertinently as old sobersides opposite. The gentleraan with the rose finished his wine at a draught and pushed back his chair. "Sir," he said, rising and resting the tips of his fingers on the table as he looked down upon the man in gray, "you may take it for your consolation that to all practical purposes I am already upon the way to Schlafingen, and if I appear to linger in Paris, you may either take that apparition as a lusus natures, or, if you prefer, you may assume that I am at this present here and not otherwhere for some very ex- cellent reason. But if you want me again you must 25 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN look for me in Schlafingen, and so I wish you good- day." In another moment the gentleman with the rose had whisked out of the room and the man in gray was left alone. The gentleman with the rose wasted no time in trying to find out the lodgings of the Chevalier Philip O'Hagan. He knew that gentleman too well to question the certainty that he had already left Paris. So he made his way back briskly to the inn where he had left his horse.. He walked indifEerent to the attractions of Paris that had so delighted him an hour ago, indifferent to the glances of the crowd through which he made his way. His head was humming with possibilities, probabilities, certainties. Given a brutal drunken, loutish husband, and a beautiful, proud, romantic wife, you could easily deduce a court at- mosphere hideously disagreeable even to its familiars and positively dangerous to a stranger who was as romantic as Orlando and as chivalrous as Quixote. So when the gentleman with the rose had reached his inn, paid his scanty reckoning, kissed the maid again, and mounted his horse, he summed up the situation pithily to himself as he rode away: "Philip may be in difficulties down yonder; Philip may have need of me." V THE BANBURY MANNER IN the clear heat of ths summer night the gardens of the Electoral Palace of Schlafingen showed as like fairy-land as the unlimited prodigality and the limited imagination of the Elector could make them. Thousands of colored lamps twinkled and glittered on the solemn trees, the smooth hedges, the sophis- ticated arbors, emerald and silver, gold and blue and ruby, in whose strange light the leaves of trees and bushes seemed fiercely, unreally green. Fountains leaped and plashed and trickled in circles of the like fires. Wherever it seemed humanly possible to set a colored cresset a colored cresset had been set. Wits labored in praise of the result. Some admirers likened the glowing lamps to handfuls of jewels scattered by Aladdin on the pathway of his fair; others suggested a resemblance to colored fishes on a magic sea; others, seeking more poetic simile, mur- mured of fire-flies tangled in the hair of night. The rococo statues, pedantic tenants of that fantastic paradise, alone seemed indifferent to the patches of colored light that mottled their naked limbs with more hues than the coat of Joseph and made your 3 27 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN Hermes your Harlequin. At the head of the canal a Triton, sprawling in a mighty shell and blowing great spouts of water from a fluted conch, was arched with the vivid lamps whose lights stained his shining body like a rainbow and made the splashing streams leap like strands of liquid metals into the dark channel. All over the garden there were little arbors, discreet, profound, on whose tables wines and sweetmeats waited to solace those that might seek their seclusion. Farther afield were sombre alleys, lonely groves, and idle thickets, where no lamps flamed a false day, and where those that chanced to stray thither, hand in hand, might confidently count, if not on safety from interruption, at least upon easy and unrecognized escape from interrupters. The Elector's master of the ceremonies was a thoughtful official, whose past and whose present maintained in him a lively sym- pathy with the tastes and the frailties of courtly humanity, and those that were the best able to ap- preciate his soUcitude were always the first to applaud, to each other, his foresight. There had been, was, and would be dancing in the palace, but the dances were honored chiefly by the more ceremonial of the courtly party, and the majority of the guests preferred to revel in the coolness and mystery of the many-colored night. The gardens were thronged in all directions with a merry motley of masqueraders, who carried their fantasies in the highest spirits. For the most part they represented figures from the Italian comedy of masques, or the 28 THE BANBURY MANNER French fancies that softened and degraded those brilliant originals, or sham classic figures girt in tunics of gilded leather and crested with feathers, or absurd Chinese mandarins. The multitude of women were chiefly shepherdesses with gilded crooks, sub- stantial sylphs or sturdy goddesses, great in a display of leg, and all, Greek, Roman, or Arcadian, bepatched, behooped, bepainted, and bewigged, according to the order of the mode. The whole effect seemed to Mr. Banbury, as he paused on the terrace before descending the steps to plunge into the thick of it, too glaringly strong and crude in color, too heavily ornate, to please his British fastidiousness. Indeed, Mr. Banbury, trim, precise, meticulous, in his quiet suit of brown and silver, was a marked contrast to the bulk of the masqueraders. His round and ruddy visage, suggestive of a healthy and phlegmatic but slightly supercilious cherub, loomed in its unmasked nudity of disapproval upon the jigging jollities below him, with whom, however, he would now condescend to mingle. But if Mr. Banbury eyed the grotesque license of riot with disfavor, his own solemnity of habit and pomposity of carriage marked him out, first as an eccentricity 'and next as a victim, to the sportive in- stincts of the froKc-folk below him. As Mr. Banbury reached the lower level of the steps and advanced slowly, surveying the scene about him through the quizzing-glass affixed to the top of his cane, he was suddenly made the centre for a rush of laughing mas- 29 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN queraders, male and female, who swiftly formed a ring of linked hands round him and began to caper nimbly. Poor Mr. Banbury, sorely perplexed by this flux of popular attention, strove in vain to escape from the meshes of the human net that invested his serenity. Bright eyes derided him through the loop- holes of gaudy masks, paste-board heads of animals and demons butted at him and uttered monstrous noises, harlequins clapped him with their bats, fools belabored him with their bladders, impish minxes tweaked him freely with sly fingers. It was all like some incredible and distressing nightmare. "Good people, good people," he protested, plain- tively, when he found that it was impossible to pene- trate the leaping, reeling, screaming circle of ridicule that environed him; "good people, what is the matter with you? You embarrass me sadly." Fresh shrieks of derision greeted this entreaty proffered in Mr. Banbury's best French, and his tormentors revolved around him, more swift, more impudent, and more mischievous than before. No doubt the rakes and jades would have soon got tired of plaguing the stranger, but Mr. Banbury, who was beginning to get very hot and very cross, was just making up his mind to forget for the moment his diplomatic position and come to grips with the biggest man he could catch, when a goddess out of a machine rescued him from his dilemma. The goddess patently was Diana. A crescent moon of diamonds blazed in her dark hair, a white tunic 30 THE BANBURY MANNER veiled her graceful body ; she carried a hunting-spear in her hand. Standing on the steps of the terrace from which Mr. Banbury had just descended she ex- horted the cohorts of Comus with a serio-comic gravity. "Hence!" she cried; "hence, ye tormenting sprites, I banish ye! This swain is under my protection." She waved her spear as she spoke in a command- ing manner, as if it were a magic wand, and as every one of the merry-makers knew her, the sound of her voice and the sight of her smiling face rendered their tranquillizing service to the diplomatist in distress. The teasing circle fell asunder, and the maskers, screaming, laughing, hooting, whistling, eddied and ebbed in floods of merriment through the radiating alleys of the garden, vaxiishing at length in depths of many-colored mystery. Mr. Banbury, mopping his hot forehead with a silk handkerchief, found himself alone with his celestial rescuer. "I thank you," he panted. "How hot the brats have made me!" A home thought came over him, irresistible, and he sighed involuntarily as, also involuntarily, he gave his thought expression: "I should like a mug of ale." The lithe Diana laughed, and in spite of his irri- tation, her laugh sounded as musical in the ears of Mr. Banbury as if he had been indeed Endymion, bathing in the radiance of the moon. "There is wine in every arbor, young Englishman." Mr. Banbury shook his head. 31 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN "I had sooner drink ale," he asserted, patriotically. Then, recalling with some annoyance the latter part of her speech, he questioned: "Pray, how do yon know I am English?" Again the kirtled divinity giggled, and Banbury felt that his ears were pinker than his cheeks. "Good Lord!" she cried. "Do you think you flash a Parisian accent?" Now this was precisely what Mr. Banbury did think of himself, and her irreverence fretted him. To cover his mortification he questioned again: "What was the matter with those mummers that they worried me so?" Diana was pat with her answer. "They were quizzing you for not wearing a cos- tume." Mr. Banbury frowned sourly. "I would not make a guy of myself," he protested, emphatically. Diana dipped him a swimming courtesy that seemed incongruous in a goddess of the chase that was but kirtled to the knees. "Thank you," she murmured, mockingly. Banbury saw his mistake and tried hurriedly to mend it. "Pardon. A woman may wear what plumage she pleases and look well in false feathers. But a man should never choose to be a mountebank. But I forget. Permit me to present myself to your god- dess-ship." 32 THE BANBURY MANNER He drew his heels together and made her a stiff little bow, with some measured play of the hat. "Mr. James Banbury, British Envoy here, newly arrived, and your very humble servant." Diana made him another cheese, the effect slightly grotesque, the machinery of the movement very patent with so much of her shapely legs displayed beneath her would-be classical garment. "I am Swanhild von Eltze, attending on her royal highness the Electoral Princess." Banbury gave her another bow, and then asked her with almost boyish eagerness: "Why did you come so timely to my rescue?" The Moon maiden seemed amused. "I saw you at court this morning and took a fancy to your solemn face." Banbury inclined stiffly. This, on the heels of the hint as to his French accent, put him on his dignity. "Vastly flattered," he murmured in a way which he believed to be impressive, but which wholly failed to impress his companion, who laughed heartily. "Vastly flattered," she repeated, mimicking Ban- bury's manner and also Banbury's accent to the life. He recognized the mimicry of his manner, but happily failed to recognize the double edge of the interpreta- tion. Diana came dancing near to him and looked into his face, and her laughing eyes were very lumi- nous and alluring. "You are the most solemn of solemn Englishmen. How can you be so owlish?" 33 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN Banbury was too fascinated by the eyes to re- sent any impertinence from their owner. But he remembered his distinguished position and made answer, draped in the best Banbury manner, for all the world as if he were standing for his por- trait: "I take life seriously, I thank Heaven!" Swanhild's fair face grew suddenly grave, and though the evening air was quite warm enough to justify her in wearing the diaphanous draperies of Diana, she gave a little shiver. "If we took life seriously here some of us would sicken. It is very clear that you are newly come, to speak so." "I do not care much for the place," Banbury pro- tested. He was not going to admit that any foreign country could satisfy one who was happy enough to be bom an Englishman and to serve an English sov- ereign. He proceeded affably to explain his reasons for his distaste. "Too much drumming and thrumming, too much dancing and glancing. Not like my England." Diaila gave a little shiver, but this time it was one of palpable affectation. "The land of eternal fog," she commented scorn- fully. Banbury hastened to correct her. "Honor, that is a libel. We only have fogs in winter. Our summer is summer, I promise. You would like England, I am sure you would. You would like Beddington." 34 THE BANBURY MANNER "Beddington! What a name! What is Bedding- ton?" Banbury held up his hand in an ecstasy of ad- miration. "My house in Surrey. A mellow English manor, a mellow English garden, and, oh, the mellow English ale we table!" It seemed to Swanhild that something like a tear moistened the clarity of the exile's eyes as he re- gretted thus the merits of a nectar unknown to her. She extended her hand, which Banbury took with a somewhat awkward alacrity, and, leading him a few steps along the grass, conducted him to one of the little arbors with which the gardens were starred and invited him to enter. The pair seated themselves at opposite sides of a little table daintily provided. Swanhild poured from a crystal flagon a yellow wine that glowed like fluent moonbeams. "Drink German wine with me," she pleaded, "and forget your English liquor. Drink the health of the Princess Dorothea." Banbury lifted the glass to his lips. "The Princess Dorothea," he toasted cheerily and sipped at the golden drink. The sip prolonged itself; the glass rose higher and higher; manifestations of delight rippled over the smooth face of the stranger, and when he set down his glass not a drop remained of its delicious contents. "Honor, that's ripe and prime," he murmured in the hush of his church-on-Sunday voice ; and, indeed, 35 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN he did right to praise, for vintages were offered to all the world that night which were of the high aris- tocracy of the Elector's cellar. Emboldened, Ban- bury leaned forward and touched, appealingly, the beautiful bare arm that rested on the table. "You are very kind to me," he whispered, con- fidentially; "be still kinder. A diplomatist's position here is delicate. Perhaps I have heard too much; perhaps I have heard too little. You, a friend of the Princess, cannot you give me a hint of how things really stand?" Swanhild looked at the young man with good- humor. As she said, she had taken a fancy to him at first sight, and she knew very well that his friendship might indirectly be of service to her mistress. His face was honest, his gaze candid; he was new to diplomacy, innocent of intrigue. "That is an easy task. What do you expect to find in a court where a girl, beautiful, high-spirited, and good, is given to a prince, stupid, brutal, lewd ?" Banbury's face, paling a Uttle under its pink, showed that he was shocked, even horrified, at this way of classifying august personages. "The Electoral Prince," he protested, with a quavering voice; "a personable prince." He was so upset by this way of dealing with the great that he hastened to fill himself another glass of the glorious wine. Swanhild struck her white fist on the table so energetically that flask and glasses rang, and some golden drops were scattered. To prevent 36 THE BANBURY MANNER further damage Banbury seized his glass and drained it slowly, staring in awe the while over its rim at Swanhild, white with indignation, speaking fast. "He is as vile as she is exquisite. All men would die blithely to kiss her fingers — all save one, her husband. A personable prince! His mistresses set the mode here. You will pay court to them, sir, if you wish to be popular. You will pay no heed to me. ' ' Swanhild put her pretty hands to her face as if to restrain her tears, but she was observing Banbury closely through her fingers. As for him, this kind Diana, the wine, the night, the privacy, made his head spin. It seemed to him that the best thing for his government, and certainly the best thing for his own content, was to remain friends with this enchant- ing creature. He ventured again upon an unresisted pressure of the white arm. "Gently," he entreated, "gently. I would always be your friend. I have, indeed, heard something of what you say, but I must confess also that I have heard that a certain lady is frivolous, quick-tempered, quick-witted at her lord's expense — " He was not allowed to say more. Swanhild was on her feet in a rage and looking at him with such scorn as the original Diana might have shown to over- bold Orion. "That is right. Stand up for him. You will prove a supple courtier. But I tell you that she has a great spirit. She is young and has a right to live; she meets despair with laughter." 37 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN The second glass of wine had fired Banbury to un- familiar temerities. Rising in his turn he placed his hands on Diana's shoulders, and with a gentle press- ure and the entreaty of his glance persuaded her to resume her seat. "I do but repeat what I hear," he argued. "You must not take offence at my ignorance. But if your Princess be so unhappy as you say, does she" — ^his voice lowered, a little insinuating — "does she find no consolation for her woes?" Swanhild shook her crescented head defiantly. "None. She is as pure as a woman can be who is married to Prince Max." Banbury looked profoundly sagacious. "Pity she is childless," he commented. Swanhild fiercely denied him. "Thank Heaven she is childless. How could she mother a child Uke him ? It does not matter for the state, since the Prince has a brother that would make a better heir than he. Prince Max cares nothing for the state, or for aught save his pleasures." Banbury tasted his third glass and felt less reluctant to discuss the conduct of the great. Evidently his Diana — she was his Diana already in his thoughts — had a faith in his wisdom, and it behooved him to prove himself wise. He assumed an air of preter- natural intelligence which made Swanhild long to laugh. "Come, come, you are a partisan," he protested. "We in England are accustomed to excuse certain 38 THE BANBURY MANNER peccadillos in the lord which are quite inexcusable in the lady." "Will you be of that mind when you marry?" Diana flashed at him. Banbury shook his head. "If I were to marry I should marry for love and be always my wife's lover." He spoke warmly, felt warmly, enraptured with Diana's eyes. Then he remembered himself the diplo- matist and resumed, judicially: "But princely persons cannot wed at their will. It is a state affair, and you must not tie King Jack too tightly to Queen Jill." "Yet must Queen Jill be pinioned to King Jack?" Swanhild questioned. "That is a different matter." Banbury hesitated; the discussion was becoming delicate. "Well," he said, striking a new path for his un- certainty, "I suppose you have a prince's party here and a princess's party. Who belongs to this and who to that?" Swanhild knitted her dark brows. "Every knave and slave in the court, every minion, every flatterer, every pander, every brute man and loose woman in the Electorate are of the Prince's party." Banbury permitted himself to smile a little at the sweeping vehemence of Swanhild, but his smile chilled into insignificance before her frigid frown, and to cover his confusion he questioned anew with a lively show of interest. 39 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN "Who form the party of the Princess?" Swanhild was prompt with her response. "All who know her, all to whom God has given the grace to understand that rare, brave nature. Every man that is at heart a gentleman, and of these the best is the beast Prince's own brother, Prince Karl, who, I think, is in love with her, which is why he seldom shows at court. Every woman that is at heart a gentlewoman, and of these, as I think, the best is myself, however I may seem in your eyes that talk to yoiS like this. Even the Electress has a kind of kindness fo rher, when she is awake, which is not often." There were tears in her voice, and the tendef heart of Banbury throbbed responsive. He rose from his place; he approached the weeping girl; he would have folded her in his arms had she permitted it. But she was herself again in an instant, dry-eyed and smiling, and the best favor he could gain was the liberty to kiss her white hand again and yet again. Banbury felt very strangely; at that moment he would have bartered Beddington and all its cellars of ancient ale to clip Diana in his embrace and to kiss Diana on the lips. But Diana was bright ice again. Over away in the town a clock struck ten, and Swanhild, holding up her hand to silence her companion, counted the strokes. "It is time for us to part," she said, gravely, and immediately hot fumes of jealousy mounted to Ban- bury's brain. 40 THE BANBURY MANNER "Why should we part?" he asked, angrily. "Do you expect to meet some one else?" Swanhild stared at him in a surprise that was not altogether real nor altogether without gratification. "Yes," she said, ca,lmly, "I expect to meet some one else. You cannot expect to monopolize my society, young Englishman." Banbury grunted something inarticulate and reach- ed for the depleted flagon, but Swanhild whisked it from his fingers. "Surly person," she said, gently, "you have drunk enough, for if you wish to see me again you must keep a clear head. My business now is with a friend of my Princess, but my business will soon be ended." In a moment Banbury was at her feet metaphori- cally; actually he kneeled upon a chair and held her hand tenderly while he assured her, what was indeed very truth, that his dearest dream was to see her again as soon as possible. So much havoc had Diana's eyes and the night and the wine, like moonlight, wrought on the Banbury heart. Swanhild smiled at his fervor. "Do you know the Gallery of the Gods?" she whispered. Banbury shook his head. "The avenue of lindens to the north of the canal with a statue of a heathen god between every pair of trees. If you should chance to walk there in half an hour you need not walk alone." Banbury made her a profound bow, and pressed his hat over his heart lest the goddess might hear its ecstatic palpitations. 41 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN "I always study mythology at night," he asserted. Swanhild extended her hand in silence; in a silent rapture Banbury kissed the delicate fingers, and then, fearing that if he lingered his feelings might be too much for his English dignity, he hurriedly quitted the arbor and, ascending the steps to the terrace, made his way towards the palace, a much more agi- tated and bewildered gentleman than the formal di- plomatist who had so solemnly descended those same steps so short a time before. Swanhild looked after his retreating figure with a faint, melancholy smile upon her face. She had made friends with the EngUshman deliberately, in cool blood had fanned his latent ardor, all because she thought that he might be useful to her in being useful to her beloved Princess; and, after all, somehow the honest, warm heart behind the pompous shyness had appealed to her unexpectedly, as the presence of some stvirdy coimtry flower might appeal in the parade of some formal parterre. She laughed a little bitterly, shrugged her comely shoulders, and then, catching up her abandoned hunting - spear, stepped out of the arbor and ran across the grass, swift and graceful as ever Diana in glades of Latmos, till she came to the head of the canal where the Triton spouted ceaselessly. In the shadow of the trees that wardered the dark water a gentleman walked enveloped in a mantle. Swanhild made straight for him, and the man, hearing her approach, came to a halt and awaited her. VI THE SWEETEST YOUNG PRINCE AS soon as Swanhild was near enough to the watch- J\ er for her words to be heard, she said, low and clear: "If you come from Paris tell me the newest news." Philip O'Hagan immediately came out of the shadow and answered her. "The newest news is that Philip O'Hagan of the Irish Guards, having left Paris in answer to a letter, and having arrived at Schlafingen, is now in the gardens of the Elector at the time and place appointed in the instructions he found awaiting him on his arrival." He made her a profound bow as he finished speak- ing, and in the mingled lights Swanhild was able to see and admire his gallant bearing and his handsome face. He, now looking steadily at the graceful girl in the frail pagan raiment, waited for her to speak. For a moment Swanhild felt at a loss. The hour she had so much desired had struck; it had brought the man who, as she hoped, would prove the champion of her lady, and now in the presence of this grave and comely cavalier her gladness and her audacity were 4 43 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN hampered by a most unfamiliar embarrassment, and she scarcely knew what to say. "Monsieur O'Hagan," she faltered, "what do you think of me?" Philip made her another bow. "A beautiful woman, who has honored me with her command. You summoned me and I came." "Ah, sir," Swanhild protested, recovering her nerve and her impertinence, "you did not come for me." "Had you sent me your image," Philip repUed, "I should have certainly done so. But your letter spoke of another — " Swanhild interrupted him quickly. "Oh, sir, I am no love-sick adventuress, believe me. You have been praised in my hearing for a perfect cavalier, hand and heart ever at a good woman's service." "My sword, my hand, my heart, are always at a good woman's service. What can I do for you?" "For me, nothing," Swanhild answered; and if there was no note of regret in her voice, there was per- haps a pang — no, not a pang, just a prick — of regret at her heart that, indeed, this ready, splendid gentle- man was not her servant. "You grieve me," Philip said, quietly, and said no more. All through his journey he had wondered what was expected of him, and when he encountered this beautiful, smiling creature, who displayed her graces so freely to the air, he began to wonder whether the adventure was not after all more commonplace 44 THE SWEETEST YOUNG PRINCE than he had supposed. Swanhild may have thought that his manner lacked enthusiasm, for she said, hurriedly : "I serve the noblest, the most wronged lady in Europe, and it is she whom you should be proud to help." "Who is the lady you serve?" "I think you know very well," Swanhild answered. "I serve the Princess Dorothea of Schlafingen." Philip's lips tightened and the muscles of his cheeks twitched at her speech. "Surely the Princess Dorothea chose her protector when she married Prince Max." Philip strove to speak calmly, but the old grief was qmck within him, as bitter as the old joy was sweet. "She is wedded to a devil," Swanhild insisted. "She has no friend here who can serve her, as she should be served, with whole and hopeless service. That is why I sent for you." Philip's heart was beating fast, but he controlled his voice to coldness as he answered, slowly : "Long ago I knew the Princess Dorothea. Long ago we played as lovers in the rose-gardens of her father's home. I was an Irish soldier of fortune, she was a poor duke's daughter. She forgot me long ago. She married his highness of Schlafingen. What can the Irish soldier of fortune do for her now.?" "I think," Swanhild insinuated, cunningly, scru- tinizing his rigid face, "your words are less gener- ous than yourself. The disappointments of love are 45 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN bitter for youth to bear, but I think that a true man should only remember the joys of love, and be tender and selfless in the remembering." Philip's stiffness weakened before her tender speech, her caressing voice, her shining eyes. The soft, warm air fluttered her draperies ; she looked very white and ethereal in the medley of tinted lights. Here was a woman to win a man's heart, here was a woman with a heart worth winning. If Philip and Swanhild had met elsewhere, Philip might very well have found words wherewith to tell her as much. But Philip was living now in the atmosphere of his first love and the shadow of his first sorrow, and was not to be tempted by the charms of a Diana who had no thought to charm or tempt him. Swanhild was desperately honest in her loyalty. "I reverence my dream," he said, "and it is for the sake of that dream that I am here to-night. I am honored to think that her highness should remember me, should remember that she has a right to my service." "The Princess remembers the friend of her youth," Swanhild answered; "but it is not the Princess who claims his service. She is far too proud to appeal for help to any one. It is I, and I alone, who, counting on your chivalry, have summoned you to her aid." "Forgive me," Philip said, "if I say that I seem to have come hither on a fool's errand. If the Princess has not desired my help and does not know of my presence, I have no right to thrust myself upon her 46 THE SWEETEST YOUNG PRINCE notice, no shade of justification for posing as her defender." For an instant Swanhild seemed incarnate anger at the obstinacy of the man; then her nimble reason triumphed over her wrath. "You talk icily, yet perhaps you talk wisely ac- cording to your light. You have not seen him. You have not seen her." She paused for a moment, her body poised, listen- ing. A flourish of trumpets over yonder at the palace told her that the princely feast was ended, and she knew that the gorgeous Prince Max would be sure to take the air with his favorites. A dexterous general, she had made her plans warily and chance had chimed with her desire. "Come with me." She held out her hand and he took it, thrilling a little as he did so at the firm clasp of her fine fingers. She drew him with her away from the canal in the direction of the terrace, almost deserted now, for the signal that the ducal supper had ended meant that the feasting of the lesser guests and the minor dignitaries might begin. Unresisting, he followed where she led, half bewildered, half diverted, thus to travel in the track of a beautiful heathen goddess through the magic of a summer night towards an unexplained adventure and an unknown goal. Fortune favored Swanhild. As they approached the open space below the terrace, the princely party were descending the steps. PhiUp, restrained by 47 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN Swanhild in the shadow of the shrubbery, beheld through the boughs a stout young man with a white complexion, a sullen face, and dull eyes. He was magnificently dressed, and had very evidently drunk more than could possibly be good for him. This was 'the Electoral Prince. He was arm in arm with two women, one handsome in the autumnal fashion of one that had known too well the desires of Spring and the lusts of summer; the other young, and attractive chiefly by reason of her youth, very blonde, very plump, and round, and smooth, with a vacant, not unamiable, face. Both women were so dressed as to display as much as possible of their bosoms; the cheeks of both were plastered with white and red; the actions of both were supply obedient to the lavish caresses of the prince. Behind these at a little dis- tance followed a group of the more favored of the courtiers, male and female, all primed to a vinous de- light at everything that was said or done by the Electoral Prince. Swanhild whispered to Philip that the elder of the two women with the Prince was Madame von Lutten — ^this he already knew, though he did not tell Swan- hild as much — and that the younger was Mademoiselle von Ehrenberg. The company moved slowly across the grass within ear-shot of the watchers. "Faith of my faith," the Prince hiccoughed, wag- ging his head from one to the other of the women he escorted, "I do not know which of you is the more adorable. When I kiss you" — and as he spoke he 48 THE SWEETEST YOUNG PRINCE embraced Madame von Lutten warmly — "I think I am in Elysium." He turned his head to the Ehren- berg girl and pressed his mouth voraciously to her ripe young lips. "When I kiss you I clasp paradise." He began to laugh stupidly, swaying backward and forward between the women who supported him. "Settle it among yourselves," he chuckled; "I love both of you." "And we both love you, sire," the elder woman re- sponded, warmly, while the younger only giggled and rolled her blue eyes foolishly. The Electoral Prince came to a halt with a bemused look on his face as if he were trying to follow some train of thought too intricate for his muddled faculties. "What," he asked, thickly, "was the fool's name in the Roman story who judged the stripped goddesses ?" This time Mademoiselle von Ehrenberg, relatively fresh from the severities of a governess, saw a chance of speaking to advantage. She answered with an attempt at archness. "I think that your serene highness means Paris the Trojan shepherd, who gave Venus the golden apple as a prize for the fairest." "I do not care who I mean," the Prince growled, slightly resenting the information with its suggestion of superiority on the part of the speaker. "If I were to give a golden apple to the fairest woman here I should want to rob a golden orchard." His conceit so pleased him that he began to laugh vacantly, shutting his eyes as he did so and showing 49 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN his teeth swinishly. Philip decided that his serene highness was not a pleasant object to look upon when he was amused. All the courtiers applauded the Prince's humor. Only Madame von Lutten, with a sour smile, made a comment. "There can be no question as to the loveliest lady at the court." Max lolled upon her, dnmkenly curious. " Who is she ?" he demanded. "Speak up. Name yourself, hussy, and I will say ay to it." Mademoiselle von Ehrenberg looked lazily annoyed. Madame von Lutten made a kind of deferential courtesy as she answered: "I mean, of course, your serene highness's royal consort." An ugly flush ruddled for the moment the white face of the Prince, and he scowled at the Lutten woman in a rage that did not dismay her who had intended to raise it. "My wife!" he shouted, furiously. "Damn her and damn you for speaking of her! Praise her to booby Karl, if you please. He will lick up your praises of the jade. Not I." Mademoiselle von Ehrenberg stared with a childish amazement at the raving Prince, and the courtiers in the rear exchanged significant glances and pre- tended to have heard nothing. "Is she unkind to you," she asked, "that you rate her so roundly?" SO THE SWEETEST YOUNG PRINCE "Do not talk of her, I tell you," Max bawled at the girl. "She is unkind to everybody; she does not know when she is well off. You are the miss for my money." And again he imprinted an unctuous kiss on the pink mouth of the Ehrenberg. Dimpling with pleas- ure, she was quick to urge a request. "If you feel so fond, sir, will you grant me a favor?" Max leered on the girl, Max patted her naked shoulders, fondling her with eyes and fingers. "Ask and have," he grunted. Almost timidly miss made her petition. "Your serene highness's leave to figure in the royal minuet that is to be danced at midnight." The request had a sobering effect upon the Prince. "Lord, lass," he declared, "that is clean against etiquette!" Madame von Lutten thrust in her venomed word. "Her serene highness would never permit it, child." The speech had the effect it was intended to have. Precise as the Prince was in all matters relating to the procedure of a court, the idea of a breach of etiquette offended him less than the thought that his wife could prevent it. He glared at the Lutten, and then turned, pawing the Ehrenberg. "My word is law here for my friends, my court, my wife. You shall dance in the minuet, my kitten, let my cat-wife like it or lump it." SI THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN The girl was a little frightened at the storm she had conjured up. "I do not want to vex your wife," she whimpered^ "Who cares what you want!" bellowed the Elec- toral Prince. "It's what I want that counts here in Schlafingen. I wish I could vex her till she killed herself. So were the world merrier." "How horrid you are!" von Ehrenberg whined, with tears in her meaningless blue eyes. She did not like to be shouted at. Madame von Lutten touched the Prince on the arm. I "Your highness is indiscreet," she whispered. "Oh, damn discretion!" answered Max. "Come, you jades, shall we have a race in the moonlight? I have drunk enough Tokay to deaden an emperor, but I can still run, I promise you." With a wild halloo Max seized the two women, a hand each, and started, sxifficiently unsteady, to run down the avenue. The three figures flickered away into dimness, the women, fairly alert, fairly erect, sustaining their reeling lord and lover, who filled the night with obscene vociferations as he capered. The little knot of courtiers, fired by the princely example, joined hands, man and woman, and vanished down the avenue, dancing and panting at the heels of the delirious trio. When the rabble was fairly out of sight, Swanhild and Philip emerged from their retreat. They had observed in silence, and for some moments they kept silent still, standing on the moonlit, lamplit sward 52 THE SWEETEST YOUNG PRINCE and thinking their thoughts. Then Philip turned to Swanhild and made her a very stately bow. "I pray you," he requested, gravely, "to bring me at once to speech of her highness the Princess Doro- thea. But when you do so, be as good as to present me to her notice, not as Philip O'Hagan of old, but as" — ^he paused for an instant with his hand to his forehead, and then added — "as the Chevalier Jadis. "Which is as who should say, 'My Lord Long Ago,'" he murmured to himself in English. VII ALWAYS IN THE DREAM SWANHILD, who had foreseen everything with the skill of a master of ceremonies, felt very sure of the whereabouts of her beloved mistress. On the other side of the canal, between its banks and the neighbor river, was situated the pavilion in which of late it had pleased the Princess to dwell, and in the gardens of this pavilion there was a kind of Chinese pagoda, with steps to the edge of the water, and here her serene highness often loved to sit alone and feed the fond carp that thronged the flood. Here to- night, Swanhild, for her own reasons, had made assignation with her lady, begging her to come there after the wearisome court banquet was over, and Swanhild felt confident that Dorothea, who loved any child's play, any pretty mystery, any by-breath of romance that could be enjoyed unawares in that horrid, formal, sordid little court, would keep her tryst. Swanhild was justified in her confidence. As she and Philip made their way along the darkling bank they both perceived a white figure seated pensive beneath the pillars of the pagoda. Philip felt a catch of the breath and a quaver of 54 ALWAYS IN THE DREAM the heart at the sight of that white figure. The night and its spangled trappings fell away from him as curtains fall, and between the parted folds he saw a garden and roses and a boy and a girl at play. And so for the next fev,r paces he walked unconscious, fifteen years younger, fifteen years happier, till he and Diana came to the place where that silent lady waited and brooded upon Fate. Commanded by a pressure of Swanhild's fingers, Philip came to a halt a few feet from the pagoda, while the girl, detaching herself from him, advanced and greeted her mistress. As the Princess turned her head Philip could see "in the fantastic light the pale face and the wide, bright eyes of her who had been little more than a child the last time he had beheld her, in the pleasaunce thick with autumnal roses, where for the last time he had kissed her lips as he said her farewell, and went out into the world to win glory and gold for her sake. An agony of tears blinded his eyes and the white face became indistinct as a vision seen in a mist. ' ' Well , ' ' said Dorothea to Swanhild. ' ' Will-o'-the- Wisp, what is it?" Swanhild caught at the dear hand extended and kissed it fondly. "There is a gentleman here, a poor kinsman of mine, who wants your princely word for advancement." Dorothea laughed softly, and Philip standing apart heard her and felt the tragedy of her laughter lacerate his heart. 55 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN "What can I do for any one in Schlafingen, Mad- ness?" Swanhild was not to be denied. "At least see him — ^hear him," she pleaded. Dorothea looked curiously at her eager face and then glanced from her to where the unknown gentle- man stood muffled and rigid. "Is he your lover?" she whispered. Swanhild uttered little cries of protest. "No, no, no, no!" Then turning to Philip she beckoned to him vehe- mently, and called to him: "Come forward, sir." Philip advanced; Philip, who had seen the world and looked into the iron eyes of war, and confronted great captains and wooed great ladies without a tremor — Philip trembled as he advanced and bow- ed in silence, vaguely conscious that Swanhild was hurriedly presenting him to her princely mistress as the Chevalier Jadis. "Is this the gentleman?" Dorothea asked, gracious- ly. "How can we serve you, sir?" At the imminent sound of her voice the trouble of Philip's spirit was too great to suffer him to speak. Swanhild came close to him and whispered in his ear. "You wish to enter the Prince's service." The sound of Swanhild's voice seemed to restore Philip to his senses. "Do I?" he asked, in astonishment. S6 ALWAYS IN THE DREAM "Of course you do," Swanhild admonished him. Then turning to the Princess she pleaded: "Dear lady, will you hear my petitioner?" Dorothea inclined her head a little in the direction of the Chevalier Jadis. "Speak, sir," she said, kindly. Swanhild, drawing back into the darkness behind the pagoda, glided out of sight and hearing and made her deft way to the Gallery of the Gods. Philip, directly addressed, es- sayed to speak, and was angry with himself to find that he stammered like a bashful recniit. "Madame," he began, "I hardly know how to frame my request. I feel so confused at my own effrontery in seeking this interview — " His voice trailed off into silence. Dorothea sought to give him confidence. "There is no need. To be the friend of my dear Swanhild is to be my friend. Pray, sir, be seated and pray speak freely." With a gracious motion of her hand she directed the young man to take his place beside her on the bench in the pagoda, one of those acts of amiable familiarity which did her so much harm in the pedantic court of Schlafingen, strangled with etiquette. Philip seated himself in obedience to her sign. He wondered if she could hear his heart beating. He began to talk big to drown its clamor. "Madame, to be frank, I am a soldier of fortune. Is there emplojrment for me at the court of Schlafin- gen?" 57 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN Dorothea looked at him thoughtfully. She could not see his face very clearly in the obscurity of the pagoda, but what she could discern attracted her. "His highness the Elector and his highness the Electoral Prince are both soldiers and lovers of soldiers. You have seen service ?" PhiUp answered the simple question simply. "I have followed arms all my Ufe." Dorothea laughed a little ghost of a laugh. "You talk like a veteran, yet your voice is the voice of youth." ' ' I am old enough to know my mind, and my mind is for your service." Philip was eager to bring their speech nearer to the long ago. "I am old enough to remember that I have been younger and to regret my youth." He said this with so true a ring of sorrow in his voice that it startled the attention of his hearer, and she sought to distinguish his face more clearly. "Were you happy in your youth.?" she asked him. Philip bowed his head. "Yes. And you?" It was something unceremonial thus to question her serene highness, but Dorothea was never cere- monious, and she answered him as frankly as if she had been Swanhild and not Dorothea of Schlafingen. "I? Yes." Then as she spoke she gave a little sigh, and he, hearing her, sighed too for s)niipathy, and then S8 ALWAYS IN THE DREAM catching at his courage as the drill-sergeant collars a lagging recruit, he spoke: "Madame and Princess, to-night is a night of make- believe. None of us yonder are what we seem to be. We masquerade as Caesars, being no more than poor workaday jog-trots. Speaking with all reverence, might you and I wear the masking humor for a few moments.?" Something in his voice stirred her with indefinable feeling such as the west wind arouses in those that are tuned to its music, memories of old times, old smiles, old weeping. "What do you mean?" she whispered. Philip resolved to hazard much. "Just this, highness. Let us pretend that we are old friends newly come together after an ache-long time. That we talk of ancient radiant days. Do you consent? So. I will lead the game. Tell me what you see most clearly in the crystal of your memory?" It seemed to Dorothea that she could not deny this voice which had such power to conjure up the past. "I see a garden," she said, slowly, "which to my memory seems i always sunny, always rich in roses. In that garden a boy and girl are playmates, who do not dream that they will ever grow old." She paused for an instant. "That is the pride of youth," sighed Philip. "They flutter, innocently mad with the joy of s 59 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN summer, from rose-tree to rose-tree. They hide in the cool shadows to whisper fairy-tales." Again she paused. It seemed to her as if in re- calling this past she was obeying the command of some power outside her and stronger than herself. "What are their fairy-tales?" Philip asked, hoarsely. "Tell me of their fairy-tales." "The boy will be a soldier, a great and saintly soldier, Michael Archangel or George Archangel, who will ride the world redressing all wrongs and succor- ing all sufferers, but he will always return to the garden and the girl." "The girl his queen," PhiHp murmured to himself. Dorothea did not seem to hear him. "She waits for him on a throne with a crown upon her hair. From the ends of the earth kings come to woo her, but she bids them all turn bridle and ride homeward in despair, for her heart is given to a saintly soldier who travels on the wings of the wind to claim her." "Does the saintly soldier come?" Philip questioned in a low voice, and in a low voice Dorothea answered him. "Always, in the dream. I see his eyes, and his hair, and his smile. He rides through a lane of roses, he lays the keys of cities, the crowns of kings at her feet; he kneels to kiss her hand, and then in the core of every rose there rings a marriage-bell." Her voice faded into silence and Philip took up the fairy-tale. 60 ALWAYS IN THE DREAM "I, too, have loved a garden and dreamed a child's dream. But my hero is not so heavenly. His ad- ventures are not all splendid. His armor is soiled by quagmire and morass; the elves mislead him in the elfin wood; he learns in evil cities the secrets of strange lips, the secrets of strange eyes. His sword is not always for the rightful quarrel, nor his hand always for the noblest hand." The princess gave a Uttle sigh. "My dream is sweeter than yours." Philip sighed too, but his sigh was a bitter one. "Mine is more real. For when my soldier, stained by his sins, but not ruined by them, returns to the garden, he finds the princess false and fled. She has fled from the roses to marry a barbarous king." Dorothea drew her hand across her eyes with the gesture of one that wakes from sleep. It startled her to find that her hand was wet with tears. "Let us wake from this dreaming," she said, wist- fully. Philip leaned forward and touched her hand. "Wait," he said. "Though his mouth has gnawed at the apple of life, still, in gain and hazard, shame and honor, victory and defeat, his heart has been faithful to the girl of his dream." The insistence of his voice was now irresistible. Dorothea rose to her feet. "Who are you?" she asked, and trembled as she spoke. Philip rose to his feet and took off his hat. "I am Philip O'Hagan." 6i THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN Dorothea's impulse was to fling herself into the arms of Philip. But swift as the desire came the recollection that she was a wife, if an unhappy one, and that no man's arms held any shelter for her. How often had she been wooed; how often she had scorned her wooers, true to her sense of honor, true to her sense of purity, and for their sake faithful to the savage who had married her. But though many had striven to tempt her, trading on their knowledge of her sorrows, she had never felt temptation till now, till the moment when the boy hero of her girlhood stood before her, a man, valiant, handsome, passion- ate. She clinched her hands tightly and forced her- self to speak without tears. "Philip, my little Philip, my gentleman of gentle- men, why have you come back to me?" Philip would have travelled to the ends of the earth to be so greeted, eyes and voice. "Madame," he said, "I should be proud if I were permitted to serve you." Dorothea shook her head. "There is nothing you can do for me now, Philip." The night annihilated time. Philip forgot the years that lay behind him and her, forgot that the gardens of Schlafingen were not the gardens of Son- nenburg, forgot everything except that the unex- pected had happened and that he was face to face with the love of his youth. "Nothing!" he cried. "Anything! Everything! You are not happy. You dare not say you are happy. ' ' 62 ALWAYS IN THE DREAM For one passionate moment Dorothea longed to answer, "I am not happy," and in so speaking to give the boy that once was, and the man that seemed still, her lover, liberty to speak what words he would. Then she remembered that the worst part of her un- happiness was that she must never confess that she was unhappy. "I am as happy as I expected to be," she answered him gravely, and then as one who has the wish and the right to direct the course of conversation, she asked him: "Why do you visit Schlafingen, Monsieur O'Hagan?" Philip felt that she was setting a barrier between him and her by the tone of her voice, by the gravity of her manner, by her abrupt disuse of his Christian name. He could do nothing but accept her decision. As to her question, she evidently did not know, and therefore must not know, that he had been sent for. "Madame," he answered, "duty brought me to within a little distance of Schlafingen; pleasure prompted me to visit your dominion that I might ascertain if my old playmate remembered me, and the chance of a masquerade brought me acquainted with your maid-of -honor." "Your old playmate has never forgotten you. Mon- sieur O'Hagan," Dorothea said, softly. "It is very pleasant to welcome you to Schlafingen. Prince Max will be glad to make your acquaintance. If you will accompany me I will present you to him." 63 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN She turned her head and called into the darkness: "Swanhild!" and out of the darkness Diana, who had left the Gallery of the Gods, fluttered alert. "It is almost time for the minuet," the Princess said. "I have asked Monsieur O'Hagan to give me his hand for the dance." VIII THE MINUET AMONG all the merry maskers of that splendid i\ festival no mask seemed merrier than a certain personage costumed as the fantastic Coviello of the Italian comedy. This nimble individual was dressed in his single suit of gray flannel with huge red buttons. A close cap adorned with long cock's feathers covered the whole of his head, save his face, which was con- cealed by a black and red mask, with a nose like the beak of a chanticleer. Below the mask a ragged straw-colored beard straggled. His wrists and ankles were circled with bracelets of little bells, which made a brisk jingling to all his movements, and he carried a quaint lute to which he occasionally sang, very nasally, some snatch of a ballad in a villanous Vene- tian dialect. This rattlesome jester skipped, jigged, tripped, and twisted like a fellow possessed; seemed to be a thousand men at once in a thousand places at once, and as he wriggled and tickled his way through the pack of masqueraders he had some wantonry for every woman's ear, some jocularity for every man's, that left in the wake of his progress a ripple of grins and titters. 6S THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN Never was such an indomitable merry - andrew, never such a bitter wit; Pasquin was affable to him, and Diogenes a parasite. His lips leaked lampoons, he whispered innuendoes; he displayed a very genius for ball-room intrigue. Once a woman took fright at his words, whereupon, changing his bearing, he kissed her hand with so gallant a manner and turned her a compliment so prettily apologetic that she gave him blessing for curse. Once a man took offence needless- ly, and being choleric, began to bluster of cudgellings till the mountebank caught him by the wrists in a grasp that was not to be denied, and forcing him to his knees left him in the attitude of abasement, a staring - stock for the multitude and most firmly resolved to try no further conclusions with his ad- versary. The rascal seemed to gather as he went all the scandal of the court, all the tattle of the city, and to serve it anew, spiced to the firiest diet, to those that found it most or least delectable as accident chanced. Wherever he strayed in the maze he was easily king of all the buffoonery, master of the mirth, lord of misrule, his errant reign a blaze of glory. He never lingered long enough in one corner or dallied long enough with one coterie for his humors to stale or his pungencies to pall. On the stroke of midnight the princely minuet was to be danced in a portion of the gardens private to the special, to the elect, to those that birth or favor or high place made intimates of the court. By that 66 THE MINUET time the mass of the revellers were betaking them- selves home with humming heads and thumping hearts, some acoach, some afoot, all at the top of jollification and startling the moonlit streets of the sleepy little city with their splashes of bright color and their snatches of wild songs. Many a matron wondered, as she wended her way, who the rogue was who had hazarded such bold com- pliments from behind his bird's beak. Many a maid remembered with a little sigh the fantastico with the funny lute who could pay such tribute of pretty phrases beneath his breath in the most audible of little whispers. Many a man chuckled at the thought of some droll story told in a flash by the jolly stranger as he paused for a moment on his mystifying passage, or grunted at the recollection of some stinging witti- cism to which now, and now only, he had found the fitting repartee. The antic gallant of whom so many were thinking was not with those that went their way through Schlafingen to beds that were seldom unoccupied so late. He was not indeed one of the elect, but he had heard of the princely minuet and decided to witness it. Escaping from the main stream of the retiring guests, he gUded into an alley of comparative ob- scurity, where the lamps were beginning to grow dim and where some had gone out. At the end of this alley, behind the shelter of a yew hedge, he effected a metamorphosis. He stripped off his loose gray dress, plucked cap and mask from his face, tweaked the 67 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN bunch of straw-colored beard from his chin, and stood up in the dusk a comely gentleman dressed courtly in black. He made a bundle of his grotesque accoutre- ments, laid the lute upon them to keep them in their place, and then, with the cunning dexterity of an old campaigner, proceeded to pick his way, soundless and in shadow, towards that part of the garden where a faint hum of voices and the shrill tuning of fiddles told him that the princely minuet was to be per- formed. As Dorothea and her companions came to the place appointed for the dancing, the Princess glanced over the groups of courtiers till she found the man for whom she was looking, the Marquis de la Vigerie, rep- resentative of France at the Electoral court. She made him a sign with her fan that was a summons to her side, and la Vigerie was quick to obey the invita- tion. He was a handsome man, no longer young, but resolutely determined never to grow old, who had modelled himself with idolatry upon the Duke of Orldans and sought on a smaller scale and in foreign places to emulate his reputation for successes and excesses. He had flagrantly laid siege to the Prin- cess's heart on his first arrival in Schlafingen and had taken his total discomfiture with a great deal of good grace, never without hope, waiting on opportunity and consoling himself in the mean time by the knowl- edge that Schlafingen was rich in pretty women not unwilling to accept the homage of the eminent French- man. Now his pulses quickened as he caught the 68 THE MINUET Princess's signal, only to flag again as he saw at Dorothea's side a handsome gentleman new to court, yet whose features seemed not altogether unfamiliar to him. Dorothea greeted la Vigerie brightly as he made her his humble salutations. "Marquis," she said, "I wish to make known to you Monsieur the Chevalier Philip O'Hagan, of your monarch's regiment of Irish Guards, who is making a passing visit to Schlafingen, and who naturally wishes to pay his respects to the representative of his sovereign." PhiUp bowed to la Vigerie and la Vigerie bowed to Philip, la Vigerie eying the new-comer with a mental disapproval which found no expression in his cordi- ality of speech or bearing. "I thought I knew monsieur's face," he said, ur- banely; "but of course his name is very familiar to me, as to all who follow with admiration and with envy the careers of brave soldiers. I can only regret that it was not my privilege to present Monsieur O'Hagan to your highness." Philip was hastening to explain, conscious of a dereliction of etiquette, that he was the bearer of a letter for the Marquis from his Colonel, which he had proposed to present in the morning, when Dorothea gayly interrupted him. "The Marquis must needs excuse you, for it was at my invitation that Monsieur O'Hagan is here to- night. Monsieur O'Hagan is an old friend of mine. 69 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN We were playmates in Sonnenburg years ago, when we were both Uttle more than children." La Vigerie took note of the fact with no great com- fort, but his affability beamed the more. "Monsieur O'Hagan's name is sufficient introduc- tion to the heart of any French gentleman, but the privilege of your highness 's friendship would be an in- troduction to paradise were he not already arrived there." Dorothea laughed and Philip bowed again. He knew la Vigerie by sight; he knew of his reputation, and felt sure that he must have looked upon the Princess as a possible prize, but he felt equally sure, now that he had beheld her again, that Dorothea was of a different temper from the ladies who gave to la Vigerie his easy laurels. Dorothea asked la Vigerie to present Monsieur O'Hagan to the master of the ceremonies as a dis- tinguished soldier of high standing in France, and when this was duly done she announced her intention of taking Monsieur O'Hagan's hand in the coming minuet in place of the Frenchman for whom the honor was intended. Hurried interrogations of the acquiescing la Vigerie by the somewhat flustered court official were met by urbane assurances on the French- man's part that even if the stranger were not, as he undoubtedly was, of noble, if not of royal blood in his own country, his standing in France and his career as a soldier were in themselves sufficient to justify the honor which was about to be accorded to him. La 70 THE MINUET Vigerie did all this out of no kindness to the new- comer, whom he regarded resentfully as a very possible if not, indeed, already publicly proclaimed, rival to his flame, but from a canny desire to satisfy any wish of Dorothea's which might set up a sense of gratitude or serve in some way, some how, some time, to put her in his power. And now the fiddles having been scraped and strained into tune, and the guests being all assembled, the moment came for the minuet to be danced. The master of ceremonies had made all the arrangements. Since la Vigerie had allowed the new-comer to take his place as the partner of the princess, the change had been accepted by the official mind without too much disturbance of its balance. The most dis- tinguished of Grand Duchesses had already been found to take the hand of the Electoral Prince. His high- ness was not indeed as yet present, but the master of ceremonies informed Dorothea of the name and rank of the lady who was to face her, and all that remained was to do the same as a mere matter of form to the Prince on his arrival. Max frankly detested these formal dances, and always acquiesced with sulky in- difference in the decisions arrived at by the master of ceremonies, his one desire being to get the tiresome business over and return to his wine, his dice, and his raddled nymphs. The striking up by the fiddles of the national air of Schlafingen made it known to all assembled that his highness the Electoral Prince had arrived. Couples 71 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN hastened to their allotted places. In another instant the fiddles flowed into the dainty plaintiveness of a French air and the stately, graceful dance began. Few of those present, and none of those taking part in the dance, had noticed a Uttle occurrence which took place while the band was still playing the national air. Prince Max had staggered into the enclosure, dragging with him the half-delighted, half-frightened Ehrenberg, and had hiccoughed to the dismayed chamberlain his intention to tread the measure with her. A feeble protest that the Grand Duchess of Wisbeck had been chosen for the honor was brushed aside by Max with a drunken, "Damn the Grand Duchess of Wisbeck!" which there was no gainsaying. Then to the chamberlain's despair Max reeled to his appointed place dragging his Ehrenberg after him, while the offended and astounded Grand Duchess, after a hurried recourse to a smelling-bottle, had to be escorted to the supper-room in a huff and plied with strong waters by obsequious friends. A chana- berlain in consternation could do nothing but let the dance proceed. Dorothea, bright and high-spirited at the coming of Philip, with its rekindling of girUsh memories, had paid no heed to the composition of the minuet, and Philip, even if he had not been absorbed by the thought of his partner, would have been too un- famihar with the personages of the Electoral court to know that anything unusual had taken place. But while others were watching and wondering, too be- 72 THE MINUET wildered even to whisper, suddenly Dorothea saw in front of her the foolish smooth face, the foolish smooth hair of Mademoiselle von Ehrenberg, and saw at the same moment that she was holding the hand of the Electoral Prince, while she stared with a kind of nursery stare, half defiance and half deprecation, into Dorothea's eyes. Philip, moving slowly and easily through move- ments long familiar to him and thinking of little else than that he held Dorothea by the hand, suddenly felt that soft hand harden in his and grasp his fingers with a grip of astonishing fierceness. Looking up in surprise, Philip beheld Dorothea's face pale and rigid with some powerful emotion unintelligible to him, and his hurried glance around revealed to him on the countenances of the company an apprehension that he could not appreciate. Immediately opposite he saw a fleshy white-faced gentleman, who reeled in his gait, and by his side a painted piece of girl's flesh, that seemed at once timid and insolent. He knew the man was the Electoral Prince, he thought the girl was the one he had seen on the terrace. He realized that something very serious had happened when the Princess, ceasing from the dance, turned to him and said, clearly and coldly: "Have the goodness to conduct me to a seat; Monsieur O'Hagan, I will dance no longer." The consternation was general. Philip, having only one purpose in the world, to pleasure his lady, 73 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN made the princess a deep reverence and handed her from the paralyzed minuet as composedly as if he were conducting her to her coach after the theatre. All the other dancers stood still for an instant, then the Electoral Prince, furiously shaking himself free of the now frightened Ehrenberg, who tried to re- strain him, staggered across the grass and confronted Dorothea and Philip. "Gods and devils, woman!" he shouted, "what is the meaning of this?" His manner was so menacing, his tone so brutal, that Philip made ready, come what might come of it, to take him by the throat and fling him from Dorothea's path if he moved an inch nearer. But Dorothea, looking at him disdainfully, answered him, disdainfully: "Your serene highness will excuse me if I decline to dance with some of your serene highness's friends." Max raised his hand as if to strike her a blow, but the silence about him, a silence only broken by the sniffling of the Ehrenberg, had its effect upon his drunken humor. Philip made to step between the calm woman and the savage man, but a touch from Dorothea's hand upon his arm stayed him, and he remained by her side. By this time the despairing chamberlain was by Max's side clawing at him, vainly aiming to pacify. All others stood apart and held their breaths and were vaguely conscious that for once in a way they were beholding something really worth looking at. 74 THE MINUET "What the devil, madame!" began Max again, "what is it to you whom I choose to dance with in your damned fandangoes? I do not question your spark, though I never saw his cursed face before. Why should you quarrel with my partner, whose name you know well enough?" At this moment Monsieur the Marquis de la Vigerie asserted himself, bland and suave. "Your serene highness," he said, as calmly as if nothing out of the way were toward, "will you permit me to present to you a gentleman recommended to me by my beloved monarch, a soldier whom France delights to honor. Monsieur the Chevalier O'Hagan." The Marqtiis spoke mellifluously, but there was a firmness in his voice as of one that meant to be heard and that meant to be attended to. Philip bowed stiffly to the Electoral Prince. Un- doubtedly the best thing to do under the distressing conditions was to act as if nothing had happened as long as that were possible. The Electoral Prince flushed an angry red. The composure of the French- man served in some degree to sober him, and his chamberlain's prayers had at last touched his sodden senses. "It should be live and let live," he grumbled. "Why should not poor miss foot it in this foolery if she has a mind to it ? She is no worse than the others. ' ' "I am presenting to your serene highness my friend and my king's friend, Monsieur O'Hagan," interposed la Vigerie with quiet insistence. 75 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN Max scowled first on the Frenchman, who met his glare with an air of impeccable politeness, and then on the Irishman, who gave him back his frown with a look of hatred that he yearned to interpret into words and deeds. Yonder in the arbutus shrubbery another Irishman, watching the scene, saw and ap- plauded. "Sir," Max grunted surlily, "I never saw your damned face, nor heard your damned name before, but I tell you plainly that I Uke neither the one nor the other, and if you have a mind to take offence, by God I have a mind to give offence!" He was so stupidly, brutally drunk that, had he not been what he was, he would have been no more heedable than some sodden ruffian in the street, nursing a bulkhead. But because Max was the heir to a sovereign prince, and because the Marquis de la Vigerie never cared to make mischief where mischief would be of no use to him, be pushed himself between Philip and the Electoral Prince. Philip was minded to take his highness by his embroidered collar and souse him in the nearest fountain, an inclination distinctly hinted in the glitter of his eye. Max, on his side, was hot for a brawl, and was fumbling clumsily for his sword-hilt. Dorothea surveyed him with a gaze in which an age of scorn had turned into a sudden flame of hatred. Monsieur de la Vigerie felt the breath of all the volcanic passions about him, but was dexterously resolved that they should only blow as he pleased. 76 THE MINUET "Your highness has a nimble wit," he said, and bowed, "and we French gentlemen have the skill to appreciate what others might think a misfit. It will be my pleasure to present Monsieur O'Hagan more formally to your notice to-morrow." Max scowled malignly. "You talk very fine, Monsieur the Marquis, you talk vastly fine. But if there be those too high and mighty to dance with my friends, then I'm damned if I will dance with theirs. Come, kitten." He turned to the Ehrenberg and caught her by the arm. "Let us go our ways and play puss in the comer." The Ehrenberg was very red-eyed, and her cheeks had paled from their familiar pink under her paint. She was thoroughly alarmed at the fury of the wind for which she had whistled, and wished very heartily that she had nipped her ambition to figure in the minuet. She would have liked to slink out of sight quietly, but she had no will to resist the Prince, and could do no more than suffer him to lug her away. Most of the company had dispersed ere this, moved by the chamberlain's hints and their own sense of discretion, so the Prince and his minion found an easy road open to the palace and to such pleasures of drink and dalliance as the man desired and the woman at least professed to desire. IX PASSIONS IN THE PARK AS the pair trailed away along the terrace Dorothea r\ turned to Philip, from whose face the slightest shade of annoyance had already vanished. "Monsieur O'Hagan," she said, "I think that for me the pleasures of the evening have happily come to an end, and that I am free to retire to my own domin- ion. Yonder is my kingdom," and she pointed to where her pavilion lay apart beyond the canal. "If you should happen to pass under its shadow on your way hence, you may chance to see a woman at a window who will wish you good-night as you pass." Philip bowed profoundly. He was troubled with a thousand wonderful thoughts, and it certainly did not seem his part to preach prudence to a self-willed and much-offended princess. She spoke now in a little louder tone as the Marquis de la Vigerie drew nearer. "Good-night, Monsieur O'Hagan," she said. "We hope that you will honor our court with your presence very often so long as you delay in Schlafingen. Mon- sieur the Marqtiis, will you give me your escort to the pavilion?" 78 PASSIONS IN THE PARK The Marquis bowed. Dorothea made a sign to Swanhild, who, with her Banbury in tow, had joined the company at the beginning of the minuet and had remained after most of the company had dispersed on the minuet's abrupt conclusion. Dorothea and her lady-in-waiting moved away accompanied by la Vigerie. Banbury, after a moment's hesitation, ad- vanced towards Philip, where he stood alone lost in sweet thought. "Mr. O'Hagan — " Banbury began. Philip turned and looked at him, at first a little un- certain, then suddenly recognizing. "Surely, surely, it is Monsieur Banbury!" Banbury bowed. "At your service." "I remember," said Philip, laughing, "that the last time we met you asserted that the climate of County Surrey was finer than the climate of County Cork. The next morning we were both called away from Paris, and chance has sundered us ever since. There are quiet corners in this park. Shall we settle the trifling difference?" He tapped the hilt of his sword playfully. Ban- bury shook his head. He took Philip's jesting seri- ously; it was part of the Banbury manner to take pleasantries seriously. "My dear sir, we cannot battle here in the Prince's park. And, indeed, I do not know how far my present position would allow the representative of his country to remember the quarrels of the private man. 79 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN Later on, when I have my holidays, I shall be de- lighted to spit or be spitted. In the mean time I can do you a service." ' ' Can you ? " laughed PhiHp. ' ' What is it ? " BanbTiry came nearer and spoke almost in a whisper. "There is a certain exalted personage who is said to have domestic difficulties. He would be very glad of any excuse for finding a certain exalted lady in the wrong, or apparently in the wrong. Any friend of hers will therefore do well to be careful for the lady's sake." Philip's first inclination was to be nettled and to resent the diplomatist's suggestion. But he saw in Banbury's honest face that he meant well, and he thanked him in the same general terms that Banbury had employed in his warning. "I am sure," he said, "that any true friend of any lady would be most careful of his conduct." He bowed and Banbury bowed. "Good-night," said Banbury, and "Good-night," echoed Philip, and Banbury turned and went his way, leaving Philip alone. Here and there throughout the garden stray revel- lers were straggling by twos towards the palace and the final festivities of the night. Philip was think- ing of Banbury's words and his own promise to the Princess to pass under the shadow of the pavilion in the hope of seeing a woman's face at a window and hearing a woman's voice. There was nothing very rash in that, he reflected, and even if there were, it 80 PASSIONS IN THE PARK was not for him to question any of her wishes. More than ever the love of his youth seemed now the sovereign lady of his life, although fate held them so inexorably apart. As Philip stood silently, deep in his reflections, a page of the palace household advanced towards him and handed him a letter, and, saluting him respect- fully, retired. Philip turned the missive in his fingers indifferently, and saw that it was sealed with the image of an antique harp and bore the motto, "Toute la lyre." The too-eloquent wax seemed to rekindle some displeasing memories, for Philip frowned as he broke the seal, and his frown increased as he opened the letter and read: "Valiant Traveller, — Since your arrival you have met with too many of the inclemencies of Schlafingen. Is it not time to accord you some of its clemency? There is one here who has long remembered with regret and who now rejoices to remember the time when she and Philip O'Hagan were friends. If Philip O'Hagan's memories are as fresh and as tender, he has but to linger awhile in the gardens. He shall not linger long unac- companied." The letter bore for signature the Christian name "Caroline," which Philip knew too well to be that of Madame von Lutten. He paused for a moment in angry reflection, then, shrugging his shoulders, he tore the letter contemptuously in two, flung the halves upon the grass, where they lay patent in the 8i THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN moonlight, and turning on his heel walked swiftly away in the direction of the pavilion. As soon as he was out of sight a head was cautiously obtruded from the shadow of the nearest shrubbery. The head appeared to reconnoitre, and apparently finding the time and the quiet propitious, emerged with its appended body into the open. The lurker stretched himself as one that was tired of lying in ambush, and then going swiftly over the sward swooped upon the fragments of the rejected letter, and putting the ragged edges together calmly mas- tered their contents. "Now who the devil may Caroline be.'" he mur- mured to himself, in perplexity, as he pocketed the document. "I wonder why Philip is so ready to make an enemy of an old friend in a place where I'm thinking he will need all the friends he can get to- gether." He looked around him cautiously, for his quick ear heard sound of distant footsteps, and he immediately saw the figure of a woman, cloaked and hooded, coming quickly down the alley in his direction. "This is Caroline, for a thousand pounds," he mur- mured, and waited upon events. The woman came to a halt quite close to the motion- less watcher, and addressed him in a soft voice that was tuned to a cunning music. "I am glad to find that Philip cares to wait for my coming," she said, fixing her bright eyes upon the watcher's smiling face. The woman wore a mask, so 82 ! PASSIONS IN THE PARK the watcher could see no more of her face than those bright eyes, but he felt their appeal and grew cu- rious. "Sure I'd wait for you as long as Oisin lingered in the Land of Youth," he answered, gallantly, clapping a hand on his heart and making a reverent leg. "Then you have not forgotten our friendship?" the mask questioned again, and the reply rattled out emphatic. "Indeed I have not," the man asserted, consoling his conscience with the sage reflection that it was clearly impossible to forget what one had never known. "And I am longing for the sight of your lovely face this minute." Instantly the lady unmasked and showed him in the moonUght a face no longer in its primy youth, but still a face extremely handsome, a face of passionate demand and passionate promise, fine eyes, a fierce mouth, cheeks smooth beneath the rouge. "Have I changed?" she asked, with a coquettish affectation of sadness. "Devil a bit," cheerfully answered her companion, who had never seen her before in his life. "Unless, indeed, you call it a change to be if possible a taste more beautiful than you were the last time." "Ah, that last time!" the lady sighed, dreamily, and her companion sighed, too, as he repeated the words, "the last time," and wondered on what terms it had left this pretty lady and himself, or, rather, the one that he was taken to be. Discretion prompted 83 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN him to let the lady do the most part of the talking, and the lady seemed very willing to talk. "Well," she said, "the stupid palace is shut for the night, and the pretty Prince is playing the swain with his new plaything. You must not bear him a grudge for his roughness; he had drunk more than his custom and will make you his humble apologies to-morrow." "Never trouble your head about that," made answer her affable companion. "I have seen too much of the world to be worried by the whim-whams of a little German flipper kin." The lady beamed on him. "My home of Allegresse lies but a little way off, and my coach waits at a gate hard by. If you will come with me we will find lights there and wine and dice and bright eyes — " "You will bring those with you," murmured her interlocutor, throwing himself into the spirit of the adventure. The lady tapped him with her fan. "I wonder," he said, in himself, "what your name may be?" The lady went pleasantly on. "And when we have made an end of supping and playing we can sit apart and talk of old times." "And act our battles over again?" the man sug- gested, with a smile. The lady looked agreement, but she tapped her cavalier again sharply with her fan, so sharply that in her vehemence she let the pretty toy slip from her fingers and fall on the grass at a little distance from the pair. As the man turned 84 PASSIONS IN THE PARK to pick up the trinket, the woman made as if to run, though it was but a fluttering kind of a run that took her at a little pace over a little space, and as she ran she called : "Follow me, friend Philip ; follow me to Allegresse." "Ay, and to some devilment also, I'm thinking," the man muttered, while he stooped to pick up the fan. As he straightened and turned to follow his ambling herald, he whispered to himself with a grin : "Philip seems to be getting on very well in Schlaf- ingen." Then speeding nimbly over the grass, he soon caught up with the flying nymph, and the pair made their way together towards a side gate of the park. And so for a while the park seemed devoted to silence and to quiet. But only for a while. X COMUS AND HIS CREW MAX, supping and sulking with his Ehrenberg and a few men minions and women minions to his mind, began to grow surly. He was more than in his cups from the beginning, but he kept filling himself up and up with none to say him nay, till from sulky he grew surly, and from surly, savage to madness. At first he stuttered, jumbling his words dully, so that they seemed to ttmible from his loose mouth without meaning and without control. But as he drank his muddled wits seemed, if not to grow clearer, at least to crystallize, and his fuddled fancies to rally like a discomfited army round a last standard of intemperate rage. He spoke less, but his speech was firmer; his flabby lips tightened, his swimming eyes dried and steadied; his hands, that had pawed aim- lessly at the napery, took on a kind of rigidity. His pot-companions, drunk beyond heed of circumstance, noted no change in his bearing, but the Ehrenberg, flustered though she was by the evening's work and the wine she had taken to tune her nerve -strings, noted the change without in the least tmderstanding it, and began — as was her way when anything dis- 86 COMUS AND HIS CREW quieting and stirprising vexed her — to grow frighten- ed. She tried, ineffectually, to stay his hand from flask and glass; she laid her own hand once in timid attempt to restrain upon his arm, only to find her fingers flung roughly off, and to meet an ugly glare on Max's face that made her shrink and shiver. The ready tears filled her childish, her dollish-blue eyes. "What is the matter with you?" she sniffed, pettish and terrified. Max answered her by banging his hand on the table till the glasses rang and rattled and the flushed faces of his company turned on him in sodden astonishment. "Matter!" he bawled; "the matter is that I have an upstart wife that needs taming and that shall be tamed. ' ' He leaned his trunk across the table, tipping over a couple of bottles that vomited their red and white across the cloth and onto the floor, where they puddled. "What is the duty of a wife?" he shouted, and his fiery eyes ranged the circle of red faces. "What is the duty of a wife, I say?" Somebody essayed to answer him, incoherent with hiccoughs, but not inaudible, giving the words, "to love, honor, and obey." Max banged his hand again upon the table. "Love!" he cried; "the jade never loved me; and as for honor, why, I can honor myself without her help; but obey, ay, that's the mark." He travelled again the round of the puzzled, flus- tered faces. "Does she obey me?" 87 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN The faces still stared at him vacant. "No! Shall she obey me? Ay." He shouted his affirmation in a great voice, and flinging himself back in his chair gulped another cup of wine. His friends were past understanding, but they guessed that he expected approval, and they gave it with inarticulate cries and the unsteady elevation of wineglasses. "I tell you," Max asserted, now horribly con- fidential, "the jade should obey me and the jade shall obey me. You saw how she flouted me to- night; you saw how she flouted this pretty child here," and as he spoke he caught the blubbering Ehrenberg clumsily round the neck and rubbed her face against his shoulder. When he let her free again there were smears of white and red on his silken coat, and the girl's face looked like a pup- pet's that had been left out-of-doors in the rain. "She is too high and mighty to dance with my friends, is she.?" Max screamed, his colder drvmken- ness killing his wits while keeping the show of them alive. "She will insult my partner; she will insult me, the beggarly upstart, and think herself safe because a couple of damned foreigners stand by, that may write despatches to their cursed courts. But she has no palavering Frenchman or beefy Briton with her now, and 'tis time she made amends. Come with me, friends, and come you, missy." He rose as he spoke and dragged the Ehrenberg to her fe^t with him. 88 COMUS AND HIS CREW "She shall apologize to missy now before the lot of you, or else be sick and sorry." His speech was peppered with profanity; 'his hearers were familiar with such forms of strengthen- ing speech, but even their senses, deadened by use and drenched with wine, quickened a little to ad- miration of the volubility and variety of the Prince's oaths. Every man and woman rose, laughing furiously, laughingly foolishly. They did not know what Max was going to do and they did not care, but they had a vague sense that some diversion was being promised to them. Only the Ehrenbetg, whose fears had shielded her reason, clutched at the Prince's arm and pleaded feebly. "Your highness, do not be angry. I do not mind. Her highness must be in bed by now." Max lifted his free hand as if he would strike the girl on her tear-stained face, and she released him and shrank from him with a moan. "What if she be?" he answered. "Do you think I have never seen her in bed till now? She shall kneel in her night-gown and beg your pardon, my pretty." He turned from her, and, lurching towards the fireplace, caught up his gold-headed stick that stood in an angle. "This shall teach her wisdom," he yelled, swinging it round his head and sweeping a number of glass pendants from the chandelier above him, that rattled on table and floor like gigantic hailstones. 89 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN "This shall teach her manners — this shall teach her penitence!" The Ehrenberg had sunk in a little heap on the floor and swayed in the niidst of her spreading hoops like a battered flower. Max gripped her by the shoulder and the girl squealed as his fingers brtiised her tender plumpness. "Come!" he ordered; "come!" "I can't," she sobbed. "I am sick, I am going to faint. Go on; I will follow you." Indeed she was in a pitiable condition, half under the table and clinging desperately to one of the legs. Max shook her and then let her go with an oath. "Come or stay," he said, "it is all one. If you do not come to her she shall come to you, if I have to flog her through the park till she fall at your feet. Come on, you others." He gave a hunting cry and made a dash for the open window, flourishing his stick. The madness that had steadied his speech had stiffened his sinews, and though he reeled as he ran, he could run without falling. Out into the moonlit night he leaped and out into the moonlit night the others followed him, drunken men and drunken women, howling like the crew of Comus, as with Max at their head they raced unsteadily across the shining grass. No sooner were they gone than the Ehrenberg staggered to her feet and ran screaming for help through the corridors in the direction of the Elector's apartments. 90 XI THE MAN AT THE BALCONY TO Philip, as he walked through the deserted gardens, the quiet and the silence of the night were qualities of enchantment, acting upon his senses as fantastically as if the very air about him were woven of the web of a magician's glamour. He had set out for Schlafingen in a transport of enthusiasm, drunk with the wine of memory, dizzy with the music of the tune of youth. He had arrived at Schlafingen something sobered, something disheartened, some- thing doubtful. What after all should he be able to do for this princess of Schlafingen, of whom he knew nothing? How could he hope to find any trace of the girl of boyhood's garden in the woman of the world who had consented to become the bride of the Electoral Prince? If she were disillusioned, would not he, too, pay a price for her friendship with his own bitterest disillusion? He had smiled himself into favor and sighed himself out of favor too often to wish for such fortune here, and even while he up- braided himself for the impertinence of such thoughts, he knew too well the world's way with its men and women to hope with any gravity that the Electoral 91 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN Princess of Schlafingen would be any liker the May- girl of Sonnenburg than Philip O'Hagan of the Irish Guard was like the youth who had been her playmate. So he had doubted, so he had feared, only to have all his doubts, all his fears dissipated by the first sound of her voice, by the first smile of her eyes. The spirit of the May-girl still lived in that radiant presence, the valiant candor of the child still shone like a glory round the head of the fair woman who had surely suffered, but who, as surely, had never sinned. All the devotion of his Celtic soul had been kindled by the sight of her. To think of her was to experience the exaltation of a spirit liberated from the demands of the flesh, and if he longed to pass his sword through the heart of Max, it was with no desire to destroy a rival, but only with the fierce wish to avenge an insult to one who should be above all evil thought or deed. He was now within the shadow of the pavilion and slowly skirting its walls. All was still in the gardens; all seemed still in the villa. No light was visible in any of its windows, no sound was audible behind its walls. Had it been the palace of the sleeping beauty it could not have seemed to lie steeped in a deeper slumber. Philip moved slowly forward, and cau- tiously mounted the steps, watching, hopeful, hold- ing his breath. Suddenly for an instant a thin line of light divided perpendicularly a part of the dark- ness above him, as a closely drawn curtain was for an instant sundered and a white figure glided on to 92 THE MAN AT THE BALCONY the balcony of a window a little above his head. He knew that it was she and came nearer. The woman leaned out into the night. "Philip!" she said, gently. "Philip!" PhiUp was underneath the balcony. "Here, dear lady." The woman kept silence for a few seconds as if un- certain what to say. Then she spoke rapidly and low. "Philip, dear Philip, I wanted to see you again to- night, for I wanted to know why you had come to Schlafingen." She thought he was going to speak and put up her hand to check him. "Wait! I feared — forgive me now, for' you know me of old and know that I must always speak my mind — I feared that perhaps you might have heard tales that I was sad, perhaps that I needed consola- tion, and, hearing such things, might have thought that we two might perhaps take up again the love- tale we broke off so many years ago." "Indeed," Philip began in honest protest, but again she stayed him. "I know now why you came," she said. "My dear mad will-o'-the-wisp Swanhild has confessed to me. I know how rashly she wrote to you; I know how gallantly you answered the amazing summons. Dear Don Quixote, spurring the dusty highways to the relief of an unfortunate lady. Oh, it was brave of you, and good of you, and true of you, like the 93 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN brave, good, true boy I knew once long ago, so long ago that I sometimes think it was all a dream. But it was very wrong of Swanhild to write, and I have scolded her for it. She is a whimsical, imaginative creature, and fancies all sorts of follies, but I am not the imfortunate lady of her figments, and, indeed, as the world goes, have but little to complain of." "You were brave as a fair girl," said Philip, "and you are brave as a fair woman. It is not what I heard, but what I saw to-night, that makes me deny your denial." Dorothea laughed, a little ghost of a laugh, with no mirth to give it substance. "Men are not always courteous, friend Philip, but women are not always wise. If I had not taken offence I should not have been offended." "Why should you suffer the least insult from such a man?" Philip asked, angrily. Again Dorothea raised her hand. "Hush!" she said; "you are speaking of my hus- band. I have shut my eyes so often; why must I needs open them to-night ? Oh, I will tell you why, friend Philip, it was because I had seen you, and, seeing you, had grown young again. I was a free girl again with my life before me, a girl in a garden with a beautiful world waiting for me outside its gates. Why did you come, friend Philip, to remind Dorothea of Schlafingen that she was once Dorothea of Sonnenburg?" "I came," Philip answered, with a swelling heart, 94 THE MAN AT THE BALCONY "because there seemed a chance that I might serve you; I came because I longed to see you again. Dorothea, Dorothea, whatever is left of worth in my life I devote to your service!" "You will serve me best, friend Philip, by riding away and forgetting my existence." "Why should I ride away? Is there no work that a man may do in Schlafingen?" "You must ride away," Dorothea answered, with a sigh, "because if you were to remain here your staying would only serve to make us both unhappy." "I could only be happy being near you, sometimes seeing you, sometimes hearing your voice." Dorothea was silent awhile, and when at length she spoke, her voice sounded graver and more determined. " I do not think you would be very happy. Philip, if you wish to please me, to serve me, you must ride away to-morrow. Do not plead with me. Obey. This night of our meeting must be the night of our parting." "Dorothea, have pity," Philip cried, passionately, moved beyond his self-control. Dorothea heard the cry of his heart and she shivered, though the night air was very warm. "You must go," she said; "if you honor me, if you love me, you must go. If you stay you will gain nothing, for I shall not see you again, and you know that I keep my word; but I shall only feel that I have lost a friend." Philip hid his face in his hands. Was it for this 95 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN that he had ridden, listening to the music of the tune of youth? To see her for a few moments, to renew the nobiUty of his soul, and then to lose her forever whether he went or whether he stayed, for he knew her well enough to feel sure that she would keep her word. Yet there was a sweetness in the very terms of this dismissal which might redeem a worst past with the hope of a nobler future. With that knowl- edge strong upon him he spoke. "I honor you, Dorothea." Then he was silent while he said to himself: "I love you, Dorothea," for he knew in his heart that she would have him love, but that she would not have him put his faith into words. "I will do as you will, but I want your promise always, to believe in me, and if ever you have need of me, to send for me, wherever I may be." "I promise," she answered, softly. "Good-night, and good-bye." She drew herself back as if to vanish, while he stood there in an agony, straining his sight to see the last of that white figure. Suddenly the quiet was jarred by a distant noise of confused shoutings. Away in the distance, in the direction of the Electoral Palace, unsteady lights seemed to flicker in the darkness like a flutter of fire-flies. Faintly in the stillness could be heard the noise of running feet. Dorothea leaned forward again. Philip, turning in the direction of the sounds, sought in- 96 THE MAN AT THE BALCONY stinctively for his sword-hilt, to ease his blade in its scabbard. The ribbons of his sword-knot were some- how entangled, and impatiently, unconsciously, he plucked them free. "What has happened?" he whispered to the woman above him. Dorothea, listening intently, caught a familiar sound among the nearing shouts, and she spoke at once, imperiously. "Go at once!" "Are you in danger?" Philip questioned, racked between his duty to obey and his duty to protect a woman from peril. "I am in danger if they find you here, you, or any man. I am in no danger if you go. Obey me, or you destroy me. Through the trees you will find the road to the gate. It should be open still, but the password is 'Melusine.' Go!" Instantly she disappeared behind the curtain and the pavilion was blank and black again. Philip could now see unsteady figures staggering down the alley, waving lights and crying meaningless cries, one at their head burlier than the rest, running silently. The next moment Philip had leaped within the curtain of the trees and was speeding to the gate. He had not gone many seconds when Max and his companions straggled into the space before the pavilion. Max's face was hideously white and his breath was wellnigh spent, but he turned to his companions with a new fury in his eyes, which made him forget, with 97 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN drunken instability, the purpose of his coining and think only of the new rage at his heart. "There was a man beneath the window!" he gasped, and then, his words following his thoughts — "there was a man in her room! Follow him — follow! Yonder he ran." He pointed towards the sheltering trees, while his gaping associates tried to reaUze why they were there and what Prince Max was saying. "Follow!" he shrieked again and staggered forward. He was blown by the run; his movements were un- steadier; his new fury did not stiffen him as his old rage had done. He struck his feet one against the other, stumbled, and fell sprawling on his face. As he clawed about to pick himself up again, for his friends were in no state to give him aid and could only sway about grinning and tittering emptily, his fingers closed on some bits of ribbon, and he rose to his feet holding in his hand the bow-knot of a sword. "There was a man," he raved; "run to the gate and stay him. I'll question the jade." Two of the men made an attempt to obey the prince's command and plunged between the trees, lurching and bumping against each other and the tree-trunks. Max faced to Dorothea's window, call- ing on her with foul names and with foul oaths to show herself. Then, as no answer came from the hushed pavilion, he reeled up the steps to the door and tugged impotently at the handle. The door was surely shut and truly bolted, and he might as well have tried to 98 THE MAN AT THE BALCONY force his way through the soHd wall. Wildly he began to hammer with the stick he still carried in his hand against the panels of the door, raining a shower of resounding blows and calling furiously upon anybody and everybody to let him in. The cane splintered in his fingers with the violence of the strokes, and he still battered away with the stiomp and still bellowed imprecations against a building that might have been a mausoleum in its indifferent silence. The pursuers were stumbling their way along the alley; those that remained were leering idiotically at the furious prince, and the women had squatted down upon the grass in their billowing hoops, and were alternately yawning and giggling. They had not the faintest idea of what was going forward; they only realized incoherently that the prince was very diverting and that it was pleasantly cool on the grass. At this moment the Elector himself made his ap- pearance, borne by sturdy, puffing varlets in his gaudy sedan-chair, on whose flamboyant panels naked graces languished. Roused by the racket of the Ehrenberg, as he was tranquilly drinking his spiced night -cap, he had hurried grumbling into his dressing-gown and sum- moned his reluctant lackeys. The evident terror of the girl and her incoherent rendering of the threats of the Electoral Prince had convinced the Elector that his son was in one of his troublesome moods and that his personal intervention might be necessary to 99 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN save the life of his daughter-in-law, for whom he cared a Uttle, and the reputation of his state, for which he cared a great deal. It was, therefore, the Elector, at once gorgeous and grotesque in brocaded silk and crimson slippers, who played the divinity out of the machine in the tragic farce that was being enacted at the foot of the pavilion. Max was still thumping at the heedless portal when the sound of his father's voice and the sight of his father's presence brought a pause to his labors. The squatting ladies scrambled to their feet, the lolling men recovered some erectness of carriage. The pair that had gone in pursuit, struggling back un- successful, came to a halt in astonishment and alarm as they beheld the Elector. The sight was not un- alarming. On the edge of the bank stood the angry old man, his red face redder than custom under the white silk night-cap, which he had forgotten or dis- dained to doff, his burly, all-unbuttoned body partly draped in the floating robe whose colors vied with the plumage of some tropic bird, and behind him, grimly at attention, a company of the Elector's gi- gantic grenadiers, who, hastily summoned by his or- ders, had come from their guard-house at the double and were now ranged behind him. "Curse you, sir," the old man roared, as the son turned his white face towards the red face of his parent. "What in the devil's name are you doing here at this hour of the night, dragging decent folk from their beds?" I GO THE MAN AT THE BALCONY Max made to answer, but he faltered. At his drunkest and ughest he was afraid of his father, and already the hotness of his intoxication was ebbing. While he hesitated, the curtains of the Princess's window parted and Dorothea came onto her balcony. "Your serene highness," she called, clearly, to the Elector, "I appeal with confidence to your protection from those that have disturbed my rest and attempted to break into my dwelling." The old Elector looked up at the woman with a kindly smile. "Don't be afraid, Dollkin," he shouted; "he sha'n't hurt you while I am by, I promise you." "Hurt her, curse her!" cried Max, whom the sight of his wife had wrung with new wrath; "it is she who has hurt me." "Nonsense!" growled the Elector. "You had no right to force your doxy into her dance. Want of taste, son, want of tact." Max's passion suddenly calmed into an ugly cun- ning. He would say nothing of what he had seen just then; he would leave his wife unsuspicious of his knowledge; he would wait till the morning to spin snares with a cooler wit. His face was working unpleasantly, but though he parted his lips as if to speak no sound came from between them. He was sober enough now to think, to calculate, to plan. Unheeded, he thrust his left hand into his bosom, the hand that held the knot of ribbons his fingers had closed on when he fell. He lOI THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN drew out his hand empty and let it fall to his side, and there was that upon his countenance which a cynic or a misanthrope would have taken pleasure to call a smile. "Perhaps I was wrong, sir," he said, lumpishly. ' ' I was vexed and I had been drinking. But my wife has no right to defy my wishes or to deny me ad- mittance. If I choose I will visit her at the head of a company of sappers." "You are not pleasant company when you are drunk. Max," said the Elector. "I, on the contrary, am. That is the radical difference between us. And it is what a man does when he is drunk that counts, for a man isn't responsible in his sleep. Now beg your wife's pardon and come along with me to bed." "I will come with you, sir," said Max, sullenly, "but I will not beg her pardon." "Will you not, by God!" roared the Elector, in a blaze of rage, for he was tired, and the talking made him thirsty and the night air plied him with twinges. "Will you not? Then if you do not I will clap you under arrest, son though you be, and you shall sleep in the guard-house." Max clinched the hand that clutched the bludgeon as if he would have hurled it at the speaker, but he stood like a stock and spoke no word. The Elector turned to the officer in command. "Put his highness under arrest," he said, quietly. The officer advanced towards Prince Max, and the 102 THE MAN AT THE BALCONY Prince, who knew his father too well to goad him, lifted his hand. "Stay, sir," he said; "I will do your bidding." He turned and moved a few paces in the direction of the window where Dorothea stood statue-like in the night. "Lady and wife," he said, making an awkward bow, and placing his left hand to the bosom of his coat where the knot of ribbon nestled unseen, "in obedience to my father's wish I tender you my regrets for having disturbed you so inopportunely to-night. It was tactless; it was tasteless. I ask your pardon." He gave her another clumsy salutation. Doro- thea, looking down upon her husband, saw him clearly in the moonlight, saw his clothes dabbled with wine and rouge and mud, his face, pale above his ruined finery, set in a grin of stony malice. The words he had spoken were seemingly conformable to courtesy, but the tone in which he spoke them accentuated the double meaning that they carried. She shivered as she surveyed the scene before her — the bedraggled Prince with his party of muddled ruffians, and wantons holding stumps of candles; the old Elector fantastically apparelled against his back- ground of rigid grenadiers. And she thought of the knight-errant who had brought back her youth to her mind and who had offered her his service. She bowed her head in response to her husband's words. She did not speak. Her heart was as cold as the hand that was pressed against it. 103 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN "There," said the Elector; "that's done and well done. Come with me, son Max, and if you will take my advice you will drink no more to-night. Good- night, Dollkin." "Good-night, your serene highness," Dorothea an- swered from her balcony. Then ^the Elector got into his chair, bidding his son walk by the side. Max's rabble scrambled back to the palace as well as they could, and soldiers closed the singular procession. All was quiet in the gardens of the pavilion, deserted save for the presence of a couple of grenadiers, left to guard the pavilion by the Elector, who did not place the slightest faith in any promise of his son's. XII THE "THREE KINGS" THE inn of the "Three Kings" at Schlafingen was thought well of by travellers, better of by the in- habitants of the town, and best of by its proprietors. These were not, as so often happens in the case of your inn, tavern, hostelry, or auberge, man and wife, but brother and sister. Hans and Lischen were of the fourth generation in the direct line that had guided the fortunes -of the "Three Kings," and it looked very likely that they would be the last. A Humperdienster had reigned over the "Three Kings," as Tamerlane had reigned over his bitted and bridled kings of Asia, since the beginning of the sixteenth century, and each in his generation had wooed, won, and wedded some comely burgess maiden of his own way of life, but always one that was well dowered — an essential to the wedding ceremonial in the eyes of a true Humperdienster — and the steady adherence to this principle had made the Humperdiensters, from sire to son, gather together a number of pretty pennies, thalers, ducats, nobles, and other minted moneys of all varieties and values which, placed in safe and 105 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN shrewd hands in more than one capital of Europe, came to represent in the fulness of time a nest-egg which it would have taken a bird of the brood of the roc to hatch with any degree of comfort. But when Hans Humperdienster and Lischen Humperdienster found themselves alone in the world, very mature orphans and absolute master and mistress of the historic "Three Kings," they had a solemn conference. Lischen announced to her brother that if he were desirous to wive she would not stand in his way or object to his bringing a young woman into the business to reign in her place. Hans most earnestly assured her that he had no desire and no intention to marry. He did not tell his sister the reason; he did not truly tell himself the reason. For it was a reason so preposterous that to confess it even to one's self would be, as it were, to propose and second one's candidature for the earliest vacancy in the nearest mad-house. Yet even the pretty, gray midges that wheel their day-long life in the summer air, shall they be blamed for adoring the sun? Shall the brown bats that fly by twilight be derided if they sigh for the moon, crescent or gibbous or on the wane ? Thus in the privacy of his apartment, putting pen to paper, Hans Humperdienster had often sought to ease his sorrows with immortal verse, and he had certainly found the similes of the midges and the bats very soothing, for he habitually wore gray garments and his Sunday clothes were of an umber brown. Did Lischen understand aught of her brother's io6 THE "THREE KINGS" noble woes? Did she realize that a man may be an innkeeper and yet house a spirit that may yearn for the daughters of kings? She did, but she kept her own counsel. She had a great regard for her brother. She thought him one of the best of men, which he most certainly was; she also thought him one of the most desirable in all wooable women's eyes, which he certainly was not. Yet with his honest heart and his fortune there were very few marriage- able girls in all Schlafingen who would not have jumped, the prettiest and the pertest of them, to his humming, if he had hummed them a wedding-march. Lischen, knowing this far better than Hans did, took stock of his self-denying ordinance, and painted him in the chapel of her extravagant fancy as love's rarest, fairest, devil-may-care martyr. For it was not to be denied that the angel of romance in her most extravagant apparel had en- tered the heart of the honest innkeeper and establish- ed her whimsical dominion there. Hans knew, and Lischen knew, and no one else save Hans and Lischen knew, that the innkeeper of the "Three Kings" cher- ished in his bosom an amazing flame. The brother never spoke of it to the sister; the sister never hint- ed at it to the brother; the pair took it for granted, tacitly, as sun-worshippers would take for granted the existence of the glowing god of their adoration. A high passion is uncontrollable by philosophy and smiles at social standing. If a cat may look at a king, what law of mortals may forbid your vintner, 8 107 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN your simple innkeeper, to look upon a princess, and find her lovely to behold, and so finding her to set his foolish wits afire with the torch of the leveller ? The thing was harmless ; the thing was sane in its very in- sanity; it merely meant that one gray-coated burgess was, as it were, the temple of a celestial service. And there is the fable of the mouse and the lion. If a Will-o'-the-Wisp, frantic to aid her loved lady, should get some fitful glimpse of such a worshipful condition in one so humble, where could perplexed, distressed damsel find better messenger, envoy, ambassador ex- traordinary ? Will-o'-the-Wisp had some jewels — a few; Dorothea had some jewels — not a few, the gifts of her kinsfolk in the gloomy days when she was given to Prince Max. With some wild idea of making ready to escape from a tyranny that threatened to grow too aching and shameful to bear, Dorothea talked of selling her jewels that she might have some means of her own. Will-o'-the-Wisp Swanhild jumped at the notion, clubbed her jewels with those of her dear mistress — unknown to her dear mistress — and con- sulted discreetly the devoted Humperdienster. The devoted Humperdienster was all for Paris as the best market for jewelry. He had business in Paris, bus- iness connected with some portion of that nest-egg already alluded to; he would gladly do the busi- ness to pleasure Fraulein von Eltze. The name of Paris made Swanhild think of an Irish gentleman in the service of France, who had once been her lady's io8 THE "THREE KINGS" playmate. Often enough in sad reminiscence Doro- thea had talked of the gardens of Sonnenburg and the fanciful gallant youth who had been her boyish lover. Then Will - o' - the - Wisp played her daring game, and confided not only jewels but letters to the chivalrous Humperdienster, who vanished for a sea- son from Schlafingen with its bibulous Elector, its sleepy Electress, its crapulous Electoral Prince, and its taciturn hunting-man Prince Karl. Wherefore the "Three Kings" had for the time being a landlady but no landlord. So when Philip O'Hagan halted in the court-yard of the "Three Kings" in the deepening dusk of a summer's day, there was no Hans Humperdienster to greet him with smiles and suavities and rubbings of the hands. In his place stood Lischen Humper- dienster, apologizing for the absence of a brother whom Philip had never heard of and, as he thought, never seen, but explaining that she had received from that brother certain instructions for her guest's com- fort which she would do her best to make good. After saying thus much she conducted him to his quarters, which proved to be a most comfortable suite of rooms in the quietest corner of the inn, and looking, not on to the noisy street, but on to a large and delicious fruit garden, whose ruddy wall ran out of sight to within measurable distsince of the Elector's park. This garden had been one of the chief prides of the Humperdiensters since first they commenced inn- keeping. 109 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN The first moment that Lischen Humperdienster found herself alone with her new customer — for Teague had been despatched to superintend the care of the horses — she produced from her pocket a letter which she told Philip had been intrusted to her to present to him on his arrival. This letter contained a card of invitation to the ball at the palace that night, and also a few lines in a woman's hand, now familiar, bidding him to be at a certain hour by the image of the Triton at the head of the canal in the Electoral Park. Philip thanked his hostess, com- manded supper, ate it when it was ready in his private apartment with something of a traveller's satisfaction, though his mind was too agitated by the eccentricity of his adventure and his fantastic anticipations to allow him to do due justice to Lischen Humper- dienster 's genius for housekeeping. Dusk had deepened into dark, and Philip had de- parted for the palace, and the streets of Schlafin- gen were beginning to present an unusual appear- ance, owing to the groups of masqueraders that went their way along them in the same direction, when a second traveller made his appearance at the door of the "Three Kings." The new-comer's face was fringed with a red beard and whiskers; the new- comer was muffled to the nose by the collar of his cloak; his hat was drawn low over a head of curly red hair; all that Lischen Humperdienster could discern of him was a pair of audacious, wheedling, domineering eyes, that coaxed their way into her THE "THREE KINGS" maiden heart before ever their owner spoke her a word. It was not for nothing that a traveller from Paris had accomplished on the road a metamor- phosis worthy of Master Ovid at his best. The new-comer soon learned, without seeming in- qtiisitive, all that he desired to know. A traveller had preceded him, a traveller who had already- supped and had temporarily quitted the "Three Kings." Where had he gone that he could quit so pleasant a shelter? Why, to the masquerade at the palace. Did not Mein Herr know that there was a masquerade at the palace? Mein Herr knew noth- ing; Mein Herr had come from far away; Mein Herr envied his predecessor with an evening's entertain- ment ahead of him. Was there no way for a stranger to come at the jollities ? Spinster Humperdienster pinched her chin; she took kindly to the voluble voyager. In a small way she wished him well. Had he come a few days earlier there would have been no difHculty; any stranger of distinction could on proper showing win an invitation from the chamberlain. It was too late for that now — ^at this the stranger sighed heavily — still there might after all be a way. Here the stranger bright- ened amazingly. In spinster Humperdienster's par- lor there were two tickets for the merry-making, ornate copper-plates, heraldic, allegorical, floriated, which had come for her and her brother as honest burgesses of long standing in the town. Resting on her mantel-piece they regaled her vision, lifting her III THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN from an inn parlor to the fellowship of the great. Had her brother been at home she might have con- sented to wear mask and hood and take his arm for a smile at the fire-works and a peep at the Princess — his Princess, their Princess. As it was, her brother was away, and she stayed by her hearth contented. He was away, as she guessed — nay, as she knew, though nothing had been said of it between them — on great business, state business, the business of the one, the only. Under these conditions benevolence besieged her spirit, and after some tugging of the heart-strings, she very affably offered to give her visitor one of the precious cards. Her visitor, delighted in his gratitude, offered to act as her escort, but the good woman shook her head. If Hans could not go, being better employed, Lischen would not go neither, being well employed in thinking of him and his mission. Re- lieved at this, the stranger showed no sign of relief, though he had steadfastly resolved, had she accepted, to lose her in the crowd at the earliest opportunity. He regretted politely her firmness of heart, thanked politely her kindness of spirit, and then, attacked by an afterthought, asked the good dame if there were any place in the town where he might get him a masking-habit. There proved to be such a place, for the little town boasted a little theatre, and the little theatre had a costumer who always had some frippery in his ward- robe, and just now had been doing a roaring trade in 112 THE "THREE KINGS" masks and dominoes, noses and beards. Thither tripped the nimble visitor, and presently returned the poorer for some silver pieces and the richer for a large parcel carried under his arm, which he conveyed to his apartment and smuggled under lock and key. He supped well, though his beard seemed to trouble him, and more than once he put his hand to his head as if making to remove thence some cap or hat that irked him, and brought the hand back empty. He supped well, but he supped speedily; then skipped to his chamber, and presently came gingerly down the stairs all swaddled in a great cloak, and with a mask on his face, and so out-of-doors into the quiet , moonlit, starlit, lamplit night, making for the palace. Spinster Humperdienster, sitting in her parlor and playing patience, congratulated herself on having in one evening received two such pleasant-spoken guests. How merrily the first-comer had desired to see the fun! How gently the second had asked for letters! No, now she remembered, of course it was the first- comer who asked for letters, and the second who desired to see the masquerade. This recollection raade spinster Humperdienster, without attaching any significance to the fact, take note there and then that the voices of the two guests resembled each other very remarkably. After which reflection the two guests faded from the dame's mind, and she busied herself with her game until it was time for posset and bed. On such a night the gravity of the inn rules was 113 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN reasonably relaxed. A servant yawned- by the bolted door, ready to unbolt when the two guests of the "Three Kings" returned from the revels. That servant only unbolted to a call once, when he admitted the first traveller, who civilly wished him a late good-night, and gave him a comfortable coin. He had wakened from a fitful sleep in a cramped position to find the morning sunlight in the hall; he had opened the inn doors for the day before he re- membered that he could not remember how or when the second traveller had made his appearance. XIII ONE IN A WARDROBE PHILIP O'HAGAN woke early in the morning fol- lowing the masquerade, after a few hours of un- easy and unrefreshing sleep teased by ugly dreams. At first, as is usual with those that wake in a strange place, he did not know where he was. Then sud- denly he remembered, and instantly the events of the past night lived in his memory. With a heavy heart he recalled that she had commanded him to leave Schlafingen, that she had told him how if he stayed he need not hope to see her again. Yet though he had no thought that she might change her mind he resolved that he would not depart at once. He would linger out the morning at least, in the hope of hearing some news from the palace, in the hope of receiving some surety of Dorothea's welfare. He felt confident that Swanhild would send him some message. Possibly she might even contrive an inter- view with him, from which he might learn what had happened after his departure, and how far resent- ment for the affront to his wanton might inspire the malice of the Electoral Prince. Philip had experienced no difficulty in escaping "5 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN from the precincts of the park after his interrupted interview with Dorothea. The gates were still open, and the sentinel's challenge was promptly answered by the password. Bitterly Philip regretted the necessity which compelled him thus to retreat, and his morning mind fed upon the humiliation, and found it just as bitter as it had seemed in the fierce ignominy of experience. What would he not have given for a quiet place and a naked sword, and Max opposite to him, like weaponed and like purposed, that one of the two should kill the other. But, in- deed, Philip felt confident that his sword would prove the sword of justice to strike the offender down. Philip tried to breakfast in the room where he had supped the night before, the living - room of the apartment reserved for him, a stately room for an inn, and a fragrant, for its open windows looked over that orchard garden of which the Humperdien- sters were proud, and from which now a confused company of sweet smells floated into the chamber on the vans of the June breeze. He breathed the summer air in sadness; he drew in the perfume of flower and leaf in tribulation of spirit. What was the good of summer and its gifts to one whose way seemed now to lie through an avenue of withered trees amid fields of ceaseless winter? His sorry thoughts were too much for him. He left his breakfast almost untasted, to the despair of Teague, and decided to go for a walk while Teague ii6 ONE IN A WARDROBE got the horses ready for departure. Departure! He sighed at the word and wished the morning wind might blow all memory from his brain. Teague was profoundly discomfited by his master's black humor. One thing Teague was resolved upon. He would leave the rejected breakfast where it lay. By-an-by, perhaps, he suggested, when Master Philip came back, the raw of the morning might have made him more in tune for some slices of fine ham and some glasses of red wine. Thus resolving, Teague left the table as it stood and quitted the room to look after the horses, and also to pursue a little gallivanting with a maid of the inn who had captured his vagrom fancy. Soon after, Philip, still leaving the breakfast sternly alone, went out into the quiet sunlit streets of the Uttle town and drifted idly along the river, absorbed in melancholy thoughts. For a while the room lay empty. The sunshine rippled over the room; the summer air blowing through the open window brought with it the treas- ures of sweet scent that it had stolen from flowers and fruit in the garden and scattered them generously around. It would have been a thousand pities that such a pleasant room should long remain unoccupied, and indeed it did not long remain unoccupied. But its new occupant entered the pleasant room, not by the door, but by the way of the sunshine and the scented air, the way of the open window. Some one came very qviietly through the qtiiet garden, some one shifted a gardener's ladder to the sill of Philip's win- 117 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN dow, some one cautiously ascended the ladder, and then a face that might have been Philip O'Hagan's, but was the face of John O'Hagan, looked into the room. Seeing nobody there, John scrambled through the window and looked about him. Then he tiptoed towards the bedroom door, opened it gingerly, and peeped into an empty room. John returned to the sitting-room thoughtfully. "Philip is up betimes," he murmured, then allowed his gaze to dwell caress- ingly on the well - plenished breakfast - table. "I'll be for having a slice of that ham," he said to himself, and had it. The gratefvd saltness reminded him of an abiding thirst, and he helped himself to two generous glasses of a merry red wine for which Schlafingen was famous. Then he felt better. An O'Hagan never felt tired, but if such a base feeling could have been harbored by any of that house it might have been pardoned to John that morning. People supped late and long at Allegresse; people played high and deep at Allegresse; at Allegresse, too, people wandered much through charming gar- dens in the cool dawn, and made love with very practical sentimentality in green boscages. John had made his escape with difficulty from clinging arms, inviting lips, and alluring eyes. He had taken advantage of an impromptu game of hide- and-seek to scale a back gate. He had walked all the way from Allegresse, singing "The Red Fox" as he strode, to the astonishment of early peasants. He ii8 ONE IN A WARDROBE had entered the territory of the "Three Kings" by way of the garden and had been tempted by the con- junction of an open window and a gardener's ladder informally to enter Philip's room, whose location he had learned the night before, and take him, as he judged, unawares in his bed. And now he had judged wrongly; Philip was as matinal as he, and had left behind him an untasted breakfast. At least, John could repair that wrong, amend that error. While he mused he munched, while he dreamed he drank. How good the white bread was, and the red wine and the provocative ham, that stimulated hunger and thirst alike! But while John ate and drank his mind was not idle. He wanted to take Philip by surprise — and how best might the thing be done? To remain where he was would never do. Philip might come upon him unawares and see him too soon. He denied a proposal to hide in the bedroom; he might be found there by a servant and forced to a pre- mature avowal. He eyed the great wardrobe over against the wall affectionately. It was a huge thing with two great doors; it looked as if it might conceal a giant. John took another glass of wine, then rising, crossed the room and proceeded to inspect the wardrobe. The key was in the lock. John turned it and puUing the big doors apart peered into the roomy gloom. A couple of coats hung on pegs in a corner, otherwise it was empty, and obviously vast' enough 119 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN to conceal a man with ease. John thrust his head further into the cavity, whistling in his glee. Thanks to his position and thanks to his whistling he did not hear a decorous tap at the door, did not hear the tap repeated, did not hear the door handle tried and turned, did not hear the door open. So when John, chuckUng at having found a comfortable lurking place, withdrew his head and shoulders from the cave of the wardrobe, he discovered to his surprise and chagrin that he was not alone in the room. A pink- faced, fair-haired gentleman of a stiff carriage, soberly habited in a chocolate-colored stiit, was staring at him with a pair of interrogative blue eyes. John gaped at him, taken unawares, but as the stranger extended his hand with an air of difHdent cordiality John returned the salutation and made to recover his composure^ "Sir," said the florid gentleman, speaking his French with a flagrantly Britannic accent, "I trust I find you well and none the worse for the pleasures of last night." There was no such prim, pink-cheeked figure at Allegresse last night, of that John was very certain; he was also certain that the stranger claimed his ac- quaintance believing him to be brother Philip, and . that the pleasures he referred to were the pleasures of the Elector's park. He answered at once with jovial- ity and truth: "I never felt better in the whole course of my life, thank you kindly, and if I had not got my head stuck ONE IN A WARDROBE into that clothes-box yonder I should not have had the seeming unpoliteness to show you my back when you did me the honor to pay me a visit." Mr. Banbury gently deprecated the Irishman's flaniboyant excuses. "It is for me to apologize," he asserted, "for vent- uring to intrude upon your privacy. But when I knocked twice and got no answer I still felt that my business was so pressing that I would even take the liberty of entering to await your return." John eyed the Englishman a thought gloomily. Had he come to borrow money, he wondered, or to claim money due. Generous though he was, he was not disposed to the first possibility at the moment; for the second possibility he was at no time disposed. Somehow the stranger's bearing did not suggest monetary need. "I call it vastly kind and friendly of you, and no liberty at all," he protested, heartily. "Won't you be seated?" He pointed with a flowing gesture to an arm-chair, in which Mr. Banbury seated himself stiffly. "Sir,"' Mr. Banbury began, austerely, "I come on no pleasant business, albeit I come in a friendly spirit. Some while ago we had a difference as to the relative merits of the county Surrey and the county Cork — let that pass for the nonce. We can resume those geographical discussions hereafter, at our leisure." "Begad, we can!" John assented, heartily. He did 121 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN not know what the deuce his unknown friend was talking about, but plainly it concerned Philip's in- terests, and therefore it behooved him to be wary. Mr. Banbury's speech rolled solemnly on. "It would be unbecoming of me in my position here to make any comment upon any members of the illustrious family who sway the destinies of Schlafin- gen, but at the same time I am well aware that you were a witness of his highness's little ebullition of temper last night." "I was," said John, as emphatically as truthfully. He did not think it necessary to add that he was a witness while he lay on his stomach in the arbutus shrubbery and peeped through the leaves. "It seems," Mr. Banbury went on monotonously, "that some one, feeling a natural sympathy for the painful position of her serene highness, was at once so chivalrous and so ill-advised as to proffer con- solation beneath the window of her pavilion at an advanced hour of the morning." Mr. Banbury's voice was very grave. Mr. Ban- bury's pink face was pinker. John began to imagine dimly the things that had happened while he made merry at AUegresse. "I am glad you say chivalrous." he murmured, eager for more news. Mr. Banbury was his man for that. "I say chivalrous and I mean chivalrous," he as- serted; "but I also say ill-advised and mean ill-ad- vised. These are not the days of King Priam and 122 ONE IN A WARDROBE the Knights of the Round Table, and when the gentle- man serenades the lady in the thick of the midnight, it is unfortunate, if not unusual, that he should be surprised by the husband." "Very unfortunate," John whispered from dry lips. What had happened to Philip, he asked himself, and then conjured his fears with the reflectiOh that the affable visitor took him to be Philip, and that, there- fore, in his interlocutor's mind, Philip was for the moment out of danger. "While under the circumstances," Mr. Banbury resumed, "I applaud the gentleman's alacrity in re- tiring, I deplore his obtuseness in leaving behind him any token of his presence — a sword-knot, as I be- lieve," he added, after a brief pause. Now, John did not happen to wear a sword-knot, so he fitted the case patly. Mr. Banbury smiled phlegmatically and went on with his commentary. "It is not to be denied that there is some tattle in the palace, even that there is some babble in the town. Naughty news flies fast in a little place like this, and it is blown abroad with great freedom that his serene highness the Electoral Prince is in a devil of a tantrum. I know these things because in my position it is my business to see everything, to hear everything, to know everything. I hope it is no in- fringement of my diplomatic duties to add that I should like to suggest to a certain chivalrous gentle- man that it might be well, in the interests of a certain august lady, for him to make himself scarce." 9 123 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN The epilogue was not so impressive as the prologue, but both served their turn in accentuating for John the sense of danger to Philip. A cloud of conjectures muddled his mind. One thing seemed imperative. He must get rid of this friendly, pompous, garrulous Englishman. It would never do if Philip were to walk in and find them colloguing together and spoil the whole scheme that John was vaguely shaping in his brain. In a twinkle he rose to his feet, and Mr. Banbury, always formal, always scrupulous, in- stantly did the like. "My dear sir'" said John, "you have done a certain gentleman that shall be nameless" — and here he winked rogviishly at Banbury, who did not return the signal — "a service for which he will always be in- debted to you. And his first proof of that indebt- edness is to suggest that it would be well if you com- promised yourself no further by keeping his com- pany," "You are in the right there," murmured Mr. Ban- bury, horribly conscious of the deUcacy of his position; "if you will allow me I will take my leave." He made for the door, but John intercepted him. Luck might have it that Philip would be con:ung in as the Englishman was going out and so spoil all. "It goes against the grain," he protested, "to urge any gentleman to quit the shelter of my modest roof, and still more to suggest to him how he should leave that shelter, but at the same time, I think it would be 124 ONE IN A WARDROBE wiser, diplomatically speaking, if he left by another road from that by which he came." Mr. Banbury, swimming deliciously in an ether of mystery and intrigue, cordially agreed with him. "Is there another exit from this chamber?" he questioned. "There is," said John. "Some boy of a gardener put his ladder fominst my window this morning, for the trailing of creepers, belike. If you would con- descend to so discreet a vehicle, you might skip through the garden and make home again and nobody be a penn)rworth the wiser." The hint jumped v/ith Banbury's wish. Strictly speaking, he ought not to have come at all ; if, there- fore, he could keep his coming hid by a mysterious departure, so much the better. He looked at the ladder; it was solid. He looked at the garden; it was no great distance from the window. He gravely bade John good-day, assured him of his S3anpathy and friendship until such time as the question of the relative merits of Cork and Surrey could be more seriously considered. Then climbing over the sill on to the ladder, he descended into the garden and dis- appeared. When his visitor had vanished, John first smiled and then frowned. Philip was undoubtedly getting into a scrape, and it was altogether very lucky that he had come along to help him out of it. But he did not clearly understand the conditions of the scrape nor the precise form that his assistance was 125 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN to take, and he helped himself to another glass of the delicate red wine to give his wits a fillip. His puzzled meditations were interrupted by the sound of footsteps on the stairs outside. Instantly John sprang for cover, twitched apart the doors of the wardrobe, and ensconced himself in its depths, leaving one of the doors a little open so as to be able to survey the room. His strategic action was barely completed when the steps outside passed from the stairs to the passage. Then the door of the room opened and John gave a gasp of joy, for Philip en- tered the room, though John was inclined to groan, too, to see the gravity on Philip's face. But John did not emerge from his hiding-place, because Teague trod at his master's heels, and John wished his meet- ing with his brother to be without witness. So he waited where he was while Philip flung himself into a chair, while Teague busied himself with the business of removing the breakfast, smiling broadly as he did so to find that his master had done better with the viands than his dejected appearance would give reason to believe. Balancing the tray dexterously, Teague, still grinning, made to leave the chamber. Indeed, the door had closed upon him, and John was just widening the aperture of the wardrobe to emerge upon his astonishable brother, when the door of the room swung open again. With an oath none the less vigorous for being limited to the silent vehicle of thought, John once again bobbed back into his burrow, and, peeping through the permissible chjnk, 186 ONE IN A WARDROBE observed that the landlady of the "Three Kings" had entered and was dipping decorous courtesies to Philip, who had risen wearily from hi^ chair when he perceived who it was that had disturbed his melancholy cogitations. v, XIV "THE KNIGHT OF THE FLOWERS" MISTRESS HUMPERDIENSTER looked demure, but there was a kind of twinkle in her eye as she spoke. "There are a couple of country girls below, who say that they have brought some flowers for your excellency." "Flowers!" Philip repeated, dully, and stared at his hostess. His griefs had confused his conscious- ness of every-day realities. "Flowers!" "They say your excellency ordered flowers," Mistress Humperdienster replied, "and they have brought their wares for your excellency to choose from." As a man that wakes from a heavy dream sud- denly realizes a waking world and its alacrities, so Philip suddenly realized that these flower-girls might have a meaning of their own. Possibly one of them bore a message from Swanhild. "I had forgotten," he protested, hastily; "truly I had forgotten. Pray send them hither!" Brother John, lodged in his hollow place, was puzzled by Philip's alertness. While he wondered, 128 "THE KNIGHT OF THE FLOWERS" Mistress Humperdienster withdrew, and it was evi- dent that the flower-girls she spoke of must have been waiting in the passage, close on her heels, for before the man in the room and the man in the wardrobe realized that she had gone, the door opened again and gave entrance to two country girls, of a very neat humbleness of attire, with shawls about their heads, so twisted as completely to conceal their faces. Large baskets of country flowers hung on their crooked, elbows. Philip rose anew from his chair as the girls entered and saluted them nervously. The women waited by the door in an awkward silence, hanging their veiled heads. John, in his concealment, rubbed his chin and speculated furiously. As the visitors seemed re- solved to remain as mute as Memnon before sunrise, Philip broke the silence. "You wished to see me?" he questioned, eagerly. "Have you some message to deliver to me?" The girls put their hooded heads together in a conspiracy of whispers. Each of them seemed to be urging the other to overcome reluctance and speak, and each seemed coyly reluctant to obey the other's urgencies, and all the while Philip, politely expectant, burned with impatience, as for that matter did John in his sequestration. At last one of the pair of girls, seemingly summoning courage enough for the furtherance of the adventure, ad- vanced towards PhiUp, and, taking up a little posy of flowers that lay on the top of the other blooms as- 129 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN sembled in her basket, flung it, with a timid boldness, on the table just in front of Philip, who seized upon it avidly. The other girl meanwhile slipped towards the open window and seemed to be wholly absorbed in contemplation of the garden that lay below. Now John began to feel horribly embarrassed. He could not join the company — that was out of the question; neither could he escape from his intrench- ment unseen, and yet while he remained in his ward- robe it was impossible for him not to overhear any conversation that might pass in the room. He con- soled himself, however, with the reflection that the abiding presence of the second woman precluded any possibility of gallantry in the episode, and resigned himself to his position of witness in spite of himself. Meanwhile, Philip was busy with the mysterious gift. "Is this your message.?" he asked of his hooded visitor, seeking eagerly the while if the nosegay con- cealed any scrap of written paper. The girl nodded in affirmation of his question, but PhiUp could dis- cover no shred of writing lurking among the pretty blossoms. "Is that your message?" Philip asked again, and again the silent girl nodded, and again Philip fruit- lessly examined the little bunch of flowers. "Have you no other message for me ?" he inquired, and still the girl kept silence, but this time she shook her head. Suddenly a possible key to the riddle came into Philip's mind, and he scrutinized his posy more 130 "THE KNIGHT OF THE FLOWERS" attentively. There to his hand lay pinks, with a sprig of rosemary, and the lower half of a leaf of laurel that had been cut in twain, and a white rose that was at the core of the posy, together with a stem of stinging nettle. Philip turned from the cryptic nosegay to the still and silent watcher. "I am not very flower-wise," he said; "but I find here rosemary, which, as I think, asks me if I re- member." The girl by the table nodded. Philip continued his thoughtful search. "Remember what? Here are pinks, and they mean fidelity. Do I remember my fidelity ?" Again the girl inclined her hooded head and rested one hand against the table as if to steady herself. Philip touched the white rose. "My fidelity to the white rose, to the white rose of the world? Indeed and indeed I remember that with every hour and every minute of the day." The girl still said nothing, but she pointed to where Philip had scattered on the table the other elements that went to the making of the mysterious missive. Philip bent over them, guessing at their secret meanings. "Here is a stem of nettle, which, as I think, means danger. Here is a chipped laurel leaf. Now the laurel stands for glory, but shredded thus it would seem to threaten little glory to him who shall re- member his fidelity to the white rose of the world." 131 THE ILLUSTRIOUS 0''HAGAN Again the veiled girl nodded, and now Philip latighed and huddled the little heap of leaves and petals together and pushed them on one side. "Here the message does not concern me," he said, gladly, "for the greatest glory I can hope for from here to world's end is my fidelity to the white rose of Schlafingen." This time the girl began to laugh very softly and sweetly, swaying a little against the table as she did so, and Philip stared at her in a wonder which ended when she spoke, being slain by a greater wonder. For though all that she said was, "I think we must name you the Knight of the Flowers," her voice had the heavenliest sound to Philip's ears, and instantly he fell on one knee before her as she drew the shawl from her face and smiled down upon him where he stayed at her feet. Now the curious fact was, explain it how you will, that while Philip was taken by surprise, hiding John was not. Philip, heavy with his care, thought only of the flower-girl as a messenger from his queen, perhaps the Diana-lady of the previous night; any- way, one whose identity concerned him little if she wished to keep it concealed. But John, less troubled spectator, felt confident from the first that the colored shawl of the seeming peasant muffled the fair beauty of the Electoral Princess. But if John was not surprised, also John did not rejoice. Dorothea held out her hand to Philip, and he caught it and kissed it reverently, and then she drew him 132 "THE KNIGHT OF THE FLOWERS" to his feet. She was laughing now unrestrainedly, laughing till her eyes were wet, and, indeed, tears seemed the proper tribute to such laughter, that had so little mirth in it. At the sound of that laughter hiding John's heart ached. At the sound of that laughter the girl at the window turned her head for a moment in the direction of the Princess and then re- stuned her silent contemplation of the inn's garden. But Dorothea went on laughing as if life were blithe for her, while Philip gazed at her, troubled by his delight and her merriment. "Have I not fooled you?" she asked, and then, "Have I frightened you, Philip, that you stare at me so? Do you think I am out of my senses?" She was laughing so that she could scarcely stand. Philip quickly brought a chair for her, and she sank into it wearily, though she still looked up into his anxious face and laughed. "Well, Philip, have you nothing amazing to say to this amazing visit?" "There are no words in the world proper for my joy in seeing you," Philip answered. "I did not dream, I did not dare to hope that I should see you again." Dorothea wore for a moment an air of gravity that was less pathetic than her laughter. "A woman may feel wisely overnight," she asserted, "and change her mind before morning." She began to laugh again. "I suppose you will think you ought to scold me, ^33 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN my Knight of the Flowers, for paying you a visit in this mad, unceremonious way, and playing this silly trick, but even a staid lady must be merry sometimes, and I am mad and merry this morning, so you will merely waste your breath if you scold me, for I shall only laugh in your face." It seemed to Philip, as it seemed to hiding John, that she did not stay from laughter simply because she could not cease. Philip guessed that something grim must have happened to gain him this strange visit and show her in these strange spirits. He pre- tended to chime with her assumed humor. "Why should I scold you for honoring a poor soldier of fortune so highly? I shall carry myself hereafter like a marshal of France, I promise you." He spoke lightly, but his heart was afire with anxiety, and care reigned in his eyes while his lip smiled. Dorothea was still laughing spasmodically while he spoke, but when he had finished she caught at the edge of the table with both hands and clutched it hard as if to brace her strength and compel com- posure. "Philip," she said, and her voice was sober now, all the laughter strained out of it and out of her wild eyes. "Philip, you said last evening that you were my servant, my soldier, my knight. Was that folly of starlight, or the gospel according to Philip?" She scanned his face eagerly as she spoke, and must have read there his homage and his faith. "Madame," Philip answered, with the firmness of 134 "THE KNIGHT OF THE FLOWERS" one that asserts an unquestionable fact, "I am your servant and your soldier to the end of the story." Dorothea set her elbows on the table and, nestling her face in her hands, looked piteously at him. "Philip," she said, slowly, "I want to get away from this place." She paused for a moment and tapped on the table nervously with the tips of her fingers, little drum-calls to encourage her confession. "Last night I believed I could live out my miserable life here, but now I want to escape." She thrust out her hands towards him, fiercely, in appeal. "Will you help me to escape?" A new joy throbbed in Philip's heart, a new joy that fought with a new horror. "I will do anything you wish," he answered; "but what has happened since I saw you?" Dorothea answered him calmly, much as a child might repeat a distasteful lesson that it had learned by heart. "My husband paid me a visit last night. He came to command me to humble myself before his latest mistress, and, if I refused, to beat me into submission. But he thought he saw some one leaving my window, and his rage and hate ran a new course. The Elector came and saved me from a madman. The Electress is no help, and the Elector is old ; the Elector is not to be relied upon, and now I want to escape, for if I cannot escape, I think, God forgive me, that I shall kill myself." Philip listened to her with a rigid face. He was 135 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN praying for the hour that would deliver Prince Max into his hands, but there was no time now to waste in words or thoughts of vengeance. "Whither would you escape ?" he asked, qtiietly, as if the escape of a princess of Schlafingen from her husband's side and the Elector's court were the easiest business in the world, that had but to be named to be undertaken, and undertaken to be carried out. "I would go to Sonnenburg," Dorothea answered, "to my father's house. I think I should be safe there. I want you to go to Sonnenburg and see my father and win his consent to my coming. It will vex him, I fear, but for sure he loves me still. Then you must make the plans to set me free, for, Philip, my mind has withered in this place, and I cannot think, and I feel as helpless as a child." Then she hid her face and began to cry. It was pathetic to the concealed watcher to see the proud woman so broken, but to Philip in that instant her .tears were less tragic than her laughter and he thank- ed Heaven that they had come. "I will ride towards Sonnenburg to-day," he said, simply. "I will arrange everything. Be patient and have no fear, for indeed you shall escape." Dorothea, buoyed by his confidence, withdrew her hands from her face, and, looking at Philip with swimming eyes, she seemed as if about to speak. John, who was longing to emerge from his conceal- ment and offer himself as a second champion, only 136 "THE KNIGHT OF THE FLOWERS" restrained himself by the thought of the astonish- ment his unexpected apparition would cause. So he, too, waited upon Dorothea's words. But what she would have said was stayed by the hurried move- ment from the window of the girl who had accom- panied the Princess, and whose drawn-back shawl now revealed the face of Swanhild. "Your highness," she cried, in much surprise and some alarm, "Mr. Banbury is coming through the garden in a prodigious hurry." Dorothea rose to her feet. Grief had faded from her face even as mirth had left it, and she met Swan- hild's news with calm. Philip kept silence, busily thinking what this news might portend. John, in his cupboard, wondered who Mr. Banbury might be. "Has our absence been noted?" Dorothea asked. "Have we been followed here?" "Whatever Mr. Banbury comes for," Swanhild suggested, somewhat nervously, "I feel sure that he is to be relied upon as a friend." She made another dart towards the window and came fluttering back with wide eyes. "He is mounting a ladder that stands beneath this window," she gasped. "He is coming to this room. What shall we do?" Philip had decided. He opened the door of the room and with a friendly imperativeness whisked the two women into the Uttle passage. "Wait here," he whispered. "If this visit means no danger to you I will clap my hands and you can 137 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN escape as you came. Mistress Humperdienster is to be trusted?" Dorothea nodded. Philip closed the door briskly and with a stride was at the table and in a chair as Mr. Banbury's face, even more florid than its wont, appeared above the window-sill, and a moment later Mr. Banbury came tumbling into the room, some- what more out of breath and generally discomposed than was, he felt, befitting the dignity of an English diplomatist. Philip rose swiftly from his seat as if he had been taken by surprise. XV MR. BANBURY INTERVENES MR. BANBURY was undoubtedly flustered, though he hated to think himself so, and to find him- self so. "A thousand apologies," he began, in answer to Philip's impUed interrogation, "for again intruding upon your privacy, and this time so unceremoniously, but my news must be my excuse. I withdraw my former advice, given under different conditions and on imperfect information. You must not think of making yourself scarce. In fact, that is the very last thing you must think of doing." Philip stared at him. Could the placid, the diplo- matic Banbury have suddenly gone mad ? ' That was unlikely. He was plainly brimming with warnings, but warnings against what? "I do not understand — " Philip began, but Ban- bury interrupted him most informally. "Even if you wished to make yourself scarce you could not do so now," he went on. "I have just ascertained by chance that every way out of Schlaf- ingen is guarded. Any attempt to make yourself scarce, as I suggested, would be not merely fu- lo 139 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN tile, but would be tantamount to a confession of guilt." Though Philip was mystified, it was clear that some- thing had happened which affected him, and he was about to entreat his visitor to explain, when to his dismay the door of the room opened and the two flower-girls entered the room. Before Philip could make a gesture to restrain her, Dorothea had ad- vanced towards Banbury and addressed him. "The Chevalier O'Hagan is in danger?" she asked. "I know some English and guessed so much. What is the danger?" Mr, Banbury was somewhat short-sighted. Thus he had not seen Swanhild's head at the window when he made his hurried progress across the inn garden a few minutes earlier. But Dorothea was not so near to him that he could not fail to recognize her, in spite of her whimsical disguise, and he gaped in as- tonishment. "Your highness," he stammered, his instantly adopted French sounding flagrantly Britannic even to his ears in his agitation. But he went no further. Dorothea took him up. "I know you are a gentleman," she said. "I know I can trust to your discretion. What danger threat- ens the Chevalier O'Hagan?" It was characteristic of her that she took no thought for herself, wasted no time in explanation of her presence there. What the Englishman might think did not trouble her. Her friend was menaced. She 140 MR. BANBURY INTERVENES must know his peril, she must help him, if she could. Philip stood by with his hands clinched in anguish, confident indeed that he could rely upon Banbury's silence, longing to explain, but unable to do so in the face of Dorothea's calm indifference to the innuendo of the situation. As for Banbury, his troubled face brightened a little when he realized that the Princess had a companion and that the companion was his dear Diana of last night, the enchanting Swanhild. "Your serene highness," he repeated, "a little while ago I thought it would be for the Chevalier's interests that he should leave Schlafingen as speedily as might be, in consequence of some talk I heard about an episode at the palace last night. But since then I have learned that some, no doubt unfounded, suspicions about the Chevalier have assumed a more pronounced shape in the minds of those that harbored them, and that in consequence steps have been taken to prevent the Chevalier from leaving the town." Dorothea paled. She seemed about to speak, but Philip, heedless of etiquette, interposed. While much that Banbury was saying mystified him ex- tremely, it was quite clear that a spirit of mischief was busy and that the first care was the Princess's safety. "If your highness will permit me," he said, "the most immediate matter is your return to the palace." He turned to Banbury and continued: "Her highness was poUte enough to honor me with some commands for Paris — " 141 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN But here Swanhild cheerfully interrupted, her bright eyes smiling enigmatically on Banbury, plying him with temptations, menaces, defiances, promises. "Monsieur Banbury knows all about that. I wagered Mr. Banbury last night that her serene highness and I would successfully pass ourselves off upon the Chevalier O'Hagan as flower-girls this morn- ing. I have won your gold pieces, excellent Monsieur Banbury." Mr. Banbury blinked at her, admiring her wit and glibness, thinking she ought to be whipped for her impudence. But he said nothing, and, bowing stififiy, accepted the situation. Swanhild had secured a good witness if the Princess's indiscretion came to light. Dorothea, impatient of this by-play, turned to Philip. "I must be assured of your safety." "Let your serene highness be at ease," Philip as- sured her. "I am in no conceivable danger. I am the soldier of a prince who protects his subjects, and I have committed no offence against the peace of Schlafingen." He spoke with an airy conviction intended to dissipate her fears, but he grew graver as he again spoke of her. "Your serene highness will permit her humble servant to entreat her to return at once to the palace. The Uttle scheme for my mystification which you honored me by planning has proved successful, but the essence of a jest is brevity." 142 MR. BANBURY INTERVENES Dorothea looked irresolute. Swanhild chimed in. "The Chevalier is right, your highness. Let us be trudging." Here Mr. Banbury, who had been staring in ad- miration at Swanhild, made a voluntary sacrifice to beauty in a quandary. "May I suggest to your highness," he began, "that it might be as well if you deigned to depart as I arrived, by this ladder and through the garden. One never knows who may be watching in the public street. By the garden you may gain by-ways. The ladder, I can assure you from experience, is no such difficult matter, and I will myself , with your permission, be your escort as far as the park and the pavilion." Poor Mr. Banbury, for a prudent politician, was diving neck-deep in the imbroglio, but he was in- stantly rewarded by the flash of thanks in Swanhild's eyes. "Mr, Banbury advises rightly," Philip said. "Fare- well, Princess." Dorothea held out her hand wistfully. Philip stooped and kissed it. "You — " she began, and hesitated. Philip an- swered her uiiuttered question. "I shall remain in Schlafingen for the present. I hope I may be permitted the honor to wait upon your serene highness to-morrow." Dorothea bent her head. Swanhild was rightly all impatience to be gone. She addressed the en- tangled Banbury. 143 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN "Monsieur Banbviry, will you be so good as to descend to the garden and to contemplate the ground religiously while you hold the ladder steady." Mr. Banbury instantly obeyed and disappeared from the chamber. John, from his retreat, got a glimpse of scarlet stockings as Swanhild whisked her- self out of the window on to the first rung of the ladder, and a moment later the white stockings of Dorothea followed her example. Philip, standing by the window, saw the three figures flitting among the flowers to disappear in the depths of the garden. Then with a sigh he turned from the window and flung himself heavily into a chair to think over the astonishing events of the morning. XVI A GHOST FROM GREECE HIS sour musings were stiangely interrupted by the most astonishing event of that astonishing morning. The door of the great wardrobe against the wall opened and a man's form stepped out of it into the room. Philip, staggered and aghast, won- dered in swift flashes of bewildered thought whether he were seeing his image in some mirror, gazing at his own fantastic double, or facing the ghost of his dead brother. Then the bewildering thing said, "Philip, my boy, how are you?" and illusion surrendered to amazing reality. "John!" cried Philip, in a whirlwind of confusion, fear and hope, wonder and joy brawling for suprem- acy, "John!" He had half risen from his chair as he spoke, but he was forced back into it again by strong hands set firmly upon his shoulders. They were his brother's hands, and his brother's face was looking down upon him with a glow of loving-kindness in the eyes. "Little Philip," John murmured, tenderly, over the man of his own size, the man of his own strength, "forgive me, little Philip. Did I give you a fright?" 1 45 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN Philip was so taken aback that he stammered and gasped like a laggard school-lad. John that was dead a year ago, John that he had wept for in secret, now to come thus from a wardrobe into his room at Schlafingen. ■ It baffled credibihty, and he could do nothing but gape and gabble inanities. "Sure it's myself," John went on, and as he spoke the sound of his voice was transmuted in the listener's brain to many things — the roll of the Gaelic, and the smoke of the peat, and the "Come all ye" of the wandering singer, and the ' ' stole away ' ' of the hunting- chorus, and the talk round the watch-fires by night. "Sure it's myself, alive and hearty, and glad as a man can be to see you, little Philip." "In God's name," faltered Philip, "how did you come here?" John jerked his thtmib in the direction of the open window. "By the gardener's ladder," he answered, "which I found in the garden yonder. With the help of the Lord I have climbed over a wall." The room still seemed to swim around Philip, but this practical answer did much to convince him of the reality of what at first seemed hallucination. "But I heard you were dead and buried in Greece," he pleaded, in extenuation of the incredulity with which he had greeted his visitor. "Devil a bit," John answered, joUily. "I was wotmded, 'tis true, outside a little village in Pelo- ponnesus which used long ago to be Argos. Just 146 A GHOST FROM GREECE think of it! Do you remember how Father Dion, Heaven rest his soul, used to try to give me Latinity ? Well, I pledge you my word, Philip, when I lay bleeding' outside that little hole of a place, what should come into my mind but those lines about some Grecian fellow who gets knocked on the head in foreign parts, and, dying, remembers sweet Argos. Faith, I thought I was going to die and remember sweet Argos and be damned to her." "But you didn't die,"^' Philip commented. As a comment or as a question, his words were sufficiently meaningless, but he had not as yet got his breath, as it were, and did not know what to say. "No," said John, complacently. "The luck of the O'Hagans. I mended when they said I was dead — sure I was always a contradictory devil — ^but as the news of my death had been set down in the despatches I thought it would be ungentlemanly to correct the errors of my superior officers, and besides, there were reasons, one, two, and three, why it was convenient for John O'Hagan to be out of the way." Five minutes earlier it would have seemed im- possible to Philip that he could occupy his mind with other thoughts that day than thoughts of Dorothea, and Schlafingen, and his mission to Sonnenburg. But this incredible resurrection had for the moment ban ished present cares and duties from his consciousness, and his brain was busy with the troubles of the past. "For Heaven's sake, John," he entreated, "as you are alive and well, and here, for all of which I thank 147 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN God, tell me the truth of that business in London. Did you kill a man in Hyde Park?" "I did that same," John answered, composedly, and whistled a bar or two of "LilUbulero." "But the story they told in Paris was that the man you killed was an unarmed man." "Then they told a mighty big lie," John answered, as calmly as before. Philip reached out his hand and clasped John's in his. "Don't suppose I ever doubted it," he said, "but it eases my mind about the man from whom I first heard the report." "What about him?" "Oh, nothing. He was sick for some weeks through falUng on a sword-point. Tell me the tale, John." "It's not much of a story," John answered, with sudden gravity. "It began when I was in Vienna. There was a little English girl I met at the Russian Embassy that took my fancy; she was so young and pretty and timid, Lord Oglethorpe's daughter, just over seventeen. Plenty of fellows were after her, for her wealth as well as herself, but the favored spark of the family was a damned blackguard named Gunn — ^Tom Giinn, of Langton, who was as rich as rich and as wicked as wicked. He was tempted by the child because she was so green and raw and be- cause she hated him. Lord, how she must have hated him when she plucked up the courage to tell me so!" 148 A GHOST FROM GREECE "Were you in love with her?" Philip asked. John shook his head sadly. "What the devil should I be doing, falling in love with a httle girl like Letty Oglethorpe? Besides, I think she was in love with some one else, who wasn't a penniless Irish rebel, and who may have been a decent fellow enough, from all she told me, though she didn't tell me much. The long and the short of it was, that I was so touched by the little maid's quandary— not that I was the least bit in love with her, you understand — ^that I thought I would have a chat with my fine Mr. Gunn. So when it came to putting up the banns for the Hon. Letitia Oglethorpe, and Thomas Gunn, Esquire, of Langton, why I slipped over to England, though it was as much as my life was worth to do that same." "Was the girl very fair?" Philip asked, and John again nodded. "She was pretty, and she was good, and she took to me as she might have taken to a big brother, if she had the luck to have one. And Tom Gunn was such a blackguard! I hid for a bit in London and found out his ways, so one morning as he was driving in his chariot in Hyde Park, as grand as you please, I rode up to his carriage window and made him a bow. You should have seen his face, for we were not exactly friends in Vienna. " 'Good-morning,' says I, with the height of polite- ness. 'We have not met since we were in Vienna together.' 149 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN "He was silent for a bit, then he spits out like a turtle his 'What do you want with me?' " 'A plain answer to a plain question,' says I. 'Do you mean to marry Miss Oglethorpe ?' "'I do,' he says, and licks his lips. "'I object to that same,' I says, still very polite, with my eye on his knave's face. "'What the devil business is it of yours, you damned Rapparee,' he screams at me, and then he calls, 'Drive on, coachman,' for the man had reined in when I came up, thinking me his master's friend. He was for driving on now, but I soon settled that. "'If you lift reins or whip I'll blow your brains out,' I promised him, and he sat as still as an image, though I could see he was looking for help. But we were in a quiet place, thanks be, and there was no- body by. "'Now,' says I, to the rascal inside the coach, '1 want you to come out and cross swords with me to settle this little difference.' "Then he began to curse me, and I told him a few plain truths, and we were both pretty warm. At last I says to him: "'Will you fight,' I says, 'or must I pull you out by the scruff and make you.'" "'I'll see you danmed first, you bloody Tory,' he cries, and then without a word of warning he snatches a brace of pistols from under the cushion in front of him. 'Thieves!' he screams, and fires point-blank at me. It wasn't a bad shot, though I was a close ISO A GHOST FROM GREECE mark enough, for the ball nipped my ear, and the least taste of a nicer aim would have settled me. Then I heard shouts, and in a kind of mist I saw Letty alone in a room with this thing, and I couldn't stand it, so I pulled a pistol from my holster and shot him dead where he sat. Then I rode for my life and took hiding, and got abroad in time, and so to serve against the Turks in Greece and to my death before sweet Argos. That's my story." "What became of the girl?" PhiUp asked, thought- fully. John shook his head. "I don't know. I suppose she is married to somebody by now. Anyhow, I saved her from that satyr, thanks be." Philip caught John's hand and pressed it brotherly. Then, the oddness of the adventure being somewhat smoothed off, he began to remember where he was, and to reflect that John being in Schlafingen was almost as remarkable as John being alive. "What are you doing here, you good ghost?" he asked. "Why have you travelled to Schlafingen?" John looked down upon Philip — he was sitting on the table by now, and Philip in his chair — and shook his head with a playful gravity. He felt very sure in that moment that he must be the elder brother. "Why have you travelled to Schlafingen? That is more to the point, I think, little Philip." Philip straightway gave John a simple account of why he had left Paris and of what had happened at Schlafingen, as far as he knew. John listened at- 151 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN tentively, and when Philip had made an end, he told how he had learned of PhiUp's departure and how he had come to Schlafingen on his heels, and how he had changed his appearance on the way. "I have heard something of the place and its ways and its dangers, and I thought you might get into mischief, and by the Lord I was right." He was about to confess that during his imprison- ment in the wardrobe he had been perforce a witness of the interview between Dorothea and Philip when the sound of a step on the stair interrupted him. "They must not find two of us here," he whispered into his brother's ear. "By your leave." He whisked into Philip's bedchamber just as a knock came to the door. Philip bade enter and pre- tended to be busy over . some papers. The door opened and Mistress Humperdienster came into the room. The good woman's face was very white and frightened. "Sir," she said, in a voice that was greatly agitated — "sir, Graf von Lutten is below." "Well?" said Philip, quietly, though he knew very well that the purport of her words meant mis- chief. "He desires to wait upon you," the alarmed woman went on. "He has his great gilt carriage at the door and a guard of soldiers, and, oh, sir, what is going to happen?" "Nothing is going to happen," Philip said, reas- suringly, though he knew very well that much was 152 A GHOST FROM GREECE going to happen. "Will you present my respects to his excellency and say that I shall be pleased to receive him here." Poor Mistress Humperdienster, her face all of a whimper, shuffled out of the room. In another in- stant Philip found John's left hand upon his shoulder. John's right hand held a somewhat crumpled red wig and whiskers. He had carried it in his breast-pocket all the night and all the morning. "Get in there," John whispered, pointing to the bedroom he had just quitted, and before Philip could do more than look a question he went on: "I'll take your place, and go to the palace, for 'tis there I'm sure they want you. Inside there you must mount these whimsies " — and he pressed the red wig and its appendages into Philip's fingers. "There's a door gives onto the corridor. My room is at the end; the red room they call it. Wait there till I am gone, and then pay my scot as the gentleman in the red room, and be off to Sonnenburg as fast as you can. Now do as you are told; there is a darling." It was clear to Philip that John's mad plan was unanswerably sane and excellent. With an appar- ent Philip O'Hagan abiding in Schlafingen, the real Philip O'Hagan would have absolute freedom to elaborate his schemes for the deliverance of the Princess. Yet he did not like the idea, for many reasons. He did not like to run away from danger. He did not like to leave his brother in his danger. But his chief reason was the thought that Dorothea ^53 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN would be deceived. John seemed to divine his thoughts. "There's not a soul in this place that won't think I am Philip, barring one, and that one will keep the secret. Hark, there is some one coming up the stairs!" There was no time to argue, to consider. Philip felt that it would be folly to resist, and yielded. "I shall be all right, my lad," John whispered. "The luck of the O'Hagans." He pushed Philip, still with the wig trailing from his fingers, into the bedroom and shut the door. Then flinging himself into Philip's chair, he stretched his legs comfortably and listened with a smile to the ascending footsteps. XVII GRAF VON LUTTEN "/''^OME in," John called, cheerfully, when the ex- v.^ pected knock came. Then the door opened and a gentleman entered the room, a gentleman habited soberly in black, but with a fine profusion of costly lace at his neck and wrists. He bowed solemnly to John, who rose and returned his salutation, think- ing the while that this must be von Lutten, and that he looked the deuce of a rogue. Any doubt was promptly settled by the intruder's speech. "The Chevalier O'Hagan?" he said, interrogatively, and then acknowledging John's affirmative bow pre- sented himself. "I am Graf von Lutten, minister to his serene highness the Electoral Prince, at your service." "Well, Graf," asked John, affably, "what may your excellency be wanting with me?" Von Lutten produced a snuff-box, proffered it to John, who politely declined, and then took a pinch himself delicately, flicking his lace ruffles daintily afterwards. So he had seen great seigneurs snuff at Versailles, and it was always von Lutten's ambition to pass for a grand seigneur. It was known to very THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN few that he was the illegitimate son of a turnkey. Von Lutten again brought his snuflf-box under John's notice. It was adorned with a miniature, ringed in brilUants, of a red-faced, periwigged personage. "My illustrious master," von Lutten explained with a reverent sigh. "A gift from his gracious fingers in return for some poor service I was able to render. Ah, it is a pride to serve so generous a prince." "It must be that same," John concurred; "but did your excellency come all this way ,to show me a snuff-box?" Von Lutten shook his powdered head. "The Chevalier O'Hagan is a gentleman so justly distinguished as a votary of Mars — and, shall we add, of Venus — ^that it is a privilege to be permitted to pay him my respects." He was talking very urbanely, and he seemed to be quite absorbed in his snuff-box and his compli- ments, but John was very confident that he was ob- serving cunningly the while all that there was to observe in the room. However, it was a matter of complete indifference to John how long his visitor chose to protract a conversation which he felt sure would come to only one conclusion. "Will you be taking anything this fine morning?" he hinted convivially, with a wave of his hand towards the bell-rope. Von Lutten deprecated re- freshment and denied thirst with a polite gesture. "Surely we may say a votary of Venus," he went iS6 GRAF VON LUTTEN on. "Surely one to whom the fair send floral tokens may be so named," and he pointed to where on the table lay the scattered components of Philip's enig- matical nosegay. "Dear me, if I know anything of the language of flowers — and I have been in the East, Chevalier, where they carry the art to excess — I should say there was some delicious mystery, some pretty intrigue, whispered at by these sprigs and petals. The faithful pink, the white rose, the nettle danger, what a telltale little bunch of meanings." "Your excellency," said John, with insolent good- humor, "will you have the goodness to tell me why I am thus honored by your interest ?" "Chevalier," answered von Lutten, affably, "will you have the goodness to tell me what you did last evening, after the masquerade?" John's sense of humor was so highly tickled by his memories of the previous evening, and the whim- sicality which prompted von Lutten of all men to interrogate him, that he was very nearly compelled to laugh in the minister's face. But he kept his gravity with an effort. "Faith," he said, "as between two gentlemen that understand the world, I think I must leave that question unanswered." "In that case," said von Lutten, still suavely, "I must request the pleasure of your company for a little drive in a carriage." "Indeed, and where to, your excellency?" John asked, with a well-feigned air of surprise. 157 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN "To the palace," von Lutten answered, and slipped his snuff-box into his pocket with the air of a man who closes a conversation. "Now suppose," suggested John, "that I were to say to your excellency that I had no inclination for an outing this morning at all, what would your excellency say to that?" "I should say," von Lutten went on composedly, "that my desire for your company is so keen that to procure myself the pleasure I should even go to the length of summoning friends from below whose ar- guments would perhaps be more convincing than mine." "To put it plainly," John asserted, jocosely, "I am a prisoner." "To put it plainly," answered von Lutten, again producing his box and again taking snuff in the Versailles manner, "you are much wanted at the palace." "In that case," said John, "I have no more to say, but I give you fair warning that I am a subject of his most Catholic majesty the King of France, and that I shall appeal to the protection of his representative." Graf von Lutten made no answer to this threat, but merely smiled grimly, and flicked imaginary particles of snuff from his ruffles. "Shall I be detained long at the palace?" John asked, haughtily. Von Lutten shrugged his shoulders and again consigned his snuff-box to his pocket. "That depends upon the pleasure of his serene GRAF VON LUTTEN highness the Elector. In any case you need not trouble about your belongings here. If you should need any of your possessions they can be sent for hereafter." John understood perfectly well that this meant a close perquisition into Philip's effects the moment his back was turned, and he chuckled inwardly to think that Philip was not likely to leave any compromising documents behind him. "I will delay your excellency no longer," he said, and rose from his seat. "Let us be jogging." He made to move towards the door, but von Lutten laid his hand, a coarse hand, in spite of all its owner's efforts to blanch it into aristocracy, upon John's arm and stayed him. "Chevalier," he said, smoothly, ."let us converse together as men of the world." "Devil take it!" John answered, impatiently, for the old rogue's suavity was beginning to vex him. "We couldn't very well talk as women of the world, could we?" Von Lutten grinned, and his features when he grinned were not altogether agreeable to contemplate. "You are facetious," he observed, dryly. "It is well to meet adversity with a merry heart. But it is prosperity, and not adversity, you would be journey^ ing to meet, if you chose to make it so." "What are you driving at?" John asked, some- thing savagely. "No man seeks adversity will- ingly." IS9 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN Von Lutten's grin deepened and became more malignant to behold. But he spoke insinuatingly. ' ' The love of a great lady may be very flattering to the vanity, but the friendship of great princes is more gratifying to the pocket." "Your excellency," said John, "you speak like a printed book, but how do your aphorisms apply to me ?" "Come, come," urged von Lutten, gently rallying, "there are plenty of pretty women in Europe. For my own part," he interpolated, musingly, "I do not find that princesses are more satisfactory than sim- pler creatures, and if you are willing to oblige a cer- tain distinguished personage that may readily be nameless, you will have no lack of money to fcliy dainty dolls with." "Please to talk more plainly, your excellency," said John. "I think my intelligence is a little hard of hearing to-day." "Plainly, then," said von Lutten, visibly nettled, "if you are willing to confess where you spent last evening you will do a distinguished personage a service, and though it may be necessary to affect a severity towards you, believe me, you shall have no reason to repent yovu- seasonable indiscretion." John smiled sweetly into von Lutten's face, though his feet were dancing-mad to kick him. "I can assure your excellency that I passed a very pleasant evening, but I am afraid that I cannot say more than that without more authoritative per- mission than you can accord." r6o GRAF VON LUTTEN "Do you mean the distinguished personage to whom I have alluded," von Lutten asked, eagerly. "Never mind whom I mean," John responded, cheerfully; "time will tell. And, meanwhile, we are wasting that same time. I solicit your excellency's escort to the palace." With a wry smile von Lutten opened the door and requested John to precede him. John walked into the passage and went down the stairs humming the chorus of a hunting-song. When he came to the court-yard he found a smail guard of soldiers in pos- session, and his excellency's gilt coach waiting out- side. He climbed into the coach, followed by von Lutten; the soldiers formed into an escort on either side, and the whole procession moved slowly along the main street of the little town in the direction of the palace, while the inhabitants, crowding at windows and lounging at doors, watched the slow course of the gilt coach and the soldiers, and wondered what had happened. All the way von Lutten discoursed glibly on the wisdom of pleasing the great, of the virtues and graces of his serene highness the Elector and his admirable son the Electoral Prince, and of the misfortunes that might come, even in the augustest circles, from un- fortunate marriages. John allowed him to run on untrammelled, for every second word he said was in some sense a revelation to his hearer of the unfamiliar world he was about to enter. One little principality is very much like another i6i THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN little principality in its broad effect; it is in the par- ticulars that petty state varies from petty state, and it was with these very particulars that von Lutten in his zeal was possessing John. John knew something indeed, vaguely, of Schlafingen from hearsay, enough to know that it was neither a school of morals nor a temple of bliss, but he wished to know more, so kept his peace and let von Lutten prattle. Von Lutten fancied himself a Machiavelli, but he was a very pinchbeck, fifth-rate imitation of even the conven- tional conception of the Florentine, and his long-prac- tised cunning was really no match for the seeming guilelessness of the soldier of fortune by his side. While von Lutten was hugging himself in the conceit that he was catching the Chevalier O'Hagan in his crafty nets, John was stiffening a frail knowledge of Schlafingen, gleaned from the chatter of a mas- querade and garnered from the babble of Allegresse, with information dexterously elicited from a com- panion garrulous because he believed that garrulity was serving his turn, whereas it really served the turn of his antagonist. By the end of his drive it seemed to him as if he had lived in the honest little town and in the wicked little court of Schlafingen for half his life. He knew the drunken old ruin of a stately soldier that was the Elector; he knew the maundering old woman, much given to eating and drinking and most of all given to sleeping, that had once been a beauty and a toast, and was now the Electress, fecund mother of 162 GRAF VON LUTTEN children, many daughters married here and there and two sons, the Electoral Prince Max, sottish, lascivious ruffian, and Prince Karl that was laconic, and loved the chase and loved one woman to no purpose. For the woman was his sister-in-law, Dorothea, who liked the rough, rugged man, and was kind to him, but would have none of his love, though it was honest love of its kind, and very honest love for that place. Where- fore Prince Karl passed most of his time ahunting and the gaudy Electoral court saw little of him. John knew already, though his companion did not harp on this string, that the great power at court was Madame von Lutten, who pleased the Elector and pleased the Electoral Prince, and had always a niece or a kins- woman of some kind in readiness to solicit the smiles of the latter. In a word, John felt, and rightly felt, that he knew a good deal about Schlafingen by the time that he and his companion arrived at the Schloss. It was evident to John, as he drove through the palace gates, that some little importance was at- tached to his capture. His experienced eye noted that the guard was doubled; he guessed that greater force was in readiness unseen. More and more he blessed his fortunate stars that had guided him to Schlafingen in time to take Philip's identity, for though he had, as Philip's counterfeit, blustered gallantly to von Lutten of his rights as a soldier of France, he knew very well that the claim would serve him in little stead if the Elector were convinced of his 163 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN intrigue with the Princess who was the Electoral Prince's wife. For that meant treason against the state of Schlafingen, that meant a crime which the autocrat of Schlafingen would think himself perfectly justified in punishing as he pleased. John knew very well what form the pleasure of the offended potentate would take. He knew, too, from the supper-table scandals of AUegresse that Monsieur de la Vigerie, rep- resentative of his most Catholic majesty, would be none too eager to serve the cause of a successful rival for the favors of the Electoral Princess. But though his head was as tickle on his shoulders as that of Claudio in the comedy, John did not care a rap for the peril he was in. He did not set his life at a high price. It was already forfeit in one country; it mattered little if he paid the penalty in another. Philip's life was worth the saving, for Philip had a clean career, and Philip had a cause to serve, and, above all, Philip was little Philip. So John sat with his arms folded and listened with an air of good-humored sim- plicity to von Lutten's somewhat obvious strategies, and was perfectly composed and debonair when the carriage came to a halt at a door in the left wing of the palace, and von Lutten, disappointed at the little effect of his argviments, and therefore less polite in voice and manner, summoned him to alight. John followed his conductor past a sentinel into a hall, and along passages and up-stairs, and through corridors till they came to a halt in a handsome ante- chamber outside whose doors a couple of soldiers 164 GRAF VON LUTTEN kept guard. Von Lutten pointed out to John that provision of wine and cakes stood on a side-table if he desired refreshment. He also pointed out the futility of any attempt to escape, a courtesy which John acknowledged with the assurance that as he was certain that he had no danger to escape from, he was perfectly content to remain where he was, especially with the solace of the wine and the cakes. Von Lutten made a grimace, took snuff, shrugged his shoulders, told his prisoner that he would be sum- moned when he was needed, and so left him to his reflections. Those reflections were very much pleasanter than von Lutten dreamed of. John always enjoyed a whimsical adventure, and here was an adventure that was whimsical with a vengeance. He chuckled to think how diverting an alibi he had provided for Philip, and the buoyancy of his blithe spirits assured him that the tangled business would smooth out ac- cording to his wishes. "The luck of the O'Hagans," he murmured, confidently, to himself. XVIII A PALACE OF PERTURBATION THE little world of the palace was profoundly agitated. Through all its labyrinth rumor ran, carried by pages, bandied by waiting-maids, brawled over in the guard-house, cackled over by court ladies and their beaux, tittered at by cynic wits. All that was definitely known was that at an early hour Prince Max, having slept off the fumes of the preceding night's debauch, had demanded an audience of the Elector his father. Prince Max had been denied on the ground that the Elector was asleep, and that as he had given orders that he was not to be disturbed under any conceivable condition of things, there was nobody in his suite foolhardy enough to infringe upon his commands. Prince Max, it seemed, went away in a vile humor, to return again later, and once again later still, when at last the news greeted his surliness that the Elector was awake, and had consented very unwillingly to receive him while the vexed Elector drank his morning chocolate. The interview between father and son was l^ng, and at first stormy, as it seemed to those who waited outside the Electoral bedchamber and heard the i66 A PALACE OF PERTURBATION hubbub of voices. But presently this calmed down, and by -and -by Prince Max came forth from the presence with a look of satisfaction on his sullen face, and a minute or two later von Lutten was sent for and despatched to the town with a carriage and a military escort. It was freely asserted and generally credited that he had gone to pay a visit to the handsome stranger, the young Irish gentleman in the service of France, who had been accorded such a distingttished position in the court minuet on the previous evening by the favor of her highness the Electoral Princess. Soon after this belief was confirmed by the return of von Lutten with the Chevalier O'Hagan in his company, it was known, at first to a few, and then, as court knowledge ever widens to many, that the Elector had sent a peremptory message to his daughter-in-law, at her pavilion in the park, demanding her immediate attendance upon him at the palace. The palace air buzzed with whispers, quivered with questions. Spec- ulations gleamed in all eyes and trembled on all lips. Dorothea and Swanhild, escorted by the silent Ban- bury, had reached the park through byways without adventure or discovery. At the little private gate of which Swanhild had the key they said a grateful farewell to their escort, and Swanhild favored him with a glance which set his honest heart dancing. Then they slipped into the park and out of his sight, and he made his way to his lodgings in a state of singular perturbation. Really, for a newly arrived 167 THE ILLUSTRIOUS O'HAGAN minister he was getting very much into the thick of things. He felt helplessly that he was becoming im- plicated in mysteries with which he, as a discreet diplomatist, had no concern whatever; but then he thought of Swanhild's bright eyes, and of Swanhild's red lips, which he longed most unaffectedly to kiss, and he forgot everything else in a golden dream in which a girl like Diana and Beddington in Surrey were deliciously associated. As for Diana and her Princess, they had made their way through quiet alleys to the pavilion and gained their apartments, and just changed their flower-girl seeming for the habits of court ladies when the Elector's message arrived. Dorothea had been an- ticipating danger ever since her escape from the "Three Kings," and she met the summons with no sign of alarm. Smiling she turned to Swanhild. "Will-o'-the-Wisp, my father-in-law wants to see me. Shall we walk across the park to the palace ?" Swanhild nodded assent. She did not speak, for her thoughts were too busy to allow her to talk. She scented peril in this message, and her quick wits climbed the heights of innumerable possibilities. While Dorothea was informing the Elector's envoy that she would at once attend upon his serene high- ness, Swanhild slipped into the\\\\\\X\>>\'>Xv\\\*JX^