In a penetrating voice, which could not fail to reach the ears of those in the room adjoining hers, or the ears of the actors in the scene below, she adjured her daughter in English. This language was safest, she considered, as the desperado with the rucksacks could not understand and resent her criticism, while the flower of Rhaetian chivalry next door would comprehend both the words and the necessity for action.
"Mary!" she shrieked, loyally remembering in her excitement the part she was playing. "Mary, where did you pick up that alarming-looking ruffian? I believe he intends to keep your rucksacks. Is there no man-servant about the place whom Frau Johann can call to her a.s.sistance?"
All four of the actors glanced up, aware for the first time of an audience. Had the Grand d.u.c.h.ess been less near-sighted, less agitated, she might have been surprised at the varying yet vivid expressions of the faces. But she saw only that the tall, dark-faced peasant, who had so glared at poor Frau Johann, was throwing off his burdens with sudden haste and roughness.
"I do hope he hasn"t stolen anything," said the Grand d.u.c.h.ess. "Better not let him go until you have looked into your rucksacks. That silver drinking-cup you _would_ take up----"
She paused, not so much in obedience to Sylvia"s quick reply, as in amazement at Frau Johann"s renewed antics. Was it possible that the landlady understood more English than her guests supposed, and feared lest the man with the bare knees--perhaps equally well-informed--might seek immediate revenge? Those bare knees alone were evidence against his character in the eyes of the Grand d.u.c.h.ess. They imparted a brazen, desperate air; and a man who cultivated so long a s.p.a.ce between stockings and trousers might easily be capable of any crime.
"Oh, mother, you are very much mistaken. This excellent young man is a great friend of mine, and has saved my life," Sylvia was protesting; and her words began at length to penetrate the ears of the Grand d.u.c.h.ess. Overwhelmed by their full import, she suffered a sudden revulsion of feeling, which caused her to catch at the window-curtains for support.
"Saved your life!" she echoed. "Then you have been in danger. Thank heaven, the young man is not likely to know English, or I should not soon forgive myself. Here is my purse. Give it to him, and come indoors at once. You really look ready to faint."
So speaking, she s.n.a.t.c.hed from a table close by her purse, containing ten or twelve pounds in Rhaetian money; but before she could accomplish her dramatic purpose, flinging the guerdon literally at the misjudged hero"s feet, Sylvia prevented her with an imploring gesture.
"He will take no reward for what he has done save our thanks, and those I give him now, for the second time," cried the girl. She then turned to the man, and made him a present of her hand, over which he bowed with the air of a courtier rather than the rough manner of a peasant. The Grand d.u.c.h.ess still hoped that the Emperor might be at the window, as really it was a pretty sight, and presented a pleasing phase of Sylvia"s character.
She eagerly awaited her daughter"s approach, and having lingered to watch with impatience the rather ceremonious parting, she hastened to the door of the sitting-room to welcome the travellers as they came upstairs.
"My darling, who do you think was listening and looking from the window next ours?" she breathlessly inquired, when she had embraced her recovered treasure for the secret of the adjoining room was too great to keep. "You can"t guess? I"m surprised at that, since you are not ignorant of a certain person"s nearness. Why, who but the Emperor himself?"
"Then he must have an astral body--a _Doppelganger_," said Sylvia, "since he has been with me all day, and that was he to whom you offered your purse."
The Grand d.u.c.h.ess sat down; not so much because she desired to a.s.sume the sitting position as because she experienced a sudden weakening of the knees. For a moment she was unable to speculate: but a poignant thought pa.s.sed through her brain. "Heavens! what have I done? And it may be that one day he will become my son-in-law."
Meanwhile, Frau Johann--a strangely subdued Frau Johann--had droopingly followed the chamois-hunter into the house.
"My friend, you must learn not to lose your head," said he, when she had timidly joined him in the otherwise deserted hall.
"Oh, but Your Majesty--"
"How many times must I remind you that His Majesty remains in Salzbruck or some other of his residences when I am at Heiligengelt?
If you cannot remember, I must look for chamois elsewhere than on the Weisshorn."
"I will not forget again, Your--I mean, I will do my best. Yet never before have I been so tried. To see your n.o.ble and high-born shoulders loaded down as if--as if you had been but a common _Gepacktrager_ instead of----"
"A chamois-hunter? Don"t distress yourself my friend. I have had a very good day"s sport."
"It has given me a weakness of the heart, Your--sir. How can I again order myself civilly to those ladies, who----"
"Who have afforded peasant Max a few amusing hours. Be more civil than ever, for my sake, friend. And, by the way, do you happen to know the names of the ladies? That one of them is Miss Collison, I have heard; but the others----"
"They are mother and daughter, sir. The elder, who spoke, in her ignorance, such treasonable things from the window, is called by the Miss Collinson "Lady de Courcy". The younger--the beautiful one--is also a miss; and I think her name is Mary. They talk together in English, and though I know few words of that language, I have heard "London" mentioned not once, but many times between them. Besides, it is painted in big black letters on their boxes."
"You did not expect them here?"
"Oh, no, sir. Had any one written at this season, when I am honoured by your presence, I should have answered that we were full, or the house closed--or any excuse which occurred to me. But no strangers have ever remained in Heiligengelt, or arrived, so late; and I was taken unawares when my son Alois drove them up last night. They are here but for a few days, on their way to Salzbruck, and so home, the pretty Miss de Courcy said; and I thought----"
"You did quite right, Frau Johann. Has my messenger come with letters?"
"Yes, Your--yes, sir; just now also a telegram was brought up by another messenger, who came in a great hurry, and has but lately gone." The chamois-hunter shrugged his shoulders and gave vent to an impatient sigh. "It is too much to expect that I should be left in peace for a single day, even here," he muttered as he moved toward the stairs.
To reach Frau Johann"s best sitting-room (selfishly occupied, according to one opinion, by the gentlemen absent all day upon the mountains) he was obliged to pa.s.s a door through which issued unusual sounds. Involuntary he paused. Some one was striking the preliminary chords of a _volkslied_ on his favourite instrument, a Rhaetian improvement upon the zither. As he lingered, listening, a voice began to sing--such a voice! Softly seductive as the purling of a brook through a meadow; rich as the deepest notes of a nightingale in its first pa.s.sion for the moon.
The song was the heartbroken cry of an old Rhaetian peasant, who, lying near death in a strange land, longs for the sunrise light on the mountain-tops at home, more earnestly than for heaven.
The listener did not move until the voice had died into silence. He knew, though he could not see, who the singer had been. It was impossible for the fat lady at the window, or the thin lady with the Baedeker, to own a voice like that. Only one there was who could so exhale her soul in the perfume of sound. To his fancy, it was like hearing the fragrance of a lily breathed aloud. In reality, it was Sylvia, with childish vanity, showing off her prettiest accomplishment, in order that the impression she had made might be deepened.
The man outside the door had heard many golden voices--golden in all senses of the word--but never before one which so strangely stirred his spirit, stirred it with a pain that was bitter sweet and a vague yearning for something he had never known. If he had been asked what was the thing for which he sighed, he could not, if he would, have told; for a man cannot explain that inner part of himself which he has never even tried to understand.
Before he had thought of moving, the beautiful voice, no longer plaintive, but swelling to triumphant brilliancy, broke into the national anthem of Rhaetia warlike, calling her sons to face death singing, in her defense. It was as if a rainbow shower of diamonds had been flung into the sunshine, and the heart of the man who stood at the head of his nation thrilled with the response that never failed.
"She is an Englishwoman, yet she sings the Rhaetian music as I have never known a Rhaetian girl sing it," he told himself, slowly pa.s.sing on to his own door. "She is a new type of woman to me. A pity that she is not a Princess, or else--that Maximilian and Max the chamois-hunter are not two. Still, in such a case, the chamois-hunter would be no match for Miss de Courcy of London, so the weights would balance in the scales as unevenly as now."
He smiled, and sighed, and shrugged his shoulders once again. Then he opened the door of his sitting-room, to forget, among certain doc.u.ments which urged the importance of immediate return to duty, the difference between Max and Maximilian, the difference between women and women.
"Good-bye to the mountains, to-morrow morning," he said to his chosen comrades. "Hey for work and Salzbruck again!"
_She_ was going to Salzbruck in a few days, according to Frau Johann.
But Salzbruck was not Heiligengelt, and Maximilian the Emperor was not, at his palace, in the way of meeting tourists. It was good-bye to Miss de Courcy as well as to the mountains.
"She"ll never know to whom she gave her ring," he thought, with the dense innocence of a man who has studied all books save woman"s looks.
"And I"ll never know who gives her a plain gold one for the finger on which she once wore this."
But in the next room, divided from him by a single wall, sat Princess Sylvia of Eltzburg-Neuwald.
"When we meet again at Salzbruck, he must never dream that I _knew_ all the time," she was saying to herself. "Some day I shall long to confess. But I could only confess to a man who excused, because he loved me. And suppose that day should never come?"
CHAPTER V
NOT DOWN IN THE PROGRAMME
LETTERS of introduction for Lady de Courcy and her daughter to those best worth knowing among Rhaetia"s _haute n.o.blesse_ were a part of the "plan" concocted in the Richmond garden--that plan which the Grand d.u.c.h.ess had seen and dreaded in Sylvia"s shining eyes.
The widow of the Hereditary Grand Duke of Eltzburg-Neuwald was reported in the papers to be travelling with the Princess Sylvia in Canada and the United States. Fortunately for the plot, the elder lady had spent so many years in retirement in England, and had, even in her youth, met so few Rhaetians, that there was little fear of any embarra.s.sing _contretemps_. Her objections to the unconventional attempt to win a lover, instead of resting content with a mere husband, were based on other grounds; Sylvia had overcome them, nevertheless; and, in the end, the Grand d.u.c.h.ess had proved not only docile but positively fertile in expedient. She it was who suggested, since the adoption of borrowed plumes was a necessity, that de Courcy, her mother"s maiden name, should be chosen.
One friend only had been taken into Sylvia"s fullest confidence, and that friend was a lady whose husband had been British Amba.s.sador at the Rhaetian Court. She knew "everybody who was anybody" there, and had entered with a fearful joy into the spirit of the escapade.
Exactly how it was to end she did not see; but so far as she was concerned, that was a detail; and she had written for Lady de Courcy all the letters needful as an open sesame to the Court.
Sylvia did not wish to hurry away from Heiligengelt to Salzbruck, even though the inn was empty (save for her own small party) two days after their arrival. They had met: the rest lay on the knees of the G.o.ds.
And since the best sitting-room was now at the ladies disposal, it was but fair to Frau Johann that they should remain for a time, if only to make use of it. When they left at last, after a stay of a week, it was to go to Salzbruck for the great festivities which were to mark the Emperor"s thirty-first birthday, an event enhanced in national importance by the fact that the tenth anniversary of his succession would fall on the same date. On the day of the journey, the Grand d.u.c.h.ess had a headache and was cross.
"I don"t see what you"ve accomplished so far by this mad freak," she said fretfully to her daughter, in the train which carried them away from Pitzbuhel. "We"ve been perched on a mountain-top, like the Ark on Ararat, for a week, our marrow freezing in our bones; and, after all, what have we to show for it--unless an incipient influenza?"
Sylvia had nothing to show for it; at least, nothing that she meant to show; but in a little scented silk bag which nestled against her heart lay a tiny folded piece of blotting-paper. If you looked at its reflection in a mirror, you saw, written twice over, in a firm, opinionated hand, the name, "Mary de Courcy." And Sylvia had found it in a book after Frau Johann had made the best sitting-room ready for new occupants. Therefore she loved Heiligengelt; therefore she thought with silent satisfaction of her visit there.
To learn her full name he must have made inquiries, for Miss M"Pherson had not uttered it on their progress down the mountain. It had been in his thoughts, or he would not have committed it to paper in a moment of idle dreaming. Through all her life Sylvia had known the want of money, but now she would not have taken a thousand pounds for the contents of the silken bag.