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Blanchard,
Dunoisse followed his Fate up the great echoing nave of the Cathedral,
ushered by the gyrating von Steyregg. Penitents of both sexes, waiting their
turn in lengthy rows outside the occupied confessionals, glanced up from
their beads, as, in a whisper that rattled amidst the carved rafters of the lofty
roof, the agent announced:
“Here lie Your Serene Highness’s illustrious forefathers!” And
ostentatiously dried his sympathetic tear with a vast flapping handkerchief
of Isabella hue.
Certainly the sacred fane was populous with departed von Widinitz, from
Albertus I., First of the Line, and his spouse, the chaste Philippina; to
Ludovicus, the latest departed, whose Bathildis had predeceased him by a
generation or two.
You saw them represented from life-size to the quarter-bust, in brass,
bronze, lead, marble, porphyry, granite, alabaster—every conceivable
medium known to sepulchral Art. And to Dunoisse’s peculiar torment,
those tricksy sprites, von Steyregg and Köhler, united in discovering
between the cast or sculptured countenances of these worthies and the
moody visage of their harassed descendant resemblances of the striking
kind. To hear the knaves appeal to one another—warrant, justify, and
approve the claim of a thirteenth-century nose to its modern reproduction—
to witness them scouring aisles or rummaging chapels in full cry after a
chin, or mouth, or ear, or forehead; to see them run the elusive feature from
metal or stone to living earth; and congratulate one another on the fortunate
issue of the chase; would have provoked a smile on the countenance of a
Trappist. Their sacrifice laughed even whilst he writhed.
The ceremony of leaving cards upon the Archbishop of Widinitz
followed. A trap-mouthed, blue-shaven ecclesiastic of the humbler sort,
who wore a bunch of keys at the girdle of his well-darned cassock, opened
the oaken, iron-studded door, and took the proffered oblongs of pasteboard
without enthusiasm, intimating that His Lordship did not receive strangers
upon days of solemn retreat. With this janitor von Steyregg parleyed vainly,
maintaining a brisk exchange of arguments at the top of the Palace
doorsteps, whilst his principals waited at the bottom in the yellow barouche.
A sportive Fate at this juncture breaks the thread of the narrative with a
Pantomime Interlude. For as, more in sorrow than in anger at the obstinacy
of the janitor, the Baron shook off his tear upon the inhospitable threshold,
and turned upon his heel—a little white-headed, berry-brown urchin—a
bare-legged messenger, arrayed in a tattered shirt and the upper half of a
pair of adult breeches, carrying a reed-basket in which reposed a fine, fat,
silvery trout, newly-caught and tempting,—dived between the legs that so
strikingly resembled balusters, and dodged into the Palace with a flourish of
dirty heels.
If a portly Magyar of noble rank, in the act of rolling down a steepish
flight of limestone steps, could possibly be regarded as a mirth-provoking
object, one might be tempted to smile as von Steyregg, recording each
revolution upon his person with grievous bumps and bruises, performed the
horizontal descent. Henriette screamed, Köhler beat his bosom, the tag-rag
and bobtail roared with glee, while Dunoisse, compelled to share in their
amusement despite the sickness at his heart, jumped out of the carriage and
picked up the groaning Baron, restored him his battered curly-brimmed hat,
the comb, hairbrush, and piece of soap which had escaped from his coat-
tails in the course of transit, thrust him into the vehicle, and bade the
coachman return to “The Three Crowns.”
LVIII
What the Father Economus said when he found the grocer’s billet under
the red-spotted trout we may not hear. How the Archbishop received the
warning must be equally a matter of conjecture. Hasten on to the smarting
conclusion of the Day of Disgrace that dawned so fairly, that shone so
brightly, that promised such a harvest to those who failed to mark how upon
the southwest horizon huge formless ramparts of blue black cumuli were
steadily building, while faint mutterings of distant thunder presaged the
breaking of the storm....
The four adventurers had supped together upon the best the inn could
furnish. Now, seated at ease about the relics of the banquet, in the dining-
room of the private suite occupied by His Serene Highness and Her
Excellency, they discussed the Plan of Campaign. Fragrant vapors of
choicest Habanas enhaloed them, by permission of Her Excellency, who
held between her exquisite lips a Turkish cigarette. And as they smoked and
talked, the contents of a capacious China Bowl of Maraschino Punch
(compounded by Köhler, who was a clever hand at such delicious
chemistry) sank lower, inch by inch....
You may picture Steyregg, revived by much food and a great deal of
liquor; his cuts and scratches plastered with diachylum, the Alpine summit
of his bald occiput adorned by a compassionate chambermaid with patches
of brown-paper steeped in vinegar, retained in place by a linen bandage of
turban-shape, reading from a folio sheet of coarsely printed rag-paper,
blackened with ancient Gothic capitals (and filched from where it had
fluttered, held by a pin, upon one of the notice-boards exposed in the porch
of the Cathedral), the Programme for the following day.
“We begin,” he boomed, after much preliminary throat-scraping, “by
Your Serene Highness’s permission—if the Herr Attorney-Oath-
Commissioner will snuff the candles I shall be able to see better!—we begin
with Deputations from the various Trades-bands and Companies of Handi-
craftsmen carrying banners.... Follow....”
The gross man expanded his chest, and rolled out:
“The Charity-Children of both sexes, the boys carrying green branches,
the girls bouquets of flowers. Succeed....
“Confraternities of Sodalists, male and female, headed by Persons on
Horseback in Roman and Silesian costumes, representing St. Lawrence with
his gridiron and St. Hyacinth with his ax.
“A triumphal Car, with a Tableau of St. Helena in Roman Imperial Habit,
instructing St. Macarius, Bishop of Jerusalem, where to Dig for the Relic of
the True Cross....
“The Four Mendicant Orders of Religious of both sexes, with tapers.
“The Boys of the Dominican Orphanage bearing tapers.
“The Girls of the Carmelite School strewing flowers.
“The Image of Our Lady of the Assumption, attended by Sisters of the
Order of the Immaculate Heart.”
Dunoisse started in his chair. A burning heat raced through him, and yet
he shivered, oppressed by a deadly sickness of the soul.
“The Secular Clergy,” read von Steyregg, and cleared his throat. “The
Archbishop and Chapter. The Sacred Canopy, borne by six Noble Officers
of the Garrison in Full Uniform.”...
Dunoisse, with an ashen face, rose up at the foot of the table.... It had
been revealed to him as by a lightning-flash, over what a bottomless abyss
he hung.... Henriette appeared to notice nothing.... von Steyregg pursued:
“In this unhappy document, Madame, I have suggested an alteration. As
here provided, the Mayor and Corporation, the Garrison—in uniform of
review—with the towns-people, peasants, children, and beggars were to
have brought up the rear of the procession. But my amendment (forwarded
in writing to the Archbishop, since that prelate has rudely closed his doors
against us), is, that His Lordship and the Chapter should be followed by—
grant but a moment!—I will set it down....”
He sucked a black-lead pencil, scrawled on the wide margin of the
official programme, and read as he scrawled:
“His Serene Highness, Hector-Marie-Aymont, Prince-Aspirant of
Widinitz, carrying a taper, and attended by the Wohlgeboren Herr Attorney-
and-Oath-Commissioner Ottilus Köhler, and the Hochwohlgeboren Herr
Baron, Rodobald Siegfridus Theodore von Steyregg, Knight of the Most
Pious Order of Saint Emmerich.” He added, blowing like a seal, and
mopping his great moist countenance with a crumpled table-napkin:
“Take the word of a Magyar nobleman, Your Serenity, that taper of yours
will have cooked the Regent Luitpold’s goose for him, all being said and
done!”
But His Serene Highness, who had dropped heavily back into the chair,
was leaning upon his folded arms, staring with an air of deep abstraction at
the polished surface of the dessert-covered mahogany, and might have
heard or not.
“Dull dog that you are, my Prince!” said von Steyregg mentally, “this
charming Eve of yours is worth a million of you. Were she Princess-
Aspirant of this phlegmatic State, it would be a hop, skip and jump into the
saddle. With you, had you not a Steyregg at your elbow—Ps’sst!—the
whole adventure would fizzle off like a damp squib—I would bet my head
on it! Now, what picture you are gaping at—with your eyes fixed and your
jaw dropping—I would give this glass of punch to know.”
He tossed it off with a flourish and a wink at his rat-faced confederate.
The flourish, the wink, were lost upon Dunoisse.
For as a hanging man may see, in the last struggles of asphyxia, the
dreadful details of the crime that led to his execution limned in lifelike
action and color on the swirling fire-shot blackness, so rose before the
mental vision of the son of Marie-Bathilde a picture of the Cathedral, with
the great procession of the morrow—headed by the white-robed bearer of
the Crucifix, amidst wafts of incense and intoned Litanies, rolling down the
nave of the Cathedral and out through its west door upon the streets.
Ah! was Henriette deaf, that she did not hear the chanting voices, and the
slow, measured tread of the lay folk, and religious, and the pattering
footsteps of the children, as, with reverent demeanor and hushed, rapt faces
they moved before or followed the image of the Mother of God?
Did she not see the Canopy of wrought cloth-of-gold, adorned with
tassels of pearls, fringed with innumerable little golden bells that tinkled as
its bearers bore it onwards? Was she blind to the Figure that stumbled along
in its shelter, robed in white linen, bloodstained and torn and dusty, bending
almost double under a Cross of roughly-shaped timbers, and wearing a
Crown of Thorns?...
The haggard black eyes sought hers in desperate interrogation. But
Henriette was dreamily playing with a silver fruit-knife as she listened to
von Steyregg. Her own eyes were hidden under their long lashes; her face
told no tale, as the intolerable voice of the agent trumpeted:
“As regards a favorable answer from this arrogant prelate, Your
Excellency, I will guarantee it within the hour—or two—having, in His
Serene Highness’s name, as his business-representative, undertaken that
compliance with his desires will be made profitable in the pecuniary sense
by a donation of One Thousand Thalers to the Restoration Fund of the
Cathedral. Ahem!”
He winked his left eye, which the sliding turban threatened to extinguish,
folded up the official programme and threw it on the table, saying:
“This reading dries the throat consumedly. With Her Highness’s—I mean
with Madame’s permission, I will take another drop of punch!”
He filled a bumper and proposed a toast: “To the Success of The
Adventure!”
Köhler drank the sentiment with enthusiasm. Henriette sipped, smiling at
her moody lover, who pushed his glass away. And a resonant, cultured
voice said from the doorway:
“Permit me to beg pardon of the company for having entered
unannounced!”
The heads of the adventurers turned as by a single impulse. The landlord,
who had knocked unheard, and ushered in a stranger under cover of the
toast-drinking, was seen to be posed, in an attitude of rigid respect, beyond
the threshold. The person who had spoken, a short priest with singularly
bright gray eyes shining out of a pale, thin-featured face;—who was
wrapped, despite the sultry heat of August, in a voluminous and shabby
black cloak, and did not seem at all embarrassed,—was standing just within
the door.
He said, and the great volume of his voice seemed to fill the room and
flow outwards through the French windows that opened upon a stone
balcony overhanging the Market Place:
“May it be understood that I am here as the mouthpiece of the
Archbishop of Widinitz?... May I presume that I shall be patiently listened
to?... I will be as brief as is compatible with clearness. Pray remain seated,
all of you. No, sir, I am obliged!...”
For Henriette had risen languidly and curtsied deeply. Von Steyregg had
hoisted himself to those baluster-shaped legs of his. Köhler had got up with
his mouth full of almonds and raisins: and Dunoisse, with the polished
grace that distinguished him, was offering the little priest his chair.
The ecclesiastic scanned the dark, handsome face and the soldierly,
muscular, supple figure with a degree of kindliness. He said, as he waved
the offered seat away:
“What I have to say, Colonel Dunoisse, will be best said standing. Your
intention to visit this town was not previously notified to the Archbishop.
He was not consulted in the matter of your intentions and views. Otherwise
you might have been spared the commission of a grievous error, which
cannot but create antagonism, prejudice, and contempt in the minds of those
whom you would most desire to ingratiate——”
He broke off, for von Steyregg smote upon the table, and bellowed, while
the decanters and glasses jingled, peaches hopped from the center dish, and
the thumper’s turban fell off and rolled under the board:
“‘Contempt,’ sir, is not a word to be used in connection with His Serene
Highness. I, Rodobald von Steyregg, Baron and Knight of the Sublime
Order of St. Emmerich, protest against its use!”
Having protested, Steyregg dived for his turban, replaced it on his head,
and snorted defiance. The small pale priest regarded him with a faint,
lurking smile, and said calmly:
“Sir, the Archbishop received a letter from you this evening. I am
charged with the answer to the document herewith.”
He turned to Dunoisse and continued:
“Colonel Dunoisse, the fact of your near alliance by blood with the
reigning House of Widinitz is incontestable and undeniable. Did not the
Salic law obtain in this principality, upon you would undoubtedly devolve
the Hereditary Crown.”
His great voice seemed to be a palpable presence in the room. While he
spoke, not by any means at the full pitch of it, the wires of a spinet that
stood against the wall vibrated audibly; and the crystal pendants on the
chandeliers and mantel-vases tinkled with a gentle musical sound. While
another sound, of which Dunoisse had been faintly conscious for some
time, and which might have been the muttering of distant thunder; or the
humming of innumerable bees; or the purring of a cat of Brobdingnagian
proportions, was stilled as though the unknown forces that combined to
cause it had caught an echo of the powerful tones, and held their peace to
listen.
As the priest went on:
“Undoubtedly, but the fundamental law as it stands strictly excludes the
female line and the males derived from it. And were it possible to change
this law, even at the eleventh hour, I am deputed to say to you that the
procedure would be strenuously opposed by the person who would in that
event stand as the direct dynastic successor to the hereditary authority!”
“My mother!”
Dunoisse, through whom the words had darted with a shock and thrill
resembling the discharge from an electric battery, thrust from him the chair
on which he had hitherto indifferently leaned, and turned upon the speaker a
face that had suddenly grown sharp and pinched, saying in a voice that was
curiously flat and toneless:
“You are in communication with my mother, sir? You have been deputed
by her to say this to me?”
The priest bowed assent, and continued calmly:
“For, though it be true that the Almighty, in His Infinite wisdom, has
chastened us Catholics of Widinitz by placing over us a sovereign of the
Reformed Faith; and, though we cannot but deplore the rigor with which the
Regent has treated certain communities of religious hitherto resident in the
principality; we are bound to own that in other respects we have been
treated with clemency and justice. In addition, the domestic life of our
Regent is free from scandal....”
Dunoisse’s ears burned like fire. The little priest’s great voice went on:
“We recognize in His Serene Highness a chaste spouse, a wise father, a
prudent governor. How ill-advised should we be to prefer to a ruler such as
this a bad Catholic, an individual whose personal history affords a
lamentable example of ungoverned passions; who, dead to all sense of
shame, blazons his infamy before the eyes of the conscientious and the
decent——”
Dunoisse interrupted, saying with stiff lips:
“May I take it that these personalities are leveled at myself?”
The little priest returned, with extraordinarily quiet dignity:
“The rebuke, Colonel Dunoisse, is meant for you. I do not deal in
personalities.”
He added, in a voice that sent keen, icy thrills coursing down the spines
of his listeners:
“The Archbishop replies to the proposal contained in your agent’s letter
emphatically in the negative. He says to you, Colonel Dunoisse, with the
voice that speaks to you now: ‘You have offered us a price in money for the
privilege of participating in the morrows procession. You have not scrupled
to present yourself as a partaker in the solemnities of our Blessed Lady’s
Festival. You shrink not at the thought of approaching Him Who is borne
beneath the Sacred Canopy, unconfessed, unabsolved—in a state of deadly
sin. Shameless, unabashed, you would display yourself to the scandal of
Christ’s servants, accompanied by the partner of your lamentable errors—
with your acknowledged mistress, the unfaithful wife of another, flaunting
by your side!”
Henriette, pale as death, leaped up from her seat as a woman might who
had swallowed some deadly alkaloid. Dumbly, as though the poison
veritably stiffened her muscles, she writhed, fighting for speech—
wrenching at the velvet ribbon that confined her swelling throat.
“You!—you!—you hear these insults?” she at last stammered, pointing a
quivering hand at Dunoisse, whom the words seemed to have deprived of
the powers of speech and motion. “Are you deaf, sir, that such things are
spoken, and you stand there silent as one of those statues in the Cathedral?
Are you dumb or paralyzed that you do not order this man to leave my
presence? Cannot you see,” she raved, “that this is no messenger from the
Archbishop? Some fanatical priest,—some presumptuous secretary,—has
dared—has——! Just Heaven!—if my husband had been here, he would
have thrown the creature from the room!”
But Dunoisse remained speechless and frozen, under the fiery torrent of
her upbraidings. It was von Steyregg who, in absence of any demonstration
from his principal, seized his opportunity to be effective and picturesque.
He strode haughtily to the door, and, opening it, turned with majesty to the
intruder, trumpeting:
“With your person, sir, respecting your cloth as I abhor your sentiments, I
will not soil my fingers. But unless you instantly remove yourself from
these apartments, private to His Serene Highness and Her Excellency, I will
—I will ring for the landlord and have you carried out and put upon the
street!”
“That could hardly be,” said the little gray priest mildly, “for I am the
Archbishop of Widinitz....”
He showed one lean finger outside the folds of the shabby cloak. Upon
the digit a great sapphire gleamed darkly.... And a silence of unspeakable
consternation fell upon the conspirators, that was suddenly broken by a
half-brick, deftly thrown, that crashed through a pane of one of the French
windows, shivered a crystal chandelier full of twinkling wax-lights that
hung above the supper-table; and plopped into the punch-bowl, dispersing
shivers of Oriental ware and gouts of fragrant liquor into every corner of the
room....