CHAPTER IV.
“Gute Nacht, Herr Bennett! Schlafen Sie wohl!”
The dwarf, smiling mischievously, disappeared through the entrance and Bennett closed the heavy oaken door and carefully bolted it. His madcap visitor had refused to satisfy his curiosity upon several important points, and the American made ready for bed with a disturbed mind. Was Cousin Fritz really his friend? That the dwarf was crazy he had no doubt, but his insanity was not dangerous if he was actually well disposed toward the stranger. But the dwarf’s mysterious and sudden appearance, his signal to the men Bennett now called “the conspirators,” and his stubborn refusal to answer the questions put to him, combined to cast a doubt upon his sincerity.
“The situation is certainly depressing,” soliloquized Bennett, as he slowly doffed his clothes. “The king blows hot and cold, and, so far as I can learn, is handicapped by an empty treasury. The Princess Hilda holds me in contempt and suspicion. The crazy jester is not a safe ally. As for the court at large, there is not a man or woman in the circle who would not be glad to see me driven out of the kingdom. It is more than probable that there is a conspiracy on foot against my life. And what do I gain by remaining here? Not one glance from her wonderful eyes, not a smile from her sweet lips; nothing but cold, contemptuous indifference. Nobody, so far as I know, has ever called Jonathan Edwards Bennett a fool, but he deserves that name to-night. Heigh-ho! a rolling stone gathers no moss, but it gets a great many hard knocks.”
With this melancholy reflection, Bennett, with a farewell glance at the moonlight pouring in at the windows—which he had taken care to fasten with bars—turned on his pillow and wooed the fickle goddess whose duty it is to reknit the raveled sleeve of care. He was about to win a great victory in his coquetting with sleep, when he was startled into a sitting posture by a rap on the panel of the door he had recently bolted.
Bennett’s first thought was that he had fallen into a doze and had been the victim of a mild attack of nightmare. He listened intently. The breeze from the hills, defying the broken windows, stirred the heavy hangings surrounding his old-fashioned bed, and the mysterious noises that haunt an ancient castle at night fell upon his ear. Suddenly a gentle rap again echoed from the opposite side of the chamber. The American pushed aside his bed curtains and stole softly toward the door. The ease with which Cousin Fritz had defied bolts and bars had not tended to allay Bennett’s growing distrust of his surroundings.
“Who’s there?” he asked in a low voice as he reached the door. There was a silence for an instant. Bennett, who prided himself upon his courage, was ashamed to realize that his heart was beating with an abnormal celerity.
“I come from the princess,” answered a woman’s voice. “I have a message for Herr Bennett.”
“Wait just a moment, then,” said the astonished American, hurrying toward the chair upon which he had placed his clothes. That Princess Hilda wished to communicate with him was a fact so surprising that his agitation increased. His hands trembled as he hurriedly donned his garments and endeavored to render his toilet worthy of the audience before him.
Presently he unbolted the great door, and against the moonlight that streamed through the corridor he saw the figure of one of the princess’s waiting-women.
“Let us go as quietly as possible,” she said. “The Princess Hilda will receive you in the Hall of Armor.”
They crept softly along the corridor and down a flight of stone steps that seemed to lead them from the moonlight into the black depths of eternal gloom. The woman rapped on a small door at the foot of the stairway. As they awaited the answer to her signal, the thought flashed through Bennett’s mind that he had placed himself in the power of those who might prove to be his enemies. He sought in vain to read the face of the woman at his side. Instinctively he placed his hand upon his hip pocket, in which he had always carried a revolver. A moment later he felt ashamed of his fears. The small door had been thrown back, and upon his startled gaze broke a vision that recalled his youthful dreams of romance.
Through the stained-glass windows of a great hall the moonlight streamed in multicolored beams. Like a mediæval army mustered at midnight stood the grim figures of the armored Schwartzburgers. Long black shadows, weird and wavering, made effective background for the polychromatic glories of this dazzling scene.
And there in the foreground, the moonlight caressing her golden hair, stood the Princess Hilda, a vision of beauty amid the relics of old wars and the steel-clad presentments of her blood-stained ancestors. The clear-cut face, the stately figure, the regal simplicity of her attire, seemed to make her at that instant the very incarnation of all that was noblest in the mediæval cult. She appeared to be a spirit from the past haunting the scenes where chivalrous warriors in the days of old had paid the homage of death in return for the smile of love.
Bennett felt dazed by the unexpected beauty of the picture that met his eyes. For a moment he doubted the reality of the scene before him. Was he dreaming? Was it not certain that a love song, followed by a martial chorus, would soon recall him to his senses; that he would find himself not in a castle but in an opera house?
Suddenly the voice of the princess convinced him of the reality of his surroundings.
“Herr Bennett, accept my thanks. It was kind of you to come to me.”
The words were unexpected. They placed the princess under obligation to a man she had hitherto treated with contemptuous indifference. But her voice was cold and formal. Bennett realized that, like the figures of her ancestors, she was clad in armor. Theirs was of steel, hers of pride.
“It would be the greatest pleasure of my life to serve you, Princess Hilda,” said the American, the tone of his voice leaving no doubt of his sincerity.
There was silence between them for a time. In some remote corner of the castle a door creaked on its hinges. The waiting-woman made a gesture of impatience somewhere in the shadows, and a piece of armor clanked angrily.
“If that is true,” said the princess, with less coldness in her tones than before, “I shall put you to the test at once. Herr Bennett, I am in sore distress.”
How great a sacrifice it was for this proud woman to meet him thus secretly and to confess that he could be of service to her in her hour of trouble, Bennett was sufficiently generous to realize. Irresponsible in many ways, brilliant but erratic, the American was essentially a gentleman. Furthermore, he had never felt for a woman the reverential admiration that the golden-haired vision before him inspired. There was something unearthly in the influence she exercised over him at this moment. The glory of renunciation—the crowning beauty of the age of chivalry—seemed to affect him as he stood there in the shimmering moonlight, a modern knight-errant vowing fealty to a high ideal at a mediæval shrine.
“I repeat,” he said, “my promise to serve you as best I may.”
“Then I implore you, Herr Bennett,” went on the princess in a low voice, “to leave the kingdom at once. The harm you have wrought may never be wholly undone, but you can, at least, save us from further disaster.”
“It shall be as you wish, Princess Hilda,” he said sadly. “But tell me, is the crisis more threatening than I had feared?”
“I do not know,” she answered, a melancholy smile playing across her face. “The king is driven to his wit’s ends, and to-night he had news from below that fills him with consternation. As you know, his brother, my uncle Wilhelm, plots for his dethronement. His emissaries throughout the kingdom are fostering discontent. The recent defalcations have emboldened the schemers and the feeling against the king is on the increase. There is only one thing that can save us, Herr Bennett. If it is noised abroad in the morning that you have left Hesse-Heilfels, never to return, his majesty’s subjects will take heart and rally to his support. Am I not right?”
Her appeal to his judgment pleased Bennett. Furthermore, he knew that the conclusion she had reached was sound. Nevertheless, the sacrifice he was about to make was greater than she could understand. That a Yankee adventurer should dare to harbor for a princess of the house of Schwartzburg a feeling akin to love was a possibility that, he well knew, she could not comprehend.
“I fear,” he said gloomily, “that you are not wrong, Princess Hilda, in looking upon me as the Jonah who is sinking the ship of state. It is well, perhaps, that I should go at once. But give me leave to say that in obeying your commands I feel a joy that is begotten of my power to repair in part the wrongs that I have done to you, and a sorrow that springs from the thought that I shall never look upon your face again.”
Impulsively he stepped forward, and bending his knee kissed the cold hand she held out to him. Then he arose, gazed for a moment at her white, sad face, and turned and left the hall.
How he reached his apartments, Bennett never knew. That he groped for many minutes in a darkness that seemed eternal, bruising himself in his efforts to find the moonlit corridor, he remembered later on; but the bitterness of his renunciation—fantastic though his love might be—was the one feeling that dominated him during that midnight passage through unknown hallways and up shadow-haunted stairs.
As he glanced around his bedchamber a conviction came over him that it had been entered since his departure. He had found the oak doors closed, as he had left them, but there was something in the appearance of the apartment—he could not say just what it was—that convinced him that some one had paid him a visit during his absence. He approached the bed and pulled aside the curtains. Upon one of the pillows a piece of note-paper had been pinned. Seizing it nervously, Bennett hurried to a window, through which the moonlight was still streaming. Scrawled in pencil, the paper bore the following lines:
“Come to the king at once when you return. He is in grave danger, and so are you. This is not a jest.
Cousin Fritz.”