CHAPTER XV.

As the prince hurried through the ante-room, like Orestes driven by the furies, he met the Baroness Grenwitz, who came to take leave of the princess. He thought he would sink into the ground for shame, as she looked fixedly into his eyes. She said something to him, but he did not hear what it was. His ears were ringing with strange sounds. He uttered an inarticulate sound, which was to represent an apology. Then he rushed out.

The baroness followed him with a sombre, suspicious look.

Anna Maria had not had a happy moment since she had entered the house. The reception last night had touched her to the quick. The constrained manner of the prince, the unprofitable efforts of the princess to give to the interview a more cordial tone, the thinly-veiled irony of the count, who ridiculed every affectionate word--all this had filled her with sad apprehensions for Helen's future. She had passed the night without sleep, thinking over the riddle, and again and again she had come to the conclusion that the princess must have been faithless to her husband at some time in her life, and that the count thus had an iron hold on her. Perhaps the striking want of resemblance between father and son might have contributed to such a conclusion. Thus she had risen late in very bad humor, and with a violent nervous headache, and was rather pleased to learn that Miss Helen had driven out to visit her friend, Sophie. Helen had scarcely left the house when two letters were brought in, one from Grunwald, the other from the city itself. She opened the one from Grunwald first. The news of Malte's illness filled her with consternation. She had always trembled for his life, from childhood up; were her fears to be realized now? And if Malte should die--oh that God in His great mercy would prevent that!--the whole entailed estate went, now that Felix also was no more, to a Captain Grenwitz, the son of her former husband's first cousin, a beggar, whom she had never liked, and who had always looked like a hungry pike eagerly snapping at the estate. He was henceforth to be master at Grenwitz? Why, after all, she would have preferred to find out that Oswald Stein was really Harald's legitimate son.

Mechanically she opened the second letter. It was from Albert Timm and ran thus:

"Madame:--After our last interview you will not be surprised if I now use the weapons against you, which I until then had been using for you. Mr. Stein has been fully informed. Before the year is out--you may rely on it--he is master of Stantow and Baerwalde, and you will, besides, have to pay the back interest for twenty-four years. This is simple ruin for you. I might rub my hands with delight at your discomfiture; but Albert Timm is a good-natured fellow and offers you a piece of good advice in return for your ingratitude. Make your peace with Mr. Stein before it is too late! Better a small sacrifice than an entire loss. I send your adversary to you; receive him kindly, and if you are wise give him the hand of your daughter, who loves him madly. The princely match is anyhow at an end, considering that the prince is not the son of a count, but of a rope-dancer, and the matter is in such a position that the whole world will soon enjoy the grand scandal. But I must resist your desire to hear the full explanation of this interesting affair, which you might disregard as you disregarded certain other explanations of mine. Perhaps you may change your mind after the interview with Mr. Stein, and become convinced of the sincere friendship with which I have the honor, etc., etc."

At any other time the baroness would have looked upon this letter merely as a renewed effort on the part of Mr. Timm to regain his lost position; but this morning her mind was so disturbed that the letter and everything else appeared to her in quite a new light. Was not, after all, everything and anything possible in this false world? It was evident that this Mr. Timm knew more than most people, and at all events the persistence with which he adhered to his statements was very remarkable. Even Felix in his last letter had admitted the fact!

The usual energy of the baroness gradually gave way under the heavy pressure. And now Helen, whom she had sent for, was not coming back; and in an hour the train would start by which alone she could reach Grunwald next day! Her trunks were not packed, the question whether Helen should accompany her or stay had not been decided, and she had yet to take leave of the princess and the prince. But that, at all events, could be done in Helen's absence! Necessity released her from the rules of etiquette; and, besides, the princess herself had asked her the night before to come unannounced to her rooms.

Thus Anna Maria left her rooms and went hastily down the long passages and through the ante-rooms which led to the apartments of the princess, when suddenly the prince rushed out, evidently in a high state of excitement, and passed her without saying a word.

"That is strange!" said the baroness. The door opened again suddenly, and Nadeska rushed out with terror in her face.

"Where is the princess?" asked the baroness.

"In there. She is unwell. No one is coming to answer the bell. I am going to look for the servants."

"Do so!" said the baroness. "I will stay in the meantime with the princess."

Nadeska did not look as if she liked the arrangement, but she dared not prevent the baroness from entering. She hurried away, while Anna Maria stepped into the rosy twilight of the apartments of the princess.

She was still lying in the arm-chair near the fire. Her half-closed eyes and the convulsive movements of her hands showed that she had not quite recovered yet from a fit of fainting.

"Give me back my son, Nadeska!" she murmured. "He must not wrestle with that Hercules; the father is stronger than the son. You see! you see! how he takes him around the waist and lifts him up. He will throw him down, here at my feet. There, there----"

The unfortunate woman broke out in hysterics, mixed with a horrible laugh. Between times she raved:

"Don't let the count know! The count will tell the baroness! The baroness will tell her beautiful daughter, and then she wont take the rope-dancer's son! There he comes, his head cut open, and----"

A fearful cry broke from the bosom of the sufferer. She started up, and stared with haggard looks at the baroness. Immediately she sank back once more, fainting anew. Nadeska came in with a couple of Russian maids. She seemed to be anxious to get the baroness out of the way.

"The princess has these attacks quite often," she said, in her smooth, humble manner, while the servants took up the fainting lady and carried her into her bed-room. "She must be left alone in such cases; the presence of strangers makes it only worse."

"I am not going to disturb her, my dear," said the baroness, coldly; "especially as I have to leave in an hour. I shall write a few lines to her grace."

"What does that mean?" said Nadeska. "Does she also know more than she ought to know?"

The baroness returned to her rooms in a state of indescribable excitement. What was that she had seen and heard? The wild expression in the prince's face, the confused speeches of the princess, the suspicious' manner of the waiting woman, who evidently knew all about the family drama--what was she to think of it? What ought she to do? It was perhaps the first time in her life that the clever, sensible woman was utterly at a loss. But was not the ground giving way under her feet? Was the indestructible pillar of her success not snapping suddenly like a bruised reed? The prince a rope-dancer's son! A family secret anxiously guarded for twenty-odd years, suddenly proclaimed in the streets and on the house-tops! Her son, the legitimate heir to the immense estate, sick unto death! An unknown scion of a former owner, rising unexpectedly from obscurity, a lost will in his right hand, which made him owner of a fortune that the baroness had all her life regarded as her own! And what would Helen say? How her pride would suffer when she learnt that the diamonds of the princely crown were nothing but vile glass, unfit for the lowest of the low!

A carriage came dashing into the court-yard. It was Helen. The heart of the baroness beat as if the decisive moment was only now approaching. A few anxious moments and the beautiful daughter came, pale and distressed, into the room, and threw herself into her mother's arms with a passionate vehemence which contrasted most strangely with her usual reserve and coldness.

"God be thanked you are back!" said Anna Maria. "I must go; I wanted to ask you if you will go with me!"

"Can you ask me?" cried Helen. "I should stay here, and without you?"

"Then you do not feel happy here, Helen?"

"No, no! I do not love the prince! I have never loved him!" And Helen hid her face on her mother's bosom.

The baroness was much surprised. Helen's words, and even more the tone in which she said them, and her whole strange, passionate manner, suddenly gave her an utterly new insight into her daughter's character. She had a dim perception that large portions of her inner life had so far been utterly unknown to her, and that all her cleverness, of which she was so proud, had not enabled her to see clearly in her own daughter's heart.

"Why did you give your promise then?" she asked.

"I cannot tell. I was--I did not know what I was doing. But now I do know it. I cannot marry the prince; he must give me back my word. If you insist upon the marriage I shall die!"

"And if I do not insist?"

It was now Helen's turn to be surprised. She looked at the baroness with wondering eyes.

"As I say, my dear child, I have made certain discoveries this morning which have startled me, to say the least, very much, and which have brought me the conviction that we have proceeded in this whole matter with a want of caution which might possibly have been quite disastrous to us all."

"I do not understand you, mamma!" said Helen.

"Well, it is hard to understand," said Anna Maria, plaintively. "I hardly know where my head is. I am perfectly miserable!"

And the baroness threw herself into a chair as if she were broken-hearted, and commenced weeping bitterly.

Helen had never seen her mother weep. The unusual sight touched her deeply. She knelt down by her, and tried to console her with kind, soothing words. But it was all in vain.

"It is not that alone, though that is bad enough," sobbed Anna Maria; "but we also are threatened with a similar exposure," and under the pressure of a moment, yielding to the natural impulse of all helpless sufferers to cling to others at any hazard, she told Helen in a few words all about Oswald's claims on her fortune, and that if these claims should be legally established she and her daughter alike would be beggars.

Helen had listened to her in breathless excitement. Her color came and went continually, her eyes were fixed on her mother, her hand held her mother's hands with a firm grasp.

"Beggars! you say? Better so and a clear conscience than in abundance and fainting with anxiety! Come, mamma, I am not afraid of poverty! You have often told me how poor you were before you were married to papa. Why should I be better off? I do not see that being rich has made you happy, or papa; he told me so in his last hour. I have seen it with my own eyes how much happier people are who have nothing but their affection, who rely on nothing but their own strength. I have strength; I can and will work for you, if it must be so. But now let us go away from here. You are sick and weary; your hand is icy cold, and your forehead is burning; stay, do not get up. I will pack your things; you need not trouble yourself; I shall be down in five minutes."

"No," said the baroness, "let me do that. Mary can help me. You can do something else for me. We cannot well leave without writing a few words of farewell to the princess, as she is too unwell to see us, and we are in such a hurry. Sit down and write a few lines, kindly and politely, but neither more nor less than what is indispensable."

"I will do so," said Helen, sitting down at her escritoire, while her mother went into the adjoining room.

Helen had just taken up her pen when she heard a noise behind her which made her look up. In the middle of the room stood Oswald, deadly pale, his large eyes, brilliant with fever, fixed upon her. Helen was so terrified that she could not speak nor move. She thought for a moment it was an apparition.

Oswald seemed to guess so.

"It is really I!" he said. "Pardon me for my abrupt appearance. I asked for the baroness; they showed me in here."

"I will call my mother," said Helen, rising.

"I pray, stay," said Oswald; "I pray you! I have only two words to say. I would rather say them to you than to the baroness."

There was something so solemn in Oswald's manner and tone of voice that Helen had not the heart to refuse his request.

"Will you sit down?" she said, sinking herself into a chair and pointing at another chair near her.

Oswald sat down.

"I do not know, Miss Helen, if your mother has spoken to you of certain intrigues by which she has been troubled of late, and which originate mainly with a certain Mr. Timm?"

"I have just this morning heard of it for the first time."

"That was my own fate. And this is what brings me here. I cannot bear the thought; I believe I could not die quietly if I thought that you believed me capable of employing such vile means against you. Will you please tell the baroness so?"

"I will."

"And tell her also, I pray, and believe yourself, how bitterly I regret that you have been troubled with such a matter."

"It was nothing but an invention of Mr. Timm!"

"No, Miss Helen!" said Oswald, with a sorrowful smile. "I presume it is more than that. I am only too much afraid it is the real truth, and that is the second reason why you see me here."

"You surely do not imagine we would refuse to acknowledge legitimate claims against us?"

"That case will never arise. I have no desire to make such claims. I should never have done so, under any circumstances; and least of all now."

He cast a look around him. The splendor of the apartment reminded him forcibly in whose house he was.

"Least of all now!" he repeated. "Here are the papers which prove this most unfortunate of all stories. I desire the baroness to take them and to keep them, so as to be secure at all times against that man's machinations."

He placed the documents and papers which Timm had brought him a few hours before upon Helen's escritoire, and bowed to take leave.

"One moment, sir!" said Helen, rising likewise. "Do you imagine my mother will accept such a gift? Who has given you the right to think so little of us?"

"I think, Miss Helen, your pride misleads you in this instance. There is evidently no one whom this whole matter concerns except myself, and I desire to be relieved of an unpleasant suspicion. It was hardly necessary to remind me that a few hundred thousand dollars, more or less, mattered little to the mother of the owner of Grenwitz, and to the betrothed of Prince Waldenberg."

"Circumstances ought not to affect our duties," replied the young girl, rising to her full height and curving her lips contemptuously; "and you need not believe that I am so indifferent to your claims because, I am proud of our wealth and our rank. We are at this very moment on the point of leaving for Grenwitz, where my brother is lying dangerously ill; and there, on my escritoire, lies the beginning of a letter in which the princess will be told that I shall never be her son's wife."

Helen's dark eyes were shining brightly; the hot blood gave greater depth to the red on her cheeks. Oswald had never seen her so beautiful, so marvellously beautiful. And this at the moment when he had already in his heart bid farewell to life, which had no longer any charms for him. Just now this glorious beauty, this highest beau-ideal of his wildest dreams, must present herself to him, not at an inapproachable distance, but within reach attainable to his bold desires--to his firm will, perhaps! Why did she tell him that she would never marry the prince? And why did she tell it in such a defiant tone, if she did not mean to humble him--the weak, hesitating, fickle man--by the strength of her will, by the promptness with which she abandoned all this splendor, merely in order to remain true to herself?

These thoughts passed swiftly through Oswald's mind, which worked all the faster as he had been so long sleepless and feverish. He knew that she would never have told him all this if she had not loved him at some time or other; if she did not perhaps still love him; and yet he knew with absolute certainty that they were separated from each other irretrievably by all that had happened. There was therefore no bitterness, but deep sadness in his voice, as he fixed his eyes immoveably upon the heavenly beauty before him and said, slowly:

"Let us not sadden one another still more by violent, bitter words! Who knows whether we shall ever speak to each other again? I feel like a dying man, and what I am going to say I do not say for myself, but from an earnest desire to state the truth. Helen, I have loved you from the hour when I saw you first in the park at Grenwitz! I have never forgotten that moment. I know that you also would have loved me if I had but been true to myself; you might have become my own. But when I forsook myself you also forsook me, and now there is an abyss between us over which there is no bridge. And what seemed to be about to bring us together--the discovery of this morning--only parts us forever. I feel it clearly. You will never be disposed to accept a gift, as you call it; and I would rather burn my right hand than stretch it out after the inheritance of a man who made my mother the most wretched of women. There is no peace possible between us, even if everything else were as it ought to be. And now, Helen, before we part--probably forever--one more request; give me your hand across that gulf which parts us, as a token that I am forgiven!"

Helen laid her hand in Oswald's.

Thus they stood and looked deep into each other's eyes; and as they so looked they saw all the golden summer mornings in the past at Grenwitz under the whispering trees, and all the purple-glowing evenings in the green beech woods near the sea-shore--and then they saw nothing more, for a close veil of tears hid the enchanting images.

"Farewell, Helen!"

"Farewell, Oswald!"

"Forever!"

Oswald did not take the beloved one in his arms; a feeling of holy reverence kept him back. He felt that the time for repentance which was granted to him was too short, and swearing new vows which he felt no strength to keep was not making amends for so many broken ones.

He let the hand go which he had held in his own, and--the next moment Helen was alone.

She was still standing so, her eyes fixed on the door through which Oswald had disappeared, when the baroness came back to the room.

"It is high time, Helen," she said; "the carriage is waiting. Are you ready?"

"Yes."

"What papers are those on the escritoire?"

"Did he not take them again?"

"Who?"

"Oswald."

"Has he been here? What did he want?"

"He came to say good-by. Take those papers, mother. He brought them to you."

"Helen, you look pale; and you have been crying! What does that mean? Do you love that man? Must I lose my last child then?"

"Be calm, mamma. I shall not leave you in our misfortune. There is the letter to the princess. One moment, mother."

She sat down and wrote in great haste a few lines.

"Well, that is done! I am free once more! Come, mamma; I will show you that I have still strength and courage enough for life. Come!"

And she drew the baroness, who willingly yielded herself up to her daughter's superior energy, with her out of the room.

A minute later the two ladies had left Waldenberg House, and half an hour afterwards the train carried them away from the city.