The mind of Burgravine Betty was a weather-vane, gilt and fantastically wrought, that veered in ever contrary directions, as blew the wind of her mood. Of constant purposes she knew but one, that of her own pleasure. But what course of action would best minister to this was a matter of perpetual indecision. She had amused herself with rare gusto, after months of enraging dulness, with the handsome stranger who had so impertinently sought the hospitality of Wellenshausen. And though a sermon from that crazy person the fiddler—no doubt a gentleman in masquerade, or Betty was no judge of such point—had left her momentarily abashed, sentimental over rocking cradles and wifely duty and such-like unprofitable conventions, the next morning the little shining vane was setting straight for the soft west of dalliance, and she fully meant to cheat her Bluebeard by as complete an affaire de coeur as circumstances would permit. Nay, while apparently taking virtuous farewell over night of the unexpected kinsman, she had already planned heaven knows what secret assignations, palpitating meetings in the shadow of the ruins, descents into the forest-land and green picnics in discreet glades, yea, even excursions into the deepest of the woods. But the secret departure of the degenerate Kielmansegg and the unwelcome appearance of a tactless husband had shattered these agreeable projects. And Betty's vane had flown to north again: cold virtue in an injured wife, most wrongfully suspected. Next, by her husband's odious tricks of suspicion, thrown once again into the company of good looks and young manhood, what a succession of small hot and cold breezes kept the weather-cock shifting east, south-east and south, back to west again! Positively driven to elope, by sheer dread of the fate of Desdemona under her own cushions, what better choice could be made than this Steven von Waldorff-Kielmansegg—rich, high-born, and so vastly personable? And in Vienna, these times, people scarcely could look askance at a divorcée.
Yet, a rainy night, and some more of that ubiquitous fantastic musician's nonsense, and hey for a new quarter of the compass again! She could scarcely, however, regret the chill wind of reason that had shifted her purpose at the last hour—a night in the oubliette, even with a charming companion, coincided by no means with Betty's ideas of enjoyment. And then, not having the knowledge of the murderous locality acquired by that climbing kid Sidonia, she and Count Steven might well be swirling, this sunny moment, in undesired comradeship under the black waters of the pit. Betty shuddered in every fibre of her ease-loving body.
Now, during these days of Sidonia's brief betrothal, the Burgravine was in a more than usually undecided and dissatisfied frame of mind. Nevertheless, her mood pointed steadily for Cassel. As a Bluebeard, there could be no doubt of it, the Burgrave's occupation was gone. He was abject under his Betty's sandal. And Betty's foot, for so little a one, could stamp curiously hard. Henceforth the husband who would have compassed her murder had (the Burgravine fondly believed) no choice but to be his wife's slave. Dared he but thwart the smallest of her wishes, she knew well now how to reduce him to obedience. Cassel it was to be. Cassel, so soon as this absurd wedding was over.
A very sulky shoulder did the Burgravine turn upon the whole ridiculous affair. An errant squire of dames, dull, undiscriminating, ill-mannered youth, who, when a Betty was within the same horizon, could have the poor taste even to look at a Sidonia; to take up a hoyden, sun-burnt as a peasant child, and with as much idea of the refinements of life as the village chits with whom she was wont to make so free! A pretty show would she make of herself in Vienna!
The Burgravine had a curious glitter in those eyes of hers, that generally astonished the stranger by their flower-blue in her olive face; yet, withal, she was full of smiles. Was it not the wedding-day of the Baroness Sidonia, her husband's niece?
Never had the Burg, on its dominating height, seen a bride go forth from its "honour gate" to the ancestral chapel with so little ceremony. Great carouse had there been at the castle on similar occasion, loud ringing of joy bells, and belching of powder smoke from the ramparts, wide flaunting of the old blue and yellow banner over the belfry. High folk, thickly gathered in Wellenshausen's Burg, had drunk deep on the height; low folk in Wellenshausen Dorf, on the plain, had vied successfully with their betters. The glories of the weddings at Wellenshausen had been retailed from father to son. Yet this last bride of the house, heiress as she was to most of its honours, slipped from her chamber to the altar-steps with scarce the tinkling of the chapel-bell to mark her passage, and only the cries of one or two village children, hot from their scramble up the crag, to acclaim her, the smiles, tearful, motherly and portentous, of the forest-mother to brace her for the great plunge into the unknown. Such was the haste and privacy with which the compact was carried out. The imperious bridegroom had willed it so. Nevertheless, if ungraced by pomp and unwitnessed by honoured guests, the ceremony was impressive enough in the simplicity and earnestness of the two chiefly concerned.
So thought the musician, who knelt hidden, all in the dust, between the tomb of the greatest of the old Wellenshausens and the chapel wall. He had refused the post of honoured guest, the prominent seat prepared by Sidonia herself, the proffer of Steven's dark suit and purple stockings.
"I shall be with you all the same, my children," he had promised them. And from his place of concealment nothing escaped his watchful anxiety. It did his heart good to catch a glimpse of the bridegroom's face as it was turned upon the bride. Never, it seemed to him, had Sidonia looked more completely the child. She went through the ordeal with a blithe serenity; he knew that the music he had made for her that morning, at the misty dawn, was singing in her heart.
At the sight of her golden head under the bridal veil, the vagabond closed his restless eyes for a minute. An inner vision of poignant tenderness rose upon him. "O Love, O Death, how the wheel turns with us!"
To the bowing snuff-coloured notary from Helmstadt, the Burgrave in his glittering Chancellor's uniform was a very awe-inspiring person: he quailed under the unblinking gaze of His Excellency, beneath the jealous eyebrows. Far indeed was he from suspecting that the merest glint of the Burgravine's blue orbs—so youthful, so affable an apparition to the dusty man of law—sufficed to make Wellenshausen, the terrible, quail in his tall boots.