"Madam," answered the count, bowing, "I intend to take up my abode in Cassel—at the Aigle Impérial. Therefore there will be no difficulty about my address. But let me remark that annulments are not easily concluded without the consent of both parties."
He closed the door between them upon these words.
"He does not love me—he never loved me!" said Sidonia to her bursting heart. "It was all pride!"
The other unworthy suspicions, which Betty had so subtly instilled, could not live in her soul after having come again under the glance of Steven's eye. But she had pride too, her woman's pride, and it showed her what she had to do, even though it killed her.
"O Geiger-Onkel," cried the poor child, "what have you brought me to! Even you have abandoned me!"
Betty's arrows, shot at spiteful random, occasionally hit a truer mark than she herself suspected. When, in her tower prison, she had petulantly averred that the Burgrave would certainly keep in his own hands the choosing of Sidonia's husband (and for very good reasons!) she had unconsciously struck the gold. The heiress's guardian did not intend, if it could be helped, to have his accounts examined. Hence, apart from the humiliating pressure put upon him, against which his elementary violence rebelled, the young Austrian was the last person the Burgrave would have desired as nephew-in-law. There was a relentlessness in the young man's eye and a clear penetration, which, whenever the Burgrave remembered them, sent uncomfortable chills through his frame. True, Count Kielmansegg had never breathed one syllable on the subject of his bride's fortune; but this very silence struck the Chancellor as the more ominous.
"I shall have his lawyers on top of me before I know where I am," he had many a time growled in those sullen days that followed Sidonia's betrothal, chiefly at those hours of conscience's activity, the dull hours before the dawn, when the night's potations had ceased to stimulate.
It was not that Wellenshausen had ever been consciously dishonest. In his fine masculine, Germanic way, when he had put large sums of his ward's money to his own uses, he had felt himself almost in the right. Was it not against nature that mere females should have advantages over the male? Indeed, he had scarcely taken the trouble to make memoranda of the expenditure: in Jerome's kingdom, especially in financial matters, it was never customary to waste time upon details, and the sense of impending catastrophe, more particularly of late, had increased the sense of the value of the fleeting moment.
Since his second marriage the Burgrave had certainly taken both hands to Sidonia's treasure. There was the loan to his Royal Master; a matter of high diplomacy! It was well to have a lien over so slippery a patron. And, besides, it would be all to the child's advantage, no doubt, later on. Practically an investment! There were Betty's pearls.... Well, in these uncertain times, might not jewels also be looked upon as an investment? none the worse for having gleamed so charmingly on Betty's shoulders!
And there was this, and there was that.... In the small hours above mentioned, memory became inconveniently active. Once or twice the Burgrave had sat up in his feather-bed to wipe a clammy forehead; in truth, he did not know how much the heiress of Wellenshausen, apart from the lands, was heiress to. But there was a certain document of his late brother's, referring, in very precise terms, to the Fideicommission, to the trust.