"Why did I marry him?" returned the Burgravine, sharply. "Ah, he was very different then, my dear! The monster! how he deceived me! Do you think I should ever have consented if I had not known that he was King Jerome's minister; if he had not promised me that we should live at Cassel; if I had not been told that one was more gay at Cassel now than at Paris itself? And honourably I was served, was I not? Ten days at Cassel, while there was scarce a cat stirring, the King called away by the Emperor, then snatched off to this place, this bald, hateful eagle's crag, at the first hint of any gaiety. Men talk of their honour, my love—a big word behind which they can play any trick upon us poor women their humour may prompt." Her voice broke shrilly. Then she added, with sudden calmness: "And if I had had a silver groschen to my name, you may imagine 'tis not old Wellenshausen's second wife that I should be—but some fine young man's first one. Sidonia, how unfair is fate!" She looked enviously at the girl. "There are you, with all your money, who will never have a suitable notion of what to do with it, while I—I——" She snapped two taper fingers together sharply and twisted a dear little plump shoulder well-nigh free of the fashionable Viennese robe, which looked so oddly out of place in the mediæval severity of the tower room.
There was silence, while Sidonia reflected. The Burgravine had a way of opening strange perspectives before the young mind that had hitherto known but the simplest and straightest outlook on life. Wonderful customs had the new mistress brought to the old Burg—odd fads of fashion, new hours of meals, new liveries and unknown demands on the servants' attention. A prisoner, she assumed supreme authority within the limits of her prison. It sometimes seemed as if the very stones in the old wall were echoing surprise. Sidonia, who had run wild within them, near seventeen years of happy unexacting childhood, found herself frequently marvelling at a code of morality so startling in its novelty as to range beyond her judgment. She felt that she could as little fit herself to this new aunt's view of existence, as her modest country limbs to one of those outrageous garments of Viennese mode, over which the Burgravine could sigh a whole morning through in rapture and regret—lamenting, with the voluble aid of Mademoiselle Eliza, her French maid, the opportunities lost in this God-forsaken corner of the world.
"And pray," said Bluebeard's wife, after a pause (never a very long one with her, for, if Sidonia had the gift of silence which belongs to all creatures who have lived much with nature, her Aunt Betty possessed it not at all), "and pray, how many days is it since your uncle took the road for Cassel, a-bursting with hypocritical sighs of farewell?"
"I don't know," said Sidonia, starting from her dream. "Ten days?"
"Ten days!" The words were echoed in a high pitch of indignation.
"Three weeks, then," amended the girl, hastily. "I really don't know; time goes so fast."
"Time goes so fast! Oh, you—you...!" Cherry lips of scorn babbled vainly in search of fitting epithet. "You—you're his own niece!"
Yet as life would have been distinctly duller were she to quarrel outright with Sidonia, the Burgravine quickly turned the batteries of her wrath to the old direction.
"Little did I think on that day, when my father, away in our dear Austrian home, bade me hasten to the great salon and pour out coffee for the gentleman from Hanover who had come to buy our horses—little did I think what lay in store for me! 'You must smile on him, child,' said my mother; 'he is an old nobleman, very rich; and if your father sells well, it may mean a month in Vienna for you!' Ach, heavens!" said the Burgravine, "think of me, my Sidonia, smiling, in my innocence, on him—on him! And who was bought and sold? It was poor Betty!"
"I think it is very wrong of Uncle Ludo," asserted Sidonia, severely, a flush rising to her sunburnt cheek. "Why, since he has married you, will he not trust you?"