CHAPTER III
When I reached the Schloss Graben I stood a moment to reconnoitre, and found myself in the same still, cobble-paved road where I had met Anna a few hours before. On my left rose the high garden-walls overtopped by a web of bare interlacing branches, and over that again the palace windows and its mansard roof; on my right the row of silent brown or red stone houses, well-to-do and snugly private, with beaten iron bars to the low windows and great scallop shells over the doors. This was the house down the stone steps of which my wife’s servant had come this morning, and this was number ten. Of course! How clear it was all becoming to me! I dashed the sweat from my brow, for I had come like a lamplighter. Then I tramped up the three steps and again halted a second. How quiet the house was!
But I should soon put some bustle into it, I said to myself, and smiled. I plied the knocker till the sleeping echoes awoke, and I hung on the iron rope of the bell till the shrill protest of the jingling peal rang out into the street. There came other sounds from within as of a flutter in a dovecot. Doors were opened and shut precipitately. A window was thrown back above my head; there was a vision of a white-capped face thrust forward and withdrawn; and, indeed, like rabbits from a warren, most, I believe, of the idle servants in the street were popping out to see whence could proceed such unholy clangour.
The door before me was at length cautiously and slowly opened, and through the aperture the frightened, rose-red face of a maid looked out at me.
I saw that I had been incautious, and therefore addressed her with a suave mock courtesy. Indeed, now that the actual moment had come I felt stealing over me a very deadly calm.
“Forgive me,” said I, “my wench, for disturbing you thus rudely. I see I have alarmed you. These are, however, but old soldiers’ ways, which I trust your good mistress will pardon to an old friend. Your mistress is, if I mistake not, now the doctor’s lady. But when I knew her she was Fräulein Ottilie Pahlen.”
The girl’s mouth had, during this long speech, which in my new mood came glibly enough to my lips, become broadened into a grin. There are very few girls in the Empire, I have been told, that will not feel mollified towards a soldier.