“It all began by a freak of her Highness, ...” and with the echo of them whirling as it were in a mad dance through my brain to the sound of thundering cataracts, a whirlpool of flame spreading before my eyes, I fell with a crash, as it seemed, into a yawning black abyss.
When I again came to myself the cold air was blowing in upon me through the open casement, and I was stretched full length on a hard floor, in what seemed a perfect deluge of the very strongest vinegar I have ever smelt. At one side of me knelt my hostess, her healthy face blanched almost beyond recognition. On the other, between my wandering gaze and the window, swam the visage of the maid, eyes and mouth as round as horror could make them, but with cheeks the ruddiness of which, it seemed, no emotion could mitigate.
Both my kind attendants gave a cry as I opened my eyes.
“He is recovering, Trude,” said Madam Lothner (to call her now by her proper name).
“Ah! gracious lady,” answered the wench in an unctuous tone of importance; “his face is still as red as the beet I was pickling when I heard you scream—would God the master were here to bleed him. Shall I send into the town to seek him?”
“God forbid!” cried her mistress, in a hasty and peremptory tone. “No, I tell you, Trude, he is recovering, and I have not been a doctor’s wife these six weeks for nothing. The flush is fading even as I look at him. See thee here, fetch me some of the cordial water.”
I do not know how far her six weeks’ association with the medical luminary, her husband, had profited Madam Lothner. I have since been told that her administration of cordial, immediately upon such a blood stroke to the head as mine, ought really to have finished me off. But as it happened it did me a vast deal of good, and I was soon able to shake off the giddiness, the sickness, and the general confusion of my system.
With recovered wits it gradually became apparent to me that while Madam Lothner continued to ply me with every assistance she could think of, regarding me with eyes in which shone most kindly and womanly benevolence, her chief anxiety nevertheless was to get rid of me with all possible despatch.
But I was not likely to give up such an opportunity. The chaos in my mind consequent upon the unexpected revelation, and its disastrous physical effect, was such as to render me no very coherent inquisitor. Nevertheless, the determination to learn all that this woman could tell me about my wife rose predominant above the seething of my thoughts.
Ottilie, my wife, was Ottilie the Princess after all! I had felt the truth before it had been told me. But whilst they removed an agonising supposition, these struck me nevertheless as strange unhomely tidings which opened fresh difficulties in my path—difficulties the full import of which were every second more strongly borne upon me. Ottilie the Princess!... Everything was changed, and the relentless attitude of the Princess bore a very different aspect to the mere resentment of the injured wife. When my letters had been flung back in my face, when I had been kidnapped and expelled the country, it had been then by her orders. She had sent to demand the divorce. Who had set the bravo on my track? By whose wish had my life been so basely, so persistently, attempted? By hers—Ottilie, the Princess? A Princess who had repented of her freak, whose pride, whose reputation, had suffered from the stigma of an unequal match.