“Oh, that,” said I with conviction, “you need not tell me!”
She seemed vastly tickled by the frankness of this my first observation after such long listening, and had to throw herself back on the hay, and laugh her laugh out, before she could sit up again and continue:
“So, as I was saying, I saw the departure. The doctor looked livid with fright, and as for the Herr Chamberlain, he was muffled up in blankets and coats, but I got a glimpse of his face for all that, and it was spotted all over with great red spots!”
The Princess pushed her hat off her forehead, and turned upon her lady-in-waiting a face that had grown almost livid.
“Pooh!” said the lady-in-waiting; “your Highness is over-nervous; ’tis now a good fortnight since the old gentleman left us, and if you or I were to have had it we should have shown symptoms long ago. Well, sir, to continue: our worthy hostess the Countess was in a fine fume, as you can fancy, between duty and natural affection, terror and anxiety. She was by way of keeping the whole matter a dead secret both from us and from the servants; but the fumigations she set going in the house, the airing, the dosing, together with her own frantic demeanour, would have been enough to enlighten even obtuser wits than ours. With one exception all our servants fled, and all hers. She had to replace them from a distance. The anger, the responsibility, the agitation generally, were too much for her years and constitution; and three days ago—in the act (as we discovered) of writing to the Duchess for instructions, for she had expected the Court doctor would have sent on special messengers to the courts of her Highness’s relatives, and was in a perfect fever at receiving no news—as I say, in the very act of writing evidently to despatch another post herself, the poor old lady was struck with paralysis, and was carried speechless to bed. Now, Monsieur Jean Nigaud, you English are a practical race. Do you not agree with me that since the Lord, in His wisdom, decreed that it was good for the Countess’s soul to have a little physical affliction, it could not have happened at a better moment for us? I know that her Highness disapproves of what she calls my heartlessness, but I cannot but rejoice in our freedom.
“The Countess is recovering, but she won’t speak plain for a long time to come. Meanwhile we are free—free as air! Our only personal attendant is my own—my old nurse. You shall see her. She speaks but little, but she adores me. But as we cannot understand a word of the language spoken here, and the resources of this district are few, I will own to you, her Highness has found it a little dull, in spite of her lady-in-waiting’s well-known gift of entertainment, up to to-day.”
She threw me an arch look as she spoke, but the Princess, rising with the dignity peculiar to her, conveyed her sense that the joke had this time been carried a little too far.
The shadows were lengthening, the wind had fallen, it was an hour of great peace and beauty in the land. The Princess took a few steps towards the road where waited the carriage; I ran forward and presumed to offer her my arm, which she very graciously, but not without a blush, accepted. The maid of honour, springing to her feet, followed us, tripping over the rough ground, with a torn frock and her hat hanging on her neck by its ribbons. I mind me well how the chasseurs of the equipage stared to see their lady come leaning on the arm of a peasant. How they stared, too, at the unabashed, untidy apparition of the lady-in-waiting! But she, humming a little song as she went, seemed the last in the world to care what impression she made.
As we neared the coach, a tall woman all in black, with a black shawl over her black hair, jet-black eyes, staring blankly out of a swarthy face, descended from it. She looked altogether so dark and forbidding a vision that I gave a start when I saw her thus unexpectedly. She seemed a sort of blot on the whole smiling, sunny landscape. But as Mademoiselle Ottilie drew near, the woman turned to her, her whole face breaking pleasantly into a very eloquence of silent, eager love.