We were speaking French. I bowed low, fearing to spoil it all by another word. The Princess stretched out her hand and I kissed the back of her glove, and then I had the privilege of also kissing Miss Ottilie’s sunburnt, scratched, and rather grimy bare little paw, which she, with affected dignity, thrust forward for my salute.
The carriage drove away, and as it went I mind me how the nurse looked after me with a darkling anxiety, and also how as I stalked homewards through the evening glow, with my body-guard tramping steadily behind me, I kept recalling the sound of the four gracious words with which the Princess had consented to accept of my hospitality.
She had said, it is true, “Che n’ai bas beur,” but none the less was the memory a delicate delight to my heart the whole night through.
CHAPTER IV
I had questioned János on our homeward way concerning my new acquaintances; but the fellow was so ill-disposed by nature to external gossip, so wholly occupied with the minute fulfilment of his daily task, which was to watch over the well-being and safety of his master, that he had gathered no acquaintance with affairs outside his province. With the head factor, however, whom I sent for immediately after supper, I was more fortunate. This man, Karl Schultz, is Saxon-born, and consequently one of the few of my numerous dependants with whom I can hold converse here. It was but natural that among the peasantry the advent of strangers, evidently of wealth and distinction, should have created some stir, and it is Schultz’s business, among many other things, to know what the peasantry talk about; although in this more contented part of the world this sort of knowledge is not of such importance as among our neighbours the Poles. Schultz, therefore, was aware of the arrival of the ladies, likewise of the rumour of smallpox, which had, so he informed me, not only driven all the servants out of the Castle of Schreckendorf, but spread something like a panic over the country-side. Tidings had also come to his ears that two gentlemen—one of them suffering from the dreadful malady (doubtless the poor Chamberlain)—had been abandoned in their carriage by their postillions and servants at the small village of Kittlitz, some forty miles from here, just over the Lusatian border. He corroborated, in fact, greatly to my joy, all that I had been told; for I had had an uneasy fear upon me, now and again, as I marched home in the evening chill, that I had been too ready to lend credence to a romantic and improbable story. But, better than all, Schultz, having felt a special curiosity concerning visitors from his own country, had, despite the attempt to keep the matter secret, contrived to satisfy himself to the full as to their identity. And thus did I, to my no small triumph, from the first day easily penetrate the ill-guarded incognita.
The beautiful wandering Princess was the only daughter of the old reigning house of Lausitz-Rothenburg; and it was from Georgenbrunn, where she had been on a visit to her aunt the Dowager Duchess of Saxony, that the second outbreak of the epidemic had driven her to take refuge with the Countess Schreckendorf in our neighbourhood.
Vastly satisfied with my discovery, and not a little fluttered by the impending honour, I made elaborate preparations the next day against the coming of such guests. We rifled the gardens, the greenhouses, and the storerooms, and contrived a collation the elegance of which taxed our resources to the uttermost.
Not in peasant garb did I start at noon upon my romantic quest, but in my finest riding suit of mulberry cloth embroidered with green and silver, (of what good auguries did I not think when I remembered that green and white were actually the colours of the Maison de Lusace, and that in this discreet manner I could wear on my sleeve the mark of a delicate homage?), ruffles of finest Mechlin fluttered on my throat and wrists, and a hat of the very latest cock was disposed jauntily at the exact angle prescribed by the Vienna mode.