I swung round on him instantly.
"I am glad there is a man to deal with. How dare you presume to meddle in my affairs, Baron Heckscher?"
"Really—but how shall I call you? Not the Prince any longer, I presume? Then what?" and he regarded me with an insolent smile.
"His Majesty the Emperor, within the last few minutes, has been good enough to call me by my own name—the Count von Rudloff. That may be a precedent good enough for even you to follow."
He stared at me in blank astonishment. The fact that I had been closeted with the Emperor might mean everything to him, and at the thought all other considerations were dwarfed. I enjoyed his discomfiture. All his insolence disappeared.
"You do not believe what he says, surely?" cried the vindictive old lady when he made no immediate answer, for he stood in great perplexity what course to take toward me.
"You will see you cannot remain here in the face of the baroness's attitude," he said to me at length, with an air that was half truculent and half deprecatory.
I laughed.
"I see you are vastly disconcerted to hear that I have had an audience with his Majesty, and have left him under circumstances that augur ill for you; and well you may be," I added meaningly. "You dare to meddle in my matters at a time when you will need all your wits to save your own from shipwreck. But I have had enough of you, and of this folly. I now demand in the name of the Emperor to see the Countess Minna von Gramberg, and if you attempt to stop me," I said sternly to the Baroness Gratz, "the consequences may be far more grave than you think."
Her anger and dislike of me gave her plenty of courage, however, and she still set me at defiance, abusing me for an impostor and a cheat; and when I declared that if they did not take my message to Minna I would myself go straight to her rooms, she planted herself in front of the door and dared me to attempt to leave it for that purpose, and vowed she would call the servants if I would not go away.