Speaking throughout with great diffidence, but always in the gentle tones of a child that knows it has been naughty, she began by explaining that she had been to Scotland Yard, where a very charming man—the chief, I presume—had been most kind and sent her hither, where he promised her she would find help and consolation in her dreadful, dreadful trouble.
Encouraged by Lady Molly, she soon plunged into her narrative: a pathetic tale of her own frivolity and foolishness.
She was originally Lady Muriel Wolfe-Strongham, daughter of the Duke of Weston, and when scarce out of the schoolroom had met the Grand Duke of Starkburg-Nauheim, who fell in love with her and married her. The union was a morganatic one, the Grand Duke conferring on his English wife the title of Countess of Hohengebirg and the rank of Serene Highness.
It seems that, at first, the marriage was a fairly happy one, in spite of the bitter animosity of the mother and sister of the Grand Duke: the Dowager Grand Duchess holding that all English girls were loud and unwomanly, and the Princess Amalie, seeing in her brother’s marriage a serious bar to the fulfilment of her own highly ambitious matrimonial hopes.
“They can’t bear me, because I don’t knit socks and don’t know how to bake almond cakes,” said her dear little Serene Highness, looking up with tender appeal at Lady Molly’s grave and beautiful face; “and they will be so happy to see a real estrangement between my husband and myself.”
It appears that last year, whilst the Grand Duke was doing his annual cure at Marienbad, the Countess of Hohengebirg went to Folkestone for the benefit of her little boy’s health. She stayed at one of the Hotels there merely as any English lady of wealth might do—with nurses and her own maid, of course, but without the paraphernalia and nuisance of her usual German retinue.
Whilst there she met an old acquaintance of her father’s, a Mr. Rumboldt, who is a rich financier, it seems, and who at one time moved in the best society, but whose reputation had greatly suffered recently, owing to a much talked of divorce case which brought his name into unenviable notoriety.
Her Serene Highness, with more mopping of her blue eyes, assured Lady Molly that over at Schloss Starkburg she did not read the English papers, and was therefore quite unaware that Mr. Rumboldt, who used to be a persona grata in her father’s house, was no longer a fit and proper acquaintance for her.
“It was a very fine morning,” she continued with gentle pathos, “and I was deadly dull at Folkestone. Mr. Rumboldt persuaded me to go with him on a short trip on his yacht. We were to cross over to Boulogne, have luncheon there, and come home in the cool of the evening.”
“And, of course, something occurred to disable the yacht,” concluded Lady Molly gravely, as the lady herself had paused in her narrative.