“I am glad,” he said, “to find something surviving to your sense of duty.”
Von Gastein made no answer. He ought not; he could not, indeed. That sense of warring emotions hurt him like a violent indigestion.
The King, for some minutes, condescended to speak no more, but sat looking out of the window upon the darkening flats and the white ribbon of the road reeling under him. What was in his mind? He had always declared, for some reason, that he would not long survive his wife; and she had died six months ago. Had he somehow cheated Fate—or might he have cheated it had he remained in England? This was his first visit to his patrimony since her death. Her death, her released spirit—turn the coach!
No, his beloved Herrenhausen! The stout little Guelph was no coward for all his love of life and good-living. A murrain on this old wives’ trash of spectres and premonitions! He glanced at the figure opposite—it sat up rigid and grey like a signpost—and, with a scowl, looked out of the window again.
Thirty-two years—a woman of sixty, and she had been a fresh, blooming young wife of twenty-eight when he had consigned her to her living death! Much water, as they said in England, had flowed under London Bridge during that interval—the highways of life had been paved and repaved. Thirty-two years! The Schloss was a dead, dreary place, situated in a dead, dreary country—a mere lonely manor-house in the wilds, good enough for a month’s stay; but—thirty-two years! Gott in Himmel! And she had been vivacious, worldly, sparkling with the glory of being and doing when he had last seen her!
A vision of the castle, as he had known it once or twice in the old, far-off days, rose before him. He saw again the leagues of flat marshland which surrounded it, the reedy river crawling by its walls, the grey alders shivering in the wind, and the wheeling of lonely plovers. He saw the sad towers, the cold, undecorated rooms, the windows looking out upon the lifeless waste of road. The road! the livid unfruitful highway, upon which, for hours at a time, it had been said, dry burning eyes had been set, despairing for the mercy, the deliverance, which never came! For thirty-two years! God in heaven! while the frost of age slowly settled on the beautiful eyes, the deep black hair, the breaking heart! With a writhe, as of physical suffering, the old man turned from his window.
“The life was dull at Schloss Ahlden?” he said.
“Dull, sire.”
The correct, impassive attitude of the Captain maddened while it half cowed him. For a minute he held his breath—only to release it in a sudden question, unexpected, astounding:
“In your eyes, soldier, she was innocent?”