Bennett peered down at the pale face at his side. He held a candle in his hand as they groped slowly forward in a tunnel that Cousin Fritz ascribed to the Romans. Beyond them gleamed another unsteady light, carried by Carl Eingen. Now and then they could hear a penetrating voice raised in song or lowered in soliloquy as Cousin Fritz guided them toward their goal.
The Princess Hilda and Fraulein Müller had laid aside their court attire and had donned peasant costumes, of a very antique cut, which Cousin Fritz had obtained from his collection of old-fashioned trumpery, a collection from which the social history of Hesse-Heilfels for several generations could have been reconstructed by an imaginative writer.
The princess looked up at Bennett, a merry gleam in her dark blue eyes:
“I’m tired, yes; but not of action. I am weary of imprisonment. I long to reach the end of this tunnel. I feel as though I were approaching the sunlight after being buried alive for centuries.”
“But, tell me,” he persisted, his voice low and vibrant, “will you never regret your decision? Think of what you have given up. When you donned that peasant’s dress you laid aside a future that shone with the splendors of high state. That simple cap upon your head replaces a queen’s diadem. The sacrifice, your highness, is more than I can ask.”
“Why will you tease me?” she cried with petulant playfulness. “When I put off my court dress, I gave up forever the title of ‘your highness.’ What has that title brought to me? Nothing but weariness and pain.”
Just beyond them she could see Carl Eingen with his arm around the waist of Fraulein Müller. “Do you think,” asked Hilda, her eyes dancing as they met Bennett’s, “do you think that Gretchen would wish to return to my court with the knowledge that Carl Eingen was forever an exile from the kingdom?”
Bennett trembled with a sensation of ecstatic triumph. His mind recalled the thought that had inspired him when he followed the Princess Hilda into the cellar on the night of the king’s overthrow. In this subterranean realm there would be no kings and princesses. They would all be fugitives, placed upon a plane of equality by the levelling power of misfortune. Beyond his wildest dreams, that thought had been prophetic. By no conscious effort upon his part, he had won the confidence, perhaps the love, of this woman at his side. The hand of sorrow had laid its grip upon her young heart, and in the hour of her misfortune she had looked at life with eyes that saw all things from a new point of view.
“It is strange,” she whispered as they stole forward through the damp and narrow passageway, “it is strange that I should feel for my old life no regret, no desire to return to the tawdry glories of a court. But do you know, Herr Bennett, I feel that I would rather die in this old cellar than go back to my people, to be stared at by the gaping crowds, to hear the murmur of their senseless chatter as they told each other the tale of my burial and resurrection. Ugh! The very thought of it is horrible.”
They hurried on in silence for a time.