“It shall be as you wish, Princess Hilda,” he said sadly. “But tell me, is the crisis more threatening than I had feared?”
“I do not know,” she answered, a melancholy smile playing across her face. “The king is driven to his wit’s ends, and to-night he had news from below that fills him with consternation. As you know, his brother, my uncle Wilhelm, plots for his dethronement. His emissaries throughout the kingdom are fostering discontent. The recent defalcations have emboldened the schemers and the feeling against the king is on the increase. There is only one thing that can save us, Herr Bennett. If it is noised abroad in the morning that you have left Hesse-Heilfels, never to return, his majesty’s subjects will take heart and rally to his support. Am I not right?”
Her appeal to his judgment pleased Bennett. Furthermore, he knew that the conclusion she had reached was sound. Nevertheless, the sacrifice he was about to make was greater than she could understand. That a Yankee adventurer should dare to harbor for a princess of the house of Schwartzburg a feeling akin to love was a possibility that, he well knew, she could not comprehend.
“I fear,” he said gloomily, “that you are not wrong, Princess Hilda, in looking upon me as the Jonah who is sinking the ship of state. It is well, perhaps, that I should go at once. But give me leave to say that in obeying your commands I feel a joy that is begotten of my power to repair in part the wrongs that I have done to you, and a sorrow that springs from the thought that I shall never look upon your face again.”
Impulsively he stepped forward, and bending his knee kissed the cold hand she held out to him. Then he arose, gazed for a moment at her white, sad face, and turned and left the hall.
How he reached his apartments, Bennett never knew. That he groped for many minutes in a darkness that seemed eternal, bruising himself in his efforts to find the moonlit corridor, he remembered later on; but the bitterness of his renunciation—fantastic though his love might be—was the one feeling that dominated him during that midnight passage through unknown hallways and up shadow-haunted stairs.
As he glanced around his bedchamber a conviction came over him that it had been entered since his departure. He had found the oak doors closed, as he had left them, but there was something in the appearance of the apartment—he could not say just what it was—that convinced him that some one had paid him a visit during his absence. He approached the bed and pulled aside the curtains. Upon one of the pillows a piece of note-paper had been pinned. Seizing it nervously, Bennett hurried to a window, through which the moonlight was still streaming. Scrawled in pencil, the paper bore the following lines:
“Come to the king at once when you return. He is in grave danger, and so are you. This is not a jest.
Cousin Fritz.”