. . . Something else getting "stopped"! The envoy looks.
But lo, she is alive again! This time she is in distant Northern lands, or was, for now (and, strangely, we thank Heaven for it) we know not where she is. Wherever it is, she is happy. She has been saved, as by flame; has been snatched from her Duke, and borne away to joy and love—by an old gipsy-woman! No lover came for her: it was Love that came, and because she knew Love at first sight and sound, she saved herself.
The old huntsman of her husband's Court tells the story to a traveller whom he calls his friend.
"What a thing friendship is, world without end!"
It happened thirty years ago; the huntsman and the Duke and the Duchess all were young—if the Duke was ever young! He had not been brought up at the Northern castle, for his father, the rough hardy warrior, had been summoned to the Kaiser's court as soon as his heir was born, and died there,
"At next year's end, in a velvet suit . . .
Petticoated like a herald,
In a chamber next to an ante-room
Where he breathed the breath of page and groom,
What he called stink, and they perfume."
The "sick tall yellow Duchess" soon took the boy to Paris, where she belonged, being (says our huntsman) "the daughter of God knows who." So the hall was left empty, the fire was extinguished, and the people were railing and gibing. But in vain they railed and gibed until long years were past, "and back came our Duke and his mother again."
"And he came back the pertest little ape
That ever affronted human shape;
Full of his travel, struck at himself.
You'd say, he despised our bluff old ways?
—Not he!"
—for in Paris it happened that a cult of the Middle Ages was in vogue, and the Duke had been told there that the rough North land was the one good thing left in these evil days: