I closed the window, lowered the curtain, and went towards my bed. But the train of thought I had been following had escaped me, and I stopped and surveyed once more all the magnificence of the luxurious room.
"And to all this she has been accustomed from her childhood," I said to myself. "Upon such soft carpets has her dainty foot always trod; her hand has always touched fabrics of this voluptuous texture; she has always breathed this perfumed atmosphere. And if shameless selfishness should meet with such a fate as brutal arrogance--this house should fall as fell that older one--it would be hard, cruelly hard for her. The other called me once her George, her dragon-slayer. But she did not wish to be rescued, and I, still half a boy, could not have rescued her. With this one it might perhaps be otherwise; perhaps she would rather be rescued than perish--and in any event, I am no longer a boy."
And here my eye fell upon the little mangy seal-skin portmanteau which William Kluckhuhn had carefully placed at the foot of the bed whose voluminous curtains he had looped back, and I had to laugh aloud. For it was ridiculous, when I possessed hardly more than was contained in this little shabby wallet, a borrowed one at that, to talk of rescuing a house like this--to worry my brains about the fate of men who lived in a house like this! So I betook myself to bed, and, as I was just falling asleep, awakened myself again by laughing at something--I did not know what.
CHAPTER XI.
But when I awoke the next morning at early dawn I knew what it was. It was the embroidered ribbon which I had discovered the evening before in the bunch of flowers, and in which my fancy, half asleep, seemed to catch a delightful solution of all the enigmas that surrounded me here: but now, with senses wide awake, I saw nothing in it but a bit of sentimental silliness on the part of good-hearted Fräulein Duff. Still a feeling of disquiet seized me that compelled me to get up and dress myself hastily. A pair of sparrows that had their nest somewhere close at hand under the eaves began an animated conversation, and then stopped suddenly, finding that it was earlier than they had supposed.
So I found it myself: when I stepped to the window, with the ribbon in my hand, I could not distinguish the gold letters of the embroidery from the blue ground of the silk. I was vexed at myself for my childish curiosity. Had I come here to puzzle at riddles?
But I held the ribbon still in my hand as the sky began to grow brighter and the first rosy morning light tinged the eastern clouds. Already I could distinguish the garden beds from the gravelled walks beneath me, and in the beds even the yellow crocuses from the blue hyacinths, and now again I looked at the magic ribbon and could plainly read the motto I so well knew.
"Anyhow," I said to myself, "whether it be meant in earnest or in joke; whether it be the silly sentimentality of the duenna or a saucy jest of the maiden, it is a good word and I will lay it to heart. I will seek faithfully: and as for what I shall find, I will not puzzle my brains beforehand with guessing."
I took the ribbon with me, that it might not meet the prying eyes of William Kluckhuhn, and left the room. Passing through the roomy house, where darkness and silence still reigned through all the carpeted corridors and stairs, I sought and found a door leading from the lower hall into the open air.
It was a small side-door, like that which in the old house opened into the neglected back-yard. The back-yard had disappeared, of course, and everything else was so changed that I found myself in an entirely new and strange region. But I soon discovered that it was not merely that all things were here new and different, but that they were in perfect contrast to the old. While the ruinous and obviously uninhabitable old castle had towered aloft in great masses, bare of all ornament, the new building presented itself of moderate size but judiciously proportioned, evidently planned for comfort and convenience, and in a neat if not altogether pure style of architecture. The court-yard, with kitchen and other outbuildings which formerly had adjoined the castle, was now removed to the distance of a hundred yards or so, and the house had handsome grounds all around it, adorned with trees and shrubbery, evidently of recent planting. The intention was to separate a small blooming oasis, the centre of which was the house, from the rest of the ground devoted to cultivation--a pretty device, which would only require twenty years or so for its perfect realization.