“I do, you impertinent boy! And I shall not even try to present you to her.”
“According to all accounts, dear Princess, you should be the last to fear her, for in your society alone does she appear to find any pleasure. Who else can claim to know her? I have heard of no one.”
“Again I am assured of your fitness for the diplomatic career! As I told you, she was placed in my hands. I found her little in need of instruction. She seems to have been born with a sort of royal tact—this makes me believe that her parents were political refugees, at least. Perhaps they had disgraced themselves in other ways. Or it is possible that she is the illegitimate offspring of a prince and some pretty little actress who was bundled out of the country. Austrian archdukes have a mania for romantic marriages. N’importe! We have always remained friends of a sort. I rarely let a week pass without going to see her, and once in a while she comes to me alone and sits in my garden—and expresses her scorn of Sardou and her admiration of Ibsen! When I would give two or three of my best memories to hear how many lovers she has had, and what they were like. A woman can always be read through her lovers. Whatever Styr’s may have been, her one desire now is to be impersonal. I might as well invoke Brynhildr or Iseult. Perhaps nothing personal remains in that charming casket. Off the stage ivory, on the stage fire. It is all very odd. I have never been so intriguée in my life. Don’t try to know her. She might find you worth talking to—and then—who knows?”
Ordham flushed at the bare suggestion. “I am quite determined to know her.”
Excellenz noted that his eyes were less infantile than usual. “Well, later—I will take you to one of her routs,” she remarked indifferently, determined to do nothing of the sort. “I wonder where this remarkable concert is to take place.” She beckoned to the master of ceremonies, and was informed that the prima donna would stand on the Marienbrücke, the narrow bridge that spans the Pöllat at a dizzy height, and that the guests would listen from the windows of the Festsaal, or from the balcony of the throne room below, as suited their pleasure. His Majesty would occupy the balcony before his bedroom windows.
Ordham’s eyes flashed. “When?” he demanded.
“When the moon rises, sir. In less than an hour.”
IV
THE STYR
John Ordham stood alone on the balcony before the throne room. Princess Nachmeister, shivering and twinging, had gone over to her own comfortable apartment, where, wrapped in a wadded dressing-gown, she could sit at her window and lose nothing of the concert. Ordham, for some time, was sensitively conscious of an unquiet spirit just round the corner of the castle. He could not hear a footfall, a sigh, but he knew that the lonely King was trying to surrender his tormented soul to the golden flood pouring upward from the white figure on the Marienbrücke, perhaps to the unearthly beauty of the night.
The full moon mounted slowly above the three snow peaks of the distant Alps. It turned even the lakes to sheets of silver, threw forest and unpowdered mountain tops into hard black outline against the deep blue of a sky that seemed to throb with a thousand responsive notes: the golden notes of every human song-bird that Earth had lost. The wind was still. Save for the roar of the waterfall, there was not a sound in the world but that great voice that seemed to fill it.