“I thought of that, of course; but none of my servants know any of the Wass household.”
“Nor mine, probably. But I do my scheming through no such dangerous channels. The secret police is always at my service. By to-morrow night I shall have had an interview with the woman. If she has anything to reveal I shall extract it with the promise of a position in the Residenz; that is a bribe more potent than gold—which we will not use unless we must. As soon as I am in possession of the facts I shall act—you say he has vowed to do nothing rash for a week?”
“To be ill, if necessary. Fortunately she cannot storm the Legation.”
“Even so, we must act quickly. If the woman is really desperate, she will find some way to compromise him—and what more effective than a violent scene in the British Legation? It would be all over Munich in an hour. But, by all the saints,” Nachmeister crossed herself devoutly, “that scene she shall never make. We will baffle her before she has quite lost her patience.”
When Excellenz had bidden good-by to her guest she stood for a moment regarding the path with drawn brows. Had she engaged upon an enterprise to deliver the lamb from the panther to the tigress? In a moment she shook her head. She was a very wise old woman, and she recalled that Styr had made no apologies, no explanations. She had said nothing about disinterested friendship, taking a natural interest in a man so much younger than herself. Nachmeister had long outlived the folly of generalizing, of assuming that the same set of motives must govern the most diverse individuals. For the present, at least, Ordham was in no danger from the prima donna, who, no doubt, had lived her life, and would hardly waste her time playing upon the weakness of young men.
“But if I should be mistaken,” she thought grimly, “she too can be circumvented. Ordham must marry Mabel Cutting.”
XVI
THE IVORY TOWER OF STYR
Two days later Styr stood in the tower of her living room, awaiting Excellenz, who had sent her a succession of hasty notes. As always, when the river was full, she had the sensation of floating on the current of the lovely light green waters. The birds were singing in her garden and in the deep glades of the park. The Isar itself sang of the glaciers and snow peaks that gave it birth. From the fields, beyond the heavy trees, came the dainty uplifting scent of newly mown hay. Usually this scene of sylvan isolation fed the poetry of her secret life, and in these morning hours, when the park was deserted, she might people it with satyrs and dryads, even with Valkyrs, if she wished. But to-day it seemed only the romantic annex to the exciting drama into which she had precipitated herself; and it required but a slight effort to conjure up the gorgeously dressed little butterfly with her ugly old soul in her desperate face, and the perplexed, doubtless terrified, young man, dragging his feet beside her.
Styr was by no means in a philosophic frame of mind. She fully realized that this license in which she had indulged for the first time in many years, this luxury of active interest in a human being, other than a student or a chorus girl in distress, would lead far—unless she promptly locked the gates again. Already her brain was showing a disposition to offer hospitality to more than one of the great interests with which the world palpitated. Yesterday she had been on the point of buying a newspaper. If Ordham continued to call, they would inevitably discuss all interests under the sun; books alone would never occupy them; one by one the atrophies in her uncommonly complete nature would disintegrate, disappear. And she had lived the inner life so completely, so jealously, almost as isolated in her villa by the Isar as had it been one of those schlosses on its lonely peak that decorate the German landscape! That sense of unviolated liberty! It had at times lifted her spirit to that exalted pitch to which music raises the emotional capacity of speech. There are more forms of happiness than one in this world, and Margarethe Styr had solved the greatest problem of woman’s existence: she was quite happy, and not because she had found the man of her heart, but because she had eliminated man from her existence altogether. Whether Nature, that inexorable slave-driver, would have permitted her to dwell in peace with art and her soul had not circumstances first made all men hateful to her, was beside the question. But although she had found happiness, it was at the expense of far more than the one dream to which most women cling until the last of their days. She had denied her mind much that it naturally craved, and she had suppressed those superficial frivolous instincts which have their own appetites. She often longed to dress (and show herself), in marvellous Paris frocks, and, never before having known women with whom she cared to associate (save briefly on Atlantic steamers), she would have derived much honest enjoyment from long gossips with these friendly sophisticated women of Munich; she would have liked to know and discuss all the little comedies, tragedies, diverting weaknesses, in the lives of her new compatriots. But she had not dared, and the results she had achieved by her fidelity to the life long since prescribed by her too enlightened brain, encouraged her to persist. She half resolved that, having done her obvious duty by a fellow-creature, she would withdraw from further intercourse with him at once. Better snap this link while her surfaces were merely rippled, not drift on until all that was feminine in her was caught in the net of the world again, and this ideal existence destroyed.
It was at this point in her meditations that Princess Nachmeister was shown into the gallery, and she went hastily through the arch to meet her.