“Dictate it to me in pure German and I will learn it.”
“I would not pollute my lips. Sit up and say after me: ‘I am a silly young English puppy, who should be striding through the Englischergarten reciting German verbs aloud when I am dawdling in bed like a scented harlot—’ ”
“Oh! oh! I shall not. How shocking of you! Mein liebes Fräulein!” And he stared at her so incredulously that she felt uncomfortable.
“Well, you deserve to have harsh things said to you,” she growled, “and you would demoralize the vocabulary of a saint. Also! I shall converse with you no more. Conjugate the verb ‘arbeiten,’ and then read aloud three pages of Wallenstein. If you mispronounce a word, it shall be four, and there will be two more verbs. Sit up!”
He meekly obeyed her; and when she had stalked out he hastened to the tennis court and played until luncheon.
That evening Fräulein Lutz, sitting alone in her musty little flat, her spectacles astride her nose, muttering aloud over the notes she had graciously been permitted to cull from the royal archives, became the astounded recipient of an immense bunch of violets. They were royal purple in colour and wet with what might have been the dew of the Riviera, whence they came. But they were quite scentless. If she suspected the donor she made no sign, and on the following morning was more than commonly snappish. But the wide streamers of purple satin ribbon which held the violets together decorated her best bonnet till the last of her days.
XX
ISOLDE
The opera house, notwithstanding its great parquet and five tiers almost encircling the auditorium, holding some twenty-two hundred people, was always well filled; but Ordham had never seen it as crowded as to-night. There had been an official announcement that the King would honour the season’s last performance of Tristan und Isolde, and the blue lights were burning all over the house, softening its classic severity into the mysterious twilight of some vast sea grotto whose surges held captive and coloured the rays of the moon. Of course, at the last moment the King would change his royal mind; everybody felt sure of that; yet, so obstinate is hope, even society had turned out, satisfied to honour Styr, at least, before departing for the country. The boxes beside the stage, and at the back, flanking the King’s (which rose from the balkon to the last of the galleries), always reserved for royalties, their households and guests, were generally empty. To-night they were filled, and, with the front row of the fashionable balkon, gave the house a smarter appearance than usual; the good hausfrau, genuine lover of all the arts as she was, never thought of wearing anything but her street frock, consisting at this time of a skirt, overskirt, and basque—whose points stood upright, back and front. Her daughter, perchance, enlivened the useful shade of her costume by a bit of pink or blue tulle about the turned-in neck of her basque. The good man was shabby and comfortable in his business suit. Had it not been for the liberal patronage of officers, the parkett would have presented a dreary expanse, and even the fashionable women, unless the court was to be present, seldom thought the opera worthy of full dress. To-night, however, there were many bare necks and fine gowns, jewels and feathers, in the balkon and loges, and even in the front rows of the parkett, which many, Ordham among them, preferred as affording a better view of the performers. The orchestra, under its great conductor, Lévy, never fretted the most sensitive eardrum.
Few sit until the last bell has rung, and Ordham stood with the rest, his back to the stage, viewing what to him was always an interesting sight, and feeling so blithe and happy in his regained freedom, his mother’s promise, received that morning, to persuade his creditors to hold their peace until after his examinations, the flutter of anticipation which he always enjoyed when about to hear Styr sing one of her great rôles, that long after, when he sat in this opera house for the last time in his life, he recalled that night and his boyish spirits, and wondered if the world had remodelled itself meanwhile.
He saw many that he knew, and bowed in his formal way, lit now and again by his quick smile, so full of youthful brilliancy and sweetness that tired befeathered old women shook their heads and doubted if a young man of so many attractions would ever amount to anything. But when Nachmeister was favoured with that smile to-night, she nodded her head sagely and felt that she could depart for her spa in peace on the morrow. No man in love, or nearing the border-land of tumult, could smile like that. She was a guest in a box beside the King’s, the one allotted to Lola Montez during her brief reign in Bavaria, when Ludwig I was king. She too had been elevated to the Bavarian aristocracy, and no royalty won more than a passing glance when Countess Landsfeldt sat magnificently in this box, flashing her bold black eyes at the patricians that feared and snubbed her; far less clever than Styr, few doors had opened to her. Princess Nachmeister was surrounded by a bevy of young princesses, pretty with youth, but insipid, as most young royalties are. The Queen-mother sat alone in the great box, looking old and sad, not a vestige of her beauty surviving, nor even of that air which is supposed to distinguish a queen from a hausfrau. She was dowdy and unattractive, but she cared not; to-morrow she would be in her humble retreat, Elbingen-Alp, alone with her memories and the new consolation she had found in the Church of Rome. She, too, hoped for the presence of her son to-night, but she, too, knew that he would not come.