CHAPTER VI LITTLE CARL
I was awakened by the note of a horn blown by some ranger in the forest. The sun was shining in through the window, night had vanished with all its dreams and fears, and Joubert was at the door.
Joubert, unsuccessful, perhaps, in one of his multifarious love-affairs, was grumpy; and when I tried to explain about the nocturnal visitors he wouldn't listen. He knew my imaginative powers, and put my story down to them; and, as for me, attracted by the events of the moment as all children are, I had nearly forgotten the whole matter by breakfast-time.
I was led down by Joubert and given into the charge of Gretel. Breakfast was laid for Eloise and me in the same boudoir where we had supped the night before, but lo, and behold! when we reached the room another child was there as well as Eloise.
A boy of my own age. A charming little figure dressed in the uniform of a Pomeranian grenadier.
"This is Carl!" cried Eloise, pulling the little grenadier forward by the hand. "This is Toto, Carl. I forgot his other name. No matter. I am hungry. Gretel, I pray you let us have breakfast."
Carl was dark; and he met me without smiling, and took my hand without grasping it properly, and looked at me, not directly, but in a veiled manner curious in a child so young.
Carl repelled me, and yet attracted me. When I contrast his face with the portrait in the picture-gallery of the schloss, I can see now, with the eye of memory, the awful likeness between him and the dead and gone Margaret von Lichtenberg, just as I can see the likeness between myself and Philippe de Saluce.
The "family likeness"—that mysterious fact in life before which science is dumb—never was more manifest; but what made the thing more curious, more deeply involved in mystery, was the fact that under the same roof, hundreds of years after the old tragedy of long ago, the facsimiles of the two actors should meet as children fresh to the world.
As for me this morning, I saw nothing in Carl von Lichtenberg but a little boy of my own age, somewhat fantastically dressed. The half-terror, the extraordinary sensation that the picture of Margaret von Lichtenberg had called up in my mind the night before, had expended itself and vanished, leaving me incapable of further psychic perception. Everything was commonplace again as the bread-and-butter that Gretel was cutting for us at the side-table.