“Listen, father,” she said, stooping over him. “I have been hard and cold. Perhaps you will grant that I have had two reasons for it. But I am going to do better. I will take care of him and I will do all I can to make him happy. I promise.”
Perhaps it was relief. Perhaps even then the thought of Annunciata’s tardy and certain-to-be bungling efforts to make Ferdinand William Otto happy amused him. He smiled faintly.
Nikky, watching his rooms being dismantled, rescuing an old pipe now and then, or a pair of shabby but beloved boots,—Nikky, whistling to keep up his courage, received a note from Hedwig late that afternoon. It was very brief:
To-night at nine o’clock I shall go to the roof beyond
Hubert’s old rooms, for air.
HEDWIG.
Nikky, who in all his incurious young life had never thought of the roof of the Palace, save as a necessary shelter from the weather, a thing of tiles and gutters, vastly large, looked rather astounded.
“The roof!” he said, surveying the note. And fell to thinking, such a mixture of rapture and despair as only twenty-three, and hopeless, can know.
Somehow or other he got through the intervening hours, and before nine he was on his way. He had the run of the Palace, of course. No one noticed him as he made his way toward the empty suite which so recently had housed its royal visitor. Annunciata’s anxiety had kept the doors of the suite unlocked. Knowing nothing, but fearing everything, she slept with the key to the turret door under her pillow, and an ear opened for untoward sounds.
In the faint moonlight poor Hubert’s rooms, with their refurbished furnishings covered with white linen, looked cold and almost terrifying. A long window was open, and the velvet curtain swayed as though it shielded some dismal figure. But, when he had crossed the room and drawn the curtain aside, it was to see a bit of fairyland, the roof moonlit and transformed by growing things into a garden. There was, too, the fairy.
Hedwig, in a soft white wrap over her dinner dress, was at the balustrade. The moon, which had robbed the flowers of their colors and made them ghosts of blossoms, had turned Hedwig into a pale, white fairy with extremely frightened eyes. A very dignified fairy, too, although her heart thumped disgracefully. Having taken a most brazen step forward, she was now for taking two panicky ones back.
Therefore she pretended not to hear Nikky behind her, and was completely engrossed in the city lights.