Köhler traveled light in the matter of baggage. A battered hat-box and a venerable portmanteau contained his indispensable necessaries of the road. An old campaigner in the field of fortune, von Steyregg’s coat-tails invariably did duty as his carpet-bags and valises. Upturned, these well-stuffed receptacles served as cushions, upon which the Baron lolled magnificently, patronizing the subservient valet and the blushing maid who secretly admired large, overbearing men with flamboyant hair. True, von Steyregg’s hyacinthine locks left off long before they reached the summit of his cranium, but you cannot have everything, thought the maid.
“We are not real,” Henriette would say to her lover. “We are two sweethearts out of some fairy-tale of M. Anthony de Hamilton or Madame d’Aulnoy.... That old woman in the red cloak is not a wood-gathering peasant, but a witch; that black face peeping at us through the bushes does not belong to a charcoal-burner or a lignite-miner, but to some spiteful gnome or kobold.... You are the Prince of the Enchanted City in the Sleeping Forest. And I am your Princess, my dear!”
Dunoisse sighed, knowing that whether he were a Prince or not would depend upon the disposition of the liegemen of Widinitz; upon the goodwill of His Majesty the King of Bavaria; upon the approval of the Diet of the Germanic Confederation, and the clinching decision of the Special Tribunal known as the Austrägal Court. And that, even if these powers were unanimous in confirming the claim of Succession made by the son of Marie-Bathilde, the question of Henriette’s ever becoming the legal partner of the throne, which in that event would be his, opened up another vista of possibilities, amongst which Divorce loomed large ... whilst Death, his black robe discreetly draped about his grisly anatomy, hovered unobtrusively in the background.
Nom d’un petit bonhomme! If de Roux should die, that regrettable loss to the Army of France would be, it seemed to Dunoisse, the way out of the tangled labyrinth of difficulties and anxieties.
His eyes avoided Henriette’s, lest she should read his thought in them. But hers were raised to the rosy snow-peaks that lifted above the dark, shaggy green of the pine-forests, her sensitive nostrils quivered, her lips were parted as she drank the fragrant air.
How crystal-pure she seemed.... And yet it was but seeming.... A picture, shown upon the background of a murky Paris street-corner, by the flare of a smoky lamp, rose up in Dunoisse’s memory; and the ugly, haunting laugh of the tall, sardonic workman who had chatted with a comrade on that unforgettable night of the return from London, sounded in his ears. And when Henriette asked, turning to him with the tenderest solicitude in her lovely face:
“Why do you shiver, dearest? Are you cold?” her lover answered, with forced gayety:
“A footstep must have passed over the place where my grave is to be made. You know the old saying?”
“Quite well,” she told him, adding with an exquisite inflection of tenderness. “But it would be ‘our’ grave, Hector.... For I could not live without you, you know that very well! Dearest, why do you start?”
For the muscles of the shoulder against which she leaned, had given a sudden jerk, and the man’s head had pivoted from her abruptly, as though pulled by a wire.