Something in her manner had puzzled Otto, had possibly touched him with suspicion.
‘Is it not strange,’ he remarked, ‘that I should choose my accomplice from the other camp?’
‘Fool!’ she said. ‘But it is your only wisdom that you know your friends.’ And suddenly, in the vantage of the deep window, she caught up his hand and kissed it with a sort of passion. ‘Now go,’ she added, ‘go at once.’
He went, somewhat staggered, doubting in his heart that he was over-bold. For in that moment she had flashed upon him like a jewel; and even through the strong panoply of a previous love he had been conscious of a shock. Next moment he had dismissed the fear.
Both Otto and the Countess retired early from the drawing-room; and the Prince, after an elaborate feint, dismissed his valet, and went forth by the private passage and the back postern in quest of the groom.
Once more the stable was in darkness, once more Otto employed the talismanic knock, and once more the groom appeared and sickened with terror.
‘Good-evening, friend,’ said Otto pleasantly. ‘I want you to bring a corn sack—empty this time—and to accompany me. We shall be gone all night.’
‘Your Highness,’ groaned the man, ‘I have the charge of the small stables. I am here alone.’
‘Come,’ said the Prince, ‘you are no such martinet in duty.’ And then seeing that the man was shaking from head to foot, Otto laid a hand upon his shoulder. ‘If I meant you harm,’ he said, ‘should I be here?’
The fellow became instantly reassured. He got the sack; and Otto led him round by several paths and avenues, conversing pleasantly by the way, and left him at last planted by a certain fountain where a goggle-eyed Triton spouted intermittently into a rippling laver. Thence he proceeded alone to where, in a round clearing, a copy of Gian Bologna’s Mercury stood tiptoe in the twilight of the stars. The night was warm and windless. A shaving of new moon had lately arisen; but it was still too small and too low down in heaven to contend with the immense host of lesser luminaries; and the rough face of the earth was drenched with starlight. Down one of the alleys, which widened as it receded, he could see a part of the lamplit terrace where a sentry silently paced, and beyond that a corner of the town with interlacing street-lights. But all around him the young trees stood mystically blurred in the dim shine; and in the stock-still quietness the upleaping god appeared alive.