"Count von Reuss slay me! I could eat him up without salt or savory—a weak reed, a kerl without backbone save of buckram; why, I will shake him this day like a rat between my hands!"
So I spoke in my anger, hot with myself that I had let the Little
Playmate suffer these things, and resolved that neither Prince nor
Princess would stand between me and my love a moment longer.
But in all lands it takes more than Say-so to budge the stubborn wheels of circumstance.
CHAPTER XXXI
I FIND A SECOND
I meant to go directly to the Prince in his chamber and tell him that from this time forth Helene and I had resolved to battle out our lives together. But it chanced that I passed through the higher terrace on my way to the lower—a bosky place of woods, where the Prince loved to linger in of a summer afternoon, drowsing there to the singing of birds and the falling of waters. For our Karl had tastes quite beyond sour black Casimir, with his church-yard glooms and raw-bone terrors.
On the upper terrace I found Von Reuss, lolling against the parapet with other blue flittermice, his peers—he himself no flittermouse, indeed, but of the true Casimir vampire breed, horrid of tooth, nocturnal, desirous of lusts and blood.
At sight of him I went straight at mine enemy, as if I had been leading a charge.
"Sir," said I, "you are a base rascal. You have insulted the Lady Helene, maid of honor to the Princess, the adopted child of my father. Her wrongs are mine. You will do me the honor of crossing weapons with me!"
"I have not learned the art of the axe," said he, turning about, listlessly. "You expect too much, Sir Executioner!"