The Prince of the Captivity: The Epilogue to a Romance

by Sydney C. Grier

But in spite of Helene’s eagerness for exertion, it was long before she could attempt the mountains. Naturally enough, when the excitement of returning to her favourite scenes, and of welcoming Usk, had passed, she seemed to lose strength, and to the anxious eye of her mother appeared actually worse than she had been at Nice. Almost in desperation, the Grand-Duchess threw herself upon Usk for help, and adopted him as the natural sharer of her anxieties with a calmness that surprised him.

“You must help me to save her,” she said. “Here are the doctor’s directions, and I look to you to carry them out.”

Somewhat amused though he was at being turned into a sick-nurse, Usk accepted the position, which he found to be no sinecure, and which made him feel by turns horribly cruel and a good deal of a fool. Helene was to live almost entirely in the open air, it seemed, and to take exercise at stated hours and for a fixed period of time. If she grew tired too soon, it was his duty to pretend not to notice it, and to talk to her as she walked until she forgot it too. Or if, as sometimes happened, she was ready to wander on when the stated time was over, he was obliged to induce her to rest, which could occasionally only be done by pretending that he himself was tired. It struck him once, when he was hurrying after his patient with a rug, because she would not sit down anywhere but on the grass, that his position was a good deal less romantic than might have been expected from his conversation with his mother. Helene talked to him as naturally as if he had been her brother, and he could not flatter himself that her frank pleasure in his society, and her readiness to turn to him for everything she wanted done, sprang from any stronger feeling than pure friendliness. His uncle and the Grand-Duchess must have been mistaken, he decided, and the fact produced in him curiously mixed sensations. On the one hand, when Helene was better, nothing more would be expected of him, and he could go his way in peace; but, on the other, he felt that he had to some extent been fooled when he was induced to screw himself up to the performance of a tremendous exploit which now appeared quite unnecessary. But he grew genuinely fond of Helene in a brotherly way, and was as proud as her mother when she began to show unmistakable signs of returning health. When she refused breakfast one day, and the Grand-Duchess only waited until she was out of sight to weep, Usk showed no disappointment. His prescience was rewarded in the course of the morning, when Helene confessed suddenly that she was “so hungry,” and asked him to fetch her something to eat. Then there was the day when for the first time an expedition was undertaken beyond the grounds, and Helene proudly introduced him to one of her friends, the wife of a goatherd who lived on the mountain-side. The good woman set before her visitors a meal of black bread and goats’ milk; and this simple fare, which Usk privately thought very nasty, Helene ate and enjoyed, and the Grand-Duchess wept again, but this time her tears were of joy.

Now that Helene was sufficiently recovered to take longer walks, her mother thought it advisable to consider the conventions once more. At first she succeeded in putting a veto on any distant expeditions by the plea that Helene would overtask her strength, but when Usk had suggested taking a pony with them, on which she could ride when she was tired, it was necessary to provide suitable companions. Neither the Grand-Duchess nor the Queen were equal to the exertion involved, but the former invited her youngest son and his wife to pay a visit to Lauterbach. Prince Franz Immanuel had been educated in England, and Usk and he had been contemporaries at Eton for some years, so that they had many interests in common, while Princess Theresia, the daughter of Félicia’s uncle, Don Florian of Arragon, was so fond of things English that she was known at the Pannonian Court as the Anglomaniac. To her the Grand-Duchess had divulged her scheme concerning Usk and Helene as soon as it was formed, hoping to gain one firm ally, and the event proved that her object had been attained. The elder children of the Grand-Duchess, to whom the secret had not been revealed, were already writing from their married homes to inquire suspiciously why “that man Mortimer’s nephew” was being thrown so much with Lenchen, and prophesying that complications would occur; but Princess Resi was an ardent supporter of the match, and insisted that her husband should share her views. He had been inclined at first to adopt the natural Schwarzwald-Molzau attitude, and scout the idea of a mésalliance; but he and his wife were a most devoted couple, and she fairly talked him over. Plied all day and every day with arguments in favour of love-matches, unequal marriages, unions in which the parties were of different nationalities, and harassed by the unreasonable conduct of Princess Resi, who insisted on taking any opposition as a reflection on herself or her mother, whose admission into the house of Albret-Arragon had only been secured by her immense dowry, he yielded at last, and when they arrived at Lauterbach his wife had him well in hand. He was further cheered by finding that Usk showed no signs of undue elation, and that the intercourse between him and Helene was of so free and brotherly a nature as to suggest that the Grand-Duchess’s plan had miscarried.

Prince Franz and his wife were ideal companions on the expeditions Helene loved. Princess Resi’s Anglomania was of so pronounced a character as to degenerate occasionally into caricature, especially in the matter of the costumes she adopted for climbing; but she made it a point of honour to do as much as her husband, and they followed Helene uncomplainingly into all the nooks and corners of the mountains. So tireless was Helene herself that Prince Franz unhesitatingly expressed his opinion that she had never been ill at all, and that her ailments had simply been assumed as an excuse for leaving Nice and returning to her beloved Lauterbach, but his wife reproved him for this in private. She understood from the Grand-Duchess, she said, that Helene’s recovery was almost entirely due to Usk’s care of her, and the firmness with which he had carried out the doctor’s orders, and if things of that kind were said, he would think her friends grudged him his fitting reward. Even now, said Princess Resi, she thought his feelings must have been wounded in some way, for she took care that he had an opportunity nearly every day of speaking to Helene, but it was clear he had not done it yet.

As for Usk, about this time he wrote to his mother alluding gloomily to Miss Jones, without specifying which Miss Jones he meant, and advised her to make up her mind to welcome that young lady into the family after all. It is possible that he was influenced by an incident from which he drew, perhaps, larger deductions than he should have done.

He was mounting the stairs which led to the morning-room at the Schloss one day when he heard a sound as of paper being torn violently, and then Prince Franz’s voice raised in protest.

“What in the world are you doing, Lenchen? That paper is mine.”

“Then you had no business to bring it here. It’s a shame!” The stove-door clanged, and there was a sound of fire-irons. “As if I would let it lie about for him to see! She must be wickeder than I could ever have imagined it possible for a woman to be, to go and break his heart——”

Usk stood hesitating on the threshold as Helene, with a flushed face, rose from her knees before the stove. It had not struck him at first that he was one of the persons alluded to, but now the truth was clear. It was something about Félicia that she had been unwilling for him to see, and of late he had thought less and less about Félicia, and might almost be said to have forgotten her. Helene read in his face that he had heard and understood, but she misread the blankness of his expression when he realised the change which had come over his mind.