“Your Majesty may be the depredator to a much more serious extent, if you will condescend but to take the Countess’s heart along with you,” said the Colonel, with a grave smile. “It is, I have no doubt, too loyal not to be quite at your Majesty’s mercy.”
“Hah!” said Leopold; “I must be expeditious then, or she will be devoté, or in the other world—incapable of any love but for a lapdog, or turned into a canonised saint. But in the mean time look to these nobles. If conspiracy there be, let us be ready for it. I have confidence in your Pandours. They have no love for the Hungarians. Place a couple of your captains in my antechamber. Let the rest be on the alert. You will be in the palace, and within call, for the next forty-eight hours.”
The Emperor then left the room. Von Herbert wrote an order to the Major of the Pandours for a detachment to take the duty of the imperial apartments. The evening was spent at the opera, followed by a court ball; and the Emperor retired, more than satisfied with the dancing loyalty of the Hungarian beaux and belles.
The night was lovely, and the moon shone with full-orbed radiance upon the cloth of gold, embroidered velvet curtains, and high enchased silver sculptures of the imperial bed. The Emperor was deep in a midsummer night’s dream of waltzing with a dozen winged visions, a ballet in the Grand Opera given before their Majesties of Fairyland, on the occasion of his arrival in their realm. He found his feet buoyant with all the delightful levity of his new region; wings could not have made him spurn the ground with more rapturous elasticity. The partner round whom he whirled was Oberon’s youngest daughter, just come from a finishing school in the Evening Star, and brought out for the first time. But a sudden sound of evil smote his ear; every fairy drooped at the instant; he felt his winged heels heavy as if they were booted for a German parade; his blooming partner grew dizzy in the very moment of a whirl, and dropped fainting in his arms; Titania, with a scream, expanded her pinions, and darted into the tops of the tallest trees. Oberon, with a frown, descended from his throne, and stalked away in indignant majesty.
The sound was soon renewed; it was a French quadrille, played by a Golden Apollo on the harp—a sound, however pleasing to earthly ears, too coarse for the exquisite sensibilities of more ethereal tempers. The God of Song was sitting on a beautiful pendule, with the name of Sismonde conspicuous on its dial above, and the name of the Countess Joblonsky engraved on its marble pedestal below. The Emperor gazed first with utter astonishment, then with a burst of laughter; his words had been verified. He was in a new position. He was to be the “receiver of stolen goods” after all. But in the moonlight lay at his feet a paper; it contained these words:—
“Emperor—You have friends about you, on whom you set no value; you have enemies, too, about you, of whom you are not aware. Keep the pendule; it will serve to remind you of the hours that may pass between the throne and the dagger. It will serve, also, to remind you how few hours it may take to bring a noble heart to the altar and to the grave. The toy is yours. The Countess Joblonsky has already received more than its value.
“Speranski.”
The Countess Joblonsky had been the handsomest woman in Paris twenty years before. But in Paris, the reign of beauty never lasts supreme longer than a new Opera—possibly, among other reasons, for the one that both are exhibited without mercy for the eyes or ears of mankind. The Opera displays its charms incessantly, until all that remain to witness the triumph are the fiddlers and the scene-shifters. The Belle electrifies the world with such persevering attacks on their nervous system, that it becomes absolutely benumbed. A second season of triumph is as rare for the Belle as the Opera, and no man living ever has seen, or will see, a third season for either. The Countess retired at the end of her second season, like Diocletian, but not, like Diocletian, to the cultivation of cabbages. She drew off her forces to Vienna, which she entered with the air of a conqueror, and the rights of one; for the fashion that has fallen into the “sere and yellow leaf” in Paris, is entitled to consider itself in full bloom at Vienna. At the Austrian capital she carried all before her, for the time. She had all the first of the very first circle in her chains. All the Archdukes were at her bidding; were fed at her petits soupers of five hundred hungry noblesse, en comité; were pilfered at her loto-tables; were spell-bound by her smiles, laughed at in her boudoir, and successively wooed to make the fairest of Countesses the haughtiest of Princesses. Still the last point was incomplete,—she was still in widowed loveliness.