"Now," said Nigel to himself, "if I do but send Sergeant Blick to her waiting-maid with this sonnet ensconced in a basket of roses it is odds but her Highness gets it, and if any one intercept it beshrew me if he make anything of it, for I can make little of it myself."
The plan, clumsy or not, was successful. Sergeant Blick could be very stupid on occasions, till he knew he had what he wanted, and it cost him some pains before he could arrive at the personal attendant of the Archduchess. Then a handsome bribe for herself and the direct and not super-refined flatteries of the sergeant procured the faithful delivery of the gift.
Nigel had sent the drawing of the figure to meet either fortune. If she had not seen it before, it at all events assisted to explain the allusions of the sonnet; and if she had, by the hand of Wallenstein, it would justify his request as showing that he himself understood the linking of the three destinies.
As he sat with Hildebrand at his evening meal the day following, he was summoned and bidden to attend in the garden of the palace at the hour of nine, when he would be met at the nearest gate.
This involved some explanation to Hildebrand, who, receiving the other's assent to his own hint of an assignation, merely laughed and asked no more.
Nigel was punctual, and the same page who had introduced him to the Archduchess in the gallery met him, and bowing, led the way by a path little difficult to remember through the garden, where he had met Father Lamormain, to a little orchard close, which was separated from the garden by a thick hedge, within which was a wall. The page unlocked the gate of this with a key, which he then handed to Nigel, bowed again, and turned as if to go. Nigel entered the orchard close, and following a little path between two rows of trees came to an open bower, which had a carpet of thick sward, an old stone seat, a screen of yews and laurels all about save for the entrance and the exit opposite.
The night was matchless with moonlight. The trees shone whitely. Deep shadows fell from trees and bushes which were full of foliage. Out of a shadow stepped the Archduchess Stephanie, a dark-hued velvet cloak dependent from her shoulders and open, displaying her milk-white neck and bosom, and a robe of some sheeny tissue of gold thread and silk that glittered here and there as she moved, whose texture caught the moonbeams. Upon her head she wore a little golden fillet of antique work, which seemed to confine her profusion of black curls that for the rest framed in her glorious face and danced in the night breeze upon her shoulders. The dark eyebrows and the long lashes, like thickets half concealing twin lakes, made her complexion look paler than usual. But her red full lips parted in a smile.
Her beauty, intensified by the moonlight, and suffused with something more of air and sky, her ever astonishing resemblance to the strange Ottilie von Thüringen, together took Nigel by storm. The shock of it thrilled him. No Wallenstein of forty-eight, wrapped securely in the husk of his own fortunes, but a living man with all the ripe vintage of twenty-five surging in his veins, was Nigel. What would the world of men of forty-eight not give to have the glorious energy, the unconquerable vigour, the joyous ardour for love of twenty-five, of twenty-five that can quaff and quaff again and still hold out the bowl for more? Give? Another world!
Was it perchance precisely fair? The law of Archduchesses is sure their own, and no man can gainsay it.
Nigel, bewildered for a moment, stammered out—