"So much the better for me, if I am indispensable to you--you know that is the goal of my desires! But dearest friend--you are suffering and I cannot aid you because I do not know the difficulty! What avail is a physician, who cures only the symptoms, not the disease. You are simply bungling about on your own responsibility and every one knows that is the worst thing a sick person can do. Consumptives use the hunger-cure, anæmics resort to blood letting. You, my dear Madeleine, I think, do the same thing. Mortification, when your vital strength is waning, moral blood-letting, while the heart needs food and warmth. What kind of cure is it to be up all night long and wander about in cold churches, with the thermometer marking below freezing, early in the morning. I should advise you to edit a book on the physiology of the nerves. You are like the man in the fairy-tale who wanted to learn to shiver." An involuntary smile hovered about the countess' lips.
"Duke--your humor is beginning to conquer. No doubt you are right in many things, but you do not know the state of my mind. My life is destroyed, the axe is laid at the root, happiness, honor--all are lost."
"For Heaven's sake, what has happened to thus overwhelm you?" asked the duke, still in the most cheerful mood.
She could not tell him the truth and pleaded some incident at court as an excuse. Then in a few words she told him of the queen's displeasure, the malice of her enemies, her imperilled position.
"And do you take this so tragically?" The prince laughed aloud: "Pardon me, chère amie--but one can't help laughing! A woman like you to despair because a few stiff old court sycophants look askance at you, and the queen does not understand you which, with the dispositions you both have, was precisely what might have been expected. It is too comical! It is entirely my own fault--I ought to have considered it--but I expected you to show more feminine craft and diplomacy. That you disdained to employ the petty arts which render one a Persona grata at court is only an honor to you, and if a few fops presumed to adopt an insolent manner to you, they shall receive a lesson which will teach them that your honor is mine! Nay, it ought to amuse you, to feign death awhile and see how the mice will all come out and dance around you to scatter again when the lioness awakes. Do you talk of destroyed happiness and roots to which the axe is laid? Oh, women--women! You can despair over a plaything! For this position at court could never be aught save a toy to you!"
"But to retire thus in shame and disgrace--would you endure it--if it should happen to you? Ought not a woman to be as sensitive concerning her honor as a man?"
"I don't think your honor will suffer, because the restraint of court life does not suit you! Or is it because you do not understand the queen? Why, surely persons are not always sympathetic and avoid one another without any regret; does the fact become so fateful because one of you wears a crown? In that case I beg you to remember that a crown is hovering over your head also--a crown that is ready to descend whenever that head will receive it, and that you will then be in a position to address Her Majesty as 'chère cousine!' You, a Princess von Prankenberg, a Countess Wildenau, fly like a rebuked child at an ungracious glance from the queen and her court into a corner of a church?" He shook his head. "There must be something else. What is it? I shall never learn, but you cannot deceive me!"
The countess was greatly disconcerted. She tried to find another plausible pretext for her mood and, like all natures to whom deception is not natural, said precisely what betrayed her: "I am anxious about the Wildenaus--they are only watching for the moment when they can compromise me unpunished, and if the queen withdraws her favor, they need show me no farther consideration."
The duke frowned. "Ah! ah!"--he said slowly, under his breath: "What do you fear from the Wildenaus, how can they compromise you?"
The countess, startled, kept silence. She saw that she had betrayed herself.