"If it please, your lordship, to wait until we have shown her highness your wife the extent and arrangement of the monastery as she wishes--" suggested the Abbot.
"Aye--pray do so, my lord Duke," urged Wyso anxiously. "It will be to the advantage of your teeth if you leave the fat sheep, which were running about only an hour ago to sweat a little longer in front of the fire."
Reichenberg looked sharply at the fat monk with his thick lips and sensual grin. "You are not the man to die for the sake of keeping a vow," thought he. "When you have well drunk you will make a clean breast of it."
"Very well," said the Duke. "Then we will wait--less for the sake of my teeth than of yours, old gentleman--if indeed you still have any left. You will grant a dispensation this day in our honour, my Lord Abbot, will you not?"
"I will do so, my Lord," said the Abbot smiling, "they may enjoy themselves to their heart's content. And so, Donatus, my son, come now with me that I may conduct you to her ladyship, the Duchess, if she will accept you as her guide."
Donatus rose with simple dignity, and followed the Abbot. The two gentlemen, Meinhard and Reichenberg, looked after him in silence.
"Tell me, Count, what passed between you and the youngster that you got so angry about it?" asked the Duke, pushing back a little way from the table that the others might not overhear them.
"It is a mere whim, if you will," replied Reichenberg in a low voice. "But the boy's resemblance to me struck me amazingly. I--I might have had a child who would have been of just his age, and if it had been a son he might have looked exactly like that, for not only is the lad like me, he has just my wife's eyes and soft voice."
"Your wife's?" said the Duke, and he shook his head.
"My first wife's," said the Count, "whom I repudiated just about the time when my first child would have been born. You were then only a boy, and you were not at the court of your grandfather Albert. My wife was a Ramüss, and hardly were we married when that venomous serpent, the Countess of Eppan, poisoned my ear and heart. Not till last year, when the wretched woman was on her deathbed and sent to me in her last agony, did she confess that she had accused my wife falsely, in order to obtain her place. The name and wealth of the Reichenberg family were an eyesore to her, for she was both poor and haughty; the castle of Reichenberg, as you know, formerly belonged to the house of Eppan. She longed to restore it to them by a marriage with me--her heart was never mine as I saw very plainly later on. Now for a year past I have been wandering about the world, seeking in vain for some trace of my outcast wife. God in Heaven alone knows what may have become of them both, mother and child; my race ends with me, and I myself have driven out the heir that God perhaps had granted me--an outcast--to die! And that boy's eyes struck me like a thunderbolt. He looked just as my wife looked when I drove her away. Duke, if it were he--" The Count was silent, and his lips quivered.