Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard (30 page)

On the morning of the fourteenth of July he waylaid his wife as she was taking the air in the park and through the lattice of the gate told her that, convinced of her tracherousness, he would kill the valet or himself. Lispeth did not take his threats seriously, but she was terrified of a scandal at this moment and could see no other way out of the dilemma than to disclose part of the truth to her husband. Yes, there was a baby at Rosenbad. She could at the moment give him no further information, he must take it for what it was and might come to understand in time. If he would solemnly swear to her that he would go home immediately after, she would bring down the child to the gate in the afternoon, so that he could see it with his own eyes. Matthias took the oath, walked back to a small inn quite close to the chateau where he had left his mare and cart, and there to clear his confused mind emptied a bottle of wine. It was at this moment that he fell into the hands of Duke Marbod’s intriguers.

The two gentlemen by this time had almost given up the hunt. They had not been able to get into touch with the Rosenbad household, only at a distance had they seen Prince Lothar, Herr Cazotte and Ehrengard riding by, and Herr Cazotte had been right inasmuch as that the presence of the young maid-of-honor averted suspicions of double dealing. They were about to return somewhat crestfallen to Duke Marbod, but had come up close to the gates for a last attempt. By chance they got into conversation with Matthias, who over his bottle babbled out the list of his misfortunes, his wife’s
shamelessness and the villainy of the whole court in barring out her lawful husband.

The gentlemen looked at one another.

In the eleventh hour they found themselves to have been right. Surprisingly, mysteriously, their own fancies and fabrications took shape before their eyes, and proof was at hand. After a short consultation, while pouring more wine into their informant, they gravely initiated him into the situation: a dangerous plot was in progress at the Schloss. They could at the moment give him no further information. But it was a matter of high treason, and very likely, as he had been suggesting, Prince Lothar’s valet was at the head of it.

This much they could promise him, that in case he could manage to carry off the woman and the child and deliver them into their hands at “The Blue Boar,” he would be rendering a great service to his country, and they would pay him out on the spot a reward of a hundred thaler. Matthias was not so much moved by these prospects as by the satisfaction of long-wanted sympathy, also in seeing his personal grievances exalted into an affair of state he got back some of his self-confidence.

Thus it happened that in the afternoon of the fourteenth of July the husband brought his cart to the gate of the park, was shown the child, and told his wife that he did now believe in her innocence and was ready to forget all. As the two were taking a final leave, he managed to lure the unsuspecting woman outside the gate and even to make her put her foot on the nave of the wheel and lift up the child in order that he might kiss it. At that moment he seized her round the waist with one arm and dragged her onto the seat of his cart, while with his other arm he slashed the mare wildly with the reins and made her start into a mad gallop. Lispeth gave
one long, terrible scream. But a minute later they were at the foot of the hill in a thick cloud of dust, and once out of earshot from the chateau and the park the unhappy woman dared not cry for help. She clung to the child and the seat and burst into a storm of tears.

During the whole mad drive of almost an hour no word was exchanged between the abductor and the victim, and no argument put forth from either side. It would indeed have been difficult to catch any word spoken in the rumble and clatter which surrounded and followed the cart like a thick swarm of angry bees, or to think of any argument while the small vehicle was being flung up and down and from right to left on rough, stony roads. All the same husband and wife, pressed together, were in some way communicating and acting upon one another.

Lispeth had at once realized with deadly clearness that she was hopelessly in the power of the blunt, silent figure beside her. He had outwitted, lost and ruined her, and with her the Princess and the whole circle of people who had put their trust in her. She had thought him a fool, and he was a fool, but he was something else and worse, he had in him a dreadful cruelty which she had never suspected. She wept loudly and without restraint.

Matthais, who had vowed that no protest on his wife’s part should move his heart, in the course of the drive was slowly being converted and brought into a state of contrition by that fine thing: the righteous fury of an honest person. Vaguely he felt the distance between the countrywoman in his cart, smelling from clean starched linen and bathed in artless tears, and the new urbane plotting friends smelling from pomade, waiting for him in the inn, and of the monstrousness of delivering the former into the hands of the latter. But tossed from side to side both bodily and spiritually he was incapable
of forming any plan, and after a while left matters in charge of his mare.

This patient animal, possibly the most indignant of the group, could not go on forever at her first mad rate; as her master lost heart she slowed down. Lispeth then sat up a little, drew a deep breath and looked round.

Through the mist of her tears and the beginning dusk she saw a great many mounted soldiers galloping in the fields to all sides of her. She remembered the big maneuvers going on and somehow took courage, soldiers in uniform were decent people and would side with a woman against a madman and murderer. A short time later the road ran through a village and up to an inn which the mare knew, she stopped before its door. Matthias gave in to her, pushed his cap back on his head and silently, almost humbly, climbed down and helped his wife and the child to the ground. Dusk was coming on, there were lights in the windows of “The Blue Boar.”

Behind them there was both high glee and merriment, and deep anxiousness.

The maneuvers were over. The officers were celebrating the occasion by a dinner in the big common room, from which loud talk and laughter rang. Here Kurt von Blittersdorff, who had distinguished himself in a cavalry attack, was being congratulated by his colonel. In a smaller room behind the hall there was silence. Duke Marbod’s followers had not been prepared for the big gay gathering, they were afraid of being recognized and questioned, had chosen to lie low, and sat without words on two chairs, at times looking at one another.

Lispeth, Matthias and the child, like a second Holy Family of mystical inside relationship, were met at the door with the information that there was no room for them in the inn. Lispeth, sore-limbed and swaying on her feet with exhaustion,
had only one thought: to find a place where she could feed the baby, and no words to express her need. But a kind of desperate determination in her mien and carriage, like that of a soldier dying on his post, moved the heart of a little maid of the inn, who herself had got young brothers and sisters at home, and who obtained for her a small room upstairs, where she could at last sink down on a chair and unbutton her bodice. The moment she had laid the child to the breast both became perfectly calm.

Matthias meanwhile slunk away to unharness the mare in the stable of the inn, highly nervous that his employers should somehow appear, or send for him, and happy when inexplicably they did not. He told the people of the inn that he had got nothing to do with anybody there and was going to leave as soon as his wife had had a rest. He then again slunk upstairs and sat down on a stool with his back to the wall in the exact manner of his friends down below. The little maid after a while brought up a candle and a tray with milk and bread and remnants from the officers’ table.

During the time when these things were happening on the road and in the inn, emotions of a no less volcanic nature filled the rooms behind the silk curtains of Schloss Rosenbad.

When the child and his nurse were found missing, enquiries, at first only slightly uneasy, then inspired by growing fear and in the end by horror and dismay, were made in all directions. The baby and the nurse, it was said, had last been seen in the park. But a gardener’s boy reported that he had observed Lispeth talking to a man outside the gate, and soon it was known that a cart with a man and a woman in it had been tearing down the road at incredible speed. There was no mistaking the fact that the little Prince had been kidnapped.

How, now, was Rosenbad to take in the truth and survive it? The cannons of the citadel of Babenhausen were held
ready to proclaim, on the very next day, the birth of an heir to the throne, the flags of the palace were laid forth to be hoisted and fill the air over the towers with gay colors. Was the roar of triumph to be quelled in those iron throats and the sky to be left empty? Had the incessant watch of two months been in vain, and was the glory of Babenhausen to prove still-born? And oh, the child, the child—the trusting, laughing baby, the apple of the eye of Rosenbad—was he to be flung all alone into a hard world, possibly never to be seen again?

Two months ago when the very small voice had first been heard in its rooms, the house had been lifted off the ground to float, a temple of happiness, in the air above the lake and the green slopes. Now within one short hour it was overthrown as by an earthquake and was left roofless, open to all the winds of heaven, a ruin.

At first neither of the unhappy parents was informed of their misfortune. Prince Lothar had gone to town to bring his mother Herr Cazotte’s latest miniature of the baby and would not be back till evening. Princess Ludmilla was studying the texts of her Italian songs for the concert and had given instructions that she was not be disturbed.

But Countess Poggendorff in the garden room actually fell on her knees with the weight of all the falling stones of the chateau upon her delicate shoulders. When she got some of her strength back she rang the bell and sent for Herr Cazotte, and when he appeared she threw herself into his arms.

This heart-rending news, she declared in a faint and broken voice, must by all means be kept from the Princess, who might take her death from it, and meanwhile rescuers would have to be sent out to all four corners of the earth. But O my dear Herr Cazotte, who was wise and discreet enough to be trusted with a mission so momentous and so delicate!

Herr Cazotte at once ordered his small gig made ready and his cloak and hat brought down. While he waited he stood silent, with a thoughtful face.

As usual, he knew more than other people. He had seen Matthias on one of the man’s vain expeditions to the chateau, he had even talked with him and had some of the offended husband’s grudges confided to him. On one of his trips to town, upon a hot day, he had stopped at “The Blue Board” to have a drink, and there had met the two conspirators, who were old acquaintances of his. He now put two and two together and blamed himself for having been so absorbed in a single work of art as to overlook the artifice of baser minds in the neighborhood.

But the terrible news was not unwelcome to him. After his last walk by the Leda fountain with Ehrengard he had passed a bad night and had left his work untouched in the morning. Now he saw that although they had been playing him a trick, those dangerous playfellows of his, the Gods, were with him still. The course of things was inspiring, and of all things in the world Herr Cazotte really with his whole heart wanted only one: inspiration. From the present situation almost any other might arise, and Herr Cazotte was a collector and connoisseur of situations.

The first of these presented itself when Ehrengard came into the room, in her riding habit and just back from her ride, and Madame Poggendorff turned from Herr Cazotte to fall on the neck of the girl, sobbing as unrestrainedly as an hour before had Lispeth in the cart and on the road. As soon as she was enlightened upon the catastrophe Ehrengard again pulled on her riding gloves to go in pursuit of the criminals. Countess Poggendorff begged her to go with Herr Cazotte in his gig, she did not like the thought of her facing these scoundrels all alone, and it was getting late. No, said Ehrengard,
she was not afraid. Wotan was quite fresh, she had been out exercising Prince Lothar’s mount for him, and she would be quicker on horseback than in a carriage. She knew all the roads and paths in the neighborhood, and if she were to stay out late she was used to riding at night.

Herr Cazotte did not try to hold her back. If she had the advantage of getting off before him, he on his side had a surer track to go upon. During the minutes in which he stood watching the tearful older and the flaming younger woman, a succession of charming pictures passed through his mind. He would be presenting the regained child to the girl to give back into its mother’s arms, he might even be on his knees before her to do so. An amorino, the Princess had called her baby, an amorino indeed, joining, as with a garland of roses, a human couple. Would the girl not feel then for a vertiginous moment this particular amorino to be, spiritually and emotionally, her own child—and his! He himself got her into the saddle.

Wotan was in high spirits, when Ehrengard reined him in to question people on the road he reared, and she was so filled with indignation against the kidnappers on whose track she was trotting that she beat her mount with her riding whip. All the same she was happy, it was as if for a long time she had yearned to be angry. She was Ehrengard, no one could take that away from her, and, strangely, it was a privilege. The evening air was getting cooler, she rode through many spheres of fragrance: clover, flowering lime trees, and drying strawberry fields, through them all the ammoniac smell of the lathering horse was the strongest. She drew in her breath deeply, and ran on, with raised head and distended nostrils, a young female centaur playing along the grass fields.

She had the hunting instincts of her breed, it was not difficult to her to run the fugitives to earth in “The Blue
Boar.” The cart was still standing outside the stable, and she learned from an ostler of the inn that the man, the woman and the child were in the house, possibly, she thought, behind the lighted window above her head. She left Wotan in the man’s care, ordering him to walk him up and down for half an hour and then to rub him well with a wisp of straw. There were, she noticed, a number of soldiers about the place, she felt happier still at this sight, they were people of her own kind, and it was as if she had got home.