The Queen-mother lingered on in Munich, and society with her. Excellenz Nachmeister and the diplomatic corps entertained constantly, and if the rest of the fashionable world took little initiative, it was always ready to lend the light of its countenance. Ordham, with the most enthusiastic intentions, saw little of Countess Tann, but at least he broke no engagements with her; and this, to those that knew him, would have appeared more significant than had he sought her daily. That pleasure awaited the empty summer months, and meanwhile, conformably with his half-admitted creed, he missed nothing that promised enjoyment. Nevertheless, true to his promise to Margarethe Styr, he took his daily lesson with Fräulein Lutz; and this recalls a story which became current in Munich at the time and entertained his friends not a little. Lutz related it with a mixture of tartness and triumph to Styr, who told it to Nachmeister, who——

His Grenadier, as he called her, arrived at the Legation every morning at five minutes before ten. He received her in an upper sitting room, and had made more progress in four weeks than during the six preceding months of his sojourn in Munich. As a rule he appeared at the rendezvous not more than five or six minutes later than Lutz, but one morning he arose with the greatest reluctance. He had taken a party of English friends to the monastic cellar of the Hofbräu the night before, and sat up until late listening to the students singing, and drinking beer in an atmosphere as thick as a London fog. He wanted to lie in bed until noon, but dared not run the risk of the loss of his Lutz. He arose when called, but entered the frigid presence quite twelve minutes late. Being greeted with a withering outburst, he was suddenly inspired to torment this iron-clad female, for whom he appeared to have no more magnetism than had he been a wooden dummy into which she was employed to drill holes and instil so much German per day. He sank into the deepest chair in the room, and drawled:

“I am so sorry—”

“That is the one thing you can say fluently in German! At least one thousand times have I heard you say it.”

“Oh—but I am—really. Not to be late, but to be obliged to come at all. I was so deliciously comfortable.”

“Deliciously—in bed—at this hour! What an admission for a man to make!”

“But to you I am only a boy,” murmured Ordham.

“Ach ja! But you would like to be thought a man. Nicht? When you have succeeded in raising a mustache you will want to be thought young again. I have taught hundreds of your sex, and not one has more sense than the other. But not one!”

“Is that the reason you have never married?”

Her mottled complexion turned a uniform purple, and she investigated his innocent orbs with her bright little black eyes. Then she demanded haughtily: “What is that to you? Am I here to answer personal questions?”

“But this is the morning for conversation, Fräulein. We had those hideous verbs yesterday. And I am so tired! That was so easy, so natural to say, for I know that at least one Herr Professor carries an arrow in his heart.”

The personage in question had eluded Fräulein Lutz with such conspicuous adroitness some years before that the affair had become historical. She felt a natural gratification that the story had altered its front with the lapse of time, but replied severely: “Enough! We will ask and answer questions of a less personal nature. Also! How many neckties do you possess? I have now taught you for four weeks and I have seen a new one every day.”

“And she calls that an impersonal question! But I am quite ready to answer, liebes Fräulein, for my man informed me yesterday. I possess exactly two hundred and eighty-four.”

“Two hundred and eighty-four neckties!” shrieked Fräulein Lutz. “It is impossible! But impossible!”

“Only until this afternoon. Then I shall possess two hundred and eighty-six. And next week I expect a box from London—”

“But it is incredible. Why, I have taught counts, barons, princes for thirty years, and I do not believe that one of them possessed more than ten or twelve neckties at a time.”

“O—h—h—h—”

“Don’t dare to turn up your English nose at counts and princes—princes of the blood, let me explain. Ach Gott! Act Gott!” She looked him over. “And socks, handkerchiefs—all match! Do you assert that you have two hundred and eighty-four handkerchiefs, shirts, pairs of socks? Answer in idiomatic German or I shall make you write it.”

She did make him write it. Once more he lay back exhausted. Taking out a handkerchief, he sniffed at it, then waved it gently.

“And scent!” She almost choked. “I have noticed it before, but was too polite to make remarks. To-day I relieve my mind. Scent is obnoxious, demoralizing, intended only for idle fine ladies and those others whom we never mention. Why do you use scent? Mind your idiom.”

He sank into a posture almost reclining; he half closed his eyes and half opened his mouth. He looked very naughty indeed. “Why?” he murmured dreamily. “Because I find in perfumes one of the exquisite sensations of life. I should like to lie in bed all day while some one sprinkled the crude air with distilled odours—and dream—ah!”

“I’ve a mind to box your ears!” she cried furiously and with a very red face. “And your German is as execrable as your sentiments.”

“Dictate it to me in pure German and I will learn it.”

“I would not pollute my lips. Sit up and say after me: ‘I am a silly young English puppy, who should be striding through the Englischergarten reciting German verbs aloud when I am dawdling in bed like a scented harlot—’ ”

“Oh! oh! I shall not. How shocking of you! Mein liebes Fräulein!” And he stared at her so incredulously that she felt uncomfortable.

“Well, you deserve to have harsh things said to you,” she growled, “and you would demoralize the vocabulary of a saint. Also! I shall converse with you no more. Conjugate the verb ‘arbeiten,’ and then read aloud three pages of Wallenstein. If you mispronounce a word, it shall be four, and there will be two more verbs. Sit up!”

He meekly obeyed her; and when she had stalked out he hastened to the tennis court and played until luncheon.

That evening Fräulein Lutz, sitting alone in her musty little flat, her spectacles astride her nose, muttering aloud over the notes she had graciously been permitted to cull from the royal archives, became the astounded recipient of an immense bunch of violets. They were royal purple in colour and wet with what might have been the dew of the Riviera, whence they came. But they were quite scentless. If she suspected the donor she made no sign, and on the following morning was more than commonly snappish. But the wide streamers of purple satin ribbon which held the violets together decorated her best bonnet till the last of her days.

The opera house, notwithstanding its great parquet and five tiers almost encircling the auditorium, holding some twenty-two hundred people, was always well filled; but Ordham had never seen it as crowded as to-night. There had been an official announcement that the King would honour the season’s last performance of Tristan und Isolde, and the blue lights were burning all over the house, softening its classic severity into the mysterious twilight of some vast sea grotto whose surges held captive and coloured the rays of the moon. Of course, at the last moment the King would change his royal mind; everybody felt sure of that; yet, so obstinate is hope, even society had turned out, satisfied to honour Styr, at least, before departing for the country. The boxes beside the stage, and at the back, flanking the King’s (which rose from the balkon to the last of the galleries), always reserved for royalties, their households and guests, were generally empty. To-night they were filled, and, with the front row of the fashionable balkon, gave the house a smarter appearance than usual; the good hausfrau, genuine lover of all the arts as she was, never thought of wearing anything but her street frock, consisting at this time of a skirt, overskirt, and basque—whose points stood upright, back and front. Her daughter, perchance, enlivened the useful shade of her costume by a bit of pink or blue tulle about the turned-in neck of her basque. The good man was shabby and comfortable in his business suit. Had it not been for the liberal patronage of officers, the parkett would have presented a dreary expanse, and even the fashionable women, unless the court was to be present, seldom thought the opera worthy of full dress. To-night, however, there were many bare necks and fine gowns, jewels and feathers, in the balkon and loges, and even in the front rows of the parkett, which many, Ordham among them, preferred as affording a better view of the performers. The orchestra, under its great conductor, Lévy, never fretted the most sensitive eardrum.

Few sit until the last bell has rung, and Ordham stood with the rest, his back to the stage, viewing what to him was always an interesting sight, and feeling so blithe and happy in his regained freedom, his mother’s promise, received that morning, to persuade his creditors to hold their peace until after his examinations, the flutter of anticipation which he always enjoyed when about to hear Styr sing one of her great rôles, that long after, when he sat in this opera house for the last time in his life, he recalled that night and his boyish spirits, and wondered if the world had remodelled itself meanwhile.

He saw many that he knew, and bowed in his formal way, lit now and again by his quick smile, so full of youthful brilliancy and sweetness that tired befeathered old women shook their heads and doubted if a young man of so many attractions would ever amount to anything. But when Nachmeister was favoured with that smile to-night, she nodded her head sagely and felt that she could depart for her spa in peace on the morrow. No man in love, or nearing the border-land of tumult, could smile like that. She was a guest in a box beside the King’s, the one allotted to Lola Montez during her brief reign in Bavaria, when Ludwig I was king. She too had been elevated to the Bavarian aristocracy, and no royalty won more than a passing glance when Countess Landsfeldt sat magnificently in this box, flashing her bold black eyes at the patricians that feared and snubbed her; far less clever than Styr, few doors had opened to her. Princess Nachmeister was surrounded by a bevy of young princesses, pretty with youth, but insipid, as most young royalties are. The Queen-mother sat alone in the great box, looking old and sad, not a vestige of her beauty surviving, nor even of that air which is supposed to distinguish a queen from a hausfrau. She was dowdy and unattractive, but she cared not; to-morrow she would be in her humble retreat, Elbingen-Alp, alone with her memories and the new consolation she had found in the Church of Rome. She, too, hoped for the presence of her son to-night, but she, too, knew that he would not come.

It was half-past six when word came from the palace that his Majesty, indisposed, had left for Linderhof; the last bell rang, darkness descended upon the house, the overture began. As Ordham sat with his eyes closed lest they be diverted by the fat red necks and plastered heads, which shone in the dusk, mayhap by hungry jaws munching chocolate or peppermint, his high spirits slid down into a fathomless abyss; that tide of sweet despair swirled round and over him, driving repose, content, gayety from every chamber of his soul, and filling it with unrest, vague delicious terrors, that made him move his arms restlessly until he succumbed utterly.

Never had been and never will be so full an expression of unsatisfied longing. Surge upon surge from the opening phrase, presaging a yearning that is not all bliss and a torment that is not all pain, so long as mortals may die; surge upon surge of aching passion, sweet oblivion, mortal disappointment, infinite desire, a love that only the immortals could satisfy and only death can quench. The imagination reels along with this appalling betrayal of mortal love. The curse and the boon of imagination, the indomitable pursuit of happiness, even while the mind holds its sides like a chuckling monk, the inevitable awaking, the cry for death, annihilation, Nirvana,—all and far more are in this mighty tonal dirge of the human heart to lift Wagner’s masterpiece to the apex of all the masterpieces the world has preserved.

Unsatisfied longing! Ordham never listened to this music-drama that he did not wonder its keynote should possess him irresistibly throughout the performance and desert him when it was over. Even in the foyer, during the pauses, he was the cool young modern with inherited experiences in his brain that pushed him far from the sources of nature; but when the surges beat on his spirit once more he was the immemorial lover.

On the stage Styr was always beautiful and never more so than as Isolde, with her soft golden wig, her dark eyes enlarged, their natural mobility enhanced by subtle arts which other stage women secretly studied in vain, her ivory-white luminous skin. In the first act she wore a flowing gown of an imperial blue shade, the perfect lines of her long arms enticing under floating gauze, her long throat rising bare with the plastic firmness which she might have inherited from the women that inspired the dreams of Solomon.

When Isolde raised herself slowly from the cushions of the couch in the pavilion of the ship which was bearing her to the old king of Cornwall she had consented to marry, abandoning something of her first attitude of utter despair, and lifting her head toward the joyous singing of the sailors, her eyes in one long look expressed everything. The dullest could not entertain the delusion that here was merely an unhappy young princess of “Irenland,” speeding against her will to fulfil a detestable marriage, but a woman of the maturest passions, who had already drunk deep of the cup of love, scornful of every law that might exist for princess or peasant, and who had watched and waited, and accepted the fact of betrayal.

And the audience felt itself, not in the presence merely of a woman eaten with hatred, fury, desire for vengeance, but of a primeval force, passion incarnate, such as Earth unlooses in convulsions that have annihilated millions and buried continents. No other Isolde has ever been as great as Styr, for no other has been able to suggest this ferocious approach of a devastating force, this hurricane sweeping across the mind’s invisible plain, tearing at the very foundations of life. And all this she expressed before singing a note, with her staring moving eyes, her eloquent body, still and concealed as it was, a gesture of the hand. It was a concentration of the mental faculties, such as gives weak women superhuman physical strength in moments of terror or anger; in her own case they were whipped up like a whirlwind by the released horrors in her soul, and used with a supreme exercise of art that made her the risen Isolde.

When she started up, crying out to the wind and waves to shatter the ship, the passion in her voice hardly expressed the rage consuming her in plainer terms than that first long silent moment had done.

Styr’s transitions from wildness to gloom, to bitter wildness again, then to a regal imperiousness, when she ordered Brängane to summon Tristan (which must have made the royal women present envy the majesty of soul that could inform poor commonplace flesh with so dread a mien), were all done with that complete abandonment to her rôle of the great artist who never for a moment addresses her audience. Then, once more, she betrayed in her strained eyes and body her outraged womanhood as Brängane was courteously repulsed by Tristan (alas! very fat), standing with folded arms at the helm, and taunted by Kurwenal and the sailors. Upon the tirewoman’s return, after a moment’s futile attempt at self-control, she broke forth into a furious denunciation of the false lover, mingling it with bitter reminiscences of a time so fatal to herself when he was ill and at her mercy, and she healed and loved him. The anger gradually faded from her voice, which softened into the most exquisite tenderness and sweetness. “His eyes on mine were fastened. . . . the sword dropped from my fingers!” In that brooding moment every woman in the audience recalled the unforgettable, the eyes of the young widened with terror and hope.

But that moment was brief. Her wrongs beat upon her brain again. With their recital to the trembling Brängane she worked herself up to that tremendous climax where, flinging her back against the drawn curtains, with arms outstretched, she screamed out her curses, invoking vengeance and death.

Never theatrical, and conveying the impression throughout the greater part of that act, in which she ran the gamut of the passions, that she let escape but the smoke of the terrible fires below, when she did give way to ungovernable fury, she gashed the hidden rivers of blood before the footlights to such a pitch that it is no wonder the Germans keep on calling for more sensation, more thrill, with an insatiety which will work the ruin of music and drama in their nation unless some genius totally different from Wagner rises and diverts them into safer channels. Beyond Wagner in his own domain there is nothing but sensationalism. Rather, he took all the gold out of the mine he discovered and left but base alloy for the misguided disciple.

Not the least impressive moment in this terrible act was when Styr, after staring at the phials in the casket while the idea of death matured in her desperate brain,—death for herself as well as for the man that betrayed her,—raised her head slowly, her body to its full height. She looked the very genius of death, a malign fate awaiting its moment to settle upon the ripest fruit, the blithest hopes. A subtle gesture of her hand seemed to deprive it of its flesh, leave it a talon which held a scythe; by the same token one saw the skeleton under the blue robe; her mouth twisted into a grin, her eyes sank. It was all over in half a minute, it was but a fleeting suggestion, but it flashed out upon every sensitive soul present a picture of the charnel house, the worm, death robbed of its poetry, stripped to the bones by the hot blasts from that caldron of hate.

When, having compelled Tristan to drink the love potion which Brängane, who has no taste for crime, mixed instead of the draught of death, when, from the dark abysses of suicide and murder, her soul rose slowly and dazedly, but free, to the heights of the mightiest of all the passions, Styr was so superb in her abandonment, so sweet in her surrender, she carried this act of many emotions to a climax so acute and so satisfying, that few in her audience but felt the sequel should be given on the following night.

The curtain went down as Isolde was torn from Tristan’s arms by her tirewomen and old King Mark boarded the ship. Styr appeared again and again in response to loud cries, clapping, and stamping, which lasted for nearly ten minutes. But at last the audience went forth to refresh itself at the buffet. Ordham did not rise at once. He sat next to the central rope and was undisturbed. He was holding fast to that last picture of Isolde with her dazed yet illuminated eyes in which the love allowance of Earth seemed to be concentrated, when his own eyes unwittingly fell upon the woman that occupied the seat in front of him. She had neatly turned back her overskirt and skirt, and from the capacious pocket of her petticoat was extracting two large sandwiches, a slab of chocolate, and an apple. He gave an almost audible groan and went out into the foyer to exchange “Wunderschöns” with his friends.

The second act, greatest of all love scenes as it is, is far less of a strain on the audience than the first. When Tristan and Isolde, having expressed their joy in meeting in that succession of ecstatic love cries which makes the words feeble and superfluous, sank down upon the bench (that astigmatic couch!) and the love duet began, Ordham once more closed his eyes and listened, with his soul detached from his body, to that voice of fluid gold, melting, fainting, fiery, dreaming, despairing, expressing every phase of the phenomenon of love. Never has the ecstasy and the futility of love been expressed as here, and when Styr, her voice returning from those starry voids where Isolde’s soul had borne Tristan’s, passionately demanded death as the only relief for the insupportable tension of body and spirit, although she did not move, she conveyed the impression of a still more complete abandon. The tenor, being of immense proportions, and with his eyes seldom roving from the baton of the conductor, conveyed no such impression, or the scene might have been unbearably descriptive. But in Germany either the tenor or the soprano, by the entire respectability of their earthly mediums, can be relied upon to modify the most licentious opera ever written.

As Ordham did not like this particular tenor, he remained in the foyer until Tristan had finished his bleating and ranting in the last act—that vicious test of a tenor’s histrionic powers, as of his vocal endurance—and bribed the doorkeeper to let him enter later and stand while Styr sang the Liebestod. Sometimes she rose to her feet as if impelled upward by the intensity of her vision; but to-night she chose to exhibit the physical weakness of delirium as the soul struggled free of the relaxing flesh, the ecstasy of death. Styr always triumphed anew in that supreme effort of Wagner, and on this night when the curtain fell the audience “went quite mad.” While the house was ringing with “Styr!” “Styr!” “Styr!” Ordham conceived a sudden resolution. He had invited Princess Nachmeister, Mr. Trowbridge, and several other friends to sup with him at Maximilia; and although nothing was better known in Munich than that Styr never accepted invitations to supper after one of her performances, was never to be seen, for that matter, he determined to persuade her to join his party. It would gratify his vanity hugely to succeed where all had failed, and he craved the new experience of talking with her immediately after she had created the greatest of her illusions.

He had been behind the scenes with Kilchberg, who loved a maiden in the chorus, and he knew the location of Styr’s dressing room, although he had never caught a glimpse of her in or near it. He was determined to see her to-night; and he did!

He had made his way across the back of the stage, passed open doors of supers who were frankly disrobing, too hungry to observe the minor formalities, and was approaching the room of the prima donna, when its door was suddenly flung open, a little man was rushed out by the collar, twirled round, and hurled almost at his feet. The Styr, her own hair down, her face livid, her eyes blazing, shouted hoarsely at the object of her wrath, who took to his heels. The intendant rushed upon the scene. Styr screamed out that the minor official had dared to come to her dressing-room with a criticism upon the set of her wig, and that if ever she were spoken to again at the close of a performance by any member of the staff, from the intendant down, she would leave Munich the same night. The great functionary fled, for she threatened to box his own ears unless he took himself out of her sight, and the Styr stormed up and down, beat the scenery with her hands, stamped, hissed, her pallor deepening every second, until it was like white fire. Ordham, half fascinated, half convulsed, at this glimpse of the artistic temperament in full blast, stared at her with his mouth open. She looked like some fury of the coal-pit, flying up from the sooty galleries on the wings of her voice. Her words had been delivered with a strange broad burring accent, which Ordham found more puzzling than her tantrum.

Suddenly she caught sight of him. If possible her fury waxed.

“You! You!” she screamed. “Go! Get out of here! How dare you come near me? I hate you! I hate the whole world when I have finished an opera! They ought to give me somebody to kill! Go! I don’t care whether you ever speak to me again or not—”

Ordham, not knowing whether he should feel insulted or philosophical, beat a hasty retreat; and, remaining late at Maximilia, had no time to ponder upon the matter that night. He had barely awakened in the morning when he received the following note:

Ordham had no intention of ignoring the impromptu to which he had been treated, whether she expected it of him or not, and on the following Thursday evening, as they were drinking coffee in the garden after supper, he said abruptly:

“I should not have recognized your voice the other night if I had not seen you—ah—when you demolished that poor little man. Is—is it the native American?”

“One variety.” Her present tones were dry, but without displeasure. “It was the voice of the Middle West. When I was Peggy Hill, working in the coal-mines—and for several years after—the burrs on my voice were as thick as a chestnut tree’s. Insensibly, in New York, they began to peel off, and soon after I went on the stage I fell in love with purity of diction and studied with an English teacher of elocution until I retained not a trace of even the generic American. But when I lose my temper it bursts out of its little dungeon exactly as other bad characteristics do when we are off guard. I used to flatter myself that I had uprooted certain qualities I resented having been born with, but I have discovered that they occupy remote chambers of my brain, biding their time. Perhaps I was one of the viragoes of the French Revolution!”

“Did you—once let it go rather often? Somehow you seemed so wonderfully natural.”

“I let it go pretty often down in that opera house. Men have such tact! Fancy telling a singer at the end of a performance, when every nerve in her body is a red-hot humming wire, that her wig was not on straight! The intendant came to me one night after the first act of Isolde and presumed to criticise my tempo. I threw a hand mirror at him, and he has never visited my dressing-room since. I would have treated the King in the same fashion, but he is the one man that would never make such a mistake. Wagner has a good deal to answer for! The lyrics are excitable enough, but the music of The Master creates a madness; it sets up a vibration in the nervous system, which, added to the obsession of the characters, lifts us bodily from the plane of the normal, and no doubt works permanent changes. I am talking, of course, of singers that have temperament as well as voice.” She lit a cigarette and leaned back in her rustic chair. “Before?—Oh, yes. But less and less as time went on. Tantrums do not hurt a prima donna; in fact they are of use in inspiring the authorities with awe. But in the private life—well, the price I sometimes had to pay was too high. I soon stopped throwing things about like a fishwife; and all the rest of it.”

Ordham studied her face attentively in the pause that followed. Apparently she had forgotten him, and was staring into the deep arbours beyond the river. Her profile looked hard and cruel, sharpened against the black shadow of the trees, like the fine edge of an axe. He held his breath as the expression deepened into sullen ferocity, then stood up, overturning his chair.

“I should like to know every bit of your history,” he said, “every detail.”

“How you would hate me!”

“I think not. Some people might have hated you the other night when you looked like all the furies, but I was the more interested. The usual does not appeal to me particularly.”

“But there is a limit! If ever I want you to hate me, I will tell you the story of my life, as they say in New York.”

“Why in New York?”

“It is a bit of slang, and New York is the factory of much of the American slang and a sort of clearing-house for the rest. Does not our slang appeal to you?”

“I find it utterly meaningless,” he said candidly. “Ours is bad enough, but at least it has some point.”

“That ours has none is the whole point. It takes the sharp American wits to understand a new bit of slang or a new joke; the cryptic quality of both, indeed, has played its part in sharpening those same wits. If you are not ever on the alert over there, you go under.”

“Really? What a bore!”

She laughed as naturally as a child, but even in her mirth she no longer betrayed the nurture of the West.

“You are so delightfully genuine! The American imitation of the British aristocrat is the funniest thing in the world. You are not unhumorous from our crude point of view, but I doubt if you could really be affected if you tried, and you never would try. And yet over there you would be thought a mass of affectations.”

“I hope I’ll never go ‘over there.’ I’ve scarcely ever met an American that I liked. The women want too much waiting on, and I always have a feeling that the men despise me.”

“Perhaps they do, understanding no type but their own; few have had the opportunity to study the men of other races. To an American the man with no capacity for work, to ‘hustle,’ no desire to fight his way to the top, simply encumbers the earth. I hope you never will go over. No matter how good an Englishman’s manners may be at home, they become abominable the moment he sets foot in the United States. Even yours might not stand the test—whatever that test is.”

“I am sure they are merely terrified. We are not accustomed to reporters, interviewers, to an avalanche of invitations from people we don’t know. It is enough to terrify any one; and being a shy race—not having had your liberal education!—we shrink into a sort of panoply of war. We don’t go over meaning to be rude, but we are driven to appear so rather than show our fright and look ridiculous. One of my cousins visited the United States a year or two ago, just after he came into his title, and he was so hounded by reporters and lion hunters, that after doubling and dodging until he was worn out, he gave himself the airs of a stage lord and succeeded in freezing them off. Then the journalists wrote vicious articles calling him a snob—It would seem that like a good many others, they do not know exactly what that word means. And Jim is as decent a little chap as you could find in England.”

“Well, you misjudge us too. You are always commiserating the American husbands left at home to coin dollars while their wives swarm over Europe. If you only knew how delighted the American husband is to get rid of his wife for a few months out of the year! But come, let us go in. I know that you long for an easy chair and to see your cigarette smoke, while I dare not sit out too late. Who is not a slave of some sort?”

He graduated from the easy chair to the divan by imperceptible degrees, for he had arts of his own; and in the course of a month of well-nigh daily intercourse he was almost as much at home in the villa by the Isar as Styr herself. Insensibly he began to assume airs of ownership, which made Margarethe wonder how her sense of humour had hitherto survived with so little to feed upon. He never gave her a sentimental glance, nor, not even when they talked till two in the morning and he left by the tower window in Kilchberg’s boat, did he in any way manifest a desire to make love to her. Nevertheless, it was quite evident that he had drifted into the assumption that the great prima donna, from whom no other man in Europe could claim more than a bow, or a few meaningless phrases at a rout, existed for him alone; that her time, her mind, her affections, were his; that, putting the attitude into the American nutshell, he owned her. And yet, while his bearing was a mixture of the husband, the friend, the lover, and the spoilt child, it was all on the mental plane; nor did he ever lose a certain formality, which indeed was so integral a part of his birthright that no intimacy of his would ever descend into the too dangerous places of familiarity.

If, as time went on, Styr was at some pains to analyze a relationship so foreign to the usual, no such fatiguing process had ever occurred to him. He accepted it all as a matter of course, as he did whatever good things came his way; it was only the rare scowl of fortune that gave him astonished pause. He sometimes threw a passing smile to an intimacy which had all the surface appearance of so much more, and appreciated the piquancy of this secret and unique experience. Now and again, too, he threw a bone of gratitude to Frau von Wass for curing him of whatever hankering for intrigue he may once have cherished, however languidly; although he was under no delusion in regard to Styr, knowing well that did he drop into even the usual gallantries he would be snubbed for his pains. Commonly, however, he wasted no time on thought, not even upon that inevitable future in which this rare and delightful companion could have no part. But when was he inclined to invoke the future unless his creditors were impertinent, or he dreamed vaguely of some strange exalted happiness for which he saw no parallel in life? At present his hopeful debtors were awaiting the sure enthusiasm of Lord Bridgminster when his brilliant heir had passed triumphantly into the diplomatic service; and if he sometimes dreamed, it was not of the woman he liked best on earth: she, being always at hand, why, in heaven’s name, should he dream of her?

Before leaving Munich, Princess Nachmeister had resolved upon a bold move. Too astute to mention the name of Mabel Cutting, she yet confided to the woman who, it was patent, alone possessed any real influence over her favourite, that his mother and friends were arranging a wholly desirable alliance for him, and only delayed bringing the two young people together until the girl should have gained the poise and experience of a London season, and he should have assimilated, undistracted, the knowledge of German necessary for his examinational ordeal.

“You are the subtlest of women,” continued the old diplomat. “Instil the expedience of an early and wealthy marriage into the mind of this most extravagant of princelings. Gott! One would think that my lord of Bridgminster was eighty and living on pap, not a red-faced sportsman of less than forty. That dear little boy! I fairly shudder when I imagine his future without an income practically unlimited.” She pressed her mummified old hand close upon Styr’s, a rare amenity in one that never permitted Munich to forget that she was its social dictator and the intimate friend of the Queen-mother. “Yes, that dear little boy! Cannot you conjure up his unhappy fate if he flings away this great opportunity and goes on at this pace for five years longer on the income of a younger son?”

“I think the dear little boy will always fall on his feet, whether he marry this particular heiress or not. It seems to be the mission of certain of our sex to take care of him, extricate, engineer him. I have had this greatness thrust upon me, and I seem humbly to accept it. No doubt it is as much a part of my destiny as to cheer up the King at midnight with that black auditorium between us!”

“Well, it is our duty to help others,” said the Nachmeister piously. “And particularly these young things that think the world is their footstool, and go on thinking so until too late. Two things our jüngling must do during the next two years: pass his examinations and marry. You will not deny that he has the making of a remarkable man in him?”

“He is astonishingly developed mentally, but a more lazy, lymphatic, self-indulgent, supine creature I never met in my life. If he were an American, that brain of his would be supplemented by the ‘git-up-and-git’ that would enable him to make a great man of himself unassisted. Now, it will be others that will lead him, drive him, to the goal. He’ll never lift a finger for himself.”

“Well, what matter?” asked the European. “I am sure he would not be half so delicious did he have that dreadful—how do you call it?—No! He would not be himself at all. If he becomes a great man, if his brain and talents find their opportunity, what difference whether he or others clear the way? And while I could wish myself thirty years younger, I am quite resigned to accomplish my humble part behind the scenes and leave to you the great work of giving our young friend to Europe. Will you, dear Gräfin?”

“I have quite made up my mind to keep his lofty nose to the grindstone until the last of August—if his mother sends in his name on the first of June as she proposes, he must take his examinations within three months. I do not leave Munich myself until the last week in August, and I can make him work by threatening to get a leave of absence from the King on the plea of ill health and to go yachting with some acquaintances that invite me every year. Lutz promises to remain in Munich if he will study faithfully.”

“What original phrases you have! Why did not we ever talk in English before? Ah, yes! That will be a great work, but you will also help me in the other matter?”

“Yes, I think he should marry, since he will not work.”

“Work?”

“The only fault I find with our charming youth is that he expects the world to support him, and could not make ten dollars a month if he tried. Nor would he try.”

“Gott! He cannot go out into the market-place like your Americans. He is destined for the high places of the world. Surely you know our points of view by this time, dear Gräfin. For portionless young men of our aristocracies must rich young women be found, who thus buy a better position than the one to which they were born. That is right and just. And when a young man has the talents and prospects of our friend—Gott! but he gives far more than he expects, even if he takes possession of the entire fortune. And in any case, must not girls have husbands?”

“Who is the girl in question?”

“Ah, that I cannot tell you. Personally, I do not know Lady Bridgminster; but a friend of hers writes me these things. I am assured, however, that the girl is all that we could wish. Of course he will not love her, but what of that? He will always be polite to her, and that is much! much!”

“Why do you think he will not love her?”

“Why—why—” Excellenz was quite positive that he would be quite as enamoured as any other young husband, during the honeymoon. “Oh, these young men brought up by married women—they always love women older than themselves. No doubt it will be you, ma belle Marguerite. That will do him no harm—but make him marry the girl.”

“He will not fall in love with me. I shall see to it that no such idea enters his head. As he will have to be engineered into love as into everything else, he is quite safe not to discover my fascinations unaided.”

“Ah, dear Gräfin, you Americans are so clever! Between us all, I feel confident that our dear young friend will have one of the most brilliant careers in Europe. Is it not so?”

“I do not worry in the least,” Styr had responded dryly.

Two days later Princess Nachmeister, satisfied, went off to drink the waters at her favourite spa; but promptly upon the first day of every week she received a letter from a member of the bureau of secret police.

The greater part of Ordham’s reserve melted, as was natural, when he sprawled on the divan with his coat off on a hot day, and his hostess sat in her rocking-chair fanning herself and wearing one of those white lawn wrappers that an American woman would retain in her wardrobe were she elevated to a throne. By no means frank by temperament, he indulged in frankness as a sort of luxury where his confidence had been won; and feeling more intimate with Styr than he had ever felt with anybody, he talked to her freely about himself, his family, his hopes, desires, and sentiments toward most things, until Margarethe knew him far better than either of them realized at the time.

But he was not fond of talking about himself, nor of personalities in general. Books, the theatre, life, the mysterious back-waters of human nature, interested him far more. He always brought out his London newspaper, and being too lazy to read aloud himself, made her read to him the news of the day and the editorial comment, while he explained the relationship of the present to the immediate past. Her house was littered with reviews, the works of the various masters he was obliged to study, and of the novelists and poets of the day: George Meredith, Turgénev, Rossetti, Swinburne, Browning. They wrangled across the dissecting-table of Maupassant, and picked the jewelled bones of Flaubert.

She went often to the theatre with him, sitting behind the curtains of a box; and, several famous Gasts from other capitals coming to Munich that summer, there were few pastimes they enjoyed more than this, the drama being the one subject upon which they were in perfect accord. Moreover, as the play was a diversion which she had never denied herself, she experienced no uneasy consciousness of knocking down outposts of old defences.

It was on the nights after the theatre that he remained until the small hours; he always returned with her for supper, as she would not go to a restaurant with him. There are no people wiser in human conduct than servants, and the comment indulged in between the old butler and the maids was upon the astonishing impeccancy of the relationship above stairs. Had it been otherwise, these good Bavarians would have taken it as a matter of course and made no comment whatever. The ingenuous morals of the Bavarians were a source of evergreen interest to Styr, who had been brought up in a country that wore silk over its rags. Upon one occasion, however, she was more embarrassed than moved to ethical musings. She was sitting with Ordham in the gallery after the evening meal, when her housemaid entered and asked permission to leave on the following morning for Leoni, her native village. Kurt withheld his consent, so she appealed to her gnädige frau.

“What is the matter that you go so suddenly, and when do you return?” asked Margarethe, who did not like her household upset.

“I think I cannot return, Frau Gräfin. One of my children is ill, and as I shall soon have another—which will make three—Heinrich and I have decided that it will now be cheaper to marry.”

Ordham, who was willing to discuss in the abstract all questions under the sun, blushed scarlet and dropped out of a window into the garden. Countess Tann remarked tartly:

“Indeed! It is a pity you did not think of it sooner, and then your other two children would have had the advantage of legal birth.”

“That matters not, gnädige frau, and we must be sure of children to support us when we are old and tired, before we marry and perchance have none. And, then, apart, we can make more money for some years, and the babies can be farmed until they become too many. Divorce is not easy with us, gnädige frau, as in America, and we find this arrangement right and just. It works well.”

Styr, who had never supposed the beer-soaked brain of a Bavarian peasant to be capable of any reasoning process whatever, looked at the girl with more interest. She was a plain heavily built creature, but nothing could be more honest, amiable, and sensible than her face.

“Very well! Tell Kurt to give you a month’s extra wages and to engage a new maid at once, I hope you will find your child better and have a merry wedding.”

The girl kissed her hand, protested gratitude, and withdrew.

“After all,” said Margarethe, when Ordham ventured to return, “who shall say? In Zulu land the biggest liar is king.”

“At least they have the advantage of the support of society! Ours are no better and are such shocking hypocrites, when no worse—you never hear of infanticide in this country. Probably most morality could be sifted down to utility. It is wrapped up in charming and traditional sentiments, but the kernel is plastic. These peasants find it more economical after the third discretion to set up an establishment of their own. For most of us, alas! the straight and narrow way is a more comfortable fit in the long run.”

“The simplicity and safety of your philosophy is delightful, but I fancy your temperament has saved you from a good many disasters. And I am told that you very nearly scorched your fingers not so long ago, and that only a goitre saved you. Do you ever think of poor little Frau von Wass dosing and varnishing herself in her lonely castle?”

Ordham scowled, and when he scowled he no longer looked very young. “I do not think of things I wish to forget,” he said shortly. “What is the use?”

“None whatever! How fortunate you are. No doubt you will forget all this a month after the inevitable end.”

“Oh! oh! How can you say such a thing?” He shook his finger at her, his gayety instantly restored. “Besides, I shall never be very far away. I shall always be coming back to see you. Munich, thank heaven, is in the middle of Europe. I shall come here often, no matter where I am sent.”

“Suppose you are sent to St. Petersburg or the United States?”

“I shall manage not to be. Great heaven! Fancy not to be able to see you for months at a time!” He looked appalled.

“What if you marry?”

“What difference will that make?” He moved his head impatiently and sighed, throwing himself back on the divan and biting a tassel of one of the cushions. “I dread returning to England. Only this morning I had a letter from my mother. She has some English girl or other picked out for me. At first she wrote a lot about an American girl with a fortune, the daughter of a friend of hers; but now, it seems, these dear friends have quarrelled, or my mother no longer admires Americans. At all events she is all for marrying me to some rich English girl of my own class that she has found.”

“No doubt she is quite right. Please don’t eat up my cushion.”

“I am so sorry!”

“Is the English girl beautiful?”

“I suppose so. My mother would not venture to recommend her otherwise. She knows that I hate ugliness as she does herself—and am not fond of English girls.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Let her amuse herself. One thing is positive: I shall marry to please myself.”

“I wonder?”

“What do you mean by that?” Ordham had eyes capable of a great variety of expressions. Now they looked large and cold. “Do you fancy I could be married against my will?”

“Always remember that the cleverest of men is no match for a clever woman, and if two or three clever women—” She halted, recalling her compact. “Why should you object to being steered into the matrimonial harbour by your wise mother? She is far less likely to make a mistake than you are, for you are too indolent to give such a grave subject the proper amount of deliberation. And you would soon tire of any girl you married, for you have the order of mind that demands variety. You can find that in friendships, so why miss the opportunity of an advantageous marriage.”

Ordham set his long jaw. “My mother shall not pick out my wife. The very fact that she insisted upon one of any two girls would make me believe the other was the better suited to all my requirements. I and my mother are too like and too unlike to judge for each other.”