Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (66 page)

The Princess Amalia Seraphina, a daughter of the Grand-Ducal house of Toggenburg-Tannhäuser, would be equally inconsiderable if she were not a cutting instrument in the hands of an ambitious man.  She is much younger than the Prince, a girl of two-and-twenty, sick with vanity, superficially clever, and fundamentally a fool.  She has a red-brown rolling eye, too large for her face, and with sparks of both levity and ferocity; her forehead is high and narrow, her figure thin and a little stooping.  Her manners, her conversation, which she interlards with French, her very tastes and ambitions, are alike assumed; and the assumption is ungracefully apparent: Hoyden playing Cleopatra.  I should judge her to be incapable of truth.  In private life a girl of this description embroils the peace of families, walks attended by a troop of scowling swains, and passes, once at least, through the divorce court; it is a common and, except to the cynic, an uninteresting type.  On the throne, however, and in the hands of a man like Gondremark, she may become the authoress of serious public evils.

Gondremark, the true ruler of this unfortunate country, is a more complex study.  His position in Grünewald, to which he is a foreigner, is eminently false; and that he should maintain it as he does, a very miracle of impudence and dexterity.  His speech, his face, his policy, are all double: heads and tails.  Which of the two extremes may be his actual design he were a bold man who should offer to decide.  Yet I will hazard the guess that he follows both experimentally, and awaits, at the hand of destiny, one of those directing hints of which she is so lavish to the wise.

On the one hand, as
Maire du Palais
to the incompetent Otto, and using the love-sick Princess for a tool and mouthpiece, he pursues a policy of arbitrary power and territorial aggrandisement.  He has called out the whole capable male population of the state to military service; he has bought cannon; he has tempted away promising officers from foreign armies; and he now begins, in his international relations, to assume the swaggering port and the vague, threatful language of a bully.  The idea of extending Grünewald may appear absurd, but the little state is advantageously placed, its neighbours are all defenceless; and if at any moment the jealousies of the greater courts should neutralise each other, an active policy might double the principality both in population and extent.  Certainly at least the scheme is entertained in the court of Mittwalden; nor do I myself regard it as entirely desperate.  The margravate of Brandenburg has grown from as small beginnings to a formidable power; and though it is late in the day to try adventurous policies, and the age of war seems ended, Fortune, we must not forget, still blindly turns her wheel for men and nations.  Concurrently with, and tributary to, these warlike preparations, crushing taxes have been levied, journals have been suppressed, and the country, which three years ago was prosperous and happy, now stagnates in a forced inaction, gold has become a curiosity, and the mills stand idle on the mountain streams.

On the other hand, in his second capacity of popular tribune, Gondremark is the incarnation of the free lodges, and sits at the centre of an organised conspiracy against the state.  To any such movement my sympathies were early acquired, and I would not willingly let fall a word that might embarrass or retard the revolution.  But to show that I speak of knowledge, and not as the reporter of mere gossip, I may mention that I have myself been present at a meeting where the details of a republican Constitution were minutely debated and arranged; and I may add that Gondremark was throughout referred to by the speakers as their captain in action and the arbiter of their disputes.  He has taught his dupes (for so I must regard them) that his power of resistance to the Princess is limited, and at each fresh stretch of authority persuades them, with specious reasons, to postpone the hour of insurrection.  Thus (to give some instances of his astute diplomacy) he salved over the decree enforcing military service, under the plea that to be well drilled and exercised in arms was even a necessary preparation for revolt.  And the other day, when it began to be rumoured abroad that a war was being forced on a reluctant neighbour, the Grand Duke of Gerolstein, and I made sure it would be the signal for an instant rising, I was struck dumb with wonder to find that even this had been prepared and was to be accepted.  I went from one to another in the Liberal camp, and all were in the same story, all had been drilled and schooled and fitted out with vacuous argument.  ‘The lads had better see some real fighting,’ they said; ‘and besides, it will be as well to capture Gerolstein: we can then extend to our neighbours the blessing of liberty on the same day that we snatch it for ourselves; and the republic will be all the stronger to resist, if the kings of Europe should band themselves together to reduce it.’  I know not which of the two I should admire the more: the simplicity of the multitude or the audacity of the adventurer.  But such are the subtleties, such the quibbling reasons, with which he blinds and leads this people.  How long a course so tortuous can be pursued with safety I am incapable of guessing; not long, one would suppose; and yet this singular man has been treading the mazes for five years, and his favour at court and his popularity among the lodges still endure unbroken.

I have the privilege of slightly knowing him.  Heavily and somewhat clumsily built, of a vast, disjointed, rambling frame, he can still pull himself together, and figure, not without admiration, in the saloon or the ball-room.  His hue and temperament are plentifully bilious; he has a saturnine eye; his cheek is of a dark blue where he has been shaven.  Essentially he is to be numbered among the man-haters, a convinced contemner of his fellows.  Yet he is himself of a commonplace ambition and greedy of applause.  In talk, he is remarkable for a thirst of information, loving rather to hear than to communicate; for sound and studious views; and, judging by the extreme short-sightedness of common politicians, for a remarkable provision of events.  All this, however, without grace, pleasantry, or charm, heavily set forth, with a dull countenance.  In our numerous conversations, although he has always heard me with deference, I have been conscious throughout of a sort of ponderous finessing hard to tolerate.  He produces none of the effect of a gentleman; devoid not merely of pleasantry, but of all attention or communicative warmth of bearing.  No gentleman, besides, would so parade his amours with the Princess; still less repay the Prince for his long-suffering with a studied insolence of demeanour and the fabrication of insulting nicknames, such as Prince Featherhead, which run from ear to ear and create a laugh throughout the country.  Gondremark has thus some of the clumsier characters of the self-made man, combined with an inordinate, almost a besotted, pride of intellect and birth.  Heavy, bilious, selfish, inornate, he sits upon this court and country like an incubus.

But it is probable that he preserves softer gifts for necessary purposes.  Indeed, it is certain, although he vouchsafed none of it to me, that this cold and stolid politician possesses to a great degree the art of ingratiation, and can be all things to all men.  Hence there has probably sprung up the idle legend that in private life he is a gross romping voluptuary.  Nothing, at least, can well be more surprising than the terms of his connection with the Princess.  Older than her husband, certainly uglier, and, according to the feeble ideas common among women, in every particular less pleasing, he has not only seized the complete command of all her thought and action, but has imposed on her in public a humiliating part.  I do not here refer to the complete sacrifice of every rag of her reputation; for to many women these extremities are in themselves attractive.  But there is about the court a certain lady of a dishevelled reputation, a Countess von Rosen, wife or widow of a cloudy count, no longer in her second youth, and already bereft of some of her attractions, who unequivocally occupies the station of the Baron’s mistress.  I had thought, at first, that she was but a hired accomplice, a mere blind or buffer for the more important sinner.  A few hours’ acquaintance with Madame von Rosen for ever dispelled the illusion.  She is one rather to make than to prevent a scandal, and she values none of those bribes — money, honours, or employment — with which the situation might be gilded.  Indeed, as a person frankly bad, she pleased me, in the court of Grünewald, like a piece of nature.

The power of this man over the Princess is, therefore, without bounds.  She has sacrificed to the adoration with which he has inspired her not only her marriage vow and every shred of public decency, but that vice of jealousy which is so much dearer to the female sex than either intrinsic honour or outward consideration.  Nay, more: a young, although not a very attractive woman, and a princess both by birth and fact, she submits to the triumphant rivalry of one who might be her mother as to years, and who is so manifestly her inferior in station.  This is one of the mysteries of the human heart.  But the rage of illicit love, when it is once indulged, appears to grow by feeding; and to a person of the character and temperament of this unfortunate young lady, almost any depth of degradation is within the reach of possibility.

CHAPTER III — THE PRINCE AND THE ENGLISH TRAVELLER

So far Otto read, with waxing indignation; and here his fury overflowed.  He tossed the roll upon the table and stood up.  ‘This man,’ he said, ‘is a devil.  A filthy imagination, an ear greedy of evil, a ponderous malignity of thought and language: I grow like him by the reading!  Chancellor, where is this fellow lodged?’

‘He was committed to the FlagTower,’ replied Greisengesang, ‘in the Gamiani apartment.’

‘Lead me to him,’ said the Prince; and then, a thought striking him, ‘Was it for that,’ he asked, ‘that I found so many sentries in the garden?’

‘Your Highness, I am unaware,’ answered Greisengesang, true to his policy.  ‘The disposition of the guards is a matter distinct from my functions.’

Otto turned upon the old man fiercely, but ere he had time to speak, Gotthold touched him on the arm.  He swallowed his wrath with a great effort.  ‘It is well,’ he said, taking the roll.  ‘Follow me to the FlagTower.’

The Chancellor gathered himself together, and the two set forward.  It was a long and complicated voyage; for the library was in the wing of the new buildings, and the tower which carried the flag was in the old schloss upon the garden.  By a great variety of stairs and corridors, they came out at last upon a patch of gravelled court; the garden peeped through a high grating with a flash of green; tall, old gabled buildings mounted on every side; the Flag Tower climbed, stage after stage, into the blue; and high over all, among the building daws, the yellow flag wavered in the wind.  A sentinel at the foot of the tower stairs presented arms; another paced the first landing; and a third was stationed before the door of the extemporised prison.

‘We guard this mud-bag like a jewel,’ Otto sneered.

The Gamiani apartment was so called from an Italian doctor who had imposed on the credulity of a former prince.  The rooms were large, airy, pleasant, and looked upon the garden; but the walls were of great thickness (for the tower was old), and the windows were heavily barred.  The Prince, followed by the Chancellor, still trotting to keep up with him, brushed swiftly through the little library and the long saloon, and burst like a thunderbolt into the bedroom at the farther end.  Sir John was finishing his toilet; a man of fifty, hard, uncompromising, able, with the eye and teeth of physical courage.  He was unmoved by the irruption, and bowed with a sort of sneering ease.

‘To what am I to attribute the honour of this visit?’ he asked.

‘You have eaten my bread,’ replied Otto, ‘you have taken my hand, you have been received under my roof.  When did I fail you in courtesy?  What have you asked that was not granted as to an honoured guest?  And here, sir,’ tapping fiercely on the manuscript, ‘here is your return.’

‘Your Highness has read my papers?’ said the Baronet.  ‘I am honoured indeed.  But the sketch is most imperfect.  I shall now have much to add.  I can say that the Prince, whom I had accused of idleness, is zealous in the department of police, taking upon himself those duties that are most distasteful.  I shall be able to relate the burlesque incident of my arrest, and the singular interview with which you honour me at present.  For the rest, I have already communicated with my Ambassador at Vienna; and unless you propose to murder me, I shall be at liberty, whether you please or not, within the week.  For I hardly fancy the future empire of Grünewald is yet ripe to go to war with England.  I conceive I am a little more than quits.  I owe you no explanation; yours has been the wrong.  You, if you have studied my writing with intelligence, owe me a large debt of gratitude.  And to conclude, as I have not yet finished my toilet, I imagine the courtesy of a turnkey to a prisoner would induce you to withdraw.’

There was some paper on the table, and Otto, sitting down, wrote a passport in the name of Sir John Crabtree.

‘Affix the seal, Herr Cancellarius,’ he said, in his most princely manner, as he rose.

Greisengesang produced a red portfolio, and affixed the seal in the unpoetic guise of an adhesive stamp; nor did his perturbed and clumsy movements at all lessen the comedy of the performance.  Sir John looked on with a malign enjoyment; and Otto chafed, regretting, when too late, the unnecessary royalty of his command and gesture.  But at length the Chancellor had finished his piece of prestidigitation, and, without waiting for an order, had countersigned the passport.  Thus regularised, he returned it to Otto with a bow.

‘You will now,’ said the Prince, ‘order one of my own carriages to be prepared; see it, with your own eyes, charged with Sir John’s effects, and have it waiting within the hour behind the Pheasant House.  Sir John departs this morning for Vienna.’

The Chancellor took his elaborate departure.

‘Here, sir, is your passport,’ said Otto, turning to the Baronet.  ‘I regret it from my heart that you have met inhospitable usage.’