“Pardon me,” I interrupted, “I merely said that he sat in it. I am not trying to deceive you, sir.”
“And the treaty was signed on this table,” said Mr. Riley-Werkheimer. He addressed himself to a plump young lady with a distorted bust and a twenty-two inch waist. “Maude, what do you know about the Roman-Teutonic treaty? We’ll catch you now, my friend,” he went on, turning to me. “My daughter is up in ancient history. She’s an authority.”
Miss Maude appeared to be racking her brain. I undertook to assist her.
“I mean the second treaty, after the fall of Nuremburg,” I explained.
“Oh,” she said, instantly relieved. “Was it really signed here, right here in this hall? Oh, Father! We must have that table.”
“You are sure there was a treaty, Maude?” demanded her parent accusingly.
“Certainly,” she cried. “The Teutons ceded Alsace-Lorraine to—”
“Pardon me once more,” I cried, and this time I plead guilty to a blush, “you are thinking of the other treaty—the one at Metz, Miss Riley-Werkheimer. This, as you will recall, ante-dates that one by—oh, several years.”
“Thank you,” she said, quite condescendingly. “I was confused for a moment. Of course, Father, I can’t say that it was signed here or on this table as the young man says. I only know that there was a treaty. I do wish you’d come and see the fire-screen I’ve found—”
“Let’s get this out of our system first,” said her father. “If you can show me statistics and the proper proof that this is the genuine table, young man, I’ll—”
“Pray rest easy, sir,” I said. “We can take it up later on. The facts are—”
“And this Pontius Pilate seat,” interrupted Rocksworth, biting off the end of a fresh cigar. “What about it? Got a match?”
“Get the gentleman a match, Britton,” I said, thereby giving my valet an opportunity to do his exploding in the pantry. “I can only affirm, sir, that it is common history that Pontius Pilate spent a portion of his exile here in the sixth century. It is reasonable to assume that he sat in this seat, being an old man unused to difficult stairways. He—”
“Buy it, Orson,” said his wife, with authority. “We’ll take a chance on it. If it isn’t the right thing, we can sell it to the second-hand dealers. What’s the price?”
“A thousand dollars to you, madam,” said I.
They were at once suspicious. While they were busily engaged in looking the seat over as the porters shifted it about at all angles, I stepped over and ordered my workmen to resume their operations. I was beginning to get sour and angry again, having missed my coffee. From the culinary regions there ascended a most horrific odour of fried onions. If there is one thing I really resent it is a fried onion. I do not know why I should have felt the way I did about it on this occasion, but I am mean enough now to confess that I hailed the triumphal entry of that pernicious odour with a meanness of spirit that leaves nothing to be explained.
“Good gracious!” gasped the aristocratic Mrs. Riley-Werkheimer, holding her nose. “Do you smell that”?
“Onions! My Gawd!” sniffed Maude. “How I hate ’em!”
Mr. Rocksworth forgot his dignity. “Hate ’em?” he cried, his eyes rolling. “I just love ’em!”
“Orson!” said his wife, transfixing him with a glare. “What will people think of you?”
“I like ’em too,” admitted Mr. Riley-Werkheimer, perceiving at once whom she meant by “people.” He puffed out his chest.
At that instant the carpenters, plumbers and stone masons resumed their infernal racket, while scrubwomen, polishers and painters began to move intimately among us.
“Here!” roared Mr. Rocksworth. “Stop this beastly noise! What the deuce do you mean, sir, permitting these scoundrels to raise the dead like this? Confound ’em, I stopped them once. Here! You! Let up on that, will you?”
I moved forward apologetically. “I am afraid it is not onions you smell, ladies and gentlemen.” I had taken my cue with surprising quickness. “They are raising the dead. The place is fairly alive with dead rats and—”
“Good Lord!” gasped Riley-Werkheimer. “We’ll get the bubonic plague here.”
“Oh, I know onions,” said Rocksworth calmly. “Can’t fool me on onions. They are onions, ain’t they, Carrie?”
“They are!” said she. “What a pity to have this wonderful old castle actually devastated by workmen! It is an outrage—a crime. I should think the owner would turn over in his grave.”
“Unhappily, I am the owner, madam,” said I, slyly working my foot back into an elusive slipper.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” she said, eyeing me coldly with a hitherto unexposed lorgnon.
“I am,” said I. “You quite took me by surprise. I should have made myself more presentable if I had known—”
“Well, let’s move on upstairs,” said Rocksworth. Addressing the porters he said: “You fellows get this lot of stuff together and I’ll take an option on it. I’ll be over tomorrow to close the deal, Mr.—Mr.—Now, where is the old Florentine mirror the Count was telling us about?”
“The Count?” said I, frowning.
“Yes, the real owner. You can’t stuff me with your talk about being the proprietor here, my friend. You see, we happen to know the Count.”
They all condescended to laugh at me. I don’t know what I should have said or done if Britton had not returned with a box of matches at that instant—sulphur matches which added subtly to the growing illusion.
Almost simultaneously there appeared in the lower hall a lanky youth of eighteen. He was a loud-voiced, imperious sort of chap with at least three rolls to his trousers and a plum-coloured cap.
“Say, these clubs are the real stuff, all right, all right. They’re as brittle as glass. See what I did to ’em. We can hae ’em spliced and rewound and I’ll hang ’em on my wall. All I want is the heads anyhow.”
He held up to view a headless mid-iron and brassie, and triumphantly waved a splendid cleek. My favourite clubs! I could play better from a hanging lie with that beautiful brassie than with any club I ever owned and as for the iron, I was deadly with it.
He lit a cigarette and threw the match into a pile of shavings. Old Conrad returned to life at that instant and stamped out the incipient blaze.
“I shouldn’t consider them very good clubs, Harold, if they break off like that,” said his mother.
“What do you know about clubs?” he snapped, and I at once knew what class he was in at the preparatory school.
If I was ever like one of these, said I to myself, God rest the sage soul of my Uncle Rilas!
The situation was no longer humorous. I could put up with anything but the mishandling of my devoted golf clubs.
Striding up to him, I snatched the remnants from his hands.
“You infernal cub!” I roared. “Haven’t you any more sense than to smash a golf club like that? For two cents I’d break this putter over your head.”
“Father!” he yelled indignantly. “Who is this mucker?”
Mr. Rocksworth bounced toward me, his cane raised. I whirled upon him.
“How dare you!” he shouted. The ladies squealed.
If he expected me to cringe, he was mightily mistaken. My blood was up. I advanced.
“Paste him, Dad!” roared Harold.
But Mr. Rocksworth suddenly altered his course and put the historic treaty table between him and me. He didn’t like the appearance of my rather brawny fist.
“You big stiff!” shouted Harold. Afterwards it occurred to me that this inelegant appellation may have been meant for his father, but at the time I took it to be aimed at me.
Before Harold quite knew what was happening to him, he was prancing down the long hall with my bony fingers grasping his collar. Coming to the door opening into the outer vestibule, I drew back my foot for a final aid to locomotion. Acutely recalling the fact that slippers are not designed for kicking purposes, I raised
my foot, removed the slipper and laid it upon a taut section of his trousers with all of the melancholy force that I usually exert in slicing my drive off the tee. I shall never forget the exquisite spasm of pleasure his plaintive “Ouch!” gave me.
Then Harold passed swiftly out of my life.
Mr. Rocksworth, reinforced by four reluctant mercenaries in the shape of porters, was advancing upon me. Somehow I had a vague, but unerring instinct that some one had fainted, but I didn’t stop to inquire. Without much ado, I wrested the cane from him and sent it scuttling after Harold.
“Now, get out!” I roared.
“You shall pay for this!” he sputtered, quite black in the face. “Grab him, you infernal cowards!”
But the four porters slunk away, and Mr. Rocksworth faced me alone. Rudolph and Max, thoroughly fed and most prodigious, were bearing down upon us, accounting for the flight of the mercenaries.
“Get out!” I repeated. “I am the owner of this place, Mr. Rocksworth, and I am mad through and through. Skip!”
“I’ll have the law—”
“Law be hanged!”
“If it costs me a million, I’ll get—”
“It will cost you a million if you don’t get!” I advised him, seeing that he paused for want of breath.
I left him standing there, but had the presence of mind to wave my huge henchmen away. Mr. Riley-Werkheimer approached, but very pacifically. He was paler than he will ever be again in his life, I fear.
“This is most distressing, most distressing, Mr.— Mr.— ahem! I’ve never been so outraged in my life. I—but, wait!” He had caught the snap in my atavistic eye. “I am not seeking trouble. We will go, sir. I—I—I think my wife has quite recovered. Are—are you all right, my dear?”
I stood aside and let them file past me. Mrs. Riley-Werkheimer moved very nimbly for one who had just been revived by smelling-salts. As her husband went by, he half halted in front of me. A curious glitter leaped into his fishy eyes.
“I’d give a thousand dollars to be free to do what you did to that insufferable puppy, Mr.—Mr.—ahem. A cool thousand, damn him!”
I had my coffee upstairs, far removed from the onions. A racking headache set in. Never again will I go without my coffee so long. It always gives me a headache.
CHAPTER III
I CONVERSE WITH A MYSTERY
Late in the afternoon, I opened my door, hoping that the banging of hammers and the buzz of industry would have ceased, but alas! the noise was even more deafening than before. I was still in a state of nerves over the events of the morning. There had been a most distressing lack of poise on my part, and I couldn’t help feeling after it was all over that my sense of humour had received a shock from which it was not likely to recover in a long time. There was but little consolation in the reflection that my irritating visitors deserved something in the shape of a rebuff; I could not separate myself from the conviction that my integrity as a gentleman had suffered in a mistaken conflict with humour. My headache, I think, was due in a large measure to the sickening fear that I had made a fool of myself, notwithstanding my efforts to make fools of them. My day was spoilt. My plans were upset and awry.
Espying Britton in the gloomy corridor, I shouted to him, and he came at once.
“Britton,” said I, as he closed the door, “do you think they will carry out their threat to have the law on me? Mr. Rocksworth was very angry—and put out. He is a power, as you know.”
“I think you are quite safe, sir,” said he. “I’ve been waiting outside since two o’clock to tell you something, sir, but hated to disturb you. I—”
“Thank you, Britton, my head was aching dreadfully.”
“Yes, sir. Quite so. Shortly before two, sir, one of the porters from the hotel came over to recover a gold purse Mrs. Riley-Werkheimer had dropped in the excitement, and he informed Mr. Poopendyke that the whole party was leaving at four for Dresden. I asked particular about the young man, sir, and he said they had the doctor in to treat his stomach, sir, immediately after they got back to the hotel.”
“His stomach? But I distinctly struck him on the verso.”
“I know, sir; but it seems that he swallowed his cigarette.”
To my shame, I joined Britton in a roar of laughter. Afterwards I recalled, with something of a shock, that it was the first time I had ever heard my valet laugh aloud. He appeared to be in some distress over it himself, for he tried to turn it off into a violent fit of coughing. He is such a faithful, exemplary servant that I made haste to pound him on the back, fearing the worst. I could not get on at all without Britton. He promptly recovered.
“I beg pardon, sir,” said he. “Will you have your shave and tub now, sir?”
Later on, somewhat refreshed and relieved, I made my way to the little balcony, first having issued numerous orders and directions to the still stupefied Schmicks, chief among which was an inflexible command to keep the gates locked against all comers. The sun was shining brightly over the western hills, and the sky was clear and blue. The hour was five I found on consulting my watch. Naturally my first impulse was to glance up at the still loftier balcony in the east wing. It was empty. There was nothing in the grim, formidable prospect to warrant the impression that any one dwelt behind those dismantled windows, and I experienced the vague feeling that perhaps it had been a dream after all.
Far below at the foot of the shaggy cliff ran the historic Donau, serene and muddy, all rhythmic testimonials to the contrary. With something of a shudder I computed the distance from my eerie perch to the rocks at the bottom of the cliff. Five hundred feet, at least; an impregnable wall of nature surmounted by a now rank and obsolete obstruction built by the hand of man: a fortress that defied the legions of old but today would afford no more than brief and even desultory target practice for a smart battery. To scale the cliff, however, would be an impossibility for the most resourceful general in the world. All about me were turrets and minarets, defeated by the ancient and implacable foe—Time. Shattered crests of towers hung above me, grey and forbidding, yet without menace save in their senile prerogative to collapse without warning. Tiny windows marked the face of my still sturdy walls, like so many pits left by the pox, and from these in the good old feudal days a hundred marksmen had thrust their thunderous blunderbusses to clear the river of vain-glorious foes. From the scalloped bastions cross-bowmen of even darker ages had shot their random bolts; while in the niches of lower walls futile pikemen waited for the impossible to happen: the scaling of the cliff!
Friend and foe alike came to the back door of Schloss Rothhoefen, and there found welcome or stubborn obstacles that laughed at time and locksmiths: monstrous gates that still were strong enough to defy a mighty force. There was my great stone-paved courtyard, flanked on all sides by disintegrating buildings once occupied by serfs and fighting men; the stables in which chargers and beasts of burden had slept side by side until called by the night’s work or the day’s work, as war or peace prescribed, ranged close by the gates that opened upon the steep, winding roadway that now dismayed all modern steeds save the conquering ass. Here too were the remains of a once noble garden, and here were the granaries and the storehouses.
Far below me were the dungeons, with dead men’s bones on their dripping floors; and somewhere in the heart of the peak were secret, unknown passages, long since closed by tumbling rocks and earth, as darkly mysterious as the streets in the buried cities of Egypt.
Across the river and below me stood the walled-in town that paid tribute to the good and bad Rothhoefens in those olden days: a red-tiled, gloomy city that stood as a monument to long-dead ambitions. A peaceful, quiet town that had survived its parlous centuries of lust and greed, and would go on living to the end of time.
So here I sat me down, almost at the top of my fancy, to wonder if it were not folly as well!
Above me soared huge white-bellied birds, cousins germain to my dreams, but alas! infinitely more sensible in that they roamed for a more sustain
ing nourishment than the so-called food for thought.
I looked backward to the tender years when my valiant young heart kept pace with a fertile brain in its swiftest flights, and pinched myself to make sure that this was not all imagination. Was I really living in a feudal castle with romance shadowing me at every step? Was this I, the dreamer of twenty years ago? Or was I the last of the Rothhoefens and not John Bellamy Smart, of Madison Avenue, New York?
The sun shone full upon me as I sat there in my little balcony, but I liked the dry, warm glare of it. To be perfectly frank, the castle was a bit damp. I had had a pain in the back of my neck for two whole days. The sooner I got at my novel and finished it up the better, I reflected. Then I could go off to the baths somewhere. But would I ever settle down to work? Would the plumbers ever get off the place? (They were the ones I seemed to suspect the most.)
Suddenly, as I sat there ruminating, I became acutely aware of something white on the ledge of the topmost window in the eastern tower. Even as I fixed my gaze upon it, something else transpired. A cloud of soft, wavy, luxurious brown hair eclipsed the narrow white strip and hung with spreading splendour over the casement ledge, plainly, indubitably to dry in the sun!
My neighbour had washed her hair!
And it was really a most wonderful head of hair. I can’t remember ever having seen anything like it, except in the advertisements.
For a long time I sat there trying to pierce the blackness of the room beyond the window with my straining eyes, deeply sensitive to a curiosity that had as its basic force the very natural anxiety to know what disposition she had made of the rest of her person in order to obtain this rather startling effect.
Of course, I concluded, she was lying on a couch of some description, with her head in the window. That was quite clear, even to a dreamer. And perhaps she was reading a novel while the sun shone. My fancy went to the remotest ends of probability: she might even be reading one of mine!
What a glorious, appealing, sensuous thing a crown of hair—but just then Mr. Poopendyke came to my window.
“May I interrupt you for a moment, Mr. Smart?” he inquired, as he squinted at me through his ugly bone-rimmed glasses.
The George Barr McCutcheon Megapack: 25 Classic Novels and Stories Page 233