They finished tea after that and talked no more about the photograph; Gill would have liked to ask the name of the pleasant young man with the kind eyes, but she felt rather shy about referring to him after her faux pas, though the Grand-Duchess had been so nice about it. After all it did not matter much if he were Rupert Ingram or Beverly or something like that, as he would be in a story-book, or just Rupert Smith, as people more often were in real life. She was never likely to meet him again, in either case.
Mademoiselle Pipignon did not appear till they had nearly finished tea; Gillian supposed that she was looking after Miss Berkley, and, it is to be feared, she did not feel at all sorry that Miss Berkley needed so much looking after. Mademoiselle Pipignon was really rather an alarming person, and the moment she came in, Gillian was made aware that she thought her royal pupil was showing a good deal too much kindness to a little girl of no importance.
She did not accept the chair that the Grand-Duchess pressed upon her, but stood near the door, a model of portly propriety, and inquired when Carina would wish to receive her private secretary, and deal with her correspondence. Gillian felt she ought to go, and got up.
“Hadn’t I better?” she began.
The Grand-Duchess looked at Mademoiselle Pipignon as though she meant to ask her to do something, and then seemed to change her mind.
“I will request my friend, Mademoiselle Gabrielle de Monti, to drive with you to Baroness von Traume’s house, Gillian. Would you be so kind as to ring, Pipchen dear?”
Mademoiselle Pipignon touched the bell, but before anybody could possibly have had time to answer it, there was a quick deferential knock at the door.
“Enter!” called Carina.
The door opened to disclose a tall, merry-looking boy, whose shaving, Gill observed, was very recent and not entirely necessary. He wore a splendid uniform of green and silver, and saluted with amazing precision, then held out a long, official-looking envelope of thick bluish paper.
“Special, your Highness, from his Imperial Majesty, the Kaiser,” he said, with gravity, but Gillian noticed that his eyes were not so much under control as the rest of his face.
Carina took the envelope without enthusiasm. “Thank you, Dick. Who brought it?”
“Baron von Eckart, who came before, your Highness.”
The slender eyebrows of the Grand-Duchess drew together. Gill had an idea that she was not pleased by the Kaiser’s choice of messenger.
“Oh, my dear, it will be advisable, if I may suggest—so highly recommended by his Imperial Majesty—” fussed Mademoiselle Pipignon, rather incoherently, in what was evidently meant to be an undertone. The Grand-Duchess seemed to understand her governess’s meaning.
“Yes, Pipchen, I know I must receive him with proper warmth,” she said a trifle impatiently. “But first …”
“Your dress, Ma’am?”
“No, no, my dear Mademoiselle, it will do very well. This child, I meant.”
She turned again to the boy whom she had called Dick.
“Ask Mademoiselle de Monti if she will do me the favour of escorting Miss Gillian Courtney to the house of Baroness von Traume, Dick,” she said. “Ask her to come here, to fetch Miss Courtney, you understand, and tell Baron von Eckart that we shall be ready to receive him in five minutes in the shell drawing-room.”
“Very good, Ma’am.”
The young man saluted again, with the same amazing precision, turned sharply on his heel and was gone.
Carina turned a laughing face to the rather shocked one of her governess. “Yes, I know what you are going to say—that I ought to be more dignified and proper with Dick Cheshire and never remember that we made mud pies together years ago, when you weren’t looking, darling, and have been the best of friends ever since.”
Mademoiselle Pipignon had vainly tried to check her royal pupil; she gave it up at last, and only cast one reproachful glance in Gillian’s direction, by way of intimating to the Grand-Duchess that she was not alone. She put her arm affectionately round her governess’s shoulders.
“Pipchen dear, I will make up by being the soul of discretion downstairs, and bearing it with suitable gratitude when his Imperial Majesty puts a finger, with a none too clean nail, into my affairs; and admire the photo of his Royal Ineptitude Prince Waldemar as much as expected: though even to please you, you dear, I can’t have it here, among my friends, and …”
“Ma’am, Ma’am, do remember!” implored poor Mademoiselle Pipignon, and Carina dropped a light kiss upon her forehead.
“Dearest, I will! I have finished for the present, that I promise. Gillian, you must come to see me again very soon. I shall want to hear about the real Berta, and how the literature gets on. Au revoir, we won’t say good-bye.” She dropped another of those butterfly kisses upon Gillian’s forehead, and walked out, followed by Mademoiselle Pipignon almost before Gill’s “Thank you awfully,” had been got out.
Gillian was left alone in the dainty little sitting-room feeling as though in that “Thank you” she had somehow plighted her troth and become Carina’s very loyal adherent.
CHAPTER V
The House in the Rue St. Denise
Chardille is divided into the old and new town. The old is a network of narrow streets and tall houses, many of these dating back to the fifteenth century, with wonderful carved balconies attesting their age.
There are some fine municipal buildings in both parts of the town—the “Chambers,” where the business of the country is transacted, are in the new part—the old “Hôtel de Ville” being used as a museum. But the Grand-ducal palace has not been transferred to the new town along with the seat of Government, and the old castle, modernised and enlarged, still looks down from the lower slope of the great hills rising behind old Chardille, upon the network of narrow streets and tall houses upon which the ancestors of the Grand-Duchess had looked long ago.
The Baroness von Traume lived in the new town—in a large and quite modern house, situated in the Rue St. Denise, so Gillian’s companion told her. She was a dark-eyed graceful girl of two or three-and-twenty, the Mademoiselle de Monti of whom Duchess Carina had spoken.
The boy in the glittering uniform, whom the Grand-Duchess called Dick, had brought Mademoiselle de Monti to the Grand-Duchess’s little sanctum about three minutes after Carina had gone so unwillingly to receive the Emissary of his Imperial Majesty. He introduced Gillian to her, with the cheerful information that this was the last stranger she would be required to meet to-night.
There were still the Baroness von Traume and the real Berta, Gillian reflected, as she shook hands with the Grand-Duchess’s beautiful maid of honour, wondering if anybody who looked like that and dressed like that could actually be intending to escort a shy schoolgirl to her rightful destination. Really Mademoiselle de Monti was more like a princess than Carina herself.
But Mademoiselle de Monti did intend to drive with Gillian; she made that clear at once, and, what was more, made it clear with the greatest kindliness, so soon as Dick Cheshire had performed the ceremony of mentioning Gill’s name.
“You are English, Miss Courtney,” she said, speaking in that language, though slowly and deliberately. “It will be a pleasure to me to go with you to your destination.”
“Miss Courtney is going to the Von Traumes’, to be bear-leader in ordinary to that girl who always looks as though they had stuffed her badly, and she bagged in places,” Dick explained, with more candour than politeness—as Mademoiselle de Monti seemed to think, for she interrupted with a disapproving “Really, Dick!”
“Oh, it’s all right, Mademoiselle de Monti, Miss Courtney isn’t one of those—oh well, two ladies present—one of those sweet Germans, who seem to love everybody else’s country so much better than their blessed Fatherland,” Dick assured the maid-of-honour cheerfully. “She’s quite safe.”
“I didn’t know Insterburg was a German sort of place,” Gill said. “Chardille sounds Frenchified.”
“I say! you had
better take care what you remark about ‘a German sort of place’ in the presence of a real blue-blooded Insterburger,” warned Dick. “It’s dangerous.”
“But somehow I thought you were English,” she said, rather taken aback.
“Got the bull’s-eye first time,” he assured her. “I am English; only when quite the nicest thing in mothers goes and marries an Insterburger Count, what are you to do? What I’ve done is to enter the service of the Grand-Duchess (there doesn’t seem any chance of another South African war in my lifetime, or I suppose I should have gone to Sandhurst instead), and, though my stepfather is dead, the mater and I still live on here. No, the real blue-blooded Insterburger is Mademoiselle de Monti, and if you want to drive her really wild …”
Mademoiselle de Monti interrupted at this point, much to Gillian’s relief, as she could not be sure from Dick’s rattle whether she had or had not really said something to vex the maid-of-honour.
“Mr. Cheshire talks a great deal of nonsense,’ she said in her clear refined voice. “Do not listen to him, my dear; although just this much is true, that in Insterburg we are proud of our independence and do not like to be regarded as in any way an appendage to Germany. And now, would you care to put your coat and hat on, and I will take you to the Baroness von Traume?”
“And you ought to regard it as a great compliment that she goes near that lot,” remarked the irrepressible Dick. “Mademoiselle has such an intense love for Germans. …”
“Please, Dick!” Mademoiselle de Monti broke in, in a tone of such real pain that the boy stopped dead.
“I am an unfeeling brute! Of course I had forgotten that your grandfather …”
“My grandfather was killed at Sedan,” Mademoiselle de Monti said to Gillian. “No, it was not a German bullet; he would have welcomed that, I think—he was forced to surrender with the rest at that débâcle, and fell dead an hour later. Shock the doctors called it—but I think that his heart was broken. But Dick cannot help laughing at me because I never trust a German.”
“I am an absolute ruffian,” Dick said, with conviction, “and if either of you ladies would use me as a door-mat I should feel it quite deserved. You won’t? Then I had better go and see if the car is ready for Miss Courtney.”
“I say, I’m so sorry,” Gillian said, rather awkwardly, when the boy had gone.
Mademoiselle de Monti smiled a little sadly. “Why, child? you said nothing; and Dick’s spirits carry him away, but that is nothing: we are all very fond of Dick, and would not have him otherwise. I spoke too strongly, but my father told me so often of the news of Sedan coming. He was a schoolboy then, looking to serve in the regiment commanded by my grandfather. The old Abbé, his tutor, brought the news from the town, where people were crying in the streets and refusing to believe it. My father was in the garden with my grandmother, and they saw there was the worst of news by the old Abbé’s face.
“My grandmother thought first of the country—not my grandfather. ‘A great defeat?’ she asked.
“‘Madame, prepare yourself,’ said the old priest, standing very straight. ‘Not a defeat—a débâcle—and would you have your husband live to see it?’ …
“‘No,’ she said very loudly and clearly, and then she laid her hand upon my father’s arm and told him that when he grew up he must live only to restore France to her place among the nations. We were ruined by the war, and my grandmother took her only child and came back to her own people in Insterburg.”
“And your father?” Gillian asked, deeply interested. To hear Mademoiselle de Monti talk of those long-past days of the Franco-Prussian war was like a page of history, unfolding itself before her in vivid tints.
“He was killed, when a very young man, in a duel with a swaggering Prussian captain, with twice his skill in swordsmanship and all the experience which my father had no chance to win. The Prussian insulted a young girl in a restaurant, and my father protected her. He had never fought a duel in his life, and his sight was defective. The German ran him through the lung, and he died in an hour or two. It was considered a condescension upon the part of the officer to challenge a man who was too short-sighted to pass for the army. Condescending and safe. Do you wonder that I find it difficult to like Germans, Miss Courtney?”
“Oh, please don’t call me Miss Courtney! No one does,” Gill said. She was putting on her hat before the big silver-framed toilet mirror in Carina’s bedroom, and making up her mind to a great sacrifice.
“It must be hateful for you to have to do with Germans at all. Wouldn’t you rather not come with me to-night?—please do understand I am most awfully grateful and all that; but I shall be all right, really, and—I couldn’t if I were you.”
Mademoiselle de Monti smiled again, but her dark eyes looked very soft indeed. “No, I would very much rather see you safely into the hands of your Baroness; though thank you, dear, for wanting to spare me.”
After that Gillian had left Carina’s bedroom and gone down the wide staircase with the maid of honour; past the row of footmen to the entrance, where the splendid motor-car was waiting, with Dick Cheshire standing by it.
He seemed to have recovered the spirits which Mademoiselle de Monti had repressed a few minutes ago, for as he handed Gillian to the car he requested her, in a loud whisper, “to give his love to Shakespeare, and might he implore her to remember that the poet was really born in Berlin!”
Gillian could not help giggling a little, despite the effort she was making to summon all her dignity to meet the Baroness; but that ridiculous suggestion had a pleasant friendly sound about it. She was not the homesick English schoolgirl who had come all alone to Insterburg; there were three people who were interested in her doings—Mademoiselle de Monti; Dick Cheshire and, last but decidedly not least, the Grand-Duchess Carina.
Cheered and rested and refreshed by an excellent tea, it seemed possible to face the future with courage, and to be very much interested in the present, with its journey through the picturesque old town.
Mademoiselle de Monti proved a delightful companion, and seemed to know all that there was to be known about Insterburg.
She told Gillian that in the hill that rose behind the old Grand-Ducal castle there was a wonderful grotto, which had been excavated, it was believed, in the troublous times of the Thirty Years’ War; only it was very probable that then the work had merely been widening and adding to a labyrinth of passages, which had been there from a much earlier date, and forgotten.
She showed Gillian the cathedral, from whose magnificent carved doors a Bishop of Chardille had walked unarmed and alone, except for a priest carrying a golden cross, to command the savage soldiery of Count Tilly in God’s name to spare the women, children and wounded who had thrown themselves on his protection when Chardille fell. She told how one of the brutal soldiery had thrust a pike through the saintly man who stood, unarmed, in his way, and how with his last breath, as he fell, the Bishop had cried “God forgive thee,” and the others had fallen back, terrified, aghast—and through one hideous day and night the tide of plunder, savagery and unnameable horror had flowed around the grey cathedral without passing the dead Bishop, lying in his blood across the threshold with the priest kneeling beside him, clasping the golden cross.
The story brought them beyond the limits of the old town, where such grim things had happened in time past, and into the great squares and wide tree-bordered avenues of the new town.
The houses here were large and handsome, but Gillian thought the new town far less interesting, and was sorry that the Baroness lived there.
“People who boast of their kultur as the Germans do cannot be expected to appreciate historic treasures,” Mademoiselle de Monti told her, with a slight curl of her delicately cut mouth. “That is left perhaps for less educated nationalities.”
The Rue St. Denise was the finest street in the new town, she further told Gillian, as the car sped along it. A great many fashionable people lived there, and the principal restaurant of Chardille, kno
wn as “Estinotti’s,” was situated about half-way down it. It was a great place for after-theatre suppers: “One evening perhaps Baroness Von Traume will allow you to come to the Opera with me, and then Dick Cheshire shall take us out to supper at Estinotti’s afterwards.”
Gillian looked at the brightly-lit restaurant with interest as she drove past it.
“Italian, I suppose?” she asked, and Mademoiselle de Monti smiled. “Yes, the name alone would tell one that.”
Gillian was to remember her first introduction to Estinotti’s Restaurant, by and by!
Towards the further end of the Rue St. Denise there were three houses that in especial attracted her attention. They were all built in much the same style, with large windows and balconies upon the upper floors, and each was divided from its neighbour by a narrow passage, running through to the back. But the last house of the three had one distinguishing feature, and it was upon that one that Gill fixed her interest. It had an outside iron staircase, running up, it seemed, from the narrow passage to the roof, though as far as that of course she could not see.
Gillian wondered why this house should have a staircase outside, when no other house in the street had. She was still wondering when the car pulled up—in the smooth way belonging to well-made and well-driven cars—and it was in front of the house with the outside staircase.
Mademoiselle de Monti’s voice said:
“This is the house of the Baroness Von Traume.”
Gillian had arrived at her destination at last!
CHAPTER VI
The Real Berta
The footman rang the bell, which was answered immediately. There was only time for one encouraging smile from Mademoiselle de Monti, and then Gillian had to summon her courage together and to follow the man into the Baroness’s house. The door shut behind her, and she heard the motor whir away.
Well, at least it was all immeasurably easier than it would have been an hour and a half ago, the time when she would have been arriving, all over smuts, if it had not been for the mistake of Mademoiselle Pipignon at the railway station.
Wanted, an English Girl Page 4