“An Englishman, and knew of the palace parties? What was he like, this Englishman?” enquired the Baroness, with increasing interest.
Gillian could not help feeling pleased that she was managing to get on so well with her hostess. During the long, dreary dinner she had experienced a great many qualms about those seven weeks, wondering if she and the Von Traumes would ever find anything to talk about. Now conversation had suddenly become quite easy.
“Oh, he was tall—over six feet, I should think, and awfully—I mean very nice-looking,” she said. “Rather sunburnt, and looked as though he played things a good deal, you know, and nice eyes that twinkled; oh, and a moustache, so I should think he was a soldier. He had met you, and Berta as well …” Gill broke off. She was just going to add that her friend of the train had met the Duchess too, when she remembered that photograph in Carina’s little private boudoir; somehow it felt like prying into her affairs to mention to these Germans that Rupert-George and the Grand-Duchess knew each other.
“It must have been Captain Cartaret,” the Baroness said, after waiting an instant for Gillian to finish her sentence. “How strange that you should have chanced to meet him.”
“Did you think him so handsome?” Berta asked, joining in the conversation for the first time since they had left the dining-room. “For me, I do not admire the thin brown officers of your English army.”
“What’s wrong with them?” Gill asked combatively; but either the effort of so long a sentence had been too much for Berta, or her mother’s interest in what Gillian had to say gave her no chance of expanding on the subject of British officers.
“And after Captain Cartaret had come so kindly to your assistance he told you of the Grand-Ducal Bachsfisch parties, and my Berta’s participation in them? And surely he was not so insensible as to have no word upon our little Grand-Duchess’s beauty? Come, Fräulein Gillian, you will never persuade me that was possible. Captain Cartaret is not a stock or a stone!”
The tone was one of careless jesting, but the agate eyes were freer from their heavy white lids than Gillian had seen them yet. Somehow the word ‘pumping’ would recur to her mind, though there was nothing in the style of the conversation that might not be quite innocent of anything but normal interest. In England people would not have been quite so determinedly curious, but then this was not England. All the same, Gillian did not mean to let out anything about Rupert-George and the Grand-Duchess in connection with each other, however harmless the proceeding might appear. The distrust of Germans felt so strongly by Dick Cheshire and by Mademoiselle de Monti was still with her—though she could hardly have put into words of what that vague distrust consisted.
“We talked chiefly about my ticket and where I could have put it,” she said; “and very soon after—after Captain Cartaret joined me, we were at Chardille, and then the mistake happened, owing to Mademoiselle Pipignon taking me for someone else and my being too stupid to understand, and, when we came to the palace, the Grand-Duchess was so kind as to say I must have some tea before I went on to you.”
Gillian’s story certainly could not be accused of too much thrilling interest at this point; she fancied that the Baroness was disappointed in it.
“You are not a raconteuse, Fräulein Gillian,” she said, rather impatiently. “You make the narrative of your adventures sound as flat as—as your English fenland. You do not relate what Her Grand-Ducal Highness said when your identity was discovered—what you talked of when you were so fortunate as to have the honour of taking tea with her …”
A spirit of mischief took possession of Gillian at that instant, and after all if the Baroness was deliberately pumping her guest for information she deserved no consideration.
“Sorry I’m stupid,” she apologised. “I am so dreadfully tired and sleepy that I am going to ask your leave to go to bed, Baroness, now that I know what Berta and I are to do together in the morning. Which reminds me—it was quite a pity that Berta wasn’t at the palace this afternoon, for the Grand-Duchess and I were talking about—Shakespeare.”
Gillian got up, with this parting shot, and asked leave to go to bed. The Baroness made no effort to detain her. Her enthusiasm for Shakespeare was plainly not keen enough to make her want to know what the Grand-Duchess had said about him. Gillian chuckled inwardly when she reached her bedroom, and wished that she had thought of putting forward the literary part of the interview with Carina just a little sooner. She might have been in bed by now if she had.
However, it was a big thing to be on her way there, and the tired-out girl wasted no time over the process of getting into bed. She flung off her clothes, thrust her evening frock all anyhow upon a peg in the big cupboard, gave her hair a most perfunctory brush, and in less than a quarter of an hour from the time she left the drawing-room was in the wooden bedstead, with the feather-bed-quilt on the floor, and the dressing-gown taking its place as a bed-covering.
She expected to sleep dreamlessly, but she was much too tired and excited for really comfortable sleep.
She dropped off almost at once, but it was a restless sleep, from which she was continually awakening.
It was a sleep haunted by a sense of innumerable things said which should not have been said, and still more innumerable things undone which should have been done long ago.
At last she fancied that she had not said one word of thanks to Carina for all her kindness, and found herself broad awake, with a throbbing heart and hot cheeks, preparing to get out of bed and rush to the Grand-ducal Palace in her nightdress.
The idea of ingratitude to Carina was so dreadful that it roused her more effectually than anything had done yet; she lay thinking how horrible it would have been if it had been true. Whatever she had managed to forget, it had not been anything so bad as that, thank goodness: but the recollection of something that she certainly had forgotten came to her—a little unimportant thing, but a thing on which Aunt Edith had laid such stress that she would not have forgotten it if she had not been so very tired last night.
“For pity’s sake, Gill, do remember to hang your coat up on its hanger!” Aunt Edith had said, while Gill was packing that last night at home. “You will have no excuse for not doing it now I’ve bought you that very good folding-up hanger from the six-penny bazaar; so mind you remember to put it into your coat, my dear, as soon as ever you take off your things at the Baroness’s house.”
Gillian really had meant to do it, but she had a recollection of seeing her coat in a sort of bundle over the back of a chair, where she had thrown it down when she and Berta came upstairs together. Berta had put away her hat, she remembered, but had not touched the coat. Gillian had meant to see to it herself, when she had unpacked to the very furthest recesses of the hold-all, where of course the hanger managed to hide itself. And then, when she came to bed, nothing had seemed to matter except getting into it as fast as possible.
Gillian sat up in bed. There was a moon, and her room was quite light. She had not a notion what the time might be, for she had forgotten to wind up her little silver wrist-watch last night, but she had an idea that she had been asleep for some time. Still it certainly was not morning, and there would be time to get the creases out of her coat, if she obeyed Aunt Edith’s directions at once.
There was her hold-all, a shapeless dark hump in a corner of her room, and there was another shapeless thing, her coat, hanging over the back of a chair, with one sleeve dipping to the floor.
Gillian got up, without troubling to put on dressing-gown or slippers, or to light a candle. The room was light enough and the night was warm. She went barefoot across the room, knelt down by the hold-all, and, plunging in her hand, easily found the coat-hanger, unfolded it with a little less ease, and thrust it into the sleeves of her coat. It would be something to be able to tell Aunt Edith that she had hung her ill-used coat up carefully after all. She went noiselessly enough on her bare feet to the big cupboard, whose door she had not quite shut when she hung her evening frock up. As she walke
d into it with the coat she heard two men talking almost as plainly as though they were in the room with her.
Gillian knew in an instant how that was; the back of the cupboard had been once a door of communication between her room and the next, and these two men—her host and his guest of this evening, Baron von Eckart—were in the adjoining room together.
Gillian drew back for a moment, and then laughed at herself. There was certainly no reason why she should not hang her coat up, now she had taken so much trouble to obey Aunt Edith, just because two people were talking next door. She need not listen.
She stepped back into the cupboard and felt for an empty peg.
In that moment that she was fumbling for it, she heard—something that mattered!
CHAPTER VIII
Morning Brings Counsel
The sentence which she caught before she had time to put her will-power against hearing was certainly a startling one, and did not somehow match at all with the everyday occupation of hanging a coat up.
It was spoken in German, but Gill understood it quite easily, for the speaker, Baron von Eckart, spoke it very slowly, as though he were trying to take in an unbelievable fact.
“What! Ach, Himmel! is it to believe one’s ears when you say that my accomplished friend the Baroness could get nothing from the so-dense English schoolgirl concerning the relations between the young Grand-Duchess and that cursed meddler, Cartaret the Englishman?”
Gillian got out of her wardrobe in double-quick time, and without giving another thought to the coat. She felt furious and humiliated and ashamed, but her one desire was to be out of hearing as fast as possible. Eavesdropping might be made to seem all right in books, particularly the historic kind which Rupert-George had appeared to disapprove, but it felt horribly all-wrong and disgraceful for an English girl, who had eaten of the Baron von Traume’s bread and salt.
Gillian threw her coat down on a chair, with the hanger still in it; it missed, and came to the floor with a clatter that sounded dreadfully loud in the stillness of the house.
There was a hasty movement next door, and the murmured sound of voices ceased. A minute or two later, when Gill was back in bed, her own door opened very softly, and the Baroness von Traume looked in, still in the fine evening dress she had worn at dinner.
“Did you call, Miss Courtney?” she asked coldly, with obvious indifference as to whether her guest had called or not.
“No, thank you so much for coming—I’m sure I couldn’t have called, for I’ve only just wakened up,” Gillian said.
The Baroness advanced a little further into the room and looked at Gillian critically by the light of the candle she carried.
“You have slept then—one sees it in your eyes,” she said, and Gillian began to think hopefully that she was kinder than her manner led one to expect.
“Yes, rather!” she told the Baroness, and added rather shyly, “It is most awfully good of you to bother about it.”
The Baroness did not answer. She was looking down at something which her foot had touched as she moved forward—Gillian’s coat.
Gillian followed the direction of her hostess’s eyes.
“I am so sorry, I ought to have hung it up, I know,” she said; and was just going to add that she had got up from bed to do so when something, what she did not quite know, stopped her—most probably some vague recollection of Berta’s contemptuous tone as she put away the dusty hat earlier in the evening.
The Baroness made no comment upon her apology. “I trust that you will sleep more quietly for the remainder of the night, Miss Courtney,” she said, and walked out, shading her candle. Gillian was intensely relieved to see her go, for all that her questions had seemed rather kind than otherwise.
She did not go to sleep for quite a long time after the Baroness’s visit, but lay going over all kinds of things in her mind.
The house was very quiet; if the two men next door were talking at all it must be in whispers. There was nothing to keep her awake, except that very uncomfortable sense of something going on around her which she did not understand.
“My accomplished friend the Baroness could get nothing from the so-dense English schoolgirl concerning the relations between the young Grand-Duchess and that cursed meddler, Cartaret the Englishman.”
That overheard sentence went over and over again in Gill’s tired mind, and each time she liked it less. The “so-dense English schoolgirl” must be herself, of course; it could be no one else. Gill felt her face burn hotly in the darkness—she had been rather tired and stupid perhaps, but not so stupid as all that. That was her first thought.
Then—the Baroness could “get nothing”; her instinct had been right and her hostess had been pumping deliberately in the drawing room. That was the next thing that Gill saw. Pumping, and for what? Not mere curiosity about the Grand-Duchess’s surroundings, as the Baroness had tried to make her think, but to find out the relations between the Grand-Duchess and the young Englishman who had come so opportunely to Gill’s rescue, who had talked so readily and good-naturedly on every subject except that of the Grand-Duchess, and whose photograph was in Carina’s private sitting-room, where she had told Mademoiselle Pipignon that she would not have Prince Waldemar’s.
“That cursed meddler, Cartaret the Englishman,” Baron von Eckart had said. Clearly in this house there was strong disapproval of his having anything to do with the Grand-Duchess.
“All I can say is that I’m jolly glad if the Baroness did find me dense,” Gill told herself at this point, with considerable heat.
The chief thing that worried her was what to do with her information. It was a difficult thing to say to anybody, “I was an eavesdropper last night and this is what I heard,” and still more difficult to betray in the smallest degree people whose bread she had eaten. But difficult or not, something must be done. To go to the Grand-ducal palace and ask an audience of the Grand-Duchess was her first thought, but she put it aside. Apart from the very great difficulty of going to the palace unnoticed and obtaining entrance when she did, there was a feeling that she ought not to say anything which might get her host and hostess into trouble with the ruling power. It would be better to ask Mademoiselle de Monti.
Poor Gill tossed and turned, and tried to evolve schemes for getting at Mademoiselle de Monti, or Mademoiselle Pipignon, and then of making them understand that she had not been dreaming and that the Baron von Eckart had really said what he did.
Gill felt quite sure that it was the Baron’s voice; she had heard it too often during dinner for any doubt on that score.
Somehow she fell asleep at last in the midst of composing explanations for people whom she had practically no chance of meeting, and, when she did sleep, slept heavily until one of the short-sleeved maids came into her room with fragrant, delicious coffee and a fresh roll, and with a very little hot water at the bottom of a highly-burnished jug for toilet purposes, when the early breakfast was disposed of.
Gillian woke, feeling very tired and heavy-eyed, and to no solution of last night’s problem. However, it was a bright sunny morning, when nothing in the world can manage to look very black, and the coffee was refreshing. She got up after the little meal, feeling hopeful that she would think of something soon.
Berta came to her room, as Gill was struggling with her mane of hair, apparently to find out what her guest meant to put on. She looked critically at the blue serge skirt and white shirt-blouse—she herself was dressed in a striped pink and white cambric, cut very low indeed at the throat—a frock which would have been both pretty and suitable if the stripes had been a little less aggressive, or the style less determinedly fashionable.
“We shall study for two hours, you and I, and then I shall conduct you to walk in the principal streets where you may view the shops,” Berta explained to her guest, in such careful English that Gillian fancied she must have been having a lecture from her mother upon making the most of her opportunities.
“That will be very nice,” she agre
ed heartily, though she would have preferred a little sight-seeing in the old town if Berta had been the sort of girl to whom one could suggest it.
“What you wear now will do well enough for our studies, but you will of course make your toilet before going out into the street, where one sees all the fashionable world, and sometimes even the Grand-Duchess, in the hour before the midday meal,” Berta explained solemnly.
“Oh, bother! Does that mean I have to get into my best things?” Gillian asked, half laughing in spite of her annoyance. “Oh, all right, Berta; I’ll do anything you want in that line. Only you’ll have to tell me, you know; we do things differently in England.”
“I have heard so.” Berta’s tone made Gillian long to shake her. It implied such a measureless contempt for the ways of England.
She controlled herself, however; really, it was no good “getting wild” over Berta and her ways, she told herself, and she only tied back her hair with a vicious twitch to the inoffending black bow—then pulled off the towel which she had put round her shoulders.
“Ready,” she announced. “One moment, though; I must hang up my dressing-gown.”
“And your coat, too, I trust?—See, you have left it on a chair, and creased it much, besides doubtless dirtying the chair, which has been newly covered,” reproved Berta.
If it had not been for that irritating tone of reproof, Gillian would probably have told Berta in her own defence that she had at least attempted to hang up the offending coat last night. But really, it was not Berta’s business to rebuke her untidiness; she said nothing at all, but hung up coat and dressing-gown, and followed Berta downstairs.
The room where the girls were to read was a pleasant one with a good outlook; but the windows were fast closed. Gillian bore with them for the present, though she did not despair of making Berta a little less afraid of dust before these summer holidays were over.
The two sat down together and Berta produced a bound Shakespeare in six volumes, each plentifully adorned with the complex ideas of German scholars upon Shakespeare’s inner meaning.
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