“I must keep still,” he warned himself distractedly, “quite, quite still.” But his feet were so forced back against the bar of the chair that his knees were horribly cramped, and he must ease them if he could. And with that there rushed upon him, triumphing over his pain, a full consciousness of the ignominy to which he had been subjected.
He, Philip Christopher, Count Königsmark, grandson of old John Christopher who had captured Prague, nephew of Otto William, the Marshal of Louis XIV, son of Conrad Christopher, the Master of all the Swedish Artillery, who had been killed at the siege of Bonn, brother of that Karl John whose exploits were today in all men’s mouths — he, Philip, had been mishandled and disgraced by a man who yesterday was no more than a clerk with his pen behind his ear.
“And I suffered it without resistance.” He upbraided himself bitterly. “I held out my hands to the cord, glad that it was not tightening round my throat. I let him bind me in a chair — oh, shame!” And he was suddenly amazed at the temerity with which so decadent a bantling as he, had prated of his dreams and of his heart to the lovely Princess of Celle. He had snatched at a planet as though it were no more than an apple on a tree.
Hadn’t he deserved all that had befallen him, he asked in his abasement? And all that was to befall him? This contemptuous treatment, the rings of fire about wrists and ankles, the cramped joints, the sharp stabs of exquisite pain which travelled along the nerves of his limbs in flashes of lightning. Thus his thoughts wove backwards and forwards, if thoughts they could be called, clacking shuttles in the loom of a young overwrought brain. And they wove but two webs in the end, a sense of littleness and a sense of pain. And by the time when night had come, pain had overmastered all.
It was pitch dark in the Duke’s gallery, but a faint glimmer from the outer windows made a ghostly twilight in the body of the chapel. Philip raised his head and looked through one of the three casements which stood open.
“The dawn is near,” he assured himself, but without any confidence. There were indeed many hours to creep by before the dawn shot with its colours that summer sky. They would have been more endurable no doubt to an older man. But Philip was a boy of fifteen and he was hungry and athirst. The hunger weakened him, but he could brave it out. His thirst, however, was torture.
“Water! Water!” he found himself muttering in a foolish repetition. Even if there were water within reach, he could not reach it, and even if he reached it, he would need a cupbearer to lift it to his lips, and there was no one within his call, even if he had dared to call. This chapel was a House of the Dead; and as he framed the words in his thoughts, a tinkling as of tiny bells made a silvery noise in that silent place.
There was no fairy work in those chimes. From the arches of the roof gilded chains hung down with finely carved thin disks of copper dangling at the end of them. Any visitor to Celle may see them hanging down to this day, and wonder at the fancy which conceived so odd a decoration. But Philip Königsmark had never seen them, since his gaze in that chapel never soared above the face of Sophia Dorothea and the flowers in her hair. So when a faint waft of air from an open window set a few of the medallions swinging and chiming, they chimed also with a queer conceit which the stillness of the night and the desolation of his mind had evoked in the boy.
“This is the House of the Dead,” he had said, and the clear tiny clinking of these ornaments sounded in his ears as a summons to take his place amongst them. He was too overwrought by thirst and hunger and pain to reason lucidly. He was only aware that a new fear and one more immediate and even more real was being added to those which already tormented him. He sat up and crouched forward, making himself small and praying with all his distracted soul that the utter darkness of this gallery would hide him from the dead. For he heard them now gathering in the chancel, with little whispers as of filmy, trailing garments. So many who had kneeled here and died thereafter! If he could look down from one of these casements, he would see them — he was sure of it! — and more and more of them crowding in from graveyard and tomb. And all of them waiting for the Duke’s page in his Court livery to join them. For a moment he was glad that he was bound tightly there hand and foot. And for another moment he rejoiced that the Dead have no eyes. But they were seeking for him, asking where he hid. The whispering of robes had changed now into the whispering of voices, tiny voices, no louder than a breath, but urgent. And then one of them was speaking at his side. They had found him. What the words were, he could not distinguish. But they were spoken quite close to him, and they were quite clear indistinguishable words, the words of a nightmare. Philip flinched away from them and, to cap his terror, once more the flow of wind crept through the open window, and once more the medallions tinkled. He had heard just that same sound in the streets of Catholic towns, when the priest in his robes, and his acolyte with the little tinkling bell, went on their way to the bedside of the dying.
“No! No! I won’t come with you. I won’t,” he cried aloud and he wrenched at ankle and wrist in a panic until the torture stopped him and the tears poured down his face.
Some centuries later, it seemed to him, heavy footsteps resounded in the little corridor behind the gallery, the key grated in the lock and the door was thrown open. Bernstorff, carrying a great lantern, was followed in by the soldier, Muller.
“It is time,” said Bernstorff, but he received no answer.
He lifted the lantern high and saw Philip staring at him like someone daft and horribly frightened. To tell the truth, Bernstorff was a little frightened himself. When he had received no answer, and saw only a crouched figure with a head fallen forward on its breast, he had feared that his prisoner was dead. Now he feared that the long ordeal borne by a sensitive boy had driven him out of his wits. He turned quickly to the soldier.
“Set him up on his feet!”
Muller kneeled down and cut the cord from the boy’s ankles, and Bernstorff watched Philip stretch out and bring back one leg after the other and flex the muscles.
“Oh! Oh!”
Philip moaned. But the moan of pain changed into a gasp of relief.
“You can stand?” Bernstorff asked.
Philip tried to lift himself up and sank back. He shook his head.
“Not yet.”
“Help him, Muller.”
The soldier set an arm about Königsmark and raised him up.
“Perhaps now,” said Philip, and he stamped feebly upon the floor of the gallery.
But even then Muller rather carried than supported him, along the corridor, down the steps to the door, through the passage and up the great stone stairway to the first floor of the Castle. They turned into the passage on the right which led to the private apartments of the Duke.
“I can walk by myself now,” said Philip, and the soldier let him go and fell in behind him.
For a second or two Philip tottered and stumbled, but he recovered his bracing and bracing himself walked forward between the Chancellor and the man-at-arms. The Castle was silent, its doors all shut and only a lamp or two burning at intervals on the walls of the passages. An usher was yawning at the door of the Duke’s library.
“One moment, Your Excellency,” he said as the party of three approached him. He knocked upon the panel and went in.
His Excellency looked round at Philip Königsmark and smiled. But for the colour of Philip’s coat, it would have needed a sharp eye to recognise in this forlorn and dishevelled scrub the pretty stripling with the bright eyes and the kindly laugh. The new Chancellor had been paying himself back that night at Philip’s cost for the little office darkened by the line-tree, for his years of insignificance. He had rubbed the gloss off this modish young Adonis. The jewelled green bird had lost all the sheen of his plumage, and Bernstorff was well content.
The usher came out from the library and held the door open. Bernstorff took Philip by the elbow and led him into the room. The usher followed them and closed the door. The room was brightly lit by oil lamps and wax candles in sconces. K�
�nigsmark, coming into it from the dark chapel and the dimly lit corridors, was for the first few moments blinded. As his vision cleared, he saw that the Duke was seated at a great table and engaged in affixing his seal to a folded letter. A big goblet and a jug of Rhenish wine stood at his elbow. Behind him, in a shallow recess by the fire, the Duchess was sitting with her eyes upon the burning logs. Neither of them threw a glance at Philip.
Bernstorff placed Philip opposite to the Duke on the other side of the table and himself stood away. Even then neither the Duke nor his wife had a look to spare for the prisoner. The one was busy, or, rather was making business with his seals. The other, by the fireplace, might have been reading her future in the kaleidoscope of the flaming logs, so completely was her face averted.
“To them both,” he thought bitterly, “I am a pariah brought up for judgment.”
But he was in no state after his grim vigil to observe acutely. George William didn’t look at him because he hated from the bottom of his indolent soul the business which it lay before him to do. He was annoyed by it. It was an interruption of the proper placidity of the day. He had now to rearrange his household and very possibly that work might stop him hunting in the morning. He was almost as much annoyed with Philip for causing him all this vexation as for making calf-love to his daughter.
“A couple of babies,” he said to himself, pushing his sealed letter peevishly away with a finger.
Besides, he loathed delivering judgment and homilies. He was indeed uncomfortable, like the culprit in front of him, whom he wasn’t going to look at. He’d be hanged if he would! He took a gulp of his strong yellow wine. Since the thing had to be done, he had better get it over.
“Philip Christopher, Count Königsmark,” he began in a gruff voice with his head bent, like a judge reading his notes, “you will leave Celle and my Duchy tonight, and if you ever push your head into it again, I’ll clap you into prison and keep you there. But for certain kindnesses shown to me at Breda by your mother in other days, I should do it now. I shall send a guard with you and he will not lose sight of you till he leaves you at your mother’s house. Do you understand?
“Yes, Your Highness,” said Philip in a low voice.
“Now for the homily,” said George William to himself. But he was a simple country gentleman to whom homilies were parsons’ work. He took another drink of his Steinberger.
“I must say finally and lastly,” he began and stammered and broke out with an oath, “I’m ashamed to you, Philip. Yes, that’s what I wanted to say. A couple of babies holding hands in the moonlight. I’m ashamed of you. There! Take this letter which I have written to your mother and give it to her!”
He pushed the letter across the table.
“Take it and go!”
“I can’t, sir,” said Philip quietly.
“Can’t? Can’t?” bellowed Duke George William.
“No, sir!”
Bernstorff made a swift movement towards the table. George William was puzzled. The letter was no business of Bernstorff’s. He held up his hand with a peremptory gesture and Bernstorff stopped. Then Duke George William for the first time looked across the table at Philip, and flung himself back in his chair, gasping. He took the whole picture in no doubt, but he was aware chiefly of two enormous dark tormented eyes burning in a face like a white mask.
“Great God!” he bawled, banging his fist on the table so that the wine shook in his goblet and the jug rattled on the wood. “You, Hugo, untie that boy’s hands at once.”
The usher stepped forward, but the knots were not so easily untied, and he must take a knife to it in the end. Meanwhile Duke George William sat in a rage, glaring at Bernstorff one moment, and at the usher the next.
But even when his wrists were free, there was for a time no diminution of Philip’s distress. A spasm convulsed his face and he stood, his hands dangling at his sides like the hands of a puppet, and the room revolving in circles before his eyes.
“Here!” said George William, and he filled his goblet to the brim, splashing the table in his haste. The boy was going to fall. In another moment he would be down on the floor in a swoon. “Drink this! You, Hugo, hold it to his mouth,” and he pushed the big glass across the table.
Philip had no more wish to make a scene than Duke William had to witness one. His lips curved in the ghost of a smile and “I thank Your Highness. I can hold the glass now,” he said in the ghost of a voice.
The blood was beginning to run back into his numbed fingers. He took unsteadily the glass from Hugo’s hand and drank. To his parched throat and overtired heart, the strong wine was the very elixir of life. He drank slowly and a little colour returned to his cheeks, and with a long sigh of pleasure he drew his breath deeply in. he was for setting down the glass still half-full. But George William rapped fiercely on the table.
“All of it! To the last drop!”
“I shall be drunk, sir,” Philip pleaded.
“Well then, be drunk and be damned!” cried the Duke, and he sat and watched until the glass was empty.
“This is your doing,” he said, turning upon his Chancellor. And that ambitious man saw all his new authority and his future honours crumbling away into dust.
“Your Highness so insisted upon secrecy,” he stammered. “I was perhaps over-zealous,” and he shot a venomous glance at young Königsmark. He had despised the boy before; he had looked upon him as a footstool for his own ascendancy; but the scorn had become hatred now, and a hatred which was going to increase and feed upon itself until one monstrous night years afterwards glutted it.
Philip picked up the letter and bowed low.
“I shall obey Your Highness’s orders,” he said.
So that’s over, thought Duke George William, and he wiped his forehead with his handkerchief in relief. Philip hadn’t swooned, and would be away from Celle in half an hour, and he himself could go hunting tomorrow.
But it was not all over. Philip, with a natural and pretty gesture, walked across the room to the ingle-corner where the Duchess Eleonore was seated. He dropped upon his knee at her side and, lifting the border of her dress, kissed it. But she only shook her head and still gazed into the fire.
“You cannot forgive me,” he said. “It is my sorrow. For I am Your Highness’s debtor for much kindness.”
Philip was as wrong in the reason he gave for her aversion as he had been in judging the husband George William. Eleonore had set her heart, as women will, upon a great marriage for her daughter with young Augustus William, the heir of Wolfenbüttel. It would give Sophia Dorothea the high position in the world which her wealth and her beauty demanded; and in addition it would be a very tough nut for Duchess Sophia of Hanover to crack. But none the less once or twice during this afternoon and night certain doubts, even certain pangs of remorse, had troubled her. When George William had come to Breda, wooing the penniless lady- in-waiting, Eleonore d’Olbreuse, no one had given such valuable countenance to the lovers as Philip’s mother, Amalia Magdalena, Countess Königsmark. What sort of return was that same Eleonore d’Olbreuse now making, she asked herself? And she was trying to stifle the shaming question by a show of extreme displeasure.
“There can be no forgiveness, Count Königsmark. We both trusted you. You have behaved very wickedly,” she began and was pleased with the firm tone of her voice. But now she turned to him and there was an end to the lecture. She uttered a little cry of horror. “Oh, Philip, my poor boy, what cruel things have they done to you?” And she stretched out a hand to him.
Duke George William swung about in his chair and saw what his wife saw, and cursed aloud. The boy’s stockings were torn and his ankles bleeding.
You’ll never be able to ride from Celle with your legs in that pickle,” he cried.
So here was this vexatious business deferred for another day. But Philip reassured him. There was no place for him any longer in Celle. Sophia Dorothea would be kept as far away from him as if he had the plague. The sooner he was gone, the b
etter.
“I can ride, Your Highness, if I have my boots,” he said, and His Highness’ face cleared marvellously.
“You are sure?”
“Yes, sir.”
But how far could he ride? It seemed to Duke George William that the lad’s strength had been failing ever since he had entered the room. His voice was weaker with each spoken word. And though he made a fine show of sufficiency, his slim body was wilting with fatigue.
“When did you eat last?” George William asked.
“At dinner time, sir.”
“Twelve hours ago then,” and for the second time George William shot a savage glance at his Chancellor.
“Hugo, see that supper is served to Count Königsmark in his room, whilst he changes into his riding-dress,” he bawled, and the usher departed on his errand. Then in a gentler voice: “That letter to your mother... Philip. You are holding it in your hand. Give it to me!”
Philip had no suspicion that the Duke was in his way, so long as it did not give him too much trouble, making some amends to him for the mishandling to which he had been subjected. He stepped forward, not very sure of his feet and laid the letter on the table. The Duke broke the seal and handed it back to him.
“Read!”
Philip read. There was not one word in it of his offence. Not a suggestion that he was banished in disgrace. George William wrote to his old friend Amalia Magdalena that Celle, being a peace and with God’s help intending so to remain, there was nothing more of the arts of war or of the accomplishments of a fine gentleman which a young Königsmark could learn there. “We are Boeotians, my dear Amalia, contentedly dull, thriftily uneventful, without stateliness or opportunity. Philip wastes his time here. So I send him back to you. Boys of his mettle want a busier field.”
The blood rushed into Philip’s cheeks as he read and understood the kindliness which had guided the pen. No doubt George William’s chief aim was to prevent any gossip which might tarnish the good name of his beloved Sophia Dorothea. But he might very easily have trumped up a scandalous charge against Philip which would have made the boy’s true story look like a base exhibition of spite, if he were foolish enough to tell it. In either case his predicament would be serious.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 697