Anthony was suddenly aware of a great reluctance to visit Celle. He ought to wish to visit Celle, he thought, because there she was born and there until a few days ago, she had lived. But he did not and so strong was his aversion that he found himself making excuses.
“Your Highness, if only I had the time! But I have outstayed my leave. Within a few days I must set off on my way home.”
The Princess was looking at him with a trifle of surprise and still more of impatience.
“But it’s a mere step to Celle, Monsieur, for one who has travelled to Paris and Venice and Dresden and Vienna, as I understand from Sir Henry, you have done.”
He was accused of belittling her beloved Celle. What? Make the Grand Tour and neglect Celle! Anthony grew red with confusion. He saw himself dropping like a plummet to the lowest depths of her contempt. He floundered pitiably.
“I have heard so much of Celle, Your Highness, I seem already to have visited it.”
“You have heard so much of it!” she repeated. She smiled on him again. She begged Sir Henry and himself to be seated. Anthony took a seat but lost his head.
“Yes, indeed!” he cried. “The French Garden! The green and gold chapel with the medallions hanging from the roof! The lime- tree avenue between the Castle and the town—”
“And from whom have you heard of them?” Sophia Dorothea asked leaning prettily forward; and Anthony Craston came to a full stop at the height of his panegyric.
Now he knew why he didn’t want to visit Celle. Jealousy! She, the Princess Sophia Dorothea, was so unconcernedly civil to him, the stranger whom she talked to today and would forget altogether tomorrow; and she had lived there through such intimate sweet hours with somebody else — no, he’d be hanged if he’d go to Celle.
“And from whom have you heard of them, Monsieur?” the Princess repeated and again there was a little note of surprise in her voice.
He had got to answer, and the sooner the better. Otherwise it would seem that he had heard a story which needed a good deal of dilution before it could be told.
“From Philip von Königsmark, Your Highness.”
He heard a tiny rustle of her dress, he saw her fingers jump upon her lap, but his head was too bent for him to see her face, since he did not wish her to see how the blood rushed into his. A pause just long enough to be remarked followed. Then she asked gently with a warmth which he had not heard before in her voice.
“Philip is a friend of yours?”
The warmth was obviously for Philip, not for him.
“We were together at Monsieur Faubert’s Academy in London,” he said stubbornly. But his mind was just — at that moment annoyingly just. If he stopped then, he made out Philip to be a mere gossip, a teller of tales out of school, the Sir Brilliant Fashion of the comedies. “Yes,” he continued honestly, looking straight into her eyes, “Philip was the greatest friend I have ever had. I loved him dearly. We had few secrets one from the other. I think the happiest days which he will ever know were the days when he was His Highness the Duke’s page at Celle.”
He was rewarded for his honesty with a smile of pleasure. A faint colour rose up from her throat to her pale cheeks. There was warmth now for him, too, in the cordiality of her eyes. She rose to her feet.
“We must do what we can, Sir Henry,” she said to the Ambassador, “to make this young gentleman’s stay with us pleasant in his recollections.”
She held out her hand, and as Anthony bent his head and kissed it, she added gently: “I want all my friends to visit Celle.” And she was gracious enough to thank Sir Henry Cresset for having brought his young friend to the Alte Palace.
Sir Henry looked at his young friend with a new interest as they walked back to his house.
“You’ll have to go to Celle now, my lad, whether you want to or not,” and he seemed on the point of putting some question. But he deferred it and remarked: “For a beginner you did very well, but I have a more difficult ordeal for you tomorrow.”
Anthony was a trifle uplifted by the manner of his reception and inclined to make light of ordeals.
“They must be expected. Somehow one comes through them unsinged,” he said airily.
“I will examine you more particularly upon that point tomorrow, when we have returned from Herrenhausen,” said Sir Henry grimly.
“Herrenhausen!” exclaimed Anthony. “You will take me there?”
“Yes.”
“I am glad.”
“You are wise to be glad now. For even if you are sorry afterwards, you will have had some enjoyment out of Herrenhausen.”
Anthony, however, was not to be alarmed. His few minutes with Sophia Dorothea had set him at his ease with all the crowned heads of Europe. He laughed confidently.
“There is a fountain, I believe, at Herrenhausen which throws a jet of water fifty yards high in the air,” he said with impertinence.
“There is also a lady at Herrenhausen who does the same with whippersnappers,” Sir Henry replied.
“A lady?”
“The Duchess Sophia.”
“Oh!” said Anthony and having heard something of that lady’s uncompromising conversation, his confidence dwindled. Have you seen an air-balloon dancing gaily on a string and then slowly deflating? That was Anthony Craston.
“I am to see the Duchess Sophia!” he said with a catch of the breath.
“She likes to hear news of England.”
“Come! That’s something,” said Anthony.
“Not much,” replied Sir Henry. “But no doubt you are well grounded in the theory of monads.”
“Monads!”
“Yes.”
Monsieur Faubert taught the management of the Great Horse and the accomplishments of gentlemen, but monads were not included in the curriculum.
“I have never heard of them,” said Anthony with a little shriek of despair.
Sir Henry shrugged his shoulders.
“You may have the good luck not to find Leibnitz in her company. There are times when he isn’t. In any case it would be wise of you probably to confine yourself to the Pantheistic theory of Spinoza.”
The balloon was now completely deflated and wrinkled. But there was a way out. It occurred to him suddenly. He was pleased with it.
“I must go to Celle tomorrow unfortunately.”
“You can’t go to Celle until the day after tomorrow — and that at the earliest. It would be a breach of manners fatal to a young diplomatist not to wait for the letters which the Princess is taking the trouble to prepare for you” said Sir Henry severely.
It was in consequence a fluttering and uneasy Anthony Craston who drove with Sir Henry Cresset the next morning by the long lime-tree avenue to Herrenhausen. He had no eyes for the scenes which they passed, no thoughts but of the coming interview. The yellow orangery with its high porch and ornamented façade which Duchess Sophia was to make her favourite residence was not then built on to the end of the Palace. Sir Henry and Anthony were introduced into a long room with windows which overlooked the broad central path of the gardens. Horn-beam hedges fenced the path in and at the end lay the round pond from which the famous fountain flung its jet.
Anthony, however, was hardly aware of the prospect beyond the windows. He saw a lady with black hair, blue eyes, a high nose and the straightest back possible to see, seated in a chair and, opposite to her, seated in another, a stout Minister of religion. The lady was apparently enjoying the conversation, the Minister was certainly not. He was red in the face and flustered and he seized with agitation upon the entrance of the fresh visitors.
“Your Highness will forgive me,” he began, as he rose to his feet, but Duchess Sophia shook her head.
“You shall put your case to Sir Henry before you go,” she answered, as she graciously received the Envoy and his young friend. Sir Henry, however, was too old a bird to be caught. His young friend might dance for the learned lady’s amusement — it might indeed do him some good — but not Sir Henry Cresset.
/> “Your Highness,” he answered as he bowed over her hand, “I find with advancing years a cowardly reluctance to express hasty views on any matters which are outside my domain. I leave such speculations to the eager youth of people like Mr Anthony Craston, whom you do me the honour to allow me to present to you.”
Anthony would have liked to sink through the floor, as he made his bow and finish it in the cellar. But the floor was solid, and he heard Duchess Sophia speaking to him in a pleasant encouraging voice: “I am very pleased. You are from London? I look upon it as my home and I shall welcome what news you bring of it. Meanwhile, here is Dr. Moldanus, a famous Lutheran pastor from Osnabrück who is much concerned because a shoemaker in his parish has taken to preaching. Dr. Moldanus thinks that he is inspired like a prophet of old. My own poor opinion is that Ministers should preach and shoemakers make shoes.”
Anthony Craston was in the same sort of quandary as that in which he had been the day before. He must answer and he must answer at once. He shuffled and blushed and stammered. Finally he said: “Your Highness, if that view had prevailed at the beginning of the Christian Era, there would have been very few apostles.”
As he made the remark, its inanity sounded to him prodigious. On the other hand Duchess Sophia seemed to weigh it carefully.
“Well,” she said in the end, “I take the lowest view of the Apostles.”
Dr. Moldanus bounced. He was startled. He was horrified.
“Your Highness cannot mean it,” he cried.
“But, Dr. Moldanus, I do mean it,” Duchess Sophia answered, sitting up very stiffly. “The Apostles had under their noses the answer to the great secret which through all the ages troubles the world and will trouble it to the end of time. Lazarus had come back from the grave,” and she quoted with a remarkable purity of accent the words of the English poet:
“The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns.”
“The apostles, good Doctor, knew the one traveller who had returned and never bothered their heads to ask him a question. I am supposed by foolish people not to be very zealous in matters of religion, but if Lazarus came to Herrenhausen, he wouldn’t get away from me very easily until he had told me what had happened to him after he was dead.”
She gave Dr. Moldanus a spirited nod of the head. The unhappy doctor was torn between his respect for the Duchess and his horror of the woman’s freedom of speech.
“But Madame,” he stuttered, “there are mysteries hidden from us.”
“I know that,” said the Duchess with a little smile of enjoyment at his confusion wrinkling her mouth.
“For our good,” added the Doctor.
“I doubt that,” said the Duchess.
But she had startled him and left him floundering. She had the same sort of malicious pleasure which an imp of a boy might have had who pushed an old gentleman in his clothes into the sea and watched him splashing. She brought Dr. Moldanus to land, however, with a few kind words about the edification his visit had given to her and let him go. Then she turned in her most agreeable mood to Anthony and plied him with questions about her native country as she was pleased to consider England.
“Your Highness,” Anthony replied modestly, “I have no knowledge of great personages or great affairs.”
But Duchess Sophia kept up a full correspondence with the King and the Court of England, as well as with the philosophers. What she wanted from Anthony was a picture of the daily life of a small squire in the country, and what were his politics and how deep his devotion to the Crown; and that picture Anthony was able passably well to paint for her. He could not but see how her hopes overleaped the obstacles to that distant inheritance of the throne and he discovered in that hope the explanation of the enigma of her life. The purity and dignity of her conduct, the continual sharpening of her intellect upon the acutest brains of her day, her disinclination to interfere in the small politics of Hanover, her humour, even the little falls she tried with such notable doctors as Moldanus, suggested that she was fitting herself deliberately for that coveted place.
“She means to be England’s second Elizabeth,” said Craston, when they were driving back to Hanover; and Sir Henry Cresset looked at him sharply, only to surprise a new look of interest upon his face.
“What, sir, is that house?” he asked, pointing to one which they were passing upon the left side of the road.
“That is Monplaisir.”
Anthony had been now for two days in Hanover.
“The house of Madame von Platen?”
“Yes.”
“That’s curious,” said Anthony.
“Why?”
Anthony told the Ambassador of the man with the crippled feet and his riding-boots slung about his neck, to whom he had given a lift upon the step of his chaise.
“He got down here and went into Monplaisir.”
The Ambassador listened to the story with an attention which Anthony could not understand. At the end of it he made Anthony repeat all that the crippled messenger had said and uttered a little grunt of disappointment.
“He told you nothing of himself?”
“Not a word,” said Anthony.
“Not even whence he came?”
“No, sir.”
“Yet I think you may possibly see that messenger again.”
“At Monplaisir?” Anthony cried.
Was he to be presented also to the lady who held her Court at Monplaisir?
“No, but at Celle. And, if you do, I shall be glad to know of it.”
Sir Henry was silent as the long avenue of limes unrolled like a riband upon their right hand. Then he said: “You know young Königsmark?”
“Yes,” Anthony replied shortly.
“You were perhaps present at the trial of his brother?”
“I was.”
“I have read an account of that trial. Amidst all the evasions and trickeries, a warning by the Swedish Minister Monsieur Lienburg stands out as a superb piece of common sense. He said: ‘There will be no good living in England for any who meddle with Thomas Thynne.’ The words recurred to me when I heard of the scene outside the Alte Palace.”
Anthony looked with surprise at the serious face of his companion.
“Why?”
“Because if you change the names, no saying could be truer here.”
“How so?” asked Anthony.
“There will be no good living in Hanover for any who meddle with Clara von Platen,” the Ambassador said gravely. “I regret very much the outburst of the Princess.”
Anthony rushed to the defence of Sophia Dorothea.
“I consider it very proper,” he said hotly and Sir Henry broke into a delighted laugh.
“I am hardly surprised that the messenger knew you at once to be an Englishman,” he said, but his pleasure did not last. Anxiety again lined his face and weighted his voice.
“As you say, the Princess’s reply to the impertinence of those women was the natural act of an impulsive and high-spirited girl. But it was singularly unwise. No woman likes to be publicly mistaken for a housemaid, even if she knows that the mistake was deliberate.”
“It served them right,” said Anthony sturdily. “They shouldn’t have popped their heads out of the wrong windows.”
“But there are so many wrong windows that sooner or later everyone does,’ replied the Ambassador drily. “It will be a bad day for the Princess Sophia Dorothea when her time comes to do it. She has offended her unamiable husband and made a deadly and powerful enemy of Clara von Platen.”
Thus Sir Henry summed up the consequences of her unwisdom. He might have added: “and she has stopped me from recruiting to my insufficient staff Mr Anthony Craston of Four Winds House in the county of Essex.” For after Duchess Sophia’s favourable reception of the youth, that had been the Ambassador’s intention.
But Anthony was too open a partisan to suit an Embassy to a Court of such complicated politics. It was not until four years later, when
Sir Henry Cresset had given place to another and Anthony had learnt a greater discretion, that he was promoted from the Hague to be Second Secretary to His Majesty’s Envoy to the Duchies of Hanover, Celle and Brunswick.
XVIII. PHILIP COMES TO HANOVER
IT WAS THE second day of the Carnival. It was therefore the third day of January. The season had opened sedately with a French comedy in the theatre, a Reception at Herrenhausen and cards in Duchess Sophia’s apartments afterwards. But with the second day formalities ceased, and for six weeks Hanover, in the gaiety of its crowded streets and the freedom of its entertainments, transcended the great Fair of Brunswick and pretended to rival the allurements of Dresden. Visitors with fine clothes to wear and money to spend flocked into the inns; visitors with worn clothes to replace and empty purses to fill followed them and filled the meaner lodgings. The throbbing of violins, the pulse of feet and the clink of coins made the streets at night mere draughty corridors between ballroom and casino; and the flush of pink upon the snow from lighted windows changed without an interval of darkness into the cold pallor of the dawn.
On the second night there was Redoute, a diversion which long ago Ernst Augustus had transplanted from Venice. The great Assembly Room in the Town Hall with its tier of boxes was hung with tapestries and thrown upon for a ball. All night came staid citizens with their wives, visitors, soldiers, Ministers of State, men of the law, the gallants of the Court, the squires of the countryside. The strict rules of precedence and etiquette were suspended. No invitations were needed until Shrove Tuesday had come and gone; there were only two conditions of entrance. A mask must be worn and all weapons must be left at home. Around this ballroom tables for Ombre and Piquet were set and a special room beyond was set aside for the game of Bassette where quiet was needed and the stakes were high. A third room was reserved for suppers of the more solid kind and a fourth led out of it where a traiteur behind a buffet served coffee and chocolate and liqueurs. Thus Hanover made merry on every other night from the New Year until Lent.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 710